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Yield Curves and Chance-Risk Classification: Modeling, Forecasting, and Pension Product Portfolios
(2021)
This dissertation consists of three independent parts: The yield curve shapes generated by interest rate models, the yield curve forecasting, and the application of the chance-risk classification to a portfolio of pension products. As a component of the capital market model, the yield curve influences the chance-risk classification which was introduced to improve the comparability of pension products and strengthen consumer protection. Consequently, all three topics have a major impact on this essential safeguard.
Firstly, we focus on the obtained yield curve shapes of the Vasicek interest rate models. We extend the existing studies on the attainable yield curve shapes in the one-factor Vasicek model by analysis of the curvature. Further, we show that the two-factor Vasicek model can explain significantly more effects that are observed at the market than its one-factor variant. Among them is the occurrence of dipped yield curves.
We further introduce a general change of measure framework for the Monte Carlo simulation of the Vasicek model under a subjective measure. This can be used to avoid the occurrence of a far too high frequency of inverse yield curves with growing time.
Secondly, we examine different time series models including machine learning algorithms forecasting the yield curve. For this, we consider statistical time series models such as autoregression and vector autoregression. Their performances are compared with the performance of a multilayer perceptron, a fully connected feed-forward neural network. For this purpose, we develop an extended approach for the hyperparameter optimization of the perceptron which is based on standard procedures like Grid and Random Search but allows to search a larger hyperparameter space. Our investigation shows that multilayer perceptrons outperform statistical models for long forecast horizons.
The third part deals with the chance-risk classification of state-subsidized pension products in Germany as well as its relevance for customer consulting. To optimize the use of the chance-risk classes assigned by Produktinformationsstelle Altersvorsorge gGmbH, we develop a procedure for determining the chance-risk class of different portfolios of state-subsidized pension products under the constraint that the portfolio chance-risk class does not exceed the customer's risk preference. For this, we consider a portfolio consisting of two new pension products as well as a second one containing a product already owned by the customer as well as the offer of a new one. This is of particular interest for customer consulting and can include other assets of the customer. We examine the properties of various chance and risk parameters as well as their corresponding mappings and show that a diversification effect exists. Based on the properties, we conclude that the average final contract values have to be used to obtain the upper bound of the portfolio chance-risk class. Furthermore, we develop an approach for determining the chance-risk class over the contract term since the chance-risk class is only assigned at the beginning of the accumulation phase. On the one hand, we apply the current legal situation, but on the other hand, we suggest an approach that requires further simulations. Finally, we translate our results into recommendations for customer consultation.
Wreath product groups \(C_\ell \wr \mathfrak{S}_n\) have a rich combinatorial representation theory coming from the symmetric group case and involving partitions, Young tableaux, and Specht modules. To such a wreath product group \(W\), one can associate various algebras and geometric objects: Hecke algebras, quantum groups, Hilbert schemes, Calogero--Moser spaces, and (restricted) rational Cherednik algebras. Over the years, surprising connections have been made between a lot of these objects, with many of these connections having been traced back to combinatorial constructions and properties of the group \(W\) itself.
In this thesis, we have studied one of the algebras, namely the restricted rational Cherednik algebra \(\overline{\mathsf{H}}_\mathbf{c}(W)\), in order to find combinatorial models which describe certain representation theoretical phenomena around \(\overline{\mathsf{H}}_\mathbf{c}(W)\). In particular, we generalize a result by Gordon and describe the graded \(W\)-characters of the simple modules of \(\overline{\mathsf{H}}_\mathbf{c}(W)\) for generic parameter \(\mathbf{c}\) using Haiman's wreath Macdonald polynomials. These graded \(W\)-characters turn out to be specializations of Haiman's wreath Macdonald polynomials. In the non-generic parameter case, we use recent results by Maksimau to combinatorially express an inductive rule of \(\overline{\mathsf{H}}_\mathbf{c}(W)\)-modules first described by Bellamy. We use our results in type \(B\) to describe the (ungraded) \(B_n\)-character of simple \(\overline{\mathsf{H}}_\mathbf{c}(B_n)\)-modules associated to bipartitions with one empty part. Afterwards, we relate this combinatorial induction to various other algebras and families of \(W\)-characters found in the literature such as Lusztig's constructible characters, as well as detail some connections between generic and non-generic parameter using wreath Macdonald polynomials.
