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Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability.
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.
Modeling and Formal Analysis of Meta-Ecosystems with Dynamic Structure using Graph Transformation
(2022)
The dynamics of ecosystems is of crucial importance. Various model-based approaches exist to understand and analyze their internal effects. In this paper, we model the space structure dynamics and ecological dynamics of meta-ecosystems using the formal technique of Graph Transformation (short GT). We build GT models to describe how a meta-ecosystem (modeled as a graph) can evolve over time (modeled by GT rules) and to analyze these GT models with respect to qualitative properties such as the existence of structural stabilities. As a case study, we build three GT models describing the space structure dynamics and ecological dynamics of three different savanna meta-ecosystems. The first GT model considers a savanna meta-ecosystem that is limited in space to two ecosystem patches, whereas the other two GT models consider two savanna meta-ecosystems that are unlimited in the number of ecosystem patches and only differ in one GT rule describing how the space structure of the meta-ecosystem grows. In the first two GT models, the space structure dynamics and ecological dynamics of the meta-ecosystem shows two main structural stabilities: the first one based on grassland-savanna-woodland transitions and the second one based on grassland-desert transitions. The transition between these two structural stabilities is driven by high-intensity fires affecting the tree components. In the third GT model, the GT rule for savanna regeneration induces desertification and therefore a collapse of the meta-ecosystem. We believe that GT models provide a complementary avenue to that of existing approaches to rigorously study ecological phenomena.
The service-oriented architecture supports the dynamic assembly and runtime reconfiguration of complex open IT landscapes by means of runtime binding of service contracts, launching of new components and termination of outdated ones. Furthermore, the evolution of these IT landscapes is not restricted to exchanging components with other ones using the same service contracts, as new services contracts can be added as well. However, current approaches for modeling and verification of service-oriented architectures do not support these important capabilities to their full extend.In this report we present an extension of the current OMG proposal for service modeling with UML - SoaML - which overcomes these limitations. It permits modeling services and their service contracts at different levels of abstraction, provides a formal semantics for all modeling concepts, and enables verifying critical properties. Our compositional and incremental verification approach allows for complex properties including communication parameters and time and covers besides the dynamic binding of service contracts and the replacement of components also the evolution of the systems by means of new service contracts. The modeling as well as verification capabilities of the presented approach are demonstrated by means of a supply chain example and the verification results of a first prototype are shown.
We describe an approach to modeling biological networks by action languages via answer set programming. To this end, we propose an action language for modeling biological networks, building on previous work by Baral et al. We introduce its syntax and semantics along with a translation into answer set programming, an efficient Boolean Constraint Programming Paradigm. Finally, we describe one of its applications, namely, the sulfur starvation response-pathway of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and sketch the functionality of our system and its usage.
Biology has made great progress in identifying and measuring the building blocks of life. The availability of high-throughput methods in molecular biology has dramatically accelerated the growth of biological knowledge for various organisms. The advancements in genomic, proteomic and metabolomic technologies allow for constructing complex models of biological systems. An increasing number of biological repositories is available on the web, incorporating thousands of biochemical reactions and genetic regulations. Systems Biology is a recent research trend in life science, which fosters a systemic view on biology. In Systems Biology one is interested in integrating the knowledge from all these different sources into models that capture the interaction of these entities. By studying these models one wants to understand the emerging properties of the whole system, such as robustness. However, both measurements as well as biological networks are prone to considerable incompleteness, heterogeneity and mutual inconsistency, which makes it highly non-trivial to draw biologically meaningful conclusions in an automated way. Therefore, we want to promote Answer Set Programming (ASP) as a tool for discrete modeling in Systems Biology. ASP is a declarative problem solving paradigm, in which a problem is encoded as a logic program such that its answer sets represent solutions to the problem. ASP has intrinsic features to cope with incompleteness, offers a rich modeling language and highly efficient solving technology. We present ASP solutions, for the analysis of genetic regulatory networks, determining consistency with observed measurements and identifying minimal causes for inconsistency. We extend this approach for computing minimal repairs on model and data that restore consistency. This method allows for predicting unobserved data even in case of inconsistency. Further, we present an ASP approach to metabolic network expansion. This approach exploits the easy characterization of reachability in ASP and its various reasoning methods, to explore the biosynthetic capabilities of metabolic reaction networks and generate hypotheses for extending the network. Finally, we present the BioASP library, a Python library which encapsulates our ASP solutions into the imperative programming paradigm. The library allows for an easy integration of ASP solution into system rich environments, as they exist in Systems Biology.
Recently, due to an increasing demand on functionality and flexibility, beforehand isolated systems have become interconnected to gain powerful adaptive Systems of Systems (SoS) solutions with an overall robust, flexible and emergent behavior. The adaptive SoS comprises a variety of different system types ranging from small embedded to adaptive cyber-physical systems. On the one hand, each system is independent, follows a local strategy and optimizes its behavior to reach its goals. On the other hand, systems must cooperate with each other to enrich the overall functionality to jointly perform on the SoS level reaching global goals, which cannot be satisfied by one system alone. Due to difficulties of local and global behavior optimizations conflicts may arise between systems that have to be solved by the adaptive SoS.
This thesis proposes a modeling language that facilitates the description of an adaptive SoS by considering the adaptation capabilities in form of feedback loops as first class entities. Moreover, this thesis adopts the Models@runtime approach to integrate the available knowledge in the systems as runtime models into the modeled adaptation logic. Furthermore, the modeling language focuses on the description of system interactions within the adaptive SoS to reason about individual system functionality and how it emerges via collaborations to an overall joint SoS behavior. Therefore, the modeling language approach enables the specification of local adaptive system behavior, the integration of knowledge in form of runtime models and the joint interactions via collaboration to place the available adaptive behavior in an overall layered, adaptive SoS architecture.
Beside the modeling language, this thesis proposes analysis rules to investigate the modeled adaptive SoS, which enables the detection of architectural patterns as well as design flaws and pinpoints to possible system threats. Moreover, a simulation framework is presented, which allows the direct execution of the modeled SoS architecture. Therefore, the analysis rules and the simulation framework can be used to verify the interplay between systems as well as the modeled adaptation effects within the SoS. This thesis realizes the proposed concepts of the modeling language by mapping them to a state of the art standard from the automotive domain and thus, showing their applicability to actual systems. Finally, the modeling language approach is evaluated by remodeling up to date research scenarios from different domains, which demonstrates that the modeling language concepts are powerful enough to cope with a broad range of existing research problems.
