News

Deniz Sarier graduated with an M,Sc. in the B-IT Media Informatics programme in 2008 and currently holds a stipend as a Ph.D. student in the B-IT Research School, supervised by B-IT Professor Joachim von zur Gathen. Her paper "Generic Constructions of Biometric Identity Based Encryption Systems" received the Best Student Paper Award at WISTP2010, the 4th International Workshop in Information Security Theory and Practices. The workshop was devoted to "Security and Privacy of Pervasive Systems and Smart Devices" and the Award is sponsored by ISL, the Institute of IT-Security and Security Law, University of Passau.

Silhouettes is an interactive collaborative gesture-based experience for the German-Chinese House at the World EXPO 2010 in Shanghai. It was developed by Prof. Peter Russell's CAAD group and B-IT Professor Jan Borchers' Media Computing Group.

Echoing the theme of EXPO 2010, the German-Chinese House and its host, the German-Chinese government initiative Germay and China - Moving Ahead Together, EXPO visitors can create a virtual city neighborhood together by interacting with a large-scale display wall using only their body silhouettes. Their city neighborhood becomes part of a growing 3D virtual city that can be seen online.

The exhibit opened on May 1st along with the rest of the World EXPO 2010, and will be on display until June 24th. On the first day, more than 2,000 visitors enjoyed the interactive experience, and the German-Chinese House expects more than 170,000 visitors during the 2 months Silhouettes and the house will be open.

More details about the initiative, current photos and videos, and information about the unique bamboo structure housing the exhibit, can be found at the home page of the Germay and China - Moving Ahead Together initiative (in German and Chinese).

An international Symposium will be organised from May 27 -29, 2010 at B-IT to celebrate B-IT Professor von zur Gathen's 60th birthday.

More information, in particular about registration and programme.

B-IT Professors Hofmann-Apitius and Bajorath have organised the B-IT Life Science Informatics Lecture Series 2010. Due to the success of the Lecture Series in Summer Semesters 2008 and 2009 it will be continued this year.

More information about this year's invited lecturers and their topics can be found here.

Due to the success of Informatiktage in B-IT in the previous years, it was decided that Informatiktage should be held here again. Informatiktage are organised by Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V and will be held in the time of March, 19-20, 2010 at B-IT. This gathering focuses on workshops and keynote lectures, addressing excellent graduate and doctoral students in computer science.
All lectures will be held and all courses will be taught in German.

Read more...

... about the overall programme (in German)

... about the workshops (in German)

B-IT provides a platform for an intercourse among scientists, industry and politics. The 2. B-IT Wirtschaftsforum serves to highlight the competence available in the field of Life Science Science Informatics in the ABC (Aachen-Cologne Bonn) region. A dialogue is essential in promoting the dynamically growing field of Life Science Informatics and benefiting from its outcomes.

These benefits may include innovative research, new products and economic growth.

More information...

Peter Schaar, Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, will give a talk (in German) at B-IT on January 21, 2010. The talk wil be delivered within the B-IT lecture series on Data Privacy (B-IT Ringvorlesung Datenschutz).

Date: January 21, 2010
Venue: Lecture hall B-IT
Time: 19:30 hours

Peter Schaar will speak about "Das Ende der Privatsphäre" (in German).

"iPhone Application Programming", a class offered by Prof. Jan Borchers' B-IT Chair for Media Computing, has recently entered the worldwide Top 100 Downloads on iTunes U.

Read more...

Further information:

iPhone application programming class

iTunes U

Due to the overwhelming success of Schüler-Krypto in the previous years, Schüler-Krypto 2010 will offer two courses this year. They will be held on February 25 and 26, 2010. The courses will address schools, introducing school students to the important field of cryptography. Read more about Schüler-Krypto 2010 (in German).

On Monday, December 7, 2009 Prof. Jan Borchers, head of the B-IT-endowed Media Computing Group, will open Germany's first Fab Lab. These labs let anybody get from an idea for a new device to a prototype quickly, offering a glimpse of the future of personal fabrication in which, for example, 3d printers will let you print out your personal plastic cell phone cover at home - greatly impacting how we will think about mobile devices in the future.

