Nikolay Mirenkov

Professor of Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Dean of Graduate School of Computer Science and Engineering, and Vice President of the University of Aizu.

D.Sc. 1983 (Computing Center, Novosibirsk, the USSR Academy of Sciences), Ph.D. 1972 (Novosibirsk Institute of Electrical Engineering)

Background Data

Professor Mirenkov came to the University of Aizu from the Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk) in 1993, where he was the head of the supercomputer software department. He was a research visitor at the University of Erlangen-Neurenberg (Germany), Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy (France), the Central Institute of Computing Technologies (Bulgaria), etc. He was the President of the Russian Association "Parallel Computing", an expert of the National Higher Attestation Committee, and a member of Councils awarding higher degrees in research. Since 1993 he has been a professor of the University of Aizu. He was head of the Graduate department of Information systems in 1997-2001 and head of Computer Software department in 2001-2004. Now Prof. Mirenkov is Vice President of the University of Aizu and Dean of its Graduate School of Computer Science and Engineering. He also directs Active Knowledge Engineering Lab.

Research/Educational Interests

Research Description

A basis of our research is self-explanatory software components in a "film" format. A film is a series of color stills supported, if necessary, by text and sound. Each still is to represent a view of objects or processes. Each film is to represent a multiple view (an extended set of dynamic and/or static features) of objects or processes. A self-explanatory film means that the associated stills are organized and presented in such a way that the semantic richness of a computational scheme is clearly brought out. The investment of meaning in the film is reduced to developing a series of views watching (and hearing) in non-linear order. We also develop a set of icons representing such films. Icons and films are acquired in a net-accessible database. As a rule, the user should not study and remember them in advance. The film management system provides simple access to database items and modes to manipulate films and, in this way, to perform the formation of component meaning. The idea of self-explanatory software components is used in two of our grand projects: Active Knowledge Studio and F-Communication system. Active Knowledge Studio is related to the filmification of computational methods and oriented to application end users working in computational science field, as well as to university instructors and students. F-Communication system is a set of multimedia communicators and educational sub-systems related to the filmification of users' messages and the support of some studying processes, and oriented to children, elderly people and people with disabilities.

Selected Publications

e-mail: nikmir@u-aizu.ac.jp