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Engineering criminal agents
(2019)
Die Dissertation mit dem Titel "Engineering Criminal Agents" demonstriert das Zusammenspiel von drei verschiedenen Forschungsbereichen, die bereits im Titel genannt sind: Im Mittelpunkt stehen Engineering (d.h. ingenieurmäßiges Vorgehen bei der Erstellung von Systemen) und Simulation, während beide Bereiche im Kontext des Anwendungsfeldes Kriminologie (und auch den damit verbundenen sozialwissenschaftlichen Aspekten) angewandt werden. Konkreter gesagt, Ziel der Arbeit ist es, zu zeigen, wie spezifische Arten von agentenbasierten Simulationsmodellen unter Berücksichtigung und Anwendung von Methoden der Softwareentwicklung erstellt werden können.
Agentenbasierte Simulation hat sich seit Jahrzehnten als nützliche Methode der Sozialwissenschaften bewährt, und ein Trend zu komplexen Simulationsmodellen ist wahrnehmbar, nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Fortschritte in Datenverarbeitungs- und Simulationstechniken. Eine bedeutende Ursache für Modellkomplexität ist die Einbeziehung von 'Belegmaterialien' als Grundlage von Simulationsmodellen. Solche Belegmaterialien können durch mehrere Stakeholder bereitgestellt werden und dabei deren unterschiedliche Sichtweisen auf einen Modellierungsgegenstand widerspiegeln.
Dabei ergeben sich spezifische Problemstellungen für das Zusammenspiel der beiden hier relevanten Perspektiven auf das Thema Simulation: auf der einen Seite der Benutzer des Simulationsmodells, der die Anforderungen liefert und an den Simulationsergebnissen interessiert ist; auf der anderen Seite der Modellentwickler, der ein verifiziertes und validiertes formales Modell programmieren muss. Um diese beiden Perspektiven systematisch zusammenzubringen, ist substantieller Aufwand in Forschung und Entwicklung erforderlich, wo die vorliegende Dissertation einen Beitrag zu leisten beabsichtigt.
Die in dieser Arbeit erzielten praktischen Ergebnisse - in Form von Software - wurden durch eine bereichsübergreifende Herangehensweise erreicht: Durch die Verwendung von Methoden der Softwareentwicklung konnten Methoden der computergestützten Sozialwissenschaften benutzt werden, um am Ende Einblicke in soziale Systeme - wie die internen Dynamiken von kriminellen Netzwerken - zu ermöglichen.
Die vorliegende Dissertation zeigt die Forschungstätigkeiten, die für die Erzielung der Ergebnisse herangezogen wurden, sowie liefert Details und Spezifikationen zur erstellten Software.
Rahmen für diese Forschungs- und Entwicklungstätigkeiten waren in erster Linie zwei Forschungsprojekte: OCOPOMO und GLODERS.
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.
Implementation of Agile Software Development Methodology in a Company – Why? Challenges? Benefits?
(2019)
The software development industry is enhancing day by day. The introduction of agile software development methodologies was a tremendous structural change in companies. Agile transformation provides unlimited opportunities and benefits to the existing and new developing companies. Along with benefits, agile conversion also brings many unseen challenges. New entrants have the advantage of being flexible and cope with the environmental, consumer, and cultural changes, but existing companies are bound to rigid structure.
The goal of this research is to have deep insight into agile software development methodology, agile manifesto, and principles behind the agile manifesto. The prerequisites company must know for agile software development implementation. The benefits a company can achieve by implementing agile software development. Significant challenges that a company can face during agile implementation in a company.
The research objectives of this study help to generate strong motivational research questions. These research questions cover the cultural aspects of company agility, values and principles of agile, benefits, and challenges of agile implementation. The project management triangle will show how benefits of cost, benefits of time, and benefits of quality can be achieved by implementing agile methodologies. Six significant areas have been explored, which shows different challenges a company can face during implementation agile software development methodology. In the end, after the in depth systematic literature review, conclusion is made following some open topics for future work and recommendations on the topic of implementation of agile software development methodology in a company.
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.