Fab Labs recently started at the MIT Media Lab, and are being set up in many countries - thanks to RWTH Aachen University and the B-IT Foundation now also in Germany. From soldering stations and Arduino microcontroller boards, to a PCB mill, 3D printer and laser cutter, the Media Computing Group's Fab Lab offers a set of tools to turn ideas into prototypes in new ways. The opening ceremony begins at 6 pm.

For more information see the Fab Lab page at Fab Lab.

B-IT Research School in Applied Computer Science, approved by the State of North-Rhine-Westphalia, started in October 2008. First batch of applicants were accepts into B-IT Research School in 2009. Now a new application round has opened. Interested students from Germany and international students with an outstanding academic record are welcome to apply for the PhD and Combined Master-PhD Scholarships. The scholarships are to be filled in by March, 2010 .

Application deadline for these scholarships is January 2, 2010.


More information:

About the Scholarships

About the Areas of Research Covered in B-IT Research School

About the Application Requirements

About the Application Process

B-IT offers in Winter Semester 2009/2010 a lecture series on privacy that addresses a wide audience in Germany. Most of the following announcements will therefore be in German.

Das B-IT bietet im Wintersemester 2009/2010 eine Vortragsreihe zum hochaktuellen Thema Datenschutz an. Die Ringvorlesung Datenschutz bietet interessierten Bürgern die Möglichkeit, wesentliche Informationen aus erster Hand zu erhalten und sich somit eine fundierte Meinung zum Thema zu bilden.

Fragen des Datenschutzes werden dabei nicht nur aus der Sicht der Informatik betrachtet. Die Vortragsreihe beleuchtet das Thema -neben Fragen der IT- auch aus rechtlicher, politischer, künstlerischer und theologischer Sicht.

Das Programm:

29. Oktober 2009.
Prof. Dr. Klaus Brunnstein Universität Hamburg.
Datenschutz versus Informationsfreiheit: zum Schutz der Privatsphäre in Zeiten des Internet.

12. November 2009.
Gerhart Baum Bundesminister a.D
Rettet die Grundrechte: die Spannung zwischen Sicherheit und Freiheit.

26. November 2009.
padeluun Künstler und Netzaktivist.
Kommunikationsgesellschaft ohne Avantgarde, Phlegma als Gestaltungsprinzip.

14. Januar 2010.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Spiros Simitis Goethe Universität Frankfurt.
Kann es einen Datenschutz noch geben?

4. Februar 2010
Prof. Dr. Knut Wenzel Goethe Universität Frankfurt.
Nur Gott sieht ins Herz: Theologische Vorbehalte gegenüber dem Willen zum totalen Wissen.

Weitere Informationen...

A One-Day Symposium "The ABC of Life Science Informatics" will held at B-IT on November 6, 2009. The gathering is aimed a bringing together research groups from academia and industry working in the fields of bioinformatics and chemoinformatics in the Aachen-Bonn- Cologne region (the ABC-region).

The "The ABC of Life Science Informatics" is the second of its kind. The first one was held in the past year. Its enormous success lead to a repeat: "The ABC of Life Science Informatics" gathering on November 6, 2009. B-IT gladly provides the platform for this exchange of ideas.

Read more about the scientific programme in general...

Scientific programme in detail

Professor Dr. Steve Horvath, Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present his most recent findings in his talk "Gene Network Analysis" on July 31, 2009, at 11.15 a.m., B-IT Rheinsaal. Others are welcome while space permits.

Dorkbot is an international network of people doing interactive art and electronic hacks. Now Aachen has its own Dorkbot chapter, one of the first in Germany. The inaugural meeting took place on June 6, with participants from Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Darmstadt, and Duisburg. The next meeting is on July 22. Dorkbot Aachen was initiated by Prof. Jan Borchers and his B-IT endowed Media Computing Group;

More information...

