Okay, good morning.
Welcome to the first session of Algorithms for Internet Applications.
I'm glad that you're all here.
And last week should have been the first lecture in this course, but
last week I was somewhere else.
In a moment I will tell you a little bit about that.
So, my name is Hartmut Schmeck.
You see here many affiliations.
If you wonder why this title is here for this course, then you're on
the wrong course.
So, it's Algorithms for Internet Applications.
Here I show my picture again, because some people are not here, but
will be listening to this course who are not in the room at the
moment.
They will look at the recorded lectures.
You see again my contact data, my affiliations.
So, I'm sitting at the Allianz building at the Kronplatz.
My office hours are Tuesdays after the course.
You can send me email messages.
And I have several affiliations, as I mentioned already.
I'm the Chair of Applied Informatics at the Institute AIFB in the
Faculty of Economics and Business Engineering.
And I'm Director at the Institute of Applied Computer Science in the
National Research Center of the KIT.
And I'm also in the Research Center of Information Technology where we
have the information platform for technology transfer in information
technologies.
So, my research areas are efficient algorithms.
That's why I call this course Algorithms for Internet Applications.
One of my specialties is bio-inspired optimization.
So, I have worked for quite a long time on genetic algorithms and
coding optimization and so on.
Then, for some time, I organized a coordinated research program of the
German Research Foundation on Organic Computing which is about self
-organized adaptive systems.
And this led to an intensive involvement in projects on smart energy
systems.
So, this is a very hot topic in the moment.
And we are currently establishing a new discipline in this area which
is called Energy Informatics.
So, maybe I will switch this course sometime into a complete course on
Energy Informatics.
But this will take some time to do that.
So, this term, I'm again teaching this course as Algorithms for
Internet Applications.
But I will have one chapter on Energy Informatics.
So, Energy Informatics has to do with applying informatics to the
energy system.
And this is something which is rather new.
Not that we didn't have information processing in the energy system so
far.
But the challenges for transforming the energy system, the way that we
are currently planning, like transforming the energy system such that
we have a decentralized system with many power stations, small power
stations in a decentralized way, just needs very powerful applications
of informatics in that area.
You will hear more about that more at the end of this course.
So, my projects currently are mainly centered around this topic,
applying informatics to some energy application.
So, Meridio is a project which is about minimizing or moving towards
minimal emission regions, like minimal carbon dioxide or greenhouse
gas emission regions.
That means regions where we have efficient energy management.
Meridio Mobile was a project where we actually did something on
integrating electric vehicles.
That means the charging processes of electric vehicles into the smart
grid.
And this is accompanied by a project, Chrome, on cross-border mobility
with electric vehicles and a project, EIZEUS, which is on intelligent
zero emission urban systems, where again we look at electric mobility
and how we can actually move that into reality and into more
widespread use and in particular provide the infrastructure for that.
Castel is a project that is a competent center for applied security
technologies, which is a large project here at KRT where several
chairs are cooperating.
LSDMA, Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis, is another project in
the National Research Center on several data lifecycle labs.
And I'm there working on the data lifecycle lab energy.
So here... oh, this is wrong.
This, I did not change that.
I should have changed that.
Sorry.
The explanation there is on something else.
Fundamental Research and Self-Organizing Systems, Generic Observer,
Controller Architecture, Collaborative Learning, was on the previous
title of the project that was sitting there, namely the project on
organic computing, organic architectures for organic computing.
So this is not about the data lifecycle lab energy.
Then I'm also responsible for the KRT-focused computation, where
computation is not incorrectly spelled, but it is an artificial world,
a world which we created from the combination of communication and
computation, which are two essential phenomena that are inherently
combined in most of the interesting application areas that we are now
looking at currently.
And many critical infrastructures, like, for example, the energy
system, but also in traffic areas, health systems, and so on.
Okay, so it's a lot of topics which certainly have to do with being
connected using technologies that we know from the Internet, and
that's why I'm teaching something about algorithms for Internet
applications, where this course, as we'll see later, is based on
the...
or is talking about the basic algorithms or the basic aspects that we
have to look at if we talk about applying Internet technologies in a
reasonable way.
Let me briefly tell you something about why I was not here last week.
So, last week, I was in China, actually.
There was a delegation tour, a group together with our state minister
for economics and finance, Neil Schmidt.
He went to China, and a large delegation accompanied him, and there
was a group of 40 people representing the electric mobility area.
And I would like to just tell you one observation that I made there.
So, just one observation was that, for example, there was one
colleague who is, or one person, who is the head of the...
eHK, Handelskammer, the business...
what is the Handels...
Pardon?
Chamber of Commerce, thank you.
Yes, he's head of the Chamber of Commerce at Mannheim, and he's head
also of a technology park.
And he was talking to a colleague in Peking who is also head of a
technology park, like where many start-up companies are getting some
room for starting the company.
And this colleague of mine, or this colleague from Mannheim was very
proud to say, well, it's a really large technology park.
There are 70 companies in that technology park.
And his Chinese colleague, who is head of the technology park in
Peking, said, well, in my technology park there are 18,000 start-up
companies.
18,000.
So, those from China are smiling.
And then it shows they're massively investing in start-up companies.
Another observation, I talked to some professor at a university at
Peking, and he said, well, in his projects he is cooperating with
small start-up companies which his students have actually established.
So, he is running projects where certain technologies are established
or are provided by small companies established or founded by his
students.
And then he gets money from the government for projects, and in this
project he just has a contract or makes contracting with those
companies of his students.
Something of that would not be possible in Germany because I'm not
allowed to have a project where I really make a contract with somebody
who is in some way dependent from myself.
Because a student, I cannot make a contract with a student.
That's illegal.
So, but it's an interesting thing that you can run projects and in
that way support the build-up of small companies.
It's creating more business and more expertise.
And then there was another observation which I made a long time ago.
No, one more thing that we saw there in China.
There's a large city close to Shanghai which wasn't there 10 years
ago.
It was just green meadows, no buildings there.
And now there's a city about the size of Karlsruhe and there are 750
,000 scientists working there.
And this is funded by a large company, Haier, who's investing more
than 2 billion euros to build up that science city.