Das Internet of Things (IoT) ist ein schnell wachsendes, technologisches Konzept, das darauf abzielt, verschiedenste physikalische und virtuelle Objekte in einem globalen Netzwerk zu vereinen um Interaktion und Kommunikation zwischen diesen Objekten zu ermöglichen (Atzori, Iera and Morabito, 2010). Die Einsatzmöglichkeiten dieser Technologie sind vielfältig und könnten Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft in ähnlicher Weise verändern wie die Nutzung des Internets (Chase, 2013). Darüber hinaus nimmt das Internet of Things eine zentrale Rolle in der Realisation von visionären Zukunftskonzepten ein, beispielsweise Smart City oder Smart Healthcare. Zudem verspricht die Anwendung dieser Technologie Möglichkeiten, verschiedene Aspekte der Nachhaltigkeit zu verbessern und zu einem bewussteren, effizienteren und schonenderen Umgang mit natürlichen Ressourcen beizutragen (Maksimovic, 2017). Das Handlungsprinzip der Nachhaltigkeit gewinnt im gesellschaftlichen und akademischen Diskurs zunehmend an Bedeutung und trägt den teils schädlichen Produktions- und Konsummustern des vergangenen Jahrhunderts Rechnung (Mcwilliams et al., 2016). Im Zusammenhang mit Nachhaltigkeit ist die fortschreitende Verbreitung von IoT Technologie allerdings auch mit Risiken verknüpft, die im Rahmen des Vorsorgeprinzips rechtzeitig bedacht werden müssen (Harremoës et al., 2001). Dazu zählen der massive Energie- und Rohstoffbedarf der Produktion und des Betriebs von IoT Objekten, sowie deren Entsorgung (Birkel et al., 2019). Die genauen Zusammenhänge und Auswirkungen von IoT im Bezug auf Nachhaltigkeit sind bisher nur unzureichend erforscht und nehmen keine zentrale Rolle in der Diskussion dieser Technologie ein (Behrendt, 2019). Diese Arbeit hat daher das Ziel, einen umfassenden Überblick der Zusammenhänge zwischen IoT Technologie und Nachhaltigkeitsaspekten zu erarbeiten.
Um dieses Ziel zu verwirklichen, verwendet diese Arbeit die Grounded Theory Methodik in Verbindung mit einer umfassenden Literaturanalyse. Die analysierte Literatur besteht dabei aus Forschungsbeiträgen, die besonders dem Gebiet der Informationstechnik (IT) entstammen. Auf Grundlage dieser Literaturanalyse wurden Aspekte, Lösungsansätze, Effekte und Barrieren im Kontext von IoT und Nachhaltigkeit erarbeitet. Im Laufe der Analyse kristallisierten sich zwei zentrale Sichtweisen auf IoT im Zusammenhang mit Nachhaltigkeit heraus. IoT für Nachhaltigkeit (IoT4Sus) beschreibt dabei den Einsatz und die Nutzung von IoT generierten Informationen, um eine Verbesserung im Hinblick auf verschiedene Nachhaltigkeitsaspekte zu erzielen. Nachhaltigkeit für IoT (Sus4IoT) hingegen fokussiert Nachhaltigkeitsaspekte der eingesetzten Technologie und zeigt Lösungen auf um, mit der Produktion und dem Betrieb verknüpfte, negative Auswirkungen auf Nachhaltigkeit zu verringern. Die erarbeiteten Aspekte und Beziehungen wurden in einem umfangreichen Rahmenwerk, dem CCIS Framework, festgehalten und dargestellt. Dieses Rahmenwerk stellt ein Werkzeug zur Erfassung relevanter Aspekte und Beziehungen in diesem Bereich dar und trägt damit zur Bewusstseinsbildung in diesem Kontext bei. Darüber hinaus empfiehlt das Rahmenwerk ein Handlungsprinzip um die Performance von IoT Systemen im Rahmen der Nachhaltigkeit zu optimieren.
Der zentrale Beitrag dieser Arbeit besteht in der Bereitstellung des CCIS Framework, sowie der darin enthaltenen Informationen hinsichtlich der Aspekte und Beziehungen von IoT und Nachhaltigkeit.
