At the research group Intelligent Networks at TU Berlin, which is part of  Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, there are openings for the following theses:

• Evaluation of Forward Error Correction Mechanisms and Implementation in IPTV Quality Estimation Metrics (BA, MA, DA)
• Evaluation of Resend Mechanisms and Implementation in IPTV Quality Estimation Metrics (BA, MA, DA)
• Performance Evaluation of Existing Video Quality Metrics (Project, BA, MA, DA)
• Development and Implementation of error concealment
  methods for video decoding (Project, BA, MA, DA)

If you are interested in one of those, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me.

There are bad news. Viruses and worms are subject to a constant evolution and we are far from reaching the steady state. New influenza viruses, an infectious disease caused by RNA viruses, are constantly produced by mutation and reassortment (the mixing of genetic material from two similar viruses). In the olden days of computing, when we gazed at EGA graphics, computer users content against boot sector viruses and other malicious code affecting their programs. These kinds of viruses became less common in later generations where virus developer focused on exploiting the rich scripting functionalities provided by modern office application suites and Macro Viruses were becoming more widespread. Nowadays, one has to cope with security exploits in hosted software (e.g. phpBB), security leaks in web 2.0 applications (e.g. Facebook applications), phising, ….

This are well-known facts. I presented them to illustrate that viruses evolve and infect new hosts. The bad news is that research has been infected by a new virus called scholastica googlensis, as Alois Potton highlights in the 3/2008 issue of the PIK journal. Scholastica googlensis causes a linearisation of humans aiming towards a perfect alignment, making researchers comparable. Reputation is reduced to a single number, the Google Scholar index, expressing the amount of papers written by the considered author which are indexed in Google’s database. Only the number counts, publish or perish! Research is scaled down to a single metric. The higher the index, the higher the reputation, the higher chances are in an appointment board when filling a vacancy for an full professor. Alois Potton mentioned in his column the idea to reduce the review process at Dagstuhl seminars to a single one dimensional number: the Google Scholar index of the author. Life can be pretty simple.

The consequences are that a single company using the page rank algorithm not only controls the available knowledge – a fact is known, if and only if it is presented within the first n search results – but also influences the way knowledge is created by impairing the selection process in research.

Regarding to Einstein, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Is this metric already a way too simple?