Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of Periodical (36)
- Doctoral Thesis (27)
- Master's Thesis (8)
- Diploma Thesis (4)
- Study Thesis (4)
- Bachelor Thesis (2)
Language
- English (81) (remove)
Keywords
- Bluetooth (4)
- Software Engineering (4)
- Knowledge Compilation (3)
- Semantic Web (3)
- Campus Information System (2)
- E-KRHyper (2)
- Equality (2)
- Modellgetriebene Entwicklung (2)
- Ontology (2)
- Petri-Netze (2)
Institute
- Institut für Informatik (81) (remove)
This volume contains those research papers presented at the Second International Conference on Tests and Proofs (TAP 2008) that were not included in the main conference proceedings. TAP was the second conference devoted to the convergence of proofs and tests. It combines ideas from both areas for the advancement of software quality. To prove the correctness of a program is to demonstrate, through impeccable mathematical techniques, that it has no bugs; to test a program is to run it with the expectation of discovering bugs. On the surface, the two techniques seem contradictory: if you have proved your program, it is fruitless to comb it for bugs; and if you are testing it, that is surely a sign that you have given up on any hope of proving its correctness. Accordingly, proofs and tests have, since the onset of software engineering research, been pursued by distinct communities using rather different techniques and tools. And yet the development of both approaches leads to the discovery of common issues and to the realization that each may need the other. The emergence of model checking has been one of the first signs that contradiction may yield to complementarity, but in the past few years an increasing number of research efforts have encountered the need for combining proofs and tests, dropping earlier dogmatic views of their incompatibility and taking instead the best of what each of these software engineering domains has to offer. The first TAP conference (held at ETH Zurich in February 2007) was an attempt to provide a forum for the cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches from the testing and proving communities. For the 2008 edition we found the Monash University Prato Centre near Florence to be an ideal place providing a stimulating environment. We wish to sincerely thank all the authors who submitted their work for consideration. And we would like to thank the Program Committee members as well as additional referees for their great effort and professional work in the review and selection process. Their names are listed on the following pages. In addition to the contributed papers, the program included three excellent keynote talks. We are grateful to Michael Hennell (LDRA Ltd., Cheshire, UK), Orna Kupferman (Hebrew University, Israel), and Elaine Weyuker (AT&T Labs Inc., USA) for accepting the invitation to address the conference. Two very interesting tutorials were part of TAP 2008: "Parameterized Unit Testing with Pex" (J. de Halleux, N. Tillmann) and "Integrating Verification and Testing of Object-Oriented Software" (C. Engel, C. Gladisch, V. Klebanov, and P. Rümmer). We would like to express our thanks to the tutorial presenters for their contribution. It was a team effort that made the conference so successful. We are grateful to the Conference Chair and the Steering Committee members for their support. And we particularly thank Christoph Gladisch, Beate Körner, and Philipp Rümmer for their hard work and help in making the conference a success. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Microsoft Research Redmond, who financed an invited speaker.
Folksonomies are Web 2.0 platforms where users share resources with each other. Furthermore, they can assign keywords (called tags) to the resources for categorizing and organizing the resources. Numerous types of resources like websites (Delicious), images (Flickr), and videos (YouTube) are supported by different folksonomies. The folksonomies are easy to use and thus attract the attention of millions of users. Together with the ease they offer, there are also some problems. This thesis addresses different problems of folksonomies and proposes solutions for these problems. The first problem occurs when users search for relevant resources in folksonomies. Often, the users are not able to find all relevant resources because they don't know which tags are relevant. The second problem is assigning tags to resources. Although many folksonomies (like Delicious) recommend tags for the resources, other folksonomies (like Flickr) do not recommend any tags. Tag recommendation helps the users to easily tag their resources. The third problem is that tags and resources are lacking semantics. This leads for example to ambiguous tags. The tags are lacking semantics because they are freely chosen keywords. The automatic identification of the semantics of tags and resources helps in reducing problems that arise from this freedom of the users in choosing the tags. This thesis proposes methods which exploit semantics to address the problems of search, tag recommendation, and the identification of tag semantics. The semantics are discovered from a variety of sources. In this thesis, we exploit web search engines, online social communities and the co-occurrences of tags as sources of semantics. Using different sources for discovering semantics reduces the efforts to build systems which solve the problems mentioned earlier. This thesis evaluates the proposed methods on a large scale data set. The evaluation results suggest that it is possible to exploit the semantics for improving search, recommendation of tags, and automatic identification of the semantics of tags and resources.
One task of executives and project managers in IT companies or departments is to hire suitable developers and to assign them to suitable problems. In this paper, we propose a new technique that directly leverages previous work experience of developers in a systematic manner. Existing evidence for developer expertise based on the version history of existing projects is analyzed. More specifically, we analyze the commits to a repository in terms of affected API usage. On these grounds, we associate APIs with developers and thus we assess API experience of developers. In transitive closure, we also assess programming domain experience.
Social media provides a powerful way for people to share opinions and sentiments about a specific topic, allowing others to benefit from these thoughts and feelings. This procedure generates a huge amount of unstructured data, such as texts, images, and references that are constantly increasing through daily comments to related discussions. However, the vast amount of unstructured data presents risks to the information-extraction process, and so decision making becomes highly challenging. This is because data overload may cause the loss of useful data due to its inappropriate presentation and its accumulation. To this extent, this thesis contributed to the field of analyzing and detecting feelings in images and texts. And that by extracting the feelings and opinions hidden in a huge collection of image data and texts on social networks After that, these feelings are classified into positive, negative, or neutral, according to the features of the classified data. The process of extracting these feelings greatly helps in decision-making processes on various topics as will be explained in the first chapter of the thesis. A system has been built that can classify the feelings inherent in the images and texts on social media sites, such as people’s opinions about products and companies, personal posts, and general messages. This thesis begins by introducing a new method of reducing the dimension of text data based on data-mining approaches and then examines the sentiment based on neural and deep neural network classification algorithms. Subsequently, in contrast to sentiment analysis research in text datasets, we examine sentiment expression and polarity classification within and across image datasets by building deep neural networks based on the attention mechanism.
