Refine
Year of publication
- 2014 (104) (remove)
Document Type
- Bachelor Thesis (42)
- Doctoral Thesis (24)
- Part of Periodical (20)
- Master's Thesis (14)
- Diploma Thesis (2)
- Conference Proceedings (1)
- Report (1)
Keywords
- Vorlesungsverzeichnis (6)
- OpenGL (3)
- Android (2)
- Graphik (2)
- Pestizid (2)
- Pflanzenschutzmittel (2)
- Smartphone (2)
- VOXEL (2)
- Wasseroberfläche (2)
- monitoring (2)
Institute
- Institut für Computervisualistik (24)
- Institut für Management (20)
- Zentrale Einrichtungen (15)
- Fachbereich 4 (10)
- Institut für Informatik (10)
- Fachbereich 7 (9)
- Institut für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsinformatik (5)
- Institute for Web Science and Technologies (5)
- Fachbereich 5 (4)
- Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft (3)
The way information is presented to users in online community platforms has an influence on the way the users create new information. This is the case, for instance, in question-answering fora, crowdsourcing platforms or other social computation settings. To better understand the effects of presentation policies on user activity, we introduce a generative model of user behaviour in this paper. Running simulations based on this user behaviour we demonstrate the ability of the model to evoke macro phenomena comparable to the ones observed on real world data.
Field margins are often the only remaining habitats of various wild plant species in agricultural landscapes. However, due to their proximity to agricultural fields, the vegetation of field margins can be affected by agrochemicals applied to the crop fields. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the individual and combined effects of herbicide, insecticide and fertilizer inputs on the plant community of a field margin. Therefore, a 3-year field experiment with a randomized block design including seven treatments (H: herbicide, I: insecticide, F: fertilizer, H+I, F+I, F+H and F+H+I) and one control was conducted on a low-production meadow. Each treatment was replicated 8 times in 8 m x 8 m plots with a distance of 2 m between each plot. The fertilizer rates (25 % of the field rate) and pesticide rates (30 % of the field rate) used for the plot applications were consistent with realistic average input rates (overspray + drift) in the first meter of a field margin directly adjacent to a wheat field.
The study revealed that fertilizer and herbicide misplacements in field margins are major factors that affect the natural plant communities of these habitats. In total, 20 of the 26 abundant species on the study site were significantly affected by the fertilizer and herbicide treatment. The fertilizer promoted plants with high nutrient uptake and decreased the frequencies of small species. The herbicide caused a nearly complete disappearance of three species directly after the first application, whereas sublethal effects (e.g., phytotoxic effects and reduced seed productions of up to 100 %) were observed for the other affected species. However, if field margins are exposed to repeated agrochemical applications over several years, then such sublethal effects (particularly reproduction effects) also reduce the population size of plant species significantly, as observed in this study.
Significant herbicide-fertilizer interaction effects were also detected and could not be extrapolated from individual effects. The fertilizer and herbicide effects became stronger over time, leading to shifts in plant community compositions after three years and to a 15 % lower species diversity than in the control. The insecticide significantly affected the frequencies of two plant species (1 positively and 1 negatively). The results of the experiment suggest that a continuous annual agrochemical application on the study site would cause further plant community shifts and would likely lead to the disappearance of certain affected plants. A clear trend of increasing grass dominance at the expense of flowering herbs was detected. This finding corresponds well with monitoring data from field margins near the study site.
Although herbicide risk assessment aims to protect non-target plants in off-field habitats from adverse effects, reproduction effects and combined effects are currently not considered. Furthermore, no regulations for fertilizer applications next to field margins exist and thus, fertilizer misplacements in field margins are likely to occur and to interact with herbicide effects.
Adaptations of the current risk assessment, a development of risk mitigation measures (e.g., in-field buffers) for the application of herbicides and fertilizers, and general management measures for field margins are needed to restore and conserve plant diversity in field margins in agricultural landscapes.
