Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Master's Thesis (190) (remove)
Keywords
- Augmented Reality (3)
- Computersimulation (3)
- Datenschutz (3)
- Internet of Things (3)
- virtual reality (3)
- Beschaffung (2)
- E-Partizipation (2)
- E-participation (2)
- Simulation (2)
- Sport (2)
Institute
- Institut für Computervisualistik (46)
- Fachbereich 4 (34)
- Institut für Management (33)
- Institut für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsinformatik (27)
- Institute for Web Science and Technologies (19)
- Institut für Informatik (14)
- Institut für Softwaretechnik (6)
- Fachbereich 1 (1)
- Fachbereich 3 (1)
- Fachbereich 6 (1)
“Did I say something wrong?” A word-level analysis of Wikipedia articles for deletion discussions
(2016)
This thesis focuses on gaining linguistic insights into textual discussions on a word level. It was of special interest to distinguish messages that constructively contribute to a discussion from those that are detrimental to them. Thereby, we wanted to determine whether “I”- and “You”-messages are indicators for either of the two discussion styles. These messages are nowadays often used in guidelines for successful communication. Although their effects have been successfully evaluated multiple times, a large-scale analysis has never been conducted. Thus, we used Wikipedia Articles for Deletion (short: AfD) discussions together with the records of blocked users and developed a fully automated creation of an annotated data set. In this data set, messages were labelled either constructive or disruptive. We applied binary classifiers to the data to determine characteristic words for both discussion styles. Thereby, we also investigated whether function words like pronouns and conjunctions play an important role in distinguishing the two. We found that “You”-messages were a strong indicator for disruptive messages which matches their attributed effects on communication. However, we found “I”-messages to be indicative for disruptive messages as well which is contrary to their attributed effects. The importance of function words could neither be confirmed nor refuted. Other characteristic words for either communication style were not found. Yet, the results suggest that a different model might represent disruptive and constructive messages in textual discussions better.
This scientific paper deals with the question to which extend the increasing digitization has an impact on work-life balance. Answering this question is the main goal of this study.
To reach this goal a literature review is made, in which it is possible to create a direct correlation between the subjective feel of work-life balance and the perceived stress level. With the help of Antonovsky’s salutogenesis model (1997) from the stress research field, factors are ascertained which determine the perceived stress level and linked with that the perceived work-life balance. These stress-influencing factors are examined through a qualitative content analysis by Mayring (2014) on a base of a problem-centered interview.
The results suggest that the digitization has impact on all these ascertained factors and linked to them on the work-life balance. This shows, that the digitization influences us in almost every aspect of work or private life. Whether this impact is positive or negative towards the work life balance depends on the individual, that assesses this factor. Clear distinctions can be made between people working in an IT-based job and those that do not. In comparison, people with IT-based jobs perceive a substantial better impact of digitization on work-life balance.
Willingness to pay and willingness to accept on a two-sided platform - The use case of DoBeeDo
(2019)
It is widely known that especially for technology-based start-ups, entrepreneurs need to set up the boundaries of the business and define the product/service to offer in order to minimize the risk of failure. The goal of this thesis is to not only emphasize the importance of the business model development and evaluation but also show an example customer validation process for an emerging start-up named DoBeeDo, which is a mobile app operating on a two-sided market. During the process of customer validation a survey has been conducted to evaluate the interest of the target groups as well as the fit of their expectations using the Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept measures. The paper includes an analysis and evaluation of the gathered results and assesses whether the execution of the Customer Development Model can be continued.
Diese Arbeit soll das von Dietz und Oppermann entwickelte Planspiel „Datenschutz 2.0“ an den heutigen Alltag der Schüler anpassen, die Benutzung in der Sekundarstufe II ermöglichen und die technischen und gesetzlichen Problematiken des Planspiels beheben. Das mit dem Planspiel aufgegriffene Thema Datenschutz ist im rheinland-pfälzischen Informatik-Lehrplan für die Sekundarstufe II verankert. Hier wird der Begriff Datenschutz in der Reihe „Datenerhebung unter dem Aspekt Datenschutz beurteilen“ genannt. Jedoch werden in dem Planspiel keine Daten erhoben, sondern die selbst hinterlassenen Datenspuren untersucht. Diese Form des Datenschutzes ist im Grundkurs in der vorgeschlagenen Reihe „Datensicherheit unter der Berücksichtigung kryptologischer Verfahren erklären und beachten“ unter dem Thema Kommunikation in Rechnernetzen zu finden. Im Leistungskurs steht die Datensicherheit in gleichbenannter Reihe und Thema und in der Reihe „Datenerhebung unter dem Aspekt Datenschutz beurteilen“ im Thema Wechselwirkung zwischen Informatiksysteme, Individuum und Gesellschaft.
Artificial neural networks is a popular field of research in artificial intelli-
gence. The increasing size and complexity of huge models entail certain
problems. The lack of transparency of the inner workings of a neural net-
work makes it difficult to choose efficient architectures for different tasks.
It proves to be challenging to solve these problems, and with a lack of in-
sightful representations of neural networks, this state of affairs becomes
entrenched. With these difficulties in mind a novel 3D visualization tech-
nique is introduced. Attributes for trained neural networks are estimated
by utilizing established methods from the area of neural network optimiza-
tion. Batch normalization is used with fine-tuning and feature extraction to
estimate the importance of different parts of the neural network. A combi-
nation of the importance values with various methods like edge bundling,
ray tracing, 3D impostor and a special transparency technique results in a
3D model representing a neural network. The validity of the extracted im-
portance estimations is demonstrated and the potential of the developed
visualization is explored.
Es wird ein Augmented-Reality Ansatz zur Erforschung modularer OSGi-Softwaresysteme präsentiert. Der Prototyp wird unter der Verwendung der Microsoft HoloLens implementiert. Module, wie Komponenten und Packages, werden in einer virtuellen Stadt dargestellt. Dieser Ansatz ermöglicht es dem Anwender, die Software-Architektur mittels intuitiver Navigation zu erkunden: Spracheingabe, Blickpunkt- und Gestenkontrolle. Eine multifunktionale Benutzeroberfläche wird vorgestellt, die für verschiedene Zielgruppen adaptiert werden kann. Viele veröffentlichte Visualisierungen weisen keine klare Zielgruppendefinition auf. Das Konzept kann leicht auf andere Darstellungsformen, wie beispielsweise der Inselmetapher übertragen werden. Erste Ergebnisse einer Evaluierung, die mittels kleiner strukturierter Interviews gewonnen werden konnten, werden präsentiert. Die Probanden mussten vier Programm-verständnis Aufgaben lösen und ihren Aufwand, sowie ihre Arbeitsbelastung einschätzen. Die Ergebnisse bilden eine gute Grundlage für weitere Forschung im Bereich der Software- Visualisierung in Augmented Reality.
Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Betrachtung der Rolle von Vertrauen zwischen den Kapitalnehmern und Kapitalgebern auf einer der größten Crowdfunding-Plattformen, Kickstarter. Kernthema ist die Beantwortung der Forschungsfragen, wie das Vertrauen zwischen den Kapitalgebern und Kapitalnehmern im Kontext von Crowdfunding entsteht, welche Faktoren das Maß von Vertrauen in dieser Beziehung beeinflussen und welche Signale für die Vertrauensbildung verantwortlich sind. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit besteht darin, das von Zerwas, Kilian und von Kortzfleisch 2015 vorgestellte konzeptuelle Modell der Einflussfaktoren von Vertrauen im Kontext von Crowdfunding aus Sicht der Kapitalgeber zu überprüfen und gegebenenfalls zu erweitern.
Auf Grundlage einer Literaturrecherche und qualitativer, leitfadenorientierter Interviews werden die gesammelten Daten diskutiert, bestehende Faktoren verifiziert und weiterführend neue Faktoren und Signale identifiziert, die die Bildung von Vertrauen auf Crowdfunding-Plattformen beeinflussen.
Als Ergebnis werden die Überarbeitung sowie Erweiterung des Ausgangsmodells um die neuen Faktoren geographische Nähe, Vermittlerqualität und Verständnis vom Konzept Crowdfunding vorgeschlagen. Anhand der Häufigkeit der Erwähnung und Relevanz der Faktoren und beeinflussenden Signale in den durchgeführten Interviews wird weiterführend eine Gewichtung der Einzelfaktoren vorgenommen. Abschließend werden Implikationen und Bedeutung für Wissenschaft und Forschung diskutiert.
Remote rendering services offer the possibility to stream high quality images to lower powered devices. Due to the transmission of data the interactivity of applications is afflicted with a delay. A method to reduce delay of the camera manipulation on the client is called 3d-warping. This method causes artifacts. In this thesis different approaches of remote rendering setups will be shown. The artifacts and improvements of the warping method will be described. Methods to reduce the artifacts will be implemented and analyzed.
This master thesis is about the possibilities of supporting local corporate sales with the help of current mobile applications. The internet already has served in order to make the trading market more dynamic. The conditions for long-term local corporate sales have become more challenging. Because of smaller cost structures online-retailer offer prizes on which local point of sales can hardly keep up with. Another point is that more customers decide to order online because the service in e-shops enhanced; therefore, the digital transactions become more attractive for consumers. Today smartphones and tablets have brought the digitalization to a whole new level. With the possibility of Mobile Web the effects that the internet already showed us in the past have been intensified. The question that proposes here is: In which way do the conditions of competitions for local corporate sales change? This paper follows the outline of putting together various mobile services, their functions, and their practical usage, as well as the process of integrating them successfully into marketing. With that one should be able to find out if Mobile Web can be seen as an advantage for local corporates sales.
Tractography on HARDI data
(2011)
Diffusion weighted imaging is an important modality in clinical imaging and the only possibility to gain insight into the human brain noninvasively and in-vivo. The applications of this imaging technique are diversified. It is used to study the brain, its structure, development and the functionality of the different areas. Further, important fields of application are neurosurgical planning, examinations of pathologies, investigation of Alzheimer-, strokes, and multiple sclerosis. This thesis gives a brief introduction to MRI and diffusion MRI. Based on this, the mostly used data representation in diffusion MRI in clinical imaging, the diffusion tensor, is introduced. As the diffusion tensor suffers from severe limitations new techniques subsumed under the term HARDI (high angular resolution diffusion imaging) are introduced and discussed in detail. Further, an extensive introduction to tractography, approaches that aim at reconstructing neuronal fibers, is given. Based on the knowledge fromthe theoretical part established tractography algorithms are redesigned to handle HARDI data and, thus, improve the reconstruction of neuronal fibers. Among these algorithms, a novel approach is presented that successfully reconstructs fibers on phantom data as well as on human brain data. Further, a novel global classification approach is presented to cluster voxels according to their diffusion properties.
Topic models are a popular tool to extract concepts of large text corpora. These text corpora tend to contain hidden meta groups. The size relation of these groups is frequently imbalanced. Their presence is often ignored when applying a topic model. Therefore, this thesis explores the influence of such imbalanced corpora on topic models.
The influence is tested by training LDA on samples with varying size relations. The samples are generated from data sets containing a large group differences i.e language difference and small group differences i.e. political orientation. The predictive performance on those imbalanced corpora is judged using perplexity.
The experiments show that the presence of groups in training corpora can influence the prediction performance of LDA. The impact varies due to various factors, including language-specific perplexity scores. The group-related prediction performance changes for groups when varying the relative group sizes. The actual change varies between data sets.
LDA is able to distinguish between different latent groups in document corpora if differences between groups are large enough, e.g. for groups with different languages. The proportion of group-specific topics is under-proportional to the share of the group in the corpus and relatively smaller for minorities.
Current political issues are often reflected in social media discussions, gathering politicians and voters on common platforms. As these can affect the public perception of politics, the inner dynamics and backgrounds of such debates are of great scientific interest. This thesis takes user generated messages from an up-to-date dataset of considerable relevance as Time Series, and applies a topic-based analysis of inspiration and agenda setting to it. The Institute for Web Science and Technologies of the University Koblenz-Landau has collected Twitter data generated beforehand by candidates of the European Parliament Election 2019. This work processes and analyzes the dataset for various properties, while focusing on the influence of politicians and media on online debates. An algorithm to cluster tweets into topical threads is introduced. Subsequently, Sequential Association Rules are mined, yielding wide array of potential influence relations between both actors and topics. The elaborated methodology can be configured with different parameters and is extensible in functionality and scope of application.
Im Bereich Augmented Reality ist es von großer Bedeutung, dass virtuelle
Objekte möglichst realistisch in ein Kamerabild eingebettet werden. Nur
so ist es möglich, dem Nutzer eine immersive Erfahrung zu bieten. Dazu
gehört unter anderem, Verdeckung dieser Objekte korrekt zu behandeln.