Semantic descriptions of non-textual media available on the web can be used to facilitate retrieval and presentation of media assets and documents containing them. While technologies for multimedia semantic descriptions already exist, there is as yet no formal description of a high quality multimedia ontology that is compatible with existing (semantic) web technologies. We explain the complexity of the problem using an annotation scenario. We then derive a number of requirements for specifying a formal multimedia ontology, including: compatibility with MPEG-7, embedding in foundational ontologies, and modularisation including separation of document structure from domain knowledge. We then present the developed ontology and discuss it with respect to our requirements.
We aim to demonstrate that automated deduction techniques, in particular those following the model computation paradigm, are very well suited for database schema/query reasoning. Specifically, we present an approach to compute completed paths for database or XPath queries. The database schema and a query are transformed to disjunctive logic programs with default negation, using a description logic as an intermediate language. Our underlying deduction system, KRHyper, then detects if a query is satisfiable or not. In case of a satisfiable query, all completed paths -- those that fulfill all given constraints -- are returned as part of the computed models. The purpose of our approach is to dramatically reduce the workload on the query processor. Without the path completion, a usual XML query processor would search the database for solutions to the query. In the paper we describe the transformation in detail and explain how to extract the solution to the original task from the computed models. We understand this paper as a first step, that covers a basic schema/query reaÂsoning task by model-based deduction. Due to the underlying expressive logic formalism we expect our approach to easily adapt to more sophisticated problem settings, like type hierarchies as they evolve within the XML world.
Hyper tableaux with equality
(2007)
In most theorem proving applications, a proper treatment of equational theories or equality is mandatory. In this paper we show how to integrate a modern treatment of equality in the hyper tableau calculus. It is based on splitting of positive clauses and an adapted version of the superposition inference rule, where equations used for paramodulation are drawn (only) from a set of positive unit clauses, the candidate model. The calculus also features a generic, semantically justified simplification rule which covers many redundancy elimination techniques known from superposition theorem proving. Our main results are soundness and completeness, but we briefly describe the implementation, too.
The Living Book is a system for the management of personalized and scenario specific teaching material. The main goal of the system is to support the active, explorative and selfdetermined learning in lectures, tutorials and self study. The Living Book includes a course on 'logic for computer scientists' with a uniform access to various tools like theorem provers and an interactive tableau editor. It is routinely used within teaching undergraduate courses at our university. This paper describes the Living Book and the use of theorem proving technology as a core component in the knowledge management system (KMS) of the Living Book. The KMS provides a scenario management component where teachers may describe those parts of given documents that are relevant in order to achieve a certain learning goal. The task of the KMS is to assemble new documents from a database of elementary units called 'slices' (definitions, theorems, and so on) in a scenario-based way (like 'I want to prepare for an exam and need to learn about resolution'). The computation of such assemblies is carried out by a model-generating theorem prover for first-order logic with a default negation principle. Its input consists of meta data that describe the dependencies between different slices, and logic-programming style rules that describe the scenario-specific composition of slices. Additionally, a user model is taken into account that contains information about topics and slices that are known or unknown to a student. A model computed by the system for such input then directly specifies the document to be assembled. This paper introduces the elearning context we are faced with, motivates our choice of logic and presents the newly developed calculus used in the KMS.
The model evolution calculus
(2004)
The DPLL procedure is the basis of some of the most successful propositional satisfiability solvers to date. Although originally devised as a proof procedure for first-order logic, it has been used almost exclusively for propositional logic so far because of its highly inefficient treatment of quantifiers, based on instantiation into ground formulas. The recent FDPLL calculus by Baumgartner was the first successful attempt to lift the procedure to the first-order level without resorting to ground instantiations. FDPLL lifts to the first-order case the core of the DPLL procedure, the splitting rule, but ignores other aspects of the procedure that, although not necessary for completeness, are crucial for its effectiveness in practice. In this paper, we present a new calculus loosely based on FDPLL that lifts these aspects as well. In addition to being a more faithful litfing of the DPLL procedure, the new calculus contains a more systematic treatment of universal literals, one of FDPLL's optimizations, and so has the potential of leading to much faster implementations.
This minor thesis shows a way to optimise a generated oracle to achieve shorter runtimes. Shorter runtimes of test cases allows the execution of more test cases in the same time. The execution of more test cases leads to a higher confidence in the software-quality. Oracles can be derived from specifications. However specifications are used for different purposes and therefore are not necessarily executable. Even if the are executable it might be with only a high runtime. Those two facts come mostly from the use of quantifiers in the logic. If the quantifier-range is not bounded, respectively if the bounds are outside the target language-datatype-limits, the specification is too expressive to be exported into a program. Even if the bounds inside the used datatype-limits, the quantification is represented as a loop which leads to a runtime blowup, especially if quantifiers are nested. This work explains four different possibilities to reduce the execution time of the oracle by manipulating the quantified formular whereas this approach is only applicable if the quantified variables are of type Integer.
