A case study: Internet Search Techniques and Business Intelligence

One of the courses I attend at KTH is Internet Search Techniques and Business Intelligence. This course is taught in English by Erik Sneiders and Hercules Dalianis and is offered to students of the University of Stockholm (SU) as well as to students of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).

The first thing about this course, which is new to me is that in case one passes all the assignments and laborations one earns 7.5 ECTS. Concerning the fact that one ECTS should correspond 30 hours of work of a average student who reaches average grades this number seems to be a little bit high. However, this concerns only this particular course and certainly not others.

What is this course about?

This is a tough question to answer. So I follow the approach of the teachers who answer on the course web page the other question, what this course is not about: “This is not a course on how to use the interface of Internet search engines. The course gives an insight into the techniques for information searching applied on the Internet.” (Quote Origin). Obviously there are people who thought this course would teach them how to use search engines… can’t believe it. And still what is this course about? I try to summarize this:

1. How does information retrieval (IR) work?
2. What are basic IR models? (Boolean and vector space based models)
3. Search engine evaluation.
4. Similarity between documents and queries.
5. Page Rank and how to calculate this?
6. Search engine optimization of web pages.
7. Key word optimization.
8. Link optimization.
9. etc.

This is roughly the part Erik Sneiders teaches. The other part of the course is about Business Intelligence. The interesting thing about BI is that this field concerns issues how e.g. a company can get all information needed in order to have an advantage over those competitors, which do not have these information. Therefore BI is basically about information search for companies. This part of the course is ongoing at the moment and I will summarize this part by the time the course will be finished.

Laborations and Assignments

Besides a final exam this course requires to fulfil the so called Laborations and assignments. Laborations are practical sessions in computer pools at the university. So within 90 min. one has to fulfil a certain exercises. In the first lab. e.g. the big challenge was to use a software with a Swedish interface. This makes a lot of sense in a course taught in English aimed for international students etc. But it seems like that the teacher Hercules is not so aware about that people choose this course partly because it is supposed to be taught in English.

Assignments are to be done in little groups (3 to 4 students). The topics are more time consuming and take more effort than labs. In the first assignments it was demanded to conduct a search engine evaluation in a very small scale. The most difficult part about those assignments is that one has to work in groups with people one does not know at all. So for example a I turned out to be in a group with a girl who has not too much time because she mother of a little child. The other girl in the assignment group has a job every day the week until noon and lately also an exam so she does not show up at all. The third one is also an exchange student who is the total difference to the first two: he is very skillful and works hard for this class.

So all in all it is hard to say what I should think or say – is it better here than at my home university? I realised that I like smaller numbers of students in lectures (here we are about 50 students – I am used to about 10). What I like a lot is the idea to be finished with the course in the middle of the semester and then starting new courses… Too many aspects one could talk about!

The IT campus of KTH and SU in Kista, Stockholm

The main reason for me, why I am in Stockholm for a semester is that I wanted to close as many gaps in my knowledge about IT and computer science as I could. This initial intention has dramatically shifted due to some difficulties in finding a department where I could join the research work. However, I decided to make the best out of the situation and attend some courses, e.g. about topics that are not taught at my home university.

The courses about IT and computer science happen to be located on the IT-campus of the KTH and Stockholm University (SU). This means, this campus is located in the beautiful Science City in Kista, Stockholm. Why this is still supposed to be Stockholm is a maze. It takes me every day a millions of hours to get there and back.

However, this campus in Kista is pretty new and the lecture rooms are stuffed with technology for e-learning etc. Besides a huge rear projection screen you will find always a Smart Board in every lecture room. This means teachers could annotate the slides they show during their lecture. I find it very amusing that this has not been the case one single time so far.

Kampus Kista Lecture Room

In order to make sure that everybody hears everything the lecture rooms are equipped with a lot of audio technology. So the lecturer could use a mic as well as people in the audience, who wish to discuss something. As well as the CSCW technology the audio technology is not used in the lectures I attend. However, I find it pretty cool to have such nice lecture rooms etc.

Mic at every place in the audience.

Besides the technology in the lecture rooms, the campus is stuffed with IT stuff. For example almost every door is secured with an electronic lock. If one has a key card and in some cases the corresponding pin code, one can access the room or corridor behind this door. This is in some cases a little bit annoying but at least one does not need an access card to open the doors to the rest rooms.

Kayak Trip in Trollbäcken

Today was probably one of the last days, which could be called late summer days. So perfect weather for a kayak trip since it was cold but sunny! Together with three other guys from the Tyresö dormitory I went to Trollbecken and we rented there kayaks for the day.

All I can say is that if you have the chance to go on a kayak trip in Sweden just do it!

Have a look at Google’s maps where this was: Klick Here

Trip to Skansen – Stockholm

Hey hey!

Last week I had the great pleasure to visit the museum Skansen in Stockholm. This visit was organised by the course Swedish History and Societe, which I attend in order to get to know a little more about Sweden. The first advanture in the context of this visit was that I was 30 min. late when I came to Skansen becuase I had a so called laboration this afternoon in Kista. Kista is the place where most of the courses I attend are taking place, which is quite a challenge. This is because I get travel-sick quite easily in Stockholm’s Tunelbana. However, when I arrived at Skansen there was nobody I knew at the entrance so I just asked at the entrance if they let me in, since I was late and missed my group. Luckily the nice person just let me in and told me to call somebody and ask where in Skansen they were.