Während schon verschiedene Ansätze existieren, dieses Verdeckungsproblem
zu beheben, wird in dieser Arbeit eine Lösung mittels Natural Image
Matting vorgestellt. Mit Hilfe einer Tiefenkamera wird das Kamerabild in
Vorder- und Hintergrund aufgeteilt und anschließend das virtuelle Objekt
im Bild platziert. Für Bereiche, in denen die Zugehörigkeit zu Vorder- oder
Hintergrund nicht eindeutig ist, wird anhand bekannter Pixel ein Transparenz-
Wert geschätzt. Es werden Methoden präsentiert, welche einen
Ablauf des Image Matting in Echtzeit ermöglichen. Zudem werden
Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten dieser Methoden präsentiert und gezeigt, dass
durch diese eine höhere Bildqualität für schwierige Szenen erreicht wird.
Digital transformation is a prevailing trend in the world, especially in dynamic Asia. Vietnam has recorded remarkable changes in the economy as domestic enterprises have made new strides in the digital transformation process. MB Bank, one of the prestigious financial groups in Vietnam, also takes advantage of digital transformation to have the opportunity to break through to become a large-scale technology enterprise with many factors such as improving customer experience, increasing customer base and increasing customer satisfaction. enhance competitiveness, build trust and loyalty for customers. However, in the process of converting MB, there are also many challenges that require banks to have appropriate policies to handle. It can be said that MB Bank is a typical case study of digital transformation in the banking sector in Vietnam.
Tracking is an integral part of many modern applications, especially in areas like autonomous systems and Augmented Reality. For performing tracking there are a wide array of approaches. One that has become a subject of research just recently is the utilization of Neural Networks. In the scope of this master thesis an application will be developed which uses such a Neural Network for the tracking process. This also requires the creation of training data as well as the creation and training of a Neural Network. Subsequently the usage of Neural Networks for tracking will be analyzed and evaluated. This includes several aspects. The quality of the tracking for different degrees of freedom will be checked as well as the the impact of the Neural Network on the applications performance. Additionally the amount of required training data is investigated, the influence of the network architecture and the importance of providing depth data as part of the networks input. This should provide an insight into how relevant this approach could be for its adoption in future products.
Data visualization is an effective way to explore data. It helps people to get a valuable insight of the data by placing it in a visual context. However, choosing a good chart without prior knowledge in the area is not a trivial job. Users have to manually explore all possible visualizations and decide upon ones that reflect relevant and desired trend in the data, are insightful and easy to decode, have a clear focus and appealing appearance. To address these challenges we developed a Tool for Automatic Generation of Good viSualizations using Scoring (TAG²S²). The approach tackles the problem of identifying an appropriate metric for judging visualizations as good or bad. It consists of two modules: visualization detection: given a data-set it creates a list of combination of data attributes for scoring and visualization ranking: scores each chart and decides which ones are good or bad. For the later, an utility metric of ten criteria was developed and each visualization detected in the first module is evaluated on these criteria. Only those visualizations that received enough scores are then presented to the user. Additionally to these data parameters, the tool considers user perception regarding the choice of visual encoding when selecting a visualization. To evaluate the utility of the metric and the importance of each criteria, test cases were developed, executed and the results presented.
Mit dieser Arbeit werden die folgenden Ziele verfolgt: Eine repräsentative Auswahl und Sammlung von Beispielen für Mobile Ticketing Systeme (insbesondere aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum) zu recherchieren, die sich im praktischen Einsatz befinden. Eine Zusammenstellung sinnvoller Kategorien (Charakteristika) zu erarbeiten, anhand derer sich Mobile Ticketing Systeme unterscheiden oder strukturieren lassen. Eine Gegenüberstellung der Beispiele und Kategorien zu erstellen, um zu untersuchen, welche typischen Klassen bei Mobile Ticketing Systemen identifiziert werden können.
The status of Business Process Management (BPM) recommender systems is not quite clear as research states. The use of recommenders familiarized itself with the world during the rise of technological evolution in the past decade.Ever since then, several BPM recommender systems came about. However, not a lot of research is conducted in this field. It is not well known to what broad are the technologies used and how are they used. Moreover, this master’s thesis aims at surveying the BPM recommender systems existing. Building on this, the recommendations come in different shapes. They can be positionbased where an element is to be placed at an element’s front, back or to autocomplete a missing link. On the other hand, Recommendations can be textual, to fill the labels of the elements. Furthermore, the literature review for BPM recommender systems took place under the guides of a literature review framework. The framework suggests 5stages of consecutive stages for this sake. The first stage is defining a scope for the research. Secondly, conceptualizing the topic by choosing key terms for literature research. After that in the third stage, comes the research stage.As for the fourth stage, it suggests choosing analysis features over which the literature is to be synthesized and compared. Finally, it recommends defining the research agenda to describe the reason for the literature review. By invoking the mentioned methodology, this master’s thesis surveyed 18 BPM recommender systems. It was found as a result of the survey that there
are not many different technologies for implementing the recommenders. It was also found that the majority of the recommenders suggest nodes that are yet to come in the model, which is called forward recommending. Also, one of the results of the survey indicated the scarce use of textual recommendations to BPM labels. Finally, 18 recommenders are considered less than excepted for a developing field therefore as a result, the survey found a shortage in the number of BPM recommender systems. The results indicate several shortages in several aspects in the field of BPM recommender systems. On this basis, this master’s thesis recommends the future work on it the results.
The annotation of digital media is no new area of research, instead it is widely investigated. There are many innovative ideas for creating the process of annotation. The most extensive segment of related work is about semi automatic annotation. One characteristic is common in the related work: None of them put the user in focus. If you want to build an interface, which is supporting and satsfying the user, you will have to do a user evaluation first. Whithin this thesis we want to analyze, which features an interface should or should not have to meet these requirements of support, user satisfaction and beeing intuitive. After collecting many ideas and arguing with a team of experts, we determined only a few of them. Different combination of these determined variables form the interfaces, we have to investigate in our usability study. The results of the usability leads to the assumption, that autocompletion and suggestion features supports the user. Furthermore coloring tags for grouping them into categories is not disturbing to the user, but has a tendency of being supportive. Same tendencies emerge for an interface consisting of two user interface elements. There is also an example given for the definition differences of being intuitive. This thesis leads to the concolusion that for reasons of user satisfaction and support it is allowed to differ from classical annotation interface features and to implement further usability studies in the section of annotation interfaces.
This Master Thesis is an exploratory research to determine whether it is feasible to construct a subjectivity lexicon using Wikipedia. The key hypothesis is that that all quotes in Wikipedia are subjective and all regular text are objective. The degree of subjectivity of a word, also known as ''Quote Score'' is determined based on the ratio of word frequency in quotations to its frequency outside quotations. The proportion of words in the English Wikipedia which are within quotations is found to be much smaller as compared to those which are not in quotes, resulting in a right-skewed distribution and low mean value of Quote Scores.
The methodology used to generate the subjectivity lexicon from text corpus in English Wikipedia is designed in such a way that it can be scaled and reused to produce similar subjectivity lexica of other languages. This is achieved by abstaining from domain and language-specific methods, apart from using only readily-available English dictionary packages to detect and exclude stopwords and non-English words in the Wikipedia text corpus.
The subjectivity lexicon generated from English Wikipedia is compared against other lexica; namely MPQA and SentiWordNet. It is found that words which are strongly subjective tend to have high Quote Scores in the subjectivity lexicon generated from English Wikipedia. There is a large observable difference between distribution of Quote Scores for words classified as strongly subjective versus distribution of Quote Scores for words classified as weakly subjective and objective. However, weakly subjective and objective words cannot be differentiated clearly based on Quote Score. In addition to that, a questionnaire is commissioned as an exploratory approach to investigate whether subjectivity lexicon generated from Wikipedia could be used to extend the coverage of words of existing lexica.
Stylized image triangulation
(2019)
Stylized image triangulation is a popular tool of image processing. Results can be found on magazine covers or bought as a piece of art. Common use cases are filters by mobile apps or programs dedicated to automated triangulation. This thesis is based upon a paper that achieves new results formulating the adaptive dynamic triangulation as optimization problem. With this approach, new results concerning visual and technical quality are accomplished. One aim of this thesis is to make this approach accessible to as many users as possible. To reach users, a mobile app called Mesh is designed and implemented. A client-host-system is presented which relieves the app from computing the result requiring a lot of resources. Therefore, transferring the approach to a CPU based solution is part of the thesis. Also, a webserver is implemented that handles the communication between app and algorithm. “Mesh” enables the user to send a arbitrary image to the server whose result can be downloaded.
Part of the research deals with optimizing the method. As the main step, the gradient descent method, which minimizes an approximation error, is examined with three different approaches re-defining the movement of a point: The limitation of the directions of movement in a meaningful manner, diagonal directions and a dynamically repositioning of points are analyzed. Results show no improvement of visual quality using diagonal instead of horizontal and vertical steps. Disallowing a point to take its last position, the limitation of step opportunities results in a loss of visual quality but reaches an intended global error earlier. The dynamically repositioning rests upon a vectorbased solution that weights the directions and applies a factor to each of them. This results in a longer computational time but also in a higher visual quality.
Inspired by the work of Josh Bryan, another part of research aims at imitating an artists style. With the use of pseudo-random events combined with a geometryshader, a more natural look shall be achieved. This method illustrates a way of adding minor details to a rendering. To imitate an artist's work, a more complex and more precise triangulation is needed. As the last aspect, a renderstyle is presented. The style uses a center for its effect moving the triangles of a triangulation apart. The arbitrary choice of placing the centrum enables the renderstyle to be used in animations.
The application of artificial intelligences on digital games became more and more successful in recent years. A drawback is, that they need lots of computing power to achieve good results, the more complex the game, the more computing power is needed. In this thesis a strategy learning-system is implemented, which is based on crowd-learned heuristics. The heuristics are given in a wiki. The research is done according to the Design Science Research Methodology. The implemented system is allied to the game Dominion. To do this, an ontology for Dominion is designed. A mapping language is defined and implemented in the system, which allows the mapping of information in the wiki to an ontology. Furthermore, metrics to rate the found strategies are defined. Using the system, users can enter a mapping for the information transfer and apply it. They can also select cards from Dominion, for which the system determines and rates strategies. Finally, the system is evaluated by Dominion-players by rating the strategies, which are found by the system, and the defined metrics.
FinTech is deemed to be an underexplored phenomenon even in academic and real environments. Among (1) “Sustainable FinTech” – the application of information technology as innovation in established financial services providers’ business operation; and (2) “Disruptive FinTech” – the provision of financial products and services by non-incumbents which in most cases are information technology entrepreneurs, the former receives more attention. In order to contribute to Disruptive FinTech category, the thesis strive to examine Entrepreneurial Strategy framework applied for technology players taking part in Vietnam financial market.
One of the greatest goals in computer graphics is the aesthetic representation of objects. In addition to conventional methods, another field focuses on non-photorealistic renderings. The so-called example-based rendering is an area where users can transfer their art style to a pre-computed 3D rendering, using a hand-painted template. There are some algorithms that already provide impressive results, but their problem is that most of these procedures count as offline methods and are not able to produce results in real-time. For this reason, this work show a method that satisfies this condition. In addition, the influence of the run-time reduction on the results is investigated. Requirements are defined, to which the method and its results are examined. Other methods in this field are referenced and compared with their results.
Although e-participation is becoming more and more important, security risks and requirements are so far only superficially regarded. This master thesis aims at contribute to security and privacy of e-participation applications. This paper deals with the users of electronic participation forms. Since personal data has to be transmitted in the e-participation process, systems require trustworthiness, privacy, transparency, availability and legal security between public administration and users. Therefore it is very important to ensure the most of security and privacy standards in information and communication technologies by the administration and the citizens to provide the necessary confidence in using e participation applications. This master thesis examines different e-participation platforms of the areas participatory budgeting, e-consultations, party websites, and e-petitions and explores at first which influence of sensitive e-participation systems on the political system they have. Subsequently, the current safety standard of the e-participation applications is determined. For this purpose an analysis framework is used, regarding on relevant security and privacy issues for e-participation. Based on the results safety levels are deduced from different types of e-participation applications. In addition recommendations for the constitution of e-participation are concluded, which helps to make e participation applications more secure. Furthermore, future technologies with the potential to improve security in the use of electronic public participation are presented.
The mitral valve is one of the four valves in the human heart. It is located in the left heart chamber and its function is to control the blood flow from the left atrium to the left ventricle. Pathologies can lead to malfunctions of the valve so that blood can flow back to the atrium. Patients with a faulty mitral valve function may suffer from fatigue and chest pain. The functionality can be surgically restored, which is often a long and exhaustive intervention. Thorough planning is necessary to ensure a safe and effective surgery. This can be supported by creating pre-operative segmentations of the mitral valve. A post-operative analysis can determine the success of an intervention. This work will combine existing and new ideas to propose a new approach to (semi-)automatically create such valve models. The manual part can guarantee a high quality model and reliability, whereas the automatic part contributes to saving valuable labour time.