An increasing demand on functionality and flexibility leads to an integration of beforehand isolated system solutions building a so-called System of Systems (SoS). Furthermore, the overall SoS should be adaptive to react on changing requirements and environmental conditions. Due SoS are composed of different independent systems that may join or leave the overall SoS at arbitrary point in times, the SoS structure varies during the systems lifetime and the overall SoS behavior emerges from the capabilities of the contained subsystems. In such complex system ensembles new demands of understanding the interaction among subsystems, the coupling of shared system knowledge and the influence of local adaptation strategies to the overall resulting system behavior arise. In this report, we formulate research questions with the focus of modeling interactions between system parts inside a SoS. Furthermore, we define our notion of important system types and terms by retrieving the current state of the art from literature. Having a common understanding of SoS, we discuss a set of typical SoS characteristics and derive general requirements for a collaboration modeling language. Additionally, we retrieve a broad spectrum of real scenarios and frameworks from literature and discuss how these scenarios cope with different characteristics of SoS. Finally, we discuss the state of the art for existing modeling languages that cope with collaborations for different system types such as SoS.
To manage tabular data files and leverage their content in a given downstream task, practitioners often design and execute complex transformation pipelines to prepare them. The complexity of such pipelines stems from different factors, including the nature of the preparation tasks, often exploratory or ad-hoc to specific datasets; the large repertory of tools, algorithms, and frameworks that practitioners need to master; and the volume, variety, and velocity of the files to be prepared. Metadata plays a fundamental role in reducing this complexity: characterizing a file assists end users in the design of data preprocessing pipelines, and furthermore paves the way for suggestion, automation, and optimization of data preparation tasks.
Previous research in the areas of data profiling, data integration, and data cleaning, has focused on extracting and characterizing metadata regarding the content of tabular data files, i.e., about the records and attributes of tables. Content metadata are useful for the latter stages of a preprocessing pipeline, e.g., error correction, duplicate detection, or value normalization, but they require a properly formed tabular input. Therefore, these metadata are not relevant for the early stages of a preparation pipeline, i.e., to correctly parse tables out of files. In this dissertation, we turn our focus to what we call the structure of a tabular data file, i.e., the set of characters within a file that do not represent data values but are required to parse and understand the content of the file. We provide three different approaches to represent file structure, an explicit representation based on context-free grammars; an implicit representation based on file-wise similarity; and a learned representation based on machine learning.
In our first contribution, we use the grammar-based representation to characterize a set of over 3000 real-world csv files and identify multiple structural issues that let files deviate from the csv standard, e.g., by having inconsistent delimiters or containing multiple tables. We leverage our learnings about real-world files and propose Pollock, a benchmark to test how well systems parse csv files that have a non-standard structure, without any previous preparation. We report on our experiments on using Pollock to evaluate the performance of 16 real-world data management systems.
Following, we characterize the structure of files implicitly, by defining a measure of structural similarity for file pairs. We design a novel algorithm to compute this measure, which is based on a graph representation of the files' content. We leverage this algorithm and propose Mondrian, a graphical system to assist users in identifying layout templates in a dataset, classes of files that have the same structure, and therefore can be prepared by applying the same preparation pipeline.
Finally, we introduce MaGRiTTE, a novel architecture that uses self-supervised learning to automatically learn structural representations of files in the form of vectorial embeddings at three different levels: cell level, row level, and file level. We experiment with the application of structural embeddings for several tasks, namely dialect detection, row classification, and data preparation efforts estimation.
Our experimental results show that structural metadata, either identified explicitly on parsing grammars, derived implicitly as file-wise similarity, or learned with the help of machine learning architectures, is fundamental to automate several tasks, to scale up preparation to large quantities of files, and to provide repeatable preparation pipelines.
Gerade in den letzten Jahren erfuhr Open Source Software (OSS) eine zunehmende Verbreitung und Popularität und hat sich in verschiedenen Anwendungsdomänen etabliert. Die Prozesse, welche sich im Kontext der OSS-Entwicklung (auch: OSSD – Open Source Software-Development) evolutionär herausgebildet haben, weisen in den verschiedenen OSS-Entwicklungsprojekten z.T. ähnliche Eigenschaften und Strukturen auf und auch die involvierten Entitäten, wie z.B. Artefakte, Rollen oder Software-Werkzeuge sind weitgehend miteinander vergleichbar. Dies motiviert den Gedanken, ein verallgemeinerbares Modell zu entwickeln, welches die generalisierbaren Entwicklungsprozesse im Kontext von OSS zu einem übertragbaren Modell abstrahiert. Auch in der Wissenschaftsdisziplin des Software Engineering (SE) wurde bereits erkannt, dass sich der OSSD-Ansatz in verschiedenen Aspekten erheblich von klassischen (proprietären) Modellen des SE unterscheidet und daher diese Methoden einer eigenen wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung bedürfen. In verschiedenen Publikationen wurden zwar bereits einzelne Aspekte der OSS-Entwicklung analysiert und Theorien über die zugrundeliegenden Entwicklungsmethoden formuliert, aber es existiert noch keine umfassende Beschreibung der typischen Prozesse der OSSD-Methodik, die auf einer empirischen Untersuchung existierender OSS-Entwicklungsprojekte basiert. Da dies eine Voraussetzung für die weitere wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit OSSD-Prozessen darstellt, wird im Rahmen dieser Arbeit auf der Basis vergleichender Fallstudien ein deskriptives Modell der OSSD-Prozesse hergeleitet und mit Modellierungselementen der UML formalisiert beschrieben. Das Modell generalisiert die identifizierten Prozesse, Prozessentitäten und Software-Infrastrukturen der untersuchten OSSD-Projekte. Es basiert auf einem eigens entwickelten Metamodell, welches die zu analysierenden Entitäten identifiziert und die Modellierungssichten und -elemente beschreibt, die zur UML-basierten Beschreibung der Entwicklungsprozesse verwendet werden. In einem weiteren Arbeitsschritt wird eine weiterführende Analyse des identifizierten Modells durchgeführt, um Implikationen, und Optimierungspotentiale aufzuzeigen. Diese umfassen beispielsweise die ungenügende Plan- und Terminierbarkeit von Prozessen oder die beobachtete Tendenz von OSSD-Akteuren, verschiedene Aktivitäten mit unterschiedlicher Intensität entsprechend der subjektiv wahrgenommenen Anreize auszuüben, was zur Vernachlässigung einiger Prozesse führt. Anschließend werden Optimierungszielstellungen dargestellt, die diese Unzulänglichkeiten adressieren, und ein Optimierungsansatz zur Verbesserung des OSSD-Modells wird beschrieben. Dieser Ansatz umfasst die Erweiterung der identifizierten Rollen, die Einführung neuer oder die Erweiterung bereits identifizierter Prozesse und die Modifikation oder Erweiterung der Artefakte des generalisierten OSS-Entwicklungsmodells. Die vorgestellten Modellerweiterungen dienen vor allem einer gesteigerten Qualitätssicherung und der Kompensation von vernachlässigten Prozessen, um sowohl die entwickelte Software- als auch die Prozessqualität im OSSD-Kontext zu verbessern. Desweiteren werden Softwarefunktionalitäten beschrieben, welche die identifizierte bestehende Software-Infrastruktur erweitern und eine gesamtheitlichere, softwaretechnische Unterstützung der OSSD-Prozesse ermöglichen sollen. Abschließend werden verschiedene Anwendungsszenarien der Methoden des OSS-Entwicklungsmodells, u.a. auch im kommerziellen SE, identifiziert und ein Implementierungsansatz basierend auf der OSS GENESIS vorgestellt, der zur Implementierung und Unterstützung des OSSD-Modells verwendet werden kann.