And all the major universities all over the world are actually having
some sections there and are involved in that area.
So you see there's this massive investment in science and business
development.
And we went to Beijing and went to Daimler and they showed us that
they have built up a production site where they have...
Initially they thought about 20,000 vehicles per year would be
reasonable.
That was two years ago.
Last year they produced 100,000 vehicles for China.
They are just expanding their site in order to produce 200,000
vehicles per year.
Special, like specially designed, slightly variants of the types like
E and C class that they have here in Germany.
And they will also move all the development and research for Beijing.
So they will develop the cars there.
They will do research there.
They will produce the cars there.
And initially they will supply the Chinese market but it is possible
that they will also supply the Asian market from that site.
And the same is happening with Audi, Volkswagen and all the major
companies are doing that.
There was a machine or mechanical engineering company selling large
machines.
This is one of the major export areas of Germany.
Selling intelligent large machines for production sites and so on.
The largest company of that kind is now in China.
And they are looking at the need for certain machines and they look at
their expertise and notice certain strengths and certain weaknesses
that they have.
And when they have weaknesses they get the parts from countries where
there are strengths in that area.
For example, from Germany.
But the system is sold from China.
This is something which was our competence in Germany to do that.
And so what you see is that there is a shift of established
technologies towards China and then some components are delivered from
Germany.
And there is another thing which I noticed that I taught a course some
time ago, two weeks ago in China at a university and I asked the
students please come forward and present your solutions to
assignments.
They said, well, they were very shy and didn't really want to do that.
And I guess that those Chinese students who were in this room know why
they were shy and didn't do that.
They said, well, there is a certain saying in China that the first
bird gets shot by the hunter.
And I said, well, in Germany we have another saying which says the
early bird gets the worm.
And this is a fundamental difference.
It means that in China, and I think that you will agree, in China
people are educated to do something together with others and to be
conforming to certain rules and to certain behaviors.
They are not educated to be creative, to be in the front, to take
responsibility.
And this is our strength.
And so our chance, our chance is we should be the ones who are always
in the front, who are providing the top technologies, the newest
technologies.
But that means you have to be educated such that you have a strong
knowledge about the current technologies and that you know how to be
creative.
And if you look at the way our education system is currently being
transformed, then you notice, well, the programs are shortened, are
made more efficient, such that in shorter time you get more knowledge,
but to be creative you need time.
So what we are doing at the moment is something going away from
creativity and going to more conformity.
And this is exactly the wrong direction.
And so what we have to do is really to emphasize this ability to be
creative and to always generate the new ideas to have a view towards
potential of technology.
And certainly, essential technology is information technology in many
application areas.
Without information technology, you cannot provide anything which is
competitive in the world at the moment.
So this is really a challenge, and I think it's worth telling you
that, this observation, although it's not really related to this
course, but it is related to why we are teaching you something.
And it's an interesting topic to see at the different cultural ways,
or differences in education culture and so on.
And I have told the same things to the Chinese students that their
chance is to be, well, those who can exactly do what they are told,
but also to be creative.
If that happens, then there will be a very, very strong competition
for the wealth that is there, or that might be there in the world.
And we have to be very careful that we get our share of that wealth
and to be able to maintain the level of living that we have currently.
Okay, so I think that's sufficient to tell you about these things.
I would be glad to discuss things like that at different
opportunities, but certainly not extend that too much in this course.
Yeah?
Okay.
Or do you have some response to that?
Some spontaneous response, somebody?
No.
Okay.
So, organizational information.
This course, as you see, will be presented as live lectures, what you
are experiencing here.
And then the lecture is also recorded.
Slides, annotations, and sound using Camtasia.
Who of you has never used recorded lectures?
You all know that.
Okay, so that's fine.
You get the lectures as AVI documents.
You can download them from the digital video and audio archive from
the library.
Links to that are at our lecturing space in the study portal.
And you can use those recorded lectures in different ways.
You can play them using just any media player.
But the best media player for this type of application is to use the
Camtasia player.
Why it's the best?
Because it is providing visible scrolling.
That means when you are scrolling through the recorded lecture, you
are seeing an accelerated trace through that lecture.
And then you can just easily stop at the locations that you are
interested in.
And you don't have to just guess where to actually look for the
interesting area.
So I would always recommend to use the Camtasia player or some other
player which is also supporting visible scrolling.
That's the major point about that.
And certainly it doesn't make sense, for example, if you would just
look at the Diva area there.
They provide a streaming version of the course.
It doesn't really make sense to look at a streaming version.
You should always download and then look at it at the speed that you
like.
And then you can go back and forth easily.
Streaming versions are really not reasonable for systematic e
-learning.
Okay.
And I'm doing that, like I'm recording the lectures because I think
there are always some students who cannot attend the course.
And then certainly you have a way of repeating what I have told you.
And so it's a resource for looking at the information that I presented
in class.
Then we have all the relevant information about this course in our
study site.
I guess you have looked at that.
I hope the internet is working.
It is.
I certainly have to register or to log in here.
And then there should be the website of this course.
There it is.
So you know that here is all the information that you need on this
course.
You know that here are certain important things.
Registration for tutorials will also be mentioned on one of the next
slides.
So it's starting today.
You can register for the tutorials.
There's a link somewhere further down there.
There's somewhere there should be a link.
Should be.
Just look for it.
Somewhere there will be...
Maybe I can go and...
No.
Somewhere there will be the link.
Sorry, I don't see it here.
Registration.
Let me look at this.
There is register online for the tutorials.
There you have the link for going to the registration for the
tutorials for this course.
And you have one week for doing that.
Okay, so that's the tutorials.
And then there's all the other information, as you know, like the
lecture material.
Some links on literature.
There's the forum, which certainly you are encouraged to use.
We are always looking at that, so at least my assistants are doing
that.
If you have certain questions with respect to this course, just put it
there and we will send you answers.
And in that way, everybody can participate in the information we
provide in response to certain questions and remarks.
Okay, so let's go back to the slides of the course.
So that's all the relevant information is there.
And certainly you should bookmark the resource directories.
You know how to do that.
You can just bookmark the sites and then you get information.
