Institut für Informatik und Computational Science
Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (245) (remove)
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (116)
- Doctoral Thesis (85)
- Conference Proceeding (15)
- Master's Thesis (13)
- Postprint (10)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (2)
- Bachelor Thesis (1)
- Habilitation Thesis (1)
- Moving Images (1)
- Preprint (1)
Language
- English (126)
- German (118)
- Multiple languages (1)
Keywords
- Informatik (18)
- Didaktik (15)
- Hochschuldidaktik (14)
- Ausbildung (13)
- E-Learning (8)
- Maschinelles Lernen (7)
- Antwortmengenprogrammierung (6)
- Computer Science Education (5)
- Machine Learning (5)
- answer set programming (5)
Institute
- Institut für Informatik und Computational Science (245)
- Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Digital Engineering gGmbH (18)
- Extern (6)
- eLiS - E-Learning in Studienbereichen (2)
- Historisches Institut (1)
- Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) e. V. (1)
- Universitätsbibliothek (1)
- Wirtschaftswissenschaften (1)
- Zentrum für Qualitätsentwicklung in Lehre und Studium (ZfQ) (1)
Regardless of what is intended by government curriculum
specifications and advised by educational experts, the competencies
taught and learned in and out of classrooms can vary considerably.
In this paper, we discuss in particular how we can investigate the
perceptions that individual teachers have of competencies in ICT,
and how these and other factors may influence students’ learning. We
report case study research which identifies contradictions within the
teaching of ICT competencies as an activity system, highlighting issues
concerning the object of the curriculum, the roles of the participants and
the school cultures. In a particular case, contradictions in the learning
objectives between higher order skills and the use of application tools
have been resolved by a change in the teacher’s perceptions which
have not led to changes in other aspects of the activity system. We look
forward to further investigation of the effects of these contradictions in
other case studies and on forthcoming curriculum change.
The paper presents two approaches to the development of
a Computer Science Competence Model for the needs of curriculum
development and evaluation in Higher Education. A normativetheoretical
approach is based on the AKT and ACM/IEEE curriculum
and will be used within the recommendations of the German
Informatics Society (GI) for the design of CS curricula. An empirically
oriented approach refines the categories of the first one with regard to
specific subject areas by conducting content analysis on CS curricula of
important universities from several countries. The refined model will be
used for the needs of students’ e-assessment and subsequent affirmative
action of the CS departments.
The paper discusses the issue of supporting informatics
(computer science) education through competitions for lower and
upper secondary school students (8–19 years old). Competitions play
an important role for learners as a source of inspiration, innovation,
and attraction. Running contests in informatics for school students
for many years, we have noticed that the students consider the contest
experience very engaging and exciting as well as a learning experience.
A contest is an excellent instrument to involve students in problem
solving activities. An overview of infrastructure and development
of an informatics contest from international level to the national one
(the Bebras contest on informatics and computer fluency, originated
in Lithuania) is presented. The performance of Bebras contests in 23
countries during the last 10 years showed an unexpected and unusually
high acceptance by school students and teachers. Many thousands of
students participated and got a valuable input in addition to their regular
informatics lectures at school. In the paper, the main attention is paid
to the developed tasks and analysis of students’ task solving results in
Lithuania.
Social networks are currently at the forefront of tools that
lend to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). This study aimed to
observe how students perceived PLEs, what they believed were the
integral components of social presence when using Facebook as part
of a PLE, and to describe student’s preferences for types of interactions
when using Facebook as part of their PLE. This study used mixed
methods to analyze the perceptions of graduate and undergraduate
students on the use of social networks, more specifically Facebook as a
learning tool. Fifty surveys were returned representing a 65 % response
rate. Survey questions included both closed and open-ended questions.
Findings suggested that even though students rated themselves relatively
well in having requisite technology skills, and 94 % of students used
Facebook primarily for social use, they were hesitant to migrate these
skills to academic use because of concerns of privacy, believing that
other platforms could fulfil the same purpose, and by not seeing the
validity to use Facebook in establishing social presence. What lies
at odds with these beliefs is that when asked to identify strategies in
Facebook that enabled social presence to occur in academic work, the
majority of students identified strategies in five categories that lead to
social presence establishment on Facebook during their coursework.
Teaching Data Management
(2015)
Data management is a central topic in computer science as
well as in computer science education. Within the last years, this topic is
changing tremendously, as its impact on daily life becomes increasingly
visible. Nowadays, everyone not only needs to manage data of various
kinds, but also continuously generates large amounts of data. In
addition, Big Data and data analysis are intensively discussed in public
dialogue because of their influences on society. For the understanding of
such discussions and for being able to participate in them, fundamental
knowledge on data management is necessary. Especially, being aware
of the threats accompanying the ability to analyze large amounts of
data in nearly real-time becomes increasingly important. This raises the
question, which key competencies are necessary for daily dealings with
data and data management.
In this paper, we will first point out the importance of data management
and of Big Data in daily life. On this basis, we will analyze which are
the key competencies everyone needs concerning data management to
be able to handle data in a proper way in daily life. Afterwards, we will
discuss the impact of these changes in data management on computer
science education and in particular database education.
The Student Learning Ecology
(2015)
Educational research on social media has showed that
students use it for socialisation, personal communication, and informal
learning. Recent studies have argued that students to some degree use
social media to carry out formal schoolwork. This article gives an
explorative account on how a small sample of Norwegian high school
students use social media to self-organise formal schoolwork. This
user pattern can be called a “student learning ecology”, which is a
user perspective on how participating students gain access to learning
resources.
This paper discusses results from a small-scale research
study, together with some recently published research into student
perceptions of ICT for learning in schools, to consider relevant skills
that do not appear to currently being taught. The paper concludes by
raising three issues relating to learning with and through ICT that need
to be addressed in school curricula and classroom teaching.
How Things Work
(2015)
Recognizing and defining functionality is a key competence
adopted in all kinds of programming projects. This study investigates
how far students without specific informatics training are able to identify
and verbalize functions and parameters. It presents observations
from classroom activities on functional modeling in high school chemistry
lessons with altogether 154 students. Finally it discusses the potential
of functional modelling to improve the comprehension of scientific
content.