Modern products more and more contain software as an important component. On one hand the cycles of innovation are getting shorter and software allows to quickly and easily adapt a product to new needs. On the other hand software serves a tool of integration. Software-based solutions allow by their combination and interaction for new functions. Software has therefore become a key element in a highly competitive market.

Fraunhofer Institute FIT and it co-operation partners from industry and academia present up-to-date results from this area that have been obtained through an initiative funded by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research). The present symposium, held at B-IT, addresses software-developers, users and decision makers from industry and academia.

Main topics

• end user development
• usability
• engineering of embedded complex control systems
• transition to a more flexible document and process landscape

Programme of the Symposium (in German)

Read more.. (in German)

This summer school on cryptography offers undergraduate and graduate students and researchers the opportunity to crypt a bit. It provides acquaintance and interaction in an intellectually stimulating and informal atmosphere in pleasant surroundings.

Description

The one-week summer school crypt@b-it 2009 takes place 3-7 August 2008 in the b-it building. It will explore some areas of cryptography:

• Cryptography in Practice: How to make it small, fast and secure
• Topics in Symmetric Cryptology
• The Enigma crypto machine.

In addition, there will be tutorials and hands-on exercises on topics somewhat related to the lectures, including an exhibit of an actual Enigma machine. The intended audience are undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs and researchers who work in the area or at least have a basic knowledge.

Speakers

• Marc Joye, Thomson R&D, France.
• Bart Preneel, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
• Joachim von zur Gathen, b-it Bonn.
• Max Gebhardt, Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI).

More information...

B-IT Department of Computer Security (cosec) presented a lecture on May 18, 2009 within "Kinderuni" (Children's University), a Lecture Series of the University of Bonn addressing school children. The goal of Kinderuni is to introduce school children to current research at the University of Bonn. In this case, the students were introduced to cryptography, taking "typical" examples from their experience. Here is one example: The current school lesson is boring (may happen...). Aline wants to send a note to Sebastian. But Luca is interested in it too. How can Aline send Sebastian a note without Luca being able to read it? Encryption is a way to achieve this. But how can it be done? The lecture offers solutions to this problem.

Computers are in wide use today, often connected to the Internet or to each other through Wireless LAN. But anyone who is able to detect and receive the respective waves can monitor this. Is it probably the suspicious van at the opposite side of the street? Encryption can prevent this. Basic methods of encryption for this area were presented. All material and all texts can be found though the link below (in German).

More information and additional material (in German).

B-IT-bots, service robots, won first place in the Robocup@Home League at the German Open 2009 Championship held in Hannover, April 20-24, this year. The competition was held on the occasion of the Hannover Fair. The B-IT-Bots team was lead by B-IT Professors Paul Plöger and Gerhard Kraetzschmar.

The RoboCup@Home League is a competition for service robotics that takes place in an environment of several furnished rooms. During the course of the competition, these rooms are changed several times. The robot must independently and safely find and navigate around these rooms autonomously.

Read more about the B-IT bots and their team.

No formula 1 car or any toaster is run today without software. Software engineering is the key to market success for middle-sized businesses. The "Software Engineering Symposium 2009" at B-IT presents new approaches, knowledge and experiences from the initiative "Software Engineering 2006" by BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany). Speakers include among others: Professor Dr. Klaus Pohl (Requirements Engineering) and Dr. Uwe Dimslaff (sd&m, board of management).

Time: June, 3, 2009, 1.00 p.m.

Venue

Bonn-Aachen International Center
for Information Technology (B-IT)
Dahlmannstraße 2
53113 Bonn

More information about how to get to B-IT

How to get to B-IT

Registration and Programme

Participation is free of charge with a registration until May 29, 2009.

Scientific Programme

Registration

B-IT Professors Martin Hofmann-Apitius and Jürgen Bajorath have organised again a series of talks about Life Science Informatics that will be held on Thursdays in B-IT lecture hall. This semester the Lecture Series will focus on research carried out in industry. The Lecture Series in Summer Semester 2008 centred on research in academia.

More information about the Lecture Series 2009, held in co-operation with B-IT partner Fraunhofer SCAI, can be found below.

