This page contains a yearly review on my research. It is at leased updated twice a year. It will give a general view on the activities during that academically year (starting October). The page is a way for me to reflect on what has happening over larger time period.
2000-2002-- Student: Experiments during Master studies
2002-2003-- Student: Creative agent, Master thesis
2003-ongoing-- Novelty regulation model
2003-2004-- ECCO (Evolution Complexity and COgnition) and DISC
2004-2005-- The CRAB project: a web tool for reducing access cost of interdisciplinary research (for DISC)
2005-2006-- The KnoSoS project: knowledge sharing over social software (for MOSI)
2006-2007-- MOSI assistant: course prototype on web development
2007-2008-- MOSI assistant: Novelty theory & Enterprise Innovation Planning (EIP)
2008-2009-- MOSI assistant: EIP-system & WSDB course
2009-2010-- MOSI assistant: continuation & external collaboration

Introduction

In 1998 during my summer/student job at Starlab nv, the blue sky research facility, I've encountered an atmosphere where being creative with science and technology was the key to create innovation. I was only helping out to organize a conference, but experienced first had what it means to working in high-tech and creativity stimulating environment . It became clear that Starlab was a state-of-the-art experiment when I've got disillusion by how innovation is happening in general.
The reason to take an academic studies in informatics was related to that summer job, but even more to the program language scheme. Scheme got me interested in dynamics of information processing and I found it interesting to understand how a program is related to Artificial Intelligence. The courses on AI however was yet another disillusion, with its focus on expert systems and simplified simulations that in general was all about statistical mining. The two disillusion (in innovation and in AI) would become my focus on understanding the cybernetics of controlling/managing something that is unknown. It was first explained as a research on intelligence and creatively/innovation. It became the research on novelty.

Master in Computer Science

To make the ideas explicit simulations where created. I was able to code 8h to 15h a day during 2000-2003, a luxury if you think of it. In the summer of 2000 I started my first project and would work on it for more then a year. It was an agent simulation representing animals in a habitat. The simulation was inspired on games where you had a map and a mini-map to scroll a 2D-world. The agent had some variables that would change by every step they made and when the values hits a specific value, a concept would get triggered like hungry thirst, etc. This concept would get evaluated by a logic program that represented the animal cognitive structure. The experiment was a first attempt to understand the relation between embodiment and rational reasoning. Reflecting on the results, the question arise how the logic got their in it in the first place. By expanding the project with visual recognition and self-organizing of lexicon more questions than answers where created.
In my second project in the Fall of 2001 I became creative with the knowledge of expert systems. The new agent's cognition contained a a mixture of reinforcement learning and bayesian logics. The reinforcement learning was used to track back the reward in a specific context. The bayesian logic analyze the context of the reward, thus creating several context to do reinforcement learning in. The interesting part of the solution is to see how an interplay of the two quite statical methods can resolve a highly dynamic interaction. Several problems exist with the method. First it seems impossible to explain the origin of the method in an evolutionarily plausible way. The second problem is that when we look at the history of innovations we notice agents create their environment. Thus our created solution is only good enough to find the rules. The rules would not change the environment. I wanted to investigate creative agents. Lucky I found a mentor in the same line of thoughts, Walter Van de Velde. During the summer of 2002 we discussed an search for agents who learn by doing and do by learning. The idea of craftsmanship was the prior inspiration. For example, how does a painter improve herself by doing?

