004 Datenverarbeitung; Informatik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (80)
- Article (48)
- Conference Proceeding (11)
- Master's Thesis (6)
- Postprint (6)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (3)
- Other (3)
- Bachelor Thesis (1)
- Habilitation Thesis (1)
- Moving Images (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (160) (remove)
Keywords
- Machine Learning (7)
- Maschinelles Lernen (7)
- answer set programming (6)
- Antwortmengenprogrammierung (5)
- Informatik (5)
- Answer Set Programming (3)
- Informatikdidaktik (3)
- higher education (3)
- image processing (3)
- machine learning (3)
Institute
- Institut für Informatik und Computational Science (160) (remove)
Geometric generalization is a fundamental concept in the digital mapping process. An increasing amount of spatial data is provided on the web as well as a range of tools to process it. This jABC workflow is used for the automatic testing of web-based generalization services like mapshaper.org by executing its functionality, overlaying both datasets before and after the transformation and displaying them visually in a .tif file. Mostly Web Services and command line tools are used to build an environment where ESRI shapefiles can be uploaded, processed through a chosen generalization service and finally visualized in Irfanview.
Geospatial data has become a natural part of a growing number of information systems and services in the economy, society, and people's personal lives. In particular, virtual 3D city and landscape models constitute valuable information sources within a wide variety of applications such as urban planning, navigation, tourist information, and disaster management. Today, these models are often visualized in detail to provide realistic imagery. However, a photorealistic rendering does not automatically lead to high image quality, with respect to an effective information transfer, which requires important or prioritized information to be interactively highlighted in a context-dependent manner.
Approaches in non-photorealistic renderings particularly consider a user's task and camera perspective when attempting optimal expression, recognition, and communication of important or prioritized information. However, the design and implementation of non-photorealistic rendering techniques for 3D geospatial data pose a number of challenges, especially when inherently complex geometry, appearance, and thematic data must be processed interactively. Hence, a promising technical foundation is established by the programmable and parallel computing architecture of graphics processing units.
This thesis proposes non-photorealistic rendering techniques that enable both the computation and selection of the abstraction level of 3D geospatial model contents according to user interaction and dynamically changing thematic information. To achieve this goal, the techniques integrate with hardware-accelerated rendering pipelines using shader technologies of graphics processing units for real-time image synthesis. The techniques employ principles of artistic rendering, cartographic generalization, and 3D semiotics—unlike photorealistic rendering—to synthesize illustrative renditions of geospatial feature type entities such as water surfaces, buildings, and infrastructure networks. In addition, this thesis contributes a generic system that enables to integrate different graphic styles—photorealistic and non-photorealistic—and provide their seamless transition according to user tasks, camera view, and image resolution.
Evaluations of the proposed techniques have demonstrated their significance to the field of geospatial information visualization including topics such as spatial perception, cognition, and mapping. In addition, the applications in illustrative and focus+context visualization have reflected their potential impact on optimizing the information transfer regarding factors such as cognitive load, integration of non-realistic information, visualization of uncertainty, and visualization on small displays.
Nowadays, model-driven engineering (MDE) promises to ease software development by decreasing the inherent complexity of classical software development. In order to deliver on this promise, MDE increases the level of abstraction and automation, through a consideration of domain-specific models (DSMs) and model operations (e.g. model transformations or code generations). DSMs conform to domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), which increase the level of abstraction, and model operations are first-class entities of software development because they increase the level of automation. Nevertheless, MDE has to deal with at least two new dimensions of complexity, which are basically caused by the increased linguistic and technological heterogeneity. The first dimension of complexity is setting up an MDE environment, an activity comprised of the implementation or selection of DSMLs and model operations. Setting up an MDE environment is both time-consuming and error-prone because of the implementation or adaptation of model operations. The second dimension of complexity is concerned with applying MDE for actual software development. Applying MDE is challenging because a collection of DSMs, which conform to potentially heterogeneous DSMLs, are required to completely specify a complex software system. A single DSML can only be used to describe a specific aspect of a software system at a certain level of abstraction and from a certain perspective. Additionally, DSMs are usually not independent but instead have inherent interdependencies, reflecting (partial) similar aspects of a software system at different levels of abstraction or from different perspectives. A subset of these dependencies are applications of various model operations, which are necessary to keep the degree of automation high. This becomes even worse when addressing the first dimension of complexity. Due to continuous changes, all kinds of dependencies, including the applications of model operations, must also be managed continuously. This comprises maintaining the existence of these dependencies and the appropriate (re-)application of model operations. The contribution of this thesis is an approach that combines traceability and model management to address the aforementioned challenges of configuring and applying MDE for software development. The approach is considered as a traceability approach because it supports capturing and automatically maintaining dependencies between DSMs. The approach is considered as a model management approach because it supports managing the automated (re-)application of heterogeneous model operations. In addition, the approach is considered as a comprehensive model management. Since the decomposition of model operations is encouraged to alleviate the first dimension of complexity, the subsequent composition of model operations is required to counteract their fragmentation. A significant portion of this thesis concerns itself with providing a method for the specification of decoupled yet still highly cohesive complex compositions of heterogeneous model operations. The approach supports two different kinds of compositions - data-flow compositions and context compositions. Data-flow composition is used to define a network of heterogeneous model operations coupled by sharing input and output DSMs alone. Context composition is related to a concept used in declarative model transformation approaches to compose individual model transformation rules (units) at any level of detail. In this thesis, context composition provides the ability to use a collection of dependencies as context for the composition of other dependencies, including model operations. In addition, the actual implementation of model operations, which are going to be composed, do not need to implement any composition concerns. The approach is realized by means of a formalism called an executable and dynamic hierarchical megamodel, based on the original idea of megamodels. This formalism supports specifying compositions of dependencies (traceability and model operations). On top of this formalism, traceability is realized by means of a localization concept, and model management by means of an execution concept.
Die 8. Fachtagung für Hochschuldidaktik der Informatik (HDI) fand im September 2018 zusammen mit der Deutschen E-Learning Fachtagung Informatik (DeLFI) unter dem gemeinsamen Motto „Digitalisierungswahnsinn? - Wege der Bildungstransformationen“ in Frankfurt statt.
Dabei widmet sich die HDI allen Fragen der informatischen Bildung im Hochschulbereich. Schwerpunkte bildeten in diesem Jahr u. a.:
- Analyse der Inhalte und anzustrebenden Kompetenzen in Informatikveranstaltungen
- Programmieren lernen & Einstieg in Softwareentwicklung
- Spezialthemen: Data Science, Theoretische Informatik und Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten
Die Fachtagung widmet sich ausgewählten Fragestellungen dieser Themenkomplexe, die durch Vorträge ausgewiesener Experten und durch eingereichte Beiträge intensiv behandelt werden.
With the jABC it is possible to realize workflows for numerous questions in different fields. The goal of this project was to create a workflow for the identification of differentially expressed genes. This is of special interest in biology, for it gives the opportunity to get a better insight in cellular changes due to exogenous stress, diseases and so on. With the knowledge that can be derived from the differentially expressed genes in diseased tissues, it becomes possible to find new targets for treatment.
Analyses of metagenomes in life sciences present new opportunities as well as challenges to the scientific community and call for advanced computational methods and workflows. The large amount of data collected from samples via next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies render manual approaches to sequence comparison and annotation unsuitable. Rather, fast and efficient computational pipelines are needed to provide comprehensive statistics and summaries and enable the researcher to choose appropriate tools for more specific analyses. The workflow presented here builds upon previous pipelines designed for automated clustering and annotation of raw sequence reads obtained from next-generation sequencing technologies such as 454 and Illumina. Employing specialized algorithms, the sequence reads are processed at three different levels. First, raw reads are clustered at high similarity cutoff to yield clusters which can be exported as multifasta files for further analyses. Independently, open reading frames (ORFs) are predicted from raw reads and clustered at two strictness levels to yield sets of non-redundant sequences and ORF families. Furthermore, single ORFs are annotated by performing searches against the Pfam database
BCH Codes mit kombinierter Korrektur und Erkennung In dieser Arbeit wird auf Grundlage des BCH Codes untersucht, wie eine Fehlerkorrektur mit einer Erkennung höherer Fehleranzahlen kombiniert werden kann. Mit dem Verfahren der 1-Bit Korrektur mit zusätzlicher Erkennung höherer Fehler wurde ein Ansatz entwickelt, welcher die Erkennung zusätzlicher Fehler durch das parallele Lösen einfacher Gleichungen der Form s_x = s_1^x durchführt. Die Anzahl dieser Gleichungen ist linear zu der Anzahl der zu überprüfenden höheren Fehler.
In dieser Arbeit wurde zusätzlich für bis zu 4-Bit Korrekturen mit zusätzlicher Erkennung höherer Fehler ein weiterer allgemeiner Ansatz vorgestellt. Dabei werden parallel für alle korrigierbaren Fehleranzahlen spekulative Fehlerkorrekturen durchgeführt. Aus den bestimmten Fehlerstellen werden spekulative Syndromkomponenten erzeugt, durch welche die Fehlerstellen bestätigt und höhere erkennbare Fehleranzahlen ausgeschlossen werden können. Die vorgestellten Ansätze unterscheiden sich von dem in entwickelten Ansatz, bei welchem die Anzahl der Fehlerstellen durch die Berechnung von Determinanten in absteigender Reihenfolge berechnet wird, bis die erste Determinante 0 bildet. Bei dem bekannten Verfahren ist durch die Berechnung der Determinanten eine faktorielle Anzahl an Berechnungen in Relation zu der Anzahl zu überprüfender Fehler durchzuführen. Im Vergleich zu dem bekannten sequentiellen Verfahrens nach Berlekamp Massey besitzen die Berechnungen im vorgestellten Ansatz simple Gleichungen und können parallel durchgeführt werden.Bei dem bekannten Verfahren zur parallelen Korrektur von 4-Bit Fehlern ist eine Gleichung vierten Grades im GF(2^m) zu lösen. Dies erfolgt, indem eine Hilfsgleichung dritten Grades und vier Gleichungen zweiten Grades parallel gelöst werden. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde gezeigt, dass sich eine Gleichung zweiten Grades einsparen lässt, wodurch sich eine Vereinfachung der Hardware bei einer parallelen Realisierung der 4-Bit Korrektur ergibt. Die erzielten Ergebnisse wurden durch umfangreiche Simulationen in Software und Hardwareimplementierungen überprüft.
Advances in biotechnologies rapidly increase the number of molecules of a cell which can be observed simultaneously. This includes expression levels of thousands or ten-thousands of genes as well as concentration levels of metabolites or proteins. Such Profile data, observed at different times or at different experimental conditions (e.g., heat or dry stress), show how the biological experiment is reflected on the molecular level. This information is helpful to understand the molecular behaviour and to identify molecules or combination of molecules that characterise specific biological condition (e.g., disease). This work shows the potentials of component extraction algorithms to identify the major factors which influenced the observed data. This can be the expected experimental factors such as the time or temperature as well as unexpected factors such as technical artefacts or even unknown biological behaviour. Extracting components means to reduce the very high-dimensional data to a small set of new variables termed components. Each component is a combination of all original variables. The classical approach for that purpose is the principal component analysis (PCA). It is shown that, in contrast to PCA which maximises the variance only, modern approaches such as independent component analysis (ICA) are more suitable for analysing molecular data. The condition of independence between components of ICA fits more naturally our assumption of individual (independent) factors which influence the data. This higher potential of ICA is demonstrated by a crossing experiment of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Thale Cress). The experimental factors could be well identified and, in addition, ICA could even detect a technical artefact. However, in continuously observations such as in time experiments, the data show, in general, a nonlinear distribution. To analyse such nonlinear data, a nonlinear extension of PCA is used. This nonlinear PCA (NLPCA) is based on a neural network algorithm. The algorithm is adapted to be applicable to incomplete molecular data sets. Thus, it provides also the ability to estimate the missing data. The potential of nonlinear PCA to identify nonlinear factors is demonstrated by a cold stress experiment of Arabidopsis thaliana. The results of component analysis can be used to build a molecular network model. Since it includes functional dependencies it is termed functional network. Applied to the cold stress data, it is shown that functional networks are appropriate to visualise biological processes and thereby reveals molecular dynamics.
Cloud-RAID
(2014)
Emotions are a central element of human experience. They occur with high frequency in everyday life and play an important role in decision making. However, currently there is no consensus among researchers on what constitutes an emotion and on how emotions should be investigated. This dissertation identifies three problems of current emotion research: the problem of ground truth, the problem of incomplete constructs and the problem of optimal representation. I argue for a focus on the detailed measurement of emotion manifestations with computer-aided methods to solve these problems. This approach is demonstrated in three research projects, which describe the development of methods specific to these problems as well as their application to concrete research questions.
The problem of ground truth describes the practice to presuppose a certain structure of emotions as the a priori ground truth. This determines the range of emotion descriptions and sets a standard for the correct assignment of these descriptions. The first project illustrates how this problem can be circumvented with a multidimensional emotion perception paradigm which stands in contrast to the emotion recognition paradigm typically employed in emotion research. This paradigm allows to calculate an objective difficulty measure and to collect subjective difficulty ratings for the perception of emotional stimuli. Moreover, it enables the use of an arbitrary number of emotion stimuli categories as compared to the commonly used six basic emotion categories. Accordingly, we collected data from 441 participants using dynamic facial expression stimuli from 40 emotion categories. Our findings suggest an increase in emotion perception difficulty with increasing actor age and provide evidence to suggest that young adults, the elderly and men underestimate their emotion perception difficulty. While these effects were predicted from the literature, we also found unexpected and novel results. In particular, the increased difficulty on the objective difficulty measure for female actors and observers stood in contrast to reported findings. Exploratory analyses revealed low relevance of person-specific variables for the prediction of emotion perception difficulty, but highlighted the importance of a general pleasure dimension for the ease of emotion perception.
The second project targets the problem of incomplete constructs which relates to vaguely defined psychological constructs on emotion with insufficient ties to tangible manifestations. The project exemplifies how a modern data collection method such as face tracking data can be used to sharpen these constructs on the example of arousal, a long-standing but fuzzy construct in emotion research. It describes how measures of distance, speed and magnitude of acceleration can be computed from face tracking data and investigates their intercorrelations. We find moderate to strong correlations among all measures of static information on one hand and all measures of dynamic information on the other. The project then investigates how self-rated arousal is tied to these measures in 401 neurotypical individuals and 19 individuals with autism. Distance to the neutral face was predictive of arousal ratings in both groups. Lower mean arousal ratings were found for the autistic group, but no difference in correlation of the measures and arousal ratings could be found between groups. Results were replicated in a high autistic traits group consisting of 41 participants. The findings suggest a qualitatively similar perception of arousal for individuals with and without autism. No correlations between valence ratings and any of the measures could be found which emphasizes the specificity of our tested measures for the construct of arousal.
The problem of optimal representation refers to the search for the best representation of emotions and the assumption that there is a one-fits-all solution. In the third project we introduce partial least squares analysis as a general method to find an optimal representation to relate two high-dimensional data sets to each other. The project demonstrates its applicability to emotion research on the question of emotion perception differences between men and women. The method was used with emotion rating data from 441 participants and face tracking data computed on 306 videos. We found quantitative as well as qualitative differences in the perception of emotional facial expressions between these groups. We showed that women’s emotional perception systematically captured more of the variance in facial expressions. Additionally, we could show that significant differences exist in the way that women and men perceive some facial expressions which could be visualized as concrete facial expression sequences. These expressions suggest differing perceptions of masked and ambiguous facial expressions between the sexes. In order to facilitate use of the developed method by the research community, a package for the statistical environment R was written. Furthermore, to call attention to the method and its usefulness for emotion research, a website was designed that allows users to explore a model of emotion ratings and facial expression data in an interactive fashion.
Eine übliche Erzählung verknüpft lange Studienzeiten und hohe Abbrecherquoten im Informatikstudium zum einen mit der sehr gut bezahlten Nebentätigkeit von Studierenden in der Informatikbranche, die deutlich studienzeitverlängernd sei; zum anderen werde wegen des hohen Bedarfs an Informatikern ein formeller Studienabschluss von den Studierenden häufig als entbehrlich betrachtet und eine Karriere in der Informatikbranche ohne abgeschlossenes Studium begonnen. In dieser Studie, durchgeführt an der Universität Potsdam, untersuchen wir, wie viele Informatikstudierende neben dem Studium innerhalb und außerhalb der Informatikbranche arbeiten, welche Erwartungen sie neben der Bezahlung damit verbinden und wie sich die Tätigkeit auf ihr Studium und ihre spätere berufliche Perspektive auswirkt. Aus aktuellem Anlass interessieren uns auch die Auswirkungen der Covid-19-Pandemie auf die Arbeitstätigkeiten der Informatikstudierenden.
Location analyses are among the most common tasks while working with spatial data and geographic information systems. Automating the most frequently used procedures is therefore an important aspect of improving their usability. In this context, this project aims to design and implement a workflow, providing some basic tools for a location analysis. For the implementation with jABC, the workflow was applied to the problem of finding a suitable location for placing an artificial reef. For this analysis three parameters (bathymetry, slope and grain size of the ground material) were taken into account, processed, and visualized with the The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), which were integrated into the workflow as jETI-SIBs. The implemented workflow thereby showed that the approach to combine jABC with GMT resulted in an user-centric yet user-friendly tool with high-quality cartographic outputs.