This work describes a novel software tool for visualizing anatomical segmentations of medical images. It was developed as part of a bachelor's thesis project, with a view to supporting research into automatic anatomical brain image segmentation. The tool builds on a widely-used visualization approach for 3D image volumes, where sections in orthogonal directions are rendered on screen as 2D images. It implements novel display modes that solve common problems with conventional viewer programs. In particular, it features a double-contour display mode to aid the user's spatial orientation in the image, as well as modes for comparing two competing segmentation labels pertaining to one and the same anatomical region. The tool was developed as an extension to an existing open-source software suite for medical image processing. The visualization modes are, however, suitable for implementation in the context of other viewer programs that follow a similar rendering approach.
The modified code can be found here: soundray.org/mm-segmentation-visualization.tar.gz.
Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, ein Recommender System (RS) für Geschäftsprozesse zu erstellen, das auf dem bestehenden ProM-Plug-in RegPFA aufbaut. Um dies zu gewährleisten, soll zunächst eine Schnittstelle geschaffen werden, welche die von RegPFA erstellten probabilistischen endlichen Automaten (PFA) im tsml-Format zu einer erweiterbaren Datenbasis zusammenfassen kann. Anschließend soll ein Java-Programm geschrieben werden, das mithilfe dieser Datenbasis zu einem gegebenen Teilprozess die wahrscheinlichsten Empfehlungen für das nächstfolgende Prozesselement angibt.
Sediment transport contributes to the movement of inorganic and organic material in rivers. The construction of a dam interrupts the continuity of this sediment transport through rivers, causing sediments to accumulate within the reservoir. Reservoirs can also act as carbon sinks and methane can be released when organic matter in the sediment is degraded under anoxic conditions. Reservoir sedimentation poses a great threat to the sustainability of reservoirs worldwide, and can emit the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. Sediment management measures to rehabilitate silted reservoirs are required to achieve both better water quantity and quality, as well as to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
This thesis aims at the improvement of sediment sampling techniques to characterize sediment deposits as a basis for accurate and efficient water jet dredging and to monitor the dredging efficiency by measuring the sediment concentration. To achieve this, we investigated freeze coring as a method to sample (gas-bearing) sediment in situ. The freeze cores from three reservoirs obtained were scanned using a non-destructive X-Ray CT scan technique. This allows the determination of sediment stratification and character-ization of gas bubbles to quantify methane emissions and serve as a basis for the identi-fication of specific (i.e. contaminated) sediment layers to be dredged. The results demon-strate the capability of freeze coring as a method for the characterization of (gas-bearing) sediment and overcomes certain limitations of commonly used gravity cores. Even though the core’s structure showed coring disturbances related to the freezing process, the general core integrity seems to not have been disturbed. For dredging purposes, we analyzed the impact pressure distribution and spray pattern of submerged cavitating wa-ter jets and determined the effects of impinging distances and angles, pump pressures and spray angles. We used an adapted Pressure Measurement Sensing technique to enhance the spatial distribution, which proved to be a comparatively easy-to-use meas-urement method for an improved understanding of the governing factors on the erosional capacity of cavitating water jets. Based on this data, the multiple linear regression model can be used to predict the impact pressure distribution of those water jets to achieve higher dredging accuracy and efficiency. To determine the dredging operational efficien-cy, we developed a semi-continuous automated measurement device to measure the sediment concentration of the slurry. This simple and robust device has lower costs, compared to traditional and surrogate sediment concentration measurement technolo-gies, and can be monitored and controlled remotely under a wide range of concentrations and grain-sizes, unaffected by entrained gas bubbles
Abstract
This bachelor thesis delivers a comprehensive overview of the topic Internet of Things (IoT). With the help of a first literature review, important characteristics, architectures, and properties have been identified. The main aim of this bachelor thesis is to determine whether the use of IoT in the transport of food, considering the compliance with the cold chain, can provide advantages for companies to reduce food waste. For this purpose, a second literature review has been carried out with food transport systems without the use, as well as with the use of IoT. Based on the literature review, it is possible at the end to determine a theoretical ‘ideal’ system for food transport in refrigerated trucks. The respective used technologies are also mentioned. The findings of several authors have shown that often significant improvements can be achieved in surveillance, transport in general, or traceability of food, and ultimately food waste can be reduced. However, benefits can also be gained using new non-IoT-based technologies. Thus, the main knowledge of this bachelor thesis is that a theoretical ‘ideal’ transport system contains a sensible combination of technologies with and without IoT. This system includes the use of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for real-time food monitoring, as well as an alarm function when the temperature exceeds a maximum. Real-time monitoring with GPS coupled with a monitoring center to prevent traffic jams is another task. Smart and energy-efficient packaging, and finally the use of the new supercooling-technology, make the system significantly more efficient in reducing food waste. These highlights, that when choosing a transport system, which is as efficient and profitable as possible for food with refrigerated transport, companies need not just rely on the use of IoT. On this basis, it is advisable to combine the systems and technologies used so far with IoT in order to avoid as much food waste as possible.