Computational Thinking
(2015)
Digital technology has radically changed the way people
work in industry, finance, services, media and commerce. Informatics
has contributed to the scientific and technological development of our
society in general and to the digital revolution in particular. Computational
thinking is the term indicating the key ideas of this discipline that
might be included in the key competencies underlying the curriculum
of compulsory education. The educational potential of informatics has
a history dating back to the sixties. In this article, we briefly revisit this
history looking for lessons learned. In particular, we focus on experiences
of teaching and learning programming. However, computational
thinking is more than coding. It is a way of thinking and practicing interactive
dynamic modeling with computers. We advocate that learners
can practice computational thinking in playful contexts where they can
develop personal projects, for example building videogames and/or robots,
share and discuss their construction with others. In our view, this
approach allows an integration of computational thinking in the K-12
curriculum across disciplines.
The Technology Proficiency Self-Assessment (TPSA) questionnaire
has been used for 15 years in the USA and other nations as a
self-efficacy measure for proficiencies fundamental to effective technology
integration in the classroom learning environment. Internal consistency
reliabilities for each of the five-item scales have typically ranged
from .73 to .88 for preservice or inservice technology-using teachers.
Due to changing technologies used in education, researchers sought to
renovate partially obsolete items and extend self-efficacy assessment to
new areas, such as social media and mobile learning. Analysis of 2014
data gathered on a new, 34 item version of the TPSA indicates that the
four established areas of email, World Wide Web (WWW), integrated
applications, and teaching with technology continue to form consistent
scales with reliabilities ranging from .81 to .93, while the 14 new items
gathered to represent emerging technologies and media separate into
two scales, each with internal consistency reliabilities greater than .9.
The renovated TPSA is deemed to be worthy of continued use in the
teaching with technology context.
How does the Implementation of a Literacy Learning Tool Kit influence Literacy Skill Acquisition?
(2015)
This study aimed at following how teachers transfer skills
into results while using ABRA literacy software. This was done in
the second part of the pilot study whose aim was to provide equity to
control group teachers and students by exposing them to the ABRACADABRA
treatment after the end of phase 1. This opportunity was
used to follow the phase 1 teachers to see how the skills learned were
being transformed into results. A standard three-day initial training and
planning session on how to use ABRA to teach literacy was held at the
beginning of each phase for ABRA teachers (phase 1 experimental and
phase 2 delayed ABRA). Teachers were provided with teaching materials
including a tentative ABRA curriculum developed to align with the
Kenyan English Language requirements for year 1 and 3 students. Results
showed that although there was no significant difference between
the groups in vocabulary-related subscales which include word reading
and meaning as well as sentence comprehension, students in ABRACADABRA
classes improved their scores at a significantly higher rate
than students in control classes in comprehension related scores. An
average student in the ABRACADABRA group improved by 12 and
16 percentile points respectively compared to their counterparts in the
control group.
In this paper we describe the recent state of our research
project concerning computer science teachers’ knowledge on students’
cognition. We did a comprehensive analysis of textbooks, curricula
and other resources, which give teachers guidance to formulate assignments.
In comparison to other subjects there are only a few concepts
and strategies taught to prospective computer science teachers in university.
We summarize them and given an overview on our empirical
approach to measure this knowledge.
The study reported in this paper involved the employment
of specific in-class exercises using a Personal Response System (PRS).
These exercises were designed with two goals: to enhance students’
capabilities of tracing a given code and of explaining a given code in
natural language with some abstraction. The paper presents evidence
from the actual use of the PRS along with students’ subjective impressions
regarding both the use of the PRS and the special exercises. The
conclusions from the findings are followed with a short discussion on
benefits of PRS-based mental processing exercises for learning programming
and beyond.
Mentoring in a Digital World
(2015)
This paper focuses on the results of the evaluation of the first
pilot of an e-mentoring unit designed by the Hands-On ICT consortium,
funded by the EU LLL programme. The overall aim of this two-year
activity is to investigate the value for professional learning of Massive
Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and Community Online Open Courses
(COOCs) in the context of a ‘community of practice’. Three units in the
first pilot covered aspects of using digital technologies to develop creative
thinking skills. The findings in this paper relate to the fourth unit
about e-mentoring, a skill that was important to delivering the course
content in the other three units. Findings about the e-mentoring unit
included: the students’ request for detailed profiles so that participants
can get to know each other; and, the need to reconcile the different
interpretations of e-mentoring held by the participants when the course
begins. The evaluators concluded that the major issues were that: not all
professional learners would self-organise and network; and few would
wish to mentor their colleagues voluntarily. Therefore, the e-mentoring
issues will need careful consideration in pilots two and three to identify
how e-mentoring will be organised.
Physical computing covers the design and realization of interactive
objects and installations and allows students to develop concrete,
tangible products of the real world that arise from the learners’
imagination. This way, constructionist learning is raised to a level that
enables students to gain haptic experience and thereby concretizes the
virtual. In this paper the defining characteristics of physical computing
are described. Key competences to be gained with physical computing
will be identified.
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.
Think logarithmically!
(2015)
We discuss here a number of algorithmic topics which we
use in our teaching and in learning of mathematics and informatics to
illustrate and document the power of logarithm in designing very efficient
algorithms and computations – logarithmic thinking is one of the
most important key competencies for solving real world practical problems.
We demonstrate also how to introduce logarithm independently
of mathematical formalism using a conceptual model for reducing a
problem size by at least half. It is quite surprising that the idea, which
leads to logarithm, is present in Euclid’s algorithm described almost
2000 years before John Napier invented logarithm.
Current curricular trends require teachers in Baden-
Wuerttemberg (Germany) to integrate Computer Science (CS) into
traditional subjects, such as Physical Science. However, concrete guidelines
are missing. To fill this gap, we outline an approach where a
microcontroller is used to perform and evaluate measurements in the
Physical Science classroom.
Using the open-source Arduino platform, we expect students to acquire
and develop both CS and Physical Science competencies by using a
self-programmed microcontroller. In addition to this combined development
of competencies in Physical Science and CS, the subject matter
will be embedded in suitable contexts and learning environments,
such as weather and climate.
