The concept of hard and soft news (HSN) is regarded as one of the most important concepts in journalism research. Despites this popularity, two major research voids can be assigned to the concept. First, it lacks conceptual clarity: the concept gets used interchangeably with related concepts such as sensationalism, which has led to fuzzy demarcations of HSN. Also, it is still not agreed on of which dimensions the concept in composed. Second, little is known about the factors that influence the production of news in terms of their hard or soft nature. The present disserta-tion casts a twofold glance on the HSN concept – it aims to assess the conceptual status of the concept and production of hard and soft news. At the outset, this dissertation delineates the theoretical base for three manuscripts in total and presented considerations on concepts in social sciences in general and hard and soft news in particular as well as the production of news, particularly of hard and soft news. The first paper proposed a theoretical frame-work model to distinguish HSN and related concepts. Based on a literature review of in total five concepts, this model suggested a hierarchy in which these concepts can be discerned according to their occurrence in media content. The second pa-per focused on the inner coherence of the HSN concept in its most recent academ-ic understanding. The results of a factorial survey with German newspaper jour-nalists showed that, indeed, four out of five dimensions of the HSN concept com-prised what the journalists understood by it. Hence, the most recent academic un-derstanding is to a great extent coherent. The third study shed light on the produc-tion of HSN, focusing on the influence of individual journalists’ and audience’s characteristics on whether news was presented in hard or soft way. The findings of a survey with simulated decision scenarios among German print journalists showed that the HSN dimensions were susceptible to different journalistic influ-ences and that a perceived politically uninterested audience led to a softer cover-age. The dissertation concluded with connecting these findings with the considera-tions on concept evaluation and the production of news. Implications for research on and with the concept of HSN were presented, before concluding with limitations and suggestions for future research.

This thesis connects the endeavors of the winemaker’s intention in perfect and profitable wine making with an innovative technological application to use Internet of Things. Thereby the winemaker’s work may be supported and enriched – and enables until recent years still unthinkable optimization of managing and planning of his business, including close state control of different areas of his vineyard, and more than that, not ending up with the single grapevine. It is exemplarily shown in this thesis how to measure, transmit, store and make data available, exemplarily demonstrated with “live” temperature, air and soil humidity values from the vineyard. A modular architecture was designed for the system presented, which allows the use of current sensors, and similar low-voltage sensors, which will be developed in the future. By using IoT devices in the vineyard, the winemaker advances to a new quality of precision of forecasted data, starting from live data of his vineyard. Of more and more importance, the winemaker can start immediate action, when unforeseen heavy weather conditions occur. Immediate use of current data enabled by a Cloud Infrastructure. For this system, an open service infrastructure is employed. In contrast to other published commercial approaches, the described solution is based on open source. As an alone-standing part of this work, a physical prototype for measuring relevant parameters in the vineyard was de-novo designed and developed until fulfilling the set of specifications. The outlined features and requirements for a functioning data collection and autonomously transmitting device was developed, described, and the fulfilment by the prototype device were demonstrated. Through literature research and supportive orientationally live interviews of winemakers, the theory and the practical application were synchronized and qualified. For the development of the prototype the general principles of development of an electronic device were followed, in particular the Design Science Research development rules, and principles of Quality Function Deployment. As a characteristic of the prototype, some principles like re-use of approved construction and material price of the building blocks of the device were taken into consideration as well (e.g. housing; Arduino; PCB). Parts reduction principles, decomplexation and simplified assembly, testing and field service were integrated to the development process by the modular design of the functional vineyard device components, e.g. with partial reference to innovative electrical cabinet construction system Modular-3. The software architectural concept is based on a three-layer architecture inclusive the TTN infrastructure. The front end is realized as a rich web client, using a WordPress plugin. WordPress was chosen due to the wide adoption through the whole internet, enabling fast and easy user familiarization. Relevant quality issues have been tested and discussed in the view of exemplary functionality, extensibility, requirements fulfilment, as usability and durability of the device and the software. The prototype was characterized and tested with success in the laboratory and in field exposition under different conditions, in order to allow a measurement and analysis of the fulfilment of all requirements by the selected and realized electronic construction and layout. The solution presented may serve as a basis for future development and application in this special showcase and within similar technologies. A prognosis of future work and applications concludes this work.