Answer Set Programming faces an increasing popularity for problem solving in various domains. While its modeling language allows us to express many complex problems in an easy way, its solving technology enables their effective resolution. In what follows, we detail some of the key factors of its success. Answer Set Programming [ASP; Brewka et al. Commun ACM 54(12):92–103, (2011)] is seeing a rapid proliferation in academia and industry due to its easy and flexible way to model and solve knowledge-intense combinatorial (optimization) problems. To this end, ASP offers a high-level modeling language paired with high-performance solving technology. As a result, ASP systems provide out-off-the-box, general-purpose search engines that allow for enumerating (optimal) solutions. They are represented as answer sets, each being a set of atoms representing a solution. The declarative approach of ASP allows a user to concentrate on a problem’s specification rather than the computational means to solve it. This makes ASP a prime candidate for rapid prototyping and an attractive tool for teaching key AI techniques since complex problems can be expressed in a succinct and elaboration tolerant way. This is eased by the tuning of ASP’s modeling language to knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR). The resulting impact is nicely reflected by a growing range of successful applications of ASP [Erdem et al. AI Mag 37(3):53–68, 2016; Falkner et al. Industrial applications of answer set programming. K++nstliche Intelligenz (2018)]
The field of machine learning studies algorithms that infer predictive models from data. Predictive models are applicable for many practical tasks such as spam filtering, face and handwritten digit recognition, and personalized product recommendation. In general, they are used to predict a target label for a given data instance. In order to make an informed decision about the deployment of a predictive model, it is crucial to know the model’s approximate performance. To evaluate performance, a set of labeled test instances is required that is drawn from the distribution the model will be exposed to at application time. In many practical scenarios, unlabeled test instances are readily available, but the process of labeling them can be a time- and cost-intensive task and may involve a human expert. This thesis addresses the problem of evaluating a given predictive model accurately with minimal labeling effort. We study an active model evaluation process that selects certain instances of the data according to an instrumental sampling distribution and queries their labels. We derive sampling distributions that minimize estimation error with respect to different performance measures such as error rate, mean squared error, and F-measures. An analysis of the distribution that governs the estimator leads to confidence intervals, which indicate how precise the error estimation is. Labeling costs may vary across different instances depending on certain characteristics of the data. For instance, documents differ in their length, comprehensibility, and technical requirements; these attributes affect the time a human labeler needs to judge relevance or to assign topics. To address this, the sampling distribution is extended to incorporate instance-specific costs. We empirically study conditions under which the active evaluation processes are more accurate than a standard estimate that draws equally many instances from the test distribution. We also address the problem of comparing the risks of two predictive models. The standard approach would be to draw instances according to the test distribution, label the selected instances, and apply statistical tests to identify significant differences. Drawing instances according to an instrumental distribution affects the power of a statistical test. We derive a sampling procedure that maximizes test power when used to select instances, and thereby minimizes the likelihood of choosing the inferior model. Furthermore, we investigate the task of comparing several alternative models; the objective of an evaluation could be to rank the models according to the risk that they incur or to identify the model with lowest risk. An experimental study shows that the active procedure leads to higher test power than the standard test in many application domains. Finally, we study the problem of evaluating the performance of ranking functions, which are used for example for web search. In practice, ranking performance is estimated by applying a given ranking model to a representative set of test queries and manually assessing the relevance of all retrieved items for each query. We apply the concepts of active evaluation and active comparison to ranking functions and derive optimal sampling distributions for the commonly used performance measures Discounted Cumulative Gain and Expected Reciprocal Rank. Experiments on web search engine data illustrate significant reductions in labeling costs.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offers several advantages to both service providers and users. Service providers can benefit from the reduction of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), better scalability, and better resource utilization. On the other hand, users can use the service anywhere and anytime, and minimize upfront investment by following the pay-as-you-go model. Despite the benefits of SaaS, users still have concerns about the security and privacy of their data. Due to the nature of SaaS and the Cloud in general, the data and the computation are beyond the users' control, and hence data security becomes a vital factor in this new paradigm. Furthermore, in multi-tenant SaaS applications, the tenants become more concerned about the confidentiality of their data since several tenants are co-located onto a shared infrastructure.
To address those concerns, we start protecting the data from the provisioning process by controlling how tenants are being placed in the infrastructure. We present a resource allocation algorithm designed to minimize the risk of co-resident tenants called SecPlace. It enables the SaaS provider to control the resource (i.e., database instance) allocation process while taking into account the security of tenants as a requirement.
Due to the design principles of the multi-tenancy model, tenants follow some degree of sharing on both application and infrastructure levels. Thus, strong security-isolation should be present. Therefore, we develop SignedQuery, a technique that prevents one tenant from accessing others' data. We use the Signing Concept to create a signature that is used to sign the tenant's request, then the server can verifies the signature and recognizes the requesting tenant, and hence ensures that the data to be accessed is belonging to the legitimate tenant.
Finally, Data confidentiality remains a critical concern due to the fact that data in the Cloud is out of users' premises, and hence beyond their control. Cryptography is increasingly proposed as a potential approach to address such a challenge. Therefore, we present SecureDB, a system designed to run SQL-based applications over an encrypted database. SecureDB captures the schema design and analyzes it to understand the internal structure of the data (i.e., relationships between the tables and their attributes). Moreover, we determine the appropriate partialhomomorphic encryption scheme for each attribute where computation is possible even when the data is encrypted.
To evaluate our work, we conduct extensive experiments with di↵erent settings. The main use case in our work is a popular open source HRM application, called OrangeHRM. The results show that our multi-layered approach is practical, provides enhanced security and isolation among tenants, and have a moderate complexity in terms of processing encrypted data.
Mit der 4. Tagung zur Hochschuldidaktik Informatik wird eine Reihe fortgesetzt, die ihren Anfang 1998 in Stuttgart unter der Überschrift „Informatik und Ausbildung“ genommen hat. Seither dienen diese Tagungen den Lehrenden im Bereich der Hochschulinformatik als Forum der Information und des Diskurses über aktuelle didaktische und bildungspolitische Entwicklungen im Bereich der Informatikausbildung. Aktuell zählen dazu insbesondere Fragen der Bildungsrelevanz informatischer Inhalte und der Herausforderung durch eine stärkere Kompetenzorientierung in der Informatik. Die eingereichten Beiträge zur HDI 2010 in Paderborn veranschaulichen unterschiedliche Bemühungen, sich mit relevanten Problemen der Informatikdidaktik an Hochschulen in Deutschland (und z. T. auch im Ausland) auseinanderzusetzen. Aus der Breite des Spektrums der Einreichungen ergaben sich zugleich Probleme bei der Begutachtung. Letztlich konnten von den zahlreichen Einreichungen nur drei die Gutachter so überzeugen, dass sie uneingeschränkt in ihrer Langfassung akzeptiert wurden. Neun weitere Einreichungen waren trotz Kritik überwiegend positiv begutachtet worden, so dass wir diese als Kurzfassung bzw. Diskussionspapier in die Tagung aufgenommen haben.
Mit zunehmender Komplexität technischer Softwaresysteme ist die Nachfrage an produktiveren Methoden und Werkzeugen auch im sicherheitskritischen Umfeld gewachsen. Da insbesondere objektorientierte und modellbasierte Ansätze und Methoden ausgezeichnete Eigenschaften zur Entwicklung großer und komplexer Systeme besitzen, ist zu erwarten, dass diese in naher Zukunft selbst bis in sicherheitskritische Bereiche der Softwareentwicklung vordringen. Mit der Unified Modeling Language Real-Time (UML-RT) wird eine Softwareentwicklungsmethode für technische Systeme durch die Object Management Group (OMG) propagiert. Für den praktischen Einsatz im technischen und sicherheitskritischen Umfeld muss diese Methode nicht nur bestimmte technische Eigenschaften, beispielsweise temporale Analysierbarkeit, besitzen, sondern auch in einen bestehenden Qualitätssicherungsprozess integrierbar sein. Ein wichtiger Aspekt der Integration der UML-RT in ein qualitätsorientiertes Prozessmodell, beispielsweise in das V-Modell, ist die Verfügbarkeit von ausgereiften Konzepten und Methoden für einen systematischen Modultest. Der Modultest dient als erste Qualititätssicherungsphase nach der Implementierung der Fehlerfindung und dem Qualitätsnachweis für jede separat prüfbare Softwarekomponente eines Systems. Während dieser Phase stellt die Durchführung von systematischen Tests die wichtigste Qualitätssicherungsmaßnahme dar. Während zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt zwar ausgereifte Methoden und Werkzeuge für die modellbasierte Softwareentwicklung zur Verfügung stehen, existieren nur wenig überzeugende Lösungen für eine systematische modellbasierte Modulprüfung. Die durchgängige Verwendung ausführbarer Modelle und Codegenerierung stellen wesentliche Konzepte der modellbasierten Softwareentwicklung dar. Sie dienen der konstruktiven Fehlerreduktion durch Automatisierung ansonsten fehlerträchtiger, manueller Vorgänge. Im Rahmen einer modellbasierten Qualitätssicherung sollten diese Konzepte konsequenterweise in die späteren Qualitätssicherungsphasen transportiert werden. Daher ist eine wesentliche Forderung an ein Verfahren zur modellbasierten Modulprüfung ein möglichst hoher Grad an Automatisierung. In aktuellen Entwicklungen hat sich für die Generierung von Testfällen auf Basis von Zustandsautomaten die Verwendung von Model Checking als effiziente und an die vielfältigsten Testprobleme anpassbare Methode bewährt. Der Ansatz des Model Checking stammt ursprünglich aus dem Entwurf von Kommunikationsprotokollen und wurde bereits erfolgreich auf verschiedene Probleme der Modellierung technischer Software angewendet. Insbesondere in der Gegenwart ausführbarer, automatenbasierter Modelle erscheint die Verwendung von Model Checking sinnvoll, das die Existenz einer formalen, zustandsbasierten Spezifikation voraussetzt. Ein ausführbares, zustandsbasiertes Modell erfüllt diese Anforderungen in der Regel. Aus diesen Gründen ist die Wahl eines Model Checking Ansatzes für die Generierung von Testfällen im Rahmen eines modellbasierten Modultestverfahrens eine logische Konsequenz. Obwohl in der aktuellen Spezifikation der UML-RT keine eindeutigen Aussagen über den zur Verhaltensbeschreibung zu verwendenden Formalismus gemacht werden, ist es wahrscheinlich, dass es sich bei der UML-RT um eine zu Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling (ROOM) kompatible Methode handelt. Alle in dieser Arbeit präsentierten Methoden und Ergebnisse sind somit auf die kommende UML-RT übertragbar und von sehr aktueller Bedeutung. Aus den genannten Gründen verfolgt diese Arbeit das Ziel, die analytische Qualitätssicherung in der modellbasierten Softwareentwicklung mittels einer modellbasierten Methode für den Modultest zu verbessern. Zu diesem Zweck wird eine neuartige Testmethode präsentiert, die auf automatenbasierten Verhaltensmodellen und CTL Model Checking basiert. Die Testfallgenerierung kann weitgehend automatisch erfolgen, um Fehler durch menschlichen Einfluss auszuschließen. Das entwickelte Modultestverfahren ist in die technischen Konzepte Model Driven Architecture und ROOM, beziehungsweise UML-RT, sowie in die organisatorischen Konzepte eines qualitätsorientierten Prozessmodells, beispielsweise das V-Modell, integrierbar.
This paper describes the implementation of a workflow model for service-oriented computing of potential areas for wind turbines in jABC. By implementing a re-executable model the manual effort of a multi-criteria site analysis can be reduced. The aim is to determine the shift of typical geoprocessing tools of geographic information systems (GIS) from the desktop to the web. The analysis is based on a vector data set and mainly uses web services of the “Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems” (CSISS). This paper discusses effort, benefits and problems associated with the use of the web services.
The protein classification workflow described in this report enables users to get information about a novel protein sequence automatically. The information is derived by different bioinformatic analysis tools which calculate or predict features of a protein sequence. Also, databases are used to compare the novel sequence with known proteins.
In this bachelor’s thesis I implement the automatic theorem prover nanoCoP-Ω. This system is the result of porting arithmetic and equality handling procedures first introduced in the automatic theorem prover with arithmetic leanCoP-Ω into the similar system nanoCoP 2.0. To understand these procedures, I first introduce the mathematical background to both automatic theorem proving and arithmetic expressions. I present the predecessor projects leanCoP, nanoCoP and leanCoP-Ω, out of which nanCoP-Ω was developed. This is followed by an extensive description of the concepts the non-clausal connection calculus needed to be extended by, to allow for proving arithmetic expressions and equalities, as well as of their implementation into nanoCoP-Ω. An extensive comparison between both the runtimes and the number of solved problems of the systems nanoCoP-Ω and leanCoP-Ω was made. I come to the conclusion, that nanoCoP-Ω is considerably faster than leanCoP-Ω for small problems, though less well suited for larger problems. Additionally, I was able to construct a non-theorem that nanoCoP-Ω generates a false proof for. I discuss how this pressing issue could be resolved, as well as some possible optimizations and expansions of the system.
Physical computing covers the design and realization of interactive
objects and installations and allows students to develop concrete,
tangible products of the real world that arise from the learners’
imagination. This way, constructionist learning is raised to a level that
enables students to gain haptic experience and thereby concretizes the
virtual. In this paper the defining characteristics of physical computing
are described. Key competences to be gained with physical computing
will be identified.
This work introduces novel internal and external memory algorithms for computing voxel skeletons of massive voxel objects with complex network-like architecture and for converting these voxel skeletons to piecewise linear geometry, that is triangle meshes and piecewise straight lines. The presented techniques help to tackle the challenge of visualizing and analyzing 3d images of increasing size and complexity, which are becoming more and more important in, for example, biological and medical research. Section 2.3.1 contributes to the theoretical foundations of thinning algorithms with a discussion of homotopic thinning in the grid cell model. The grid cell model explicitly represents a cell complex built of faces, edges, and vertices shared between voxels. A characterization of pairs of cells to be deleted is much simpler than characterizations of simple voxels were before. The grid cell model resolves topologically unclear voxel configurations at junctions and locked voxel configurations causing, for example, interior voxels in sets of non-simple voxels. A general conclusion is that the grid cell model is superior to indecomposable voxels for algorithms that need detailed control of topology. Section 2.3.2 introduces a noise-insensitive measure based on the geodesic distance along the boundary to compute two-dimensional skeletons. The measure is able to retain thin object structures if they are geometrically important while ignoring noise on the object's boundary. This combination of properties is not known of other measures. The measure is also used to guide erosion in a thinning process from the boundary towards lines centered within plate-like structures. Geodesic distance based quantities seem to be well suited to robustly identify one- and two-dimensional skeletons. Chapter 6 applies the method to visualization of bone micro-architecture. Chapter 3 describes a novel geometry generation scheme for representing voxel skeletons, which retracts voxel skeletons to piecewise linear geometry per dual cube. The generated triangle meshes and graphs provide a link to geometry processing and efficient rendering of voxel skeletons. The scheme creates non-closed surfaces with boundaries, which contain fewer triangles than a representation of voxel skeletons using closed surfaces like small cubes or iso-surfaces. A conclusion is that thinking specifically about voxel skeleton configurations instead of generic voxel configurations helps to deal with the topological implications. The geometry generation is one foundation of the applications presented in Chapter 6. Chapter 5 presents a novel external memory algorithm for distance ordered homotopic thinning. The presented method extends known algorithms for computing chamfer distance transformations and thinning to execute I/O-efficiently when input is larger than the available main memory. The applied block-wise decomposition schemes are quite simple. Yet it was necessary to carefully analyze effects of block boundaries to devise globally correct external memory variants of known algorithms. In general, doing so is superior to naive block-wise processing ignoring boundary effects. Chapter 6 applies the algorithms in a novel method based on confocal microscopy for quantitative study of micro-vascular networks in the field of microcirculation.
Computer Security deals with the detection and mitigation of threats to computer networks, data, and computing hardware. This
thesis addresses the following two computer security problems: email spam campaign and malware detection.
Email spam campaigns can easily be generated using popular dissemination tools by specifying simple grammars that serve as message templates. A grammar is disseminated to nodes of a bot net, the nodes create messages by instantiating the grammar at random. Email spam campaigns can encompass huge data volumes and therefore pose a threat to the stability of the infrastructure of email service providers that have to store them. Malware -software that serves a malicious purpose- is affecting web servers, client computers via active content, and client computers through executable files. Without the help of malware detection systems it would be easy for malware creators to collect sensitive information or to infiltrate computers.
The detection of threats -such as email-spam messages, phishing messages, or malware- is an adversarial and therefore intrinsically
difficult problem. Threats vary greatly and evolve over time. The detection of threats based on manually-designed rules is therefore
difficult and requires a constant engineering effort. Machine-learning is a research area that revolves around the analysis of data and the discovery of patterns that describe aspects of the data. Discriminative learning methods extract prediction models from data that are optimized to predict a target attribute as accurately as possible. Machine-learning methods hold the promise of automatically identifying patterns that robustly and accurately detect threats. This thesis focuses on the design and analysis of discriminative learning methods for the two computer-security problems under investigation: email-campaign and malware detection.