The guided tour in the museum itself was very interesting, since the person, who showed us around could tell stories about every single artefact. In Skansen you can see little houses from the far North of Sweden as well as framer houses of the South. Also some buildings build by king Karl Gustav III are there.

Fig. A hut from Lapland (Jonnie Nord (User:Zaphod))

Besides the buildings there is also a collection of various animals e.g. elks, reindeer and brown bears.

(Picture taken by Alisdair McDiarmid from Glasgow, United Kingdom)

So if you ever have the chance to go to this place: do it. You will get some nice impressions about the life in Sweden and besides that, it is like a little vocation from the big city Stockholm

CCC: Chaos TV – Star Trek meets Monty Python

This is beautiful:

Trip to Vaxholm

Last Sunday a bunch of Erasmus-people and I had a trip to Vaxholm. It is a nice thing to do if you have nothing else to do on a typical Sunday afternoon.

Vaxholm claims to be the capital of the archipelago. We could not figure out if this is true but in any case it is a town right in the archipelago next to Stockholm.

This picture (Thanks to Wikipedia, published under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5) shows the castle of Vaxholm. The best part about this place is that the movie “Pippi Långstrump på de sju haven” has been shot partly there. Besides this happy part of history this place hosts a lot of huge guns – so if you are not so much into this stuff there is basically no reason to take the boat to the castle. But actually the boat, which brings you to the castle is worth to take a little boat ride because the furniture and all the things inside are in such a nice old school way – just great!

In any case – Vaxholm is probably a beautiful place on a summer day. On the other hand I should also get used to the northern fall, which is not so sunny and bright as I hoped it was ; )

Pictures and their nature to tell stories

As I started to sort the 2,1 GB of pictures Natasha collected from the inhabitants of the Tyresö student dormitory I found one wonderful picture showing the building, in which we live.

(Picture by Daniel)

I personally think that this image illustrates perfectly the mood this place has. The sun seems to shine brighter in Sthlm than here… When I look at this image and imagine that in the building with the sign of the Handelbanken on its roof live about 40 students from all over Europe, then I have the feeling that there are a lot of stories to tell. For example my neighbor Cedrick found in his room a letter from the guy who lived there before. In the letter he told Cedrick that he would probably think that this place sucks etc. but he should give Tyresö a chance and by the time the semester begins he would probably love this place… who knows if this prediction really came true or not?

In contrast to this image taken by Daniel stands the “advertisement” of the KTH accommodation office:

On the web-page of the accommodation office you can find the pictures above. The best trick to make even Rotterdam look nice is obviously to make the pictures while the sun is shining and if this is not enough then make pictures of happy people. This works. What they did not photograph were e.g. the kitchens, the bath rooms etc… all the difficult parts.

Probably I could collect 1000 pictures and none of them would be good enough to express the complexity of this dormitory here in Tyresö.

The Hives @ Grönalund/Stkhlm

August 31. The Hives played an amazing concert at Grönalung in Stockholm. I really liked the concert especially because there were two friends from home too, who arrived an hour before the concert began at T-Centralen, where I picked them up. Funny thing was, that you usually are allowed to get to concerts in Grönalund for the ordinary day-price, if you get in there before 6 p.m. Since I underestimated the time it takes to get to the venue from T-Centralen, we didn’t get there on time and the tickets, which I had already bought were actually invalid by then. So we just tried to get in anyways what worked surprisingly, because there was this man standing right next to the entrance things, where you have to put in your tickets, what should open the gate. These machines seemed to be broken so we just gave the man the tickets in we were in…

Helsinki Trip – Some Pictures

Hey hey,
here are some pictures of the Helsinki trip. So I would like to thank those, who made those pictures!

Are you smart enough for Nordea’s online banking?

Since everything concerning on-line banking should be absolutely dummy proof, I think it is worth to share some of the experiences I made with the on-line banking of the Nordea bank account I opened a short while ago.

The first big challenge is to log in the on-line system. You can do this ones you got your smart card and the little code generator machine. The first question I was dealing with was, if I have to connect the little machine to my computer via the USB cable, which was also in the box of the machine. As it turns out, the machine got an autonomous power supply and one should not try to connect the little machine to the computer. It works perfectly fine if you just put your smart card into it – otherwise it shows some strange symbols on its display. However, once you made this you have to face the next problem.

So as the instructions tell you, you should try to find the log in form. The problem here is that the English instructions are obviously older than the system and they do not fit to each other. So one just has to find the little link “e-kod” somewhere on the homepage of Nordea.

I figured out that the translation function of Google quite good to manage the rest of the procedures. The only thing, which is quite confusing is that one has to “Sign” some actions and sometimes you have to “Login”. So I realy do not get the point of those security procedures – althogh I am quite interested in user friendly and secure computer systems. So what I want to say is, I would not consider myself a dummy concerning computer systems and all this, however I had a realy hard time to find out how to use this system. This is probably not only because of bad usabilty of the system but also because of my swedish skills, which are not as fabulous as I whish they were.

So to make a little conclusion: if you are planing to get an bank account in Sweden then it might be a good idea to find somebody how knows how it works first. Or go to bank which got an online bank system in English.

Cheers