In this bachelor thesis a system for the simulation of the movements of molecules is developed. The calculation of the forces between chemically bonded atoms as well as intermolecular forces is done almost entirely on the GPU. The visualization of the simulation happens at an interactive framerate. To achieve rendering in realtime on off-the-shelf graphics cards, apt optimizations and slight abstractions of the underlying physical models are needed. One can control the execution speed or completely stop the simulation at any given moment. Some of the parameters of the underlying physical models of the simulation can be modified at runtime. With the right settings for the parameters, some phenomena of molecular dynamics can be observed, for example the spacial structure of the molecules.

Seit der vergangenen Dekade steigt die Nutzung von sogenannten Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) in Unternehmen. Diese versprechen sich mit der Einführung eines solchen zur Gattung der Social Software gehörenden Kollaborationssystems, die menschliche Kommunikation und Kooperation der eigenen Mitarbeiter zu verbessern. Durch die Integration von Funktionen, wie sie aus Social Media bekannt sind, entstehen große Mengen an Daten. Darunter befinden sich zu einem erheblichen Teil textuelle Daten, die beispielsweise mit Funktionen wie Blogs, Foren, Statusaktualisierungen oder Wikis erstellt wurden. Diese in unstrukturierter Form vorliegenden Daten bieten ein großes Potenzial zur Analyse und Auswertung mittels Methoden des Text Mining. Die Forschung belegt dazu jedoch, dass Umsetzungen dieser Art momentan nicht gebräuchlich sind. Aus diesem Grund widmet sich die vorliegende Arbeit diesem Mangel. Ziel ist die Erstellung eines Dashboard-Prototyps, der sich im Rahmen von Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) mit der Auswertung von textuellen Daten befasst. Analyseziel ist die Identifikation von populären Themen, die innerhalb von Communities oder communityübergreifend von den Plattformnutzern in den von ihnen erstellten Beiträgen aufgegriffen werden. Als Datenquelle wurde das auf IBM Connections aufbauende ECS UniConnect ausgewählt. Dieses wird vom University Competence Center for Collaboration Technologies (UCT) an der Universität Koblenz-Landau betrieben. Grundlegend für die korrekte Funktionsweise des Dashboards sind mehrere Java-Klassen, deren Umsetzungen auf verschiedenen Methoden des Text Mining basieren. Vermittelt werden die Analyseergebnisse im Dashboard durch verschiedene Diagrammarten, Wordclouds und Tabellen.