E-KRHyper is a versatile theorem prover and model generator for firstorder logic that natively supports equality. Inequality of constants, however, has to be given by explicitly adding facts. As the amount of these facts grows quadratically in the number of these distinct constants, the knowledge base is blown up. This makes it harder for a human reader to focus on the actual problem, and impairs the reasoning process. We extend E-Hyper- underlying E-KRhyper tableau calculus to avoid this blow-up by implementing a native handling for inequality of constants. This is done by introducing the unique name assumption for a subset of the constants (the so called distinct object identifiers). The obtained calculus is shown to be sound and complete and is implemented into the E-KRHyper system. Synthetic benchmarks, situated in the theory of arrays, are used to back up the benefits of the new calculus.
This dissertation introduces a methodology for formal specification and verification of user interfaces under security aspects. The methodology allows to use formal methods pervasively in the specification and verification of human-computer interaction. This work consists of three parts. In the first part, a formal methodology for the description of human-computer interaction is developed. In the second part, existing definitions of computer security are adapted for human-computer interaction and formalized. A generic formal model of human-computer interaction is developed. In the third part, the methodology is applied to the specification and verification of a secure email client.
Avoidance of routing loops
(2009)
We introduce a new routing algorithm which can detect routing loops by evaluating routing updates more thoroughly. Our new algorithm is called Routing with Metric based Topology Investigation (RMTI), which is based on the simple Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and is compatible to all RIP versions. In case of a link failure, a network can reorganize itself if there are redundant links available. Redundant links are only available in a network system like the internet if the topology contains loops. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize and to prevent routing loops. A routing loop can be seen as a circular trace of a routing update information which returns to the same router, either directly from the neighbor router or via a loop topology. Routing loops could consume a large amount of network bandwidth and could impact the endtoend performance of the network. Our RMTI approach is capable to improve the efficiency of Distance Vector Routing.
The University of Koblenz-Landau would like to apply for participation in the RoboCup Mixed Reality League in Suzhou, China 2008. Our team is composed of ten team members and two supervisors. All members are graduate students of Computational Visualistics. Our supervisors are Ph.D. candidates currently researching in the working groups of artificial intelligence and computer graphics.
This thesis proposes the use of MSR (Mining Software Repositories) techniques to identify software developers with exclusive expertise about specific APIs and programming domains in software repositories. A pilot Tool for finding such
“Islands of Knowledge” in Node.js projects is presented and applied in a case study to the 180 most popular npm packages. It is found that on average each package has 2.3 Islands of Knowledge, which is possibly explained by the finding that npm packages tend to have only one main contributor. In a survey, the maintainers of 50 packages are contacted and asked for opinions on the results produced by the Tool. Together with their responses, this thesis reports on experiences made with the pilot Tool and how future iterations could produce even more accurate statements about programming expertise distribution in developer teams.
The term "Augmented Reality (AR)" denotes the superposition of additional virtual objects and supplementary information over real images. The joint project Enhanced Reality (ER)1 aims at a generic AR-system. The ER-project is a cooperation of six different research groups of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Koblenz-Landau. According to Ronald Azuma an AR-system combines real and virtual environments, where the real and virtual objects are registered in 3-D, and it provides interactivity in real time [Azu97]. Enhanced Reality extends Augmented Reality by requiring the virtual objects to be seamlessly embedded into the real world as photo-realistic objects according to the exact lighting conditions. Furthermore, additional information supplying value-added services may be displayed and interaction of the user may even be immersive. The short-term goal of the ER-project is the exploration of ER-fundamentals using some specific research scenarios; the long-term goal is the development of a component-based ER-framework for the creation of ER-applications for arbitrary application areas. ER-applications are developed as single-user applications for users who are moving in a real environment and are wearing some kind of visual output device like see-through glasses and some mobile end device. By these devices the user is able to see reality as it is, but he can also see the virtual objects and the additional information about some value-added service. Furthermore he might have additional devices whereby he can interact with the available virtual objects. The development of a generic framework for ER-applications requires the definition of generic components which are customizable and composable to build concrete applications and it requires a homogeneous data model which supports all components equally well. The workgroup "Software Technology"2 is responsible for this subproject. This report gives some preliminary results concerning the derivation of a component-based view of ER. There are several augmented reality frameworks like ARVIKA, AMIRE, DWARF, MORGAN, Studierstube and others which offer some support for the development of AR-applications. All of them ease the use of existing subsystems like AR-Toolkit, OpenGL and others and leverage the generation process for realistic systems by making efficient use of those subsystems. Consequently, they highly rely on them.
This thesis introduces fnnlib, a C++ library for recurrent neural network simulations that I developed between October 2009 and March 2010 at Osaka University's Graduate School of Engineering. After covering the theory behind recurrent neural networks, backpropagation through time, recurrent neural networks with parametric bias, continuous-time recurrent neural networks, and echo state networks, the design of the library is explained. All of the classes as well as their interrelationships are presented along with reasons as to why certain design decisions were made. Towards the end of the thesis, a small practical example is shown. Also, fnnlib is compared to other neural network libraries.
Semantic desktop environments aim at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of users carrying out daily tasks within their personal information management infrastructure (PIM). They support the user by transferring and exploiting the explicit semantics of data items across different PIM applications. Whether such an approach does indeed reach its aim of facilitating users" life and—if so—to which extent, however, remains an open question that we address in this paper with the first summative evaluation of a semantic desktop approach. We approach the research question exploiting our own semantic desktop infrastructure, X-COSIM. As data corpus, we have used over 100 emails and 50 documents extracted from the organizers of a conference-like event at our university. The evaluation has been carried out with 18 subjects. We have developed a test environment to evaluate COSIMail and COSIFile, two semantic PIM applications based on X-COSIM. As result, we have found a significant improvement for typical PIM tasks compared to a standard desktop environment.
