Evolutionary Genomics in Daphnia (2017)

Maike Herrmann

For a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes and for providing reliable prognoses about the future consequences of environmental change, it is essential to reveal the genetic basis underlying adaptive responses. The importance of this goal increases in light of ongoing climate change, which confronts organisms worldwide with new selection pressures and requires rapid evolutionary change to avoid local extinction. Thereby, freshwater ectotherms like daphnids are particularly threatened. Unraveling the genetic basis of local adaptation is complicated by the interplay of forces affecting patterns of genetic divergence among populations. Due to their key position in freshwater communities, cyclic parthenogenetic mode of reproduction and resting propagules (which form biological archives), daphnids are particularly suited for this purpose. The aim of this thesis was to assess the impact of local thermal selection on the Daphnia longispina complex and to reveal the underlying genetic loci. Therefore, I compared genetic differentiation among populations containing Daphnia galeata, Daphnia longispina and their interspecific hybrids across time, space, and species boundaries. I revealed strongly contrasting patterns of genetic differentiation between selectively neutral and functional candidate gene markers, between the two species, and among samples from different lakes, suggesting (together with a correlation with habitat temperatures) local thermal selection acting on candidate gene TRY5F and indicating adaptive introgression. To reveal the candidate genes’ impact on fitness, I performed association analyses among data on genotypes and phenotypic traits of D. galeata clones from seven populations. The tests revealed a general temperature effect as well as inter-population differences in phenotypic traits and imply a possible contribution of the candidate genes to life-history traits. Finally, utilizing a combined population transcriptomic and reverse ecology approach, I introduced a methodology with a wide range of applications in evolutionary biology and revealed that local thermal selection was probably a minor force in shaping sequence and gene expression divergence among four D. galeata populations, but contributed to sequence divergence among two populations. I identified many transcripts possibly under selection or contributing strongly to population divergence, a large amount thereof putatively under local thermal selection, and showed that genetic and gene expression variation is not depleted specifically in temperature-related candidate genes. In conclusion, I detected signs of local adaptation in the D. longispina complex across space, time, and species barriers. Populations and species remained genetically divergent, although increased gene flow possibly contributed, together with genotypes recruited from the resting egg bank, to the maintenance of standing genetic variation. Further work is required to accurately determine the influence of introgression and the effects of candidate genes on individual fitness. While I found no evidence suggesting a response to intense local thermal selection, the high resilience and adaptive potential regarding environmental change I observed suggest positive future prospects for the populations of the D. longispina complex. However, overall, due to the continuing environmental degradation, daphnids and other aquatic invertebrates remain vulnerable and threatened.

Campuszeitung Ausg. 1/2017 (2017)

10 Jahre Kulturwissenschaft Innovation für das autonome Fahren Griechenlands Krise und die prinzipiellen Bedingungen für produktives Arbeiten Gesundheitsmanagement am Campus Holzfaser-Kunststoff-Verbundwerkstoffe

Unternehmensflexibilität: Arbeitspolitische Gestaltungsmuster und Steuerungsmechanismen vor dem Hintergrund divergenter institutioneller Systeme im internationalen Vergleich - Eine Fallstudie innerhalb des Daimler-Konzerns (2017)

Sven Ochsenreither

Die Dissertation bietet einen internationalen Vergleich von Gestaltungsmustern der Flexibilitätssteuerung von Unternehmen mit Schwerpunkt auf die Automobilindustrie. Vor dem Hintergrund unterschiedlicher nationaler institutioneller Systeme werden betriebliche Flexibilitätsstrategien analysiert und deren Hintergründe und Funktionsweisen detailliert erläutert. Die Analyse institutioneller Rahmenbedingungen erfolgt mittels der "Varieties of Capitalism". Die Eruierung von Flexibilitätsstrategien basiert auf einer internationalen Fallstudie.

