Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
Information & Software Engineering Group

[DigitalPreservation @ IFS]

Christoph Becker

Contact

Background

Projects

Awards

Publications

Teaching

Activities

Selected talks 

Contact

Dr. Christoph Becker

Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Software Technology and
Interactive Systems
Information and Software Engineering Group

Room: HE 04 38

Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188/2
A-1040 Wien
Austria

email: becker@domain
(domain = ifs.tuwien.ac.at)

phone: +43 1 58801 - 18818
fax: +43 1 58801 - 18899

  Photo of Christoph Becker



Note: I have left Vienna University of Technology and moved to the University of Toronto.
My email in Vienna is defunct and NOT forwarded - please contact me in Toronto. Thanks!

Permanent researcher ID (ORCID): 0000-0002-8364-0593
Profile in Toronto.


Christoph Becker is a Senior Scientist at the Vienna University of Technology, and an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he leads the Digital Curation Institute. He received his MSc in Software Engineering, MSc in Business Informatics, and Doctorate in Computer Science in Vienna. After completing his PhD in 2010 with a thesis on decision making in digital preservation, he spent a winter in Lisbon with the Information Systems research group at IST Lisbon. He then returned to Vienna to lead a research program on scalable decision support for digital preservation as part of the large-scale EC-funded project SCAPE: Scalable Preservation Environments, which he co-developed with an international consortium of universities, memory organizations, industrial research and commercial partners. Christoph frequently published in scientific journals and peer-reviewed conferences in the fields of digital libraries, digital curation, digital preservation, and software systems. He is a senior PC member of leading digital libraries conferences including JCDL and TPDL and has organized a series of workshops to promote emerging research collaborations in the area of digital preservation and sustainability.

My research:
The transition to a digital society has brought substantial changes to the information professions and new challenges to software and information systems. These systems are now at the backbone of our society, where they are used to safeguard cultural heritage, visualize time series on climate data, create born-digital art, and manage personal health records. They have substantial, far-reaching impact on how we create, disseminate and use information, and they have an increasingly central role in the social, environmental and economic sustainability of the societies on our planet. My research studies digital sustainability from multiple perspectives. The traditional artefact-centered view on information objects that prevails in archives, libraries and museums is fundamentally challenged by born-digital, inherently computational networked digital objects. The sustainability of these objects is not anymore a static property of the artefacts, as it generally is with physical books. Instead, it is a systemic property of computer files, software elements, hardware components, organizational structures and distributed networks: The interaction of these is what keeps digital objects alive. I have become very interested in employing systems thinking to better understand the systemic phenomenon of sustainability. In this, I build on my understanding of software systems engineering, decision making, and business information systems to develop an integrative long-term perspective on digital sustainability. As a digital preservation scholar, I study the lifecycles of digital objects, formats, software components and digital ecosystems in order to develop models and systems to contribute to the digital sustainability of our cultural memory and scientific record. As an information systems designer and software engineering researcher, I study the process of designing socio-technical systems involving software and how we can consider sustainability as a fundamental design concern in our design decisions.

If you want to keep track of my involvement in the SCAPE project, I am trying to blog about it.

Profile at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information
 

Background

  • 2011-2012: PostDoc Researcher at TU Vienna's Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Information and Software Engineering Group
  • 2010-2011: Visiting PostDoc researcher at INESC-ID, IST Lisbon
  • 2006-2010: PhD student and Project Assistant at TU Vienna's Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Information and Software Engineering Group doing research on Digital Preservation
  • Master of Science in Economics and Computer Science (Magisterstudium Wirtschaftsinformatik),
    Vienna University of Technology, March 2006 - May 2007.
  • Master of Science in Computer Science (Diplomstudium),
    Vienna University of Technology, March 2004 - March 2006.
  • Bachelor of Computer Science (Bakkalaureatsstudium),
    Vienna University of Technology, October 1999 - March 2004.
  • since 1998: self-employed and employed work in IT projects in Salzburg and Vienna
 
 

Projects and Activities

  • Benchmark DP
    BenchmarkDP is developing the first coherent, systematic approach to assess and compare digital preservation processes, systems, and organizational capabilities.
    BenchmarkDP is a multi-year research project (2012 - 2016) funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF).
 