Commonsense reasoning can be seen as a process of identifying dependencies amongst events and actions. Understanding the circumstances surrounding these events requires background knowledge with sufficient breadth to cover a wide variety of domains. In the recent decades, there has been a lot of work in extracting commonsense knowledge, a number of these projects provide their collected data as semantic networks such as ConceptNet and CausalNet. In this thesis, we attempt to undertake the Choice Of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) challenge, a problem set with 1000 questions written in multiple-choice format with a premise and two alternative choices for each question. Our approach differs from previous work by using shortest paths between concepts in a causal graph with the edge weight as causality metric. We use CausalNet as primary network and implement a few design choices to explore the strengths and drawbacks of this approach, and propose an extension using ConceptNet by leveraging its commonsense knowledge base.
Mit dem Erscheinen moderner Virtual Reality (VR) Headsets auf dem Verbrauchermarkt, gab es den bisher größten Aufschwung in der Geschichte der VR Technologie. Damit einhergehend rücken aber auch die Problematiken aktueller VR Hardware immer mehr in den Vordergrund. Insbesondere die Steuerung in VR war schon immer ein komplexes Thema.
Eine mögliche Lösung bietet die Leap Motion: Ein Hand-Tracking Gerät, welches ursprünglich für den Desktop-Einsatz entwickelt wurde, aber mit dem letzten größeren Softwareupdate an üblichen VR Headsets angebracht werden kann. Dieses Gerät ermöglicht ein sehr genaues Tracking beider Hände und aller Finger. Damit ist es möglich, diese vollständig in der VR Welt zu replizieren und zur Steuerung zu verwenden.
Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, virtuelle Benutzeroberflächen zu entwerfen, die mit der Leap Motion bedient werden können. Dies soll eine natürliche Interaktion zwischen dem Benutzer und der VR-Umgebung ermöglichen. Danach werden mit Hilfe einer Demoanwendung Probanden-Tests durchgeführt, um ihre Leistung zu bewerten und mit herkömmlichen VR-Reglern zu vergleichen.
Die vorliegende Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit den Chancen und Restriktionen, denen Parteien im Wahlkampf auf supranationaler Ebene der EU begegnen. Mittels kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Konzepte des Agenda-Settings (Fokus: Medien) und Agenda-Buildings (Fokus: Parteien) wird anhand des Wahlkampfs zur Wahl des Europäischen Parlaments (EP) 2014 erstens analysiert, inwieweit nationale politische Parteien die EU als Thema auf ihre Agenda setzen und ob etablierte Parteien so zu einer Normalisierung des EU-Wahlkampfs beitragen können. Zweitens wird untersucht, ob Parteien einen strukturellen Vorteil haben, die mediale Agenda auch auf supranationaler Ebene im Wahlkampf beeinflussen zu können, also mit EU-fokussierter Wahlkampfkommunikation in den Medien punkten können. Drittens wird geprüft, ob sich Parteien durch die Ablehnung der EU-Integration und der damit verbundenen, konflikthaften Kommunikation einen Vorteil für die Sichtbarkeit ihrer Kampagnen verschaffen können. Viertens und abschließend wird erforscht, ob Agenda-Building die Rangfolge spezifischer politischer Themenfelder auf der medialen Agenda im europäischen Kontext beeinflussen kann.