This thesis addresses the automated identification and localization of a time-varying number of objects in a stream of sensor data. The problem is challenging due to its combinatorial nature: If the number of objects is unknown, the number of possible object trajectories grows exponentially with the number of observations. Random finite sets are a relatively new theory that has been developed to derive at principled and efficient approximations. It is based around set-valued random variables that contain an unknown number of elements which appear in arbitrary order and are themselves random. While extensively studied in theory, random finite sets have not yet become a leading paradigm in practical computer vision and robotics applications. This thesis explores random finite sets in visual tracking applications. The first method developed in this thesis combines set-valued recursive filtering with global optimization. The problem is approached in a min-cost flow network formulation, which has become a standard inference framework for multiple object tracking due to its efficiency and optimality. A main limitation of this formulation is a restriction to unary and pairwise cost terms. This circumstance makes integration of higher-order motion models challenging. The method developed in this thesis approaches this limitation by application of a Probability Hypothesis Density filter. The Probability Hypothesis Density filter was the first practically implemented state estimator based on random finite sets. It circumvents the combinatorial nature of data association itself by propagation of an object density measure that can be computed efficiently, without maintaining explicit trajectory hypotheses. In this work, the filter recursion is used to augment measurements with an additional hidden kinematic state to be used for construction of more informed flow network cost terms, e.g., based on linear motion models. The method is evaluated on public benchmarks where a considerate improvement is achieved compared to network flow formulations that are based on static features alone, such as distance between detections and appearance similarity. A second part of this thesis focuses on the related task of detecting and tracking a single robot operator in crowded environments. Different from the conventional multiple object tracking scenario, the tracked individual can leave the scene and later reappear after a longer period of absence. Therefore, a re-identification component is required that picks up the track on reentrance. Based on random finite sets, the Bernoulli filter is an optimal Bayes filter that provides a natural representation for this type of problem. In this work, it is shown how the Bernoulli filter can be combined with a Probability Hypothesis Density filter to track operator and non-operators simultaneously. The method is evaluated on a publicly available multiple object tracking dataset as well as on custom sequences that are specific to the targeted application. Experiments show reliable tracking in crowded scenes and robust re-identification after long term occlusion. Finally, a third part of this thesis focuses on appearance modeling as an essential aspect of any method that is applied to visual object tracking scenarios. Therefore, a feature representation that is robust to pose variations and changing lighting conditions is learned offline, before the actual tracking application. This thesis proposes a joint classification and metric learning objective where a deep convolutional neural network is trained to identify the individuals in the training set. At test time, the final classification layer can be stripped from the network and appearance similarity can be queried using cosine distance in representation space. This framework represents an alternative to direct metric learning objectives that have required sophisticated pair or triplet sampling strategies in the past. The method is evaluated on two large scale person re-identification datasets where competitive results are achieved overall. In particular, the proposed method better generalizes to the test set compared to a network trained with the well-established triplet loss.

Helicopters are crucial in today’s life. A vast amount of applications prove their range, which are not coverable by other types of aircraft. But they are very complex systems, both, technically and physically. This is one of the reasons why pilot training for helicopters is quite challenging. In the last two decades flight simulators became a supplementary instrument in the educational process of pilots. With flight simulators it is possible to replay uncommon or dangerous situations. In this thesis a simple flight simulator for helicopters will be developed based on rigid body physics. The foundation is a simplified rotor model which omits complex fluid dynamics. This helps to keep the implementation simple and illustrative as well as provide simulation rates at real-time. The modules are implemented within the Unreal Engine in such way, that changing helicopter characteristics is very easy.

Das Projekt VR Fresken setzte sich zum Ziel, mit Hilfe von virtueller Realität im Rahmen einer Museumsausstellung historisch rekonstruierte Räume und deren Deckenfresken interaktiv erlebbar zu machen. In dieser Arbeit werden die eingesetzten Techniken und Technologien beleuchtet, der Anwendungsfall der VR für den Einsatz im Museum untersucht, sowie eine Evaluation der Software im Alltagsbetrieb im Museum durchgeführt.

Social entrepreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship that marries a social mission to a competitive value proposition. Notably, social entrepreneurship fosters a more equitable society by addressing social issues and trying to achieve an ongoing sustainable impact through a social mission rather than purely profit maximization. The topic of social entrepreneurship has appealed considerably to many different streams of research. The focus on understanding how and why entrepreneurs think and act is a significant justification for future research. Nevertheless, the theoretical examination of this phenomenon is in its infancy. Social entrepreneurship research is still largely phenomenon-driven. Specifically, Social Entrepreneurial Intention is in an early stage and lacks quantitative research. Therefore, this thesis proposes to address this need. The thesis’ objectives are twofold: (1) develop a formation model for Social Entrepreneurial Intentions in general and (2) test the model by conducting an empirical study. Based on these objectives, the two research questions guiding the thesis are (1) what factors influence the intention of a person to become a social entrepreneur and (2) what relationships exist among these factors. In order to answer these two research questions, this thesis uses purposeful research design, which is a combination of literature review and empirical study. The literature review is based on a comprehensive range of books, articles, and research papers published in leading academic journals and conference proceedings in different disciplines such as entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, management, social psychology, and social economics. The empirical study is conducted via a survey of 600 last-year students from four universities in three regions in Vietnam: Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh. The data are analyzed with SPSS-AMOS version 24, using screening data, scale development, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmation factor analysis. The thesis ascertains that Entrepreneurship Experience/Extra-curricular Activity, Role Model, Social Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy, and Social Entrepreneurial Outcome Expectation directly and positively affect the intention of the Vietnamese students to be social entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship Education also influences the Social Entrepreneurial Intention, but not directly, otherwise indirectly via Social Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy and Social Entrepreneurial Outcome Expectation. Similarly, Perceived Support has no direct relationship to Social Entrepreneurial Intention; however, it shows an indirect link via the mediator ‘Social Entrepreneurial Outcome Expectation’. Furthermore, the dissertation brings new insights to the social entrepreneurship literature and provides important implications for practice. Limitations and future directions are also provided in the thesis.