In this paper we describe a series of projects on location based and personalised information systems. We start wit a basic research project and we show how we came with the help of two other more application oriented project to a product. This is developed by a consortium of enterprises and it already is in use in the city of Koblenz.
In this paper we describe a network for distributing personalized information within a pervasive university. We discuss the system architecture of our Bluetooth-based CampusNews-system, both, from the administrator and the user viewpoint. We furthermore present first statistical data about the usage of the partial installation at the Koblenz campus together with an outlook to future work.
In this paper we describe a network for distributing personalized Information in a metropolitan area. We discuss the system architecture of our Bluetooth-based information system as well as the reasoning process that fits users" needs with potential messages. We furthermore present our findings on parallelizing Bluetooth connection setup and performance.
This paper shows how multiagent systems can be modeled by a combination of UML statecharts and hybrid automata. This allows formal system specification on different levels of abstraction on the one hand, and expressing real-time system behavior with continuous variables on the other hand. It is not only shown how multi-robot systems can be modeled by a combination of hybrid automata and hierarchical state machines, but also how model checking techniques for hybrid automata can be applied. An enhanced synchronization concept is introduced that allows synchronization taking time and avoids state explosion to a certain extent.
Knowledge compilation is a common technique for propositional logic knowledge bases. The idea is to transform a given knowledge base into a special normal form ([MR03],[DH05]), for which queries can be answered efficiently. This precompilation step is very expensive but it only has to be performed once. We propose to apply this technique to knowledge bases defined in Description Logics. For this, we introduce a normal form, called linkless concept descriptions, for ALC concepts. Further we present an algorithm, based on path dissolution, which can be used to transform a given concept description into an equivalent linkless concept description. Finally we discuss a linear satisfiability test as well as a subsumption test for linkless concept descriptions.
This paper offers an informal overview and discussion on first order predicate logic reasoning systems together with a description of applications which are carried out in the Artificial Intelligence Research Group of the University in Koblenz. Furthermore the technique of knowledge compilation is shortly introduced.
Connected vehicles will have a tremendous impact on tomorrow’s mobility solutions. Such systems will heavily rely on information delivery in time to ensure the functional reliability, security and safety. However, the host-centric communication model of today’s networks questions efficient data dissemination in a scale, especially in networks characterized by a high degree of mobility. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm has evolved as a promising candidate for the next generation of network architectures. Based on a loosely coupled communication model, the in-network processing and caching capabilities of ICNs are promising to solve the challenges set by connected vehicular systems. In such networks, a special class of caching strategies which take action by placing a consumer’s anticipated content actively at the right network nodes in time are promising to reduce the data delivery time. This thesis contributes to the research in active placement strategies in information-centric and computation-centric vehicle networks for providing dynamic access to content and computation results. By analyzing different vehicular applications and their requirements, novel caching strategies are developed in order to reduce the time of content retrieval. The caching strategies are compared and evaluated against the state-of-the-art in both extensive simulations as well as real world deployments. The results are showing performance improvements by increasing the content retrieval (availability of specific data increased up to 35% compared to state-of-the-art caching strategies), and reducing the delivery times (roughly double the number of data retrieval from neighboring nodes). However, storing content actively in connected vehicle networks raises questions regarding security and privacy. In the second part of the thesis, an access control framework for information-centric connected vehicles is presented. Finally, open security issues and research directions in executing computations at the edge of connected vehicle networks are presented.
The publication of freely available and machine-readable information has increased significantly in the last years. Especially the Linked Data initiative has been receiving a lot of attention. Linked Data is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and anybody can simply publish their data in RDF and link it to other datasets. The structure is similar to the World Wide Web where individual HTML documents are connected with links. Linked Data entities are identified by URIs which are dereferenceable to retrieve information describing the entity. Additionally, so called SPARQL endpoints can be used to access the data with an algebraic query language (SPARQL) similar to SQL. By integrating multiple SPARQL endpoints it is possible to create a federation of distributed RDF data sources which acts like one big data store.
In contrast to the federation of classical relational database systems there are some differences for federated RDF data. RDF stores are accessed either via SPARQL endpoints or by resolving URIs. There is no coordination between RDF data sources and machine-readable meta data about a source- data is commonly limited or not available at all. Moreover, there is no common directory which can be used to discover RDF data sources or ask for sources which offer specific data. The federation of distributed and linked RDF data sources has to deal with various challenges. In order to distribute queries automatically, suitable data sources have to be selected based on query details and information that is available about the data sources. Furthermore, the minimization of query execution time requires optimization techniques that take into account the execution cost for query operators and the network communication overhead for contacting individual data sources. In this thesis, solutions for these problems are discussed. Moreover, SPLENDID is presented, a new federation infrastructure for distributed RDF data sources which uses optimization techniques based on statistical information.
Using semantic data from general-purpose programming languages does not provide the unified experience one would want for such an application. Static error checking is lacking, especially with regards to static typing of the data. Based on the previous work of λ-DL, which integrates semantic queries and concepts as types into a typed λ-calculus, this work takes its ideas a step further to meld them into a real-world programming language. This thesis explores how λ-DL's features can be extended and integrated into an existing language, researches an appropriate extension mechanism and produces Semantics4J, a JastAdd-based Java language semantic data extension for type-safe OWL programming, together with examples of its usage.