Creative Agents

After several investigations related to creative/innovative agent a challenge was created. The goal was to get a clear vision by making incremental iterative simulations that where used to adapt our view. In February 2003 a specific experiment arose. The agent would start with a knowledge base to "survive" in its environment, but its actions would change the surrounding, forcing his knowledge-system to adapt along the way. The simulation was inspired by a documentary of apes using primitive tools. In my simulation the principle was to figure out how an agent could learn from "eating the fruit of nuts" to "breaking the nut with a stone" to get the fruit out of it. In the setup the agent had knowledge of stones and knew that stones break other stones. The whole solution seams amazingly rational if you look at the process afterwards. First the agent picks up fruit from open shells and it would make the relation with shelter and fruit. By getting some fruits out of half-open shells it would notice the spontaneous breaking of the shell. By eating fruit, open shells would become rear. So the agent has to get fruits out of the shell. From this moment on the agent could find nuts that are to hard to break. Giving him a problem of something that did work earlier on. To solve this the agent search is knowledge system and tries to recombine it to find a solution that may work. So the agent thinks of using a stone to break the nut. After trying it out, the positive feedback would add it as new option.
By the incremental simulations each of the rational steps just explained would become more concrete. Simultaneous the design would change to make the actions possible. The chalange was to shift away from hard coded "knowledge" to a system that learns knowledge. The method used allowed us to get over our own restrictions. For example, in AI you learn the trouble of ambiguity in visual recognition: how do you recognize the object without failures? It turns out we actually need the ambiguity and that such failures are natural and the source for new opportunities. For example, failing to separate the nut from the fruit allowed learning. In the simulation a value, representing the hardness of the nut, would stimulate the ambiguity. When the harness was very low no distinct recognition was made between nut or fruit. In case of low harness the nut could break spontaneous and become the fruit. The agent could observe the phenomena of breaking and use it later on to do it intentionally. A similar ambiguity relates breaking and stones This, than, would lead to an agents regulating its actions to create from understanding out of ambiguity.

Novelty regulation model

By putting so much time to develop the simulations, it did put time on other parts, like understanding the existing literature in greater depth. This is where my interdisciplinary research started. I'm connecting the dots in embodied-extended cognition, with studies on the emerging of science, with literature on innovation management and with knowledge on software development. The creative agent simulation was an embodied-extended cognition experiment, many of the literature gave me a better understanding how it fits with current research on cognition. However, the focus on emerging of knowledge is much more related to research on science studies. Interestingly the two domains have each a publication of a design of a control-system that is similar to my creative agent, thus came the generalization to "novelty regulation". While the two domains help to understanding the problem it is innovation management that really requires the insights. The research renews the interest in IT-management to see how software development can help people to conduct innovation in a more structured way as now is happening by wikis and other collaborative tools.

2003-2004

End 2003 and beginning of 2004 started disappointing, my funding was rejected and the research lab Walter Van de Velde had hoped to create never happened (see DISC open letter). I understood I was standing alone (again) and knew my research needed to become embedded in the research landscape. At that point my research is about intelligence, cognition and awareness. I made contacts with Erik Myin at our university and we where creating a paper "The primacy of context" for the for the EELC congress in May. At the EELC Francis Heylighen contacted me with the suggestion to become member of ECCO. I knew Francis from the seminaries in 2002, but than ECCO didn't exist yet. The period with Erik and ASSC8 conference in June started a new aria in my activities: the need to get embedded and connected. I went to several FET & NEST information sessions to get contacts. My paper for EELC got rejected because of ill writing and to vague. I still didn't had any publication but my activities and the contacts I made convinced me of going on. Walter had suggested me to go to the convivio summer school in September, so I did. Convivio was another interesting view on IT and design and it fitted nicely in what Walter had learned me.

2004-2005

In October Walter contacted me with the option to work on the CRAB project. I would start at that project in December, at that time Walter was changing to a new function as one of the EU FET coordinators. The most part of my activities in 2005 was about developing CRAB and my interaction with ECCO. My relation with ECCO would become more imported, with my ECCO-colleges I kept on discussing our research, Francis became my advisor and helped me with writing a working paper and suggested some readings to get me more embedded. With Marko I was having some interesting collaboration and some outlines for papers, but he left in April and our plans got canceled. My own working paper transformed to a paper for EMCSR, thanks to the hard support of Francis.
In December I made my first contact with Tanguy Coenen on a workshop of Knowledge management and IT. So 2004 started bad, but it ended good. The developing of CRAB would also bring me into contact with several other interesting people and organizations like the cross-talk sessions and Maya Van Leemput who works on future studies. Still inside DISC where I was developing CRAB I was very isolated. In the mean while Tanguy and Dirk Kennis where preparing a IWT-TETRA on "Knowledge sharing" and in the summer they got the good news the project was accepted. They asked me to work on the KnoSoS project.
Next to cognitive research and the KnoSoS projects, I started to learn about entrepreneurs. I got back into contact with Walter De Brouwer, after a terrible accident with he's sun we talk a lot in the Hospital. Walter is the nephew of my mother, but having a small family I call him my nephew as well. He was the head of Starlab and the reason I get the summer job (see introduction). Walter defended his PhD in September. We discussed topics several times that year and he gave me some interesting books to read.