The increased networking of devices has established the usage of distributed applications as a common method in software development. Despite the demand of anonymity in using distributed applications, software frameworks still lack appropriate support in developing them. Building anonymous communicating applications therefore often results in an expensive individual approach. This work integrates an approach for anonymous communication using remote procedure calls into a software framework for building distributed applications. This also includes the design, development, and prototypical implementation of a binding for the MAppLab Remote Procedure Call Framework on the basis of the mPartAPI Framework. Furthermore the resulting prototype will be tested in an exemplary scenario.
Diese Bachelorarbeit befasst sich mit der Entwicklung und Implementierung einer Gesichtserkennenden Software, die in der Lage ist Personenströme zurnerkennen und zu protokollieren. Dabei wird, ausgehend von den speziellen Anforderungen der Bildverarbeitung die entstandene Softwarearchitektur und deren Implementation vorgestellt. Zusätzlich wird zur Implementation ein Webinterface entwickelt welches die Verwaltung der Daten vereinfachen soll. Abschließend werden weitere Verfahren der Gesichtserkennung vorgestellt und gegen das eingesetzte Verfahren verglichen. Zum Schluss wird die implementierte Software evaluiert.
Modeling and publishing Linked Open Data (LOD) involves the choice of which vocabulary to use. This choice is far from trivial and poses a challenge to a Linked Data engineer. It covers the search for appropriate vocabulary terms, making decisions regarding the number of vocabularies to consider in the design process, as well as the way of selecting and combining vocabularies. Until today, there is no study that investigates the different strategies of reusing vocabularies for LOD modeling and publishing. In this paper, we present the results of a survey with 79 participants that examines the most preferred vocabulary reuse strategies of LOD modeling. Participants of our survey are LOD publishers and practitioners. Their task was to assess different vocabulary reuse strategies and explain their ranking decision. We found significant differences between the modeling strategies that range from reusing popular vocabularies, minimizing the number of vocabularies, and staying within one domain vocabulary. A very interesting insight is that the popularity in the meaning of how frequent a vocabulary is used in a data source is more important than how often individual classes and properties arernused in the LOD cloud. Overall, the results of this survey help in understanding the strategies how data engineers reuse vocabularies, and theyrnmay also be used to develop future vocabulary engineering tools.
Im Verlauf der vergangenen Jahre wurden unter der Leitung von Dr. Merten Joost basierend auf Microcontrollern der ATMega-Reihe verschiedene Projekte zur Ansteuerung der Peripheriegeräte eines Computers realisiert. Hierzu zählen unter anderem die Abfrage einer Tastatur, die Ausgabe von Audio- und Videosignalen sowie eine Programmierumgebung mit eigener Programmiersprache. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die gesammelten Projekte zu verbinden, um als Ergebnis einen eigenständigen "Homecomputer" zu erhalten, der per Tastatur angesteuert werden können soll und über eine Audio- und Videoausgabe verfügen soll. Dabei wird eine SD-Karte als Speichermedium dienen, das per Tastatureingabe über eine Art Shell verwaltet werden kann.
Diffusion imaging captures the movement of water molecules in tissue by applying varying gradient fields in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based setting. It poses a crucial contribution to in vivo examinations of neuronal connections: The local diffusion profile enables inference of the position and orientation of fiber pathways. Diffusion imaging is a significant technique for fundamental neuroscience, in which pathways connecting cortical activation zones are examined, and for neurosurgical planning, where fiber reconstructions are considered as intervention related risk structures.
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is currently applied in clinical environments in order to model the MRI signal due to its fast acquisition and reconstruction time. However, the inability of DTI to model complex intra-voxel diffusion distributions gave rise to an advanced reconstruction scheme which is known as high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI). HARDI received increasing interest in neuroscience due to its potential to provide a more accurate view of pathway configurations in the human brain.
In order to fully exploit the advantages of HARDI over DTI, advanced fiber reconstructions and visualizations are required. This work presents novel approaches contributing to current research in the field of diffusion image processing and visualization. Diffusion classification, tractography, and visualizations approaches were designed to enable a meaningful exploration of neuronal connections as well as their constitution. Furthermore, an interactive neurosurgical planning tool with consideration of neuronal pathways was developed.
The research results in this work provide an enhanced and task-related insight into neuronal connections for neuroscientists as well as neurosurgeons and contribute to the implementation of HARDI in clinical environments.