For software engineers, conceptually understanding the tools they are using in the context of their projects is a daily challenge and a prerequisite for complex tasks. Textual explanations and code examples serve as knowledge resources for understanding software languages and software technologies. This thesis describes research on integrating and interconnecting
existing knowledge resources, which can then be used to assist with understanding and comparing software languages and software technologies on a conceptual level. We consider the following broad research questions that we later refine: What knowledge resources can be systematically reused for recovering structured knowledge and how? What vocabulary already exists in literature that is used to express conceptual knowledge? How can we reuse the
online encyclopedia Wikipedia? How can we detect and report on instances of technology usage? How can we assure reproducibility as the central quality factor of any construction process for knowledge artifacts? As qualitative research, we describe methodologies to recover knowledge resources by i.) systematically studying literature, ii.) mining Wikipedia, iii.) mining available textual explanations and code examples of technology usage. The theoretical findings are backed by case studies. As research contributions, we have recovered i.) a reference semantics of vocabulary for describing software technology usage with an emphasis on software languages, ii.) an annotated corpus of Wikipedia articles on software languages, iii.) insights into technology usage on GitHub with regard to a catalog of pattern and iv.) megamodels of technology usage that are interconnected with existing textual explanations and code examples.
This paper documents the development of an abstract physics layer (APL) for Simspark. After short introductions to physics engines and Simspark, reasons why an APL was developed are explained. The biggest part of this paper describes the new design and why certain design choices were made based on requirements that arose during developement. It concludes by explaining how the new design was eventually implemented and what future possibilities the new design holds.
Interactive video retrieval
(2006)
The goal of this thesis is to develop a video retrieval system that supports relevance feedback. One research approach of the thesis is to find out if a combination of implicit and explicit relevance feedback returns better retrieval results than a system using explicit feedback only. Another approach is to identify a model to weight existing feature categories. For this purpose, a state-of-the-art analysis is presented and two systems implemented, which run under the conditions of the international TRECVID workshop. It will be a basis system for further research approaches in the field of interactive video retrieval. Amongst others, it shall participate in the 2006 search task of the mentioned workshop.
Empirical studies in software engineering use software repositories as data sources to understand software development. Repository data is either used to answer questions that guide the decision-making in the software development, or to provide tools that help with practical aspects of developers’ everyday work. Studies are classified into the field of Empirical Software Engineering (ESE), and more specifically into Mining Software Repositories (MSR). Studies working with repository data often focus on their results. Results are statements or tools, derived from the data, that help with practical aspects of software development. This thesis focuses on the methods and high order methods used to produce such results. In particular, we focus on incremental methods to scale the processing of repositories, declarative methods to compose a heterogeneous analysis, and high order methods used to reason about threats to methods operating on repositories. We summarize this as technical and methodological improvements. We contribute the improvements to methods and high-order methods in the context of MSR/ESE to produce future empirical results more effectively. We contribute the following improvements. We propose a method to improve the scalability of functions that abstract over repositories with high revision count in a theoretically founded way. We use insights on abstract algebra and program incrementalization to define a core interface of highorder functions that compute scalable static abstractions of a repository with many revisions. We evaluate the scalability of our method by benchmarks, comparing a prototype with available competitors in MSR/ESE. We propose a method to improve the definition of functions that abstract over a repository with a heterogeneous technology stack, by using concepts from declarative logic programming and combining them with ideas on megamodeling and linguistic architecture. We reproduce existing ideas on declarative logic programming with languages close to Datalog, coming from architecture recovery, source code querying, and static program analysis, and transfer them from the analysis of a homogeneous to a heterogeneous technology stack. We provide a prove-of-concept of such method in a case study. We propose a high-order method to improve the disambiguation of threats to methods used in MSR/ESE. We focus on a better disambiguation of threats, operationalizing reasoning about them, and making the implications to a valid data analysis methodology explicit, by using simulations. We encourage researchers to accomplish their work by implementing ‘fake’ simulations of their MSR/ESE scenarios, to operationalize relevant insights about alternative plausible results, negative results, potential threats and the used data analysis methodologies. We prove that such way of simulation based testing contributes to the disambiguation of threats in published MSR/ESE research.
This thesis addresses the problem of terrain classification in unstructured outdoor environments. Terrain classification includes the detection of obstacles and passable areas as well as the analysis of ground surfaces. A 3D laser range finder is used as primary sensor for perceiving the surroundings of the robot. First of all, a grid structure is introduced for data reduction. The chosen data representation allows for multi-sensor integration, e.g., cameras for color and texture information or further laser range finders for improved data density. Subsequently, features are computed for each terrain cell within the grid. Classification is performedrnwith a Markov random field for context-sensitivity and to compensate for sensor noise and varying data density within the grid. A Gibbs sampler is used for optimization and is parallelized on the CPU and GPU in order to achieve real-time performance. Dynamic obstacles are detected and tracked using different state-of-the-art approaches. The resulting information - where other traffic participants move and are going to move to - is used to perform inference in regions where the terrain surface is partially or completely invisible for the sensors. Algorithms are tested and validated on different autonomous robot platforms and the evaluation is carried out with human-annotated ground truth maps of millions of measurements. The terrain classification approach of this thesis proved reliable in all real-time scenarios and domains and yielded new insights. Furthermore, if combined with a path planning algorithm, it enables full autonomy for all kinds of wheeled outdoor robots in natural outdoor environments.