2005-2006

I started working for KnoSoS in December. The atmosphere in the team was as good as it can get. I've became a Drupal addict and programmed a lot. Their where two new challenges, the fits is to code in team, the other is to push the code back to the open source community. My biggest talent in coding, creating new generic designs, became challenged with other needs in development. While being pleased with the generic design the problem of getting it taken up in the social context was disappointing. It became the incentive to co-organizing the drupal conference (actually as a the triplet: govcamp, drupalcon, barcamp) for september. ECCO was a bit on a low track during that year, also my research on cognition was low. Everything was focused on KnoSoS and Drupal.

2006-2007

I've stopped working on the KnoSoS project as Tanguy finished he's PhD, their was the need for an assistant at MOSI. Of course I wanted to do this as I wanted to make my PhD. With KnoSoS entering a non-development face the timing was right. I became the assistant for programming and databases. With the bad experience they had with programming I felt the challenge to rework it. The database exercise course had no good study material so I created that as well, but that was straight forward. The programming on the other had, has been transformed significant to a course on web development. In the mean time I still was working on web development myself. I had been working on jquery during the Winter. The outcome of the course was more than satisfying. It required a lot of work making the course, but it is task I would like to push for many years.
I also discover the work of Joel Moky, an authority on the history of technology. I had known about medieval technology even during my Master thesis, but never been able to link it to innovation. So I was trilled to read Moky's work. It had an analytical approach and it fits nice with other work addressing the complexity of innovation, like Herbert Simon and Bruno Latour. Finally some decent progress of a cybernetic approach to innovation. During the summer I gave a presentation relating my HL-cognition to radical innovation. The direction of using cognitive research for innovation management is something that gets more response. I was also allowed to have the ECCO seminaries at MOSI and hoped their would be some collaboration between the two.

2007-2008

My projects where never longer than a year. Now I see myself working on longer term projects. In 2006-2007 I was quit busy with teaching and so had little time for publications. The teaching would be a significant part of my job, but I liked it very much. I created one paper for the EMCSR congress, introducing the concept of novelty. In MOSI their was the meeting with the professors about the future of the course. In 2007-2008 the course got optimized. The same course became plans for 2008-2009 as "Web service development for business" for the First year of Master of Technology Management.
My interests in bringing web development in general and more specific Drupal to the academic sphere were shared by others. I got contacted by Kristof Van Tomme on the quest to get research funding for Drupal projects. Kristof is co-organizing Drupalcon Szeged. We went to Drupalcon Szeged and it was a great event, but the efforts of the EU funding turned out to be fruitless

In ECCO more of the new members where interested in complexity of innovation management also a team for the ecco-site was becoming active. In April I got the idea to describe the innovation management as "Enterprise Innovation Planning" (EIP). It was around the same time I got into contact with Wim Van Haverbeke. He learned me about disruptive innovation. I became quite fond of disruptive innovation and particularly the concept disruptive growth engine, what came close to my EIP idea. At that time I was working on a paper for the IFIP 8.6 "Open IT-based Innovation" conference. It got, as expected, refused, but I was aiming my arrows on the Doctoral Consortium that would happen before the conference, but it got canceled. I went to it any way, to learn more about management, but I didn't got much to take home (no relevant links to my research).

