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HPI Future SOC Lab
(2024)
The “HPI Future SOC Lab” is a cooperation of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and industry partners. Its mission is to enable and promote exchange and interaction between the research community and the industry partners.
The HPI Future SOC Lab provides researchers with free of charge access to a complete infrastructure of state of the art hard and software. This infrastructure includes components, which might be too expensive for an ordinary research environment, such as servers with up to 64 cores and 2 TB main memory. The offerings address researchers particularly from but not limited to the areas of computer science and business information systems. Main areas of research include cloud computing, parallelization, and In-Memory technologies.
This technical report presents results of research projects executed in 2020. Selected projects have presented their results on April 21st and November 10th 2020 at the Future SOC Lab Day events.
Floods continue to be the leading cause of economic damages and fatalities among natural disasters worldwide. As future climate and exposure changes are projected to intensify these damages, the need for more accurate and scalable flood risk models is rising. Over the past decade, macro-scale flood risk models have evolved from initial proof-of-concepts to indispensable tools for decision-making at global-, nationaland, increasingly, the local-level. This progress has been propelled by the advent of high-performance computing and the availability of global, space-based datasets. However, despite such advancements, these models are rarely validated and consistently fall short of the accuracy achieved by high-resolution local models. While capabilities have improved, significant gaps persist in understanding the behaviours of such macro-scale models, particularly their tendency to overestimate risk. This dissertation aims to address such gaps by examining the scale transfers inherent in the construction and application of coarse macroscale models. To achieve this, four studies are presented that, collectively, address exposure, hazard, and vulnerability components of risk affected by upscaling or downscaling.
The first study focuses on a type of downscaling where coarse flood hazard inundation grids are enhanced to a finer resolution. While such inundation downscaling has been employed in numerous global model chains, ours is the first study to focus specifically on this component, providing an evaluation of the state of the art and a novel algorithm. Findings demonstrate that our novel algorithm is eight times faster than existing methods, offers a slight improvement in accuracy, and generates more physically coherent flood maps in hydraulically challenging regions. When applied to a case study, the algorithm generated a 4m resolution inundation map from 30m hydrodynamic model outputs in 33 s, a 60-fold improvement in runtime with a 25% increase in RMSE compared with direct hydrodynamic modelling. All evaluated downscaling algorithms yielded better accuracy than the coarse hydrodynamic model when compared to observations, demonstrating similar limits of coarse hydrodynamic models reported by others. The substitution of downscaling into flood risk model chains, in place of high-resolution modelling, can drastically improve the lead time of impactbased forecasts and the efficiency of hazard map production. With downscaling, local regions could obtain high resolution local inundation maps by post-processing a global model without the need for expensive modelling or expertise.
The second study focuses on hazard aggregation and its implications for exposure, investigating implicit aggregations commonly used to intersect hazard grids with coarse exposure models. This research introduces a novel spatial classification framework to understand the effects of rescaling flood hazard grids to a coarser resolution. The study derives closed-form analytical solutions for the location and direction of bias from flood grid aggregation, showing that bias will always be present in regions near the edge of inundation. For example, inundation area will be positively biased when water depth grids are aggregated, while volume will be negatively biased when water elevation grids are aggregated. Extending the analysis to effects of hazard aggregation on building exposure, this study shows that exposure in regions at the edge of inundation are an order of magnitude more sensitive to aggregation errors than hazard alone. Among the two aggregation routines considered, averaging water surface elevation grids better preserved flood depths at buildings than averaging of water depth grids. The study provides the first mathematical proof and generalizeable treatment of flood hazard grid aggregation, demonstrating important mechanisms to help flood risk modellers understand and control model behaviour.
The final two studies focus on the aggregation of vulnerability models or flood damage functions, investigating the practice of applying per-asset functions to aggregate exposure models. Both studies extend Jensen’s inequality, a well-known 1906 mathematical proof, to demonstrate how the aggregation of flood damage functions leads to bias. Applying Jensen’s proof in this new context, results show that typically concave flood damage functions will introduce a positive bias (overestimation) when aggregated. This behaviour was further investigated with a simulation experiment including 2 million buildings in Germany, four global flood hazard simulations and three aggregation scenarios. The results show that positive aggregation bias is not distributed evenly in space, meaning some regions identified as “hot spots of risk” in assessments may in fact just be hot spots of aggregation bias. This study provides the first application of Jensen’s inequality to explain the overestimates reported elsewhere and advice for modellers to minimize such artifacts.
