Joel Palmius

See also: linkedin, Contuitus Net Research AB

Having entered this page, you are probably looking for personal information concerning me, Joel Palmius. The below is a collection of such information. Having had the experience with older homepages growing stale, outdated and in all aspects moldy, I have decided to keep this one rather short and straight to the point.

The following is what you can find on this page:

Current employment
CV
- Professional career
- Publications, theses and conference papers
- Teaching experience
- Awards and nominations
Open source projects
Fields of expertise
- Programming languages and platforms
- Expertise in psychology
Things not related to my profession
Other links
Contact information

Current employment

Since April 2011 I am the CEO of Contuitus Net Research AB, a consultancy firm focusing on computer aided surveying in a wide sense. I give advice concerning automated and digitalized data collection and help with systems development, support and hosting within the same area.

CV

Professional career

  1998      Teacher at Miroi (shorter course in JavaScript) 
  1998-2000 Lab assistant, programming and networks communication (at MIUN)
  1999      Lecturer at summer course in computer use (at MIUN)
  1999      Assistant system administrator (at MIUN)
  1999      Developer of first version of Mod_Survey (financed by National Institute for Working Life)
  1999-2003 Lead programmer at valuator
  2000      Master degree in informatics (at MIUN)
  2000-2001 Lecturer (part-time), programming and networks communication (at MIUN)
  2000-2001 Project (part-time), "Kontaktytor" research project (at MIUN)
  2001-2009 Post-graduate studies in informatics (at MIUN)
  2001      Member of the AMSIDO project (MIUN and the Swedish National Defense College)
  2002      Part of the administrative staff of the CITMO conference
  2003      Bachelor degree in psychology (at MIUN)
  2005      Licentiate degree in informatics (at MIUN)
  2008      Part of the administrative staff for the IRIS-31 conference
  2009      Project (part-time), "PUPIL" (developing tools for distance education in experimental psychology)
  2009-2010 Lecturer (part-time), various courses related to web and open source (at MIUN)
  2010      PhD degree in Computer and Systems Science (at MIUN)
  2010-2011 Independent IT consultant
  2011-     CEO of Contuitus Net Research AB

Publications, theses and conference papers

  2000      Palmius J: The Design of Self-organization
            Master thesis in Informatics presented at MIUN
  2000      Palmius J: State Space Vectors - On Directionality Tools in Self-organizing Systems
            23d Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS-23)
  2000      Sandberg K, Palmius J, Pan Y: An Evaluation of a Wizard Approach to Web Design 
            Third International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics
  2001      Palmius J: Self-organization in Software Design
            Systemics and Informatics Research Seminar on AIH (SIMS'01)
  2002      Egonsdotter G, Palmius J: A Base for Simulating Information Distribution
            From Systems Theory and Practice in the Knowledge Age. Edited by Ragsdell et al., 
            Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 2002
  2003      Palmius J, Silvergran J: An Evaluation of Ideal Route Models for Indoor Navigation
            Bachelor Thesis in Psychology presented at MIUN
  2003      Palmius J, Egonsdotter G, Asproth V: Simulations of Highly Complex Social Systems...
            From Dubois D (ed) (2004): International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems. Vol 14.             
  2005      Palmius J, A Theoretical Base for High-level Simulation of Organisational Information Systems
            From Systems Research and Behavioral Science. No 22.        
  2005      Palmius J, Defining the "Information" Part of "Information System"
            From Proceedings of IRIS 2005
  2005      Palmius J, A Theoretical Base for The Simulation of Information Systems
            Licentiate thesis presented at MIUN
  2007      Palmius J, Criteria for measuring and comparing information systems
            30th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS-30)
  2008      Palmius J, Temporal perspectives on systems development
            31th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS-31)
  2009      Palmius J, Persson-Slumpi T: A Comparison of Three Approaches to Model Human Behavior
            In Dubois D (2010): "Computing Anticipatory Systems"
            American Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings 437 (selected papers)
            This article was granted a 'best paper award' on CASYS'09
  2010      Palmius J, Criteria for Supporting Change in Information Systems
            [Accepted for Organizational Transformation and Social Change, pending editorial changes]
  2010      Palmius J, Organization-level Information Systems - Tools for Supporting the Development Process
            Doctoral thesis presented at MIUN

Teaching experience
For space reasons I have broken this out to a separate page.

