Latest developments from MU's department of New Media Technology
Tourismus 2020 Workshop (May 15th – 16th)
MU's Professor Prof. Arno Scharl, head of the department of New Media, was a member of the organizing committee of this year’s annual Tourismus 2020 Workshop which took place in Mayhofen, Austria.
Focusing on online activities, the goal of the workshop was to create a vision of the requirements that future successful companies in the tourism sector will need to fulfill.
On May 16th Prof. Scharl hosted the session on big data in German, “BigData—Was soll man damit tun?’’. Furthermore, he shared his expertise speaking on the subject of using web intelligence to improve decision making in the tourism sector as part of the session on data aggregation, “Datenaggregation”.
He explained its importance: “To further support the long-term development of established brands, a continuous evaluation of direct and indirect reporting is key. What influence do news and social media have on how destinations are perceived by the public? Do I reach the desired audiences, and what subjects and emotions are they connecting with my product? Those and many other complex questions can be tackled with Web Intelligence technologies.”
FWF ''Am Puls'' (April 29th)
As part of the FWF’s “Am Puls” series of talks which highlight developments in research, Prof. Scharl was invited to discuss the use of Big Data technologies for the analysis of documents gathered from online sources.
With the example of several current international research projects as well as the Media Watch on Climate Change – a publicly available online portal for news analysis in the environmental field - he underlined the importance of using advanced technologies for knowledge extraction.
According to Scharl, Big Data is not only about the amounts of data and the speed of the processes: intelligent data analysis methods are required to make communication processes more transparent. Prof. Scharl further explained how such methods can support social innovation as well as decision making processes on both an individual and a collective level.
Current Projects
Prof. Scharl has an extensive background in the field of big data analysis and is leading MODUL’s research team, who are are currently participating in several national and international research projects developing leading technologies in the field of big data analysis such as uComp funded by the Austrian FWF and DecarboNet and PHEME funded by the European Union.
Tourismus 2020: http://www.tourismus2020.com/
FWF Am Puls: http://www.fwf.ac.at/de/public_Relations/events/index.html
Media Watch on Climate Change: http://www.ecoresearch.net/climate/
PHEME: www.pheme.eu
DecarboNet: www.decarbonet.eu
uComp: www.uComp.eu
Screen shot of the Media Watch on Climate Change