In the last decade, policy-makers around the world have turned their attention toward the creative industry as the economic engine and significant driver of employments. Yet, the literature suggests that creative workers are one of the most vulnerable work-forces of today’s economy. Because of the highly deregulated and highly individuated environment, failure or success are believed to be the byproduct of individual ability and commitment, rather than a structural or collective issue. This thesis taps into the temporal, spatial, and social resolution of digital behavioural data to show that there are indeed structural and historical issues that impact individuals’ and
groups’ careers. To this end, this thesis offers a computational social science research framework that brings together the decades-long theoretical and empirical knowledge of inequality studies, and computational methods that deal with the complexity and scale of digital data. By taking music industry and science as use cases, this thesis starts off by proposing a novel gender detection method that exploits image search and face-detection methods.
By analysing the collaboration patterns and citation networks of male and female computer scientists, it sheds lights on some of the historical biases and disadvantages that women face in their scientific career. In particular, the relation of scientific success and gender-specific collaboration patterns is assessed. To elaborate further on the temporal aspect of inequalities in scientific careers, this thesis compares the degree of vertical and horizontal inequalities among the cohorts of scientists that started their career at different point in time. Furthermore, the structural inequality in music industry is assessed by analyzing the social and cultural relations that breed from live performances and musics releases. The findings hint toward the importance of community belonging at different stages of artists’ careers. This thesis also quantifies some of the underlying mechanisms and processes of inequality, such as the Matthew Effect and the Hipster Paradox, in creative careers. Finally, this thesis argues that online platforms such as Wikipedia could reflect and amplify the existing biases.
Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are often listed as the three major requirements for achieving data security and are collectively referred to as the C-I-A triad. Confidentiality of data restricts the data access to authorized parties only, integrity means that the data can only be modified by authorized parties, and availability states that the data must always be accessible when requested. Although these requirements are relevant for any computer system, they are especially important in open and distributed networks. Such networks are able to store large amounts of data without having a single entity in control of ensuring the data's security. The Semantic Web applies to these characteristics as well as it aims at creating a global and decentralized network of machine-readable data. Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data is therefore also important and must be achieved by corresponding security mechanisms. However, the current reference architecture of the Semantic Web does not define any particular security mechanism yet which implements these requirements. Instead, it only contains a rather abstract representation of security.
This thesis fills this gap by introducing three different security mechanisms for each of the identified security requirements confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Semantic Web data. The mechanisms are not restricted to the very basics of implementing each of the requirements and provide additional features as well. Confidentiality is usually achieved with data encryption. This thesis not only provides an approach for encrypting Semantic Web data, it also allows to search in the resulting ciphertext data without decrypting it first. Integrity of data is typically implemented with digital signatures. Instead of defining a single signature algorithm, this thesis defines a formal framework for signing arbitrary Semantic Web graphs which can be configured with various algorithms to achieve different features. Availability is generally supported by redundant data storage. This thesis expands the classical definition of availability to compliant availability which means that data must only be available as long as the access request complies with a set of predefined policies. This requirement is implemented with a modular and extensible policy language for regulating information flow control. This thesis presents each of these three security mechanisms in detail, evaluates them against a set of requirements, and compares them with the state of the art and related work.
Die Entwicklung von Algorithmen im Sinne des Algorithm Engineering geschieht zyklisch. Der entworfene Algorithmus wird theoretisch analysiert und anschließend implementiert. Nach der praktischen Evaluierung wird der Entwurf anhand der gewonnenen Kenntnisse weiter entwickelt. Formale Verifffizierung der Implementation neben der praktischen Evaluierung kann den Entwicklungsprozess verbessern. Mit der Java Modeling Language (JML) und dem KeY tool stehen eine einfache Spezififfkationssprache und ein benutzerfreundliches, automatisiertes Verififfkationstool zur Verfügung. Diese Arbeit untersucht, inwieweit das KeY tool für die Verifffizierung von komplexeren Algorithmen geeignet ist und welche Rückmeldungen für Algorithmiker aus der Verififfkation gewonnen werden können.Die Untersuchung geschieht anhand von Dijkstras Algorithmus zur Berechnung von kürzesten Wegen in einem Graphen. Es sollen eine konkrete Implementation des Standard-Algorithmus und anschließend Implementationen weiterer Varianten verifffiziert werden. Dies ahmt den Entwicklungsprozess des Algorithmus nach, um in jeder Iteration nach möglichen Rückmeldungen zu suchen. Bei der Verifffizierung der konkreten Implementation merken wir, dass es nötig ist, zuerst eine abstraktere Implementation mit einfacheren Datenstrukturen zu verififfzieren. Mit den dort gewonnenen Kenntnissen können wir dann die Verifikation der konkreten Implementation fortführen. Auch die Varianten des Algorithmus können dank der vorangehenden Verififfkationen verifiziert werden. Die Komplexität von Dijkstras Algorithmus bereitet dem KeY tool einige Schwierigkeiten bezüglich der Performanz, weswegen wir während der Verifizierung die Automatisierung etwas reduzieren müssen. Auf der anderenrn Seite zeigt sich, dass sich aus der Verifffikation einige Rückmeldungen ableiten lassen.
Software is vital for modern society. The efficient development of correct and reliable software is of ever-growing importance. An important technique to achieve this goal is deductive program verification: the construction of logical proofs that programs are correct. In this thesis, we address three important challenges for deductive verification on its way to a wider deployment in the industry: 1. verification of thread-based concurrent programs 2. correctness management of verification systems 3. change management in the verification process. These are consistently brought up by practitioners when applying otherwise mature verification systems. The three challenges correspond to the three parts of this thesis (not counting the introductory first part, providing technical background on the KeY verification approach). In the first part, we define a novel program logic for specifying correctness properties of object-oriented programs with unbounded thread-based concurrency. We also present a calculus for the above logic, which allows verifying actual Java programs. The calculus is based on symbolic execution resulting in its good understandability for the user. We describe the implementation of the calculus in the KeY verification system and present a case study. In the second part, we provide a first systematic survey and appraisal of factors involved in reliability of formal reasoning. We elucidate the potential and limitations of self-application of formal methods in this area and give recommendations based on our experience in design and operation of verification systems. In the third part, we show how the technique of similarity-based proof reuse can be applied to the problems of industrial verification life cycle. We address issues (e.g., coping with changes in the proof system) that are important in verification practice, but have been neglected by research so far.