Awards and nominations

  2007      Nominated for the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for my 
            lead role in the Mod_Survey project.

Open Source Projects

I am the lead designer for a software project called Mod_Survey and I help out with MakeHuman where I am responsible for nightly builds for Linux and windows. Apart from this I participate in several other projects by contributing code and bug reports.

Fields of expertise

Formally I am an information systems developer. That is, my general field of expertise is in arranging people, procedures, policies, routines and technology so that people in an organization can get relevant information in a timely and efficient manner. This naturally includes a lot of technology and general systems development, since a heavy focus usually lie on the computerized parts of the information system.

However, people who get in contact with me professionally usually do so because of one of two reasons. The by far most common reason is because of my focus expertise within the field of web surveying, or in practice web-based questionnaires. At the point of writing this (2010) I have been working with web surveying for twelve years. During this time I have been the lead developer of mod_survey, a software package for on line surveying. I have also participated in several major surveying projects, and assisted with technological expertise in several others. My expertise within this field is down-to-earth practical: I know how to build and conduct web surveys from the bare-bone software components up to the design of the actual questions and data analysis. Because of this practical focus, you will not find any articles written by me in the subject.

My second field of expertise is that of evaluations of information systems. This is my academic subject as a post-graduate student at mid Sweden university. Above, you will find the articles I have written on the subject, along with my licentiate thesis.

Programming languages and platforms
I wrote my first computer program when I was 10 years old. It was in basic on my Commodore 64. Since then I have been playing around with computers more or less daily, and often the my point of interest has been programming various things.

At this point in time the following languages are the ones I'm most up to date with:

Perl, which is the language mod_survey is written in. My focus here is text parsing, text processing and web-related scripting. However, perl is my number one choice then I need to write a short program to do something on my linux box.
Java is the language I use if I want to write a more structured program. My focus here has traditionally been on the web too (servlets, jsp...), but lately I've written both traditional applications (such as jMod_Survey Editor) and XML/text-processing applications. I feel comfortable with the major open-source libraries here, mainly the ones collected under Jakarta.
XML is what I use for most advanced text processing. Partly because of having been lecturer on a university XML course, but also for my own projects, I have thorough knowledge of XML and its related technologies (mainly those focusing on text markup and transformations).

Apart from these, the following platforms, scripts, languages and markup sets are things I have more than a passing knowledge of:

ActionScript 3
JavaScript
PHP
HTML
SQL
PgSQL
DocBook (both XML and SGML)
bash-script
csh-script
XML related technologies (solid knowledge of XSLT, XPATH, XSL-Fo, DTDs...)

Through the years I have studied lots and lots of programming languages. I cannot possibly remember them all, but the following are some of the ones I have written major or minor programs in:

C
C++
Pascal
Delphi
Prolog
ARexx (does anyone even remember what this was used for? :-) )
QBasic
C64-basic
Visual basic
C64-assembler
Amiga assembler
Tcl
sed
awk
MSOffice VB (mainly under excel and access)

Apart from the programming as such, I have thorough knowledge of both Windows and Linux platforms, and how to make programs for them. I use Linux as operating system on my workstations.

Expertise in psychology
I am here using psychology in a broad sense. Basically, think of it as "measuring and managing stuff related to individuals".

I have two major fields of expertise related to humans. The one you might have heard about me because of, is web surveying. I have participated in several projects for conducting web surveys in practice. In these I have contributed expertise on the specific topics related to surveying on line, but also helped in question design and post-hoc psychometrics.

The second major field I have knowledge of is usability, or how to make certain that something is usable and useful by a specific type of user. I worked for one and a half year in a usability project, and it was initially planned that my PhD studies would be within this field. I know how to set up usability experiments, and how to measure usability as defined by Nielsen, ISO or Allwood. While I did not really engage in a lot of academia surrounding this, you will find one usability article I co-authored above.

I wrote my bachelor thesis in psychology on measuring how people move in corridor.

Things not related to my profession

I am a member of the red cross, through which I also work as a volunteer. When writing this (early 2010) my red cross volunteering is focused on SFI (Swedish For Immigrants) where I help with conversation groups as a neutral third part.

Contact information

Personal contact, emergencies and general admiration should go to me privately:

  Address:      Joel Palmius,
                Genvägen 56B,
                S-83142 Östersund,
                Sweden,
  Phone:        +46(0)63517309, +46(0)702833355
  Email:        joel.palmius@contuitus.com