The main contributions of the automatic algorithm are an estimated semantic separation of the two leaflets of the mitral valve and an optimization process that is capable of finding a coaptation-line and -area between the leaflets. The segmentation method can perform a fully automatic segmentation of the mitral leaflets if the annulus ring is already given. The intermediate steps of this process will be integrated into a manual segmentation method so a user can guide the whole procedure. The quality of the valve models generated by the method proposed in this work will be measured by comparing them to completely manually segmented models. This will show that commonly used methods to measure the quality of a segmentation are too general and do not suffice to reflect the real quality of a model. Consequently the work at hand will introduce a set of measurements that can qualify a mitral valve segmentation in more detail and with respect to anatomical landmarks. Besides the intra-operative support for a surgeon, a segmented mitral valve provides additional benefits. The ability to patient-specifically obtain and objectively describe the valve anatomy may be the base for future medical research in this field and automation allows to process large data sets with reduced expert dependency. Further, simulation methods that use the segmented models as input may predict the outcome of a surgery.
In scientific data visualization huge amounts of data are generated, which implies the task of analyzing these in an efficient way. This includes the reliable detection of important parts and a low expenditure of time and effort. This is especially important for the big-sized seismic volume datasets, that are required for the exploration of oil and gas deposits. Since the generated data is complex and a manual analysis is very time-intensive, a semi-automatic approach could on one hand reduce the time required for the analysis and on the other hand offer more flexibility, than a fully automatic approach.
This master's thesis introduces an algorithm, which is capable of locating regions of interest in seismic volume data automatically by detecting anomalies in local histograms. Furthermore the results are visualized and a variety of tools for the exploration and interpretation of the detected regions are developed. The approach is evaluated by experiments with synthetic data and in interviews with domain experts on the basis of real-world data. Conclusively further improvements to integrate the algorithm into the seismic interpretation workflow are suggested.
Using semantic data from general-purpose programming languages does not provide the unified experience one would want for such an application. Static error checking is lacking, especially with regards to static typing of the data. Based on the previous work of λ-DL, which integrates semantic queries and concepts as types into a typed λ-calculus, this work takes its ideas a step further to meld them into a real-world programming language. This thesis explores how λ-DL's features can be extended and integrated into an existing language, researches an appropriate extension mechanism and produces Semantics4J, a JastAdd-based Java language semantic data extension for type-safe OWL programming, together with examples of its usage.
Diese Masterarbeit beschreibt und evaluiert die im Rahmen der Arbeit entwickelten Erweiterungen zur Schellings Segregationsimulation. Der Nobelpreisträger Thomas C. Schelling simulierte als erster ab 1969 die Segregation. Die dabei entstandenen Ergebnisse erlaubten eine genauere Analyse der auftretenden Phänomene. Uri Wilensky, Mitarbeiter der "Northwestern University", entwickelte seit 1999 eine Segregationssimulation in NetLogo.
Im Rahmen meiner Masterarbeit habe ich das NetLogo-Model von Uri Wilensky in sechs unterschiedlichen Szenarien weiterentwickelt.
This master thesis deals basically with the design and implementation of a path planning system based on rapidly exploring search trees for general-n-trailers. This is a probabilistic method that is characterized by a fast and uniform exploration. The method is well established, however, has been applied only to vehicles with simple kinematics to date. General-n-trailers represent a particular challenge as their controllability is limited. For this reason the focus of this thesis rests on the application of the mentioned procedure to general-n-trailers. In this context systematic correlations between the characteristics of general-n-trailers and the possibilities for the realization and application of the method are analyzed.
A service excellence culture is determined by various factors. Some factors are supporting the realization of a service excellence culture, others are more about to inhibit excellent service. The internal environment of the organisation is the foundation for excellent service. While the employees are known as the key of excellent service, it is up to the management to support their employees with a respective treatment. Especially empowerment and encouragement are known as supportive elements concerning service-orientated behaviour of the employees. The term internal excellence describes the optimal internal situation of the organisation for introducing a service excellence culture. Within an internal excellence, the front-line-employees are creating customer satisfaction and delight among the customers by working off the customers problems as well with standardized processes, as well as with innovative processes. An inhibiting factor is the complexity of the customers problems. With a rising complexity, it gets more difficult to solve the problem and to create customer satisfaction and customer delight. In the IT service industry, the complexity has a special impact. Due to the characteristics of the industry, encountered problems are often complicated and technical sophisticated. These individual characteristics lead to an increased complexity, the front-line-employees have to deal with. To manage this challenge, several measures have to be adopted. The service-employee can be supported by a clearly defined guideline, that includes all relevant steps of the service process. Additionally, a learning culture can be enhanced by creating a knowledge database, where service-cases are documented. The technical support of the service-employee by using special software tools is another measure, which supports the service excellence culture of the organisation.
Rudolf Virchows Vorstellungen von einer human-bürgerlichen Krankenpflege in der Zeit des preußischen Kulturkampfes
Über die Auseinandersetzungen im Preußischen Haus der Abgeordneten zwischen Rudolf Virchow, dem Kultusministerium und der Zentrumspartei über die katholischen Kranken-pflegeorden – von Hilmar Conrad
Der Mediziner und liberale Abgeordnete des Preußischen Hauses der Abgeordneten Rudolf Virchow ist vielen bekannt für den Satz „‹Omnis cellula e cellula›“1, aus seinem Werk ‚Die Zellularpathologie‘. Er wies mit diesem Lehrsatz und der zugrundeliegenden Forschung nach, dass Zellen in Morphologie und Funktion die kleinste Einheit des menschlichen Körpers sind.2 Der spätere Medizinprofessor wurde am 13. Oktober 1821 in Schivelbein geboren und verstarb am 5. September 1902 in Berlin. Das Jahr 1848 ist in zweierlei Hinsicht als Schicksalsjahr für Virchow zu betrachten. Er war in dieser Zeit Militärarzt und wurde in diesem Winter 1847/48 von der preußischen Regierung nach Ober-schlesien entsendet, wo eine Typhus-Epidemie wütete. Sein Auftrag war die wissenschaftliche Analyse der Geschehnisse. An seinem 80. Geburtstag sagte er über diese Reise: „Jene 16 Tage in Oberschlesien, 1848, waren das entscheidende Ereignis meines Lebens.“3 Es war Revolution in Berlin und dort zurück, nahm er an den Kämpfen für Demokratie teil.4 Im Bericht über seine Reise schlussfolgerte er, dass zur Prävention einer solchen Seuche in Oberschlesien Demokratisierung und Bildung für die Bevölkerung notwendig seien – das war der Beginn der Sozialmedizin. Ab 1859 war er Berliner Stadtverordneter und ab 1861 Mitglied des Preußischen Abgeordnetenhauses für die linksliberale Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, die er zusammen mit Mitstreitern gegründet hatte. Von 1880 bis 1893 war er Abgeordneter im Deutschen Reichstag.5 Für ihn war „[d]ie Medizin […] eine soziale Wissenschaft, und die Politik ist weiter nichts als Medizin im Großen.“6
Was diese Person also so spannend macht, ist, dass sie gleich zwei relevanten Gruppen angehörte, welche einflussreich über die Krankenpflege sprachen: die der Politik und die der Ärzte.
Rudolf Virchow forderte am 9. November 1869 auf dem Kongress der deutschen Frauenvereine in Berlin eine Pflege, die sich außerhalb der Kirchen organisieren solle:
„Organisiren wir ganz und gar ausserhalb der kirchlichen Organisation, organisiren wir ganz innerhalb der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft als solcher, nach rein menschlichen Aufgaben, ohne irgend einen weiteren Nebenzweck.“7
Was Virchow hier forderte ist eine Hinwendung zum ‚Humanen‘8, wie er es nannte und auch in mehreren Debatten im Abgeordnetenhaus erläuterte. Dies überrascht nicht, war er doch maßgeblich am Kulturkampf im Parlament beteiligt und ein vehementer Verfechter der Säkularisierung.9 Das wissenschaftlich relevante Problem an dieser Stelle ist Virchows zentrale Äußerungen über die Krankenpflege im Kontext der geführten Debatten im Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus darzustellen. Die wissenschaftliche Literatur geht hierbei, nur sehr oberflächlich auf das vor- und hinterher Gesagte ein, obwohl es sich um Debatten handelt. Und hier zeigt sich auch die Relevanz der Arbeit. Natürlich liegt das Interesse darauf, Virchows Vorstellungen über die Krankenpflege anhand seiner Beiträge im Preußischen Haus der Abgeordneten nachzuvollziehen, aber eben auch nachzuzeichnen, wie sich die gesamten Debatten um die Krankenpflege, in denen sich Virchow bewegte, zugetragen hatten.
Demnach ist das Erkenntnisinteresse dieser Arbeit herauszuarbeiten, welche Ansichten Rudolf Virchow über die Krankenpflege seiner Zeit hatte, wie er sie im Preußischen Haus der Abgeordneten verteidigte, wie sich die Ansichten seiner politischen Gegner und der preußischen Regierung dazu verhielten sowie daraus folgend, wie die Debatten über die Krankenpflege im Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus verliefen.
1 Virchow, zit. n. Schipperges (1994): Rudolf Virchow, S. 58.
2 Schipperges (2008): Virchow, Rudolf (Ludwig Carl), S. 257.
3 Andree (2006): Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) im Spannungsfeld von Glauben, Kirche und Staat, S. 99.
4 Vgl. ebd., S. 99–100.
5 Vgl. Schipperges (2008): Virchow, Rudolf (Ludwig Carl), S. 257–258.
6 Schipperges (1994): Rudolf Virchow, S. 113. Im Original kursiv.
7 Virchow (1879): Die berufsmässige Ausbildung zur Krankenpflege, auch ausserhalb der kirchlichen Organisationen, S. 49. Im Original gesperrt.
8 Vgl. Virchow (1875): Rede im Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus, Berlin. 8. Mai 1875, S. 207.
9 Vgl. Virchow (1873): Rede im Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus, Berlin. 17. Januar 1873, S. 359.
Statistical Shape Models (SSMs) are one of the most successful tools in 3Dimage analysis and especially medical image segmentation. By modeling the variability of a population of training shapes, the statistical information inherent in such data are used for automatic interpretation of new images. However, building a high-quality SSM requires manually generated ground truth data from clinical experts. Unfortunately, the acquisition of such data is a time-consuming, error-prone and subjective process. Due to this effort, the majority of SSMs is often based on a limited set of this ground truth training data, which makes the models less statistically meaningful. On the other hand, image data itself is abundant in clinics from daily routine. In this work, methods for automatically constructing a reliable SSM without the need of manual image interpretation from experts are proposed. Thus, the training data is assumed to be the result of any segmentation algorithm or may originate from other sources, e.g. non-expert manual delineations. Depending on the algorithm, the output segmentations will contain errors to a higher or lower degree. In order to account for these errors, areas of low probability of being a boundary should be excluded from the training of the SSM. Therefore, the probabilities are estimated with the help of image-based approaches. By including many shape variations, the corrupted parts can be statistically reconstructed. Two approaches for reconstruction are proposed - an Imputation method and Weighted Robust Principal Component Analysis (WRPCA). This allows the inclusion of many data sets from clinical routine, covering a lot more variations of shape examples. To assess the quality of the models, which are robust against erroneous training shapes, an evaluation compares the generalization and specificity ability to a model build from ground truth data. The results show, that especially WRPCA is a powerful tool to handle corrupted parts and yields to reasonable models, which have a higher quality than the initial segmentations.
Public electronic procurement (eProcurement), here electronic sourcing (eSourcing) in particular, is almost certainly on the agenda when eGovernment experts meet. Not surprisingly is eProcurement the first high-impact service to be addressed in the European Union- recent Action Plan. This is mainly dedicated to the fact that public procurement makes out almost 20% of Europe- GDP and therefore holds a huge saving potential. To some extent this potential lies in the common European market, since effective cross-boarder eSourcing solutions can open many doors, both for buyers and suppliers. To achieve this, systems and processes and tools, need to be adoptable, transferable as well as be able to communicate with each other. In one word, they need to be interoperable. In many relevant domains, interoperability has reached a very positive level, standards have been established, workflows been put in place. In other domains however, there is still a long road ahead. As a consequence it is crucial to define requirements for such interoperable eSourcing systems and to identify the progress in research and practice.