The first part of this thesis addresses email-campaign detection. We focus on regular expressions as a syntactic framework, because regular expressions are intuitively comprehensible by security engineers and administrators, and they can be applied as a detection mechanism in an extremely efficient manner. In this setting, a prediction model is provided with exemplary messages from an email-spam campaign. The prediction model has to generate a regular expression that reveals the syntactic pattern that underlies the entire campaign, and that a security engineers finds comprehensible and feels confident enough to use the expression to blacklist further messages at the email server. We model this problem as two-stage learning problem with structured input and output spaces which can be solved using standard cutting plane methods. Therefore we develop an appropriate loss function, and derive a decoder for the resulting optimization problem.
The second part of this thesis deals with the problem of predicting whether a given JavaScript or PHP file is malicious or benign. Recent malware analysis techniques use static or dynamic features, or both. In fully dynamic analysis, the software or script is executed and observed for malicious behavior in a sandbox environment. By contrast, static analysis is based on features that can be extracted directly from the program file. In order to bypass static detection mechanisms, code obfuscation techniques are used to spread a malicious program file in many different syntactic variants. Deobfuscating the code before applying a static classifier can be subjected to mostly static code analysis and can overcome the problem of obfuscated malicious code, but on the other hand increases the computational costs of malware detection by an order of magnitude. In this thesis we present a cascaded architecture in which a classifier first performs a static analysis of the original code and -based on the outcome of this first classification step- the code may be deobfuscated and classified again. We explore several types of features including token $n$-grams, orthogonal sparse bigrams, subroutine-hashings, and syntax-tree features and study the robustness of detection methods and feature types against the evolution of malware over time. The developed tool scans very large file collections quickly and accurately.
Each model is evaluated on real-world data and compared to reference methods. Our approach of inferring regular expressions to filter emails belonging to an email spam campaigns leads to models with a high true-positive rate at a very low false-positive rate that is an order of magnitude lower than that of a commercial content-based filter. Our presented system -REx-SVMshort- is being used by a commercial email service provider and complements content-based and IP-address based filtering.
Our cascaded malware detection system is evaluated on a high-quality data set of almost 400,000 conspicuous PHP files and a collection of more than 1,00,000 JavaScript files. From our case study we can conclude that our system can quickly and accurately process large data collections at a low false-positive rate.
Multi-sided platforms (MSP) strongly affect markets and play a crucial part within the digital and networked economy. Although empirical evidence indicates their occurrence in many industries, research has not investigated the game-changing impact of MSP on traditional markets to a sufficient extent. More specifically, we have little knowledge of how MSP affect value creation and customer interaction in entire markets, exploiting the potential of digital technologies to offer new value propositions. Our paper addresses this research gap and provides an initial systematic approach to analyze the impact of MSP on the insurance industry. For this purpose, we analyze the state of the art in research and practice in order to develop a reference model of the value network for the insurance industry. On this basis, we conduct a case-study analysis to discover and analyze roles which are occupied or even newly created by MSP. As a final step, we categorize MSP with regard to their relation to traditional insurance companies, resulting in a classification scheme with four MSP standard types: Competition, Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration.
Structuring process models
(2012)
One can fairly adopt the ideas of Donald E. Knuth to conclude that process modeling is both a science and an art. Process modeling does have an aesthetic sense. Similar to composing an opera or writing a novel, process modeling is carried out by humans who undergo creative practices when engineering a process model. Therefore, the very same process can be modeled in a myriad number of ways. Once modeled, processes can be analyzed by employing scientific methods. Usually, process models are formalized as directed graphs, with nodes representing tasks and decisions, and directed arcs describing temporal constraints between the nodes. Common process definition languages, such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) allow process analysts to define models with arbitrary complex topologies. The absence of structural constraints supports creativity and productivity, as there is no need to force ideas into a limited amount of available structural patterns. Nevertheless, it is often preferable that models follow certain structural rules. A well-known structural property of process models is (well-)structuredness. A process model is (well-)structured if and only if every node with multiple outgoing arcs (a split) has a corresponding node with multiple incoming arcs (a join), and vice versa, such that the set of nodes between the split and the join induces a single-entry-single-exit (SESE) region; otherwise the process model is unstructured. The motivations for well-structured process models are manifold: (i) Well-structured process models are easier to layout for visual representation as their formalizations are planar graphs. (ii) Well-structured process models are easier to comprehend by humans. (iii) Well-structured process models tend to have fewer errors than unstructured ones and it is less probable to introduce new errors when modifying a well-structured process model. (iv) Well-structured process models are better suited for analysis with many existing formal techniques applicable only for well-structured process models. (v) Well-structured process models are better suited for efficient execution and optimization, e.g., when discovering independent regions of a process model that can be executed concurrently. Consequently, there are process modeling languages that encourage well-structured modeling, e.g., Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and ADEPT. However, the well-structured process modeling implies some limitations: (i) There exist processes that cannot be formalized as well-structured process models. (ii) There exist processes that when formalized as well-structured process models require a considerable duplication of modeling constructs. Rather than expecting well-structured modeling from start, we advocate for the absence of structural constraints when modeling. Afterwards, automated methods can suggest, upon request and whenever possible, alternative formalizations that are "better" structured, preferably well-structured. In this thesis, we study the problem of automatically transforming process models into equivalent well-structured models. The developed transformations are performed under a strong notion of behavioral equivalence which preserves concurrency. The findings are implemented in a tool, which is publicly available.
Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Entwicklung einer Applikation, welche Infrastrukturdaten über Eisenbahnnetze generiert. Dabei bildet die Erzeugung der topologischen Informationen den Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit. Der Anwender charakterisiert hierfür vorab das gewünschte Eisenbahnnetz, wobei die geforderten Eigenschaften die Randbedingungen darstellen, die bei der Synthese zu beachten sind. Zur Einhaltung dieser Bedingungen wird die Constraint-Programmierung eingesetzt, welche durch ihr spezielles Programmierparadigma konsistente Lösungen effizient erzeugt. Dies wird u.a. durch die Nachnutzung so genannter globaler Constraints erreicht. Aus diesem Grund wird insbesondere auf den Einsatz der Constraint-Programmierung bei der Modellierung und Implementierung der Applikation eingegangen.
Die öffentliche Verwaltung setzt seit mehreren Jahren E-Government-Anwendungssysteme ein, um ihre Verwaltungsprozesse intensiver mit moderner Informationstechnik zu unterstützen. Da die öffentliche Verwaltung in ihrem Handeln in besonderem Maße an Recht und Gesetz gebunden ist verstärkt und verbreitet sich der Zusammenhang zwischen den Gesetzen und Rechtsvorschriften einerseits und der zur Aufgabenunterstützung eingesetzten Informationstechnik andererseits. Aus Sicht der Softwaretechnik handelt es sich bei diesem Zusammenhang um eine spezielle Form der Verfolgbarkeit von Anforderungen (engl. Traceability), die so genannte Verfolgbarkeit im Vorfeld der Anforderungsspezifikation (Pre-Requirements Specification Traceability, kurz Pre-RS Traceability), da sie Aspekte betrifft, die relevant sind, bevor die Anforderungen in eine Spezifikation eingeflossen sind (Ursprünge von Anforderungen). Der Ansatz dieser Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zur Verfolgbarkeit im Vorfeld der Anforderungsspezifikation von E-Government-Anwendungssystemen. Er kombiniert dazu aktuelle Entwicklungen und Standards (insbesondere des World Wide Web Consortium und der Object Management Group) aus den Bereichen Verfolgbarkeit von Anforderungen, Semantic Web, Ontologiesprachen und modellgetriebener Softwareentwicklung. Der Lösungsansatz umfasst eine spezielle Ontologie des Verwaltungshandeln, die mit den Techniken, Methoden und Werkzeugen des Semantic Web eingesetzt wird, um in Texten von Rechtsvorschriften relevante Ursprünge von Anforderungen durch Annotationen mit einer definierten Semantik zu versehen. Darauf aufbauend wird das Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) verwendet, um die Annotationen als spezielle Individuen einer Ontologie auf Elemente der Unified Modeling Language (UML) abzubilden. Dadurch entsteht ein neuer Modelltyp Pre-Requirements Model (PRM), der das Vorfeld der Anforderungsspezifikation formalisiert. Modelle diesen Typs können auch verwendet werden, um Aspekte zu formalisieren die sich nicht oder nicht vollständig aus dem Text der Rechtsvorschrift ergeben. Weiterhin bietet das Modell die Möglichkeit zum Anschluss an die modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung. In der Arbeit wird deshalb eine Erweiterung der Model Driven Architecture (MDA) vorgeschlagen. Zusätzlich zu den etablierten Modelltypen Computation Independent Model (CIM), Platform Independent Model (PIM) und Platform Specific Model (PSM) könnte der Einsatz des PRM Vorteile für die Verfolgbarkeit bringen. Wird die MDA mit dem PRM auf das Vorfeld der Anforderungsspezifikation ausgeweitet, kann eine Transformation des PRM in ein CIM als initiale Anforderungsspezifikation erfolgen, indem der MOF Query View Transformation Standard (QVT) eingesetzt wird. Als Teil des QVT-Standards ist die Aufzeichnung von Verfolgbarkeitsinformationen bei Modelltransformationen verbindlich. Um die semantische Lücke zwischen PRM und CIM zu überbrücken, erfolgt analog zum Einsatz des Plattformmodells (PM) in der PIM nach PSM Transformation der Einsatz spezieller Hilfsmodelle. Es kommen dafür die im Projekt "E-LoGo" an der Universität Potsdam entwickelten Referenzmodelle zum Einsatz. Durch die Aufzeichnung der Abbildung annotierter Textelemente auf Elemente im PRM und der Transformation der Elemente des PRM in Elemente des CIM kann durchgängige Verfolgbarkeit im Vorfeld der Anforderungsspezifikation erreicht werden. Der Ansatz basiert auf einer so genannten Verfolgbarkeitsdokumentation in Form verlinkter Hypertextdokumente, die mittels XSL-Stylesheet erzeugt wurden und eine Verbindung zur graphischen Darstellung des Diagramms (z. B. Anwendungsfall-, Klassendiagramm der UML) haben. Der Ansatz unterstützt die horizontale Verfolgbarkeit zwischen Elementen unterschiedlicher Modelle vorwärts- und rückwärtsgerichtet umfassend. Er bietet außerdem vertikale Verfolgbarkeit, die Elemente des gleichen Modells und verschiedener Modellversionen in Beziehung setzt. Über den offensichtlichen Nutzen einer durchgängigen Verfolgbarkeit im Vorfeld der Anforderungsspezifikation (z. B. Analyse der Auswirkungen einer Gesetzesänderung, Berücksichtigung des vollständigen Kontextes einer Anforderung bei ihrer Priorisierung) hinausgehend, bietet diese Arbeit eine erste Ansatzmöglichkeit für eine Feedback-Schleife im Prozess der Gesetzgebung. Stehen beispielsweise mehrere gleichwertige Gestaltungsoptionen eines Gesetzes zur Auswahl, können die Auswirkungen jeder Option analysiert und der Aufwand ihrer Umsetzung in E-Government-Anwendungen als Auswahlkriterium berücksichtigt werden. Die am 16. März 2011 in Kraft getretene Änderung des NKRG schreibt eine solche Analyse des so genannten „Erfüllungsaufwands“ für Teilbereiche des Verwaltungshandelns bereits heute verbindlich vor. Für diese Analyse kann die vorliegende Arbeit einen Ansatz bieten, um zu fundierten Aussagen über den Änderungsaufwand eingesetzter E-Government-Anwendungssysteme zu kommen.
In the geoinformatics field, remote sensing data is often used for analyzing the characteristics of the current investigation area. This includes DEMs, which are simple raster grids containing grey scales representing the respective elevation values. The project CREADED that is presented in this paper aims at making these monochrome raster images more significant and more intuitively interpretable. For this purpose, an executable interactive model for creating a colored and relief-shaded Digital Elevation Model (DEM) has been designed using the jABC framework. The process is based on standard jABC-SIBs and SIBs that provide specific GIS functions, which are available as Web services, command line tools and scripts.
Bildverarbeitungsanwendungen stellen besondere Ansprüche an das ausführende Rechensystem. Einerseits ist eine hohe Rechenleistung erforderlich. Andererseits ist eine hohe Flexibilität von Vorteil, da die Entwicklung tendentiell ein experimenteller und interaktiver Prozess ist. Für neue Anwendungen tendieren Entwickler dazu, eine Rechenarchitektur zu wählen, die sie gut kennen, anstatt eine Architektur einzusetzen, die am besten zur Anwendung passt. Bildverarbeitungsalgorithmen sind inhärent parallel, doch herkömmliche bildverarbeitende eingebettete Systeme basieren meist auf sequentiell arbeitenden Prozessoren. Im Gegensatz zu dieser "Unstimmigkeit" können hocheffiziente Systeme aus einer gezielten Synergie aus Software- und Hardwarekomponenten aufgebaut werden. Die Konstruktion solcher System ist jedoch komplex und viele Lösungen, wie zum Beispiel grobgranulare Architekturen oder anwendungsspezifische Programmiersprachen, sind oft zu akademisch für einen Einsatz in der Wirtschaft. Die vorliegende Arbeit soll ein Beitrag dazu leisten, die Komplexität von Hardware-Software-Systemen zu reduzieren und damit die Entwicklung hochperformanter on-Chip-Systeme im Bereich Bildverarbeitung zu vereinfachen und wirtschaftlicher zu machen. Dabei wurde Wert darauf gelegt, den Aufwand für Einarbeitung, Entwicklung als auch Erweiterungen gering zu halten. Es wurde ein Entwurfsfluss konzipiert und umgesetzt, welcher es dem Softwareentwickler ermöglicht, Berechnungen durch Hardwarekomponenten zu beschleunigen und das zu Grunde liegende eingebettete System komplett zu prototypisieren. Hierbei werden komplexe Bildverarbeitungsanwendungen betrachtet, welche ein Betriebssystem erfordern, wie zum Beispiel verteilte Kamerasensornetzwerke. Die eingesetzte Software basiert auf Linux und der Bildverarbeitungsbibliothek OpenCV. Die Verteilung der Berechnungen auf Software- und Hardwarekomponenten und die daraus resultierende Ablaufplanung und Generierung der Rechenarchitektur erfolgt automatisch. Mittels einer auf der Antwortmengenprogrammierung basierten Entwurfsraumexploration ergeben sich Vorteile bei der Modellierung und Erweiterung. Die Systemsoftware wird mit OpenEmbedded/Bitbake synthetisiert und die erzeugten on-Chip-Architekturen auf FPGAs realisiert.
Personal fabrication tools, such as 3D printers, are on the way of enabling a future in which non-technical users will be able to create custom objects. However, while the hardware is there, the current interaction model behind existing design tools is not suitable for non-technical users. Today, 3D printers are operated by fabricating the object in one go, which tends to take overnight due to the slow 3D printing technology. Consequently, the current interaction model requires users to think carefully before printing as every mistake may imply another overnight print. Planning every step ahead, however, is not feasible for non-technical users as they lack the experience to reason about the consequences of their design decisions.
In this dissertation, we propose changing the interaction model around personal fabrication tools to better serve this user group. We draw inspiration from personal computing and argue that the evolution of personal fabrication may resemble the evolution of personal computing: Computing started with machines that executed a program in one go before returning the result to the user. By decreasing the interaction unit to single requests, turn-taking systems such as the command line evolved, which provided users with feedback after every input. Finally, with the introduction of direct-manipulation interfaces, users continuously interacted with a program receiving feedback about every action in real-time. In this dissertation, we explore whether these interaction concepts can be applied to personal fabrication as well.
We start with fabricating an object in one go and investigate how to tighten the feedback-cycle on an object-level: We contribute a method called low-fidelity fabrication, which saves up to 90% fabrication time by creating objects as fast low-fidelity previews, which are sufficient to evaluate key design aspects. Depending on what is currently being tested, we propose different conversions that enable users to focus on different parts: faBrickator allows for a modular design in the early stages of prototyping; when users move on WirePrint allows quickly testing an object's shape, while Platener allows testing an object's technical function. We present an interactive editor for each technique and explain the underlying conversion algorithms.
By interacting on smaller units, such as a single element of an object, we explore what it means to transition from systems that fabricate objects in one go to turn-taking systems. We start with a 2D system called constructable: Users draw with a laser pointer onto the workpiece inside a laser cutter. The drawing is captured with an overhead camera. As soon as the the user finishes drawing an element, such as a line, the constructable system beautifies the path and cuts it--resulting in physical output after every editing step. We extend constructable towards 3D editing by developing a novel laser-cutting technique for 3D objects called LaserOrigami that works by heating up the workpiece with the defocused laser until the material becomes compliant and bends down under gravity. While constructable and LaserOrigami allow for fast physical feedback, the interaction is still best described as turn-taking since it consists of two discrete steps: users first create an input and afterwards the system provides physical output.
By decreasing the interaction unit even further to a single feature, we can achieve real-time physical feedback: Input by the user and output by the fabrication device are so tightly coupled that no visible lag exists. This allows us to explore what it means to transition from turn-taking interfaces, which only allow exploring one option at a time, to direct manipulation interfaces with real-time physical feedback, which allow users to explore the entire space of options continuously with a single interaction. We present a system called FormFab, which allows for such direct control. FormFab is based on the same principle as LaserOrigami: It uses a workpiece that when warmed up becomes compliant and can be reshaped. However, FormFab achieves the reshaping not based on gravity, but through a pneumatic system that users can control interactively. As users interact, they see the shape change in real-time.