You get just reminders whenever there is a change on the relevant
sites.
For example, if I put new lecture materials there, you will get a
message that you know you can download something which is new.
Okay, I mentioned that there will be some students who are not present
in this classroom here because they are somewhere else.
So there are local students here at Karlsruhe.
Even not all of them will be participating here in the live lectures.
Some will just look at the recorded lectures.
But there are also distant students at other locations.
We had some cooperation of informatics departments all over Germany.
Funded for some time by a project 10 years ago already.
Time is running quite fast.
I still have some students at different locations but in particular at
Hanover who are usually looking at this course.
So welcome to those students at Hanover who will look at this course
or listen to this a bit later when it's made online.
And then they will listen to what I tell and present.
So then there's also another project which ran for some time.
EUKOR is the European Corporation on the Upper Rhine region.
And I guess you know that everybody who is registered here at this
university who is a student at KIT can also attend courses at any of
those universities in the Upper Rhine region.
That means at Freiburg, at Straßburg, at Basel and so on.
They are all in this European Corporation in the Upper Rhine region.
And you certainly have to make arrangements with your real home
university.
But it is supported that you can go to one of those universities in
the Upper Rhine region, attend courses there, and they usually will be
accredited here to your programme of study at Karlsruhe and the same
is true for the other students from Freiburg or Basel or Straßburg.
Actually it's eight universities which are cooperating there.
Okay, so that's why this lecture is recorded, or more arguments why
this is recorded.
And certainly students from other universities who would like to take
this course for credit should send a message to us, in particular to
my assistant Mark Miltin, and then they get all the information that
is necessary to actually access the material that is available here in
the lecture area on the internet.
Then I wanted to present to you something which is some kind of
cooperation tool which we actually designed quite some time ago,
almost ten years ago, but last year all of a sudden students jumped on
those tools.
Now I just, at the start of this lecture, I tried to start those tools
and somehow they didn't work.
I will try it again.
Try to start those tools, in particular here the tool that I need
here.
If there's again a problem...
Oh, it looks fine.
So let me try it again.
Now it works.
Perfect.
And then I would just open all those tools that I need, and...
So this is also another tool that I need.
That's it.
And then we can go back to the slide.
Okay, so these are tools for electronic feedback, for asking
questions, asking multiple choice test questions by me to you.
You can answer those questions, and certainly in this room, you can
all easily ask questions.
But I can ask you questions, and I see, for example, how many of you
are for...
We will do that in a moment, see how that works.
This has been developed some time ago, about 10 years ago in a project
on Notebook University Karlsruhe, and at that time these nice tools
did not really get momentum because students didn't have free access
to the internet.
It was quite expensive to have that, and so they were not really that
interested in that.
And last year in one of my second year courses, all of a sudden,
almost all the students used that, and so we have upgraded the system
into an app, and so you can download those apps.
So we have a web application, which is this type here, so even if you
don't have a smartphone, you can just use that.
I will make those diagrams here a bit larger in a moment, and you can
download it easily from the screen.
So these are two different versions.
There's a web application, and there's an app for Android phones.
We are still working on the iPhone version, but we have it in the
moment just for the Android.
And what you can do there, like if you would like to get the web
application, you can just download it here if you have some devices
there.
And if you would like to get the app, then you can use this one.
Yeah?
If somebody wants to use that, you're welcome to do that.
I can go on.
There's somebody who needs that app.
Okay?
And so what do we have there?
There is the app, which you can start.
First, you have to install that.
You have to download it from the App Store.
You have to install it, and so on.
Then you can register for the course.
You have to select the course.
At the moment, I guess there will only be this course active.
Only that will appear on your screen, I guess.
And so I can...
No, I will not use that now.
I will just use my tools.
And then you can just use any username, whatever you like, and then
register for that application.
And then we have the possibility for you to give feedback on the speed
of this course, like on my lecturing speed.
So if I should present things faster or slower, then you can indicate
that.
Or if it's all right, you just press that button.
And you can also ask questions.
And then, if you ask a question, I will see it here on my feedback
tool.
I will see a yellow exclamation mark.
And then I can access a question there.
So this is the feedback that you can give.
And I can ask you questions.
So, for example, I could ask a question, who discovered the
electromagnetic waves?
And then here are two different spellings of that name.
And you can select the correct one, or whatever you like.
And I can then send the answer.
And I can see what you have answered there.
And I can also publish those results.
And you can see the result of such a vote.
And so you can actually...
This is displayed here.
You can see the results.
If I publish the results, you can see them on the app.
You can see what people have actually answered to that.
So this is one possibility of giving feedback.
And I thought I could just test that also in this course.
See, I'm doing that in the second-year course on foundations of
informatics.
And so we could actually try that.
So let me just briefly...
Maybe somebody's already there.
Hmm?
Oh, yeah.
What did I use there?
Just AIA.
Very simple.
AIA.
Algorithms for Internet Applications.
It should be correct.
Just try it.
Is it correct?
Good.
So somebody said already it's okay, the speed.
Yeah?
So you see the feedback.
And now I could ask you questions.
So, for example, I could ask you this question, for example.
So the question is, which courses should be taught in English?
I'm teaching this course in English.
Actually, why should I teach a course in English?
There are quite a few students, quite a few foreign students, but some
students come to Germany because they want to learn German, and they
don't want to learn English in Germany.
But some people come to Germany, although they are fluent in English,
but they like to get the knowledge that we present in Germany, and so
they should have a chance to get this knowledge in English.
Okay.
So some people are answering, as you see.
Yeah?
And so you see how this is working.
So there are people.
People are saying, okay, it might be okay to have one lecture in
English, but students are coming here to learn German, so most of the
courses should be in German.
The question is whether introductory courses should be taught in
English or in German.
So far, we are teaching all of them in German.
Oh, actually,
somebody noticed that you can ask questions.
Testing, just ignore me.
Okay.
So you can ask questions, and then I can respond to that.
So this is something which can be annoying if somebody does that too
often, but it is a way of giving some feedback in a way that is
different from just raising your hands and telling me something,
although here you definitely can just raise up your hand and ask me
something.
Okay, so this is the way we can use this tool.