This study explored the question whether greenhouse gas mitigation projects in Namibia could be initiated through local economic development programmes. In particular, research was done on whether the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol could play an essential role in the promotion of such mitigation projects.
In a first step supporting and inhibiting factors (potential for mitigation projects, business and investment climate, institutions, etc.) were discussed, which have a negative or positive influence on mitigation projects. In a second step the mind-set of climate and energy experts as well as of local economic development experts and practitioners was analysed with regard to the research questions. To this end, 229 questionnaires, 28 interviews and the output of a focus group discussion with 20 participants were evaluated. Additionally, the author conducted a real life case study to investigate the practicability of initiating greenhouse gas mitigation projects through local economic development efforts. Parallel to the development of an economic development strategy in the Namibian region of Otjozondjupa, the potential for greenhouse gas mitigation projects was explored. Based on the outcome of this investigation project ideas were developed and their potential socio-economic impact was evaluated. Promising projects were then included into the development strategy.
Due to various factors such as the complexity of CDM, low greenhouse gas emissions in Namibia, the low price of emission rights and insufficient financial means it is unlikely that CDM projects can be initiated through local economic development initiatives in Namibia. However, many stakeholders consider the idea of interlinking mitigation projects and local economic development initiatives favourably as long as such projects support the broader objectives of those initiatives. This research has shown that locally initiated mitigation projects do not contribute much to employment or income generation at the local level in Namibia. Thus, national strategic objectives should be considered, such as improving access to electricity to all strata of society or becoming less dependent on electricity imports. This requires, however, that local economic development strategies also cover the energy sector, that local governments are willing and capacitated to initiate mitigation projects, that national and local public institutions work together more closely, that national and local economic framework conditions are improved so as to attract private investments, and that the experiences and interests of the relevant stakeholders are considered throughout the project development process.
The goal of this work is evaluation and optimization of several eye-tracking algorithms for estimation of relevant features regarding accuracy. The extracted features are pupil- and glintcenters. The algorithms are applicable to off the shelf cameras. A synthetic model of the eye was modified and utilized. The model was used to supply ground truth for the evaluation of the methods.
Ziel dieser Ausarbeitung ist es, das Wippe-Experiment gemäß dem Aufbau innerhalb der AG Echtzeitsysteme unter Leitung von Professor Dr. Dieter Zöbel mithilfe eines LEGO Mindstorms NXT Education-Bausatzes funktionsfähig nachzubauen und das Vorgehen zu dokumentieren. Der dabei entstehende Programmcode soll didaktisch aufbereitet und eine Bauanleitung zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Dies soll gewährleisten, dass Schülerinnen und Schüler auch ohne direkten Zugang zu einer Hochschule oder ähnlichem Institut den Versuchsaufbau Wippe möglichst unkompliziert im Klassenraum erleben können.
Mathematical Modelling of GIS Tailored GUI Design with the Application of Spatial Fuzzy Logic
(2014)
This PhD thesis is situated within the framework of the Research-Group Learning and Neurosciences (ReGLaN)-Health and Logistics project. The goal of this project is the optimisation of health service delivery in the rural areas of South Africa. Cooperation takes place between ReGLaN-Health and Logistics and the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Meraka Institute, with Prof Dr Dr Marlien Herselman of Pretoria, South Africa, as the central contact person. This thesis deals with the mathematical modelling of Geographic Information System (GIS)-tailoredrnGraphical User Interface (GUI) design with the application of spatial fuzzy logic. This thesis considers the mathematical visualisation of risk and resource maps for epidemiological issues using GIS and adaptive GUI design for an Open Source (OS) application for digital devices. The intention ofrnthis thesis is to provide spatial decision support tailored to different user groups. In order for the GUI elements to be evaluated and initialised, empirical teaching-learning-research on dealing with geomedia and GUI elements was conducted.
Through the increasing availability of access to the web, more and more interactions between people take place in online social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, or sites where opinions can be exchanged. At the same time, knowledge is made openly available for many people, such as by the biggest collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia and diverse information in Internet forums and on websites. These two kinds of networks - social networks and knowledge networks - are highly dynamic in the sense that the links that contain the important information about the relationships between people or the relations between knowledge items are frequently updated or changed. These changes follow particular structural patterns and characteristics that are far less random than expected.