We conclude this dissertation by extrapolating the current evolution into a future in which large numbers of people use the new technology to create objects. We see two additional challenges on the horizon: sustainability and intellectual property. We investigate sustainability by demonstrating how to print less and instead patch physical objects. We explore questions around intellectual property with a system called Scotty that transfers objects without creating duplicates, thereby preserving the designer's copyright.
Die Dissertation stellt eine neue Herangehensweise an die Lösung der Aufgabe der funktionalen Diagnostik digitaler Systeme vor. In dieser Arbeit wird eine neue Methode für die Fehlererkennung vorgeschlagen, basierend auf der Logischen Ergänzung und der Verwendung von Berger-Codes und dem 1-aus-3 Code. Die neue Fehlererkennungsmethode der Logischen Ergänzung gestattet einen hohen Optimierungsgrad der benötigten Realisationsfläche der konstruierten Fehlererkennungsschaltungen. Außerdem ist eins der wichtigen in dieser Dissertation gelösten Probleme die Synthese vollständig selbstprüfender Schaltungen.
Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) facilitate the provision and orchestration of business services to enable a faster adoption to changing business demands. Web Services provide a technical foundation to implement this paradigm on the basis of XML-messaging. However, the enhanced flexibility of message-based systems comes along with new threats and risks. To face these issues, a variety of security mechanisms and approaches is supported by the Web Service specifications. The usage of these security mechanisms and protocols is configured by stating security requirements in security policies. However, security policy languages for SOA are complex and difficult to create due to the expressiveness of these languages. To facilitate and simplify the creation of security policies, this thesis presents a model-driven approach that enables the generation of complex security policies on the basis of simple security intentions. SOA architects can specify these intentions in system design models and are not required to deal with complex technical security concepts. The approach introduced in this thesis enables the enhancement of any system design modelling languages – for example FMC or BPMN – with security modelling elements. The syntax, semantics, and notion of these elements is defined by our security modelling language SecureSOA. The metamodel of this language provides extension points to enable the integration into system design modelling languages. In particular, this thesis demonstrates the enhancement of FMC block diagrams with SecureSOA. To enable the model-driven generation of security policies, a domain-independent policy model is introduced in this thesis. This model provides an abstraction layer for security policies. Mappings are used to perform the transformation from our model to security policy languages. However, expert knowledge is required to generate instances of this model on the basis of simple security intentions. Appropriate security mechanisms, protocols and options must be chosen and combined to fulfil these security intentions. In this thesis, a formalised system of security patterns is used to represent this knowledge and to enable an automated transformation process. Moreover, a domain-specific language is introduced to state security patterns in an accessible way. On the basis of this language, a system of security configuration patterns is provided to transform security intentions related to data protection and identity management. The formal semantics of the security pattern language enable the verification of the transformation process introduced in this thesis and prove the correctness of the pattern application. Finally, our SOA Security LAB is presented that demonstrates the application of our model-driven approach to facilitate a dynamic creation, configuration, and execution of secure Web Service-based composed applications.
Discriminative Models for Biometric Identification using Micro- and Macro-Movements of the Eyes
(2021)
Human visual perception is an active process. Eye movements either alternate between fixations and saccades or follow a smooth pursuit movement in case of moving targets. Besides these macroscopic gaze patterns, the eyes perform involuntary micro-movements during fixations which are commonly categorized into micro-saccades, drift and tremor. Eye movements are frequently studied in cognitive psychology, because they reflect a complex interplay of perception, attention and oculomotor control.
A common insight of psychological research is that macro-movements are highly individual. Inspired by this finding, there has been a considerable amount of prior research on oculomotoric biometric identification. However, the accuracy of known approaches is too low and the time needed for identification is too long for any practical application. This thesis explores discriminative models for the task of biometric identification.
Discriminative models optimize a quality measure of the predictions and are usually superior to generative approaches in discriminative tasks. However, using discriminative models requires to select a suitable form of data representation for sequential eye gaze data; i.e., by engineering features or constructing a sequence kernel and the performance of the classification model strongly depends on the data representation. We study two fundamentally different ways of representing eye gaze within a discriminative framework. In the first part of this thesis, we explore the integration of data and psychological background knowledge in the form of generative models to construct representations. To this end, we first develop generative statistical models of gaze behavior during reading and scene viewing that account for viewer-specific distributional properties of gaze patterns. In a second step, we develop a discriminative identification model by deriving Fisher kernel functions from these and several baseline models. We find that an SVM with Fisher kernel is able to reliably identify users based on their eye gaze during reading and scene viewing. However, since the generative models are constrained to use low-frequency macro-movements, they discard a significant amount of information contained in the raw eye tracking signal at a high cost: identification requires about one minute of input recording, which makes it inapplicable for real world biometric systems. In the second part of this thesis, we study a purely data-driven modeling approach. Here, we aim at automatically discovering the individual pattern hidden in the raw eye tracking signal. To this end, we develop a deep convolutional neural network DeepEyedentification that processes yaw and pitch gaze velocities and learns a representation end-to-end. Compared to prior work, this model increases the identification accuracy by one order of magnitude and the time to identification decreases to only seconds. The DeepEyedentificationLive model further improves upon the identification performance by processing binocular input and it also detects presentation-attacks.
We find that by learning a representation, the performance of oculomotoric identification and presentation-attack detection can be driven close to practical relevance for biometric applications. Eye tracking devices with high sampling frequency and precision are expensive and the applicability of eye movement as a biometric feature heavily depends on cost of recording devices.
In the last part of this thesis, we therefore study the requirements on data quality by evaluating the performance of the DeepEyedentificationLive network under reduced spatial and temporal resolution. We find that the method still attains a high identification accuracy at a temporal resolution of only 250 Hz and a precision of 0.03 degrees. Reducing both does not have an additive deteriorating effect.
The constantly growing capacity of reconfigurable devices allows simultaneous execution of complex applications on those devices. The mere diversity of applications deems it impossible to design an interconnection network matching the requirements of every possible application perfectly, leading to suboptimal performance in many cases. However, the architecture of the interconnection network is not the only aspect affecting performance of communication. The resource manager places applications on the device and therefore influences latency between communicating partners and overall network load. Communication protocols affect performance by introducing data and processing overhead putting higher load on the network and increasing resource demand. Approaching communication holistically not only considers the architecture of the interconnect, but communication-aware resource management, communication protocols and resource usage just as well. Incorporation of different parts of a reconfigurable system during design- and runtime and optimizing them with respect to communication demand results in more resource efficient communication. Extensive evaluation shows enhanced performance and flexibility, if communication on reconfigurable devices is regarded in a holistic fashion.
User Experience (UX) describes the holistic experience of a user before, during, and after interaction with a platform, product, or service. UX adds value and attraction to their sole functionality and is therefore highly relevant for firms. The increased interest in UX has produced a vast amount of scholarly research since 1983. The research field is, therefore, complex and scattered. Conducting a bibliometric analysis, we aim at structuring the field quantitatively and rather abstractly. We employed citation analyses, co-citation analyses, and content analyses to evaluate productivity and impact of extant research. We suggest that future research should focus more on business and management related topics.
Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehen virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodelle, die Objekte, Phänomene und Prozesse in urbanen Räumen in digitaler Form repräsentieren. Sie haben sich zu einem Kernthema von Geoinformationssystemen entwickelt und bilden einen zentralen Bestandteil geovirtueller 3D-Welten. Virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodelle finden nicht nur Verwendung als Mittel für Experten in Bereichen wie Stadtplanung, Funknetzplanung, oder Lärmanalyse, sondern auch für allgemeine Nutzer, die realitätsnah dargestellte virtuelle Städte in Bereichen wie Bürgerbeteiligung, Tourismus oder Unterhaltung nutzen und z. B. in Anwendungen wie GoogleEarth eine räumliche Umgebung intuitiv erkunden und durch eigene 3D-Modelle oder zusätzliche Informationen erweitern. Die Erzeugung und Darstellung virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle besteht aus einer Vielzahl von Prozessschritten, von denen in der vorliegenden Arbeit zwei näher betrachtet werden: Texturierung und Visualisierung. Im Bereich der Texturierung werden Konzepte und Verfahren zur automatischen Ableitung von Fototexturen aus georeferenzierten Schrägluftbildern sowie zur Speicherung oberflächengebundener Daten in virtuellen 3D-Stadtmodellen entwickelt. Im Bereich der Visualisierung werden Konzepte und Verfahren für die multiperspektivische Darstellung sowie für die hochqualitative Darstellung nichtlinearer Projektionen virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle in interaktiven Systemen vorgestellt. Die automatische Ableitung von Fototexturen aus georeferenzierten Schrägluftbildern ermöglicht die Veredelung vorliegender virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle. Schrägluftbilder bieten sich zur Texturierung an, da sie einen Großteil der Oberflächen einer Stadt, insbesondere Gebäudefassaden, mit hoher Redundanz erfassen. Das Verfahren extrahiert aus dem verfügbaren Bildmaterial alle Ansichten einer Oberfläche und fügt diese pixelpräzise zu einer Textur zusammen. Durch Anwendung auf alle Oberflächen wird das virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodell flächendeckend texturiert. Der beschriebene Ansatz wurde am Beispiel des offiziellen Berliner 3D-Stadtmodells sowie der in GoogleEarth integrierten Innenstadt von München erprobt. Die Speicherung oberflächengebundener Daten, zu denen auch Texturen zählen, wurde im Kontext von CityGML, einem international standardisierten Datenmodell und Austauschformat für virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodelle, untersucht. Es wird ein Datenmodell auf Basis computergrafischer Konzepte entworfen und in den CityGML-Standard integriert. Dieses Datenmodell richtet sich dabei an praktischen Anwendungsfällen aus und lässt sich domänenübergreifend verwenden. Die interaktive multiperspektivische Darstellung virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle ergänzt die gewohnte perspektivische Darstellung nahtlos um eine zweite Perspektive mit dem Ziel, den Informationsgehalt der Darstellung zu erhöhen. Diese Art der Darstellung ist durch die Panoramakarten von H. C. Berann inspiriert; Hauptproblem ist die Übertragung des multiperspektivischen Prinzips auf ein interaktives System. Die Arbeit stellt eine technische Umsetzung dieser Darstellung für 3D-Grafikhardware vor und demonstriert die Erweiterung von Vogel- und Fußgängerperspektive. Die hochqualitative Darstellung nichtlinearer Projektionen beschreibt deren Umsetzung auf 3D-Grafikhardware, wobei neben der Bildwiederholrate die Bildqualität das wesentliche Entwicklungskriterium ist. Insbesondere erlauben die beiden vorgestellten Verfahren, dynamische Geometrieverfeinerung und stückweise perspektivische Projektionen, die uneingeschränkte Nutzung aller hardwareseitig verfügbaren, qualitätssteigernden Funktionen wie z.~B. Bildraumgradienten oder anisotroper Texturfilterung. Beide Verfahren sind generisch und unterstützen verschiedene Projektionstypen. Sie ermöglichen die anpassungsfreie Verwendung gängiger computergrafischer Effekte wie Stilisierungsverfahren oder prozeduraler Texturen für nichtlineare Projektionen bei optimaler Bildqualität. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt wesentliche Technologien für die Verarbeitung virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle: Zum einen lassen sich mit den Ergebnissen der Arbeit Texturen für virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodelle automatisiert herstellen und als eigenständige Attribute in das virtuelle 3D-Stadtmodell einfügen. Somit trägt diese Arbeit dazu bei, die Herstellung und Fortführung texturierter virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle zu verbessern. Zum anderen zeigt die Arbeit Varianten und technische Lösungen für neuartige Projektionstypen für virtueller 3D-Stadtmodelle in interaktiven Visualisierungen. Solche nichtlinearen Projektionen stellen Schlüsselbausteine dar, um neuartige Benutzungsschnittstellen für und Interaktionsformen mit virtuellen 3D-Stadtmodellen zu ermöglichen, insbesondere für mobile Geräte und immersive Umgebungen.
In this project I constructed a workflow that takes a DNA sequence as input and provides a phylogenetic tree, consisting of the input sequence and other sequences which were found during a database search. In this phylogenetic tree the sequences are arranged depending on similarities. In bioinformatics, constructing phylogenetic trees is often used to explore the evolutionary relationships of genes or organisms and to understand the mechanisms of evolution itself.
Boolean constraint solving technology has made tremendous progress over the last decade, leading to industrial-strength solvers, for example, in the areas of answer set programming (ASP), the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), propositional satisfiability (SAT) and satisfiability of quantified Boolean formulas (QBF). However, in all these areas, there exist multiple solving strategies that work well on different applications; no strategy dominates all other strategies. Therefore, no individual solver shows robust state-of-the-art performance in all kinds of applications. Additionally, the question arises how to choose a well-performing solving strategy for a given application; this is a challenging question even for solver and domain experts. One way to address this issue is the use of portfolio solvers, that is, a set of different solvers or solver configurations. We present three new automatic portfolio methods: (i) automatic construction of parallel portfolio solvers (ACPP) via algorithm configuration,(ii) solving the $NP$-hard problem of finding effective algorithm schedules with Answer Set Programming (aspeed), and (iii) a flexible algorithm selection framework (claspfolio2) allowing for fair comparison of different selection approaches. All three methods show improved performance and robustness in comparison to individual solvers on heterogeneous instance sets from many different applications. Since parallel solvers are important to effectively solve hard problems on parallel computation systems (e.g., multi-core processors), we extend all three approaches to be effectively applicable in parallel settings. We conducted extensive experimental studies different instance sets from ASP, CSP, MAXSAT, Operation Research (OR), SAT and QBF that indicate an improvement in the state-of-the-art solving heterogeneous instance sets. Last but not least, from our experimental studies, we deduce practical advice regarding the question when to apply which of our methods.
Although educational content in electronic form is increasing dramatically, its usage in an educational environment is poor, mainly due to the fact that there is too much of (unreliable) redundant, and not relevant information. Finding appropriate answers is a rather difficult task being reliant on the user filtering of the pertinent information from the noise. Turning knowledge bases like the online tele-TASK archive into useful educational resources requires identifying correct, reliable, and "machine-understandable" information, as well as developing simple but efficient search tools with the ability to reason over this information. Our vision is to create an E-Librarian Service, which is able to retrieve multimedia resources from a knowledge base in a more efficient way than by browsing through an index, or by using a simple keyword search. In our E-Librarian Service, the user can enter his question in a very simple and human way; in natural language (NL). Our premise is that more pertinent results would be retrieved if the search engine understood the sense of the user's query. The returned results are then logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matchings. Our E-Librarian Service does not return the answer to the user's question, but it retrieves the most pertinent document(s), in which the user finds the answer to his/her question. Among all the documents that have some common information with the user query, our E-Librarian Service identifies the most pertinent match(es), keeping in mind that the user expects an exhaustive answer while preferring a concise answer with only little or no information overhead. Also, our E-Librarian Service always proposes a solution to the user, even if the system concludes that there is no exhaustive answer. Our E-Librarian Service was implemented prototypically in three different educational tools. A first prototype is CHESt (Computer History Expert System); it has a knowledge base with 300 multimedia clips that cover the main events in computer history. A second prototype is MatES (Mathematics Expert System); it has a knowledge base with 115 clips that cover the topic of fractions in mathematics for secondary school w.r.t. the official school programme. All clips were recorded mainly by pupils. The third and most advanced prototype is the "Lecture Butler's E-Librarain Service"; it has a Web service interface to respect a service oriented architecture (SOA), and was developed in the context of the Web-University project at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI). Two major experiments in an educational environment - at the Lycée Technique Esch/Alzette in Luxembourg - were made to test the pertinence and reliability of our E-Librarian Service as a complement to traditional courses. The first experiment (in 2005) was made with CHESt in different classes, and covered a single lesson. The second experiment (in 2006) covered a period of 6 weeks of intensive use of MatES in one class. There was no classical mathematics lesson where the teacher gave explanations, but the students had to learn in an autonomous and exploratory way. They had to ask questions to the E-Librarian Service just the way they would if there was a human teacher.
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in available compute capacities. However, these “Grid resources” are rarely accessible in a continuous stream, but rather appear scattered across various machine types, platforms and operating systems, which are coupled by networks of fluctuating bandwidth. It becomes increasingly difficult for scientists to exploit available resources for their applications. We believe that intelligent, self-governing applications should be able to select resources in a dynamic and heterogeneous environment: Migrating applications determine a resource when old capacities are used up. Spawning simulations launch algorithms on external machines to speed up the main execution. Applications are restarted as soon as a failure is detected. All these actions can be taken without human interaction. A distributed compute environment possesses an intrinsic unreliability. Any application that interacts with such an environment must be able to cope with its failing components: deteriorating networks, crashing machines, failing software. We construct a reliable service infrastructure by endowing a service environment with a peer-to-peer topology. This “Grid Peer Services” infrastructure accommodates high-level services like migration and spawning, as well as fundamental services for application launching, file transfer and resource selection. It utilizes existing Grid technology wherever possible to accomplish its tasks. An Application Information Server acts as a generic information registry to all participants in a service environment. The service environment that we developed, allows applications e.g. to send a relocation requests to a migration server. The server selects a new computer based on the transmitted resource requirements. It transfers the application's checkpoint and binary to the new host and resumes the simulation. Although the Grid's underlying resource substrate is not continuous, we achieve persistent computations on Grids by relocating the application. We show with our real-world examples that a traditional genome analysis program can be easily modified to perform self-determined migrations in this service environment.