I can ask questions, and we see exactly how you respond to that.
And so it gives some interesting results.
So you say, this one, advanced courses only, and seminars.
Yeah, okay.
So this is something we can maybe continue at a later time.
And let me come back to the course.
I will make a vote sometime later in some other lecture of this course
to see whether you like those tools or not.
Okay, so this course is certainly here Tuesdays in this lecture hall.
You are here.
Those who didn't find the room and get just a recorded lecture now
know where this course is actually presented.
I have two tutorial assistants this time.
Two assistants of mine are supporting this.
Mark Mertin, who has done that for several years already, and Fabian
Rigolle is a new PhD or doctoral researcher in my group who is also
supporting this course.
And they said they didn't want to provide fixed office hours, just
contact them and you can make an arrangement, get just some
appointment for talking to them.
And we have several tutors, as you saw already on this webpage, on
registering for the course.
So we have different times for the tutorials.
Every week, three different times, three tutors and you only have to
attend it every other week.
So every tutor is teaching two groups and you just have to select one
of them and you can start registering for the tutorials starting
today.
Okay, the tutorials will start on the 6th of November, so in two weeks
from now, and so you will get the first assignments next week.
Why are we actually providing you with tutorials?
Certainly the only way or the best way to learn something is to
actively use the material that I presented you.
So if you don't use the knowledge that I tried to present to you or
these things, if you don't get involved actively in that, you don't
have lasting knowledge and lasting capabilities.
And so you need those assignments.
So there are exercises in tutorials.
We also give some home assignments and so these assignments will be
reviewed in the tutorials.
You can also submit the assignments, submit your solutions, and then
you get feedback whether that was okay or not, so that will be
corrected, but it's not mandatory to submit your assignments.
We also give you one programming assignment.
So the other ones are just on paper and pencil.
So there's one programming assignment on some algorithm that I
presented in the class.
And if you do that successfully, then this is one of the two needed
well -done, excess or well-done tasks of the bonus examination.
What is the bonus examination?
There is a specific, some people might call it a midterm, but it's not
a midterm actually.
It's a special bonus examination where you get three tasks to do and
you have to do two of those perfectly.
So if two of them are done perfectly, then you get a bonus.
And these tasks are similar to the exercises that we present to you in
the tutorials, and so if you have worked successfully on the
tutorials, then you will have no problem in passing that examination
and getting actually the bonus.
So this bonus exam will be in January.
It's about three weeks before the end of the term, so it means that at
that time you have worked on quite a few of the assignments, and then
we just test there whether you actually have learned something on
tasks that you have to do that are very similar to exercises and
tutorials.
And then you get a bonus.
What is this bonus?
Well, certainly the first bonus is that if you work actively on the
tutorials, you are much better in knowing the content of this course.
So that's, first of all, a good bonus.
But then you also get an improvement in the mark that you would get
otherwise in the final exam.
So if you pass the final exam, you get the next level of the mark.
So if you would get a 2.3 in the exam, then this is improved to a 2.0.
Or if you have a 1.3, it's improved to a 1.0.
If you have passed the exam with a 1.0, it remains at 1.0.
We don't give you a 0.7.
That's not a legal mark.
So this is what we do there in the bonus exam.
I guess you know these things.
You know that already from the introductory courses.
Now, just another organizational thing.
You know that we provide credits.
Now, depending on the program of study or the regulations for your
program of study, at some time we said we are providing 4.5 credits,
and then we said no, 5.
I don't care really.
Just dependent on the specific program of study that you are in, you
will get either 4.5 or 5 credit points.
I could write just 5 credit points everywhere.
You know, one reason why in the ECTS system they say you are not
allowed to use something like 4.5, one reason is certainly that in the
systems where they register or where they store all those ECTS credit
points, they can only store integers.
Yeah.
Well, that's the way they have designed the system, and so it's not
allowed to do something like 4.5.
This is not really a valid argument, you could say, but this is the
kind of arguments that you sometimes get.
I prefer to just look at the time you spend in those courses, so
that's 2.1.
Semester week or semester week hours, that's our traditional way of
counting, but this is like 4.5 or 5 is now the standard way of
counting the amount of work that you put into this course.
That's what we are counting here.
And then the question is, who is actually the target group?
So, students of business engineering, Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen.
Who is in that program?
Most of you.
Okay.
Who is in economics engineering, Technische Fabel?
One.
Who is in information engineering and management?
Okay.
Who is in NTECH, the new program?
Nobody.
Okay.
Then we have all kinds of modules.
You know that now in this new bachelor master system, we have to
provide all kinds of modules.
If a course is to be taken for credit, then it has to be in some
module.
So, this course actually is in a range of different modules depending
on which program of study you are in.
And I actually provide this in...
The three always means it's the third year of a bachelor.
The four means it's in the master program.
So, this course can be taken either in the final year of the bachelor
program or in the master program.
You know that differently from other countries, we don't actually make
that drastic difference in the level at which we teach a course.
The third year bachelor is at the same level as our master program.
So, it's the same high standard that we usually provide.
Okay.
And if you are at a different university, you have to look for the
module where you can take this for credit.
You have to check that locally.
What type of exam will we have?
There's a written exam on the Tuesday or Wednesday of the first week
after the end of term.
Should be February.
That's wrong, but I should have updated that.
Just check that.
I don't know exactly whether it is February 12th.
The Tuesday or Wednesday after the end of term, it's around those
dates.
And certainly not 2012, but 2013.
Maybe that I didn't update that date there.
We can easily check what the date of the first Tuesday and Wednesday
and the first week after the end of term is.
The term ends sometime around February 10th.
So, it might be right.
Maybe it's February 14th or 15th.
Okay.
Why do we present English courses?
I mentioned that already.
Internationalization.
Improving English language skills for those who would like to work
later on in the global market.
Regardless what you would like to do, you are very likely to have to
converse in English in your professional area.
So, you have to prepare for foreign studies.
Who of you has been in a foreign country for studying so far?
Some of you.
Who has not been in a foreign country, but intends to go to some other
country for studying?
Yeah, okay.
So, this is good that you do that because in this way you get
essential insights and get essential new knowledge.