2008-2009

It is clear my Phd will be about Enterprise Innovation Planning and that I will need time to make it concrete. During this year I focused on translating my cognitive model to innovation management, clarifying the management system and by the end of the summer I still had to address the management processes. A paper for the EIP concept, which in wrote in collaboration with my colleague Tanguy, advisors E. Vandijck and advisors E. Torfs, got accepted for the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM). ISPIM had a theme “the future of innovation” and it was a great contrast to IFIP "open IT innovation", as so many presentations and discussions were relevant to my research. During ISPIM I talked to Simon Dewulf of CREAX and in the summer I went to CREAX for a deeper conversation. CREAX is a product innovator and I'm quite interested in using there system for EIP. For the same reason I became involved on Service Innovation. During the whole year there were the Round tables on Service innovation, an initiative of IBM and AGORIA. I participated in the 4th meeting in September 2008 and the 5th meeting in February 2009, then we did two presentations with IBM alone and I presented my work at the 6th meeting in September 2009.

At the VUB my colleagues and mentors became more interested in the topic, so I gave three more seminars for MOSI/ECCO during the first semester. There was also a mini ECCO conference and we had several meetings with Marc Goldchstein on entrepreneurship. There was an unexpected course I had to give in the first semester, but the second semester sucked up much more of my energy for teaching. The Programming course of previous two years was for master after master programs, it got integrated into the joined master with the ULB. The course would now have the appropriate name “Web Service Development for Business” and be taught to the first year master students in Business technology. The students performing the best were the ones who used Drupal. To make that part obligated I had to add several new exercises. The new target group was also less familiar with the complexity of projects and needed more structure too.

2009-2010

The summer ended with the EIASM summer school where I made some interesting relations. With Jeff Butler and Boris Bend we kept up mailing back and forth about our ideas to support R&D management by building a web application for pre-publishing. During the R&D conference in July this has lead to a great summery during the last workshop. At this moment I’m in a planning process to make an experiment on it with Jeff as supervisor. I've also met Bart van Looy at the summer school and went to visit him in Leuven. During my presentation on the ES-navorsingsdagen I had the pleasure to have Andre Spithoven who I first met during ISPIM. It turns out to be a trend the whole year to keep contact with people I met at meetings.

We made planes to visit companies to investigate our EIP with the current practice (AS-IS analysis). This has lead to few visits with big companies like IBM, Toyota, medium companies like Recticel and small companies like CREAX and Namahn and bigger research groups at our university like TONA. Thus, we shifted from internal seminars to external discussion about bringing the EIP project to practice. Remarkable non of our contacts had problems with our approach, in fact these contact made efforts to bring us into closer collaboration. The reason we didn't go to actual collaboration related to the crisis and the risk/challenge of our project. We can summarize it as follows: while our project is a possible optimization of their R&D output, they are currently struggling for survival and don't have the luxury to explore on non-core related targets. If we could prove the EIP works, the story would be different, but now we are trying to put up an experiment and the climate is not exactly in our favor. The AS-IS analysis was very clarifying and not experienced as negative, just that we need to focus on emerging R&D opportunities. This relates to the experiment I'm planning with Jeff, but I'm not going to talk about that just yet.

The WSDB-course had an interesting outcome this year. While some sold their project last year as e-commerce website, I made an effort to break that treat. The best projects were prototypes of a product, not just "creating a website" service. By pushing this boarder I did see some failures too, but I prefer a student to fail and learn a lot than to end up with some pocked money. The WSDB-course illustrates an opportunity on emerging R&D: shifting for web services to web products. Thus the course turned out to be a great contribution to my the core of my research and not just a computer-mediated learning experiment as I thought it would be. That was surly not intended and is a positive surprise.

From a theoretical point I have several working papers. My paper of ISPIM got invited for a speical issue and this became a great chalange to make the EIP more concrete. Tanguy has helped me a lot during the last year to get this to an acceptable structured level. Based on the discussion with Jeff and the outcome of the WSDB-course I made a first small step to make a research publication about Drupal for the R&D management conference.