In this thesis we extend the worst-case modeling approach as first introduced by Hua and Wilmott (1997) (option pricing in discrete time) and Korn and Wilmott (2002) (portfolio optimization in continuous time) in various directions.
In the continuous-time worst-case portfolio optimization model (as first introduced by Korn and Wilmott (2002)), the financial market is assumed to be under the threat of a crash in the sense that the stock price may crash by an unknown fraction at an unknown time. It is assumed that only an upper bound on the size of the crash is known and that the investor prepares for the worst-possible crash scenario. That is, the investor aims to find the strategy maximizing her objective function in the worst-case crash scenario.
In the first part of this thesis, we consider the model of Korn and Wilmott (2002) in the presence of proportional transaction costs. First, we treat the problem without crashes and show that the value function is the unique viscosity solution of a dynamic programming equation (DPE) and then construct the optimal strategies. We then consider the problem in the presence of crash threats, derive the corresponding DPE and characterize the value function as the unique viscosity solution of this DPE.
In the last part, we consider the worst-case problem with a random number of crashes by proposing a regime switching model in which each state corresponds to a different crash regime. We interpret each of the crash-threatened regimes of the market as states in which a financial bubble has formed which may lead to a crash. In this model, we prove that the value function is a classical solution of a system of DPEs and derive the optimal strategies.
In 2002, Korn and Wilmott introduced the worst-case scenario optimal portfolio approach.
They extend a Black-Scholes type security market, to include the possibility of a
crash. For the modeling of the possible stock price crash they use a Knightian uncertainty
approach and thus make no probabilistic assumption on the crash size or the crash time distribution.
Based on an indifference argument they determine the optimal portfolio process
for an investor who wants to maximize the expected utility from final wealth. In this thesis,
the worst-case scenario approach is extended in various directions to enable the consideration
of stress scenarios, to include the possibility of asset defaults and to allow for parameter
uncertainty.
Insurance companies and banks regularly have to face stress tests performed by regulatory
instances. In the first part we model their investment decision problem that includes stress
scenarios. This leads to optimal portfolios that are already stress test prone by construction.
The solution to this portfolio problem uses the newly introduced concept of minimum constant
portfolio processes.
In the second part we formulate an extended worst-case portfolio approach, where asset
defaults can occur in addition to asset crashes. In our model, the strictly risk-averse investor
does not know which asset is affected by the worst-case scenario. We solve this problem by
introducing the so-called worst-case crash/default loss.
In the third part we set up a continuous time portfolio optimization problem that includes
the possibility of a crash scenario as well as parameter uncertainty. To do this, we combine
the worst-case scenario approach with a model ambiguity approach that is also based on
Knightian uncertainty. We solve this portfolio problem and consider two concrete examples
with box uncertainty and ellipsoidal drift ambiguity.
Distributed systems are omnipresent nowadays and networking them is fundamental for the continuous dissemination and thus availability of data. Provision of data in real-time is one of the most important non-functional aspects that safety-critical networks must guarantee. Formal verification of data communication against worst-case deadline requirements is key to certification of emerging x-by-wire systems. Verification allows aircraft to take off, cars to steer by wire, and safety-critical industrial facilities to operate. Therefore, different methodologies for worst-case modeling and analysis of real-time systems have been established. Among them is deterministic Network Calculus (NC), a versatile technique that is applicable across multiple domains such as packet switching, task scheduling, system on chip, software-defined networking, data center networking and network virtualization. NC is a methodology to derive deterministic bounds on two crucial performance metrics of communication systems:
(a) the end-to-end delay data flows experience and
(b) the buffer space required by a server to queue all incoming data.