The poster and abstract describe the importance of teaching
information security in school. After a short description of information
security and important aspects, I will show, how information security
fits into different guidelines or models for computer science educations
and that it is therefore on of the key competencies. Afterwards I will
present you a rough insight of teaching information security in Austria.
ProtoSense
(2015)
Let’s talk about CS!
(2015)
To communicate about a science is the most important key
competence in education for any science. Without communication we
cannot teach, so teachers should reflect about the language they use in
class properly. But the language students and teachers use to communicate
about their CS courses is very heterogeneous, inconsistent and
deeply influenced by tool names. There is a big lack of research and
discussion in CS education regarding the terminology and the role of
concepts and tools in our science. We don’t have a consistent set of
terminology that we agree on to be helpful for learning our science.
This makes it nearly impossible to do research on CS competencies as
long as we have not agreed on the names we use to describe these. This
workshop intends to provide room to fill with discussion and first ideas
for future research in this field.
Participants of this workshop will be confronted exemplarily
with a considerable inconsistency of global Informatics education at
lower secondary level. More importantly, they are invited to contribute
actively on this issue in form of short case studies of their countries.
Until now, very few countries have been successful in implementing
Informatics or Computing at primary and lower secondary level. The
spectrum from digital literacy to informatics, particularly as a discipline
in its own right, has not really achieved a breakthrough and seems to
be underrepresented for these age groups. The goal of this workshop
is not only to discuss the anamnesis and diagnosis of this fragmented
field, but also to discuss and suggest viable forms of therapy in form of
setting educational standards. Making visible good practices in some
countries and comparing successful approaches are rewarding tasks for
this workshop.
Discussing and defining common educational standards on a transcontinental
level for the age group of 14 to 15 years old students in a readable,
assessable and acceptable form should keep the participants of this
workshop active beyond the limited time at the workshop.
A lot has been published about the competencies needed by
students in the 21st century (Ravenscroft et al., 2012). However, equally
important are the competencies needed by educators in the new era
of digital education. We review the key competencies for educators in
light of the new methods of teaching and learning proposed by Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their on-campus counterparts,
Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs).
Die Wahl des richtigen Studienfaches und die daran anschließende
Studieneingangsphase sind oft entscheidend für den erfolgreichen Verlauf eines Studiums. Eine große Herausforderung besteht dabei darin, bereits in den ersten Wochen des Studiums bestehende Defizite in vermeintlich einfachen Schlüsselkompetenzen zu erkennen und diese so bald wie möglich zu beheben. Eine zweite, nicht minder wichtige Herausforderung ist es, möglichst frühzeitig für jeden einzelnen Studierenden zu erkennen, ob er bzw. sie das individuell richtige Studienfach gewählt hat, das den jeweiligen persönlichen Neigungen, Interessen und Fähigkeiten entspricht und zur Verwirklichung der eigenen Lebensziele beiträgt. Denn nur dann sind Studierende ausreichend stark und dauerhaft intrinsisch motiviert, um ein anspruchsvolles, komplexes Studium erfolgreich durchzuziehen. In diesem Beitrag fokussieren wir eine Maßnahme, die die Studierenden an einen Prozess zur systematischen Reflexion des eigenen Lernprozesses und der eigenen Ziele heranführt und beides in Relation setzt.
Ziel einer neuen Studieneingangsphase ist, den Studierenden bis zum Ende des ersten Semesters ein vielfältiges Berufsbild der Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik mit dem breiten Aufgabenspektrum aufzublättern und damit die Zusammenhänge zwischen den einzelnen Modulen des Curriculums zu verdeutlichen. Die Studierenden sollen in die Lage versetzt werden, sehr eigenständig die Planung und Gestaltung ihres Studiums in die Hand zu nehmen.
In diesem Papier wird das Konzept eines Lernzentrums für die Informatik (LZI) an der Universität Paderborn vorgestellt. Ausgehend von den fachspezifischen Schwierigkeiten der Informatik Studierenden werden die Angebote des LZIs erläutert, die sich über die vier Bereiche Individuelle Beratung und Betreuung, „Offener Lernraum“, Workshops und Lehrveranstaltungen sowie Forschung erstrecken. Eine erste Evaluation mittels Feedbackbögen zeigt, dass das Angebot bei den Studierenden positiv aufgenommen wird. Zukünftig soll das Angebot des LZIs weiter ausgebaut und verbessert werden. Ausgangsbasis dazu sind weitere Studien.
Die Arbeitswelt im Fokus
(2015)
Für Bachelor-Studierende der Wirtschaftsinformatik im zweiten Semester an der Fachhochschule Kiel werden im Modul Informationsmanagement neben klassischen didaktischen Ansätzen in einer seminaristischen Unterrichtsform so genannte „Aktivbausteine“ eingesetzt: Studierende erhalten zum einen die Gelegenheit, sich im Kontakt mit Fach- und Führungskräften aus der Industrie ein konkretes Bild vom Beruf der Wirtschaftsinformatikerin bzw. des Wirtschaftsinformatikers zu machen; zum anderen erarbeiten sie innovative Ansätze der Prozessverbesserung aus Sicht der IT oder mit Nutzenpotenzial für die IT und präsentieren ihre Ergebnisse öffentlich im Rahmen des Kieler Prozessmanagementforums. Diese Aktivbausteine dienen insbesondere der Berufsfeldorientierung: Durch die Informationen, die die Studierenden über die Anforderungen und Tätigkeiten von im Beruf stehenden Menschen erhalten, werden sie in die Lage versetzt, fundierte Entscheidungen bzgl. ihrer Studiengestaltung und Berufswahl zu treffen. Im Beitrag wird die Konzeption der Bausteine vorgestellt und deren Grad der Zielerreichung durch aktuelle Evaluationsergebnisse erläutert. Zudem wird die motivationale Wirkung der Aktivbausteine anhand der Theorie der Selbstbestimmung von Deci und Ryan [DR1985, DR1993, DR2004] erläutert.
Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die Konzeption eines Software-Projektpraktikums im Bereich E-Learning, welches Lehramts- und Fachstudierenden der Informatik ermöglicht, voneinander zu profitieren und praxisrelevante Ergebnisse generiert. Vorbereitungen, Organisation und Durchführung werden vorgestellt und diskutiert. Den Abschluss bildet ein Ausblick auf die Fortführung des Konzepts und den Ausbau des Forschungsgebietes.
