On-screen interactive presentations have got immense popularity in the domain of attentive interfaces recently. These attentive screens adapt their behavior according to the user's visual attention. This thesis aims to introduce an application that would enable these attentive interfaces to change their behavior not just according to the gaze data but also facial features and expressions. The modern era requires new ways of communications and publications for advertisement. These ads need to be more specific according to people's interests, age, and gender. When advertising, it's important to get a reaction from the user but not every user is interested in providing feedback. In such a context more, advance techniques are required that would collect user's feedback effortlessly. The main problem this thesis intends to resolve is, to apply advanced techniques of gaze and face recognition to collect data about user's reactions towards different ads being played on interactive screens. We aim to create an application that enables attentive screens to detect a person's facial features, expressions, and eye gaze. With eye gaze data we can determine the interests and with facial features, age and gender can be specified. All this information will help in optimizing the advertisements.

Since the invention of U-net architecture in 2015, convolutional networks based on its encoder-decoder approach significantly improved results in image analysis challenges. It has been proven that such architectures can also be successfully applied in different domains by winning numerous championships in recent years. Also, the transfer learning technique created an opportunity to push state-of-the-art benchmarks to a higher level. Using this approach is beneficial for the medical domain, as collecting datasets is generally a difficult and expensive process. In this thesis, we address the task of semantic segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions and release experimental results that have practical value for medical imaging. First, we evaluate the performance of four neural network architectures on the dataset of the cervical spine MRI scans. Second, we use transfer learning from models trained on the Imagenet dataset and compare it to randomly initialized networks. Third, we evaluate models trained on the bias field corrected and raw MRI data. All code to reproduce results is publicly available online.

Thesis is devoted to the topic of challenges and solutions for human resources management (HRM) in international organizations. The aim is to investigate methodological approaches to assessment of HRM challenges and solutions, and to apply them on practice, to develop ways of improvement of HRM of a particular enterprise. The practical research question investigated is “Is the Ongoing Professional Development – Strategic HRM (OPD-SHRM) model a better solution for HRM system of PrJSC “Philip Morris Ukraine”?” To achieve the aim of this work and to answer the research question, we have studied theoretical approaches to explaining and assessing HRM in section 1, analyzed HRM system of an international enterprise in section 2, and then synthesized theory and practice to find intersection points in section 3. Research findings indicate that the main challenge of HRM is to balance between individual and organizational interests. Implementation of OPD-SHRM is one of the solutions. Switching focus from satisfaction towards success will bring both tangible and intangible benefits for individuals and organization. In case of PrJSC “Philip Morris Ukraine”, the maximum forecasted increase is 330% in net profit, 350% in labor productivity, and 26% in Employee Development and Engagement Index.

Hands-free text editing using multimodal approach (Voice and Gaze) can improve the text editing process than using unimodal approach (Voice only)

Unkontrolliert gewachsene Software-Architekturen zeichnen sich i.d.R. durch fehlende oder schlecht nachvollziehbare Strukturen aus. Hierfür können als Gründe beispielsweise mangelhafte Definitionen oder ein langsames Erodieren sein. Dies ist auch unter dem Begriff "Big Ball of Mud" bekannt. Langfristig erhöhen solche architekturellen Mängel nicht nur die Entwicklungskosten, sondern können letztendlich auch Veränderungen vollständig verhindern. Die Software-Architektur benötigt somit eine kontinuierliche Weiterentwicklung, um solchen Effekten entgegen wirken zu können. Eine gute Software-Architektur unterstützt die Software-Entwicklung und erhöht die Produktivität. Auf der Ebene von Quellcode existieren bereits etablierte Vorgehensweisen zur kontrollierten Verbesserung der Qualität. Im Gegensatz hierzu existieren für Verbesserungen einer Software-Architektur jedoch keine allgemeingültigen Vorgehensweisen, welche unabhängig vom Anwendungsfall angewandt werden können. An diesem Punkt setzt die vorliegende Arbeit an. Bisherige Arbeiten beschäftigen sich einerseits nur mit Teilpunkten des Problems. Anderseits existieren zwar bereits Vorgehensweisen zum Treffen von Architekturentscheidungen, jedoch agieren diese auf einer stark abstrakten Ebene ohne praktische Beispiele. Diese Arbeit stellt eine leichtgewichtige Vorgehensweise zum gezielten Verbessern einer Software-Architektur vor. Die Vorgehensweise basiert auf einem generischen Problemlösungsprozess. Auf dieser Basis ist ein Prozess zum Lösen von Problemen einer Software-Architektur entwickelt worden. Im Fokus der Arbeit stehen zur Eingrenzung des Umfanges architektonische Probleme aufgrund geforderter Variabilität sowie externer Abhängigkeiten. Die wissenschaftliche Methodik, welcher der Arbeit zugrunde liegt, agiert im Rahmen der Design Science Research (DSR). Über mehrere Iterationen hinweg wurde eine Vorgehensweise entwickelt, welche sich an Softwareentwickler mit zwei bis drei Jahren Erfahrung und Kenntnissen über Grundlage der Softwareentwicklung und Software-Architektur richtet. Fünf Schritte inkl. Verweise auf aussagekräftige Literatur leiten Anwender anschließend durch den Prozess zur gezielten Verbesserung einer Software-Architektur.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.