Replikation einer Multi-Agenten-Simulationsumgebung zur Überprüfung auf Integrität und Konsistenz
(2012)
In dieser Master -Arbeit möchte ich zunächst eine Simulation vorstellen, mit der das Verhalten von Agenten untersucht wird, die in einer generierten Welt versuchen zu über leben und dazu einige Handlungsmöglichkeiten zur Auswahl haben. Anschließend werde ich kurz die theoretischen Aspekte beleuchten, welche hier zu Grunde liegen. Der Hauptteil meiner Arbeit ist meine Replikation einer Simulation, die von Andreas König im Jahr 2000 in Java angefertigt worden ist [Kö2000] . Ich werde hier seine Arbeit in stark verkürzter Form darstellen und anschließend auf meine eigene Entwicklung eingehen.
Im Schlussteil der Arbeit werde ich die Ergebnisse meiner Simulation mit denen von Andreas König vergleichen und die verwendeten Werkzeuge (Java und NetLogo) besprechen. Zum Abschluss werde ich in einem Fazit mein Vorhaben kurz zusammenfassen und berichten was sich umsetzen ließ, was nicht funktioniert hat und warum.
Currently more than 850 biological databases exist. The majority of biological knowledge is not in these databases but rather contained as free text in scientific literature. For systems biology tasks it is often necessary to integrate and extract data from heterogeneous databases and free text as well as to analyse the information in the context of experimental data. ONDEX is an integration framework which aims to address these challenges by combining features of database integration, text mining and sequence analysis with methods for graph-based data analysis and visualisation. The main topics of this diploma thesis are the redesign of the ONDEX backend, the development of a data exchange format, the development of a query environment and the allocation of Web services for data integration, data exchange and queries. These Web services allow backend workflow control from both local and remote workstations.
To construct a business process model manually is a highly complex and error-prone task which takes a lot of time and deep insights into the organizational structure, its operations and business rules. To improve the output of business analysts dealing with this process, different techniques have been introduced by researchers to support them during construction with helpful recommendations. These supporting recommendation systems vary in their way of what to recommend in the first place as well as their calculations taking place under the hood to recommend the most fitting element to the user. After a broad introduction into the field of business process modeling and its basic recommendation structures, this work will take a closer look at diverse proposals and descriptions published in current literature regarding implementation strategies to effectively and efficiently assist modelers during their business process model creation. A critical analysis of presentations in the selected literature will point out strengths and weaknesses of their approaches, studies and descriptions of those. As a result, the final concept matrix in this work will give a precise and helpful overview about the key features and recommendation methods used and implemented in previous research studies to pinpoint an entry into future works without the downsides already spotted by fellow researchers.
Gartner predicts that 33 per cent of total accesses to Business Intelligence (BI) functionalities will be done until 2013 using mobile devices. While mobile devices have already spread to a high extent in private life they have recently become more and more part of the professional life as well and businesses are seeking to develop smart scenarios on how to integrate the new technologies in their processes. The development of mobile software applications is also booming in the field of BI. The research topic of Mobile Business Intelligence (mBI) is focussing on how to expand traditional BI concepts to the new mobility dimension thus enabling to apply BI functionalities on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers. The increasing significance of mBI for research in combination with the tremendous economic growth potential forecasted for the next years is the driver for writing this thesis. The main aspect of the present thesis is a concept on how to develop a consistent mBI Strategy aligning all structures, processes and stakeholders to one standard set of goals and guidelines. Crucial points when implementing an mBI strategy are the definition of goals, the identification of risks and opportunities, the adaptation of mBI to the user context, the integration of mBI into the existing IT landscape, as well as a proper set-up of system architectures and security concepts. Besides analyzing the aspect of mBI strategy this thesis also considers the market situation of mBI. Clearly defined goals and the systematic development of a consistent mBI strategy which is in line with these goals can be considered as a crucial prerequisite for companies to successfully implement mBI.
Motion capture refers to the process of capturing, processing and trans- lating real motions onto a 3D model. Not only in the movie and gaming industries, motion capture creates an indispensable realism of human and animal movement. Also in the context of robotics, medical movement therapy, as well as in AR and VR, motion capture is used extensively. In addition to the well established optical processes, especially in the last three areas, alternative systems based on inertial navigation (IMUs) are being used in-creasingly, because they do not rely on external cameras and thus limit the area of movement considerably less.
Fast evolving technical progress in the manufacturing of such IMUs allows building small sensors, wearable on the body which can transfer movements to a computer. The development of applying inertial systems to a motion capture context, however, is still at an early state. Problems like drift can currently only be minimized by adding additional hardware for correcting the read data.
In the following master thesis an IMU based motion capture system is designed and constructed. This contains the assembly of the hardware components as well as processing of the received movement data on the software side and their application to a 3D model.
In this thesis the possibilities for real-time visualization of OpenVDB
files are investigated. The basics of OpenVDB, its possibilities, as well
as NanoVDB and its GPU port, were studied. A system was developed
using PNanoVDB, the graphics API port of OpenVDB. Techniques were
explored to improve and accelerate a single ray approach of ray tracing.
To prove real-time capability, two single scattering approaches were
also implemented. One of these was selected, further investigated and
optimized to achieve interactive real-time rendering.
It is important to give artists immediate feedback on their adjustments, as
well as the possibility to change all parameters to ensure a user friendly
creation process.
In addition to the optical rendering, corresponding benchmarks were
collected to compare different improvement approaches and to prove
their relevance. Attention was paid to the rendering times and memory
consumption on the GPU to ensure optimal use. A special focus, when
rendering OpenVDB files, was put on the integrability and extensibility of
the program to allow easy integration into an existing real-time renderer
like U-Render.
Geographic cluster based routing in ad-hoc wireless sensor networks is a current field of research. Various algorithms to route in wireless ad-hoc networks based on position information already exist. Among them algorithms that use the traditional beaconing approach as well as algorithms that work beaconless (no information about the environment is required besides the own position and the destination). Geographic cluster based routing with guaranteed message delivery can be carried out on overlay graphs as well. Until now the required planar overlay graphs are not being constructed reactively.
This thesis proposes a reactive algorithm, the Beaconless Cluster Based Planarization (BCBP) algorithm, which constructs a planar overlay graph and noticeably reduces the number of messages required for that. Based on an algorithm for cluster based planarization it beaconlessly constructs a planar overlay graph in an unit disk graph (UDG). An UDG is a model for a wireless network in which every participant has the same sending radius. Evaluation of the algorithm shows it to be more efficient than the non beaconless variant. Another result of this thesis is the Beaconless LLRAP (BLLRAP) algorithm, for which planarity but not continued connectivity could be proven.
One of the fundamental decisions during the development of any system is the representation of data. In computer graphics, objects are usually represented as sets of triangles. There are however many different variants with their own strengths and weaknesses. This thesis will explore distancefields as a representation for objects. Distancefields are functions, which map every point in space to the distance to the closest surface point. While this description is very simple, a number of interesting properties can be derived, allowing for a multitude of shapes, operations and effects. An overview of the necessary background and methods is given. Furthermore, some extended or new approaches are presented, such as displaying implicit surfaces, approximating indirect illumination or implementing a GPU tracer.
As a result of the technical progress, processes have to be adjusted. On the one hand, the digital transformation is absolutely necessary for every organization to operate efficient and sustainable, on the other hand whose accomplishment is a tremendous challenge. The huge amount of personal data, which accrue in this context, is an additional difficulty.
Against the background of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this thesis focuses on process management and ways of optimizing processes in a Human Resources Department. Beside the analysis of already existing structures and workflows, data management and especially the handling of personal data in an application process are examined. Both topics, the process management and the data protection are vitally important by itself, but it is necessary to implement the requirements of data protection within the appropriate position of a corresponding process. Relating to this, the thesis deals with the research question of what barriers may occur by a sustainable process integration and to which extend the GDPR prevent an unobstructed workflow within the Human Resources Department of the Handwerkskammer Koblenz. Additionally, answering the question of which subprocesses are convenient for a process automation is highly significant.
In scope of these questions Business Process Management is the solution. By means of the graphical representation standard, Business Process Model and Notation, a process model with the relevant activities, documents and responsibilities of the recruitment process is designed. Based on a target-actual comparison it becomes apparent, that standardized process steps with less exceptions and a large amount of information are basically convenient for automation respectively partial automation. After the different phases of the recruitment process are documented in detail, a Workflow-Management-System can ex-port the transformed models, so the involved employees just have to carry out a task list with assigned exercises. Against the background of the data protection regulations, access rights and maturities can be determined. Subsequently only authorized employees have admission to the personal data of applicants. Because of impending sanctions by violation against the GDPR, the implementation of the relevant legal foundations within the recruitment process is necessary and appropriate. Relating to the defined research questions, it appears that in principle not every activity is appropriate for a process automation. Especially unpredictable and on a wide range of factors depending subprocesses are unsuitable. Additionally, media discontinuities and redundant data input are obstacles to an enduring process integration. Nevertheless, a coherent consideration of the topics of business process management and the data protection regulations is required.
Predictive Process Monitoring is becoming more prevalent as an aid for organizations to support their operational processes. However, most software applications available today require extensive technical know-how by the operator and are therefore not suitable for most real-world scenarios. Therefore, this work presents a prototype implementation of a Predictive Process Monitoring dashboard in the form of a web application. The system is based on the PPM Camunda Plugin presented by Bartmann et al. (2021) and allows users to easily create metrics, visualizations to display these metrics, and dashboards in which visualizations can be arranged. A usability test is with test users of different computer skills is conducted to confirm the application’s user-friendliness.
The industry standard Decision Model and Notation (DMN) has enabled a new way for the formalization of business rules since 2015. Here, rules are modeled in so-called decision tables, which are defined by input columns and output columns. Furthermore, decisions are arranged in a graph-like structure (DRD level), which creates dependencies between them. With a given input, the decisions now can be requested by appropriate systems. Thereby, activated rules produce output for future use. However, modeling mistakes produces erroneous models, which can occur in the decision tables as well as at the DRD level. According to the Design Science Research Methodology, this thesis introduces an implementation of a verification prototype for the detection and resolution of these errors while the modeling phase. Therefore, presented basics provide the needed theoretical foundation for the development of the tool. This thesis further presents the architecture of the tool and the implemented verification capabilities. Finally, the created prototype is evaluated.
Prototyp einer generischen Recommendation Engine basierend auf Echtzeit-Assoziationsanalysen mit R
(2016)
In dieser Arbeit wurde unter Verwendung der Programmiersprache R ein Prototyp zur Erstellung einer Recommendation Engine zur Aufdeckung von Assoziationen innerhalb einer gegebenen Datenmenge entwickelt. Die Berechnung der Assoziationen findet hierbei in Echtzeit statt und des Weiteren wurden die Analysefunktionen generisch programmiert, um ein schnelles Einbinden und einfaches Parametrisieren von Datensätzen zu ermöglichen. Die Entwicklung fußte auf der grundlegenden Motivation, Data Mining Methoden wie das Assoziationsverfahren teilweise zu automatisieren, um damit generierte Lösungen effizienter umsetzen zu können. Der Entwicklungsprozess war insgesamt erfolgreich, sodass alle Grundfunktionalitäten im Sinne eines evolutionären Prototypings vorhanden sind.
This thesis explores the possibilities of probabilistic process modelling for the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems in order to predict the behaviour of the users present in the CSCW system. Toward this objective applicability, advantages, limitations and challenges of probabilistic modelling are excavated in context of CSCW systems. Finally, as a primary goal seven models are created and examined to show the feasibilities of probabilistic process discovery and predictions of the users behaviour in CSCW systems.
Object recognition is a well-investigated area in image-based computer vision and several methods have been developed. Approaches based on Implicit Shape Models have recently become popular for recognizing objects in 2D images, which separate objects into fundamental visual object parts and spatial relationships between the individual parts. This knowledge is then used to identify unknown object instances. However, since the emergence of aσordable depth cameras like Microsoft Kinect, recognizing unknown objects in 3D point clouds has become an increasingly important task. In the context of indoor robot vision, an algorithm is developed that extends existing methods based on Implicit Shape Model approaches to the task of 3D object recognition.
In der Literatur sind Projekte als geeignetes Mittel zur Implementierung von Strategien im Unternehmen anerkannt. Ähnlich wie bei einem Projekt handelt es sich bei der Implementierung von Strategien um zeitlich befristete Aufgaben, die in der Regel eine hohe Komplexität und Neuartigkeit aufweisen. Aufgrund dessen werden heutzutage strategische Vorhaben in Form von Projekten umgesetzt. Somit haben Projekte eine hohe Bedeutung für die strategische Entwicklung von Unternehmen. Um diese strategische Entwicklung sichern zu können, muss ein permanentes Lenkungssystem für strategische Projekte im Unternehmen implementiert werden " das Projektportfoliomanagement. Aufgrund der Komplexität und Neuartigkeit strategischer Projekte ist das Projektportfoliomanagement ein hoch komplexes Lenkungssystem mit vielen Subprozessen, die mit hohen Kosten und Zeitaufwand verbunden sind. Diese Masterarbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Optimierung des Projektportfoliomanagements anhand der Lean-Philosophie. Letztere ist eine Sammlung von Prinzipien und Methoden, die für die Verschlankung der Produktion in der Automobilindustrie entwickelt wurde. Der Einsatz der Lean-Prinzipien brachte eine derartige Steigerung der Effizienz und Effektivität bei der Automobilherstellung, dass diese Prinzipien auch in anderen Branchen und Funktionsbereichen eigesetzt werden. Nun soll das Potential der Lean-Philosophie für die Optimierung des Projektportfoliomanagements untersucht werden.