Das „Startprojekt“
(2016)
Absolventinnen und Absolventen unserer Informatik-Bachelorstudiengänge benötigen für kompetentes berufliches Handeln sowohl fachliche als auch überfachliche Kompetenzen. Vielfach verlangen wir von Erstsemestern in Grundlagen-Lehrveranstaltungen fast ausschließlich den Aufbau von Fachkompetenz und vernachlässigen dabei häufig Selbstkompetenz, Methodenkompetenz und Sozialkompetenz. Gerade die drei letztgenannten sind für ein erfolgreiches Studium unabdingbar und sollten von Anfang an entwickelt werden. Wir stellen unser „Startprojekt“ als einen Beitrag vor, im ersten Semester die eigenverantwortliche, überfachliche Kompetenzentwicklung in einem fachlichen Kontext zu fördern.
Aus einer Vergleichsstudie mit starken und schwachen Problemlösern konnten Erkenntnisse über die effizienten Herangehensweisen von Hochleistern an Informatikprobleme gewonnen werden. Diese Erkenntnisse wurden in einem Lehrvideo zum informatischen Problemlösen didaktisch aufgearbeitet, sodass Lernenden der Einsatz von Baumstrukturen und Rekursion im konkreten Kontext gezeigt werden kann. Nun wurde die tatsächliche Lernwirksamkeit des Videos sowie die Definition der Zielgruppe in einer Vergleichsstudie mit 66 Studienanfängern überprüft.
Der Unterricht großer Studierendengruppen im wissenschaftlichen Schreiben birgt vielfältige organisatorische Herausforderungen und eine zeitintensive Betreuung durch die Dozenten. Diese Arbeit stellt ein Lehrkonzept mit Peer-Reviews vor, in dem das Feedback der Peers durch eine automatisierte Analyse ergänzt wird. Die Software Confopy liefert metrik- und strukturbasierte Hinweise für die Verbesserung des wissenschaftlichen Schreibstils. Der Nutzen von Confopy wird an 47 studentischen Arbeiten in Draft- und Final-Version illustriert.
Informatik-Studierende haben in der Mehrzahl Schwierigkeiten, einen Einstieg in die Theoretische
Informatik zu finden und die Leistungsanforderungen in den
Endklausuren der zugehörigen Lehrveranstaltungen zu erfüllen. Wir argumentieren, dass dieser Symptomatik mangelnde Kompetenzen im Umgang mit abstrakten und stark formalisierten Themeninhalten zugrunde liegen und schlagen vor, einen Beweisassistenten als interaktives Lernwerkzeug in der Eingangslehre der Theoretischen Informatik zu nutzen, um entsprechende Kompetenzen zu stärken.
Dieser Beitrag diskutiert den Einsatz von interaktiven und automatischen Theorembeweisern in der universitären Lehre. Moderne Theorembeweiser scheinen geeignet zur Implementierung des dialogischen Lernens und als E-Assessment-Werkzeug in der Logikausbilding. Exemplarisch skizzieren wir ein innovaties Lehrprojekt zum Thema „Komputationale Metaphysik“, in dem die zuvor genannten Werkzeuge eingesetzt werden.
Die Unterrichtsmethode Stationsarbeit kann verwendet werden, um Individualisierung und Differenzierung im Lernprozess zu ermöglichen. Dieser Beitrag schlägt Aufgabenformate vor, die in einer Stationsarbeit über das Klassendiagramm aus der Unified Modeling Language verwendet werden können. Die Aufgabenformate wurden bereits mit Studierenden erprobt.
Geospatial data has become a natural part of a growing number of information systems and services in the economy, society, and people's personal lives. In particular, virtual 3D city and landscape models constitute valuable information sources within a wide variety of applications such as urban planning, navigation, tourist information, and disaster management. Today, these models are often visualized in detail to provide realistic imagery. However, a photorealistic rendering does not automatically lead to high image quality, with respect to an effective information transfer, which requires important or prioritized information to be interactively highlighted in a context-dependent manner.
Approaches in non-photorealistic renderings particularly consider a user's task and camera perspective when attempting optimal expression, recognition, and communication of important or prioritized information. However, the design and implementation of non-photorealistic rendering techniques for 3D geospatial data pose a number of challenges, especially when inherently complex geometry, appearance, and thematic data must be processed interactively. Hence, a promising technical foundation is established by the programmable and parallel computing architecture of graphics processing units.
This thesis proposes non-photorealistic rendering techniques that enable both the computation and selection of the abstraction level of 3D geospatial model contents according to user interaction and dynamically changing thematic information. To achieve this goal, the techniques integrate with hardware-accelerated rendering pipelines using shader technologies of graphics processing units for real-time image synthesis. The techniques employ principles of artistic rendering, cartographic generalization, and 3D semiotics—unlike photorealistic rendering—to synthesize illustrative renditions of geospatial feature type entities such as water surfaces, buildings, and infrastructure networks. In addition, this thesis contributes a generic system that enables to integrate different graphic styles—photorealistic and non-photorealistic—and provide their seamless transition according to user tasks, camera view, and image resolution.
Evaluations of the proposed techniques have demonstrated their significance to the field of geospatial information visualization including topics such as spatial perception, cognition, and mapping. In addition, the applications in illustrative and focus+context visualization have reflected their potential impact on optimizing the information transfer regarding factors such as cognitive load, integration of non-realistic information, visualization of uncertainty, and visualization on small displays.
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 (Betreuer: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Werner Zorn [ZW07a, ZW07b]).
• 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.
[ZW07a] Zorn, Werner: «FMC-QE A New Approach in Quantitative Modeling», Vortrag anlässlich: MSV'07- The 2007 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Methods WorldComp2007, Las Vegas, 28.6.2007.
[ZW07b] Zorn, Werner: «FMC-QE, A New Approach in Quantitative Modeling», Veröffentlichung, Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik an der Universität Potsdam, 28.6.2007.