In total, this dissertation investigates the complex ways aggregation and disaggregation influence the behaviour of risk models, focusing on the scale-transfers underpinning macro-scale flood risk assessments. Extending a key finding of the flood hazard literature to the broader context of flood risk, this dissertation concludes that all else equal, coarse models overestimate risk. This dissertation goes beyond previous studies by providing mathematical proofs for how and where such bias emerges in aggregation routines, offering a mechanistic explanation for coarse model overestimates. It shows that this bias is spatially heterogeneous, necessitating a deep understanding of how rescaling may bias models to effectively reduce or communicate uncertainties. Further, the dissertation offers specific recommendations to help modellers minimize scale transfers in problematic regions. In conclusion, I argue that such aggregation errors are epistemic, stemming from choices in model structure, and therefore hold greater potential and impetus for study and mitigation. This deeper understanding of uncertainties is essential for improving macro-scale flood risk models and their effectiveness in equitable, holistic, and sustainable flood management.
State space models enjoy wide popularity in mathematical and statistical modelling across disciplines and research fields. Frequent solutions to problems of estimation and forecasting of a latent signal such as the celebrated Kalman filter hereby rely on a set of strong assumptions such as linearity of system dynamics and Gaussianity of noise terms.
We investigate fallacy in mis-specification of the noise terms, that is signal noise
and observation noise, regarding heavy tailedness in that the true dynamic frequently produces observation outliers or abrupt jumps of the signal state due to realizations of these heavy tails not considered by the model. We propose a formalisation of observation noise mis-specification in terms of Huber’s ε-contamination as well as a computationally cheap solution via generalised Bayesian posteriors with a diffusion Stein divergence loss resulting in the diffusion score matching Kalman filter - a modified algorithm akin in complexity to the regular Kalman filter. For this new filter interpretations of novel terms, stability and an ensemble variant are discussed. Regarding signal noise mis-specification, we propose a formalisation in the frame work of change point detection and join ideas from the popular CUSUM algo-
rithm with ideas from Bayesian online change point detection to combine frequent reliability constraints and online inference resulting in a Gaussian mixture model variant of multiple Kalman filters. We hereby exploit open-end sequential probability ratio tests on the evidence of Kalman filters on observation sub-sequences for aggregated inference under notions of plausibility.
Both proposed methods are combined to investigate the double mis-specification problem and discussed regarding their capabilities in reliable and well-tuned uncertainty quantification. Each section provides an introduction to required terminology and tools as well as simulation experiments on the popular target tracking task and the non-linear, chaotic Lorenz-63 system to showcase practical performance of theoretical considerations.
Proceedings of TripleA 10
(2024)
The TripleA workshop series was founded in 2014 by linguists from Potsdam and Tübingen with the aim of providing a platform for researchers that conduct theoretically-informed linguistic fieldwork on meaning. Its focus is particularly on languages that are under-represented in the current research landscape, including but not limited to languages of Africa, Asia, and Australia, hence TripleA.
For its 10th anniversary, TripleA returned to the University of Potsdam on the 7-9th of June 2023.
The programme included 21 talks dealing with no less than 22 different languages, including three invited talks given by Sihwei Chen (Academia Sinica), Jérémy Pasquereau (Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS) and Agata Renans (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). Nine of these (invited or peer-reviewed) talks are featured in this volume.
The global drylands cover nearly half of the terrestrial surface and are home to more than two billion people. In many drylands, ongoing land-use change transforms near-natural savanna vegetation to agricultural land to increase food production. In Southern Africa, these heterogenous savanna ecosystems are also recognized as habitats of many protected animal species, such as elephant, lion and large herds of diverse herbivores, which are of great value for the tourism industry. Here, subsistence farmers and livestock herder communities often live in close proximity to nature conservation areas. Although these land-use transformations are different regarding the future they aspire to, both processes, nature conservation with large herbivores and agricultural intensification, have in common, that they change the vegetation structure of savanna ecosystems, usually leading to destruction of trees, shrubs and the woody biomass they consist of.