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.
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.
As a result of the Bologna reform of educational systems in
Europe the outcome orientation of learning processes, competence-oriented
descriptions of the curricula and competence-oriented assessment
procedures became standard also in Computer Science Education
(CSE). The following keynote addresses important issues of shaping
a CSE competence model especially in the area of informatics system
comprehension and object-oriented modelling. Objectives and research
methodology of the project MoKoM (Modelling and Measurement
of Competences in CSE) are explained. Firstly, the CSE competence
model was derived based on theoretical concepts and then secondly the
model was empirically examined and refined using expert interviews.
Furthermore, the paper depicts the development and examination of
a competence measurement instrument, which was derived from the
competence model. Therefore, the instrument was applied to a large
sample of students at the gymnasium’s upper class level. Subsequently,
efforts to develop a competence level model, based on the retrieved empirical
results and on expert ratings are presented. Finally, further demands
on research on competence modelling in CSE will be outlined.
Modular and incremental global model management with extended generalized discrimination networks
(2023)
Complex projects developed under the model-driven engineering paradigm nowadays often involve several interrelated models, which are automatically processed via a multitude of model operations. Modular and incremental construction and execution of such networks of models and model operations are required to accommodate efficient development with potentially large-scale models. The underlying problem is also called Global Model Management.
In this report, we propose an approach to modular and incremental Global Model Management via an extension to the existing technique of Generalized Discrimination Networks (GDNs). In addition to further generalizing the notion of query operations employed in GDNs, we adapt the previously query-only mechanism to operations with side effects to integrate model transformation and model synchronization. We provide incremental algorithms for the execution of the resulting extended Generalized Discrimination Networks (eGDNs), as well as a prototypical implementation for a number of example eGDN operations.
Based on this prototypical implementation, we experiment with an application scenario from the software development domain to empirically evaluate our approach with respect to scalability and conceptually demonstrate its applicability in a typical scenario. Initial results confirm that the presented approach can indeed be employed to realize efficient Global Model Management in the considered scenario.
Die nachhaltige Integration von Blended Learning in den Informatik-Lehrbetrieb von Präsenzhochschulen und die Qualitätssicherung der Lehre mit digitalen Medien beruht nicht nur auf der Verfügbarkeit von Lernmaterialien und dem Zugang zu Lernplattformen, sondern erfordert auch Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen für die Lehrenden. Am Beispiel der Gestaltung von vorlesungsbegleitenden Übungen in der universitären Informatikausbildung wird ein Konzept für die Schulung von Tutoren vorgestellt, das sich an den Erfordernissen des Übungsbetriebs und den unterschiedlichen Arbeits- und Lernkontexten der künftigen Tutoren orientiert. Das Konzept basiert auf mehrjährigen Praxiserfahrungen mit Schulungsworkshops für Tutoren in der Informatik, die nun aufgrund aktueller didaktischer Konzepte zum Blended Learning und unter Berücksichtigung von Umfrageergebnissen unter studentischen Tutoren modifiziert wurden. Das neu entwickelte modulare Konzept zur Tutorenschulung befindet sich aktuell in einer erweiterten Pilotphase.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer online courses at low cost for anyone with an internet access. At its early days, the MOOC movement raised the flag of democratizing education, but soon enough, this utopian idea collided with the need to find sustainable business models. Moving from open access to a new financially sustainable certification and monetization policy in December 2015 we aim at this change-point and observe the completion rates before and after this monetary change. In this study we investigate the impact of the change on learners from countries of different development status. Our findings suggest that this change has lowered the completion rates among learners from developing countries, increasing gaps that already existed between global learners from countries of low and high development status. This suggests that more inclusive monetization policies may help MOOCs benefits to spread more equally among global learners.
If taking a flipped learning approach, MOOC content can be used for online pre-class instruction. After which students can put the knowledge they gained from the MOOC into practice either synchronously or asynchronously. This study examined one such, asynchronous, course in teacher education. The course ran with 40 students over 13 weeks from February to May 2020. A case study approach was followed using mixed methods to assess the efficacy of the course. Quantitative data was gathered on achievement of learning outcomes, online engagement, and satisfaction. Qualitative data was gathered via student interviews from which a thematic analysis was undertaken. From a combined analysis of the data, three themes emerged as pertinent to course efficacy: quality and quantity of communication and collaboration; suitability of the MOOC; and significance for career development.
In this paper, we take a closer look at the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in Norway. We want to contribute to nuancing the image of a sound and sustainable policy for flexible and lifelong learning at national and institutional levels and point to some critical areas of improvement in higher education institutions (HEI). 10 semistructured qualitative interviews were carried out in the autumn 2020 at ten different HE institutions across Norway. The informants were strategically selected among employees involved in MOOC-technology, MOOCproduction and MOOC-support over a period of time stretching from 2010–2020. A main finding is that academics engaged in MOOCs find that their entrepreneurial ideas and results, to a large extent, are overlooked at higher institutional levels, and that progress is frustratingly slow. So far, there seems to be little common understanding of the MOOC-concept and the disruptive and transformative effect that MOOC-technology may have at HEIs. At national levels, digital strategies, funding and digital infrastructure are mainly provided in governmental silos. We suggest that governmental bodies and institutional stake holders pay more attention to entrepreneurial MOOC-initiatives to develop sustainability in flexible and lifelong learning in HEIs. This involves connecting the generous funding of digital projects to the provision of a national portal and platform for Open Access to education. To facilitate sustainable lifelong learning in and across HEIs, more quality control to enhance the legitimacy of MOOC certificates and micro-credentials is also a necessary measure.