Information about the B-IT Lecture Series in Life Science Informatics 2009

Four publications of B-IT Professor Borchers' group were accepted in this year's ACM CHI Conference. The conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) is organized by the non-profit Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Read more on this here.

Since 2005, 5 PhD students have completed their theses under the supervision of B-IT Professor Bajorath, the latest PhD thesis being completed in January 2009. Three former PhD candidates are continuing their work as postdocs in the department of Life Science Informatics.

The current application phase for the PhD and combined Master-PhD scholarships of the B-IT Research School has finished. Please visit this page from time to time for the next scholarship openings.

B-IT Research School in Applied Computer Science, approved by the State of North-Rhine-Westphalia, started in October 2008. Interested students from Germany and international students with an outstanding academic record are welcome to apply for the PhD and Combined Master-PhD Scholarships. The scholarships are to be filled in by April 1, 2009.

Application deadline for these scholarships is January 30, 2009.

Important note: The current application phase for the PhD and combined Master-PhD scholarships of the B-IT Research School has finished. Please visit this page from time to time for the next scholarship openings.

More information:

About the Scholarships

About the Areas of Research Covered in B-IT Research School

About the Application Requirements

About the Application Process

Due to the overwhelming success of Schüler-Krypto in the previous years, Schüler-Krypto 2009 will offer two courses this year. They will be held on February 12 and 13, 2009. The courses will address schools, introducing school students to the important field of cryptography. Read more about Schüler-Krypto 2009 (in German).

Deniz Sarier graduated in 2007 in Media Informatics, with a thesis on hybrid symmetric/asymmetric encryption written under the supervision of B-IT Professor von zur Gathen.

She has won the Best Student Paper Award of the "2008 International Conference of Information Security and Internet Engineering", held in London, UK, and has been invited to the conference committee of the coming "World Congress on Engineering 2009 (WCE 2009)". After this major success at a very early career stage, she is now pursuing doctoral studies at the B-IT Research School.

B-IT group of Computer Security (cosec) particiaptes within the activities of the Year of Mathematics in the Science Tent in Bonn. From 2 to 5 July 2008 the science tent will invite people to Bonn city for strolling through projects showing how mathematics shapes their everyday life. We will also be part of this exhibition. Mathematics is the fundamental building block of cryptography. Cryptography in turn grants security, authenticity, anonymity, and much more. That in turn enables us in our every day life to buy and sell in the internet, to communicate with people around the world

Read more about this here.

This summer school on cryptography offers undergraduate and graduate students and researchers the opportunity to crypt a bit. It provides acquaintance and interaction in an intellectually stimulating and informal atmosphere in pleasant surroundings.

Description

The one-week summer school crypt@b-it 2008 takes place 28 July - 1 August 2008 in the b-it building. It will explore some areas of cryptography:

- Design and analysis of block ciphers and cryptographic hash functions
- Cryptography: Numbers at work and play
- The Enigma crypto machine

In addition, there will be tutorials and hands-on exercises on topics somewhat related to the lectures, including an exhibit of an actual Enigma machine. The intended audience are undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs and researchers who work in the area or at least have a basic knowledge. Speakers

- Vincent Rijmen, COSIC, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium / IAIK Krypto Group, Graz University of Technology, Austria.
- Igor Shparlinski, ACAC, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
- Joachim von zur Gathen, b-it Bonn
- Frank Niedermeyer, BSI Bonn

Read more about crypt@bit.

Following the success of Mobile Response 2007, we would like to announce the continuation of this event in 2008. Mobile Response 2008 will be hosted by the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology in Bonn. The symposium will present the latest approaches and technical solutions in the area of mobile information technology for emergency response planning and execution. We invite participation from research, industry and public rescue organizations to enable an in-depth discussion of the opportunities and drawbacks of new digital technologies for emergency response.

Read more about this symposum and its programme at its Website.