And this is very important to get experience in foreign countries in
different ways of presenting material, different ways of studying,
different ways of living.
Okay.
And attract foreign students.
I see a few foreign students here.
So, I guess you are in some of these programs.
Who is just here for a yearly exchange?
Erasmus student?
Not an Erasmus student.
Different way of exchange.
Who is an Erasmus student?
Nobody.
Okay.
But there are some other students from different countries, which is
good.
Okay.
Then, what will I present to you?
Some survey of Internet applications.
I will tell you something about Internet history and technology, about
ways of searching in the Internet.
The Internet is providing lots of information.
How can we look for the information that is there?
I will tell you something about security issues, about cryptographic
algorithms.
Those in Information Engineering and Management have already heard
something about that.
So, there may be some things that you know already.
But I will do that.
Most of the students here are in Business Engineering.
They have not heard things about that.
And cryptographic algorithms is an essential part of applications in
the Internet.
So, you have to know something about that.
Electronic payment systems is a topic which is also important.
How can we do that in a secure way?
How can we pay for certain things in the Internet such that the
payment actually is done in a secure and safe way?
Then I will tell you something about the Internet of Energy.
So, I have to in some way condense a few of the other chapters a
little bit to provide more room for that.
And then there are many other topics that could be looked at, like
digital libraries, representation of audiovisual data on the web,
Internet computing.
Here you see many different topics which have been hyped at some time.
Hypercomputing, metacomputing, grid computing, algorithm service.
Now all the people talk about cloud computing because it's the modern
buzzword for doing something on remote computers.
So, this is just using the network systems and using some computing
resources at a different place in a way that is provided in a very
simple way.
That would be cloud computing.
And topics like spam protection.
An open network always invites people who don't have always positive
intentions.
So, some people try to disturb the normal operation of certain things.
And all people like to be always on, always get top ranks on queries
in the Internet.
So, how can you get top ranks?
Certainly you can try to pay.
That's the way some people always work, that they pay money and then
get benefits.
So, but you look for some content and if you get at the top rank a
content which is not really relevant, you are angry.
So, you would like to have spam protection.
And you would like to have spam protection if you get some spam mails
or all kinds of things are classified as being spam.
Like unwanted use, inadequate use of these facilities that we have
there.
Firewalls is another topic which had been part of this course in
previous years, but I took that out because I put in the Internet of
Energy.
Okay, a lot of references on the material that I present to you.
I just give you some of those sources where you can get this
information.
So, there are the requests for comments where all the protocols, all
the essential ideas in the Internet are written down and stored.
So, and you can go there and get the information on all, like detailed
information on all the relevant protocols of the Internet.
There is a corresponding site for all the relevant protocols and
concepts of the World Wide Web.
That's the World Wide Web Consortium or W3.org where you get all
information on web technologies.
Like for Internet technologies, you get the information at the RFC
site and for the web technologies at the W3.org.
And then there is a lot of information on Internet history.
I will provide you some information on that.
And then certainly there are all kinds of resources, literature from
journals, from books, and you can look at all that information.
There is also some listing of literature in the website of this
course.
So, that's just the organizational things.
I spent quite a bit of time on that, more than I really intended.
But there was, I guess, spent also some time on talking or telling you
something about my experiences in China.
But I think that is also something which is adequate to do that.
Sometimes people say that, well, you should not talk that much about
things that are not directly related to the things on the slides.
But I think I provide you the slides anyway.
The interesting part of a live lecture is that I tell you something.
And this is more valuable than just having something which is only the
material I have on the slides.
At least I think so.
And certainly I have to tell you something about the things on the
slides.
And so, we will continue with that.
This is here hidden.
So, I have to go to this.
Let's look at Internet applications.
Some remarks and motivation why we actually look at this topic in this
course.
So, what is actually the Internet?
The Internet actually is something which has been defined explicitly.
So, this is not just some buzzword, but it is a defined term.
So, the Federal Networking Council.
What is that?
The Federal Networking Council refers to the Federation of States in
the United States of America.
And they have a Federal Networking Council.
And since the Internet actually is something which has been designed
originally in the United States, this is something where the people
from the United States actually have the major say in how the Internet
is developing.
And so they decided, and certainly there are also some international
representatives there, so they decided what the Internet actually
means.
And there are three different aspects of the Internet which are
essential.
So, if you talk about Internet, you talk about a system which is a
global information system, providing information globally.
Now, how can you do that?
For that, first of all, you need ways of actually locating the
information.
So, you need addresses.
That's why we have a globally unique address space.
Something which in the first years of the Internet was not the case.
But at that time, in 1995, certainly that was all established.
One globally unique address space.
And then you have a unique way of addressing all the different
resources in the Internet.
One very important point, you can locate all the essential resources
that you would like to access in some way.
And then you need some way of actually getting there.
So, this is some location.
Now, you are here, and that's that location.
How do you actually get the information, or how can you actually
access that information?
For that, you need a communication protocol.
And there is this collection of protocols which are called the
Transmission Control and Internet Protocol suite of protocols.
So, it's not just those two, but it is a few more.
But it is the TCP-IP protocol collection.
So, this is also essential.
One standardized protocol.
If you would like to access information on the Internet, you know the
address, you just use some way those protocols.
So, this has to use TCP-IP in an appropriate combination.
And you will see how that works, actually, a little bit later.
And then, on top of that, we would like to use certain services.
We would like to have standard ways of accessing the information.
Like, we not only would like to send information in some way, send it
from our location to that place there.
We would also like to retrieve information from there and do that in a
standardized way.
So, there are high-level services on top of that protocol.
So, the Internet provides, uses, or makes accessible, either publicly
or privately, high-level services layered on the communications or
related infrastructure described herein.
So, services like email, file transfer, access to, for example, to web
pages, and things like that.
Standardized way of accessing information.
These three things are essential.
And if you have a system, a network, which is not based on those three
things, it's not an Internet.
Now, this is just a definition.
There have been many different protocols, different from TCP-IP.
But if you talk about the Internet, it's exactly this.
So, it looks like a globally connected system, the global information
system.