Personal fabrication tools, such as 3D printers, are on the way of enabling a future in which non-technical users will be able to create custom objects. However, while the hardware is there, the current interaction model behind existing design tools is not suitable for non-technical users. Today, 3D printers are operated by fabricating the object in one go, which tends to take overnight due to the slow 3D printing technology. Consequently, the current interaction model requires users to think carefully before printing as every mistake may imply another overnight print. Planning every step ahead, however, is not feasible for non-technical users as they lack the experience to reason about the consequences of their design decisions.
In this dissertation, we propose changing the interaction model around personal fabrication tools to better serve this user group. We draw inspiration from personal computing and argue that the evolution of personal fabrication may resemble the evolution of personal computing: Computing started with machines that executed a program in one go before returning the result to the user. By decreasing the interaction unit to single requests, turn-taking systems such as the command line evolved, which provided users with feedback after every input. Finally, with the introduction of direct-manipulation interfaces, users continuously interacted with a program receiving feedback about every action in real-time. In this dissertation, we explore whether these interaction concepts can be applied to personal fabrication as well.
We start with fabricating an object in one go and investigate how to tighten the feedback-cycle on an object-level: We contribute a method called low-fidelity fabrication, which saves up to 90% fabrication time by creating objects as fast low-fidelity previews, which are sufficient to evaluate key design aspects. Depending on what is currently being tested, we propose different conversions that enable users to focus on different parts: faBrickator allows for a modular design in the early stages of prototyping; when users move on WirePrint allows quickly testing an object's shape, while Platener allows testing an object's technical function. We present an interactive editor for each technique and explain the underlying conversion algorithms.
By interacting on smaller units, such as a single element of an object, we explore what it means to transition from systems that fabricate objects in one go to turn-taking systems. We start with a 2D system called constructable: Users draw with a laser pointer onto the workpiece inside a laser cutter. The drawing is captured with an overhead camera. As soon as the the user finishes drawing an element, such as a line, the constructable system beautifies the path and cuts it--resulting in physical output after every editing step. We extend constructable towards 3D editing by developing a novel laser-cutting technique for 3D objects called LaserOrigami that works by heating up the workpiece with the defocused laser until the material becomes compliant and bends down under gravity. While constructable and LaserOrigami allow for fast physical feedback, the interaction is still best described as turn-taking since it consists of two discrete steps: users first create an input and afterwards the system provides physical output.
By decreasing the interaction unit even further to a single feature, we can achieve real-time physical feedback: Input by the user and output by the fabrication device are so tightly coupled that no visible lag exists. This allows us to explore what it means to transition from turn-taking interfaces, which only allow exploring one option at a time, to direct manipulation interfaces with real-time physical feedback, which allow users to explore the entire space of options continuously with a single interaction. We present a system called FormFab, which allows for such direct control. FormFab is based on the same principle as LaserOrigami: It uses a workpiece that when warmed up becomes compliant and can be reshaped. However, FormFab achieves the reshaping not based on gravity, but through a pneumatic system that users can control interactively. As users interact, they see the shape change in real-time.
We conclude this dissertation by extrapolating the current evolution into a future in which large numbers of people use the new technology to create objects. We see two additional challenges on the horizon: sustainability and intellectual property. We investigate sustainability by demonstrating how to print less and instead patch physical objects. We explore questions around intellectual property with a system called Scotty that transfers objects without creating duplicates, thereby preserving the designer's copyright.
Die 7. Fachtagung für Hochschuldidaktik, die 2016 erneut mit der DeLFI E-Learning Fachtagung Informatik stattfand, setzte das erfolgreiche Modell einer Tagung fort, die sich mit hochschuldidaktischen Fragen und der Gestaltung von Studiengängen der Informatik beschäftigt.
Thema der Tagung waren alle Fragen, die sich der Vermittlung von Informatikgegenständen im Hochschulbereich widmen. Dazu gehörten u.a.:
• fachdidaktische Konzepte der Vermittlung einzelner Informatikgegenstände
• methodische Lösungen, wie spezielle Lehr- und Lernformen, Durchführungskonzepte
• empirische Ergebnisse und Vergleichsstudien
• E-Learning-Ansätze, wenn sie ein erkennbares didaktisches Konzept verfolgen
• Studienkonzepte und Curricula, organisatorische Fragen, wie Gewinnung von Studierenden, Studieneingangsphase, Abbrecher.
Die Fachtagung widmete sich ausgewählten Fragestellungen dieses Themenkomplexes, die durch Vorträge ausgewiesener Experten, durch eingereichte Beiträge und durch Präsentationen und Poster intensiv behandelt wurden.
Unser besonderer Dank gilt dem Programmkomitee und den hier nicht genannten Helfern für ihren Einsatz bei der Vorbereitung und Durchführung der Tagung.
Die Vermittlung von Modellierungsfähigkeiten in der Softwaretechnik-Ausbildung konzentriert sich meist auf Modellierungskonzepte, Notationen und Entwicklungswerkzeuge. Die Betrachtung der Modellierungsaktivitäten, etwa die Entwicklung und Gegenüberstellung alternativer Modellvorschläge, steht weniger im Vordergrund. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht zwei Formen des kollaborativen Modellierens am Tabletop in Bezug auf ihren Einfluss auf die Modellierungsaktivitäten in kleinen Gruppen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sowohl selbstorganisierte als auch moderierte Modellierungssitzungen das Entwickeln eines gemeinsamen Modellverständnisses fördern. In moderierten Sitzungen wurden zudem mehr alternative Lösungsideen entwickelt und in stärkerem Maße diskutiert.
The main objective of this dissertation is to analyse prerequisites, expectations, apprehensions, and attitudes of students studying computer science, who are willing to gain a bachelor degree. The research will also investigate in the students’ learning style according to the Felder-Silverman model. These investigations fall in the attempt to make an impact on reducing the “dropout”/shrinkage rate among students, and to suggest a better learning environment.
The first investigation starts with a survey that has been made at the computer science department at the University of Baghdad to investigate the attitudes of computer science students in an environment dominated by women, showing the differences in attitudes between male and female students in different study years. Students are accepted to university studies via a centrally controlled admission procedure depending mainly on their final score at school. This leads to a high percentage of students studying subjects they do not want. Our analysis shows that 75% of the female students do not regret studying computer science although it was not their first choice. And according to statistics over previous years, women manage to succeed in their study and often graduate on top of their class. We finish with a comparison of attitudes between the freshman students of two different cultures and two different university enrolment procedures (University of Baghdad, in Iraq, and the University of Potsdam, in Germany) both with opposite gender majority.