Lessons Learned
(2014)
This chapter summarizes the experience and the lessons we learned concerning the application of the jABC as a framework for design and execution of scientific workflows. It reports experiences from the domain modeling (especially service integration) and workflow design phases and evaluates the resulting models statistically with respect to the SIB library and hierarchy levels.
The Course's SIB Libraries
(2014)
This chapter gives a detailed description of the service framework underlying all the example projects that form the foundation of this book. It describes the different SIB libraries that we made available for the course “Process modeling in the natural sciences” to provide the functionality that was required for the envisaged applications. The students used these SIB libraries to realize their projects.
Background: The development of bioinformatics databases, algorithms, and tools throughout the last years has lead to a highly distributedworld of bioinformatics services. Without adequatemanagement and development support, in silico researchers are hardly able to exploit the potential of building complex, specialized analysis processes from these services. The Semantic Web aims at thoroughly equipping individual data and services with machine-processable meta-information, while workflow systems support the construction of service compositions. However, even in this combination, in silico researchers currently would have to deal manually with the service interfaces, the adequacy of the semantic annotations, type incompatibilities, and the consistency of service compositions. Results: In this paper, we demonstrate by means of two examples how Semantic Web technology together with an adequate domain modelling frees in silico researchers from dealing with interfaces, types, and inconsistencies. In Bio-jETI, bioinformatics services can be graphically combined to complex services without worrying about details of their interfaces or about type mismatches of the composition. These issues are taken care of at the semantic level by Bio-jETI’s model checking and synthesis features. Whenever possible, they automatically resolve type mismatches in the considered service setting. Otherwise, they graphically indicate impossible/incorrect service combinations. In the latter case, the workflow developermay either modify his service composition using semantically similar services, or ask for help in developing the missing mediator that correctly bridges the detected type gap. Newly developed mediators should then be adequately annotated semantically, and added to the service library for later reuse in similar situations. Conclusion: We show the power of semantic annotations in an adequately modelled and semantically enabled domain setting. Using model checking and synthesis methods, users may orchestrate complex processes from a wealth of heterogeneous services without worrying about interfaces and (type) consistency. The success of this method strongly depends on a careful semantic annotation of the provided services and on its consequent exploitation for analysis, validation, and synthesis. We are convinced that these annotations will become standard, as they will become preconditions for the success and widespread use of (preferred) services in the Semantic Web
We summarize here the main characteristics and features of the jABC framework, used in the case studies as a graphical tool for modeling scientific processes and workflows. As a comprehensive environment for service-oriented modeling and design according to the XMDD (eXtreme Model-Driven Design) paradigm, the jABC offers much more than the pure modeling capability. Associated technologies and plugins provide in fact means for a rich variety of supporting functionality, such as remote service integration, taxonomical service classification, model execution, model verification, model synthesis, and model compilation. We describe here in short both the essential jABC features and the service integration philosophy followed in the environment. In our work over the last years we have seen that this kind of service definition and provisioning platform has the potential to become a core technology in interdisciplinary service orchestration and technology transfer: Domain experts, like scientists not specially trained in computer science, directly define complex service orchestrations as process models and use efficient and complex domain-specific tools in a simple and intuitive way.
A major part of the scientific experiments that are carried out today requires thorough computational support. While database and algorithm providers face the problem of bundling resources to create and sustain powerful computation nodes, the users have to deal with combining sets of (remote) services into specific data analysis and transformation processes. Today’s attention to “big data” amplifies the issues of size, heterogeneity, and process-level diversity/integration. In the last decade, especially workflow-based approaches to deal with these processes have enjoyed great popularity. This book concerns a particularly agile and model-driven approach to manage scientific workflows that is based on the XMDD paradigm. In this chapter we explain the scope and purpose of the book, briefly describe the concepts and technologies of the XMDD paradigm, explain the principal differences to related approaches, and outline the structure of the book.
Solving problems combining task and motion planning requires searching across a symbolic search space and a geometric search space. Because of the semantic gap between symbolic and geometric representations, symbolic sequences of actions are not guaranteed to be geometrically feasible. This compels us to search in the combined search space, in which frequent backtracks between symbolic and geometric levels make the search inefficient.We address this problem by guiding symbolic search with rich information extracted from the geometric level through culprit detection mechanisms.
E-Learning-Anwendungen bieten Chancen für die gesetzlich vorgeschriebene Inklusion von Lernenden mit Beeinträchtigungen. Die gleichberechtigte Teilhabe von blinden Lernenden an Veranstaltungen in virtuellen Klassenzimmern ist jedoch durch den synchronen, multimedialen Charakter und den hohen Informationsumfang dieser Lösungen kaum möglich.
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Zugänglichkeit virtueller Klassenzimmer für blinde Nutzende, um eine möglichst gleichberechtigte Teilhabe an synchronen, kollaborativen Lernszenarien zu ermöglichen. Im Rahmen einer Produktanalyse werden dazu virtuelle Klassenzimmer auf ihre Zugänglichkeit und bestehende Barrieren untersucht und Richtlinien für die zugängliche Gestaltung von virtuellen Klassenzimmern definiert. Anschließend wird ein alternatives Benutzungskonzept zur Darstellung und Bedienung virtueller Klassenzimmer auf einem zweidimensionalen taktilen Braille-Display entwickelt, um eine möglichst gleichberechtigte Teilhabe blinder Lernender an synchronen Lehrveranstaltungen zu ermöglichen. Nach einer ersten Evaluation mit blinden Probanden erfolgt die prototypische Umsetzung des Benutzungskonzepts für ein Open-Source-Klassenzimmer. Die abschließende Evaluation der prototypischen Umsetzung zeigt die Verbesserung der Zugänglichkeit von virtuellen Klassenzimmern für blinde Lernende unter Verwendung eines taktilen Flächendisplays und bestätigt die Wirksamkeit der im Rahmen dieser Arbeit entwickelten Konzepte.
In the early days of computer graphics, research was mainly driven by the goal to create realistic synthetic imagery. By contrast, non-photorealistic computer graphics, established as its own branch of computer graphics in the early 1990s, is mainly motivated by concepts and principles found in traditional art forms, such as painting, illustration, and graphic design, and it investigates concepts and techniques that abstract from reality using expressive, stylized, or illustrative rendering techniques. This thesis focuses on the artistic stylization of two-dimensional content and presents several novel automatic techniques for the creation of simplified stylistic illustrations from color images, video, and 3D renderings. Primary innovation of these novel techniques is that they utilize the smooth structure tensor as a simple and efficient way to obtain information about the local structure of an image. More specifically, this thesis contributes to knowledge in this field in the following ways. First, a comprehensive review of the structure tensor is provided. In particular, different methods for integrating the minor eigenvector field of the smoothed structure tensor are developed, and the superiority of the smoothed structure tensor over the popular edge tangent flow is demonstrated. Second, separable implementations of the popular bilateral and difference of Gaussians filters that adapt to the local structure are presented. These filters avoid artifacts while being computationally highly efficient. Taken together, both provide an effective way to create a cartoon-style effect. Third, a generalization of the Kuwahara filter is presented that avoids artifacts by adapting the shape, scale, and orientation of the filter to the local structure. This causes directional image features to be better preserved and emphasized, resulting in overall sharper edges and a more feature-abiding painterly effect. In addition to the single-scale variant, a multi-scale variant is presented, which is capable of performing a highly aggressive abstraction. Fourth, a technique that builds upon the idea of combining flow-guided smoothing with shock filtering is presented, allowing for an aggressive exaggeration and an emphasis of directional image features. All presented techniques are suitable for temporally coherent per-frame filtering of video or dynamic 3D renderings, without requiring expensive extra processing, such as optical flow. Moreover, they can be efficiently implemented to process content in real-time on a GPU.
A workflow for visualizing server connections using the Google Maps API was built in the jABC. It makes use of three basic services: An XML-based IP address geolocation web service, a command line tool and the Static Maps API. The result of the workflow is an URL leading to an image file of a map, showing server connections between a client and a target host.
Die regelmäßige Navigation durch den Raum gehört für Studenten der Universität Potsdam zum Alltag. Man möchte, unabhängig vom Fortbewegungsmittel, schnell und sicher von zu Hause zum Hörsaal oder Seminargebäude. Eine umfassende Navigationshilfe, die alle Transportmodi verbindet, wird dafür verlangt.
Das Ziel dieser Arbeit besteht darin, ein Konzept für einen multimodalen Routenplaner zu entwickeln, der es Studenten und Gästen der Universität Potsdam ermöglicht, sich zwischen den dezentral gelegenen Campusstandorten zu bewegen – egal ob mit Bus und Bahn, dem Auto, Fahrrad oder zu Fuß. Die Implementierung erfolgt ausschließlich auf Grundlage freier Daten und freier, quelloffener Software (FOSS), die für diesen Zweck aufbereitet werden. Ergebnis ist eine webbasierte Applikation, die über eine Entwicklerschnittstelle (API) in andere Projekte eingebunden werden kann.
Aus einer Vergleichsstudie mit starken und schwachen Problemlösern konnten Erkenntnisse über die effizienten Herangehensweisen von Hochleistern an Informatikprobleme gewonnen werden. Diese Erkenntnisse wurden in einem Lehrvideo zum informatischen Problemlösen didaktisch aufgearbeitet, sodass Lernenden der Einsatz von Baumstrukturen und Rekursion im konkreten Kontext gezeigt werden kann. Nun wurde die tatsächliche Lernwirksamkeit des Videos sowie die Definition der Zielgruppe in einer Vergleichsstudie mit 66 Studienanfängern überprüft.
Dieses Lehrvideo zeigt aus der Perspektive einer Übertischkamera den fiktiven informatischen Hochleister Tom bei der Bearbeitung eines schwierigen Färbeproblems. Dabei kann man die fortlaufend von ihm angefertigten Skizzen beobachten und seine Gedankengänge genau verfolgen. Denn dieser Problemlöser arbeitet unter lautem Denken, d. h. er spricht alle seine Gedankengänge laut aus. Man kann zuschauen, wie Tom zunächst die Aufgabe analysiert und die dadurch gewonnenen Erkenntnisse in der anschließenden Problembearbeitung gewinnbringend einsetzt. Der Zuschauer wird dabei aber nicht allein gelassen. An markanten Stellen wird das Video unterbrochen und Toms zurückliegende Aktivitäten mit animierten Bildsequenzen vertiefend erläutert. Schwache Problemlöser können so die in Unterricht oder Vorlesung vermittelten Kenntnisse über informatische Problemlösemethoden vertiefen und deren Anwendung durch einen starken Problemlöser beispielhaft miterleben. Entstanden ist dieses Video aus einer Vergleichsstudie mit starken und schwachen Problemlösern. Die effizienten Methoden der Hochleister wurden didaktisch aufgearbeitet und zu einem modellhaften Problemlöseprozess zusammengesetzt. Der wissenschaftliche Hintergrund des Lehrvideos wird durch eine als Bildergeschichte erzählte Rahmenhandlung verdeutlicht. Bei Erstsemesterstudenten der Informatik, denen dieses Video zur Bewertung vorgespielt wurde, fand dieses Konzept große Zustimmung. Tenor: Unterhaltsam und lehrreich zugleich.
Image feature detection is a key task in computer vision. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is a prevalent and well known algorithm for robust feature detection. However, it is computationally demanding and software implementations are not applicable for real-time performance. In this paper, a versatile and pipelined hardware implementation is proposed, that is capable of computing keypoints and rotation invariant descriptors on-chip. All computations are performed in single precision floating-point format which makes it possible to implement the original algorithm with little alteration. Various rotation resolutions and filter kernel sizes are supported for images of any resolution up to ultra-high definition. For full high definition images, 84 fps can be processed. Ultra high definition images can be processed at 21 fps.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) emerged in the late 1990s as a new logic programming paradigm, having its roots in nonmonotonic reasoning, deductive databases, and logic programming with negation as failure. The basic idea of ASP is to represent a computational problem as a logic program whose answer sets correspond to solutions, and then to use an answer set solver for finding answer sets of the program. ASP is particularly suited for solving NP-complete search problems. Among these, we find applications to product configuration, diagnosis, and graph-theoretical problems, e.g. finding Hamiltonian cycles. On different lines of ASP research, many extensions of the basic formalism have been proposed. The most intensively studied one is the modelling of preferences in ASP. They constitute a natural and effective way of selecting preferred solutions among a plethora of solutions for a problem. For example, preferences have been successfully used for timetabling, auctioning, and product configuration. In this thesis, we concentrate on preferences within answer set programming. Among several formalisms and semantics for preference handling in ASP, we concentrate on ordered logic programs with the underlying D-, W-, and B-semantics. In this setting, preferences are defined among rules of a logic program. They select preferred answer sets among (standard) answer sets of the underlying logic program. Up to now, those preferred answer sets have been computed either via a compilation method or by meta-interpretation. Hence, the question comes up, whether and how preferences can be integrated into an existing ASP solver. To solve this question, we develop an operational graph-based framework for the computation of answer sets of logic programs. Then, we integrate preferences into this operational approach. We empirically observe that our integrative approach performs in most cases better than the compilation method or meta-interpretation. Another research issue in ASP are optimization methods that remove redundancies, as also found in database query optimizers. For these purposes, the rather recently suggested notion of strong equivalence for ASP can be used. If a program is strongly equivalent to a subprogram of itself, then one can always use the subprogram instead of the original program, a technique which serves as an effective optimization method. Up to now, strong equivalence has not been considered for logic programs with preferences. In this thesis, we tackle this issue and generalize the notion of strong equivalence to ordered logic programs. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the strong equivalence of two ordered logic programs. Furthermore, we provide program transformations for ordered logic programs and show in how far preferences can be simplified. Finally, we present two new applications for preferences within answer set programming. First, we define new procedures for group decision making, which we apply to the problem of scheduling a group meeting. As a second new application, we reconstruct a linguistic problem appearing in German dialects within ASP. Regarding linguistic studies, there is an ongoing debate about how unique the rule systems of language are in human cognition. The reconstruction of grammatical regularities with tools from computer science has consequences for this debate: if grammars can be modelled this way, then they share core properties with other non-linguistic rule systems.
Interaktive System sind dynamische Systeme mit einem zumeist informationellen Kern, die über eine Benutzungsschnittstelle von einem oder mehreren Benutzern bedient werden können. Grundlage für die Benutzung interaktiver Systeme ist das Verständnis von Zweck und Funktionsweise. Allein aus Form und Gestalt der Benutzungsschnittstelle ergibt sich ein solches Verständnis nur in einfachen Fällen. Mit steigender Komplexität ist daher eine verständliche Beschreibung solcher Systeme für deren Entwicklung und Benutzung unverzichtbar. Abhängig von ihrem Zweck variieren die Formen vorgefundener Beschreibungen in der Literatur sehr stark. Ausschlaggebend für die Verständlichkeit einer Beschreibung ist jedoch primär die ihr zugrundeliegende Begriffswelt. Zur Beschreibung allgemeiner komplexer diskreter Systeme - aufbauend auf einer getrennten Betrachtung von Aufbau-, Ablauf- und Wertestrukturen - existiert eine bewährte Begriffswelt. Eine Spezialisierung dieser Begriffs- und Vorstellungswelt, die den unterschiedlichen Betrachtungsebenen interaktiver Systeme gerecht wird und die als Grundlage beliebiger Beschreibungsansätze interaktiver Systeme dienen kann, gibt es bisher nicht. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Bereitstellung einer solchen Begriffswelt zur effizienten Kommunikation der Strukturen interaktiver Systeme. Dadurch soll die Grundlage für eine sinnvolle Ergänzung bestehender Beschreibungs- und Entwicklungsansätze geschaffen werden. Prinzipien der Gestaltung von Benutzungsschnittstellen, Usability- oder Ergonomiebetrachtungen stehen nicht im Mittelpunkt der Arbeit. Ausgehend von der informationellen Komponente einer Benutzungsschnittstelle werden drei Modellebenen abgegrenzt, die bei der Betrachtung eines interaktiven Systems zu unterscheiden sind. Jede Modellebene ist durch eine typische Begriffswelt gekennzeichnet, die ihren Ursprung in einer aufbauverwurzelten Vorstellung hat. Der durchgängige Bezug auf eine Systemvorstellung unterscheidet diesen Ansatz von dem bereits bekannten Konzept der Abgrenzung unterschiedlicher Ebenen verschiedenartiger Entwurfsentscheidungen. Die Fundamental Modeling Concepts (FMC) bilden dabei die Grundlage für die Findung und die Darstellung von Systemstrukturen. Anhand bestehender Systembeschreibungen wird gezeigt, wie die vorgestellte Begriffswelt zur Modellfindung genutzt werden kann. Dazu wird eine repräsentative Auswahl vorgefundener Systembeschreibungen aus der einschlägigen Literatur daraufhin untersucht, in welchem Umfang durch sie die Vorstellungswelt dynamischer Systeme zum Ausdruck kommt. Defizite in der ursprünglichen Darstellung werden identifiziert. Anhand von Alternativmodellen zu den betrachteten Systemen wird der Nutzen der vorgestellten Begriffswelt und Darstellungsweise demonstriert.