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 present the new multi-threaded version of the state-of-the-art answer set solver clasp. We detail its component and communication architecture and illustrate how they support the principal functionalities of clasp. Also, we provide some insights into the data representation used for different constraint types handled by clasp. All this is accompanied by an extensive experimental analysis of the major features related to multi-threading in clasp.
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.
Multiplicative Up-Drift
(2020)
Drift analysis aims at translating the expected progress of an evolutionary algorithm (or more generally, a random process) into a probabilistic guarantee on its run time (hitting time). So far, drift arguments have been successfully employed in the rigorous analysis of evolutionary algorithms, however, only for the situation that the progress is constant or becomes weaker when approaching the target. Motivated by questions like how fast fit individuals take over a population, we analyze random processes exhibiting a (1+delta)-multiplicative growth in expectation. We prove a drift theorem translating this expected progress into a hitting time. This drift theorem gives a simple and insightful proof of the level-based theorem first proposed by Lehre (2011). Our version of this theorem has, for the first time, the best-possible near-linear dependence on 1/delta} (the previous results had an at least near-quadratic dependence), and it only requires a population size near-linear in delta (this was super-quadratic in previous results). These improvements immediately lead to stronger run time guarantees for a number of applications. We also discuss the case of large delta and show stronger results for this setting.
A project involving the composition of a number of pieces
of music by public participants revealed levels of engagement with and
mastery of complex music technologies by a number of secondary student
volunteers. This paper reports briefly on some initial findings of
that project and seeks to illuminate an understanding of computational
thinking across the curriculum.
The development of new and better optimization and approximation methods for Job Shop Scheduling Problems (JSP) uses simulations to compare their performance. The test data required for this has an uncertain influence on the simulation results, because the feasable search space can be changed drastically by small variations of the initial problem model. Methods could benefit from this to varying degrees. This speaks in favor of defining standardized and reusable test data for JSP problem classes, which in turn requires a systematic describability of the test data in order to be able to compile problem adequate data sets. This article looks at the test data used for comparing methods by literature review. It also shows how and why the differences in test data have to be taken into account. From this, corresponding challenges are derived which the management of test data must face in the context of JSP research.
Keywords
The development of new and better optimization and approximation methods for Job Shop Scheduling Problems (JSP) uses simulations to compare their performance. The test data required for this has an uncertain influence on the simulation results, because the feasable search space can be changed drastically by small variations of the initial problem model. Methods could benefit from this to varying degrees. This speaks in favor of defining standardized and reusable test data for JSP problem classes, which in turn requires a systematic describability of the test data in order to be able to compile problem adequate data sets. This article looks at the test data used for comparing methods by literature review. It also shows how and why the differences in test data have to be taken into account. From this, corresponding challenges are derived which the management of test data must face in the context of JSP research.
Das Gebiet der Netzsicherheit ist ein schwer zu lehrendes und mühsam zu lernendes Fach in der Informatikausbildung. Dies hat verschiedene Gründe, z.B. erfordert es Fachkenntnis, die jenseits von bunten Bildern zu vermitteln ist und sich dabei mit geringer Halbwertszeit weiterentwickelt. Echte Bedrohungsszenarien müssen unter Laborbedingungen nachgestellt werden, und der Umgang mit den Sicherheitswerkzeugen ist sehr komplex. Auf der einen Seite muss das System konzeptionell verstanden werden und auf der anderen Seite sind viele Details in der Konfiguration von Firewalls, Netz-Komponenten und –Werkzeugen für klassische Prüfungssituationen in der Ausbildung anzuwenden. Mit NetS-X (Network Security Experience) stellen wir einen laufenden Prototyp einer e-learning Plattform vor, mit der ein weiter Bereich von Sicherheitsszenarien vermittelt werden kann. Dabei wird der Lernende in einem Spielsystem mit Situationen konfrontiert, die er in einer echten, auf Linux basierenden typischen IT-Infrastruktur eines Unternehmens beherrschen muss. Die sicherheitsrelevanten Aktivitäten des Lernenden, z.B. der Einsatz von Monitor-Werkzeugen oder die Konfiguration von Netz-Komponenten werden dabei nicht simuliert, sondern real durchgeführt und durch Prozesse des Spielsystems beobachtet und bewertet. Autorenwerkzeuge ermöglichen den Lehrenden und Spielern, selber neue Spielsituationen, Sicherheitsszenarien oder Wissenskomponenten in das System zu integrieren.
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.
In den letzten Jahren ist die Aufnahme und Verbreitung von Videos immer einfacher geworden. Daher sind die Relevanz und Beliebtheit zur Aufnahme von Vorlesungsvideos in den letzten Jahren stark angestiegen. Dies führt zu einem großen Datenbestand an Vorlesungsvideos in den Video-Vorlesungsarchiven der Universitäten. Durch diesen wachsenden Datenbestand wird es allerdings für die Studenten immer schwieriger, die relevanten Videos eines Vorlesungsarchivs aufzufinden. Zusätzlich haben viele Lerninteressierte durch ihre alltägliche Arbeit und familiären Verpflichtungen immer weniger Zeit sich mit dem Lernen zu beschäftigen. Ein weiterer Aspekt, der das Lernen im Internet erschwert, ist, dass es durch soziale Netzwerke und anderen Online-Plattformen vielfältige Ablenkungsmöglichkeiten gibt. Daher ist das Ziel dieser Arbeit, Möglichkeiten aufzuzeigen, welche das E-Learning bieten kann, um Nutzer beim Lernprozess zu unterstützen und zu motivieren.
Das Hauptkonzept zur Unterstützung der Studenten ist das präzise Auffinden von Informationen in den immer weiter wachsenden Vorlesungsvideoarchiven. Dazu werden die Vorlesungen im Voraus analysiert und die Texte der Vorlesungsfolien mit verschiedenen Methoden indexiert. Daraufhin können die Studenten mit der Suche oder dem Lecture-Butler Lerninhalte entsprechend Ihres aktuellen Wissensstandes auffinden. Die möglichen verwendeten Technologien für das Auffinden wurden, sowohl technisch, als auch durch Studentenumfragen erfolgreich evaluiert. Zur Motivation von Studenten in Vorlesungsarchiven werden diverse Konzepte betrachtet und die Umsetzung evaluiert, die den Studenten interaktiv in den Lernprozess einbeziehen.