Accelerating volume rendering for virtual reality applications (2017)

Arend Buchacher

With the emergence of current generation head-mounted displays (HMDs), virtual reality (VR) is regaining much interest in the field of medical imaging and diagnosis. Room-scale exploration of CT or MRI data in virtual reality feels like an intuitive application. However in VR retaining a high frame rate is more critical than for conventional user interaction seated in front of a screen. There is strong scientific evidence suggesting that low frame rates and high latency have a strong influence on the appearance of cybersickness. This thesis explores two practical approaches to overcome the high computational cost of volume rendering for virtual reality. One lies within the exploitation of coherency properties of the especially costly stereoscopic rendering setup. The main contribution is the development and evaluation of a novel acceleration technique for stereoscopic GPU ray casting. Additionally, an asynchronous rendering approach is pursued to minimize the amount of latency in the system. A selection of image warping techniques has been implemented and evaluated methodically, assessing the applicability for VR volume rendering.

GeKOS - Gemeinsam entdecken Kinder ihren Ort mit Studierenden (2017)

Heike de Boer Benjamin Braß Henrik Bruns

Dieses Dokument umfasst den ersten Zwischenbericht zum Projekt GeKOS – Gemeinsam entdecken Kinder ihren Ort mit Studierenden, der im September 2016 an die Schöpflin-Stiftung übergeben wurde, sowie zentrale Evaluationsinstrumente aus dem 1. und 2. Durchgang.

Mitteilungsblatt der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Nr. 4/2017 (2017)

Beitragsordnung der Studierendenschaft der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau

Mitteilungsblatt der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Nr. 3/2017 (2017)

Achte 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 Siebte 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 Beitragsordnung der Studierendenschaft der Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau

Real-time sensor-based motion capture system for virtaul reality (2017)

Vera Christ

Motion Capture bezeichnet das Aufnehmen, Weiterverarbeiten und auf ein 3D Modell Übertragen von reellen Bewegungen. Nicht nur in der Film- und Spieleindustrie schafft Motion Capture heute einen nicht mehr wegzudenkende Realismus in der Bewegung von Mensch und Tier. Im Kontext der Robotik, der medizinischen Bewegunsthearpie, sowie in AR und VR wird Motion Capture extensiv genutzt. Neben den etablierten optischen Verfah- ren kommen aber gerade in den letzen drei Bereichen auch vermehrt alternative Systeme, die auf Intertialsystemen (IMUs) basieren zum Einsatz, da sie nicht auf externe Kameras angewiesen sind und somit den Bewegungsraum deutlich weniger beschränken. Schnell vorranschreitender technischer Fortschritt in der Herstellung solcher IMUs, erlaubt den Bau kleiner Sensoren die am Körper getragen werden können und die Bewegung an einen Computer übertragen. Die Entwicklung in der Anwendung von Inertialsystemen auf den Bereich des Motion Capture, steckt allerdings noch in den Kinderschuhen. Probleme wie Drift können bis- her nur durch zusätzliche Hardware, zur Korrektur der Daten, minimiert werden. In der folgenden Masterarbeit wird ein IMU basiertes Motion Capture System aufgebaut. Dies umfasst den Bau der Hardware sowie die softwa- reseitige Verarbeitung der erhaltenen Bewegungsinformationen und deren Übertragung auf ein 3D Modell.

Managing and using provenance in the semantic web (2017)