The second step of investigation took place at the department of computer science at the University of Potsdam in Germany and analyzes the learning styles of students studying the three major fields of study offered by the department (computer science, business informatics, and computer science teaching). Investigating the differences in learning styles between the students of those study fields who usually take some joint courses is important to be aware of which changes are necessary to be adopted in the teaching methods to address those different students. It was a two stage study using two questionnaires; the main one is based on the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire of B. A. Solomon and R. M. Felder, and the second questionnaire was an investigation on the students’ attitudes towards the findings of their personal first questionnaire. Our analysis shows differences in the preferences of learning style between male and female students of the different study fields, as well as differences between students with the different specialties (computer science, business informatics, and computer science teaching).
The third investigation looks closely into the difficulties, issues, apprehensions and expectations of freshman students studying computer science. The study took place at the computer science department at the University of Potsdam with a volunteer sample of students. The goal is to determine and discuss the difficulties and issues that they are facing in their study that may lead them to think in dropping-out, changing the study field, or changing the university. The research continued with the same sample of students (with business informatics students being the majority) through more than three semesters. Difficulties and issues during the study were documented, as well as students’ attitudes, apprehensions, and expectations. Some of the professors and lecturers opinions and solutions to some students’ problems were also documented. Many participants had apprehensions and difficulties, especially towards informatics subjects. Some business informatics participants began to think of changing the university, in particular when they reached their third semester, others thought about changing their field of study. Till the end of this research, most of the participants continued in their studies (the study they have started with or the new study they have changed to) without leaving the higher education system.
Computer Security deals with the detection and mitigation of threats to computer networks, data, and computing hardware. This
thesis addresses the following two computer security problems: email spam campaign and malware detection.
Email spam campaigns can easily be generated using popular dissemination tools by specifying simple grammars that serve as message templates. A grammar is disseminated to nodes of a bot net, the nodes create messages by instantiating the grammar at random. Email spam campaigns can encompass huge data volumes and therefore pose a threat to the stability of the infrastructure of email service providers that have to store them. Malware -software that serves a malicious purpose- is affecting web servers, client computers via active content, and client computers through executable files. Without the help of malware detection systems it would be easy for malware creators to collect sensitive information or to infiltrate computers.
The detection of threats -such as email-spam messages, phishing messages, or malware- is an adversarial and therefore intrinsically
difficult problem. Threats vary greatly and evolve over time. The detection of threats based on manually-designed rules is therefore
difficult and requires a constant engineering effort. Machine-learning is a research area that revolves around the analysis of data and the discovery of patterns that describe aspects of the data. Discriminative learning methods extract prediction models from data that are optimized to predict a target attribute as accurately as possible. Machine-learning methods hold the promise of automatically identifying patterns that robustly and accurately detect threats. This thesis focuses on the design and analysis of discriminative learning methods for the two computer-security problems under investigation: email-campaign and malware detection.
The first part of this thesis addresses email-campaign detection. We focus on regular expressions as a syntactic framework, because regular expressions are intuitively comprehensible by security engineers and administrators, and they can be applied as a detection mechanism in an extremely efficient manner. In this setting, a prediction model is provided with exemplary messages from an email-spam campaign. The prediction model has to generate a regular expression that reveals the syntactic pattern that underlies the entire campaign, and that a security engineers finds comprehensible and feels confident enough to use the expression to blacklist further messages at the email server. We model this problem as two-stage learning problem with structured input and output spaces which can be solved using standard cutting plane methods. Therefore we develop an appropriate loss function, and derive a decoder for the resulting optimization problem.
The second part of this thesis deals with the problem of predicting whether a given JavaScript or PHP file is malicious or benign. Recent malware analysis techniques use static or dynamic features, or both. In fully dynamic analysis, the software or script is executed and observed for malicious behavior in a sandbox environment. By contrast, static analysis is based on features that can be extracted directly from the program file. In order to bypass static detection mechanisms, code obfuscation techniques are used to spread a malicious program file in many different syntactic variants. Deobfuscating the code before applying a static classifier can be subjected to mostly static code analysis and can overcome the problem of obfuscated malicious code, but on the other hand increases the computational costs of malware detection by an order of magnitude. In this thesis we present a cascaded architecture in which a classifier first performs a static analysis of the original code and -based on the outcome of this first classification step- the code may be deobfuscated and classified again. We explore several types of features including token $n$-grams, orthogonal sparse bigrams, subroutine-hashings, and syntax-tree features and study the robustness of detection methods and feature types against the evolution of malware over time. The developed tool scans very large file collections quickly and accurately.
Each model is evaluated on real-world data and compared to reference methods. Our approach of inferring regular expressions to filter emails belonging to an email spam campaigns leads to models with a high true-positive rate at a very low false-positive rate that is an order of magnitude lower than that of a commercial content-based filter. Our presented system -REx-SVMshort- is being used by a commercial email service provider and complements content-based and IP-address based filtering.
Our cascaded malware detection system is evaluated on a high-quality data set of almost 400,000 conspicuous PHP files and a collection of more than 1,00,000 JavaScript files. From our case study we can conclude that our system can quickly and accurately process large data collections at a low false-positive rate.
Services that operate over the Internet are under constant threat of being exposed to fraudulent use. Maintaining good user experience for legitimate users often requires the classification of entities as malicious or legitimate in order to initiate countermeasures. As an example, inbound email spam filters decide for spam or non-spam. They can base their decision on both the content of each email as well as on features that summarize prior emails received from the sending server. In general, discriminative classification methods learn to distinguish positive from negative entities. Each decision for a label may be based on features of the entity and related entities. When labels of related entities have strong interdependencies---as can be assumed e.g. for emails being delivered by the same user---classification decisions should not be made independently and dependencies should be modeled in the decision function. This thesis addresses the formulation of discriminative classification problems that are tailored for the specific demands of the following three Internet security applications. Theoretical and algorithmic solutions are devised to protect an email service against flooding of user inboxes, to mitigate abusive usage of outbound email servers, and to protect web servers against distributed denial of service attacks.
