Ralf Biedert

Ralf Biedert started his research carreer with the task of investigating and implementing user observation plugins for a text processor/editor. The goal was to observe the user's text work and send respective events to EPOS's context elicitation module.
Ralf started with the realization of an observation plugin for OpenOffice, an open-source text processing framework. Although first experiences were quite promising, we successively ran into more and more trouble regarding the Java API. Some methods did not work, others were missing. It turned out, that implementing plugins for OpenOffice is done best directly in C++, however, that was not on our mind...
The next choice was jEdit, an open-source text editor written in pure Java. Having full Java support, the realization of a user observation plugin has been done. Hence, EPOS's context elicitation is already benefiting from the observation user's text work. However, this only holds for simple ASCII text editing/viewing of course. Whenever you are interested in this plugin, let us know.

Ralf Biedert currently investigates methods to extend the simple observation of the user's text actions towards a recognition of the user's real text work. The goal is to detect, for instance, whether some passage has been really read by the user or whether it was just visible.
First results were quite promising. He will continue this task in form of a diploma thesis. Therefore, read more about that topic in the DIPLOMA THESES section below.