Die Analysen zeigen erstens, dass ein europapolitischer Fokus der Wahlkampfkommunikation nicht mehr nur auf Seiten der kleinen (euroskeptischen) Parteien zu finden ist. Verfolgen die Parteien einen europapolitischen Fokus in ihrer Wahlkampfkommunikation, haben sie zweitens gute Chancen, in der Medienberichterstattung präsent zu sein. Drittens stellt sich ein negativer Tenor der Parteienkommunikation nicht als ausschlaggebend für die Sichtbarkeit der Parteien im Wahlkampf heraus. Eine klare Positionierung auf politischen Sachfragen bereitet Parteien viertens auch auf die Restriktionen der weiteren Ausbildung einer europäischen Themenagenda vor, da die Verschiebung in der Wichtigkeit von Themen zuerst von den Medien erfasst wird, die Kampagnenkommunikation folgt erst darauf. Die Arbeit schließt nach einer Diskussion dieser Ergebnisse mit einer Einschätzung der Analyselimitationen und einem Ausblick auf weitere Forschungsansätze.
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.
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.
In this thesis, I present the results of my studies on taxonomy, systematics, and biogeography of Impatiens (Balsaminaceae) in Madagascar and the Comoro islands.
In Chapter 1 I reviewed the literature on taxonomy and classification of Balsaminaceae, on habitat, world distribution, morphology, molecular phylogenetics and infrageneric classification of the genus Impatiens. In Chapters 2-15 (Fischer & Rahelivololona 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016, Fischer et al. 2004. 2017, 2018a, b submitted, Rahelivololona et al. 2003) I presented the first results of a revision of Balsaminaceae of Madagascar and the Comoro islands including the description of 78 new species. In Chapter 16 (Yuan et al. 2004) we worked on the phylogeny and biogeography of Balsaminaceae inferred from ITS sequences using combined results from molecular phylogenetic and morphological analyses. In Chapter 17 (Rahelivololona et al. 2018) we conducted a phylogeny and assessment of the infrageneric classification of species in the Malagasy Impatiens (Balsaminaceae) with a particular emphasis on taxa collected from Marojejy.
Below I summarise the most important findings of each chapter and provide an outlook for future studies.
How many species of Impatiens occur in Madagascar and the Comoro islands?
To provide additional information on the taxonomic revision of Impatiens in Madagascar and the Comoro islands, the identification of already described species as well as the description of new species was conducted. Based on herbarium specimens from BR, G, K, NEU, P, TAN and on living plants collected during several field trips, 78 new species and 6 nomina nova have been published and another 70 new taxa are already identified. Actually more than 260 species occur in Madagascar and the Comoro islands and all of them are endemic. For each species, a description of the morphology, phenology, ecology and known distribution range was provided. Apart from new taxa, the delimitation of already described species like Impatiens firmula Baker and Impatiens hildebrandtii Baill. could be clarified by studying the types and by observing the variability in the field.
Are the groups of Impatiens in Madagascar monophyletic, and what is the systematic position of Trimorphopetalum?
Yuan & al. (2004) conducted a molecular phylogenetic study to examine the morphological and karyological evolution, and the historical biogeography of the Balsaminaceae family by using nucleotide sequence data of internal transcribed spacer regions of nuclear ribosomal DNA. The results support the monophyly of the Malagasy endemic section Trimorphopetalum and show that the cleistogamous Impatiens inaperta should be included in the sect. Trimorphopetalum which is the most derived within Impatiens. Therefore, the section Preimpatiens proposed by Perrier de la Bâthie (1934) is paraphyletic.