NC has already seen application in the industry, for instance, basic results have been used to certify the backbone network of the Airbus A380 aircraft.
The NC methodology for worst-case performance analysis of distributed real-time systems consists of two branches. Both share the NC network model but diverge regarding their respective derivation of performance bounds, i.e., their analysis principle. NC was created as a deterministic system theory for queueing analysis and its operations were later cast in a (min,+)-algebraic framework. This branch is known as algebraic Network Calculus (algNC). While algNC can efficiently compute bounds on delay and backlog, the algebraic manipulations do not allow NC to attain the most accurate bounds achievable for the given network model. These tight performance bounds can only be attained with the other, newly established branch of NC, the optimization-based analysis (optNC). However, the only optNC analysis that can currently derive tight bounds was proven to be computationally infeasible even for the analysis of moderately sized networks other than simple sequences of servers.
This thesis makes various contributions in the area of algNC: accuracy within the existing framework is improved, distributivity of the sensor network calculus analysis is established, and most significantly the algNC is extended with optimization principles. They allow algNC to derive performance bounds that are competitive with optNC. Moreover, the computational efficiency of the new NC approach is improved such that this thesis presents the first NC analysis that is both accurate and computationally feasible at the same time. It allows NC to scale to larger, more complex systems that require formal verification of their real-time capabilities.
Crowd condition monitoring concerns the crowd safety and concerns business performance metrics. The research problem to be solved is a crowd condition estimation approach to enable and support the supervision of mass events by first-responders and marketing experts, but is also targeted towards supporting social scientists, journalists, historians, public relations experts, community leaders, and political researchers. Real-time insights of the crowd condition is desired for quick reactions and historic crowd conditions measurements are desired for profound post-event crowd condition analysis.
This thesis aims to provide a systematic understanding of different approaches for crowd condition estimation by relying on 2.4 GHz signals and its variation in crowds of people, proposes and categorizes possible sensing approaches, applies supervised machine learning algorithms, and demonstrates experimental evaluation results. I categorize four sensing approaches. Firstly, stationary sensors which are sensing crowd centric signals sources. Secondly, stationary sensors which are sensing other stationary signals sources (either opportunistic or special purpose signal sources). Thirdly, a few volunteers within the crowd equipped with sensors which are sensing other surrounding crowd centric device signals (either individually, in a single group or collaboratively) within a small region. Fourthly, a small subset of participants within the crowd equipped with sensors and roaming throughout a whole city to sense wireless crowd centric signals.
I present and evaluate an approach with meshed stationary sensors which were sensing crowd centric devices. This was demonstrated and empirically evaluated within an industrial project during three of the world-wide largest automotive exhibitions. With over 30 meshed stationary sensors in an optimized setup across 6400m2 I achieved a mean absolute error of the crowd density of just 0.0115
people per square meter which equals to an average of below 6% mean relative error from the ground truth. I validate the contextual crowd condition anomaly detection method during the visit of chancellor Mrs. Merkel and during a large press conference during the exhibition. I present the approach of opportunistically sensing stationary based wireless signal variations and validate this during the Hannover CeBIT exhibition with 80 opportunistic sources with a crowd condition estimation relative error of below 12% relying only on surrounding signals in influenced by humans. Pursuing this approach I present an approach with dedicated signal sources and sensors to estimate the condition of shared office environments. I demonstrate methods being viable to even detect low density static crowds, such as people sitting at their desks, and evaluate this on an eight person office scenario. I present the approach of mobile crowd density estimation by a group of sensors detecting other crowd centric devices in the proximity with a classification accuracy of the crowd density of 66 % (improvement of over 22% over a individual sensor) during the crowded Oktoberfest event. I propose a collaborative mobile sensing approach which makes the system more robust against variations that may result from the background of the people rather than the crowd condition with differential features taking information about the link structure between actively scanning devices, the ratio between values observed by different devices, ratio of discovered crowd devices over time, team-wise diversity of discovered devices, number of semi- continuous device visibility periods, and device visibility durations into account. I validate the approach on multiple experiments including the Kaiserslautern European soccer championship public viewing event and evaluated the collaborative mobile sensing approach with a crowd condition estimation accuracy of 77 % while outperforming previous methods by 21%. I present the feasibility of deploying the wireless crowd condition sensing approach to a citywide scale during an event in Zurich with 971 actively sensing participants and outperformed the reference method by 24% in average.