The modeling and evaluation calculus FMC-QE, the Fundamental Modeling Concepts for Quanti-tative Evaluation [1], extends the Fundamental Modeling Concepts (FMC) for performance modeling and prediction. In this new methodology, the hierarchical service requests are in the main focus, because they are the origin of every service provisioning process. Similar to physics, these service requests are a tuple of value and unit, which enables hierarchical service request transformations at the hierarchical borders and therefore the hierarchical modeling. Through reducing the model complexity of the models by decomposing the system in different hierarchical views, the distinction between operational and control states and the calculation of the performance values on the assumption of the steady state, FMC-QE has a scalable applica-bility on complex systems. According to FMC, the system is modeled in a 3-dimensional hierarchical representation space, where system performance parameters are described in three arbitrarily fine-grained hierarchi-cal bipartite diagrams. The hierarchical service request structures are modeled in Entity Relationship Diagrams. The static server structures, divided into logical and real servers, are de-scribed as Block Diagrams. The dynamic behavior and the control structures are specified as Petri Nets, more precisely Colored Time Augmented Petri Nets. From the structures and pa-rameters of the performance model, a hierarchical set of equations is derived. The calculation of the performance values is done on the assumption of stationary processes and is based on fundamental laws of the performance analysis: Little's Law and the Forced Traffic Flow Law. Little's Law is used within the different hierarchical levels (horizontal) and the Forced Traffic Flow Law is the key to the dependencies among the hierarchical levels (vertical). This calculation is suitable for complex models and allows a fast (re-)calculation of different performance scenarios in order to support development and configuration decisions. Within the Research Group Zorn at the Hasso Plattner Institute, the work is embedded in a broader research in the development of FMC-QE. While this work is concentrated on the theoretical background, description and definition of the methodology as well as the extension and validation of the applicability, other topics are in the development of an FMC-QE modeling and evaluation tool and the usage of FMC-QE in the design of an adaptive transport layer in order to fulfill Quality of Service and Service Level Agreements in volatile service based environments. This thesis contains a state-of-the-art, the description of FMC-QE as well as extensions of FMC-QE in representative general models and case studies. In the state-of-the-art part of the thesis in chapter 2, an overview on existing Queueing Theory and Time Augmented Petri Net models and other quantitative modeling and evaluation languages and methodologies is given. Also other hierarchical quantitative modeling frameworks will be considered. The description of FMC-QE in chapter 3 consists of a summary of the foundations of FMC-QE, basic definitions, the graphical notations, the FMC-QE Calculus and the modeling of open queueing networks as an introductory example. The extensions of FMC-QE in chapter 4 consist of the integration of the summation method in order to support the handling of closed networks and the modeling of multiclass and semaphore scenarios. Furthermore, FMC-QE is compared to other performance modeling and evaluation approaches. In the case study part in chapter 5, proof-of-concept examples, like the modeling of a service based search portal, a service based SAP NetWeaver application and the Axis2 Web service framework will be provided. Finally, conclusions are given by a summary of contributions and an outlook on future work in chapter 6. [1] Werner Zorn. FMC-QE - A New Approach in Quantitative Modeling. In Hamid R. Arabnia, editor, Procee-dings of the International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Methods (MSV 2007) within WorldComp ’07, pages 280 – 287, Las Vegas, NV, USA, June 2007. CSREA Press. ISBN 1-60132-029-9.
Thema dieser Arbeit sind echtzeitfähige 3D-Renderingverfahren, die 3D-Geometrie mit über der Standarddarstellung hinausgehenden Qualitäts- und Gestaltungsmerkmalen rendern können. Beispiele sind Verfahren zur Darstellung von Schatten, Reflexionen oder Transparenz. Mit heutigen computergraphischen Software-Basissystemen ist ihre Integration in 3D-Anwendungssysteme sehr aufwändig: Dies liegt einerseits an der technischen, algorithmischen Komplexität der Einzelverfahren, andererseits an Ressourcenkonflikten und Seiteneffekten bei der Kombination mehrerer Verfahren. Szenengraphsysteme, intendiert als computergraphische Softwareschicht zur Abstraktion von der Graphikhardware, stellen derzeit keine Mechanismen zur Nutzung dieser Renderingverfahren zur Verfügung. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, eine Software-Architektur für ein Szenengraphsystem zu konzipieren und umzusetzen, die echtzeitfähige 3D-Renderingverfahren als Komponenten modelliert und es damit erlaubt, diese Verfahren innerhalb des Szenengraphsystems für die Anwendungsentwicklung effektiv zu nutzen. Ein Entwickler, der ein solches Szenengraphsystem nutzt, steuert diese Komponenten durch Elemente in der Szenenbeschreibung an, die die sichtbare Wirkung eines Renderingverfahrens auf die Geometrie in der Szene angeben, aber keine Hinweise auf die algorithmische Implementierung des Verfahrens enthalten. Damit werden Renderingverfahren in 3D-Anwendungssystemen nutzbar, ohne dass ein Entwickler detaillierte Kenntnisse über sie benötigt, so dass der Aufwand für ihre Entwicklung drastisch reduziert wird. Ein besonderer Augenmerk der Arbeit liegt darauf, auf diese Weise auch verschiedene Renderingverfahren in einer Szene kombiniert einsetzen zu können. Hierzu ist eine Unterteilung der Renderingverfahren in mehrere Kategorien erforderlich, die mit Hilfe unterschiedlicher Ansätze ausgewertet werden. Dies erlaubt die Abstimmung verschiedener Komponenten für Renderingverfahren und ihrer verwendeten Ressourcen. Die Zusammenarbeit mehrerer Renderingverfahren hat dort ihre Grenzen, wo die Kombination von Renderingverfahren graphisch nicht sinnvoll ist oder fundamentale technische Beschränkungen der Verfahren eine gleichzeitige Verwendung unmöglich machen. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellte Software-Architektur kann diese Grenzen nicht verschieben, aber sie ermöglicht den gleichzeitigen Einsatz vieler Verfahren, bei denen eine Kombination aufgrund der hohen Komplexität der Implementierung bislang nicht erreicht wurde. Das Vermögen zur Zusammenarbeit ist dabei allerdings von der Art eines Einzelverfahrens abhängig: Verfahren zur Darstellung transparenter Geometrie beispielsweise erfordern bei der Kombination mit anderen Verfahren in der Regel vollständig neuentwickelte Renderingverfahren; entsprechende Komponenten für das Szenengraphsystem können daher nur eingeschränkt mit Komponenten für andere Renderingverfahren verwendet werden. Das in dieser Arbeit entwickelte System integriert und kombiniert Verfahren zur Darstellung von Bumpmapping, verschiedene Schatten- und Reflexionsverfahren sowie bildbasiertes CSG-Rendering. Damit stehen wesentliche Renderingverfahren in einem Szenengraphsystem erstmalig komponentenbasiert und auf einem hohen Abstraktionsniveau zur Verfügung. Das System ist trotz des zusätzlichen Verwaltungsaufwandes in der Lage, die Renderingverfahren einzeln und in Kombination grundsätzlich in Echtzeit auszuführen.
Aktuelle Softwaresysteme erlauben die verteilte Authentifizierung von Benutzern über Ver-zeichnisdienste, die sowohl im Intranet als auch im Extranet liegen und die über Domänen-grenzen hinweg die Kooperation mit Partnern ermöglichen. Der nächste Schritt ist es nun, die Autorisierung ebenfalls aus der lokalen Anwendung auszulagern und diese extern durchzu-führen – vorzugsweise unter dem Einfluss der Authentifizierungspartner. Basierend auf der Analyse des State-of-the-Art wird in dieser Arbeit ein Framework vorges-tellt, das die verteilte Autorisierung von ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) authenti-fizierten Benutzern auf Basis ihrer Gruppen oder ihrer persönlichen Identität ermöglicht. Es wird eine prototypische Implementation mit Diensten entwickelt, die für authentifizierte Be-nutzer Autorisierungsanfragen extern delegieren, sowie ein Dienst, der diese Autorisierungs-anfragen verarbeitet. Zusätzlich zeigt die Arbeit eine Integration dieses Autorisierungs-Frameworks in das .NET Framework, um die praxistaugliche Verwendbarkeit in einer aktuel-len Entwicklungsumgebung zu demonstrieren. Abschließend wird ein Ausblick auf weitere Fragestellungen und Folgearbeiten gegeben.
Thema des Workshops waren alle Fragen, die sich der Vermittlung von Informatikgegenständen im Hochschulbereich widmen. Dazu gehören u.a.: - fachdidaktische Konzepte der Vermittlung einzelner Informatikgegenstände - methodische Lösungen, wie spezielle Lehr- und Lernformen, Durchführungskonzepte - Studienkonzepte und Curricula, insbesondere im Zusammenhang mit Bachelor- und Masterstudiengängen - E-Learning-Ansätze, wenn sie ein erkennbares didaktisches Konzept verfolgen empirische Ergebnisse und Vergleichsstudien. Die Fachtagung widmete sich ausgewählten Fragestellungen dieses Themenkomplexes, die durch Vorträge ausgewiesener Experten, durch eingereichte Beiträge und durch eine Präsentation intensiv behandelt wurden.
E-Learning Symposium 2018
(2018)
In den vergangenen Jahren sind viele E-Learning-Innovationen entstanden. Einige davon wurden auf den vergangenen E-Learning Symposien der Universität Potsdam präsentiert: Das erste E-Learning Symposium im Jahr 2012 konzentrierte sich auf unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten der Studierendenaktivierung und Lehrgestaltung. Das Symposium 2014 rückte vor allem die Studierenden ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit. Im Jahr 2016 kam es durch das Zusammengehen des Symposiums mit der DeLFI-Tagung zu einer Fokussierung auf technische Innovationen. Doch was ist aus den Leuchttürmen von gestern geworden, und brauchen wir überhaupt noch neue Leuchttürme? Das Symposium setzt sich in diesem Jahr unter dem Motto „Innovation und Nachhaltigkeit – (k)ein Gegensatz?“ mit mediengestützten Lehr- und Lernprozessen im universitären Kontext auseinander und reflektiert aktuelle technische sowie didaktische Entwicklungen mit Blick auf deren mittel- bis langfristigen Einsatz in der Praxis.
Dieser Tagungsband zum E-Learning Symposium 2018 an der Universität Potsdam beinhaltet eine Mischung von Forschungs- und Praxisbeiträgen aus verschiedenen Fachdisziplinen und eröffnet vielschichtige Perspektiven auf das Thema E-Learning. Dabei werden die Vielfalt der didaktischen Einsatzszenarien als auch die Potentiale von Werk-zeugen und Methoden der Informatik in ihrem Zusammenspiel beleuchtet.
In seiner Keynote widmet sich Reinhard Keil dem Motto des Symposiums und geht der Nachhaltigkeit bei E-Learning-Projekten auf den Grund. Dabei analysiert und beleuchtet er anhand seiner über 15-jährigen Forschungspraxis die wichtigsten Wirkfaktoren und formuliert Empfehlungen zur Konzeption von E-Learning-Projekten. Im Gegensatz zu rein auf Kostenersparnis ausgerichteten (hochschul-)politischen Forderungen proklamiert er den Ansatz der hypothesengeleiteten Technikgestaltung, in der Nachhaltigkeit als Leitfrage oder Forschungsstrategie verstanden werden kann. In eine ähnliche Richtung geht der Beitrag von Iris Braun et al., die über Erfolgsfaktoren beim Einsatz von Audience Response Systemen in der universitären Lehre berichten.
Ein weiteres aktuelles Thema, sowohl für die Bildungstechnologie als auch in den Bildungswissenschaften allgemein, ist die Kompetenzorientierung und –modellierung. Hier geht es darum (Problemlöse-)Fähigkeiten gezielt zu beschreiben und in den Mittelpunkt der Lehre zu stellen. Johannes Konert stellt in einem eingeladenen Vortrag zwei Projekte vor, die den Prozess beginnend bei der Definition von Kompetenzen, deren Modellierung in einem semantischen maschinenlesbaren Format bis hin zur Erarbeitung von Methoden zur Kompetenzmessung und der elektronischen Zertifizierung aufzeigen. Dabei geht er auf technische Möglichkeiten, aber auch Grenzen ein. Auf einer spezifischeren Ebene beschäftigt sich Sarah Stumpf mit digitalen bzw. mediendidaktischen Kompetenzen im Lehramtsstudium und stellt ein Framework für die Förderung ebensolcher Kompetenzen bei angehenden Lehrkräften vor.
Der Einsatz von E-Learning birgt noch einige Herausforderungen. Dabei geht es oft um die Verbindung von Didaktik und Technik, den Erhalt von Aufmerksamkeit oder den Aufwand für das Erstellen von interaktiven Lehr- und Lerninhalten. Drei Beiträge in diesem Tagungsband beschäftigen sich mit dieser Thematik in unterschiedlichen Kontexten und zeigen Best-Practices und Lösungsansätze auf: Der Beitrag von Martina Wahl und Michael Hölscher behandelt den besonderen Kontext von Blended Learning-Szenarien in berufsbegleitenden Studiengängen. Um die Veröffentlichung eines global frei verfügbaren Onlinekurses abseits der großen MOOC Plattformen und den didaktischen Herausforderungen auch hinsichtlich der Motivation geht es im Beitrag von Ennio Marani und Isabel Jaisli. Schließlich schlagen Gregor Damnik et al. die automatische Erzeugung von Aufgaben zur Erhöhung von Interaktivität und Adaptivität in digitalen Lernressourcen vor, um den teilweise erheblichen Erstellungsaufwand zu reduzieren.
Zum Thema E-Learning zählen auch immer mobile Apps bzw. Spiele. Gleich zwei Beiträge beschäftigen sich mit dem Einsatz von E-Learning-Tools im Gesundheitskontext: Anna Tscherejkina und Anna Morgiel stellen in ihrem Beitrag Minispiele zum Training von sozio-emotionalen Kompetenzen für Menschen mit Autismus vor, und Stephanie Herbstreit et al. berichten vom Einsatz einer mobilen Lern-App zur Verbesserung von klinisch-praktischem Unterricht.
The innovation of information techniques has changed many aspects of our life. In health care field, we can obtain, manage and communicate high-quality large volumetric image data by computer integrated devices, to support medical care. In this dissertation I propose several promising methods that could assist physicians in processing, observing and communicating the image data. They are included in my three research aspects: telemedicine integration, medical image visualization and image segmentation. And these methods are also demonstrated by the demo software that I developed. One of my research point focuses on medical information storage standard in telemedicine, for example DICOM, which is the predominant standard for the storage and communication of medical images. I propose a novel 3D image data storage method, which was lacking in current DICOM standard. I also created a mechanism to make use of the non-standard or private DICOM files. In this thesis I present several rendering techniques on medical image visualization to offer different display manners, both 2D and 3D, for example, cut through data volume in arbitrary degree, rendering the surface shell of the data, and rendering the semi-transparent volume of the data. A hybrid segmentation approach, designed for semi-automated segmentation of radiological image, such as CT, MRI, etc, is proposed in this thesis to get the organ or interested area from the image. This approach takes advantage of the region-based method and boundary-based methods. Three steps compose the hybrid approach: the first step gets coarse segmentation by fuzzy affinity and generates homogeneity operator; the second step divides the image by Voronoi Diagram and reclassifies the regions by the operator to refine segmentation from the previous step; the third step handles vague boundary by level set model. Topics for future research are mentioned in the end, including new supplement for DICOM standard for segmentation information storage, visualization of multimodal image information, and improvement of the segmentation approach to higher dimension.
This thesis presents methods for automated synthesis of flexible chip multiprocessor systems from parallel programs targeted at FPGAs to exploit both task-level parallelism and architecture customization. Automated synthesis is necessitated by the complexity of the design space. A detailed description of the design space is provided in order to determine which parameters should be modeled to facilitate automated synthesis by optimizing a cost function, the emphasis being placed on inclusive modeling of parameters from application, architectural and physical subspaces, as well as their joint coverage in order to avoid pre-constraining the design space. Given a parallel program and a set of an IP library, the automated synthesis problem is to simultaneously (i) select processors (ii) map and schedule tasks to them, and (iii) select one or several networks for inter-task communications such that design constraints and optimization objectives are met. The research objective in this thesis is to find a suitable model for automated synthesis, and to evaluate methods of using the model for architectural optimizations. Our contributions are a holistic approach for the design of such systems, corresponding models to facilitate automated synthesis, evaluation of optimization methods using state of the art integer linear and answer set programming, as well as the development of synthesis heuristics to solve runtime challenges.
Die Projektierung und Abwicklung sowie die statische und dynamische Analyse von Geschäftsprozessen im Bereich des Verwaltens und Regierens auf kommunaler, Länder- wie auch Bundesebene mit Hilfe von Informations- und Kommunikationstechniken beschäftigen Politiker und Strategen für Informationstechnologie ebenso wie die Öffentlichkeit seit Langem. Der hieraus entstandene Begriff E-Government wurde in der Folge aus den unterschiedlichsten technischen, politischen und semantischen Blickrichtungen beleuchtet.