Today you can find smartphones everywhere. This situation created a hype for Augmented Reality and AR Apps. The big question is: Do these applications provide a real added value? To make AR pratically it is important to add the computational power of a computer to the advantages of AR. An easy and fast way of interaction is essential.
A Poker-Assistance-Software is an ideal test area for an AR Application with real added value. The estimation of the winning probability and a fast automated tracking of the playing cards is the perfect field of investigation.
In this discussion it is interesting to evaluate the added value of AR Applications in common.
Point Rendering
(2021)
In this thesis different methods for rendering point data are shown and compared with each other. The methods can be divided into two categories. For one visual methods are introduced that strictly deal with the displaying of point primitves. The main problem here lies in the depiction of surfaces since point data, unlike traditional triangle meshes, doesn't contain any connectivity information. On the other hand data strucutres are shown that enable real-time rendering of large point clouds. Point clouds often contain large amounts of data since they are mostly generated through 3D scanning processes such as laser scanning and photogrammetry.
Human detection is a key element for human-robot interaction. More and more robots are used in human environments, and are expected to react to the behavior of people. Before a robot can interact with a person, it must be able to detect it at first. This thesis presents a system for the detection of humans and their hands using a RGB-D camera. First, a model based hypotheses for possible positions of humans are created to recognize a person. By using the upper parts of the body are used to extract, new features based on relief and width of a person- head and shoulders are extracted. The hypotheses are checked by classifying the features with a support vector machine (SVM). The system is able to detect people in different poses. Both sitting and standing humans are found, by using the visible upper parts of the person. Moreover, the system is able to recognize if a human is facing or averting the sensor. If the human is facing the sensor, the color information and the distance between hand and body are used to detect the positions of the person- hands. This information is useful for gestures recognition and thus can further enhances human-robot interaction.
In this thesis, the performance of the IceCube projects photon propagation
code (clsim) is optimized. The process of GPU code analysis and perfor-
mance optimization is described in detail. When run on the same hard-
ware, the new version achieves a speedup of about 3x over the original
implementation. Comparing the unmodified code on hardware currently
used by IceCube (NVIDIA GTX 1080) against the optimized version run on
a recent GPU (NVIDIA A100) a speedup of about 9.23x is observed. All
changes made to the code are shown and their performance impact as well
as the implications for simulation accuracy are discussed individually.
The approach taken for optimization is then generalized into a recipe.
Programmers can use it as a guide, when approaching large and complex
GPU programs. In addition, the per warp job-queue, a design pattern used
for load balancing among threads in a CUDA thread block, is discussed in
detail.
This thesis proposes the use of MSR (Mining Software Repositories) techniques to identify software developers with exclusive expertise about specific APIs and programming domains in software repositories. A pilot Tool for finding such
“Islands of Knowledge” in Node.js projects is presented and applied in a case study to the 180 most popular npm packages. It is found that on average each package has 2.3 Islands of Knowledge, which is possibly explained by the finding that npm packages tend to have only one main contributor. In a survey, the maintainers of 50 packages are contacted and asked for opinions on the results produced by the Tool. Together with their responses, this thesis reports on experiences made with the pilot Tool and how future iterations could produce even more accurate statements about programming expertise distribution in developer teams.
Opinion Mining : Using Twitter as a source of opinion for the prediction of stock market prices
(2012)
Neben den theoretischen Grundkonzepten der automatisierten Fließtextanalyse, die das Fundament dieser Arbeit bilden, soll ein Überblick in den derzeitigen Forschungsstand bei der Analyse von Twitter-Nachrichten gegeben werden. Hierzu werden verschiedene Forschungsergebnisse der, derzeit verfügbaren wissenschaftlichen Literatur erläutert, miteinander verglichen und kritisch hinterfragt. Deren Ergebnisse und Vorgehensweisen sollen in unsere eigene Forschung mit eingehen, soweit sie sinnvoll erscheinen. Ziel ist es hierbei, den derzeitigen Forschungsstand möglichst gut zu nutzen.
Ein weiteres Ziel ist es, dem Leser einen Überblick über verschiedene maschinelle Datenanalysemethoden zur Erkennung von Meinungen zu geben. Dies ist notwendig, um die Bedeutung der im späteren Verlauf der Arbeit eingesetzten Analysemethoden in ihrem wissenschaftlichen Kontext besser verstehen zu können. Da diese Methoden auf verschiedene Arten durchgeführt werden können, werden verschiedene Analysemethoden vorgestellt und miteinander verglichen. Hierdurch soll die Machbarkeit der folgenden Meinungsauswertung bewiesen werden. Um eine hinreichende Genauigkeit bei der folgenden Untersuchung zu gewährleisten, wird auf ein bereits bestehendes und evaluiertes Framework zurückgegriffen. Dieses ist als API 1 verfügbar und wird daher zusätzlich behandelt. Der Kern Inhalt dieser Arbeit wird sich der Analyse von Twitternachrichten mit den Methoden des Opinion Mining widmen.
Es soll untersucht werden, ob sich Korrelationen zwischen der Meinungsausprägung von Twitternachrichten und dem Börsenkurs eines Unternehmens finden lassen. Es soll dabei die Stimmungslage der Firma Google Inc. über einen Zeitraum von einem Monat untersucht und die dadurch gefunden Erkenntnisse mit dem Börsenkurs des Unternehmens verglichen werden. Ziel ist es, die Erkenntnisse von (Sprenger & Welpe, 2010) und (Taytal & Komaragiri, 2009) auf diesem Gebiet zu überprüfen und weitere Fragestellungen zu beantworten.
Opinion Mining
(2010)
Das Opinion Mining stellt eine Methode dar, mit der Meinungen aus dem WWW gefiltert und intelligent aufbereitet werden können, um Stimmungsanalysen zu einzelnen Produkten und Dienstleistungen zu erstellen. Opionion Mining bietet den Unternehmen somit eine innovative Möglichkeit, ihre Marketingkommmunikation planbarer und wirkungsvoller zu gestalten und ein deutlich erhöhtes Maß an Involvement und Relevanz innerhalb bestimmter Zielgruppen zu erreichen. Zunächst werden die theoretischen Grundlagen des Web 2.0 und relevanter Methoden der Business Intelligence erläutert. Die empirische Untersuchung bildet den Schwerpunkt der Arbeit. Auf die Entwicklung eines Vorgehensmodells folgt die praktische Anwendung dieses Modells auf ein Produkt. Die Ergebnisse werden im Review-Scan im Hinblick auf Forschung und Praxis ausgewertet und diskutiert.
Data flow models in the literature are often very fine-grained, which transfers to the data flow analysis performed on them and thus leads to a decrease in the analysis' understandability. Since a data flow model, which abstracts from the majority of implementation details of the program modeled, allows for potentially easier to understand data flow analyses, this master thesis deals with the specification and construction of a highly abstracted data flow model and the application of data flow analyses on this model. The model and the analyses performed on it have been developed in a test-driven manner, so that a wide range of possible data flow scenarios could be covered. As a concrete data flow analysis, a static security check in the form of a detection of insufficient user input sanitization has been performed. To date, there's no data flow model on a similarly high level of abstraction. The proposed solution is therefore unique and facilitates developers without expertise in data flow analysis to perform such analyses.
Mit der Microsoft Kinect waren die ersten Aufnahmen von synchronisierten Farb- und Tiefendaten (RGB-D) möglich, ohne hohe finanzielle Mittel aufwenden zu müssen und neue Möglichkeiten der Forschung eröffneten sich. Mit fortschreitender Technik sind auch mobile Endgeräte in der Lage, immer mehr zu leisten. Lenovo und Asus bieten die ersten kommerziell erwerblichen Geräte mit RGB D-Wahrnehmung an. Mit integrierten Funktionen der Lokalisierung, Umgebungserkennung und Tiefenwahrnehmung durch die Plattform Tango von Google gibt es bereits die ersten Tests in verschiedenen Bereichen des Rechnersehens z.B. Mapping. In dieser Arbeit wird betrachtet, inwiefern sich ein Tango Gerät für die Objekterkennung eignet. Aus den Ausgangsdaten des Tango Geräts werden RGB D-Daten extrahiert und für die Objekterkennung verarbeitet. Es wird ein Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Forschung und gewisse Grundlagen bezüglich der Tango Plattform gegeben. Dabei werden existierende Ansätze und Methoden für eine Objekterkennung auf mobilen Endgeräten untersucht. Die Implementation der Erkennung wird anhand einer selbst erstellten Datenbank von RGB-D Bildern gelernt und getestet. Neben der Vorstellung der Ergebnisse werden Verbesserungen und Erweiterungen für die Erkennung vorgeschlagen.
With the appearance of modern virtual reality (VR) headsets on the consumer market, there has been the biggest boom in the history of VR technology. Naturally, this was accompanied by an increasing focus on the problems of current VR hardware. Especially the control in VR has always been a complex topic.
One possible solution is the Leap Motion, a hand tracking device that was initially developed for desktop use, but with the last major software update it can be attached to standard VR headsets. This device allows very precise tracking of the user’s hands and fingers and their replication in the virtual world.
The aim of this work is to design virtual user interfaces that can be operated with the Leap Motion to provide a natural method of interaction between the user and the VR environment. After that, subject tests are performed to evaluate their performance and compare them to traditional VR controllers.
This thesis deals with Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The objectives of the work are to clarify the term RRI and to identify the current state of research in the field. RRI is a concept significantly shaped by the European Commission (EC). It is composed of responsibility, research and innovation, which will be considered individually to begin with. According to the definition by Clausen (2009) used here, responsibility is made up of a subject ("Who takes responsibility"), an object ("for what,"), one or several addressees ("to whom") and authorities ("and why?"). In the conceptual chapter of this thesis, the role of organisations as subjects of responsibility is grounded in the fact that they work toward a certain purpose. More importantly, though, society as an important addressee and authority of responsibility, increasingly calls for organisations to take responsibility for the consequences and wider impacts of their actions. The field of sustainability, with its pillars of economical, ecological and social issues, is considered a key object of responsibility. Innovation and research as an integral part of it are understood as complex processes aiming at reaching corporate goals in novel ways. By means of a literature analysis according to Webster & Watson (2002) the current state of research on RRI is explored. Most of the literature used is identified as conceptual in nature. Despite the great uncertainty that still prevails, four dimensions of RRI can be identified: Deliberation, Anticipation, Reflexivity, and Responsiveness. Taking into account the results of the literature review, the dimensions offered by the EC are classified as important activities rather than conceptual dimensions. Research and innovation in alignment with RRI involves stakeholders, particularly society, in the process right from the beginning. It also examines its potential impacts and continually reflects on its motivations and underlying values. The most important aspect is the adaptability of the process in response to the results from the other dimensions. All activities are based on responsibility and sustainability and are integrated through appropriate management and governance. In addition to conceptual work, little research has been done especially with regard to operationalisation and implementation of RRI. For the latter, the embedding in a stage-gate process according to Cooper (2010) is suggested here. However, the actual design of the conceptual dimensions still needs to be specified. In addition, overall awareness of RRI needs to be sharpened and a commitment to RRI made.
Knowledge-based authentication methods are vulnerable to Shoulder surfing phenomenon.
The widespread usage of these methods and not addressing the limitations it has could result in the user’s information to be compromised. User authentication method ought to be effortless to use and efficient, nevertheless secure.
The problem that we face concerning the security of PIN (Personal Identification Number) or password entry is shoulder surfing, in which a direct or indirect malicious observer could identify the user sensitive information. To tackle this issue we present TouchGaze which combines gaze signals and touch capabilities, as an input method for entering user’s credentials. Gaze signals will be primarily used to enhance targeting and touch for selecting. In this work, we have designed three different PIN entry method which they all have similar interfaces. For the evaluation, these methods were compared based on efficiency, accuracy, and usability. The results uncovered that despite the fact that gaze-based methods require extra time for the user to get familiar with yet it is considered more secure. In regards to efficiency, it has the similar error margin to the traditional PIN entry methods.