And if you're from somewhere in the States, you would like to access
something somewhere in China, you have to know how to do that.
You just use TCP-IP, and you can access all those computers there.
Now, if we characterize that in an informal way, we could say,
essentially, it is a globally connected computer.
You can perform computations anywhere, or at those locations which
allow you to perform computations there.
And so, what you can do is simplify transfer, although certainly, like
some people talk about using cloud computing for control of certain
devices in the energy system.
Now, if you have real-time requirements, real-time means certain time
limits, and for actually doing something.
And if these time constraints are very sharp, or very small, just a
few milliseconds, you have no chance of using cloud computing.
So, people who talk about providing services for the smart grid using
cloud computing can only do something for certain applications which
don't have the real-time character.
So, if you would like to get something very fast, very quickly, which
is time-consuming, or let me say, if it's just a simple thing, and you
have to move information from some distant place where maybe the
processing is done, but you have to transport the information back and
forth, then this year might take much longer than actually doing that
operation, and so it would be much better to actually providing or
doing the computations here locally.
You have always this trade-off between transfer times latency for
communicating and doing something internally, and you all know that we
can do millions of operations inside a computer in the same time where
we just do a simple ping between two computers.
So, because of the time it takes, it takes milliseconds to move
information between two computers, but we can do millions of
operations in milliseconds.
And so, you always have to look at what is the most reasonable thing
to do.
And then, certainly, as I said, we have to look at the communication
overhead.
If you have to do high-performance computing, some are really
expensive computations, it does make sense to move that to a place
where you have very powerful machines, and then get this as a service.
So, there are many interesting aspects of using such a globally
connected computing, or computer just using, some people say using the
network, and not an individual computer.
Then we have a worldwide digital library.
You get all kinds of information.
You know that all kinds of information is available.
Electronic journals, books, proceedings, reports, the problem always
is that you don't know about the quality or relevance.
Some information is there where you don't know is it really adequate,
what is written there.
There are some sources, sometimes we talk about crowdsourcing, where
information is provided by anybody.
For example, in Wikipedia, you can make some entry, but there is some
quality control by others looking at that and correcting it.
But if you look at Wikipedia, for example, you never know whether it's
really adequate, what's written there, or whether it is just some
wrong information.
So, all kinds of things that are available, and you use that for, I
guess, most of the time in your life you have used that.
Meanwhile, maybe you cannot really imagine that this has not been
there.
One of the problems certainly is, what are the economic aspects of
that?
How can you actually make money with providing information on the
internet if you just provide content?
How do you get refunded for that if people would like to access that
freely?
So, digital rights management is an important topic, copyright
handling.
There's a topic like open access for scientific publications.
Open access, which is providing information freely, but then you have
to pay for doing that.
Interesting scheme, you'd only pay for publishing something, you don't
pay for getting information from somewhere else.
Then you don't have to pay for subscriptions to journals, but you get
that information for free because those who publish are paying for the
costs of that.
Interesting topics which have to be looked at, but this is not the
topic of this course.
Then, worldwide information exchange.
You know that we would like to get information on just any individual
company, institution.
We would like to get information on events, on culture programs.
Online learning is something, some important aspect.
Weather forecast, tourist information.
Most people only use online tourist information, make all their, or
get the train tickets there.
All kinds of things, new services, audio-on-demand, video-on-demand,
service -on-demand, or XX as a service, computing as a service.
Maybe learning as a service doesn't work, but optimizing as a service
or things like that.
There are personal newspapers, job markets, stock exchange rates can
be accessed, so lots of things that we know there.
It's a huge place for information exchange.
It's also a worldwide communication system.
We have electronic mail.
Although, if I look at my electronic mail, if I look at that in the
morning, I notice, oh, there are some messages which I have to respond
to.
And if I look at that in the evening, I don't see those messages
anymore because they are far down my list of messages.
So this is a very unreliable communication medium, meanwhile, because
it's not on purpose that I don't answer messages.
So if you send me a message and you don't get a response, just send
the message again.
Because it may just be that I didn't notice it because it was so far
down in my in-stack that I just didn't see it.
And so then I cannot respond, really.
And I very often don't have the time to look at all the messages that
came in because there are always some messages that are spam messages.
And then sometimes those relevant messages get lost in that list of
emails.
So electronic mail is an important thing, but sometimes it's not
really something which is effective anymore.
Telephone services, certainly, like Skype, important.
Telephone service, voice over IP, news groups, discussion groups,
social networks, electronic bundles, video conferences.
Computer-supported cooperative work, you do something together with
other people and do that by sharing all the documents.
For that, you need some CSCW system allowing you to share documents in
a simple way.
And the essential thing here is that nowadays it's not important how
far apart you are regionally, in fact, physically, but the important
point is what is your communication distance?
How fast can you actually communicate?
Sometimes you are closer to people who are sitting in a different
country than those people who are just sitting right next to you on
your floor because you just don't meet them that often or maybe those
on the next floor.
So communication is an important thing.
How can you exchange information?
How can you cooperate?
And if you have the perfect communication systems with people in China
or the States or in South Africa, you can cooperate with them in
almost no time.
And so the network becomes the provider of services.
It's no longer a particular server.
You just access the service and this is one of the ideas of cloud
computing, as some of you might know already.
Then there is the worldwide marketplace.
We do all kinds of market operations on the internet, on services like
the World Wide Web.
So a company nowadays can only survive if they have a reasonable
presentation in the World Wide Web.
And so you have all kinds of things like personalized warehouses,
shopping centers.
You have a worldwide customer potential that you can just address.
You have a target group for your product that is global.
You also have the customer view.
You have a worldwide product potential.
You can always get the best product.
And there are services providing you with the best product for your
needs.
But then can you trust those services?
Are they actually providing the best products or are they just paid
for providing you certain products?
Then you have to compare different of those.
You need certain references or reputation information on that.
So trustworthiness of that is also an important topic.
So many different things with respect to doing business nowadays just
rely on the internet.
Okay.
Then we have virtual distributed companies.
Companies can cooperate.
You can easily cooperate regardless of the physical distance.
And it's actually a benefit if you have a company which is spread all
over the world.
So you can have three shifts.