The goal of this thesis is to predict three characteristic link patterns for the two network types of interest: the addition of new links, the removal of existing links and the presence of latent negative links. First, we show that the prediction of link removal is indeed a new and challenging problem. Even if the sociological literature suggests that reasons for the formation and resolution of ties are often complementary, we show that the two respective prediction problems are not. In particular, we show that the dynamics of new links and unlinks lead to the four link states of growth, decay, stability and instability. For knowledge networks we show that the prediction of link changes greatly benefits from the usage of temporal information; the timestamp of link creation and deletion events improves the prediction of future link changes. For that, we present and evaluate four temporal models that resemble different exploitation strategies. Focusing on directed social networks, we conceptualize and evaluate sociological constructs that explain the formation and dissolution of relationships between users. Measures based on information about past relationships are extremely valuable for predicting the dissolution of social ties. Hence, consistent for knowledge networks and social networks, temporal information in a network greatly improves the prediction quality. Turning again to social networks, we show that negative relationship information such as distrust or enmity can be predicted from positive known relationships in the network. This is particularly interesting in networks where users cannot label their relationships to other users as negative. For this scenario we show how latent negative relationships can be predicted.
In the recent years, Software Engineering research has shown the rise of interest in the empirical studies. Such studies are often based on empirical evidence derived from corpora - collections of software artifacts. While there are established forms of carrying out empirical research (experiments, case studies, surveys, etc.), the common task of preparing the underlying collection of software artifacts is typically addressed in ad hoc manner.
In this thesis, by means of a literature survey we show how frequently software engineering research employs software corpora and using a developed classification scheme we discuss their characteristics. Addressing the lack of methodology, we suggest a method of corpus (re-)engineering and apply it to an existing collection of Java projects.
We report two extensive empirical studies, where we perform a broad and diverse range of analyses on the language for privacy preferences (P3P) and on object-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs). In both cases, we are driven by the data at hand, by the corpus itself, discovering the actual usage of the languages.
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.
This work compiles the comparison of different medical drug-dispensers. A drug-dispenser is a device which allows it from a larger amount of drugs to take a smaller one. To perform this comparison 15 requirements for the dispensers were found. The requirements "organization", "remind" and "ergonomics" are assigned to the taking-easement. "Compliance", "adaptability", "selectivity", "persistence", "functionality", "correctness" and "specificity / sensitivity" belong to the compliance, which is therapy loyalty. With it this category makes most demands. The category storage collects "hygiene", "pharmaceutical forms" and "robustness". Finally, the requirements "clarity" and "data protection" were assigned to other requirements. After this, different dispenser-concepts were first introduced and analyzed on the fulfillment of the requirements. The following concepts were analyzed: pillbox, oneweek-dispenser, Blister, tubular bag, MEMS, OtCM, electronic Dispenser, smartphone application. According to the analysis the dispensers could be compared with each other. It turned out that all concepts show deficits. Hence the author developed an own concept which fulfils all requirements except for two from well to very well. It represents the mightiest concept.
Der Markt der mobilen Endgeräte entwickelt sich schnell weiter und es kommen schon Kinder im frühsten Alter mit solchen Technologien in Berührung. Daher ist es wichtig, Kinder richtig an die Geräte heranzuführen. Von Vorteil wäre eine Einbindung von Smartphones und Tablets, im Bezug auf den Lernprozess, in den Unterricht. Die vorliegende Arbeit behandelt deshalb das Konzept einer Lernspielapp, die durch Pädagogen konfiguriert werden kann. Die Evaluation soll Aufschluss über die Motivation der Kinder geben und die Aufgeschlossenheit der Pädagogen gegenüber neuen Medien ermitteln.
Die vorliegende Arbeit hat gezeigt, dass es möglich ist an bestehenden Studien zum Thema Perceived External Reputation und der Teilnahme an der Implementierung von Dienstleitungsinnovationen anzuknüpfen. Es war sogar möglich die Abhängigkeiten der beiden Themen voneinander herauszustellen. Dies gelang unter zu Hilfenahme von weiteren Einflussfaktoren wie der erwarteten Ansehenssteigerung durch innovatives Verhalten und dem Stolz der Mitarbeiter mit dem eigenen Unternehmen in Verbindung gebracht zu werden.