The Material Point Method (MPM) has proven to be a very capable simulation method in computer graphics that is able to model materials that were previously very challenging to animate [1, 2]. Apart from simulating singular materials, the simulation of multiple materials that interact with each other introduces new challenges. This is the focus of this thesis. It will be shown that the self-collision capabilities of the MPM can naturally handle multiple materials interacting in the same scene on a collision basis, even if the materials use distinct constitutive models. This is then extended by porous interaction of materials as in[3], which also integrates easily with MPM.It will furthermore be shown that regular single-grid MPM can be viewed as a subset of this multi-grid approach, meaning that its behavior can also be achieved if multiple grids are used. The porous interaction is generalized to arbitrary materials and freely changeable material interaction terms, yielding a flexible, user-controllable framework that is independent of specific constitutive models. The framework is implemented on the GPU in a straightforward and simple way and takes advantage of the rasterization pipeline to resolve write-conflicts, resulting in a portable implementation with wide hardware support, unlike other approaches such as [4].
In this thesis, we deal with the question if challenge, flow and fun in computer games are related to each other, and which influence the motivational, psychological components motivation of success, motivation of failure and the chance of success do have. In addition, we want to know if a free choice in the level of difficulty is the optimal way to flow. To examine these theories, a study based on an online survey was executed, in which the participants played the game “flOw“. The results were evaluated with the help of a two-factorial analysis of variance with repeated measurement and tests on correlation. Thereby we found out that there actually exists a relation between challenge, flow and fun and that motivation does matter indirectly.
Particle swarm optimization is an optimization technique based on simulation of the social behavior of swarms.
The goal of this thesis is to solve 6DOF local pose estimation using a modified particle swarm technique introduced by Khan et al. in 2010. Local pose estimation is achieved by using continuous depth and color data from a RGB-D sensor. Datasets are aquired from different camera poses and registered into a common model. Accuracy and computation time of the implementation is compared to state of the art algorithms and evaluated in different configurations.
In this work a framework is developed that is used to create an evaluation scheme for the evaluation of text processing tools. The evaluation scheme is developed using a model-dependent software evaluation approach and the focus of the model-dependent part is the text-processing process which is derived from the Conceptual Analysis Process developed in the GLODERS project. As input data a German court document is used containing two incidents of extortion racketeering which happened in 2011 and 2012. The evaluation of six different tools shows that one tool offers great results for the given dataset when it is compared to manual results. It is able to identify and visualize relations between concepts without any additional manual work. Other tools also offer good results with minor drawbacks. The biggest drawback for some tools is the unavailability of models for the German language. They can perform automated tasks only on English documents. Nonetheless some tools can be enhanced by self-written code which allows users with development experience to apply additional methods.
While Virtual Reality has been around for decades it gained new life in recent years. The release of the first consumer hardware devices allows fully immersive and affordable VR for the user at home. This availability lead to a new focus of research on technical problems as well as psychological effects. The concepts of presence, describing the feeling of being in the virtual place, body ownership and their impact are central topics in research for a long time and still not fully understood.
To enable further research in the area of Mixed Reality, we want to introduce a framework that integrates the users body and surroundings inside a visual coherent virtual environment. As one of two main aspects we want to merge real and virtual objects to a shared environment in a way such that they are no longer visually distinguishable. To achieve this the main focus is not supposed to be on a high graphical fidelity but on a simplified representation of reality. The essential question is, what level of visual realism is necessary to create a believable mixed reality environment that induces a sense of presence in the user? The second aspect considers the integration of virtual persons. Can characters be recorded and replayed in a way such that they are perceived as believable entities of the world and therefore act as a part of the users environment?
The purpose of this thesis was the development of a framework called Mixed Reality Embodiment Platform. This inital system implements fundamental functionalities to be used as a basis for future extensions to the framework. We also provide a first application that enables user studies to evaluate the framework and contribute to aforementioned research questions.
Die im Rahmen dieser Masterarbeit durchgeführte Analyse von Ernährungsumstellungen auf die vegane Ernährung in Form von vier Portraits lotet mit ihrer interdisziplinären Perspektive aus Gastrosophie, Ethnologie und Leibphilosophie die soziokulturellen Aspekte dieser Transmissionsprozesse aus. Dazu gehören der zivilisatorisch erlernte Umgang mit Nahrung, das Umsetzen und Reflektieren sinnlicher Wahrnehmungen im Ernährungsprozess und die Prägung von Relationen zwischen Essendem und Zu-Essendem. Geleitet wird die Analyse dabei von der Forschungsfrage: „Welche leiblich sinnlichen Wahrnehmungen geben den Anstoß zu einer Ernährungsumstellung und wie begleiten diese den Prozess der Umstellung?“. Damit gibt die Frage den Fokus auf das (leibliche) Wahrnehmungsvermögen des Menschen vor und begrenzt Ernährung bewusst nicht auf ihre physiologische Funktion der Energiegewinnung. Dadurch flicht sie sich in den Diskurs um den cultural turn in der Ernährungswissenschaft ein und zielt weg von der metabolischen Durchmessung des Essens, hin auf das Verständnis von Ernährung als Praxis des Sich-Einverleibens-von-Anderem – Essen als Vollzug von Beziehungen. Das Sich-Ernähren wird damit als sozial geprägter und leiblich vermittelter Erfahrungsvorgang sichtbar, der über das Geschmackserlebnis hinaus durch Betroffenheitserfahrung konstituiert wird. Durch das Zusammenbringen philosophischer Perspektiven, wie die der Gastrosophie Harald Lemkes, die Essen u. a. auch als Selbstbestimmung denkt, und soziologischen Theorien, wie die des Habitus-Konzepts nach Pierre Bourdieu, wird deutlich, wie die Wahrnehmungspraxis und -fähigkeit des Menschen, in ihrem leiblichsinnlichen Aspekt, die Verhaltensbestimmung im Umgang mit Nahrung und deren Quellen beeinflusst. Die vier Portraits entstanden während einer sechsmonatigen ethnographischen Feldforschung und stellen anonymisiert die Motivation, den Verlauf und das Konfliktthema der jeweiligen Ernährungsumstellung dar. Die Portraits sind sehr individuell und zeigen auf, wie und warum beispielsweise die gesundheitliche Selbstsorge oder das empathische Mitleiden mit Nutztieren Veränderungen oder Tabuisierungen im Ernährungshandeln anstoßen.
The goal of this master thesis was to develop a CRM system for the Assist team of CompuGroup Medical that is aiding in integrating open innovation into the development of the Minerva 2.0 software. To achieve this, CRM methodology has been combined with Social Networking Systems, following the research of Lin and Chen (2010, pp. 11 – 30). To achieve the predefined goals literature has been analyzed on how to successfully im- plement a CRM system as well as an online community. Subsequently the results have been applied to the development of the Minerva Community according to the guidelines of Design Science suggested by Hevner et al. (2004, pp. 75 – 104). The finished product is designed based on customer and management requirements and evaluated from a customer and company perspective.
In usage of information systems the maintenance of their actuality and their extensibility is of importance. There is a constant reoccurrence of situations, when these goals cannot be supported by keeping on the old system, the legacy system. A solution for that is its migration into a new environment. The migration of software is to be considered as a subdiscipline of software engineering, more precisely, as a part of software maintenance. In this thesis the reference migration process model ReMiP, introduced in another thesis of the institute, was applied. The goal of this examination is to bring this model to practice in a website migration project and to analyze its validity. Here, especially the subject of completeness and generalizability of the model for migration processes and the gathering of concrete experiences with the intensity of its activities is of interest. The target environment for the website migration will be the content management system Plone. Within this thesis it will be described thoroughly. Finally, the website to migrate will be brought to its new target environment. The result of this thesis is the migrated GXL-Website in the target system Plone using the ReMiP. By this migration, the ReMiP was successfully validated as a reference process model for software migrations.
Multi-agent systems are a mature approach to model complex software systems by means of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). However, their application is not widely accepted in mainstream software engineering. Parallel to this the interdisciplinary field of Agent-based Social Simulation (ABSS) finds increasing recognition beyond the purely academic realm which starts to draw attention from the mainstream of agent researchers. This work analyzes factors to improve the uptake of AOSE as well as characteristics which separate the two fields AOSE and ABSS to understand their gap. Based on the efficiency-oriented micro-agent concept of the Otago Agent Platform (OPAL) we have constructed a new modern and self-contained micro-agent platform called µ². The design takes technological trends into account and integrates representative technologies, such as the functionally-inspired JVM language Clojure (with its Transactional Memory), asynchronous message passing frameworks and the mobile application platform Android. The mobile version of the platform shows an innovative approach to allow direct interaction between Android application components and micro-agents by mapping their related internal communication mechanisms. This empowers micro-agents to exploit virtually any capability of mobile devices for intelligent agent-based applications, robotics or simply act as a distributed middleware. Additionally, relevant platform components for the support of social simulations are identified and partially implemented. To show the usability of the platform for simulation purposes an interaction-centric scenario representing group shaping processes in a multi-cultural context is provided. The scenario is based on Hofstede's concept of 'Cultural Dimensions'. It does not only confirm the applicability of the platform for simulations but also reveals interesting patterns for culturally augmented in- and out-group agents. This explorative research advocates the potential of micro-agents as a powerful general system modelling mechanism while bridging the convergence between mobile and desktop systems. The results stimulate future work on the micro-agent concept itself, the suggested platform and the deeper exploration of mechanisms for seemless interaction of micro-agents with mobile environments. Last but not least the further elaboration of the simulation model as well as its use to augment intelligent agents with cultural aspects offer promising perspectives for future research.
Politische und gesellschaftliche Polarisierung ist ein interessantes Phänomen, über dessen Auswirkungen viele unterschiedliche, zum Teil auch gegensätzliche, Theorien existieren.
Polarisierung wird in der Literatur mit unterschiedlichen Methoden gemessen. Die vorliegende Arbeit gibt einen Überblick über existierende Polarisierungsmaße und es werden zwei neuartige Maße aus dem Gebiet der spektralen Graphentheorie vorgestellt. Anschließend werden die bekannten und die neu entwickelten Maße auf den LiquidFeedback-Datensatz der Piratenpartei Deutschland angewandt. Als Ergebnis lässt sich festhalten, dass die Maße teilweise zu unterschiedlichen Ergebnisse kommen. Dies liegt darin begründet, dass nicht alle Maße das Gleiche messen. Um zu verstehen was die einzelnen Maße aussagen, werden wesentliche Eigenschaften von Polarisierungsmaßen herausgearbeitet und es wird für jedes Maß dargelegt, welche Eigenschaften es erfüllt. Die angesprochenen Polarisierungsmaße beziehen sich auf die Entwicklung der Polarisierung zwischen Usern des LiquidFeedback-Systems. Bei der Betrachtung von einzelnen Personen und Abstimmungen fiel unter anderem auf, dass polarisierende Personen mehr Macht durch
Delegationen besitzen als die restlichen Personen und dass polarisierte Vorschläge circa doppelt so häufig umgesetzt werden.
Systems to simulate crowd-behavior are used to simulate the evacuation of a crowd in case of an emergency. These systems are limited to the moving-patterns of a crowd and are generally not considering psychological and/or physical conditions. Changing behaviors within the crowd (e.g. by a person falling down) are not considered.
For that reason, this thesis will examine the psychological behavior and the physical impact of a crowd- member on the crowd. In order to do so, this study develops a real-time simulation for a crowd of people, adapted from a system for video games. This system contains a behavior-AI for agents. In order to show physical interaction between the agents and their environment as well as their movements, the physical representation of each agent is realized by using rigid bodies from a physics-engine. The movements of the agents have an additional navigation mesh and an algorithm for collision avoidance.
By developing a behavior-AI a physical and psychological state is reached. This state contains a psychological stress-level as well as a physical condition. The developed simulation is able to show physical impacts such as crowding and crushing of agents, interaction of agents with their environment as well as factors of stress.
By evaluating several tests of the simulation, this thesis examines whether the combination of physical and psychological impacts is implementable successfully. If so, this thesis will be able to give indications of an agent- behavior in dangerous and/or stressful situations as well as a valuation of the complex physical representation.
Im Rahmen der Masterarbeit wird die kompetenzgestützte Weiterbildungssuche analysiert und am Beispiel des Weiterbildungsvergleichsportales EDUfittery dargestellt.
Die Umsetzung und Integration eines Kompetenzmessverfahrens in ein Vergleichsportal für Weiterbildungen war das Ziel dieser Arbeit. Des Weiteren sollte anhand des Kompetenzmessverfahrens ein sogenanntes „Matching“ zwischen Kompetenz und Weiterbildung erarbeitet werden. Beim „Matching“ werden dementsprechend die vom Kunden eingegebenen Kompetenzen mit passenden Weiterbildungsvorschlägen verbunden. Somit wird ein individuelles Kundenerlebnis in der Weiterbildungssuche erreicht. Um dies zu ermöglichen, wird zu Beginn der Arbeit ein theoretisches Kompetenzschema analysiert, sodass Aussagen über Erhebungsverfahren und Auswertungsstrategien getroffen werden können, um diese, besonders in Bezug auf ein web-gestütztes Messinstrument, kritisch zu hinterfragen. Aufbauend auf der Analyse verschiedener Kompetenzmessverfahren im Online-Segment, kann gezeigt werden, dass die Kompetenzdiagnostik zwar einige Verfahren zur Verfügung stellt, doch nur wenige sind praktikabel und in der Lage tätigkeitsbezogene Handlungskompetenzen zu bewerten. Folglich wurde das Instrument der Selbsteinschätzung von Kompetenzen als am besten zutreffendes Verfahren für EDUfittery gewählt.
