Projects

Intelligent Recommendation & Decision Technologies for Community-Driven Requirements Engineering

Funded by: EU H2020 Duration: 2017-2020

Requirements are the basis for all subsequent development, deployment, and maintenance activities. High quality requirements are the essential precondition for the success of an ICT project. Improving the requirements processes can reduce the overall cost of software, increase the stakeholders’ satisfaction, and dramatically improve time to market. The OPENREQ project will develop an innovative, open source recommendation & decision support platform that assists distributed stakeholders to collaborate in requirements engineering tasks. OPENREQ will allow single stakeholders, groups of stakeholders, and communities to reuse, develop, discuss, negotiate estimate, configure, and manage requirements in a context-aware and personalized way. The applicability of OPENREQ technologies will be shown in three industrial trials with influencing players in the domains of telecom, transportation systems, and cross-platform open source software.

Program Understanding German Alliance

Funded by: DFG Duration: 2019-2021

To reduce software maintenance effort and support the comprehension of programs, researchers and tool vendors have conducted a number of studies and suggested a number of tools. While the studies suffer from limitations such as small sample size or constructed lab settings, the tools are barely used in practice. PUNGA aims at gaining deeper insights into the field of program comprehension and to understand what programmers actually do when they try to understand a software system. To this end, we conduct a series of realistic qualitative and quantitative empirical studies. For instance, we observe programmers during their everyday work and analyze their comprehension activities and knowledge needs. The results will include recommendations for best-practices, empirical evidence, and tool-features to better support software developer while comprehending software in different contexts.

Open Data Studio

Funded by: Hochschulwettbewerb 2018 Duration: 2018

The term Open Data refers to data which can be distributed and used freely by anyone. The Open Data Studio is conceived as a place where prototypes for data-driven-products that work with or produce Open Data are developed. For the process of creating this platform citizens, students, and scientist of various backgrounds are invited to collaborate and at the same time to be educated about Open Data and Citizen Science. The involvement of citizens is supposed to empower and to motivate non-scientists to participate in future projects. This project is a cooperation with other Open Data related organizations here in Hamburg: Transparenzportal Hamburg, Code for Hamburg and Urban Data Hub. As one of the winning projects of the Hochschulwettbewerb 2018—for the topic 'working environments of the future’—you can find more information about the project on their website.

Forum 4.0: Semi-automated analysis and visualization of user comments

Funded by: ahoi.digital Duration: 2018 - 2020

Online user comments, such as journalistic content or product features are associated with low quality, Hate speech or even excessive demands for moderation. Forum 4.0 will develop new methods based on text analysis, machine learning (with human-in-the-loop) and Empirical Software Engineering to better exploit the constructive and deliberative potential of user comments. The aim is to systematically analyze, aggregate and visualize the content and quality of comments at runtime in order to enable constructive participation. The project builds on our previous work with social scientists and aims for an informatics-centered, interdisciplinary research network that combines the focal points “Information Governance Technologies” and “Data Science” of ahoi.digital. We foresee immense transfer potential for the media location of Hamburg.

SmartSE: A Smart Support for Large Scale Software Engineering Courses

Students Project Duration: Since 2017

Due to the technical development, basic knowledge in software engineering became advantageous in various areas and is therefore integrated into many studies. Thereby, the number and diversity of students in software engineering courses have constantly increased over the past years. By now, we hold the fundamental lecture "Software Engineering 1" (SE1) for more than 600 students. To cope with scalability challenges of this lecture, we are seeking for smart support solutions. One outcome of this project aims at developing a complementary mobile app for SE1 to capture the students’ progress in lab exercises digitally and adapt the lecture and teaching content accordingly. The project team consists of five members: Marlo Häring, Dina Salhi, Timon Brüning, Veit-Hendrik Schlenker, and Christian Schlieper. We plan to have a ready to use version by the upcoming winter semester.

	Journalism, Users, and Technology Funded By: SCAN-4J Duration: Since 2015
This project aims at developing a framework for the systematic, semi-automated analysis of audience feedback on journalistic content to better reflect the voice of users, mitigate the analysis efforts, and help journalists generate new content from the user comments.

HOOU: Hamburg Open Online University

Students Project Duration: 2015 - 2016

The Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) is an innovative and interdisciplinary project from the city of Hamburg, Hamburg’s public universities and the Multimedia Kontor Hamburg (MMKH). The Hamburg Open Online University will provide education in digital and innovative ways. Goals of HOOU are knowledge transfer and the creation of collaborative connections between different field of studies and interests. One important concept is that HOOU is open for anyone interested in education and knowledge.