Rahelivololona & al. (2018) provided a phylogenetic study focused on three subdivisions (based on macromorphological characters) proposed by Perrier de la Bâthie (1934). The analysis was done using two nuclear AP3/DEF homologues (ImpDEF1 and ImpDEF2) and the plastid atpB-rbcL spacer to reassess or assess the monophyly of the Malagasy Impatiens, of the sections Preimpatiens (Humblotianae and Vulgare groups) and Trimorphopetalum. A focus was on the species of Impatiens from the Marojejy National Park and of the morphologically variable species I. elatostemmoides, I. “hammarbyoides”, I. inaperta and I. manaharensis, using monophyly as the primary criterion.
As results the Malagasy Impatiens are paraphyletic and the section Preimpatiens sensu Perrier de la Bâthie (1934) (= subgen. Impatiens sensu Fischer & Rahelivololona 2002) was not resolved as a monophyletic group. The section Trimorphopetalum sensu Perrier de la Bâthie (1934) (= subgen. Trimorphopetalum sensu Fischer & Rahelivololona 2002), however, was strongly confirmed as a monophyletic lineage (BS: 92; BPP: 1). Neither the Humblotianae group nor the Vulgare group was supported as monophyletic. None of the morphologically variable species appeared to be monophyletic and the sampled species of Impatiens from the Marojejy National Park do also not form a monophyletic group.
What are the biogeographical position and the distribution patterns of Impatiens in Madagascar and the Comoro islands?
Investigation of the geographical affinities and species distribution of section Impatiens (including Humblotianae group and Vulgare group) and section Trimorphopetalum were conducted and the origin and evolution as well as species richness and endemism were discussed.
The isolation, the climate and the complex topography of Madagascar have generated the microhabitats and ecological niches favourable to the diversification of Impatiens species. Impatiens of Madagascar with 260 endemic species is actually the largest genus in Madagascar. Therefore, Madagascar and the Comoro islands are among the most species-rich regions in the world for Impatiens.
Future studies
In Impatiens on Madagascar, there remain numerous unresolved questions that need to be adressed:
• A further study based on a much larger molecular data set and sampling from the entire geographic ranges of Impatiens in Madagascar is needed to retest the monophyly of the different subgenera and sections, as well as a molecular dating of the Malagasy Impatiens.
• The study of pollinators as a key for understanding the radiation and species richness is required: Within Impatiens the different shapes of spur are related to pollinators (bees, birds, butterflies and moths). Therefore pollinator observation of specific species need to be done to understand the radiation of species by adaptation and coevolution with these pollinators. A pollination study with a large number of species within section Trimorphopetalum will help to understand the mechanism of complete disappearance of the spur, the shift of pollinators and the evolution of species richness.
• The destruction of the natural habitats of Impatiens and the subsequent reduction of humidity in logged area constitute a severe threat for the survival of many species. The conservation and reforestation of vulnerable areas such as Ankaratra, Daraina, Mandraka and Col des Tapia near Antsirabe is required.
• In terms of conservation and to mitigate the threat on the genus, a study on the ex-situ-conservation of Malagasy Impatiens species is very important as long as some species are suitable for horticultural purposes (e.g. Impatiens mayae-valeriae, Impatiens emiliae and species with broad red spur).
• Finally, the publication of the revision of Impatiens of Madagascar and the Comoro islands will help other botanists to identify the species and will thus increase our knowledge on the group.