  • SCAPE
    SCALable Preservation Environments

    The SCAPE project will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. These concrete project results will be validated within three large-scale Testbeds from diverse application areas: Digital Repositories from the library community, Web Content from the web archiving community, and Research Data Sets from the scientific community. Each Testbed has been selected because it highlights unique challenges. SCAPE will develop scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform that orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects. (2011-2014)
 
  • APARSEN
    Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network
    (FP7 Network of Excellence)
    APARSEN is a new Network of Excellence that aims to bring together an extremely diverse set of practitioner organisations and researchers in order to bring coherence, cohesion and continuity to research into barriers to the long-term accessibility and usability of digital information and data, exploiting our diversity by building a long-lived Virtual Centre of Digital Preservation Excellence. (2011-2014)
 
  • SHAMAN
    Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent Archiving

    The aim of SHAMAN is to develop the framework for the next generation of long term (more than one century) digital preservation systems and tools. This includes the definition of a theory of preservation that integrates the analysis, ingestion, management, access to and reuse of information objects across distributed repositories. The data preservation capabilities offered will secure the authenticity and integrity of data objects over time.
 
  • Local Organiser of IPRES 2010
    The Austrian National Library and the Technical University of Vienna were pleased to host the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2010) in Vienna in September 2010. iPRES 2010 was the seventh in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our digital heritage.
 
  • PLANETS
    (Permanent Long-term Access through Networked Services)

    The Planets project brought together European National Libraries and Archives, leading research institutions, and technology companies to address the challenge of preserving access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge. The project developed systems and tools which support the accessibility and use of digital cultural and scientific resources, specifically through the development of novel concepts, techniques and tools to preserve the availability of digital resources over time.
 
    Plato: The Planets Preservation Planning Tool
    The planning tool Plato is a decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison in a service-oriented architecture to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.
 
  • Digital Preservation Europe (DPE)
    Electronic resources are a central part of our cultural and intellectual heritage; but this material is at risk. Digital memory needs constant management, using new techniques and processes, to contain such risks as technological obsolescence. Risk begins before the digital record is created and continues for as long as the digital object needs to be retained. Digital preservation is too big an issue for individual institutions or even sectors to address independently. Concerted action at both national and international level is required. DigitalPreservationEurope facilitates pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural, public administration, and industry sectors in Europe.
 
  • DELOS EU Network of Excellence
    DELOS is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, partially funded by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). The main objective of DELOS is to coordinate a joint programme of activities of the major European teams working in digital library related areas.

    Digital Preservation Cluster (WP 6)
    Integrated research in the preservation cluster will provide the methodological framework and theory for ensuring that digital libraries research addresses preservation issues and digital libraries incorporate preservation elements in their designs.
 
  • Langfristige Archivierung digitaler Fotografien (in German)
    Diese 2007 durchgeführte Studie beleuchtet die Problemstellungen und Anforderungen bei der Langzeitarchivierung digitaler Fotografien. Wir bieten eine kurze Zusammenfassung sowie den vollständigen Text der Studie zum Download.
     

Awards

  • Highly Commended Paper Award 2016 for OCLC Systems and Services paper (see publications)
  • Oustanding Reviewer, Journal of Systems and Software, 2015
  • Highly Commended Paper Award 2015 for OCLC Systems and Services paper (see publications)
  • Best Demo Award at Digital Libraries 2014.
    The SCAPE Planning and Watch Suite wins the Best Demo award at Digital Libraries 2014, the conjoined conference for both the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries and the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries Conference series.
  • Planets project wins the 2012 Digital Preservation Award for Research & Innovation in Digital Preservation:
    For its ground-breaking and innovative technologies, the PLANETS project was awarded the 2012 Digital Preservation Award for Research & Innovation in Digital Preservation in December 2012.
  • Thesis shortlisted for Informatics Thesis Award:
    My PhD thesis was selected and shortlisted for the GI-Dissertationspreis 2010.
  • Thesis wins Information Science award: VFI-Förderungspreis 2010.
    My PhD thesis won the first prize in the 2010 award of the Verein zur Förderung der Informationswissenschaft (Assocation for the Advancement of Information Sciences).
    The jury said: Die Disssertation von Herrn Becker stellt eine besonders gründliche Analyse des Planungsprozesses für die Langzeitarchivierung digitaler Objekte einschliesslich eines systematischen Ansatzes zur Planung sowie der Erstellung eines inzwischen bereits in der Praxis erprobten Softwaretools zur Planungsunterstützung dar.
    Press release (in German)
  • Shortlisted for the Digital Preservation Award 2010.
    Plato has been shortlisted for the Digital Preservation Award 2010.
    Press release
  • Best Demo Award at ECDL 2008.
    At the European Conference on Digital Libraries 2008, ECDL 2008, the planning tool Plato shared the first prize for the best demonstration of the conference with the search engine Summa.
 