Neben Vorlesungsarchiven existieren sowohl im privaten als auch im dienstlichen Weiterbildungsbereich die in den letzten Jahren immer beliebter werdenden MOOCs. Generell sind die Abschlussquoten von MOOCs allerdings mit durchschnittlich 7% eher gering. Daher werden Motivationslösungen für MOOCs im Bereich von eingebetteten Systemen betrachtet, die in praktischen Programmierkursen Anwendung finden. Zusätzlich wurden Kurse evaluiert, welche die Programmierung von eingebetteten Systemen behandeln. Die Verfügbarkeit war bei Kursen von bis zu 10.000 eingeschriebenen Teilnehmern hierbei kein schwerwiegendes Problem. Die Verwendung von eingebetteten Systemen in Programmierkursen sind bei den Studenten in der praktischen Umsetzung auf sehr großes Interesse gestoßen.
Informatikstudiengänge verzeichnen hohe Abbruchquoten innerhalb der ersten beiden Semester, die häufig mit Leistungsdefiziten oder Motivationsproblemen begründet werden. Eine Ursache dafür, dass trotz intensiver Bemühungen um bessere Lehre und motivationsfördernde Maßnahmen diese Situation imWesentlichen unverändert bleibt, könnte darin liegen, dass nicht die eine Maßnahme oder der eine Ansatz das Problem im Ganzen lösen kann, sondern dass eine heterogene Studierendenschaft vielmehr nach unterschiedlichen Maßnahmen verlangt. Bisher findet sich wenig Forschung zu differenzierten Studierendentypen in der Informatik. Wir stellen in dieser Arbeit einen Ansatz dafür vor, die Heterogenität der Informatikstudierenden zu ergründen, und beschreiben die Ergebnisse erster Versuche mit diesem Ansatz. Um die große Anzahl von Studierenden auf eine überschaubare Anzahl von Typen mit jeweils ähnlichen Bedürfnissen und Erwartungen zu reduzieren, wird dazu die im Produktmanagement bewährte Personas-Methode adaptiert. Im Rahmen einer Befragung von 170 Informatikstudierenden konnten hierzu bereits einige Personas mit unterschiedlichen Merkmalshäufungen ausgearbeitet werden, die eine gute Grundlage darstellen, um auf dieser Basis differenzierte Interventionen zur Förderung und Motivation der Informatikstudierenden zu entwickeln.
Using the notion of an elementary loop, Gebser and Schaub (2005. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR’05 ), 53–65) refined the theorem on loop formulas attributable to Lin and Zhao (2004) by considering loop formulas of elementary loops only. In this paper, we reformulate the definition of an elementary loop, extend it to disjunctive programs, and study several properties of elementary loops, including how maximal elementary loops are related to minimal unfounded sets. The results provide useful insights into the stable model semantics in terms of elementary loops. For a nondisjunctive program, using a graph-theoretic characterization of an elementary loop, we show that the problem of recognizing an elementary loop is tractable. On the other hand, we also show that the corresponding problem is coNP-complete for a disjunctive program. Based on the notion of an elementary loop, we present the class of Head-Elementary-loop-Free (HEF) programs, which strictly generalizes the class of Head-Cycle-Free (HCF) programs attributable to Ben-Eliyahu and Dechter (1994. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 12, 53–87). Like an HCF program, an HEF program can be turned into an equivalent nondisjunctive program in polynomial time by shifting head atoms into the body.
In control theory, to solve a finite-horizon sequential decision problem (SDP) commonly means to find a list of decision rules that result in an optimal expected total reward (or cost) when taking a given number of decision steps. SDPs are routinely solved using Bellman's backward induction. Textbook authors (e.g. Bertsekas or Puterman) typically give more or less formal proofs to show that the backward induction algorithm is correct as solution method for deterministic and stochastic SDPs. Botta, Jansson and Ionescu propose a generic framework for finite horizon, monadic SDPs together with a monadic version of backward induction for solving such SDPs. In monadic SDPs, the monad captures a generic notion of uncertainty, while a generic measure function aggregates rewards. In the present paper, we define a notion of correctness for monadic SDPs and identify three conditions that allow us to prove a correctness result for monadic backward induction that is comparable to textbook correctness proofs for ordinary backward induction. The conditions that we impose are fairly general and can be cast in category-theoretical terms using the notion of Eilenberg-Moore algebra. They hold in familiar settings like those of deterministic or stochastic SDPs, but we also give examples in which they fail. Our results show that backward induction can safely be employed for a broader class of SDPs than usually treated in textbooks. However, they also rule out certain instances that were considered admissible in the context of Botta et al. 's generic framework. Our development is formalised in Idris as an extension of the Botta et al. framework and the sources are available as supplementary material.
We introduce a new measure of descriptional complexity on finite automata, called the number of active states. Roughly speaking, the number of active states of an automaton A on input w counts the number of different states visited during the most economic computation of the automaton A for the word w. This concept generalizes to finite automata and regular languages in a straightforward way. We show that the number of active states of both finite automata and regular languages is computable, even with respect to nondeterministic finite automata. We further compare the number of active states to related measures for regular languages. In particular, we show incomparability to the radius of regular languages and that the difference between the number of active states and the total number of states needed in finite automata for a regular language can be of exponential order.
Graph queries have lately gained increased interest due to application areas such as social networks, biological networks, or model queries. For the relational database case the relational algebra and generalized discrimination networks have been studied to find appropriate decompositions into subqueries and ordering of these subqueries for query evaluation or incremental updates of query results. For graph database queries however there is no formal underpinning yet that allows us to find such suitable operationalizations. Consequently, we suggest a simple operational concept for the decomposition of arbitrary complex queries into simpler subqueries and the ordering of these subqueries in form of generalized discrimination networks for graph queries inspired by the relational case. The approach employs graph transformation rules for the nodes of the network and thus we can employ the underlying theory. We further show that the proposed generalized discrimination networks have the same expressive power as nested graph conditions.