Die vorliegende Arbeit konzentriert sich dabei auf zwei Schwerpunktthemen:
> Das erste Schwerpunktthema behandelt den Entwurf eines hierarchischen Architekturmodells, für welches sieben hierarchische Schichten identifiziert werden können. Diese erscheinen notwendig, aber auch hinreichend, um den allgemeinen Fall zu beschreiben. Den Hintergrund hierfür liefert die langjährige Prozess- und Verwaltungserfahrung als Leiter der EDV-Abteilung der Stadtverwaltung Landshut, eine kreisfreie Stadt mit rund 69.000 Einwohnern im Nordosten von München. Sie steht als Repräsentant für viele Verwaltungsvorgänge in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und ist dennoch als Analyseobjekt in der Gesamtkomplexität und Prozessquantität überschaubar. Somit können aus der Analyse sämtlicher Kernabläufe statische und dynamische Strukturen extrahiert und abstrakt modelliert werden. Die Schwerpunkte liegen in der Darstellung der vorhandenen Bedienabläufe in einer Kommune. Die Transformation der Bedienanforderung in einem hierarchischen System, die Darstellung der Kontroll- und der Operationszustände in allen Schichten wie auch die Strategie der Fehlererkennung und Fehlerbehebung schaffen eine transparente Basis für umfassende Restrukturierungen und Optimierungen. Für die Modellierung wurde FMC-eCS eingesetzt, eine am Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik GmbH (HPI) im Fachgebiet Kommunikationssysteme entwickelte Methodik zur Modellierung zustandsdiskreter Systeme unter Berücksichtigung möglicher Inkonsistenzen
>Das zweite Schwerpunktthema widmet sich der quantitativen Modellierung und Optimierung von E-Government-Bediensystemen, welche am Beispiel des Bürgerbüros der Stadt Landshut im Zeitraum 2008 bis 2015 durchgeführt wurden. Dies erfolgt auf Basis einer kontinuierlichen Betriebsdatenerfassung mit aufwendiger Vorverarbeitung zur Extrahierung mathematisch beschreibbarer Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilungen. Der hieraus entwickelte Dienstplan wurde hinsichtlich der erzielbaren Optimierungen im dauerhaften Echteinsatz verifiziert.
Student teachers often struggle to keep track of everything that is happening in the classroom, and particularly to notice and respond when students cause disruptions. The complexity of the classroom environment is a potential contributing factor that has not been empirically tested. In this experimental study, we utilized a virtual reality (VR) classroom to examine whether classroom complexity affects the likelihood of student teachers noticing disruptions and how they react after noticing. Classroom complexity was operationalized as the number of disruptions and the existence of overlapping disruptions (multidimensionality) as well as the existence of parallel teaching tasks (simultaneity). Results showed that student teachers (n = 50) were less likely to notice the scripted disruptions, and also less likely to respond to the disruptions in a comprehensive and effortful manner when facing greater complexity. These results may have implications for both teacher training and the design of VR for training or research purpose. This study contributes to the field from two aspects: 1) it revealed how features of the classroom environment can affect student teachers' noticing of and reaction to disruptions; and 2) it extends the functionality of the VR environment-from a teacher training tool to a testbed of fundamental classroom processes that are difficult to manipulate in real-life.
With increasing number of applications in Internet and mobile environments, distributed software systems are demanded to be more powerful and flexible, especially in terms of dynamism and security. This dissertation describes my work concerning three aspects: dynamic reconfiguration of component software, security control on middleware applications, and web services dynamic composition. Firstly, I proposed a technology named Routing Based Workflow (RBW) to model the execution and management of collaborative components and realize temporary binding for component instances. The temporary binding means component instances are temporarily loaded into a created execution environment to execute their functions, and then are released to their repository after executions. The temporary binding allows to create an idle execution environment for all collaborative components, on which the change operations can be immediately carried out. The changes on execution environment will result in a new collaboration of all involved components, and also greatly simplifies the classical issues arising from dynamic changes, such as consistency preserving etc. To demonstrate the feasibility of RBW, I created a dynamic secure middleware system - the Smart Data Server Version 3.0 (SDS3). In SDS3, an open source implementation of CORBA is adopted and modified as the communication infrastructure, and three secure components managed by RBW, are created to enhance the security on the access of deployed applications. SDS3 offers multi-level security control on its applications from strategy control to application-specific detail control. For the management by RBW, the strategy control of SDS3 applications could be dynamically changed by reorganizing the collaboration of the three secure components. In addition, I created the Dynamic Services Composer (DSC) based on Apache open source projects, Apache Axis and WSIF. In DSC, RBW is employed to model the interaction and collaboration of web services and to enable the dynamic changes on the flow structure of web services. Finally, overall performance tests were made to evaluate the efficiency of the developed RBW and SDS3. The results demonstrated that temporary binding of component instances makes slight impacts on the execution efficiency of components, and the blackout time arising from dynamic changes can be extremely reduced in any applications.
This thesis discusses challenges in IT security education, points out a gap between e-learning and practical education, and presents a work to fill the gap. E-learning is a flexible and personalized alternative to traditional education. Nonetheless, existing e-learning systems for IT security education have difficulties in delivering hands-on experience because of the lack of proximity. Laboratory environments and practical exercises are indispensable instruction tools to IT security education, but security education in conventional computer laboratories poses particular problems such as immobility as well as high creation and maintenance costs. Hence, there is a need to effectively transform security laboratories and practical exercises into e-learning forms. In this thesis, we introduce the Tele-Lab IT-Security architecture that allows students not only to learn IT security principles, but also to gain hands-on security experience by exercises in an online laboratory environment. In this architecture, virtual machines are used to provide safe user work environments instead of real computers. Thus, traditional laboratory environments can be cloned onto the Internet by software, which increases accessibility to laboratory resources and greatly reduces investment and maintenance costs. Under the Tele-Lab IT-Security framework, a set of technical solutions is also proposed to provide effective functionalities, reliability, security, and performance. The virtual machines with appropriate resource allocation, software installation, and system configurations are used to build lightweight security laboratories on a hosting computer. Reliability and availability of laboratory platforms are covered by a virtual machine management framework. This management framework provides necessary monitoring and administration services to detect and recover critical failures of virtual machines at run time. Considering the risk that virtual machines can be misused for compromising production networks, we present a security management solution to prevent the misuse of laboratory resources by security isolation at the system and network levels. This work is an attempt to bridge the gap between e-learning/tele-teaching and practical IT security education. It is not to substitute conventional teaching in laboratories but to add practical features to e-learning. This thesis demonstrates the possibility to implement hands-on security laboratories on the Internet reliably, securely, and economically.
3D from 2D touch
(2013)
While interaction with computers used to be dominated by mice and keyboards, new types of sensors now allow users to interact through touch, speech, or using their whole body in 3D space. These new interaction modalities are often referred to as "natural user interfaces" or "NUIs." While 2D NUIs have experienced major success on billions of mobile touch devices sold, 3D NUI systems have so far been unable to deliver a mobile form factor, mainly due to their use of cameras. The fact that cameras require a certain distance from the capture volume has prevented 3D NUI systems from reaching the flat form factor mobile users expect. In this dissertation, we address this issue by sensing 3D input using flat 2D sensors. The systems we present observe the input from 3D objects as 2D imprints upon physical contact. By sampling these imprints at very high resolutions, we obtain the objects' textures. In some cases, a texture uniquely identifies a biometric feature, such as the user's fingerprint. In other cases, an imprint stems from the user's clothing, such as when walking on multitouch floors. By analyzing from which part of the 3D object the 2D imprint results, we reconstruct the object's pose in 3D space. While our main contribution is a general approach to sensing 3D input on 2D sensors upon physical contact, we also demonstrate three applications of our approach. (1) We present high-accuracy touch devices that allow users to reliably touch targets that are a third of the size of those on current touch devices. We show that different users and 3D finger poses systematically affect touch sensing, which current devices perceive as random input noise. We introduce a model for touch that compensates for this systematic effect by deriving the 3D finger pose and the user's identity from each touch imprint. We then investigate this systematic effect in detail and explore how users conceptually touch targets. Our findings indicate that users aim by aligning visual features of their fingers with the target. We present a visual model for touch input that eliminates virtually all systematic effects on touch accuracy. (2) From each touch, we identify users biometrically by analyzing their fingerprints. Our prototype Fiberio integrates fingerprint scanning and a display into the same flat surface, solving a long-standing problem in human-computer interaction: secure authentication on touchscreens. Sensing 3D input and authenticating users upon touch allows Fiberio to implement a variety of applications that traditionally require the bulky setups of current 3D NUI systems. (3) To demonstrate the versatility of 3D reconstruction on larger touch surfaces, we present a high-resolution pressure-sensitive floor that resolves the texture of objects upon touch. Using the same principles as before, our system GravitySpace analyzes all imprints and identifies users based on their shoe soles, detects furniture, and enables accurate touch input using feet. By classifying all imprints, GravitySpace detects the users' body parts that are in contact with the floor and then reconstructs their 3D body poses using inverse kinematics. GravitySpace thus enables a range of applications for future 3D NUI systems based on a flat sensor, such as smart rooms in future homes. We conclude this dissertation by projecting into the future of mobile devices. Focusing on the mobility aspect of our work, we explore how NUI devices may one day augment users directly in the form of implanted devices.
Research publications and data nowadays should be publicly available on the internet and, theoretically, usable for everyone to develop further research, products, or services. The long-term accessibility of research data is, therefore, fundamental in the economy of the research production process. However, the availability of data is not sufficient by itself, but also their quality must be verifiable. Measures to ensure reuse and reproducibility need to include the entire research life cycle, from the experimental design to the generation of data, quality control, statistical analysis, interpretation, and validation of the results. Hence, high-quality records, particularly for providing a string of documents for the verifiable origin of data, are essential elements that can act as a certificate for potential users (customers). These records also improve the traceability and transparency of data and processes, therefore, improving the reliability of results. Standards for data acquisition, analysis, and documentation have been fostered in the last decade driven by grassroot initiatives of researchers and organizations such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA). Nevertheless, what is still largely missing in the life science academic research are agreed procedures for complex routine research workflows. Here, well-crafted documentation like standard operating procedures (SOPs) offer clear direction and instructions specifically designed to avoid deviations as an absolute necessity for reproducibility. Therefore, this paper provides a standardized workflow that explains step by step how to write an SOP to be used as a starting point for appropriate research documentation.
Research publications and data nowadays should be publicly available on the internet and, theoretically, usable for everyone to develop further research, products, or services. The long-term accessibility of research data is, therefore, fundamental in the economy of the research production process. However, the availability of data is not sufficient by itself, but also their quality must be verifiable. Measures to ensure reuse and reproducibility need to include the entire research life cycle, from the experimental design to the generation of data, quality control, statistical analysis, interpretation, and validation of the results. Hence, high-quality records, particularly for providing a string of documents for the verifiable origin of data, are essential elements that can act as a certificate for potential users (customers). These records also improve the traceability and transparency of data and processes, therefore, improving the reliability of results. Standards for data acquisition, analysis, and documentation have been fostered in the last decade driven by grassroot initiatives of researchers and organizations such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA). Nevertheless, what is still largely missing in the life science academic research are agreed procedures for complex routine research workflows. Here, well-crafted documentation like standard operating procedures (SOPs) offer clear direction and instructions specifically designed to avoid deviations as an absolute necessity for reproducibility. Therefore, this paper provides a standardized workflow that explains step by step how to write an SOP to be used as a starting point for appropriate research documentation.
GraffDok is an application helping to maintain an overview over sprayed images somewhere in a city. At the time of writing it aims at vandalism rather than at beautiful photographic graffiti in an underpass. Looking at hundreds of tags and scribbles on monuments, house walls, etc. it would be interesting to not only record them in writing but even make them accessible electronically, including images.
GraffDok’s workflow is simple and only requires an EXIF-GPS-tagged photograph of a graffito. It automatically determines its location by using reverse geocoding with the given GPS-coordinates and the Gisgraphy WebService. While asking the user for some more meta data, GraffDok analyses the image in parallel with this and tries to detect fore- and background – before extracting the drawing lines and make them stand alone. The command line based tool ImageMagick is used here as well as for accessing EXIF data.
Any meta data is written to csv-files, which will stay easily accessible and can be integrated in TeX-files as well. The latter ones are converted to PDF at the end of the workflow, containing a table about all graffiti and a summary for each – including the generated characteristic graffiti pattern image.
Spotlocator is a game wherein people have to guess the spots of where photos were taken. The photos of a defined area for each game are from panoramio.com. They are published at http://spotlocator. drupalgardens.com with an ID. Everyone can guess the photo spots by sending a special tweet via Twitter that contains the hashtag #spotlocator, the guessed coordinates and the ID of the photo. An evaluation is published for all tweets. The players are informed about the distance to the real photo spots and the positions are shown on a map.
Die Tagungsreihe zur Hochschuldidaktik der Informatik HDI wird vom Fachbereich Informatik und Ausbildung / Didaktik der Informatik (IAD) in der Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. (GI) organisiert. Sie dient den Lehrenden der Informatik in Studiengängen an Hochschulen als Forum der Information und des Austauschs über neue didaktische Ansätze und bildungspolitische Themen im Bereich der Hochschulausbildung aus der fachlichen Perspektive der Informatik. Diese fünfte HDI 2012 wurde an der Universität Hamburg organisiert. Für sie wurde das spezielle Motto „Informatik für eine nachhaltige Zukunft“ gewählt, um insbesondere Fragen der Bildungsrelevanz informatischer Inhalte, der Kompetenzen für Studierende informatisch geprägter Studiengänge und der Rolle der Informatik in der Hochschulentwicklung zu diskutieren.
In the last decades, there was a notable progress in solving the well-known Boolean satisfiability (Sat) problem, which can be witnessed by powerful Sat solvers. One of the reasons why these solvers are so fast are structural properties of instances that are utilized by the solver’s interna. This thesis deals with the well-studied structural property treewidth, which measures the closeness of an instance to being a tree. In fact, there are many problems parameterized by treewidth that are solvable in polynomial time in the instance size when parameterized by treewidth.
In this work, we study advanced treewidth-based methods and tools for problems in knowledge representation and reasoning (KR). Thereby, we provide means to establish precise runtime results (upper bounds) for canonical problems relevant to KR. Then, we present a new type of problem reduction, which we call decomposition-guided (DG) that
allows us to precisely monitor the treewidth when reducing from one problem to another problem. This new reduction type will be the basis for a long-open lower bound result for quantified Boolean formulas and allows us to design a new methodology for establishing runtime lower bounds for problems parameterized by treewidth.
Finally, despite these lower bounds, we provide an efficient implementation of algorithms that adhere to treewidth. Our approach finds suitable abstractions of instances, which are subsequently refined in a recursive fashion, and it uses Sat solvers for solving subproblems. It turns out that our resulting solver is quite competitive for two canonical counting problems related to Sat.
The aim of our project design space exploration with answer set programming is to develop a general framework based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) that finds valid solutions to the system design problem and simultaneously performs Design Space Exploration (DSE) to find the most favorable alternatives. We leverage recent developments in ASP solving that allow for tight integration of background theories to create a holistic framework for effective DSE.
Independent component analysis (ICA) is a tool for statistical data analysis and signal processing that is able to decompose multivariate signals into their underlying source components. Although the classical ICA model is highly useful, there are many real-world applications that require powerful extensions of ICA. This thesis presents new methods that extend the functionality of ICA: (1) reliability and grouping of independent components with noise injection, (2) robust and overcomplete ICA with inlier detection, and (3) nonlinear ICA with kernel methods.
Learning a model for the relationship between the attributes and the annotated labels of data examples serves two purposes. Firstly, it enables the prediction of the label for examples without annotation. Secondly, the parameters of the model can provide useful insights into the structure of the data. If the data has an inherent partitioned structure, it is natural to mirror this structure in the model. Such mixture models predict by combining the individual predictions generated by the mixture components which correspond to the partitions in the data. Often the partitioned structure is latent, and has to be inferred when learning the mixture model. Directly evaluating the accuracy of the inferred partition structure is, in many cases, impossible because the ground truth cannot be obtained for comparison. However it can be assessed indirectly by measuring the prediction accuracy of the mixture model that arises from it. This thesis addresses the interplay between the improvement of predictive accuracy by uncovering latent cluster structure in data, and further addresses the validation of the estimated structure by measuring the accuracy of the resulting predictive model. In the application of filtering unsolicited emails, the emails in the training set are latently clustered into advertisement campaigns. Uncovering this latent structure allows filtering of future emails with very low false positive rates. In order to model the cluster structure, a Bayesian clustering model for dependent binary features is developed in this thesis. Knowing the clustering of emails into campaigns can also aid in uncovering which emails have been sent on behalf of the same network of captured hosts, so-called botnets. This association of emails to networks is another layer of latent clustering. Uncovering this latent structure allows service providers to further increase the accuracy of email filtering and to effectively defend against distributed denial-of-service attacks. To this end, a discriminative clustering model is derived in this thesis that is based on the graph of observed emails. The partitionings inferred using this model are evaluated through their capacity to predict the campaigns of new emails. Furthermore, when classifying the content of emails, statistical information about the sending server can be valuable. Learning a model that is able to make use of it requires training data that includes server statistics. In order to also use training data where the server statistics are missing, a model that is a mixture over potentially all substitutions thereof is developed. Another application is to predict the navigation behavior of the users of a website. Here, there is no a priori partitioning of the users into clusters, but to understand different usage scenarios and design different layouts for them, imposing a partitioning is necessary. The presented approach simultaneously optimizes the discriminative as well as the predictive power of the clusters. Each model is evaluated on real-world data and compared to baseline methods. The results show that explicitly modeling the assumptions about the latent cluster structure leads to improved predictions compared to the baselines. It is beneficial to incorporate a small number of hyperparameters that can be tuned to yield the best predictions in cases where the prediction accuracy can not be optimized directly.