Three eight-hour shifts.
People are just continually working on some product, some project.
The first ones are doing that in Europe.
Then you do something in China.
Then you do something in the United States.
And so you can continuously work on certain topics.
That's perfect.
And so certainly those people who are living in different time zones
might have some problems in communicating.
But that is something which certainly can also be resolved.
And you just need appropriate ways of using services for cooperation.
And so you get all kinds of companies which actually can have a
worldwide distribution of their divisions.
And we know all the benefits and disadvantages of those distributed
companies.
And you can also do something like having a time-limited cooperation
of some people.
Just for a certain project, you cooperate with some other company.
Then you form a time-limited virtual company which is dissolved after
the end of that project.
Just because you need certain competences for a certain project.
So you have much more flexibility in working or doing certain
interesting research or development projects.
And there are virtual universities.
I mentioned already some of those projects.
I mentioned the University Corporation of Informatic People.
There has been WIROA, the virtual university in the Upper Rhine
region.
There has been WWR, which was the Wissenswerkstatt Rechensysteme.
Production of all kinds of e-learning modules.
NuCard, Noflux University Cards.
Ruhr-Eukro-Wettwahl, I mentioned that already.
And certainly the idea of those who provide the money, who decided to
set up those funding programs, thought, well, if we generate some e
-learning modules, for example, for a course on efficient algorithms,
then we only need this one course.
And everybody who is interested in efficient algorithms can take that
virtual course.
And we don't need all those professors teaching courses at different
locations.
We just need one.
But that's certainly not happening.
And we still have all the professors teaching efficient algorithms.
But we have, in addition, certain electronic material.
So this idea of some politicians that they could actually drastically
cut down on expenses for personnel in the universities were wrong.
Because you always need updated versions of those e-learning modules
and so on.
But this is an important part, that you have actually the capability
of accessing e-learning material.
So this is something which is important, to have those materials, like
multimedia teaching, telelecturing.
I actually have taught this course sometimes as a telecourse, like a
course which is streamed online to different locations.
So students at Mannheim and Freiburg could listen to this talk
simultaneously.
But then you need synchronized reservation of classrooms and things
like that.
It's a lot of organizational overhead.
And it's actually not that beneficial, because the difference between
listening online to a remote course or looking at a recorded lecture
is not that large.
The only difference is that in a telelecture, you can give feedback
even from a remote place.
For example, using tools as the ones that I showed you here.
And so it can have a benefit, but we decided to have just this hybrid
way of teaching, having recorded lectures and then provide those
lectures for students at the same place or at some other location.
We have tele-seminars, did many things on that, having remote people
from at least two different locations cooperating in a seminar.
There are multimedia-enhanced textbooks.
So you have an online textbook and you can click on certain extra
material and get algorithm animations and things like that.
And you can have a combination of curricular content.
And certainly that's interesting.
That was one of the topics here in the University Corporation of
Informatics people and also in the Business Werkstatt Rechensystem,
where chairs all over Germany provided modules on topics in computer
engineering.
There are learning management systems and things like that are quite
important.
We don't have that much here on e-learning.
Maybe I can just briefly ask you another question.
I had a question.
I don't know whether you have done that or have looked at that.
I should clear this.
What is this?
What do you think about e-learning?
I would like to...
What's this?
How can I select the next question?
This is interesting.
Closed question.
Published question.
So, I could ask you, what do you think about e-learning?
I don't know whether you have had some experience with e-learning.
Is it important?
Is it irrelevant?
Or would you say you don't bother?
So, some remarks.
You like that.
Brief response.
Four people of you like e-learning.
I could have asked you to raise your hands whether you like e
-learning.
Raise your hands who thinks that e-learning is important.
How many think that they don't need it?
Also a few.
Okay.
No problem.
Okay.
So, majority is for that it's important.
Okay.
So, let's continue with the course.
So, that is things that we have there.
Further applications certainly are easily imaginable.
I said here...
By the way, what do you think about providing material on learning
repositories like iTunes U?
Who of you knows what iTunes U is?
iTunes University.
Who of you thinks that we should provide this course on iTunes U?
One.
Two.
Okay.
I decided against that.
Why did I do that?
I was asked like there was a checkbox on the form when we provide our
material to the library.
Should that be presented on iTunes U?
And I think that I certainly would do that at a neutral e-learning
repository.
But I don't like to provide something which is just the repository of
one specific manufacturer of products.
So, this is just Apple.
Apple is one company.
I don't provide something for Apple.
I'm teaching for something which should be available for everybody and
not just for those buying those iPhones.
Yeah.
So, I decided against that.
But some people say, oh, you have to be present there.
But my material is available anyway.
Okay.
So, what we see is that the Internet has changed our lives quite
significantly.
The way we communicate.
A lot of questions we have to look at.
So, this is just all introductory motivational part.
I should speed up a bit.
So, question is, how can we ensure reliable communication?
How can we avoid undesired messages?
What can we do about undesired communication of criminals?
This was one of the major concerns of politicians in the 90s.
That we should restrict the use of cryptography in the web.
Because only those who have criminal ideas, criminal intent, would
communicate in a secret way.
They didn't know about the necessity to have cryptography for
signatures and things like that.
But this is one thing people are looking at.
What can we do about undesired communication of criminals?
How do we make sure the person we communicate with is the person we
think it is?
So, that is something on authentication.
How do we make sure that messages have not been modified?
How do we know that the message that we get actually has been sent in
that way, has been formulated in that way by the sender that you think
is the sender?
Maybe you get a check on some money.
And how do you know that it is the valid amount there?
How can we make sure that no one else can read the messages, make it
confidential?
Many people write confidential stuff on email messages.
And email messages are the same as postcards.
Everybody can read those messages.
And if you have some private information, you should never do that by
email.
But some people post private information on Facebook.
So, that's even worse.
How can we transfer and store large amounts of data?
Big data is one of the hot issues in the moment.
Hot topics.
We have big data.
Big data means huge amounts of data.
Terabytes of data per day.
Or petabytes.
There are large scientific projects, for example, in physics.
The Large Hadron Collider project in Geneva, where they produce all
kinds of data just by having particle collisions.