Reading as a cultural skill is acquired over a long period of training. This thesis supports the idea that reading is based on specific strategies that result from modification and coordination of earlier developed object recognition strategies. The reading-specific processing strategies are considered to be more analytic compared to object recognition strategies, which are described as holistic. To enable proper reading skills these strategies have to become automatized. Study 1 (Chapter 4) examined the temporal and visual constrains of letter recognition strategies. In the first experiment two successively presented stimuli (letters or non-letters) had to be classified as same or different. The second stimulus could either be presented in isolation or surrounded by a shape, which was either similar (congruent) or different (incongruent) in its geometrical properties to the stimulus itself. The non-letter pairs were presented twice as often as the letter pairs. The results demonstrated a preference for the holistic strategy also in letters, even if the non- letter set was presented twice as often as the letter set, showing that the analytic strategy does not replace the holistic one completely, but that the usage of both strategies is task-sensitive. In Experiment 2, we compared the Global Precedence Effect (GPE) for letters and non-letters in central viewing, with the global stimulus size close to the functional visual field in whole word reading (6.5◦ of visual angle) and local stimuli close to the critical size for fluent reading of individual letters (0.5◦ of visual angle). Under these conditions, the GPE remained robust for non-letters. For letters, however, it disappeared: letters showed no overall response time advantage for the global level and symmetric congruence effects (local-to-global as well as global-to-local interference). These results indicate that reading is based on resident analytic visual processing strategies for letters. In Study 2 (Chapter 5) we replicated the latter result with a large group of participants as part of a study in which pairwise associations of non-letters and phonological or non-phonological sounds were systematically trained. We investigated whether training would eliminate the GPE also for non-letters. We observed, however, that the differentiation between letters and non-letter shapes persists after training. This result implies that pairwise association learning is not sufficient to overrule the process differentiation in adults. In addition, subtle effects arising in the letter condition (due to enhanced power) enable us to further specify the differentiation in processing between letters and non-letter shapes. The influence of reading ability on the GPE was examined in Study 3 (Chapter 6). Children with normal reading skills and children with poor reading skills were instructed to detect a target in Latin or Hebrew Navon letters. Children with normal reading skills showed a GPE for Latin letters, but not for Hebrew letters. In contrast, the dyslexia group did not show GPE for either kind of stimuli. These results suggest that dyslexic children are not able to apply the same automatized letter processing strategy as children with normal reading skills do. The difference between the analytic letter processing and the holistic non-letter processing was transferred to the context of whole word reading in Study 4 (Chapter 7). When participants were instructed to detect either a letter or a non-letter in a mixed character string, for letters the reaction times and error rates increased linearly from the left to the right terminal position in the string, whereas for non-letters a symmetrical U-shaped function was observed. These results suggest, that the letter-specific processing strategies are triggered automatically also for more word-like material. Thus, this thesis supports and expands prior results of letter-specific processing and gives new evidences for letter-specific processing strategies.
In an overall effort to contribute to the steadily expanding EO literature, this cumulative dissertation aims to help the literature to advance with greater clarity, comprehensive modeling, and more robust research designs. To achieve this, the first paper of this dissertation focuses on the consistency and coherence in variable choices and modeling considerations by conducting a systematic quantitative review of the EO-performance literature. Drawing on the plethora of previous EO studies, the second paper employs a comprehensive meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach (MASEM) to explore the potential for unique component-level relationships among EO’s three core dimensions in antecedent to outcome relationships. The third paper draws on these component-level insights and performs a finer-grained replication of the seminal MASEM of Rosenbusch, Rauch, and Bausch (2013) that proposes EO as a full mediator between the task environment and firm performance. The fourth and final paper of this cumulative dissertation illustrates exigent endogeneity concerns inherent in observational EO-performance research and provides guidance on how researchers can move towards establishing causal relationships.