 
 

Publications

Forthcoming

Peer-reviewed journals and book chapters

Peer-reviewed conferences and workshops

Others


 

Teaching

A lot of current topics at can be explored in Praktika, bachelor and master theses etc... additional topics upon request, further suggestions welcome. Please contact me for an appointment if you are interested! Some examples below.
  • Personal health data analytics
  • Large-scale web data analytics using MapReduce in the cloud
  • Scientific data preservation and curation
  • Capability Maturity Models
  • Governance, Risk and Compliance in Information Systems
  • Digital photo archival and image comparison
  • Quality assurance on format conversions
  • Non-functional requirements and software durability
  • Information modelling and model transformation
  • Multi-criteria decision making
  • Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
  • Modelling and simulation of an archival system
  • Preservation of complex objects, interactive multimedia and digital art
  • Trustworthy software evaluation
  • Web data extraction for digital preservation
Lectures: Supervised theses:
  • Stefan Schindler: File Format Analysis - Monitoring the Life Cycle of File Formats in the Internet. Master thesis, 2013.
  • Clemens Sauerwein: Model-Driven Benchmark Data Generation for Digital Preservation of Webpages. Master thesis, 2013.
  • Harald Mezensky. A Model Driven Approach to Generate Ground Truth Data for Digital Preservation. Master thesis, 2013.
  • Petar Petrov: Content Profiling for Digital Preservation. Master thesis, 2013, see also the paper at IPRES2012 and the project page.
  • Markus Hamm: Impact Assessment of Decision Criteria in Multi Criteria Decision Analysis for Digital Preservation. Master thesis, 2011, see also the paper at IPRES2011.
  • Riccardo Gottardi: Complex Digital Object Preservation. Master thesis, 2010.
  • Michael Kraxner: Maintaining a Preservation Plan. Bachelor thesis, 2009.
  • Petar Petrov: Challenges and Opportunities in Personal Health-Care Management: A concept for supporting diabetics. Bachelor thesis, 2009.
  • Mark Guttenbrunner: Digital Preservation of Video Games.
    Master thesis, completed September 2007, see also the paper at IPRES2008.
 

Activities

  • Senior Program Committee member of Digital Libraries 2014: the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) and International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2014)
  • Program Committee member of IDCC 2015
  • Co-chair of the workshop Open Research Challenges at IPRES 2013
  • Co-chair of the workshop Digital Preservation Capabilities at IPRES 2013
  • Poster and Demos Chair of IPRES 2013
  • Program Committee member of the Data Curation Workshop at TPDL 2013
  • Program Committee member of TPDL 2013
  • Co-chair of the workshop Open Research Challenges at IPRES 2012
  • Program Committee member of IPRES 2010, IPRES 2011, IPRES 2012, IPRES 2013
  • Publicity Co-chair of IPRES 2011
  • Reviewing: Among others, I have reviewed and am reviewing for the following venues.
    • ACM Transactions on Information Systems
    • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)
    • Journal of Systems and Software
    • Information and Software Technology
    • International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL)
    • Archival Science
    • Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)
    • European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL)
    • International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES)
    • International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL)
    • Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

Selected talks

  • Keynote: El planeamiento de la preservacion en un repositorio institucional. Como llegar De objectivos a soluciones? (Preservation planning in an institutional repository: From goals to actions)
    Invited keynote for BIREDIAL 2013, San Jose, Costa Rica.
  • Preservation Decisions and Governance: An IT Perspective. Invited lecture at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, January 2012. [slides]
  • Preservation Planning: which criteria matter, and how can we measure them? Tutorial given at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in Ottawa, Canada, June 2011.
  • Trustworthy Preservation Planning. Invited talk at the Colloquium for the Informatics Thesis Award 2010 at the Leibniz Center for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. May 2011. [slides]
  • Component selection in Digital Preservation: Preservation Planning as a Decision Problem. Invited talk at IST Lisbon, December 2010.
  • Digital Preservation: Challenges, Solutions, and Approaches to Accountable Planning of Digital Preservation. Tutorial given at the International Conference on Digital Libraries in New Delhi, India, February 2010.
  • Why do we have to plan digital preservation? Presentation at the Planets training event at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2009. [slides]
  • Planets: Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked Services. Invited talk at the REBIUN workshop, Murcia, Spain, October 2008
  • Planets: Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked Services. Presentation at CEBIT 2008
  • Evaluating preservation strategies: Decision support for preservation planning. Invited talk at the Tools and Trends conference at the Royal Library of the Netherlands. The Hague, November 2007
  • Preservation Planning in Planets. Invited talk at the DPC workshop on JPEG2000. British Library, June 2007.
 
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last edited 2016.06.13 by Christoph Becker