Im Zuge der Arbeit wurden zwei Online-Umfragen und ein Experteninterview durchgeführt. Dabei wurden zum einen Mitarbeiter, als auch Personaler in Bezug auf Weiterbildungen befragt. Als Experte konnte Herr Korn, von der IHK Akademie Koblenz gewonnen werden. Anhand der Umfrageergebnisse und weiterer Recherchen konnte ein umfangreicher Business Case für EDUfittery angefertigt und mit Prozessdiagrammen veranschaulicht werden. Es wird ersichtlich, dass das Thema Kompetenzanalysen in Unternehmen bisher kaum Anwendung findet. Bei genauerer Betrachtung der aktuellen Marktsituation wird zusätzlich klar, dass es derzeitig noch keine Plattform gibt, die Kompetenzen mit Weiterbildungen erfolgreich in Zusammenhang bringt, um dem Kunden individuelle Weiterbildungslösungen anbieten zu können. Als Ergebnis der Arbeit kann demnach festgehalten werden, dass eine Integration von Kompetenzanalysen im Bereich Weiterbildungssuche durchaus sinnvoll ist. EDUfittery könnte sich bei erfolgreicher Umsetzung als hilfreiches Tool im Bereich Weiterbildung und Kompetenz etablieren und somit Unternehmen grundlegend bei der Abbildung, Analyse und Weiterentwicklung von Kompetenzen unterstützen.
Mapping ORM to TGraph
(2017)
Object Role Modeling (ORM) is a semantic modeling language used to describe objects and their relations amongst each other. Both objects and relations may be subject to rules or ORM constraints.
TGraphs are ordered, attributed, typed and directed graphs. The type of a TGraph and its components, the edges and vertices, is defined using the schema language graph UML (grUML), a profiled version of UML class diagrams. The goal of this thesis is to map ORM schemas to grUML schemas in order to be able to represent ORM schema instances as TGraphs.
Up to this point, the preferred representation for ORM schema instances is in form of relational tables. Though mappings from ORM schemas to relational schemas exist, those publicly available do not support most of the constraints ORM has to offer.
Constraints can be added to grUML schemas using the TGraph query language GReQL, which can efficiently check whether a TGraph validates the constraint or not. The graph library JGraLab provides efficient implementations of TGraphs and their query language GReQL and supports the generation of grUML schemas.
The first goal of this work is to perform a complete mapping from ORM schemas to grUML schemas, using GReQL to sepcify constraints. The second goal is to represent ORM instances in form of TGraphs.
This work gives an overview of ORM, TGraphs, grUML and GReQL and the theoretical mapping from ORM schemas to grUML schemas. It also describes the implementation of this mapping, deals with the representation of ORM schema instances as TGraphs and the question how grUML constraints can be validated.
Business Process Querying (BPQ) is a discipline in the field of Business Process Man- agement which helps experts to understand existing process models and accelerates the development of new ones. Its queries can fetch and merge these models, answer questions regarding the underlying process, and conduct compliance checking in return. Many languages have been deployed in this discipline but two language types are dominant: Logic-based languages use temporal logic to verify models as finite state machines whereas graph-based languages use pattern matching to retrieve subgraphs of model graphs directly. This thesis aims to map the features of both language types to features of the other to identify strengths and weaknesses. Exemplarily, the features of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) and The Diagramed Modeling Language (DMQL) are mapped to one another. CTL explores the valid state space and thus is better for behavioral querying. Lacking certain structural features and counting mechanisms it is not appropriate to query structural properties. In contrast, DMQL issues structural queries and its patterns can reconstruct any CTL formula. However, they do not always achieve exactly the same semantic: Patterns treat conditional flow as sequential flow by ignoring its conditions. As a result, retrieved mappings are invalid process execution sequences, i.e. false positives, in certain scenarios. DMQL can be used for behavioral querying if these are absent or acceptable. In conclusion, both language types have strengths and are specialized for different BPQ use cases but in certain scenarios graph-based languages can be applied to both. Integrating the evaluation of conditions would remove the need for logic-based languages in BPQ completely.
The publication of open source software aims to support the reuse, the distribution and the general utilization of software. This can only be enabled by the correct usage of open source software licenses. Therefore associations provide a multitude of open source software licenses with different features, of which a developer can choose, to regulate the interaction with his software. Those licenses are the core theme of this thesis.
After an extensive literature research, two general research questions are elaborated in detail. First, a license usage analysis of licenses in the open source sector is applied, to identify current trends and statistics. This includes questions concerning the distribution of licenses, the consistency in their usage, their association over a period of time and their publication.
Afterwards the recommendation of licenses for specific projects is investigated. Therefore, a recommendation logic is presented, which includes several influences on a suitable license choice, to generate an at most applicable recommendation. Besides the exact features of a license of which a user can choose, different methods of ranking the recommendation results are proposed. This is based on the examination of the current situation of open source licensing and license suggestion. Finally, the logic is evaluated on the exemplary use-case of the 101companies project.
The lasting hype around the mobile internet and the related technology of the mobile applications seem not to drop off. The immense economic potential of this market leads the businesses and ventures to continuously find new ways of monetization. The underlying causes of that phenomenon are rarely challenged. Scientific research in the field of "ubiquitous mobile" has not yet developed a clear overall picture of the causes and effect chains. Attempts of deriving causes by studies in related mass media such as the computer or the internet have been discussed controversially. By combining the research streams of media motive usage and the customer retention, this paper will present a new research model. Based on a quantitative survey in the German speaking the gained data proves the motives for mobility, information gathering and entertainment purposed to be the most important drivers of customer satisfaction in mobile applications. The paper also highlights a significant correlation between the customer satisfaction and the other determinants of customer retention.
Die Zielsetzung der vorliegenden Masterarbeit lag darin, die instrumentelle Gewäs-seranalytik im Freiland für Schüler*innen erschließbar zu machen.
Als Maßnahme der Master-Thesis wurde eine arbeitsteilige Lerneinheit rund um das Thema Gewässeranalytik für den außerschulischen Chemieunterricht der Sekun-darstufe II konzipiert und evaluiert. Die Konzeption erfolgte in Anlehnung an die Lehrpläne der Fächer Biologie, Geografie, Physik und Chemie des Landes Rhein-land-Pfalz. Zur Bewertung der Gewässergüte kam das digitale Messsystem Einstein Labmate für zahlreiche physikalisch-chemische Parameter zur Verwendung. Zu-sätzlich wurde das Online-Portal FLUVIDAT Saar zur rudimentären Bestimmung von Indikatororganismen sowie für eine Einordnung der Gewässerstruktur genutzt.
Im Rahmen der begleitenden Evaluation wird der Forschungsfrage nachgegangen, in wie weit die konzipierte Einheit praxistauglich und adressatengerecht für den Chemieunterricht der Oberstufe ist. Dies wird anhand der Konstrukte „Aktuelles Inte-resse“ und „Cognitive Load“ mit einem Fragebogen, einer Videoanalyse mit litera-turbasiertem Codierleitfaden sowie einem Lesbarkeitsindex der zugrundeliegenden Experimentieranleitungen überprüft.
Die Ergebnisse der Datenauswertung zeigten ein hohes aktuelles Interesse der Schüler*innen sowie eine angemessene kognitive Belastung. Durch die Erhebung der lernbezogenen kognitiven Belastung zeigte sich, dass die im unteren Bereich liegende Schwierigkeit der Materialien kognitive Kapazitäten zur Schemabildung frei gab.
Das Ziel der vorliegenden Masterarbeit ist es, einen Einführungskurs in die Computervisualistik mit dem Schwerpunkt Computergrafik zu konzeptionieren und zu prototypisieren. Der Kurs sollte Grundlagen der Computergrafik vermitteln und dabei Bezüge zu anderen Veranstaltungen des Studiums herstellen, um Motivation und Verständnis für die komplexen Zusammenhänge der Studieninhalte in der Computervisualistik zu schaffen. Der aktuelle Studiengangplan weist hier bislang ein erkennbares Defizit auf. Für den Einführungskurs wurden prototypische Lerneinheiten auf Grundlage der didaktischen Methode der Moderation und unter Verwendung von Unity entwickelt. Konzept und Prototypen wurden an Probanden ohne informationstechnischen Hintergrund evaluiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass Unity eine geeignete Oberfläche für die Vermittlung der Informationen bietet. Diese stieß auf Akzeptanz und konnte leichte Zugänglichkeit bei den Probanden aufweisen, obwohl die Lerneinheiten selbst kleinere Schwächen aufwiesen. Im Anschluss an die erste Evaluationsphase wurde eine qualitative Umfrage mit Alumini der Computervisualistik durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse bestätigten den Bedarf nach einer einführenden Veranstaltung zur Orientierung und zur Förderung von Motivation und Verständnis für die breiten Themengebiete der Computervisualistik.
In order to plan the interior of a room, various programs for computers,
smart phones or head-mounted displays are available. The transfer to the
real environment is a difficult task. Therefore an augmented reality approach
is developed to illustrate the planning in the real room. If several
people want to contribute their ideas, conventional systems require to
work on one device together. The aim of this master thesis is to design and
develop a collaborative spatial planning application in augmented reality.
The application is developed in Unity with ARCore and C#.
Clubs, such as Scouts, rely on the work of their volunteer members, who have a variety of tasks to accomplish. Often there are sudden changes in their organization teams and offices, whereby planning steps are lost and inexperience in planning occurs. Since the special requirements are not covered by already existing tools, ScOuT, a planning tool for the organization administration, is designed and developed in this work to support clubs with regard to the mentioned problems. The focus was on identifying and using various suitable guidelines and heuristic methods to create a usable interface. The developed product was evaluated empirically by a user survey in terms of usability.
The result of this study shows that already a high degree of the desired goal could be reached by the inclusion of the guidelines and methods. From this it can be concluded that with the help of user-specific concept ideas and the application of suitable guidelines and methods, a suitable basis for a usable application to support clubs can be created.
A gonioreflectometer is a device to measure the reflection properties of arbitrary materials. In this work, such an apparatus is being built from easily obtainable parts. Therefore three stepper-motors and 809 light-emitting diodes are controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. RGB-images are captured with an industrial camera which serve as refelction data. Furthermore, a control software with several capture programs and a renderer for displaying the measured materials are implemented. These allow capturing and rendering entire bidirectional reflection distribution functions (BRDFs) by which also complex anisotropic material properties can be represented. Although the quality of the results has some artifacts due to shadows of the camera, these artifacts can be largely removed by using special algorithms like inpainting. In addition, the goniorefelctometer is applied to other use cases. One can perform 3D scans, light field capturing and light staging without altering the construction. The quality of these processes also meet the expectations in a positive way. Thus, the gonioreflectometer built in this work can be seen as a widely applicable and economical alternative to other publications.
Im Rahmen dieser Masterarbeit wird ein umfassender Überblick über die Vielfalt der Sicherheitsmodelle gegeben, indem ausgewählte Sicherheitsmodelle beschrieben, klassifiziert und miteinander verglichen werden.
Sicherheitsmodelle beschreiben in einer abstrakten Weise die sicherheitsrelevanten
Komponenten und Zusammenhänge eines Systems. Mit den Sicherheitsmodellen können komplexe Sachverhalte veranschaulicht und analysiert werden.
Da Sicherheitsmodelle unterschiedliche Sicherheitsaspekte behandeln, beschäftigt
sich diese Arbeit mit der Ausarbeitung eines Klassifizierungsschemas, welches
die strukturelle und konzeptuelle Besonderheiten der Modelle in Bezug auf die zugrundeliegenden Sicherheitsaspekte beschreibt. Im Rahmen des Klassifizierungsschemas werden die drei grundlegenden Modellklassen gebildet: Zugriffskontrollmodelle, Informationsflussmodelle und Transaktionsmodelle.
Sicherheitsmodelle werden in einem direkten und indirekten Vergleich gegenüber gestellt. Im letzten Fall werden sie einer oder mehrerer Modellklassen des Klassifizierungsschemas zugeordnet. Diese Klassifizierung erlaubt, Aussagen über die betrachteten Sicherheitsaspekte und die strukturellen bzw. konzeptuellen Besonderheiten eines Sicherheitsmodells in Bezug auf die anderen Sicherheitsmodelle
zu machen.
Beim direkten Vergleich werden anhand der ausgewählten Kriterien die Eigenschaften
und Aspekte der Sicherheitsmodelle orthogonal zu den Modellklassen
betrachtet.