The “European Master of Informatics (EuMI)” is one of the earliest and most successful among the currently ca. 80 EU-sponsored double degree scholarship programs within Erasmus-Mundus. In EuMI, B-IT Media Informatics cooperates with RWTH Aachen’s Software Systems Engineering Programme as well as with master programmes of the Universities of Trento (Italy) and Edinburgh (UK) which have achieved top places in their recent national research rankings. Since 2004, the EU supports years of student intake with 20 to 35 generous scholarships awarded in a competitive process from among roughly 500 applicants from all over the world. Up to now, a total of 94 scholarships have been awarded. The German EuMI participation is coordinated by Professors Matthias Jarke and Gerhard Lakemeyer (Information Systems and Knowledge-Based Systems Group, RWTH Aachen).

Read more about this in the press release.

B-IT director Matthias Jarke gave the Fraunhofer-Magazin an interview about B-IT and its programmes, focusing on the need to attract and further educate excellent international students. B-IT with its partners and programmes sets such a framework to achieve this goal by offering excellent students optimal conditions to train and develop their scientific skills in an inspiring academic environment.

Read more about this in the interview (page 26 and 27, in German).

B-IT Professors Martin Hofmann-Apitius and Jürgen Bajorath have organised a series of talks about Life Science Informatics that will be held on Thursdays in B-IT lecture hall. Eminent scientists from this field of research were invited to present their work.

More information about this lecture series, held in co-operation with B-IT partner Fraunhofer SCAI, can be found below.

Detailed information about the lecture series on the B-IT Website and on the SCAI Website.

B-IT Research School will offer new opportunities for excellent students of B-IT master programs in Media Informatics and Life Science Informatics to continue their studies in a PhD program, but also addresses outstanding international students from outside B-IT to apply. The PhD programs will entirely be taught in English.

B-IT Research School will be run by Aachen University and the University of Bonn under the participation of the Fraunhofer Institutes. Accepted students will be exposed to the inspiring learning and research environments of both universities, the participating Fraunhofer Institutes. Moreover, students will additionally be taught by high-level international lecturers. B-IT Research School is scheduled to start in October 2008.

The well structured PhD programs will ensure that accepted students will quickly be familiar with their respective field of doctoral research on one hand whereas B-IT partners will lay the foundation of a comprehensive education on the other hand.

The recently approved B-IT Research School also acknowledges the success of B-IT master's programs in Media Informatics and Life Science Informatics which have been run since 2003.

More information about:

B-IT Research School

• Press Release of the Ministry for Innovation, Science, Research and Technology of North Rhine-Westphalia (in German).
• Press Release of B-IT directors, Professor Dr. Armin B. Cremers and Professor Dr. Matthias Jarke (in German).

B-IT Master's programs

• Life Science Informatics.
• Media Informatics.

Due to the success of Informatiktage in B-IT in the previous years, it was decided that Informatiktage should be held here again. Informatiktage are organised by Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V and will be held in the time of March, 14-15, 2008 at B-IT. This gathering focuses on workshops and keynote lectures, addressing excellent graduate and doctoral students in computer science.

All lectures will be held and all courses wiil be taught in German.

B-IT will host the "Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2008" Conference (TEI'2008), February 18-20, 2008. The TEI'2008 is aimed at bringing researchers together from fields like tangible interfaces, graspable interfaces, physical computing, tangible interaction, IT product design, appliance design, interactive spaces, etc. and has been associated with larger research areas, including mixed, virtual, and augmented reality, and ubiquitous and pervasive computing.

The conference brings together this new field, providing a meeting ground for the diverse communities of research and practice involved with tangibles -- from computing, hardware, and sensor technology, to HCI, interaction design, and CSCW, to product and industrial design and interactive arts.

In this context, Professor Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Media lab, will deliver a key note lecture on February 18, 2008, 7.pm, in B-IT lecture room. He is a co-director of the Things That Think (TTT) and head of the Tangible Media Group Tangible Media Group at MIT.

All participants of the conference and all members of B-IT are invited to attend this key note lecture.

On Februrary 18, 2008, the German Working Group on Tangibles will be constituted at B-IT. The group will operate within the Framework of GI (Gesellschaft für Informatk e. V.). This event will be held in German.

