FIT – Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology

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FIT – Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology
> www.fit.fraunhofer.de/

Profile

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft was founded in 1949 and is a recognized non-profit organization It assumes a major role in strategic research: Commissioned and funded by Federal and Laender ministries and governments, the organization undertakes future-oriented research projects which contribute to the development of innovations in spheres of major public concern and in key technologies.
At present, the organization maintains 80 research establishments at 40 locations throughout Germany. A staff of some 13,000, the majority of whom are qualified scientists and engineers, generate the annual research volume of about 1.3 billion euro. Of this amount, about 900 million euro is derived from contract research.
Fraunhofer FIT, headquartered at Sankt Augustin near Bonn, focuses on expanding the reach of human abilities through adaptive, contextualised information systems. More than 90 researchers at Fraunhofer FIT work to enhance human abilities through flexible, context-adaptive information and cooperation systems.

Role in the Project

The Department of Information in Context helps the user to get access to public, corporate and private information spaces wherever she is and whichever device is to be used. Information and communication for mobile business ("m-commerce"), for location-based guidance and location-based announcements are examples of nomadic information systems. The Working Group on Usability Engineering uses methods in a range from ethnographic studies, scenario-based design, and integrated organisational and technical development to laboratory experiments. The working group is embedded in regional and national usability networks and is entitled to ergonomically certify software.

The Process Management Group has developed methods and tools to analyse and optimize information-intensive processes in business, engineering and government, as well as tools and business models to operate them efficiently, especially in flexible inter-organizational settings or virtual organisations. A special emphasis has been put on public-private partnerships for operating citizen oriented mobile services. Related EC projects currently conducted by the research group on business process management include APNEE-TU IST-2001-34154 (as coordinator) and Env-e-City (eContent 11035).

FIT will contribute to the usability research carried out in the project (WP2, WP4) and will coordinate the work package for recommendations for service planning (WP3), being further responsible for the elaboration of sustainable business models (WP3) for operating this kind of services. The demonstration phase (WP9) will be followed closely to validate the services from a usability and business point of view. In addition, FIT will contribute to the overall dissemination and exploitation of the project results.

Key Personnel

Thomas Rose
Thomas Rose received his Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund in 1985, and the Doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Passau in 1991. From 1990 through 1993 he was as a Research Associate with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
From October 93 until recently, he has been a Senior Researcher with the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) at the University of Ulm, Germany. Thomas Rose was head of the department of business processes and telematics. Particular emphasis has been put on applications of information and communication management technologies and services to optimize current service and business processes and eventually to design new services for businesses and the citizen. Thomas Rose has been managing several projects for industrial sponsors and publicly funded research projects and has been project co-ordinator of APNEE as well as APNEE-.
Recently, Thomas Rose has moved to FIT (Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology), Schloß Birlinghoven, Germany. He is head of the research group on business process management and co-ordinator of marketing and sales projects.

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Oppermann
Received his diploma in psychology in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1975 at the University of Bonn. In 1979, he joined the GMD German National Research Center for Information Technology. In 1993, he was appointed to an honorary professorship for Social Computer Science at the University of Koblenz now working at the institute for Computational Visualistics.
His main research interests include participatory system development, human factors of human computer interaction, ergonomic evaluation methodology, adaptive and adaptable information systems and user modeling, contextualized learning support for task driven and curriculum based learning, and nomadic information systems for cultural information presentation.