Ökologische Bewertungsansätze auf der Grundlage des Makrozoobenthos in Euphratzuflüssen der Türkei
(2019)
Nachhaltiges Gewässermanagement erfordert Methoden zur Bewertung der ökologischen Gewässerqualität. Die Basis dafür zu entwickeln setzt langjährige limnologische Forschung voraus, die jedoch in der Türkei bisher nicht ausreichend vorhanden ist. Daher war es das Ziel dieser Doktorarbeit, Grundlagenforschung im Bereich der Gewässerökologie durchzuführen und Methoden zur Bewertung der ökologischen Gewässerqualität in der Türkei anhand der Untersuchung von benthischen Invertebraten bereitzustellen. Hierfür habe ich 17 Nebenflüsse des Euphrat mit ähnlicher Typologie/Gewässerordnung ausgewählt, die unter¬schiedlichen anthropogenen Belastungen bis gar keiner Beeinträchtigung ausgesetzt waren. Die Charakterisierung der natürlichen Bergbäche war der erste wichtige Schritt zur Analyse der ökologischen Qualität. Anhand von Gemeinschaftsindizes konnte ich feststellen, dass die hierfür ausgewählten fünf Bäche einen sehr guten ökologischen Zustand aufwiesen. Des Weiteren verglich ich die verschiedenen biologischen Indizes zwischen Frühling (Mai) und Herbst (September), um den optimalen Zeitpunkt der Beprobung festzustellen. Dabei zeigten sich erhebliche Unterschiede in der Makroinvertebratenzusammensetzung zwischen den beiden Jahreszeiten: Die Anzahl der Taxa und der Shannon-Index waren im Herbst deutlich höher als im Frühjahr. Anschließend untersuchte ich bei den Referenzbächen die Nahrungsressourcen des Makrozoobenthos mittels einer Isotopen-Analyse. Als wichtigste Basalressourcen für die benthischen Wirbellosen stellte ich FPOM und Biofilm fest. Infolgedessen unterteilte ich die 17 Bäche anhand der Ähnlichkeit ihrer Gemeinschafts-struktur in drei Qualitätsklassen, die von vier Gemeinschaftsindizes (EPT [%], EPTCBO [%], Anzahl der Individuen, Evenness) unterstützt worden sind. Hierbei wurden 23 Taxa als Indikatoren für die drei Qualitätsklassen identifiziert. Im nächsten Schritt habe ich zwei Möglichkeiten für die Bewertung der Qualitätsklassen entwickelt bzw. angepasst. Als erstes adaptierte ich den biotischen Index Hindu Kush-Himalaya an das Einzugsgebiet des Euphrat, in dem ich eine neue und ökoregionspezifische Score Liste (Euph-Scores) für 93 Taxa erstellt habe. Die gewichteten ASPT-Werte, die in der vorliegenden Arbeit in Euphrat Biotischer Score (EUPHbios) umbenannt worden sind, zeigten im Vergleich zu den anderen ASPT-Werten schärfere Differenzierungen der Qualitätsklassen. Somit erwies sich dieser modifizierte Index in der praktischen Anwendung als sehr aussagekräftig und gut umsetzbar. Als zweiten biologischen Index habe ich den Anteil der Habitat-Spezialisten vorgeschlagen. Um diesen Index zu berechnen, wurden Habitatpräferenzen der 20 häufigsten Makro-invertebraten anhand des neuen Habitat-Scores identifiziert. Der Anteil der Habitat-Spezialisten unterschied sich deutlich zwischen den drei Qualitätsklassen, mit höheren Werten in natürlichen Bächen als in belasteten. Die in dieser Doktorarbeit vorgestellten Methoden und Ergebnisse können in einem multimetrischen Index für ein türkisches Bewertungsprogramm für Fließgewässer verwendet werden.
Over the past few decades society’s dependence on software systems has grown significantly. These systems are utilized in nearly every matter of life today and often handle sensitive, private data. This situation has turned software security analysis into an essential and widely researched topic in the field of computer science. Researchers in this field tend to make the assumption that the quality of the software systems' code directly affects the possibility for security gaps to arise in it. Because this assumption is based on properties of the code, proving it true would mean that security assessments can be performed on software, even before a certain version of it is released. A study based on this implication has already attempted to mathematically assess the existence of such a correlation, studying it based on quality and security metric calculations. The present study builds upon that study in finding an automatic method for choosing well-fitted software projects as a sample for this correlation analysis and extends the variety of projects considered for the it. In this thesis, the automatic generation of graphical representations both for the correlations between the metrics as well as for their evolution is also introduced. With these improvements, this thesis verifies the results of the previous study with a different and broader project input. It also focuses on analyzing the correlations between the quality and security metrics to real-world vulnerability data metrics. The data is extracted and evaluated from dedicated software vulnerability information sources and serves to represent the existence of proven security weaknesses in the studied software. The study discusses some of the difficulties that arise when trying to gather such information and link it to the difference in the information contained in the repositories of the studied projects. This thesis confirms the significant influence that quality metrics have on each other. It also shows that it is important to view them together as a whole and suppose that their correlation could influence the appearance of unwanted vulnerabilities as well. One of the important conclusions I can draw from this thesis is that the visualization of metric evolution graphs, helps the understanding of the values as well as their connection to each other in a more meaningful way. It allows for better grasp of their influence on each other as opposed to only studying their correlation values. This study confirms that studying metric correlations and evolution trends can help developers improve their projects and prevent them from becoming difficult to extend and maintain, increasing the potential for good quality as well as more secure software code.