The extensive literature in the data visualization field indicates that the process of creating efficient data visualizations requires the data designer to have a large set of skills from different fields (such as computer science, user experience, and business expertise). However, there is a lack of guidance about the visualization process itself. This thesis aims to investigate the different processes for creating data visualizations and develop an integrated framework to guide the process of creating data visualizations that enable the user to create more useful and usable data visualizations. Firstly, existing frameworks in the literature will be identified, analyzed and compared. During this analysis, eight views of the visualization process are developed. These views represent the set of activities which should be done in the visualization process. Then, a preliminary integrated framework is developed based on an analysis of these findings. This new integrated framework is tested in the field of Social Collaboration Analytics on an example from the UniConnect platform. Lastly, the integrated framework is refined and improved based on the results of testing with the help of diagrams, visualizations and textual description. The results show that the visualization process is not a waterfall type. It is the iterative methodology with the certain phases of work, demonstrating how to address the eight views with different levels of stakeholder involvement. The findings are the basis for a visualization process which can be used in future work to develop the fully functional methodology.
The Internet of Things (IoT) recently developed from the far-away vision of ubiquitous computing into very tangible endeavors in politics and economy, implemented in expensive preparedness programs. Experts predict considerable changes in business models that need to be addressed by organizations in order to respond to competition. Although there is a need to develop strategies for upcoming transformations, organizational change literature did not turn to the specific change related to the new technology yet. This work aims at investigating IoT-related organizational change by identifying and classifying different change types. It therefore combines the methodological approach of grounded theory with a discussion and classification of identified change informed by a structured literature review of organizational change literature. This includes a meta-analysis of case studies using a qualitative, exploratory coding approach to identify categories of organizational change related to the introduction of IoT. Furthermore a comparison of the identified categories to former technology-related change is provided using the example of Electronic Business (e-business), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. As a main result, this work develops a comprehensive model of IoT-related business change. The model presents two main themes of change indicating that personal smart things will transform businesses by means of using more personal devices, suggesting and scheduling actions of their users, and trying to avoid hazards. At the same time, the availability of information in organizations will further increase to a state where information is available ubiquitously. This will ultimately enable accessing real time information about objects and persons anytime and from any place. As a secondary result, this work gives an overview on concepts of technology-related organizational change in academic literature.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing, technological concept, which aims to integrate various physical and virtual objects into a global network to enable interaction and communication between those objects (Atzori, Iera and Morabito, 2010). The application possibilities are manifold and may transform society and economy similarly to the usage of the internet (Chase, 2013). Furthermore, the Internet of Things occupies a central role for the realisation of visionary future concepts, for example, Smart City or Smart Healthcare. In addition, the utilisation of this technology promises opportunities for the enhancement of various sustainability aspects, and thus for the transformation to a smarter, more efficient and more conscious dealing with natural resources (Maksimovic, 2017). The action principle of sustainability increasingly gains attention in the societal and academical discourse. This is reasoned by the partly harmful consumption and production patterns of the last century (Mcwilliams et al., 2016). Relating to sustainability, the advancing application of IoT technology also poses risks. Following the precautionary principle, these risks should be considered early (Harremoës et al., 2001). Risks of IoT for sustainability include the massive amounts of energy and raw materials which are required for the manufacturing and operation of IoT objects and furthermore, the disposal of those objects (Birkel et al., 2019). The exact relations in the context of IoT and sustainability are insufficiently explored to this point and do not constitute a central element within the discussion of this technology (Behrendt, 2019). Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a comprehensive overview of the relations between IoT and sustainability.
To achieve this aim, this thesis utilises the methodology of Grounded Theory in combination with a comprehensive literature review. The analysed literature primarily consists of research contributions in the field of Information Technology (IT). Based on this literature, aspects, solution approaches, effects and challenges in the context of IoT and sustainability were elaborated. The analysis revealed two central perspectives in this context. IoT for Sustainability (IoT4Sus) describes the utilisation and usage of IoT-generated information to enhance sustainability aspects. In contrast, Sustainability for IoT (Sus4IoT) fo-cuses on sustainability aspects of the applied technology and highlights methods to reduce negative impacts, which are associated with the manufacturing and operation of IoT. Elaborated aspects and relations were illustrated in the comprehensive CCIS Framework. This framework represents a tool for the capturing of relevant aspects and relations in this context and thus supports the awareness of the link between IoT and sustainability. Furthermore, the framework suggests an action principle to optimise the performance of IoT systems regarding sustainability.
The central contribution of this thesis is represented by the providence of the CCIS Framework and the contained information regarding the aspects and relations of IoT and sustainability.
The purpose of this research is to examine various existing cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) development platforms and evaluate one platform (IBM Watson IoT) in detail using a use case scenario. Internet of Things IoT is an emerging technology that has a vision of interconnecting the virtual world (e.g. clouds, social networks) and the physical world (e.g. device, cars, fridge, people, animals) through the Internet technology. For example, the IoT concept of smart cities which has the objectives to improve the efficiency and development of business, social and cultural services in the city, can be achieved by using sensors, actuators, clouds and mobile devices (IEEE, 2015). A sensor (e.g. temperature sensor) in the building (global world) can send the real-time data to the IoT cloud platform (virtual world), where it can be monitored, stored, analysed, or used to trigger some action (e.g. turn on the cooling system in the building if temperature exceeds a threshold limit). Although, the IoT creates vast opportunities in different areas (e.g. transportation, healthcare, manufacturing industry), it also brings challenges such as standardisation, interoperability, scalability, security and privacy. In this research report, IoT concepts and related key issues are discussed.
The focus of this research is to compare various cloud-based IoT platforms in order to understand the business and technical features they offer. The cloud-based IoT platforms from IBM, Google, Microsoft, PTC and Amazon have been studied.
To design the research, the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology has been followed, and to model the real-time IoT system the IOT-A modelling approach has been used.
The comparison of different cloud based IoT development platforms shows that all of the studied platforms provide basic IoT functionalities such as connecting the IoT devices to the cloud based IoT platform, collecting data from the IoT devices, data storage and data analytics. However, the IBM’s IoT platform appears to have an edge over the other platforms studied in this research because of the integrated run-time environment which also makes it more developer friendly. Therefore, IBM Watson IoT for Bluemix is selected for further examination of its capabilities. The IBM Watson IoT for Bluemix offerings include analytics, risk management, connect and information management. A use case was implemented to assess the capabilities that IBM Watson IoT platform offers. The digital artifacts (i.e. applications) are produced to evaluate the IBM’s IoT solution. The results show that IBM offers a very scalable, developer and deployment friendly IoT platform. Its cognitive, contextual and predictive analytics provide a promising functionality that can be used to gain insights from the IoT data transmitted by the sensors and other IoT devices.
This master- thesis investigates the topic of intercultural web design. Two websites from different countries are exemplarily compared. On the basis of cultural dimensions, cultural differences are presented on each respective website. The analysis particularly focuses on how detailed the respective website-designer and -operator regards their users" cultural differences and the creation of a cross-cultural web design. The analysis illustrates which cultural - and particularly intercultural - aspects of countries were taken into consideration in the design of the web sites. The investigation led to the conclusion that their implementation was not consequently executed for all web sites. Hence, this thesis offers suggestions for the improvement of aspects which are most important in intercultural web design.
The goal of this thesis is to create and develop a concept for a mobile city guide combined with game-based contents.
The application is intented to support flexible and independent exploration of the city of Koblenz.
Based on the geographical data, historical information for and interesting stories of various places were provided in this application. These informations are combined with playful elements in order to create a motivating concept.
Therefore, related approaches were examined and, combined with own ideas, a new concept has been developed. This concept has been prototypically implemented as an Android application and afterwards evaluated by 15 test persons. A questionnaire was used to examine the operability, the motivation of game patterns and the additional value of the application.
This thesis deals with the development and evaluation of a concept of novel interaction with ubiquitous user interfaces. To accomplish the evaluation of this interaction concept, a prototype was implementated by using an existing head-mounted display solution and an android smartphone.
Furthermore, in the course of this thesis, a concrete use case for this prototype " the navigation through a city block with the aid of an electronic map " was developed and built as an executable application to help evaluate the quality of the interaction concept. Therefore, fundamental research results were achieved.
This work covers techniques for interactive and physically - based rendering of hair for computer generated imagery (CGI). To this end techniques
for the simulation and approximation of the interaction of light with hair are derived and presented. Furthermore it is described how hair, despite such computationally expensive algorithms, can be rendered interactively.
Techniques for computing the shadowing in hair as well as approaches to render hair as transparent geometry are also presented. A main focus of
this work is the DBK-Buffer, which was conceived, implemented and evaluated. Using the DBK-Buffer, it is possible to render thousands of hairs as
transparent geometry without being dependent on either the newest GPU hardware generation or a great amount of video memory. Moreover, a comprehensive evaluation of all the techniques described was conducted with respect to the visual quality, performance and memory requirements. This
revealed that hair can be rendered physically - based at interactive or even at real - time frame rates.
The output of eye tracking Web usability studies can be visualized to the analysts as screenshots of the Web pages with their gaze data. However, the screenshot visualizations are found to be corrupted whenever there are recorded fixations on fixed Web page elements on different scroll positions. The gaze data are not gathered on their fixated fixed elements; rather they are scattered on their recorded scroll positions. This problem has raised our attention to find an approach to link gaze data to their intended fixed elements and gather them in one position on the screenshot. The approach builds upon the concept of creating the screenshot during the recording session, where images of the viewport are captured on visited scroll positions and lastly stitched into one Web page screenshot. Additionally, the fixed elements in the Web page are identified and linked to their fixations. For the evaluation, we compared the interpretation of our enhanced screenshot against the video visualization, which overcomes the problem. The results revealed that both visualizations equally deliver accurate interpretations. However, interpreting the visualizations of eye tracking Web usability studies using the enhanced screenshots outperforms the video visualizations in terms of speed and it requires less temporal demands from the interpreters.
The content aggregator platform Reddit has established itself as one of the most popular websites in the world. However, scientific research on Reddit is hindered as Reddit allows (and even encourages) user anonymity, i.e., user profiles do not contain personal information such as the gender. Inferring the gender of users in large-scale could enable the analysis of gender-specific areas of interest, reactions to events, and behavioral patterns. In this direction, this thesis suggests a machine learning approach of estimating the gender of Reddit users. By exploiting specific conventions in parts of the website, we obtain a ground truth for more than 190 million comments of labeled users. This data is then used to train machine learning classifiers to use them to gain insights about the gender balance of particular subreddits and the platform in general. By comparing a variety of different approaches for classification algorithm, we find that character-level convolutional neural network achieves performance with an 82.3% F1 score on a task of predicting a gender of a user based on his/her comments. The score surpasses 85% mark for frequent users with more than 50 comments. Furthermore, we discover that female users are less active on Reddit platform, they write fewer comments and post in fewer subreddits on average, when compared to male users.
The goal of simulations in computergraphics is the simulation of realistic phenomena of materials. Therefore, internal and external acting forces are accumulated in each timestep. From those, new velocities get calculated that ultimately change the positions of geometry or particles. Position Based Dynamics omits thie velocity layer and directly works on the positions. Constraints are a set of rules defining the simulated material. Those rules must not be violated throughout the simulation. If this happens, the violating positions get changed so that the constraints get fullfilled once again. In this work a PBD-framework gets implemented, that allows simulations of solids and fluids. Constraints get solved using GPU implementations of Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Jakobi solvers. Results are physically plausible simulations that are real-time capable.
Belief revision is the subarea of knowledge representation which studies the dynamics of epistemic states of an agent. In the classical AGM approach, contraction, as part of the belief revision, deals with the removal of beliefs in knowledge bases. This master's thesis presents the study and the implementation of concept contraction in the Description Logic EL. Concept contraction deals with the following situation. Given two concept C and D, assuming that C is subsumed by D, how can concept C be changed so that it is not subsumed by D anymore, but is as similar as possible to C? This approach of belief change is different from other related work because it deals with contraction in the level of concepts and not T-Boxes and A-Boxes in general. The main contribution of the thesis is the implementation of the concept contraction. The implementation provides insight into the complexity of contraction in EL, which is tractable since the main inference task in EL is also tractable. The implementation consists of the design of five algorithms that are necessary for concept contraction. The algorithms are described, illustrated with examples, and analyzed in terms of time complexity. Furthermore, we propose an new approach for a selection function, adapt for the concept contraction. The selection function uses metadata about the concepts in order to select the best from an input set. The metadata is modeled in a framework that we have designed, based on standard metadata frameworks. As an important part of the concept contraction, the selection function is responsible for selecting the best concepts that are as similar as possible to concept C. Lastly, we have successfully implemented the concept contraction in Python, and the results are promising.