There are a plethora of ways to guide and support people to learn about MOOC (massive open online course) development, from their first interest, sourcing supportive resources, methods and tools to better aid their understanding of the concepts and pedagogical approaches of MOOC design, to becoming a MOOC developer. This contribution highlights tools and methods that are openly available and re-usable under Creative Commons licenses. Our collection builds upon the experiences from three MOOC development and hosting teams with joint experiences of several hundred MOOCs (University of Applied Sciences in Lübeck, Graz University of Technology, University of Glasgow) in three European countries, which are Germany, Austria and the UK. The contribution recommends and shares experiences with short articles and poster for first information sharing a Monster MOOC assignment for beginners, a MOOC canvas for first sketches, the MOOC design kit for details of instructional design and a MOOC for MOOC makers and a MOOC map as introduction into a certain MOOC platform.
openHPI
(2022)
On the occasion of the 10th openHPI anniversary, this technical report provides information about the HPI MOOC platform, including its core features, technology, and architecture.
In an introduction, the platform family with all partner platforms is presented; these now amount to nine platforms, including openHPI. This section introduces openHPI as an advisor and research partner in various projects.
In the second chapter, the functionalities and common course formats of the platform are presented. The functionalities are divided into learner and admin features. The learner features section provides detailed information about performance records, courses, and the learning materials of which a course is composed: videos, texts, and quizzes. In addition, the learning materials can be enriched by adding external exercise tools that communicate with the HPI MOOC platform via the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard. Furthermore, the concept of peer assessments completed the possible learning materials.
The section then proceeds with further information on the discussion forum, a fundamental concept of MOOCs compared to traditional e-learning offers. The section is concluded with a description of the quiz recap, learning objectives, mobile applications, gameful learning, and the help desk.
The next part of this chapter deals with the admin features. The described functionality is restricted to describing the news and announcements, dashboards and statistics, reporting capabilities, research options with A/B testing, the course feed, and the TransPipe tool to support the process of creating automated or manual subtitles. The platform supports a large variety of additional features, but a detailed description of these features goes beyond the scope of this report.
The chapter then elaborates on common course formats and openHPI teaching activities at the HPI. The chapter concludes with some best practices for course design and delivery.
The third chapter provides insights into the technology and architecture behind openHPI. A special characteristic of the openHPI project is the conscious decision to operate the complete application from bare metal to platform development. Hence, the chapter starts with a section about the openHPI Cloud, including detailed information about the data center and devices, the used cloud software OpenStack and Ceph, as well as the openHPI Cloud Service provided for the HPI.
Afterward, a section on the application technology stack and development tooling describes the application infrastructure components, the used automation, the deployment pipeline, and the tools used for monitoring and alerting. The chapter is concluded with detailed information about the technology stack and concrete platform implementation details. The section describes the service-oriented Ruby on Rails application, inter-service communication, and public APIs. It also provides more information on the design system and components used in the application. The section concludes with a discussion of the original microservice architecture, where we share our insights and reasoning for migrating back to a monolithic application.
The last chapter provides a summary and an outlook on the future of digital education.
openHPI
(2022)
Anlässlich des 10-jährigen Jubiläums von openHPI informiert dieser technische Bericht über die HPI-MOOC-Plattform einschließlich ihrer Kernfunktionen, Technologie und Architektur.
In einer Einleitung wird die Plattformfamilie mit allen Partnerplattformen vorgestellt; diese belaufen sich inklusive openHPI aktuell auf neun Plattformen. In diesem Abschnitt wird außerdem gezeigt, wie openHPI als Berater und Forschungspartner in verschiedenen Projekten fungiert.
Im zweiten Kapitel werden die Funktionalitäten und gängigen Kursformate der Plattform präsentiert. Die Funktionalitäten sind in Lerner- und Admin-Funktionen unterteilt. Der Bereich Lernerfunktionen bietet detaillierte Informationen zu Leistungsnachweisen, Kursen und den Lernmaterialien, aus denen sich ein Kurs zusammensetzt: Videos, Texte und Quiz. Darüber hinaus können die Lernmaterialien durch externe Übungstools angereichert werden, die über den Standard Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) mit der HPI MOOC-Plattform kommunizieren. Das Konzept der Peer-Assessments rundet die möglichen Lernmaterialien ab.
Der Abschnitt geht dann weiter auf das Diskussionsforum ein, das einen grundlegenden Unterschied von MOOCs im Vergleich zu traditionellen E-Learning-Angeboten darstellt. Zum Abschluss des Abschnitts folgen eine Beschreibung von Quiz-Recap, Lernzielen, mobilen Anwendungen, spielerischen Lernens und dem Helpdesk.
Der nächste Teil dieses Kapitels beschäftigt sich mit den Admin-Funktionen. Die Funktionalitätsbeschreibung beschränkt sich Neuigkeiten und Ankündigungen, Dashboards und Statistiken, Berichtsfunktionen, Forschungsoptionen mit A/B-Tests, den Kurs-Feed und das TransPipe-Tool zur Unterstützung beim Erstellen von automatischen oder manuellen Untertiteln. Die Plattform unterstützt außerdem eine Vielzahl zusätzlicher Funktionen, doch eine detaillierte Beschreibung dieser Funktionen würde den Rahmen des Berichts sprengen.
Das Kapitel geht dann auf gängige Kursformate und openHPI-Lehrveranstaltungen am HPI ein, bevor es mit einigen Best Practices für die Gestaltung und Durchführung von Kursen schließt.
Zum Abschluss des technischen Berichts gibt das letzte Kapitel eine Zusammenfassung und einen Ausblick auf die Zukunft der digitalen Bildung.
Ein besonderes Merkmal des openHPI-Projekts ist die bewusste Entscheidung, die komplette Anwendung von den physischen Netzwerkkomponenten bis zur Plattformentwicklung eigenständig zu betreiben. Bei der vorliegenden deutschen Variante handelt es sich um eine gekürzte Übersetzung des technischen Berichts 148, bei der kein Einblick in die Technologien und Architektur von openHPI gegeben wird. Interessierte Leser:innen können im technischen Bericht 148 (vollständige englische Version) detaillierte Informationen zum Rechenzentrum und den Geräten, der Cloud-Software und dem openHPI Cloud Service aber auch zu Infrastruktur-Anwendungskomponenten wie Entwicklungstools, Automatisierung, Deployment-Pipeline und Monitoring erhalten. Außerdem finden sich dort weitere Informationen über den Technologiestack und konkrete Implementierungsdetails der Plattform inklusive der serviceorientierten Ruby on Rails-Anwendung, die Kommunikation zwischen den Diensten, öffentliche APIs, sowie Designsystem und -komponenten. Der Abschnitt schließt mit einer Diskussion über die ursprüngliche Microservice-Architektur und die Migration zu einer monolithischen Anwendung.