Dualizing marked Petri nets results in tokens for transitions (t-tokens). A marked transition can strictly not be enabled, even if there are sufficient "enabling" tokens (p-tokens) on its input places. On the other hand, t-tokens can be moved by the firing of places. This permits flows of t-tokens which describe sequences of non-events. Their benefiit to simulation is the possibility to model (and observe) causes and effects of non-events, e.g. if something is broken down.
Probability propagation nets
(2007)
A class of high level Petri nets, called "probability propagation nets", is introduced which is particularly useful for modeling probability and evidence propagation. These nets themselves are well suited to represent the probabilistic Horn abduction, whereas specific foldings of them will be used for representing the flows of probabilities and likelihoods in Bayesian networks.
The paper deals with a specific introduction into probability propagation nets. Starting from dependency nets (which in a way can be considered the maximum information which follows from the directed graph structure of Bayesian networks), the probability propagation nets are constructed by joining a dependency net and (a slightly adapted version of) its dual net. Probability propagation nets are the Petri net version of Bayesian networks. In contrast to Bayesian networks, Petri nets are transparent and easy to operate. The high degree of transparency is due to the fact that every state in a process is visible as a marking of the Petri net. The convenient operability consists in the fact that there is no algorithm apart from the firing rule of Petri net transitions. Besides the structural importance of the Petri net duality there is a semantic matter; common sense in the form of probabilities and evidencebased likelihoods are dual to each other.
In this paper, we demonstrate by means of two examples how to work with probability propagation nets (PPNs). The fiirst, which comes from the book by Peng and Reggia [1], is a small example of medical diagnosis. The second one comes from [2]. It is an example of operational risk and is to show how the evidence flow in PPNs gives hints to reduce high losses. In terms of Bayesian networks, both examples contain cycles which are resolved by the conditioning technique [3].
Virtual reality is a growing field of interest as it provides a particular intuitive way of user-interaction. However, there are still open technical issues regarding latency — the delay between interaction and display reaction — and the trade-off between visual quality and frame-rate of real-time graphics, especially when taking visual effects like specular and semi-transparent surfaces and volumes into account. One solution, a distributed rendering setup, is presented in this thesis, in which the image synthesis is divided into an accurate but costly physically based rendering thread with a low refresh rate and a fast reprojection thread to remain a responsive interactivity with a high frame-rate. Two novel reprojection techniques are proposed that cover reflections and refractions produced by surface ray-tracing as well as volumetric light transport generated by volume ray-marching. The introduced setup can enhance the VR experience within several domains. In this thesis, three innovative training applications have been realized to investigate the added value of virtual reality to the three learning stages of observation, interaction and collaboration. For each stage an interdisciplinary curriculum, currently taught with traditional media, was transferred to a VR setting in order to investigate how virtual reality is capable of providing a natural, flexible and efficient learning environment
The trends of industry 4.0 and the further enhancements toward an ever changing factory lead to more mobility and flexibility on the factory floor. With that higher need of mobility and flexibility the requirements on wireless communication rise. A key requirement in that setting is the demand for wireless Ultra-Reliability and Low Latency Communication (URLLC). Example use cases therefore are cooperative Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and mobile robotics in general. Working along that setting this thesis provides insights regarding the whole network stack. Thereby, the focus is always on industrial applications. Starting on the physical layer, extensive measurements from 2 GHz to 6 GHz on the factory floor are performed. The raw data is published and analyzed. Based on that data an improved Saleh-Valenzuela (SV) model is provided. As ad-hoc networks are highly depended onnode mobility, the mobility of AGVs is modeled. Additionally, Nodal Encounter Patterns (NEPs) are recorded and analyzed. A method to record NEP is illustrated. The performance by means of latency and reliability are key parameters from an application perspective. Thus, measurements of those two parameters in factory environments are performed using Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) (IEEE 802.11n), private Long Term Evolution (pLTE) and 5G. This showed auto-correlated latency values. Hence, a method to construct confidence intervals based on auto-correlated data containing rare events is developed. Subsequently, four performance improvements for wireless networks on the factory floor are proposed. Of those optimization three cover ad-hoc networks, two deal with safety relevant communication, one orchestrates the usage of two orthogonal networks and lastly one optimizes the usage of information within cellular networks.
Finally, this thesis is concluded by an outlook toward open research questions. This includes open questions remaining in the context of industry 4.0 and further the ones around 6G. Along the research topics of 6G the two most relevant topics concern the ideas of a network of networks and overcoming best-effort IP.
Conventional security infrastructures in the Internet cannot be directly adopted to ambient systems, especially if based on short-range communication channels: Personal, mobile devices are used and the participants are present during communication, so privacy protection is a crucial issue. As ambient systems cannot rely on an uninterrupted connection to a Trust Center, certiffed data has to be veriffed locally. Security techniques have to be adjusted to the special environment. This paper introduces a public key infrastructure (PKI) to provide secure communication channels with respect to privacy, confidentiality, data integrity, non-repudiability, and user or device authentication. It supports three certiffcate levels with a different balance between authenticity and anonymity. This PKI is currently under implementation as part of the iCity project.