They look at what kind of particles actually are generated there.
If some collide.
And so, they get terabytes of data per day.
This data has to be stored somewhere.
It may be accessible to those who are interested in that data.
So, the operation, the handling of big data libraries is a very hot
topic in the moment.
In many different areas of science and also beyond science.
The way we search for information, search engines, there used to be a
large variety of different search engines.
Now, it's almost exclusively Google.
Is that good?
Just a recent cover story of Spiegel is the power of Google.
It's on Google and what they actually can do, how they operate.
So, I once noticed on the web page of Google, when I looked for some
scientist, I noticed him as the chief evangelist of Google.
Now, I know that the term evangelist is used in some way in North
America.
But if I look at the word evangelist and also see that Google
proclaims that they actually support to know the truth about certain
systems, then you have to be very suspicious of what they are doing.
If you talk about, we provide the truth, and you have a chief
evangelist, you can never trust them.
Because they can do whatever they like.
They have the power to provide you with information.
And you know that depending on where you are in the world, you get
different information.
So, obviously truth is different at different locations.
And if you have one company which is providing you with the
information when you ask certain questions, then this is a very
dangerous thing.
Because we are really emphasizing the free access to information.
But if that is influenced just by one company, they have a really
strong responsibility, a high responsibility, that that actually is
independent information and not influenced by some interest groups.
And we know that Google has signed contracts with some countries about
the type of information that they provide.
They have signed contracts with some countries that whoever is
actually accessing or providing content that is not liked by a certain
government, then they would identify the persons who did that and tell
the names to the government.
This is not really free access to information.
This is very dangerous.
And so, you have a question?
The problem of natural monopoly.
Yes.
On the internet, like, for example, you can only use one really good
one.
And it doesn't make sense to have another one that is as good or the
same as the network.
You saw that there were several, and they all used Facebook.
Yes.
And it doesn't make sense to have just another one.
And so, it comes to this topic of natural monopoly.
Yes, there may be some natural monopolies, but later on we will learn
something about relevance calculations.
And so, all the different companies, like Google, has a certain way of
calculating the relevance of documents.
They provide you with answers to a query.
And this is following certain rules.
And you will always notice that information from certain sources,
which are closely connected to Google, are always on the top.
Yes.
Is that a natural monopoly?
It may be natural that you are always supporting your own buddies.
Yes.
But it's not what we really like to get.
And so, it's much better to have a competition.
There are actually search engines which exploit that and send queries
to different search engines and then get some combined view.
That is a better way of doing that.
But somehow, it's not really that popular to do that.
I don't know why, but to have just one monopoly there is a very
dangerous thing.
Because it can be misused.
I don't say that it is misused on purpose, but you have to be
suspicious.
This is something which we learn to be suspicious.
Something which, in some countries, you don't learn to be suspicious.
You learn to always accept.
In some countries, if you would ask a question as a student, you would
show that the lecturer actually has not provided you with all the
necessary information.
And so, it would be an insult to ask a question because you are
telling, oh, the lecturer didn't do it correctly.
We learn, we teach you to ask questions.
To always put in question what we tell you.
Because in this way, you will be created.
It's an important point to be able to do that.
I ask you to be suspicious on things like if there is just one company
providing information.
We will come a bit later back to that topic.
Many different things that are available there.
For example, for journals, we have specific ways of looking at whether
the content there is okay or not.
We have reviewing systems and things like that.
So, this is something which is actually done.
So, many things we have to look at there.
Many questions that could be asked.
How can we search efficiently?
How can we identify the relevant information?
And find out, is it really relevant?
What is the price for information?
Major topic of information engineering and management.
How do we protect intellectual property?
Some pirates have the idea that they can access all the information
regardless of copyrights.
This is not really correct.
What are the consequences of the Internet for politics?
It's an important topic.
How that is actually changing the Internet.
For example, in China, as I learned, in China, essential laws are put
into the Internet for feedback from the public.
Anybody can give feedback on essential new legislation.
And for a period of two months or something.
And then all this feedback is put into the laws.
You would not say that China is a democratic country.
We would say that, oh, Germany is a democratic country.
You would never find that in Germany.
That a new law is actually put for public discussion in the Internet.
Here we have different ways of doing that.
We have the parties.
We have the parliament.
Closed sessions in all kinds of committees.
But it's not put to the public.
Isn't it much more democratic to put something to the public, ask for
public feedback, than doing that just for a closed collection of
people in the parliament?
They certainly are elected.
But if we have the Internet, shouldn't we change the ways we actually
get to our legislation?
We don't do that.
I know that politicians, like representatives, members of parliament
who did that, really got punished for that.
Because that's against the rules of the parliament.
You are not supposed to ask for public feedback on a certain proposed
new law.
But wouldn't that be really more democratic?
It's interesting to see the different things that develop in the
world.
Just a few more things on motivation.
The ways we shop has changed quite a bit.
Most of you will buy things at Amazon, eBay, and so on.
You buy tickets at different places.
But how can we pay electronically?
How can we remain anonymous?
If we look at a certain shop, is that anonymous or is that traced?
How do we get certified information and quality functionality?
Also an important topic.
The way we compute is changing.
Grid computing, cloud computing, SETI at home.
Who of you doesn't know what SETI at home is?
You don't know that?
Searching for extraterrestrial information.
So that means certain information, like certain signals, are coming
from outer space somewhere.
Or is recorded.
And then people look for intelligent patterns.
And since this is a huge amount of information, you can just be part
of SETI at home.
And your screensaver can just...
When you are using a screensaver, you can use the computing power of
your computer to just look at those pieces of information that are
recorded from outer space.
And then look for intelligent information.
That's done by hundreds of thousands of people participating in that,
looking for intelligent patterns.
That's trying to look to identify certain extraterrestrial
intelligence.
Okay.
So that's a self-organized, massively parallel application, massively
distributed application of computing.
How can we protect ourselves, our computer and so on?
Different important topics.
So we know that the internet has changed our lives.
We have to look at all the effects of that.
We do that in this course.
I will do that next week on showing you more about technologies in the
internet.
Thank you very much for your attention.
See you again next week.