Introduction

On November 28,29 and 30 2018, the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) organizes the annual three-day course “Research methods and methodology for IKS”. The location will be Conference center Landgoed Huize Bergen in Vught. The course will be given in English and is part of the educational Program for SIKS-Ph.D. students. Although the course is primarily intended for SIKS-Ph.D. students, other participants are not excluded. However, their number of passes will be restricted and depends on the number of SIKS-Ph.D. students taking the course.

“Research methods and methodology for IKS” is relevant for all SIKS-Ph.D.-students (whether working in computer science or in information science), The primary goal of this hands-on course is to enable these Ph.D. students to make a good research design for their own research project. To this end, it provides an interactive training in various elements of research design, such as the conceptual design and the research planning. But the course also contains a general introduction to the philosophy of science (and particularly to the philosophy of mathematics, computer science and AI). And, it addresses such divergent topics as “the case-study method”, “elementary research methodology for the empirical sciences” and “empirical methods for computer science”.

“Research methods and methodology for IKS” is an intense and interactive course.
First, all students enrolling for this course are asked to read some pre-course reading material, comprising some papers that address key problems in IKS-methodology. These papers will be sent to the participants immediately after registration. Secondly, all participants are expected to give a brief characterisation of their own research project/proposal, by answering a set questions, formulated by the course directors, and based on the aforementioned literature. We believe that this approach results in a more efficient and effective course; it will help you to prepare yourself for the course and this will increase the value that you will get from it.

Course coordinators

Hans Weigand(UvT), Roel Wieringa(UT), John-Jules Meyer(UU), Hans Akkermans(VU) and Richard Starmans (UU)

Program

The program is available here .