Die neue interaktive Online-Bildungsplattform openHPI (https://openHPI.de) des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts (HPI) bietet frei zugängliche und kostenlose Onlinekurse für interessierte Teilnehmer an, die sich mit Inhalten aus dem Bereich der Informationstechnologien und Informatik beschäftige¬n. Wie die seit 2011 zunächst von der Stanford University, später aber auch von anderen Elite-Universitäten der USA angeboten „Massive Open Online Courses“, kurz MOOCs genannt, bietet openHPI im Internet Lernvideos und weiterführenden Lesestoff in einer Kombination mit lernunterstützenden Selbsttests, Hausaufgaben und einem sozialen Diskussionsforum an und stimuliert die Ausbildung einer das Lernen fördernden virtuellen Lerngemeinschaft. Im Unterschied zu „traditionellen“ Vorlesungsportalen, wie z.B. dem tele-TASK Portal (http://www.tele-task.de), bei dem multimedial aufgezeichnete Vorlesungen zum Abruf bereit gestellt werden, bietet openHPI didaktisch aufbereitete Onlinekurse an. Diese haben einen festen Starttermin und bieten dann in einem austarierten Zeitplan von sechs aufeinanderfolgenden Kurswochen multimedial aufbereitete und wann immer möglich interaktive Lehrmaterialien. In jeder Woche wird ein Kapitel des Kursthemas behandelt. Dazu werden zu Wochenbeginn eine Reihe von Lehrvideos, Texten, Selbsttests und ein Hausaufgabenblatt bereitgestellt, mit denen sich die Kursteilnehmer in dieser Woche beschäftigen. Kombiniert sind die Angebote mit einer sozialen Diskussionsplattform, auf der sich die Teilnehmer mit den Kursbetreuern und anderen Teilnehmern austauschen, Fragen klären und weiterführende Themen diskutieren können. Natürlich entscheiden die Teilnehmer selbst über Art und Umfang ihrer Lernaktivitäten. Sie können in den Kurs eigene Beiträge einbringen, zum Beispiel durch Blogposts oder Tweets, auf die sie im Forum verweisen. Andere Lernende können diese dann kommentieren, diskutieren oder ihrerseits erweitern. Auf diese Weise werden die Lernenden, die Lehrenden und die angebotenen Lerninhalte in einer virtuellen Gemeinschaft, einem sozialen Lernnetzwerk miteinander verknüpft.
The new interactive online educational platform openHPI, (https://openHPI.de) from Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), offers freely accessible courses at no charge for all who are interested in subjects in the field of information technology and computer science. Since 2011, “Massive Open Online Courses,” called MOOCs for short, have been offered, first at Stanford University and then later at other U.S. elite universities. Following suit, openHPI provides instructional videos on the Internet and further reading material, combined with learning-supportive self-tests, homework and a social discussion forum. Education is further stimulated by the support of a virtual learning community. In contrast to “traditional” lecture platforms, such as the tele-TASK portal (http://www.tele-task.de) where multimedia recorded lectures are available on demand, openHPI offers didactic online courses. The courses have a fixed start date and offer a balanced schedule of six consecutive weeks presented in multimedia and, whenever possible, interactive learning material. Each week, one chapter of the course subject is treated. In addition, a series of learning videos, texts, self-tests and homework exercises are provided to course participants at the beginning of the week. The course offering is combined with a social discussion platform where participants have the opportunity to enter into an exchange with course instructors and fellow participants. Here, for example, they can get answers to questions and discuss the topics in depth. The participants naturally decide themselves about the type and range of their learning activities. They can make personal contributions to the course, for example, in blog posts or tweets, which they can refer to in the forum. In turn, other participants have the chance to comment on, discuss or expand on what has been said. In this way, the learners become the teachers and the subject matter offered to a virtual community is linked to a social learning network.
摘要。哈索•普拉特纳研究院 (HPI) 的新型互动在线教育平台 openHPI (https://openHPI.de) 可以为从事信息技术和信息学领域内容的工作和感兴趣的学员提供可自由访问的、免费的在线课程。与斯坦福大学于 2011 年首推,之后也在美国其他精英大学提供的“网络公开群众课”(简称 MOOC)一样,openHPI 同样在互联网中提供学习视频和阅读材料,其中综合了支持学习的自我测试、家庭作业和社交讨论论坛,并刺激对促进学习的虚拟学习团队的培训。与“传统的”讲座平台,比如 tele-TASK 平台 (http://www.tele-task.de) 不同(在该平台中,可调用以多媒体方式记录的和已准备好的讲座),openHPI 提供的是按教学法准备的在线课程。这些课程的开始时间固定,之后在连续六个课程周稳定的提供以多媒体方式准备的、尽可能可以互动的学习材料。每周讲解课程主题的一章。为此在该周开始前会准备一系列学习视频、文字、自我测试和家庭作业材料,课程学员在该周将精力用于处理这些内容。这些计划与一个社交讨论平台相结合,学员在该平台上可以与课程导师和其他学员交换意见、解答问题和讨论更多主题。当然,学员可以自己决定学习活动的类型和范围。他们可以为课程作出自己的贡献,比如在论坛中引用博文或推文。之后其他学员可以评论、讨论或自己扩展这些博文或推文。这样学员、教师和提供的学习内容就在一个虚拟的团体中与社交学习网络相互结合起来。
Openness indicators for the evaluation of digital platforms between the launch and maturity phase
(2024)
In recent years, the evaluation of digital platforms has become an important focus in the field of information systems science. The identification of influential indicators that drive changes in digital platforms, specifically those related to openness, is still an unresolved issue. This paper addresses the challenge of identifying measurable indicators and characterizing the transition from launch to maturity in digital platforms. It proposes a systematic analytical approach to identify relevant openness indicators for evaluation purposes. The main contributions of this study are the following (1) the development of a comprehensive procedure for analyzing indicators, (2) the categorization of indicators as evaluation metrics within a multidimensional grid-box model, (3) the selection and evaluation of relevant indicators, (4) the identification and assessment of digital platform architectures during the launch-to-maturity transition, and (5) the evaluation of the applicability of the conceptualization and design process for digital platform evaluation.