More information about the conference can be found here.

More information about the conference programme can be found here.

Because of the immense success of and great demand for the Schüler-Krypto in the previous year, Schüler-Krypto 2008 will offer two courses this year. They will be held on February 14 and 15, 2008. The courses will address schools, introducing school students to the important field of cryptography. Read more about Schüler-Krypto 2008 . The course language will be German.

Innovation through Co-operation/ Innovation durch Kooperation will focus on the scientific and research potential of the regions of Lübeck and Aachen-Cologne-Bonn within the framework a European perspective. This symposium will be held in German.

More information about this symposium and the programme can be found here .

Seventh Kryptotag (Cryptography Day) will be held at B-IT on November 9, 2007. It will be organised by B-IT group Computer Security (cosec) and Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (Society for Informatics e. V.). The gathering addresses junior researchers to present and discuss current work. The language of this meeting will be German.

For more information please click here.

The 5th Fraunhofer-Symposium on Text Mining in Life Sciences will take place at B-IT on Monday (Reception) and Tuesday, September 24th and 25th.
The symposium is a community-wide appreciated conference where selected professionals from industry and academic research meet and discuss advancements in information extraction and knowledge discovery. This year’s event will focus on combining textual and image information in biomedical and chemical research.
The organisers are looking forward to welcoming you in the modern building of the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology in Bonn, located directly on the bank of the river Rhine. Please mark your calendar for this event, which attracted more than 100 participants in 2006.

Preliminary Program

Monday, 24th of September:

Pre-Symposium Reception

Location: Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Focus: come together / presentation of commercial software

Tuesday, 25th of September:

Programme:

- Information Extraction from Patents: Combining Text- and Image- Mining, Martin Hofmann-Apitius, Fraunhofer SCAI

- Mining, Storage, Retrieval: The Challenge of Integrating Chemoinformatics with chemical Structure Recognition in Text and Images, Valentina Eigner-Pitto InfoChem GmbH, Munich

- Towards a Semantic Web for Life Sciences at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Thérèse Vachon Novartis Pharma, Basel, Switzerland

- The Second BioCreative Evaluation: Lessons Learned and Future Directions, Lynette Hirschman, MITRE Corporation, Bedford MA, USA
Text Mining: from Systems Biology to eHealth Environments, Mary Kratz University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, USA

- Efficient patent management with Text Mining Technologies, Gert Jäger, PATEV GmbH & Co. KG, Munich

For more information, please see here here.

The 10th International Workshop in Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing, CASC 2007, will be held in the city of Bonn, Germany, in September 16-20, 2007.

The methods of Scientific Computing play an important role in research and engineering applications in the natural and the engineering sciences. The significance and impact of computer algebra methods and computer algebra systems for scientific computing have increased considerably in recent times. Nowadays, such general-purpose computer algebra systems as Mathematica, Maple, MuPAD, and others enable their users to solve the following three important tasks within a uniform framework:

- symbolic manipulation
- numerical computation
- visualization

The ongoing development of such systems, including their adaptation to parallel environments, puts them to the forefront in scientific computing and enables the practical solution of many complex applied problems in the domains of natural sciences and engineering.

Workshop General Chairs include Professor Vladimir P. Gerdt (Dubna) and Professor Ernst W. Mayr (Munich)

The local organising committee consists of B-IT Professor Joachim von zur Gathen and Professor Andreas Weber (Institute of Computer Science of the University of Bonn).

For more information please click here.

This summer school on cryptography offers undergraduate and graduate students and researchers the opportunity to crypt a bit. It provides acquaintance and interaction in an intellectually stimulating and informal atmosphere in pleasant surroundings.

Description
The one-week summer school crypt@b-it 2007 takes place 24-28 September 2007 in the B-IT building. It will explore some areas of cryptography:

- Security reductions for asymmetric systems
- elliptic curve cryptography
- the Enigma crypto machine.

