EmoDetector, by University of Duisburg-Essen and Nokia Research Center, is an application that provides auditory cues in addition to the notification tone upon receiving an SMS based on a real-time analysis of a message's contents, see [1].The application responds currently to the following characters sets:
- :) or :-)
- :( or :-(
- ;) or ;-)
- ok (case insensitive)
- ?
There is a version for Nokia Series 60 phones and for Android, see the
download site. Have a look at the
http://www.emodetector.tom-lab.de/ website for more information.
[1] Sahami Shirazi, A., Sarjanoja, A., Alt, F., Schmidt, A.,Häkkilä, J.:
Understanding the Impact of Abstracted Audio Preview of SMS. In Proceeding of CHI 2010, April 10-15, Atlanta, GA, USA
At the University of Duisburg-Essen we have founded paluno - The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology. Stefan Eicker, Klaus Pohl, Michael Goedicke, Volker Gruhn and me have joined forces and we bring together our expertise (and the expertise of our groups - in total about 70 people) to move software engineering forward. See the mission statement on our website: paluno.uni-due.de 
Yesterday night we celebrated the new institute at Zeche Zollverein - it was a really enjoyable evening. In the talks and discussion it became very clear that dealing with complexity in the context of the real world is the central challenges for engineering software systems. The sizes of projects our partners in industry have to master are impressive and we constantly work on our teaching and education strategies to prepare students for this world… and looking at the students who went into industry we are successful ;-)
After the software engineering talks and panel we had impressive life performances by a group of singers performing musical hits and the comedian Frank Goosen. Life performances - especially in music and dance - are always a very strong reminder for me how poor digital technology is… even in 3d, full HD and Dolby surround ;-)