This technical report presents the results of student projects which were prepared during the lecture “Operating Systems II” offered by the “Operating Systems and Middleware” group at HPI in the Summer term of 2020. The lecture covered ad- vanced aspects of operating system implementation and architecture on topics such as Virtualization, File Systems and Input/Output Systems. In addition to attending the lecture, the participating students were encouraged to gather practical experience by completing a project on a closely related topic over the course of the semester. The results of 10 selected exceptional projects are covered in this report.
The students have completed hands-on projects on the topics of Operating System Design Concepts and Implementation, Hardware/Software Co-Design, Reverse Engineering, Quantum Computing, Static Source-Code Analysis, Operating Systems History, Application Binary Formats and more. It should be recognized that over the course of the semester all of these projects have achieved outstanding results which went far beyond the scope and the expec- tations of the lecture, and we would like to thank all participating students for their commitment and their effort in completing their respective projects, as well as their work on compiling this report.
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.
Die Orientierung am Outcome eines Lernprozesses stellt einen wichtigen Pfeiler einer kompetenzorientierten Informatiklehre dar. Im Beitrag werden Konzeption und Erfahrungen eines Projekts zur outcome-orientierten Neuausrichtung der Informatiklehre unter Berücksichtigung der Theorie des Constructive Alignment beschrieben. Nach der theoretischen Fundierung der Kompetenzproblematik wird anhand eines Formulierungsmodells ein Prozess zur Erarbeitung beobachtbarer Lernergebnisse dargestellt. Die Diskussion der Projektziele und Erfahrungen in der Umsetzung und Evaluierung unterstreichen die Chancen und Herausforderungen für eine Steigerung der Studienqualität.
Output statt Input
(2010)
Die in der Fachdidaktik Informatik im Zusammenhang mit den Bildungsstandards seit Jahren diskutierte Outputorientierung wird mittelfristig auch für die Hochschullehre verbindlich. Diese Änderung kann als Chance aufgefasst werden, aktuellen Problemen der Informatiklehre gezielt entgegenzuwirken. Basierend auf der Theorie des Constructive Alignment wird vorgeschlagen, im Zusammenhang mit der Outputorientierung eine Abstimmung von intendierter Kompetenz, Lernaktivität und Prüfung vorzunehmen. Zusätzlich profitieren Lehramtsstudenten von den im eigenen Lernprozess erworbenen Erfahrungen im Umgang mit Kompetenzen: wie diese formuliert, erarbeitet und geprüft werden. Anforderungen an die Formulierung von Kompetenzen werden untersucht, mit Beispielen belegt und Möglichkeiten zur Klassifizierung angeregt. Ein Austausch in den Fachbereichen und Fachdidaktiken über die individuell festgelegten Kompetenzen wird vorgeschlagen, um die hochschuldidaktische Diskussion zu bereichern.
A constraint programming system combines two essential components: a constraint solver and a search engine. The constraint solver reasons about satisfiability of conjunctions of constraints, and the search engine controls the search for solutions by iteratively exploring a disjunctive search tree defined by the constraint program. The Monadic Constraint Programming framework gives a monadic definition of constraint programming where the solver is defined as a monad threaded through the monadic search tree. Search and search strategies can then be defined as firstclass objects that can themselves be built or extended by composable search transformers. Search transformers give a powerful and unifying approach to viewing search in constraint programming, and the resulting constraint programming system is first class and extremely flexible.
Learning the causal structures from observational data is an omnipresent challenge in data science. The amount of observational data available to Causal Structure Learning (CSL) algorithms is increasing as data is collected at high frequency from many data sources nowadays. While processing more data generally yields higher accuracy in CSL, the concomitant increase in the runtime of CSL algorithms hinders their widespread adoption in practice. CSL is a parallelizable problem. Existing parallel CSL algorithms address execution on multi-core Central Processing Units (CPUs) with dozens of compute cores. However, modern computing systems are often heterogeneous and equipped with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate computations. Typically, these GPUs provide several thousand compute cores for massively parallel data processing.
To shorten the runtime of CSL algorithms, we design efficient execution strategies that leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs. Particularly, we derive GPU-accelerated variants of a well-known constraint-based CSL method, the PC algorithm, as it allows choosing a statistical Conditional Independence test (CI test) appropriate to the observational data characteristics.
Our two main contributions are: (1) to reflect differences in the CI tests, we design three GPU-based variants of the PC algorithm tailored to CI tests that handle data with the following characteristics. We develop one variant for data assuming the Gaussian distribution model, one for discrete data, and another for mixed discrete-continuous data and data with non-linear relationships. Each variant is optimized for the appropriate CI test leveraging GPU hardware properties, such as shared or thread-local memory. Our GPU-accelerated variants outperform state-of-the-art parallel CPU-based algorithms by factors of up to 93.4× for data assuming the Gaussian distribution model, up to 54.3× for discrete data, up to 240× for continuous data with non-linear relationships and up to 655× for mixed discrete-continuous data. However, the proposed GPU-based variants are limited to datasets that fit into a single GPU’s memory. (2) To overcome this shortcoming, we develop approaches to scale our GPU-based variants beyond a single GPU’s memory capacity. For example, we design an out-of-core GPU variant that employs explicit memory management to process arbitrary-sized datasets. Runtime measurements on a large gene expression dataset reveal that our out-of-core GPU variant is 364 times faster than a parallel CPU-based CSL algorithm. Overall, our proposed GPU-accelerated variants speed up CSL in numerous settings to foster CSL’s adoption in practice and research.
We consider the subset selection problem for function f with constraint bound B that changes over time. Within the area of submodular optimization, various greedy approaches are commonly used. For dynamic environments we observe that the adaptive variants of these greedy approaches are not able to maintain their approximation quality. Investigating the recently introduced POMC Pareto optimization approach, we show that this algorithm efficiently computes a phi=(alpha(f)/2)(1 - 1/e(alpha)f)-approximation, where alpha(f) is the submodularity ratio of f, for each possible constraint bound b <= B. Furthermore, we show that POMC is able to adapt its set of solutions quickly in the case that B increases. Our experimental investigations for the influence maximization in social networks show the advantage of POMC over generalized greedy algorithms. We also consider EAMC, a new evolutionary algorithm with polynomial expected time guarantee to maintain phi approximation ratio, and NSGA-II with two different population sizes as advanced multi-objective optimization algorithm, to demonstrate their challenges in optimizing the maximum coverage problem. Our empirical analysis shows that, within the same number of evaluations, POMC is able to perform as good as NSGA-II under linear constraint, while EAMC performs significantly worse than all considered algorithms in most cases.
Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.