Arbeitsbericht zum Projekt Webutatio - Erfassung, Aufbau und Stärkung der Reputationskompetenz von Mitarbeitenden im arbeitsprozessintegrierten Umgang mit sozialen Medien (Web 2.0)

Finanzordnung Abteilung Landau Satzung der örtlichen Studierendenschaft an der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau Wahlordnung der örtlichen Studierendenschaft der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau Habilitationsordnung des Fachbereichs 3: Mathematik / Naturwissenschaften der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Koblenz Satzung zur Festsetzung von Zulassungszahlen an der Universität Koblenz-Landau für das Studienjahr 2018/2019 Satzung zur Festsetzung der Normwerte für den Ausbildungsaufwand (Curricularnormwerte) der Universität Koblenz-Landau Ordnung für die Prüfung im Masterstudiengang Master of Engineering Ceramic Science and Engineering - Nichtmetallisch-anorganische Werkstoffe und Technologien (NAWT) - an der Hochschule Koblenz und der Universität Koblenz-Landau (Kooperativer Masterstudiengang) Zweiundzwanzigste Ordnung zur Änderung der Prüfungsordnung für die Prüfung im lehramtsbezogenen Bachelorstudiengang an der Universität Koblenz-Landau Neunzehnte Ordnung zur Änderung der Prüfungsordnung für die Prüfung in den Masterstudiengängen für das Lehramt an Grundschulen, das Lehramt an Realschulen plus, das Lehramt an Förderschulen sowie das Lehramt an Gymnasien an der Universität Koblenz-Landau Zehnte Ordnung zur Änderung der Prüfungsordnung für die Prüfung im lehramtsbezogenen Bachelorstudiengang Berufsbildende Schulen an der Universität Koblenz-Landau, der Hochschule Koblenz und der philosophisch-Theologischen Hochschule Vallendar Neunte Ordnung zur Änderung der Ordnung für die Prüfung im Masterstudiengang Lehramt an berufsbildenden Schulen an der Universität Koblenz-Landau, der Hochschule Koblenz und der Philosophisch-Theologischen Hochschule Vallendar Achtzehnte Ordnung zur Änderung der Ordnung für die Prüfung im lehramtsbezogenen Zertifikatsstudiengang (Erweiterungsprüfung) an der Universität Koblenz-Landau Sechzehnte Ordnung zur Änderung der Prüfungsordnung für die Prüfung im Zwei-Fach-Bachelorstudiengang an der Universität Koblenz-Landau Zweite Ordnung zur Änderung der Gemeinsamen Prüfungsordnung für den Bachelorstudiengang „Angewandte Naturwissenschaften“ und den Masterstudiengang „Chemie und Physik funktionaler Materialien“ an der Universität Koblenz-Landau Vierte Ordnung zur Änderung der Ordnung für die Prüfung im Bachelorstudiengang und im Masterstudiengang BioGeoWissenschaften der Universität Koblenz-Landau Zweite Ordnung zur Änderung der Gemeinsamen Prüfungsordnung für den Bachelorstudiengang „Mathematische Modellierung“ und den Masterstudiengang „Mathematical Modeling of Complex Systems“ an der Universität Koblenz-Landau