In the application of filtering an inbound email stream for unsolicited emails, utilizing features that go beyond each individual email's content can be valuable. Information about each sending mail server can be aggregated over time and may help in identifying unwanted emails. However, while this information will be available to the deployed email filter, some parts of the training data that are compiled by third party providers may not contain this information. The missing features have to be estimated at training time in order to learn a classification model. In this thesis an algorithm is derived that learns a decision function that integrates over a distribution of values for each missing entry. The distribution of missing values is a free parameter that is optimized to learn an optimal decision function.
The outbound stream of emails of an email service provider can be separated by the customer IDs that ask for delivery. All emails that are sent by the same ID in the same period of time are related, both in content and in label. Hijacked customer accounts may send batches of unsolicited emails to other email providers, which in turn might blacklist the sender's email servers after detection of incoming spam emails. The risk of being blocked from further delivery depends on the rate of outgoing unwanted emails and the duration of high spam sending rates. An optimization problem is developed that minimizes the expected cost for the email provider by learning a decision function that assigns a limit on the sending rate to customers based on the each customer's email stream.
Identifying attacking IPs during HTTP-level DDoS attacks allows to block those IPs from further accessing the web servers. DDoS attacks are usually carried out by infected clients that are members of the same botnet and show similar traffic patterns. HTTP-level attacks aim at exhausting one or more resources of the web server infrastructure, such as CPU time. If the joint set of attackers cannot increase resource usage close to the maximum capacity, no effect will be experienced by legitimate users of hosted web sites. However, if the additional load raises the computational burden towards the critical range, user experience will degrade until service may be unavailable altogether. As the loss of missing one attacker depends on block decisions for other attackers---if most other attackers are detected, not blocking one client will likely not be harmful---a structured output model has to be learned. In this thesis an algorithm is developed that learns a structured prediction decoder that searches the space of label assignments, guided by a policy.
Each model is evaluated on real-world data and is compared to reference methods. The results show that modeling each classification problem according to the specific demands of the task improves performance over solutions that do not consider the constraints inherent to an application.
Contemporary multi-core processors are parallel systems that also provide shared memory for programs running on them. Both the increasing number of cores in so-called many-core systems and the still growing computational power of the cores demand for memory systems that are able to deliver high bandwidths. Caches are essential components to satisfy this requirement. Nevertheless, hardware-based cache coherence in many-core chips faces practical limits to provide both coherence and high memory bandwidths. In addition, a shift away from global coherence can be observed. As a result, alternative architectures and suitable programming models need to be investigated.
This thesis focuses on fast communication for non-cache-coherent many-core architectures. Experiments are conducted on the Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC), a non-cache-coherent many-core processor with 48 mesh-connected cores. Although originally designed for message passing, the results of this thesis show that shared memory can be efficiently used for one-sided communication on this kind of architecture. One-sided communication enables data exchanges between processes where the receiver is not required to know the details of the performed communication. In the notion of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, this type of communication allows to access memory of remote processes. In order to support this communication scheme on non-cache-coherent architectures, both an efficient process synchronization and a communication scheme with software-managed cache coherence are designed and investigated.
The process synchronization realizes the concept of the general active target synchronization scheme from the MPI standard. An existing classification of implementation approaches is extended and used to identify an appropriate class for the non-cache-coherent shared memory platform. Based on this classification, existing implementations are surveyed in order to find beneficial concepts, which are then used to design a lightweight synchronization protocol for the SCC that uses shared memory and uncached memory accesses. The proposed scheme is not prone to process skew and also enables direct communication as soon as both communication partners are ready. Experimental results show very good scaling properties and up to five times lower synchronization latency compared to a tuned message-based MPI implementation for the SCC.
For the communication, SCOSCo, a shared memory approach with software-managed cache coherence, is presented. According requirements for the coherence that fulfill MPI's separate memory model are formulated, and a lightweight implementation exploiting SCC hard- and software features is developed. Despite a discovered malfunction in the SCC's memory subsystem, the experimental evaluation of the design reveals up to five times better bandwidths and nearly four times lower latencies in micro-benchmarks compared to the SCC-tuned but message-based MPI library. For application benchmarks, like a parallel 3D fast Fourier transform, the runtime share of communication can be reduced by a factor of up to five. In addition, this thesis postulates beneficial hardware concepts that would support software-managed coherence for one-sided communication on future non-cache-coherent architectures where coherence might be only available in local subdomains but not on a global processor level.
Das Thema der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die semantische Suche im Kontext heutiger Informationsmanagementsysteme. Zu diesen Systemen zählen Intranets, Web 3.0-Anwendungen sowie viele Webportale, die Informationen in heterogenen Formaten und Strukturen beinhalten. Auf diesen befinden sich einerseits Daten in strukturierter Form und andererseits Dokumente, die inhaltlich mit diesen Daten in Beziehung stehen. Diese Dokumente sind jedoch in der Regel nur teilweise strukturiert oder vollständig unstrukturiert. So beschreiben beispielsweise Reiseportale durch strukturierte Daten den Zeitraum, das Reiseziel, den Preis einer Reise und geben in unstrukturierter Form weitere Informationen, wie Beschreibungen zum Hotel, Zielort, Ausflugsziele an.
Der Fokus heutiger semantischer Suchmaschinen liegt auf dem Finden von Wissen entweder in strukturierter Form, auch Faktensuche genannt, oder in semi- bzw. unstrukturierter Form, was üblicherweise als semantische Dokumentensuche bezeichnet wird. Einige wenige Suchmaschinen versuchen die Lücke zwischen diesen beiden Ansätzen zu schließen. Diese durchsuchen zwar gleichzeitig strukturierte sowie unstrukturierte Daten, werten diese jedoch entweder weitgehend voneinander unabhängig aus oder schränken die Suchmöglichkeiten stark ein, indem sie beispielsweise nur bestimmte Fragemuster unterstützen. Hierdurch werden die im System verfügbaren Informationen nicht ausgeschöpft und gleichzeitig unterbunden, dass Zusammenhänge zwischen einzelnen Inhalten der jeweiligen Informationssysteme und sich ergänzende Informationen den Benutzer erreichen.