An empirical study to evaluate the location of advertisement panels by using a mobile marketing tool
(2009)
The efficiency of marketing campaigns is a precondition for business success. This paper discusses a technique to transfer advertisement content vie Bluetooth technology and collects market research information at the same time. Conventional advertisement media were enhanced by devices to automatically measure the number, distance, frequency and exposure time of passersby, making information available to evaluate both the wireless media as well as the location in general. This paper presents a study analyzing these data. A cryptographic one-way function protects privacy during data acquisition.
CAMPUS NEWS - artificial intelligence methods combined for an intelligent information network
(2008)
In this paper we describe a network for distributing personalised information with the usage of artificial intelligence methods. Reception of this information should be possible with everyday mobile equipment. Intelligent filtering and spam protection aim at integrating this technology into our environment. Information on the system architecture and usage of the installation are also presented.
Specifying behaviors of multi-agent systems (MASs) is a demanding task, especially when applied in safety-critical systems. In the latter systems, the specification of behaviors has to be carried out carefully in order to avoid side effects that might cause unwanted or even disastrous behaviors. Thus, formal methods based on mathematical models of the system under design are helpful. They not only allow us to formally specify the system at different levels of abstraction, but also to verify the consistency of the specified systems before implementing them. The formal specification aims a precise and unambiguous description of the behavior of MASs, whereas the verification aims at proving the satisfaction of specified requirements. A behavior of an agent can be described as discrete changes of its states with respect to external or internal actions. Whenever an action occurs, the agent moves from one state to another one. Therefore, an efficient way to model this type of discrete behaviors is to use a kind of state transition diagrams such as finite automata. One remarkable advantage of such transition diagrams is that they lend themselves formal analysis techniques using model checking. The latter is an automatic verification technique which determines whether given properties are satisfied within a model underlying a particular system. In realistic physical environments, however, it is necessary to consider continuous behaviors in addition to discrete behaviors of MASs. Examples of those type of behaviors include the movement of a soccer agent to kick off or to go to the ball, the process of putting out the fire by a fire brigade agent in a rescue scenario, or any other behaviors that depend on any timed physical law. The traditional state transition diagrams are not sufficient to combine these types of behaviors. Hybrid automata offer an elegant method to capture such types of behaviors. Hybrid automata extend regular state transition diagrams with methods that deal with those continuous actions such that the state transition diagrams are used to model the discrete changes of behaviors, while differential equations are used to model the continuous changes. The semantics of hybrid automata make them accessible to formal verification by means of model checking. The main goal of this thesis is to approach hybrid automata for specifying and verifying behaviors of MASs. However, specifying and and verifying behaviors of MASs by means of hybrid automata raises several issues that should be considered. These issues include the complexity, modularity, and the expressiveness of MASs' models. This thesis addresses these issues and provides possible solutions to tackle them.
Hybrid automata are used as standard means for the specification and analysis of dynamical systems. Several researches have approached them to formally specify reactive Multi-agent systems situated in a physical environment, where the agents react continuously to their environment. The specified systems, in turn, are formally checked with the help of existing hybrid automata verification tools. However, when dealing with multi-agent systems, two problems may be raised. The first problem is a state space problem raised due to the composition process, where the agents have to be parallel composed into an agent capturing all possible behaviors of the multi-agent system prior to the verification phase. The second problem concerns the expressiveness of verification tools when modeling and verifying certain behaviors. Therefore, this paper tackles these problems by showing how multi-agent systems, specified as hybrid automata, can be modeled and verified using constraint logic programming(CLP). In particular, a CLP framework is presented to show how the composition of multi-agent behaviors can be captured dynamically during the verification phase. This can relieve the state space complexity that may occur as a result of the composition process. Additionally, the expressiveness of the CLP model flexibly allows not only to model multi-agent systems, but also to check various properties by means of the reachability analysis. Experiments are promising to show the feasibility of our approach.
Hybrid systems are the result of merging the two most commonly used models for dynamical systems, namely continuous dynamical systems defined by differential equations and discrete-event systems defined by automata. One can view hybrid systems as constrained systems, where the constraints describe the possible process flows, invariants within states, and transitions on the one hand, and to characterize certain parts of the state space (e.g. the set of initial states, or the set of unsafe states) on the other hand. Therefore, it is advantageous to use constraint logic programming (CLP) as an approach to model hybrid systems. In this paper, we provide CLP implementations, that model hybrid systems comprising several concurrent hybrid automata, whose size is only straight proportional to the size of the given system description. Furthermore, we allow different levels of abstraction by making use of hierarchies as in UML statecharts. In consequence, the CLP model can be used for analyzing and testing the absence or existence of (un)wanted behaviors in hybrid systems. Thus in summary, we get a procedure for the formal verification of hybrid systems by model checking, employing logic programming with constraints.
Improvements to the RMTI network routing daemon implementation and preparation of a public release
(2011)
Routing with Metric based Topology Investigation (RMTI) is an algorithm meant to extend distance-vector routing protocols. It is under research and development at the University of Koblenz-Landau since 1999 and currently implemented on top of the well-known Routing Information Protocol (RIP). Around midyear 2009, the latest implementation of RMTI included a lot of deprecated functionality. Because of this, the first goal of this thesis was the reduction of the codebase to a minimum. Beside a lot of reorganization and a general cleanup, this mainly involved the removal of some no longer needed modes as well as the separation of the formerly mandatory XTPeer test environment. During the second part, many test series were carried out in order to ensure the correctness of the latest RMTI implementation. A replacement for XTPeer was needed and several new ways of testing were explored. In conjunction with this thesis, the RMTI source code was finally released to the public under a free software license.