TamTam: Noise Control by the Crowd, for the Crowd

Open Source Project Duration: Since 2015

In our daily life, we are faced with the constantly increasing noise pollution. Environmental noise caused, e.g., by traffic, industrial, and leisure activities, is one of the biggest environmental problems, which costs Europe about 12 billion Euros per year. For instance, 43.9% of Hamburg’s area has a noise level above 55 dB(A), a level that may cause serious health consequences including lack of concentration, sleep disturbances, and organic damages. TamTam is an innovative crowdsourcing app that aim is to raise the awareness for noise pollution among citizens and help to control and minimize more. TamTam users can act as noise sensors using their smartphones anywhere anytime. The measurements from the smartphones are collected in an aggregated manner on a secure server. In a noise map, other users can see the noise levels of streets, parks, and locations like restaurants or sport hall. Additionally TamTam offers social media functionalities to get in contact with other citizens interested in the control and reduction of noise. Service providers such as hotels, restaurants, or park operators with sufficient positive noise feedback and measurements can get a quality badge granted by TamTam.

Muses Multiplatform Useable Endpoint Security

Funded By: EU Grant 318508 Duration: 2012 - 2015

Nowadays, information is highly distributed amongst corporate servers, the cloud, and multiple mobile personal devices like PDAs, tablets and smartphones. Besides, the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ practice is becoming more common in large organizations, posing new security threats and blurring the limits between corporate and personal use. MUSES will provide a user-centric, context-aware, and self-adaptive corporate security system, able to cope with the concept of seamless working experience on different devices, in which a user may start a session on a device and location and resume the process on different devices and locations, without corporate digital asset loss.

	Flunx. Interest, Me, Now Privately funded project Duration: 2014 - 2015
A new perspective on social media for mobile devices: The best of Twitter, Whatsapp, and Threema altogether.

BeeQn: A Context-aware framework for BLE

Infrastructure project, University funded Duration: 2014

BeeQn is a software development framework for the new Bluetooth Low Energy Technology (also called iBeacon). This technology opens up new possibilities concerning context-aware apps for mobile devices. It enables to attach additional information to any physical object (like a door, a product in a store, or a bike stand) or a service (like a bus ride or a music event). This information or can be discovered, retrieved, and personalized by a mobile device.

CaDO: Content Analysis for Software Documentation

Cooperation with McGill University Duration: 2011

Reading documentation is an important part of developing and managing software. For example, reference documentation complements Application Programming Interfaces (API) by providing information not obvious from the syntax of the API. To improve the quality of software documentation and the efficiency with which the relevant information it contains can be accessed, we must first understand its content. This project includes a series of studies on the nature and organization of knowledge contained in the software documentation. The first phase is to study and compare thousands of API reference documentation provided as part of two major technology platforms: Java SDK 6 and .NET 4.0. The result include (1) a description of knowledge patterns based on grounded methods and independent empirical validation, (b) insights for the design of documentation retrieval systems, the improvement of documentation quality, and the management of technical knowledge, as well as (c) open source tools for systematically studying software documentation.

FastFix: Monitoring Control for Remote Software Maintenance

Funded By: EU FP7 STREP project Duration: 2010-2013

FastFix will enable time- and cost-efficient maintenance and support services, by monitoring software applications, replicating semantic execution failures, and automatically generating patches. Software maintenance and support services are key factors to customers’ perception of software quality. Customers are more demanding about these services, while contribution of maintenance to products total cost of ownership should be reduced. Reducing maintenance costs is even more crucial for SME’s. Their software products often cover specific niches. To take full advantage of this, SMEs must get access to global markets, what is usually hampered by the lack of an adequate on-site customer support. Software vendors need a system to remotely provide a high quality support service to their customers, improve user experience and facilitate corrective, adaptive and preventive maintenance – of both new and existing software products.

TeamWeaver Open Source Project

Funded By: EU and BMBF projects Duration: Since 2010

In their daily work, software engineers need efficient support for accessing project information and sharing personal experiences. TeamWeaver is an Open Source framework, which embeds lightweight and efficient knowledge access and sharing into the working context of a developer – accessible via the Web, Wikis and the Eclipse IDE. Core features of TeamWeaver are Information access (search and assistance), need-driven knowledge sharing, automatic creating of context knowledge by user observation, lightweight “wiki-style” authoring and metadata storage with semantic technologies.