Um diese Lücke zu schließen, wurde in der vorliegenden Arbeit ein neuer hybrider semantischer Suchansatz entwickelt und untersucht, der strukturierte und semi- bzw. unstrukturierte Inhalte während des gesamten Suchprozesses kombiniert. Durch diesen Ansatz werden nicht nur sowohl Fakten als auch Dokumente gefunden, es werden auch Zusammenhänge, die zwischen den unterschiedlich strukturierten Daten bestehen, in jeder Phase der Suche genutzt und fließen in die Suchergebnisse mit ein. Liegt die Antwort zu einer Suchanfrage nicht vollständig strukturiert, in Form von Fakten, oder unstrukturiert, in Form von Dokumenten vor, so liefert dieser Ansatz eine Kombination der beiden. Die Berücksichtigung von unterschiedlich Inhalten während des gesamten Suchprozesses stellt jedoch besondere Herausforderungen an die Suchmaschine. Diese muss in der Lage sein, Fakten und Dokumente in Abhängigkeit voneinander zu durchsuchen, sie zu kombinieren sowie die unterschiedlich strukturierten Ergebnisse in eine geeignete Rangordnung zu bringen. Weiterhin darf die Komplexität der Daten nicht an die Endnutzer weitergereicht werden. Die Darstellung der Inhalte muss vielmehr sowohl bei der Anfragestellung als auch bei der Darbietung der Ergebnisse verständlich und leicht interpretierbar sein.
Die zentrale Fragestellung der Arbeit ist, ob ein hybrider Ansatz auf einer vorgegebenen Datenbasis die Suchanfragen besser beantworten kann als die semantische Dokumentensuche und die Faktensuche für sich genommen, bzw. als eine Suche die diese Ansätze im Rahmen des Suchprozesses nicht kombiniert. Die durchgeführten Evaluierungen aus System- und aus Benutzersicht zeigen, dass die im Rahmen der Arbeit entwickelte hybride semantische Suchlösung durch die Kombination von strukturierten und unstrukturierten Inhalten im Suchprozess bessere Antworten liefert als die oben genannten Verfahren und somit Vorteile gegenüber bisherigen Ansätzen bietet. Eine Befragung von Benutzern macht deutlich, dass die hybride semantische Suche als verständlich empfunden und für heterogen strukturierte Datenmengen bevorzugt wird.
Although it has become common practice to build applications based on the reuse of existing components or services, technical complexity and semantic challenges constitute barriers to ensuring a successful and wide reuse of components and services. In the geospatial application domain, the barriers are self-evident due to heterogeneous geographic data, a lack of interoperability and complex analysis processes.
Constructing workflows manually and discovering proper services and data that match user intents and preferences is difficult and time-consuming especially for users who are not trained in software development. Furthermore, considering the multi-objective nature of environmental modeling for the assessment of climate change impacts and the various types of geospatial data (e.g., formats, scales, and georeferencing systems) increases the complexity challenges.
Automatic service composition approaches that provide semantics-based assistance in the process of workflow design have proven to be a solution to overcome these challenges and have become a frequent demand especially by end users who are not IT experts. In this light, the major contributions of this thesis are:
(i) Simplification of service reuse and workflow design of applications for climate impact analysis by following the eXtreme Model-Driven Development (XMDD) paradigm.
(ii) Design of a semantic domain model for climate impact analysis applications that comprises specifically designed services, ontologies that provide domain-specific vocabulary for referring to types and services, and the input/output annotation of the services using the terms defined in the ontologies.
(iii) Application of a constraint-driven method for the automatic composition of workflows for analyzing the impacts of sea-level rise. The application scenario demonstrates the impact of domain modeling decisions on the results and the performance of the synthesis algorithm.
Parsing of argumentative structures has become a very active line of research in recent years. Like discourse parsing or any other natural language task that requires prediction of linguistic structures, most approaches choose to learn a local model and then perform global decoding over the local probability distributions, often imposing constraints that are specific to the task at hand. Specifically for argumentation parsing, two decoding approaches have been recently proposed: Minimum Spanning Trees (MST) and Integer Linear Programming (ILP), following similar trends in discourse parsing. In contrast to discourse parsing though, where trees are not always used as underlying annotation schemes, argumentation structures so far have always been represented with trees. Using the 'argumentative microtext corpus' [in: Argumentation and Reasoned Action: Proceedings of the 1st European Conference on Argumentation, Lisbon 2015 / Vol. 2, College Publications, London, 2016, pp. 801-815] as underlying data and replicating three different decoding mechanisms, in this paper we propose a novel ILP decoder and an extension to our earlier MST work, and then thoroughly compare the approaches. The result is that our new decoder outperforms related work in important respects, and that in general, ILP and MST yield very similar performance.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving approach, combining a rich yet simple modeling language with high-performance solving capabilities. Although this has already resulted in various applications, certain aspects of such applications are more naturally modeled using variables over finite domains, for accounting for resources, fine timings, coordinates, or functions. Our goal is thus to extend ASP with constraints over integers while preserving its declarative nature. This allows for fast prototyping and elaboration tolerant problem descriptions of resource related applications. The resulting paradigm is called Constraint Answer Set Programming (CASP).
We present three different approaches for solving CASP problems. The first one, a lazy, modular approach combines an ASP solver with an external system for handling constraints. This approach has the advantage that two state of the art technologies work hand in hand to solve the problem, each concentrating on its part of the problem. The drawback is that inter-constraint dependencies cannot be communicated back to the ASP solver, impeding its learning algorithm. The second approach translates all constraints to ASP. Using the appropriate encoding techniques, this results in a very fast, monolithic system. Unfortunately, due to the large, explicit representation of constraints and variables, translation techniques are restricted to small and mid-sized domains. The third approach merges the lazy and the translational approach, combining the strength of both while removing their weaknesses. To this end, we enhance the dedicated learning techniques of an ASP solver with the inferences of the translating approach in a lazy way. That is, the important knowledge is only made explicit when needed.
By using state of the art techniques from neighboring fields, we provide ways to tackle real world, industrial size problems. By extending CASP to reactive solving, we open up new application areas such as online planning with continuous domains and durations.