Such changes in woody vegetation cover and biomass are often regarded as forms of land degradation and forest loss. Global forest conservation approaches and international programs aim to stop degradation processes, also to conserve the carbon bound within wood from volatilization into earth’s atmosphere. In search for mitigation options against global climate change savannas are increasingly discussed as potential carbon sinks. Savannas, however, are not forests, in that they are naturally shaped by and adapted to disturbances, such as wildfires and herbivory. Unlike in forests, disturbances are necessary for stable, functioning savanna ecosystems and prevent these ecosystems from forming closed forest stands. Their consequently lower levels of carbon storage in woody vegetation have long been the reason for savannas to be overlooked as a potential carbon sink but recently the question was raised if carbon sequestration programs (such as REDD+) could also be applied to savanna ecosystems. However, heterogenous vegetation structure and chronic disturbances hamper the quantification of carbon stocks in savannas, and current procedures of carbon storage estimation entail high uncertainties due to methodological obstacles. It is therefore challenging to assess how future land-use changes such as agricultural intensification or increasing wildlife densities will impact the carbon storage balance of African drylands.
In this thesis, I address the research gap of accurately quantifying carbon storage in vegetation and soils of disturbance-prone savanna ecosystems. I further analyse relevant drivers for both ecosystem compartments and their implications for future carbon storage under land-use change. Moreover, I show that in savannas different carbon storage pools vary in their persistence to disturbance, causing carbon bound in shrub vegetation to be most likely to experience severe losses under land-use change while soil organic carbon stored in subsoils is least likely to be impacted by land-use change in the future.
I start with summarizing conventional approaches to carbon storage assessment and where and for which reasons they fail to accurately estimated savanna ecosystem carbon storage. Furthermore, I outline which future-making processes drive land-use change in Southern Africa along two pathways of land-use transformation and how these are likely to influence carbon storage. In the following chapters, I propose a new method of carbon storage estimation which is adapted to the specific conditions of disturbance-prone ecosystems and demonstrate the advantages of this approach in relation to existing forestry methods. Specifically, I highlight sources for previous over- and underestimation of savanna carbon stocks which the proposed methodology resolves. In the following chapters, I apply the new method to analyse impacts of land-use change on carbon storage in woody vegetation in conjunction with the soil compartment. With this interdisciplinary approach, I can demonstrate that indeed both, agricultural intensification and nature conservation with large herbivores, reduce woody carbon storage above- and belowground, but partly sequesters this carbon into the soil organic carbon stock. I then quantify whole-ecosystem carbon storage in different ecosystem compartments (above- and belowground woody carbon in shrubs and trees, respectively, as well as topsoil and subsoil organic carbon) of two savanna vegetation types (scrub savanna and savanna woodland). Moreover, in a space-for-time substitution I analyse how land-use changes impact carbon storage in each compartment and in the whole ecosystem. Carbon storage compartments are found to differ in their persistence to land-use change with carbon bound in shrub biomass being least persistent to future changes and subsoil organic carbon being most stable under changing land-use. I then explore which individual land-use change effects act as drivers of carbon storage through Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) and uncover non-linear effects, especially of elephant browsing, with implications for future carbon storage. In the last chapter, I discuss my findings in the larger context of this thesis and discuss relevant implications for land-use change and future-making decisions in rural Africa.
Laser induced switching offers an attractive possibility to manipulate small magnetic domains for prospective memory and logic devices on ultrashort time scales. Moreover, optical control of magnetization without high applied magnetic fields allows manipulation of magnetic domains individually and locally, without expensive heat dissipation. One of the major challenges for developing novel optically controlled magnetic memory and logic devices is reliable formation and annihilation of non-volatile magnetic domains that can serve as memory bits in ambient conditions. Magnetic skyrmions, topologically nontrivial spin textures, have been studied intensively since their discovery due to their stability and scalability in potential spintronic devices. However, skyrmion formation and, especially, annihilation processes are still not completely understood and further investigation on such mechanisms are needed. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to better understanding of the physical processes behind the optical control of magnetism in thin films, with the goal of optimizing material parameters and methods for their potential use in next generation memory and logic devices.