In addition, there will be tutorials and hands-on exercises on topics somewhat related to the lectures, including an exhibit of an actual Enigma machine. The intended audience are undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs and researchers who work in the area or at least have a basic knowledge.

Speakers
- Joachim von zur Gathen , B-IT Bonn,
- Frank Niedermeyer, BSI Bonn ,
- Pascal Paillier , Cryptography & Innovation, Security Labs, Gemalto
- Gadiel Seroussi , MSRI Berkeley

For more information please click here.

Prof. Dr. D.T. Lee, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan and Christian Hang, Armorize Technologies, will present a talk focusing on IT Security on June 14, 2007, 10 a.m., in B-IT lecture hall.

Abstract of the Talk
Security remains a major roadblock to universal acceptance of Web 2.0, especially since the recent sharp increase in remotely exploitable vulnerabilities has been attributed to Web application bugs. Back in 2002, we recognized that many verification tools are discovering previously unknown vulnerabilities in legacy C programs, raising hopes that the same success can be achieved with Web applications. In 2003, we proposed a static analysis algorithm to verify Web application code against security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. We tested our prototype implementation against 230 open-source Web application projects on SourceForge.net, which were selected to represent projects of different maturity, popularity, and scale. 69 contained vulnerabilities and their developers were noticed. Our results were published in WWW 2004 and DSN 2004, among others.

Due to success of our proposed algorithm and also the huge market demand, in 2005 Armorize Technologies was founded to patent and commercialize our technology. In this talk we will briefly describe the current Web security problems, our proposed algorithms, and the turning of academic research into commercial product. The productArmorize Co-deSecure 2.0 will be briefly demonstrated and its potential applications will be discussed. Finally we will briefly introduce the research program Taiwan Information Security Center (TWISC) in Taiwan, and encourage international collaboration in the broad research area of information security.

For more information please click here.

B-IT expands: Two new B-IT professors have recently joined Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology and significantly strengthen its competences in Life Science Informatics and Media Informatics.



Professor Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius

Martin Hofmann-Apitius has been appointed Professor in the field of Life Science Informatics at B-IT in September 2006. He earned his PhD at the University of Tübingen in 1991. Afterwards he worked at Institute for Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna and the German Cancer Research Center. In 1998 he changed to LION Bioscience AG. There he expanded his research activities to the area of applied Life Science Informatics. Today he heads the Life Science Informatics Department of Fraunhofer Institute SCAI. His scientific interests lie in Information Extraction/ Semantic Text Analysis, Applied Chemoinformatics, and Semantic Datagrid/ Grid Infrastructure.






Professor Dr. Albrecht Schmidt

Albrecht Schmidt studied computer science in Ulm and Manchester and he worked as a researcher at the University of Karlsruhe and at Lancaster University. There he completed in 2003 his PhD thesis on the topic of “Ubiquitous Computing – Computing in Context”. Before he became professor at the B-IT Center he headed the “Embedded Interaction Research Group” at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. His teaching and research interests are in media informatics and in particular in the area of user interface engineering.

B-IT co-operates with Beethovenfest Bonn 2006 with the presentation of "Personal Orchestra". "Personal Orchestra" is a computer-based, interactive conducting system, giving you the opportunity to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. It has been developed by B-IT Professor Dr. Jan Oliver Borchers, chair of the Media Computing Group Media Computing Group at B-IT. Professor Borchers will explain the system first. Then the audience will be invited to try "Personal Orchestra".

The system user will get a baton fitted with an infrared sensor with which he can conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which is projected with a beamer on a large screen. The Orchestra plays the music according to how they are conducted: faster, slower, louder or quieter. But be aware: If you do not conduct the Orchestra properly, the musicians will complain...

Where and when can you make this conducting experience?

Personal Orchestra
September 14, 2006
7.30 p.m., Hörsaal

Bonn-Aachen International Center
for Information Technology B-IT
Dahlmannstraße 2
53113 Bonn

How to get to B-IT : Please follow this link: How to get to B-IT?

Please note: This presentation will be given in German.

Please download the Flyer (.pdf, in German).