Zur Beherrschung großer Systeme, insbesondere zur Weitergabe und Nutzung von Erfahrungswissen in der frühen Entwurfs- und Planungsphase, benötigt man Abstraktionen für deren Strukturen. Trennt man Software- von Systemstrukturen, kann man mit letzteren Systeme auf ausreichend hohem Abstraktionsgrad beschreiben.Software-Patterns dienen dazu, Erfahrungswissen bezüglich programmierter Systeme strukturiert weiterzugeben. Dabei wird unterschieden zwischen Idiomen, die sich auf Lösungen mit einer bestimmten Programmiersprache beziehen, Design-Patterns, die nur einen kleinen Teil des Programms betreffen und Architektur-Patterns, deren Einfluss über einen größeren Teil oder gar das komplette Programm reicht. Eine Untersuchung von existierenden Patterns zeigt, dass deren Konzepte nützlich zum Finden von Systemstrukturen sind. Die grafische Darstellung dieser Patterns ist dagegen oft auf Software-Strukturen eingeschränkt und ist für die Vermittlung von Erfahrungen zum Finden von Systemstrukturen meist nicht geeignet. Daher wird die Kategorie der konzeptionellen Patterns mit einer darauf abgestimmten grafischen Darstellungsform vorgeschlagen, bei denen Problem und Lösungsvorschlag im Bereich der Systemstrukturen liegen. Sie betreffen informationelle Systeme, sind aber nicht auf Lösungen mit Software beschränkt. Die Systemstrukturen werden grafisch dargestellt, wobei dafür die Fundamental Modeling Concepts (FMC) verwendet werden, die zur Darstellung von Systemstrukturen entwickelt wurden.
Virtual 3D city and landscape models are the main subject investigated in this thesis. They digitally represent urban space and have many applications in different domains, e.g., simulation, cadastral management, and city planning. Visualization is an elementary component of these applications. Photo-realistic visualization with an increasingly high degree of detail leads to fundamental problems for comprehensible visualization. A large number of highly detailed and textured objects within a virtual 3D city model may create visual noise and overload the users with information. Objects are subject to perspective foreshortening and may be occluded or not displayed in a meaningful way, as they are too small. In this thesis we present abstraction techniques that automatically process virtual 3D city and landscape models to derive abstracted representations. These have a reduced degree of detail, while essential characteristics are preserved. After introducing definitions for model, scale, and multi-scale representations, we discuss the fundamentals of map generalization as well as techniques for 3D generalization. The first presented technique is a cell-based generalization of virtual 3D city models. It creates abstract representations that have a highly reduced level of detail while maintaining essential structures, e.g., the infrastructure network, landmark buildings, and free spaces. The technique automatically partitions the input virtual 3D city model into cells based on the infrastructure network. The single building models contained in each cell are aggregated to abstracted cell blocks. Using weighted infrastructure elements, cell blocks can be computed on different hierarchical levels, storing the hierarchy relation between the cell blocks. Furthermore, we identify initial landmark buildings within a cell by comparing the properties of individual buildings with the aggregated properties of the cell. For each block, the identified landmark building models are subtracted using Boolean operations and integrated in a photo-realistic way. Finally, for the interactive 3D visualization we discuss the creation of the virtual 3D geometry and their appearance styling through colors, labeling, and transparency. We demonstrate the technique with example data sets. Additionally, we discuss applications of generalization lenses and transitions between abstract representations. The second technique is a real-time-rendering technique for geometric enhancement of landmark objects within a virtual 3D city model. Depending on the virtual camera distance, landmark objects are scaled to ensure their visibility within a specific distance interval while deforming their environment. First, in a preprocessing step a landmark hierarchy is computed, this is then used to derive distance intervals for the interactive rendering. At runtime, using the virtual camera distance, a scaling factor is computed and applied to each landmark. The scaling factor is interpolated smoothly at the interval boundaries using cubic Bézier splines. Non-landmark geometry that is near landmark objects is deformed with respect to a limited number of landmarks. We demonstrate the technique by applying it to a highly detailed virtual 3D city model and a generalized 3D city model. In addition we discuss an adaptation of the technique for non-linear projections and mobile devices. The third technique is a real-time rendering technique to create abstract 3D isocontour visualization of virtual 3D terrain models. The virtual 3D terrain model is visualized as a layered or stepped relief. The technique works without preprocessing and, as it is implemented using programmable graphics hardware, can be integrated with minimal changes into common terrain rendering techniques. Consequently, the computation is done in the rendering pipeline for each vertex, primitive, i.e., triangle, and fragment. For each vertex, the height is quantized to the nearest isovalue. For each triangle, the vertex configuration with respect to their isovalues is determined first. Using the configuration, the triangle is then subdivided. The subdivision forms a partial step geometry aligned with the triangle. For each fragment, the surface appearance is determined, e.g., depending on the surface texture, shading, and height-color-mapping. Flexible usage of the technique is demonstrated with applications from focus+context visualization, out-of-core terrain rendering, and information visualization. This thesis presents components for the creation of abstract representations of virtual 3D city and landscape models. Re-using visual language from cartography, the techniques enable users to build on their experience with maps when interpreting these representations. Simultaneously, characteristics of 3D geovirtual environments are taken into account by addressing and discussing, e.g., continuous scale, interaction, and perspective.
We introduce a type and effect system, for an imperative object calculus, which infers sharing possibly introduced by the evaluation of an expression, represented as an equivalence relation among its free variables. This direct representation of sharing effects at the syntactic level allows us to express in a natural way, and to generalize, widely-used notions in literature, notably uniqueness and borrowing. Moreover, the calculus is pure in the sense that reduction is defined on language terms only, since they directly encode store. The advantage of this non-standard execution model with respect to a behaviorally equivalent standard model using a global auxiliary structure is that reachability relations among references are partly encoded by scoping. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Quantified Boolean formulas (QBFs) play an important role in theoretical computer science. QBF extends propositional logic in such a way that many advanced forms of reasoning can be easily formulated and evaluated. In this dissertation we present our ZQSAT, which is an algorithm for evaluating quantified Boolean formulas. ZQSAT is based on ZBDD: Zero-Suppressed Binary Decision Diagram , which is a variant of BDD, and an adopted version of the DPLL algorithm. It has been implemented in C using the CUDD: Colorado University Decision Diagram package. The capability of ZBDDs in storing sets of subsets efficiently enabled us to store the clauses of a QBF very compactly and let us to embed the notion of memoization to the DPLL algorithm. These points led us to implement the search algorithm in such a way that we could store and reuse the results of all previously solved subformulas with a little overheads. ZQSAT can solve some sets of standard QBF benchmark problems (known to be hard for DPLL based algorithms) faster than the best existing solvers. In addition to prenex-CNF, ZQSAT accepts prenex-NNF formulas. We show and prove how this capability can be exponentially beneficial.
The Potsdam answer set solving collection, or Potassco for short, bundles various tools implementing and/or applying answer set programming. The article at hand succeeds an earlier description of the Potassco project published in Gebser et al. (AI Commun 24(2):107-124, 2011). Hence, we concentrate in what follows on the major features of the most recent, fifth generation of the ASP system clingo and highlight some recent resulting application systems.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is an emerging paradigm for declarative programming, in which a computational problem is specified by a logic program such that particular models, called answer sets, match solutions. ASP faces a growing range of applications, demanding for high-performance tools able to solve complex problems. ASP integrates ideas from a variety of neighboring fields. In particular, automated techniques to search for answer sets are inspired by Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solving approaches. While the latter have firm proof-theoretic foundations, ASP lacks formal frameworks for characterizing and comparing solving methods. Furthermore, sophisticated search patterns of modern SAT solvers, successfully applied in areas like, e.g., model checking and verification, are not yet established in ASP solving. We address these deficiencies by, for one, providing proof-theoretic frameworks that allow for characterizing, comparing, and analyzing approaches to answer set computation. For another, we devise modern ASP solving algorithms that integrate and extend state-of-the-art techniques for Boolean constraint solving. We thus contribute to the understanding of existing ASP solving approaches and their interconnections as well as to their enhancement by incorporating sophisticated search patterns. The central idea of our approach is to identify atomic as well as composite constituents of a propositional logic program with Boolean variables. This enables us to describe fundamental inference steps, and to selectively combine them in proof-theoretic characterizations of various ASP solving methods. In particular, we show that different concepts of case analyses applied by existing ASP solvers implicate mutual exponential separations regarding their best-case complexities. We also develop a generic proof-theoretic framework amenable to language extensions, and we point out that exponential separations can likewise be obtained due to case analyses on them. We further exploit fundamental inference steps to derive Boolean constraints characterizing answer sets. They enable the conception of ASP solving algorithms including search patterns of modern SAT solvers, while also allowing for direct technology transfers between the areas of ASP and SAT solving. Beyond the search for one answer set of a logic program, we address the enumeration of answer sets and their projections to a subvocabulary, respectively. The algorithms we develop enable repetition-free enumeration in polynomial space without being intrusive, i.e., they do not necessitate any modifications of computations before an answer set is found. Our approach to ASP solving is implemented in clasp, a state-of-the-art Boolean constraint solver that has successfully participated in recent solver competitions. Although we do here not address the implementation techniques of clasp or all of its features, we present the principles of its success in the context of ASP solving.
Machine learning for improvement of thermal conditions inside a hybrid ventilated animal building
(2021)
In buildings with hybrid ventilation, natural ventilation opening positions (windows), mechanical ventilation rates, heating, and cooling are manipulated to maintain desired thermal conditions. The indoor temperature is regulated solely by ventilation (natural and mechanical) when the external conditions are favorable to save external heating and cooling energy. The ventilation parameters are determined by a rule-based control scheme, which is not optimal. This study proposes a methodology to enable real-time optimum control of ventilation parameters. We developed offline prediction models to estimate future thermal conditions from the data collected from building in operation. The developed offline model is then used to find the optimal controllable ventilation parameters in real-time to minimize the setpoint deviation in the building. With the proposed methodology, the experimental building's setpoint deviation improved for 87% of time, on average, by 0.53 degrees C compared to the current deviations.
Die Tagung HDI 2014 in Freiburg zur Hochschuldidaktik der Informatik HDI wurde erneut vom Fachbereich Informatik und Ausbildung / Didaktik der Informatik (IAD) in der Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. (GI) organisiert. Sie dient den Lehrenden der Informatik in Studiengängen an Hochschulen als Forum der Information und des Austauschs über neue didaktische Ansätze und bildungspolitische Themen im Bereich der Hochschulausbildung aus der fachlichen Perspektive der Informatik.
Die HDI 2014 ist nun bereits die sechste Ausgabe der HDI. Für sie wurde das spezielle Motto „Gestalten und Meistern von Übergängen“ gewählt. Damit soll ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die Übergänge von Schule zum Studium, vom Bachelor zum Master, vom Studium zur Promotion oder vom Studium zur Arbeitswelt gelegt werden.
Internetbasierte Informatiksysteme beeinflussen in steigendem Maße Situationen in unterschiedlichen Lebensbereichen. Kompetenzen zur Verwendung von Internetanwendungen und -diensten müssen explizit erworben werden, weil damit ein notwendiger Einblick in nicht beobachtbare Abläufe und nicht offen sichtbare Strukturen verbunden ist. Bisher gibt es Vorschläge für die Gestaltung schulischer Lehr-Lernprozesse zu ausgewählten Teilaspekten des Internets. Es fehlt eine systematische Analyse des Bildungsbedarfs und ein daraus resultierendes Unterrichtsmodell. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Gesamtkonzept für den Informatikunterricht in der Sekundarstufe II vorgestellt, das zu zielgerichteter und verantwortungsvoller Anwendung des Internets beiträgt. Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst den Prozess von der Analyse erforderlicher Kompetenzen bis zur Realisierung von Lehr-Lernprozessen im Informatikunterricht in der Sekundarstufe II. Es werden der Beitrag der Informatik zu identifizierten Kompetenzen untersucht und Bildungsanforderungen bestimmt. Bildungsempfehlungen und Forschungsergebnisse zu erfolgreichen Unterrichtseinheiten werden im Hinblick auf die Bildungsziele analysiert. Der Informatikunterricht unterstützt die Kompetenzentwicklung zu internetbasierten digitalen Medien. Es wird die Entwicklung eines Unterrichtsmodells zu Internetworking beschrieben. Dazu wird der Ansatz der Didaktischen Systeme untersucht, weiter entwickelt und auf den Bereich Internetworking übertragen. Der theoretische Ansatz wird dazu in vier Unterrichtsprojekten zu Internetworking in der Praxis realisiert. Beziehungen zwischen Fachkonzepten zu Internetworking werden untersucht und durch Wissensstrukturen zur Planung von Unterrichtsprojekten eingesetzt und in der Praxis erprobt. Die Beschreibung von Lernaktivitäten erfolgt auf der Basis von Aufgabenklassen, die das notwendige Wissen zur Bearbeitung einer Aufgabenstellung repräsentieren. Auf der Grundlage des Ablaufs der Aufgabenbearbeitung werden Eigenschaften von Aufgaben beschrieben und zu deren Gestaltung nutzbar gemacht. Bisher nicht durchführbare Tätigkeiten im Unterricht werden durch die Entwicklung der Lernsoftware Filius ermöglicht. Die Reduktion der komplexen Wirklichkeit durch Simulation realer internetbasierter Informatiksysteme und die Auswahl geeigneter Sichten auf den Untersuchungsgegenstand werden mit Ergebnissen der Informatikdidaktik begründet. Unterrichtsprojekte zu den Zielen werden durchgeführt, um Lehr-Lernprozesse zu erkunden und das entwickelte Didaktische System zu erproben. Ausgehend von der theoretischen Fundierung erfolgt die praktische Realisierung von Lehr-Lernprozessen. Zur Erprobung im Informatikunterricht der Sekundarstufe II in Nordrhein-Westfalen werden Minimalziele aufgrund der Lehrvorgaben bestimmt. Die methodische Gestaltung in der Erprobung erfolgt unter Berücksichtigung der Vorgaben für den Informatikunterricht und allgemeinen Anforderungen der Fachdidaktik. Handlungsorientierte Unterrichtsmittel werden ausgewählt und in der Praxis zur Untersuchung der Lehr-Lernprozesse verwendet. Im Unterricht identifizierte Lernschwierigkeiten führen zur Modifikation der Wissensstrukturen und werden im Entwicklungsprozess von Filius berücksichtigt. Die Erkenntnisse aus Unterrichtsprojekten werden genutzt, um zu bestimmen, zu welchen Aufgabenklassen weitere Aufgaben erforderlich sind und inwieweit das aus den identifizierten Merkmalen abgeleitete Vorgehen zur Entwicklung niveaubestimmender Aufgaben genutzt werden kann. Die Erprobungen bestätigen die Tragfähigkeit des Didaktischen Systems Internetworking und leisten mit der Implementierung in der Praxis einen Beitrag zur Untersuchung von Kompetenzentwicklung im Informatikunterricht. Mit dem Didaktischen System Internetworking wird ein theoretisch fundiertes und empirisch erprobtes Unterrichtsmodell zur Entwicklung von Kompetenzen zur Einrichtung und Anwendung internetbasierter Informatiksysteme beschrieben.
Modern biological analysis techniques supply scientists with various forms of data. One category of such data are the so called "expression data". These data indicate the quantities of biochemical compounds present in tissue samples. Recently, expression data can be generated at a high speed. This leads in turn to amounts of data no longer analysable by classical statistical techniques. Systems biology is the new field that focuses on the modelling of this information. At present, various methods are used for this purpose. One superordinate class of these methods is machine learning. Methods of this kind had, until recently, predominantly been used for classification and prediction tasks. This neglected a powerful secondary benefit: the ability to induce interpretable models. Obtaining such models from data has become a key issue within Systems biology. Numerous approaches have been proposed and intensively discussed. This thesis focuses on the examination and exploitation of one basic technique: decision trees. The concept of comparing sets of decision trees is developed. This method offers the possibility of identifying significant thresholds in continuous or discrete valued attributes through their corresponding set of decision trees. Finding significant thresholds in attributes is a means of identifying states in living organisms. Knowing about states is an invaluable clue to the understanding of dynamic processes in organisms. Applied to metabolite concentration data, the proposed method was able to identify states which were not found with conventional techniques for threshold extraction. A second approach exploits the structure of sets of decision trees for the discovery of combinatorial dependencies between attributes. Previous work on this issue has focused either on expensive computational methods or the interpretation of single decision trees a very limited exploitation of the data. This has led to incomplete or unstable results. That is why a new method is developed that uses sets of decision trees to overcome these limitations. Both the introduced methods are available as software tools. They can be applied consecutively or separately. That way they make up a package of analytical tools that usefully supplement existing methods. By means of these tools, the newly introduced methods were able to confirm existing knowledge and to suggest interesting and new relationships between metabolites.