First part of the thesis is dedicated to investigation of all-optical helicity-dependent switching (AO-HDS) as a method for magnetization manipulation. AO-HDS in Co/Pt multilayer and CoFeB alloys with and without the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), which is a type of exchange interaction, have been investigated by magnetic imaging using photo-emission electron microscopy (PEEM) in combination with X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD). The results show that in a narrow range of the laser fluence, circularly polarized laser light induces a drag on domain walls. This enables a local deterministic transformation of the magnetic domain pattern from stripes to bubbles in out-of-plane magnetized Co/Pt multilayers, only controlled by the helicity of ultrashort laser pulses. The temperature and characteristic fields at which the stripe-bubble transformation occurs has been calculated using theory for isolated magnetic bubbles, using as parameters experimentally determined average size of stripe domains and the magnetic layer thickness.
The second part of the work aims at purely optical formation and annihilation of magnetic skyrmions by a single laser pulse. The presence of a skyrmion phase in the investigated CoFeB alloys was first confirmed using a Kerr microscope. Then the helicity-dependent skyrmion manipulation was studied using AO-HDS at different laser fluences. It was found that formation or annihilation individual skyrmions using AO-HDS is possible, but not always reliable, as fluctuations in the laser fluence or position can easily overwrite the helicity-dependent effect of AO-HDS. However, the experimental results and magnetic simulations showed that the threshold values for the laser fluence for the formation and annihilation of skyrmions are different. A higher fluence is required for skyrmion formation, and existing skyrmions can be annihilated by pulses with a slightly lower fluence. This provides a further option for controlling formation and annihilation of skyrmions using the laser fluence. Micromagnetic simulations provide additional insights into the formation and annihilation mechanism.
The ability to manipulate the magnetic state of individual skyrmions is of fundamental importance for magnetic data storage technologies. Our results show for the first time that the optical formation and annihilation of skyrmions is possible without changing the external field. These results enable further investigations to optimise the magnetic layer to maximise the energy gap between the formation and annihilation barrier. As a result, unwanted switching due to small laser fluctuations can be avoided and fully deterministic optical switching can be achieved.
Jews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austria for centuries untold, yet often continue to be construed as the essential “other.” This essay explores a selection of sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent historical experiences amongst these two broad population groups, focusing specifically on demographic diversity, community-building, discrimination and persecution, and the post-war situation. The ultimate aim is to illuminate paradigmatically through the Austrian case study the complex multicultural mosaic of historical Central Europe, the understanding of which, so our contention, sheds a critical light on the often divisive present-day debates concerning immigration and diversity in Austria and Central Europe more broadly. It furthermore opens up a hitherto understudied field of historical research, namely the entangled history of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe.
The Jewish museums established in the fin-de-siècle Habsburg Empire postulated the unity of “the Jewish people,” with custodians constructing an “us” (Jews) in distinction to the “other” (non-Jews). In the difference-oriented frenzy of the time, Jewish identity was predominantly presented as Central European, enlightened, not overly religious, and middle-class. Then, when the Viennese Jewish Museum opened its doors in 1895, the painters Isidor Kaufmann and David Kohn created an installation called “Die Gute Stube” (The Parlor). This exhibit housed books, furniture, as well as decorative and ritual objects of the kind that were thought to be found in typical Eastern European Jewish households. However, as this article argues, this attempted visualization of the essence of Judaism and the range of Jewish life worlds promoted a paradigmatic stereotype with which Jewish museums would have to struggle for decades to come.
Even though Salonican Jews are not typically associated with the Habsburg Empire, some of them, nonetheless, lived there. This paper aims to examine the formation of these Salonican Jews’ (self-)identification by studying their social interactions with the local Viennese population such as the Viennese Sephardi or the Greek-Orthodox communities. The change of the milieu within which they found themselves subsequently impacted their self-perception. Thus, the issue of the surrounding environment and their relations with other groups became central to their self-understanding, as will be demonstrated. By examining different aspects, like migration patterns, financial decisions and family ties, one can understand how their intersection influenced Salonica Jews’ self-identification, which, at the same time, shaped and was shaped by the surrounding milieu. Within this framework, these people perceived themselves and were perceived as Salonican, Sephardi, Jewish, and as subjects of the Emperor.
“Domestic Foreigners”
(2024)
This paper examines the relationship between the Sephardic Jewish community of Vienna and the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the latter half of the 19th century. The community’s legal status was transformed following the emancipation of Austrian Jews, but very few first-hand accounts of these changes exist today. The primary sources analyzed in this paper are Judezmo-language newspapers published in Vienna at that time. The paper emphasizes the historical and political contexts surrounding these sources, particularly the community’s close ties to the Ottoman and Habsburg regimes.