Fairytale opportunity for Waikato

Media Release
February 23, 2009

Fairytale opportunity for Waikato

What do the Brothers Grimm, Albert Einstein and Karl Marx have in common? They’re all former students of Berlin’s oldest university, Humboldt University.

Humboldt, which has produced 29 Nobel laureates and currently has nearly 36,000 students, will shortly be temporary home to University of Waikato computer scientist Dr Annika Hinze

Dr Hinze has been invited to take up a six-month guest professorship at Humboldt later this month, partly funded through a Berlin city scheme to increase the number of women in senior academic positions.

She’ll be researching in the field of context-aware systems and teaching advanced classes in the Department of Computer Science.

“It’s a great opportunity for me to work with European scholars in this area,” says Dr Hinze. “I’m currently researching ways to provide tourist information tailored to individual users. The system would take into account where you are, your personal preferences, the time of day, the kind of device you’re using to access the information, and might for example recommend a restaurant, or a concert, or suggest you visit a particular museum that you might be interested in.”

Hinze says she’ll be looking specifically at ways to design systems that can talk to each other on different levels without revealing private personal information about users.

She also plans to further develop the course that she teaches at Waikato on context-aware systems.

ENDS

© Scoop Media