Eine genaue Schneesimulation ist der Schlüssel zur Erfassung der charakteristischen Visualisierung von Schnee. Aufwendige Methoden existieren, die versuchen Schneeverhalten ganzheitlich zu ergreifen. Die Rechenkomplexität dieser Ansätze hindert sie daran, Echtzeitfähigkeit zu erreichen. Diese Arbeit stellt drei Methoden vor, die unter Verwendung der GPU eine echtzeitfähige Deformation einer Schneeoberoberfläche darstellen. Die Ansätze werden hinsichtlich ihrer wahrheitsgetreuen Schneedarstellung untersucht und nach ihrer Fähigkeit, mit einer zunehmenden Anzahl von schneeverformenden Objekten zu skalieren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Methoden bei mehreren hunderten schneeverformenden Objekten ihre Echtzeitfähigkeit beibehalten. Jedoch benachteiligen die charakteristischen Einschränkungen jener Methoden die visuellen Resultate. Ein experimenteller Ansatz ist es, die Anzahl der schneeverformenden Objekte zu reduzieren und durch Zusammenfügen der Methoden ein genaueres, kombiniertes Verformungsmuster zu erzeugen.
Our work finds the fine grained edits in context of neighbouring tokens in Wikipedia articles. We cluster those edits according to similar neighbouring context. We encode neighbouring context into vector space using word vectors. We evaluate clusters returned by our algorithm on extrinsic and intrinsic metric and compare it with previous work. We analyse the relation between extrinsic and intrinsic measurements of fine grained edit tokens.
Most social media platforms allow users to freely express their opinions, feelings, and beliefs. However, in recent years the growing propagation of hate speech, offensive language, racism and sexism on the social media outlets have drawn attention from individuals, companies, and researchers. Today, sexism both online and offline with different forms, including blatant, covert, and subtle lan- guage, is a common phenomenon in society. A notable amount of work has been done over identifying sexist content and computationally detecting sexism which exists online. Although previous efforts have mostly used peoples’ activities on social media platforms such as Twitter as a public and helpful source for collecting data, they neglect the fact that the method of gathering sexist tweets could be biased towards the initial search terms. Moreover, some forms of sexism could be missed since some tweets which contain offensive language could be misclassified as hate speech. Further, in existing hate speech corpora, sexist tweets mostly express hostile sexism, and to some degree, the other forms of sexism which also appear online was disregarded. Besides, the creation of labeled datasets with manual exertion, relying on users to report offensive comments with a tremendous effort by human annotators is not only a costly and time-consuming process, but it also raises the risk of involving discrimination under biased judgment.
This thesis generates a novel sexist and non-sexist dataset which is constructed via "UnSexistifyIt", an online web-based game that incentivizes the players to make minimal modifications to a sexist statement with the goal of turning it into a non-sexist statement and convincing other players that the modified statement is non-sexist. The game applies the methodology of "Game With A Purpose" to generate data as a side-effect of playing the game and also employs the gamification and crowdsourcing techniques to enhance non-game contexts. When voluntary participants play the game, they help to produce non-sexist statements which can reduce the cost of generating new corpus. This work explores how diverse individual beliefs concerning sexism are. Further, the result of this work highlights the impact of various linguistic features and content attributes regarding sexist language detection. Finally, this thesis could help to expand our understanding regarding the syntactic and semantic structure of sexist and non-sexist content and also provides insights to build a probabilistic classifier for single sentences into sexist or non-sexist classes and lastly find a potential ground truth for such a classifier.