Web 2.0 provides technologies for online collaboration of users as well as the creation, publication and sharing of user-generated contents in an interactive way. Twitter, CNET, CiteSeerX, etc. are examples of Web 2.0 platforms which facilitate users in these activities and are viewed as rich sources of information. In the platforms mentioned as examples, users can participate in discussions, comment others, provide feedback on various issues, publish articles and write blogs, thereby producing a high volume of unstructured data which at the same time leads to an information overload. To satisfy various types of human information needs arising from the purpose and nature of the platforms requires methods for appropriate aggregation and automatic analysis of this unstructured data. In this thesis, we propose methods which attempt to overcome the problem of information overload and help in satisfying user information needs in three scenarios.
To this end, first we look at two of the main challenges of sparsity and content quality in Twitter and how these challenges can influence standard retrieval models. We analyze and identify Twitter content features that reflect high quality information. Based on this analysis we introduce the concept of "interestingness" as a static quality measure. We empirically show that our proposed measure helps in retrieving and filtering high quality information in Twitter. Our second contribution relates to the content diversification problem in a collaborative social environment, where the motive of the end user is to gain a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons of a discussion track which results from social collaboration of the people. For this purpose, we develop the FREuD approach which aims at solving the content diversification problem by combining latent semantic analysis with sentiment estimation approaches. Our evaluation results show that the FREuD approach provides a representative overview of sub-topics and aspects of discussions, characteristic user sentiments under different aspects, and reasons expressed by different opponents. Our third contribution presents a novel probabilistic Author-Topic-Time model, which aims at mining topical trends and user interests from social media. Our approach solves this problem by means of Bayesian modeling of relations between authors, latent topics and temporal information. We present results of application of the model to the scientific publication datasets from CiteSeerX showing improved semantically cohesive topic detection and capturing shifts in authors" interest in relation to topic evolution.
The architecture of decentralized digital transaction systems with public transaction history provides no transaction monitoring to prevent unwanted transactions and to identify the transmitter and receiver of those transactions. With the introduction of a public list of unwanted addresses, it is possible to isolate these unwanted addresses by general exclusion and thereby to prevent unwanted transactions, as well as to identify the owners of unwanted addresses. The public list management can be performed by decentralized multiple instances using a trust network, so that the decentralized nature of the systems is maintained.
By the work presented in this thesis, the CH4 emissions of the River Saar were quantified in space and time continuously and all relevant processes leading to the observed pattern were identified. The direct comparison between reservoir zones and free-flowing intermediate reaches revealed, that the reservoir zones are CH4 emission hot spots and emitted over 90% of the total CH4. On average, the reservoir zones emitted over 80 times more CH4 per square meter than the intermediate reaches between dams (0.23 vs. 19.7 mol CH4 m-2 d-1). The high emission rates measured in the reservoir zones fall into the range of emissions observed in tropical reservoirs. The main reason for this is the accumulation of thick organic rich sediments and we showed that the net sedimentation rate is an excellent proxy for estimating ebullitive emissions. Within the hot spot zones, the ebullitive flux enhanced also the diffusive surface emissions as well as the degassing emissions at dams.
To resolve the high temporal variability, we developed an autonomous instrument for continuous measurements of the ebullition rate over long periods (> 4 weeks). With this instrument we could quantify the variability and identify the relevant trigger mechanisms. At the Saar, ship-lock induces surges and ship waves were responsible for over 85% of all large ebullition events. This dataset was also used to determine the error associated with short sampling periods and we found that with sampling periods of 24 hours as used in other studies, the ebullition rates were systematically underestimated by ~50%. Measuring the temporal variability enabled us to build up a conceptual framework for estimating the temporal pattern of ebullition in other aquatic systems. With respect to the contribution of freshwater systems to the global CH4 emissions, hot spot emission sites in impounded rivers have the potential to increase the current global estimate by up to 7%.