Renata Queiroz Dividino

The Web contains some extremely valuable information; however, often poor quality, inaccurate, irrelevant or fraudulent information can also be found. With the increasing amount of data available, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish truth from speculation on the Web. One of the most, if not the most, important criterion used to evaluate data credibility is the information source, i.e., the data origin. Trust in the information source is a valuable currency users have to evaluate such data. Data popularity, recency (or the time of validity), reliability, or vagueness ascribed to the data may also help users to judge the validity and appropriateness of information sources. We call this knowledge derived from the data the provenance of the data. Provenance is an important aspect of the Web. It is essential in identifying the suitability, veracity, and reliability of information, and in deciding whether information is to be trusted, reused, or even integrated with other information sources. Therefore, models and frameworks for representing, managing, and using provenance in the realm of Semantic Web technologies and applications are critically required. This thesis highlights the benefits of the use of provenance in different Web applications and scenarios. In particular, it presents management frameworks for querying and reasoning in the Semantic Web with provenance, and presents a collection of Semantic Web tools that explore provenance information when ranking and updating caches of Web data. To begin, this thesis discusses a highly exible and generic approach to the treatment of provenance when querying RDF datasets. The approach re-uses existing RDF modeling possibilities in order to represent provenance. It extends SPARQL query processing in such a way that given a SPARQL query for data, one may request provenance without modifying it. The use of provenance within SPARQL queries helps users to understand how RDF facts arederived, i.e., it describes the data and the operations used to produce the derived facts. Turning to more expressive Semantic Web data models, an optimized algorithm for reasoning and debugging OWL ontologies with provenance is presented. Typical reasoning tasks over an expressive Description Logic (e.g., using tableau methods to perform consistency checking, instance checking, satisfiability checking, and so on) are in the worst case doubly exponential, and in practice are often likewise very expensive. With the algorithm described in this thesis, however, one can efficiently reason in OWL ontologies with provenance, i.e., provenance is efficiently combined and propagated within the reasoning process. Users can use the derived provenance information to judge the reliability of inferences and to find errors in the ontology. Next, this thesis tackles the problem of providing to Web users the right content at the right time. The challenge is to efficiently rank a stream of messages based on user preferences. Provenance is used to represent preferences, i.e., the user defines his preferences over the messages' popularity, recency, etc. This information is then aggregated to obtain a joint ranking. The aggregation problem is related to the problem of preference aggregation in Social Choice Theory. The traditional problem formulation of preference aggregation assumes a I fixed set of preference orders and a fixed set of domain elements (e.g. messages). This work, however, investigates how an aggregated preference order has to be updated when the domain is dynamic, i.e., the aggregation approach ranks messages 'on the y' as the message passes through the system. Consequently, this thesis presents computational approaches for online preference aggregation that handle the dynamic setting more efficiently than standard ones. Lastly, this thesis addresses the scenario of caching data from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. Data on the LOD cloud changes frequently and applications relying on that data - by pre-fetching data from the Web and storing local copies of it in a cache - need to continually update their caches. In order to make best use of the resources (e.g., network bandwidth for fetching data, and computation time) available, it is vital to choose a good strategy to know when to fetch data from which data source. A strategy to cope with data changes is to check for provenance. Provenance information delivered by LOD sources can denote when the resource on the Web has been changed last. Linked Data applications can benefit from this piece of information since simply checking on it may help users decide which sources need to be updated. For this purpose, this work describes an investigation of the availability and reliability of provenance information in the Linked Data sources. Another strategy for capturing data changes is to exploit provenance in a time-dependent function. Such a function should measure the frequency of the changes of LOD sources. This work describes, therefore, an approach to the analysis of data dynamics, i.e., the analysis of the change behavior of Linked Data sources over time, followed by the investigation of different scheduling update strategies to keep local LOD caches up-to-date. This thesis aims to prove the importance and benefits of the use of provenance in different Web applications and scenarios. The exibility of the approaches presented, combined with their high scalability, make this thesis a possible building block for the Semantic Web proof layer cake - the layer of provenance knowledge.

Test und Beurteilung der Echtzeitfähigkeit des Linux-Kernels mit und ohne Preemptive Patch (2017)

Felix Kloft

Wurden Echtzeitanwendungen früher meist auf hochspezialisierter Hardware und mit eigens dafür entwickelten Betriebssystemen ausgeführt, so wird heutzutage oft auch handelsübliche Hardware eingesetzt, auf dem eine Variante des Linux-Kernels läuft. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden Testverfahren aufgestellt und in Form einer Echtzeitanwendung implementiert, welche verschiedene Leistungsmerkmale des Linux-Kernels im Hinblick auf dessen Echtzeitfähigkeit messen. Diese Tests wurden auf drei verschiedenen Kernel-Versionen ausgeführt. Anschließend wurden die Ergebnisse der Testreihen miteinander verglichen.