Wetting of a solid surface with liquids is an important parameter in the chemical engineering process such as distillation, absorption and desorption. The degree of wetting in packed columns mainly contributes in the generating of the effective interfacial area and then enhancing of the heat and mass transfer process. In this work the wetting of solid surfaces was studied in real experimental work and virtually through three dimensional CFD simulations using the multiphase flow VOF model implemented in the commercial software FLUENT. That can be used to simulate the stratified flows [1]. The liquid rivulet flow which is a special case of the film flow and mostly found in packed columns has been discussed. Wetting of a solid flat and wavy metal plate with rivulet liquid flow was simulated and experimentally validated. The local rivulet thickness was measured using an optically assisted mechanical sensor using a needle which is moved perpendicular to the plate surface with a step motor and in the other two directions using two micrometers. The measured and simulated rivulet profiles were compared to some selected theoretical models founded in the literature such as Duffy & Muffatt [2], Towell & Rothfeld [3] and Al-Khalil et al. [4]. The velocity field in a cross section of a rivulet flow and the non-dimensional maximum and mean velocity values for the vertical flat plate was also compared with models from Al-Khalil et al. [4] and Allen & Biggin [5]. Few CFD simulations for the wavy plate case were compared to the experimental findings, and the Towel model for a flat plate [3]. In the second stage of this work 3-D CFD simulations and experimental study has been performed for wetting of a structured packing element and packing sheet consisting of three elements from the type Rombopak 4M, which is a product of the company Kuhni, Switzerland. The hydrodynamics parameters of a packed column, e. i. the degree of wetting, the interfacial area and liquid hold-up have been depicted from the CFD simulations for different liquid systems and liquid loads. Flow patterns on the degree of wetting have been compared to that of the experiments, where the experimental values for the degree of wetting were estimated from the snap shooting of the flow on the packing sheet in a test rig. A new model to describe the hydrodynamics of packed columns equipped with Rombopak 4M was derived with help of the CFD–simulation results. The model predicts the degree of wetting, the specific or interfacial area and liquid hold-up at different flow conditions. This model was compared to Billet & Schultes [6], the SRP model Rocha et al. [7-9], to Shi & Mersmann [10] and others. Since the pressure drop is one of the most important parameter in packed columns especially for vacuum operating columns, few CFD simulations were performed to estimate the dry pressure drop in a structured and flat packing element and were compared to the experimental results. It was found a good agreement from one side, between the experimental and the CFD simulation results, and from the other side between the simulations and theoretical models for the rivulet flow on an inclined plate. The flow patterns and liquid spreading behaviour on the packing element agrees well with the experimental results. The VOF (Volume of Fluid) was found very sensitive to different liquid properties and can be used in optimization of the packing geometries and revealing critical details of wetting and film flow. An extension of this work to perform CFD simulations for the flow inside a block of the packing to get a detailed picture about the interaction between the liquid and packing surfaces is recommended as further perspective.
This research explores the development of web based reference software for
characterisation of surface roughness for two-dimensional surface data. The reference software used for verification of surface characteristics makes the evaluation methods easier for clients. The algorithms used in this software
are based on International ISO standards. Most software used in industrial measuring
instruments may give variations in the parameters calculated due to numerical changes in
calculation. Such variations can be verified using the proposed reference software.
The evaluation of surface roughness is carried out in four major steps: data capture, data
align, data filtering and parameter calculation. This work walks through each of these steps
explaining how surface profiles are evaluated by pre-processing steps called fitting and
filtering. The analysis process is then followed by parameter evaluation according to DIN EN
ISO 4287 and DIN EN ISO 13565-2 standards to extract important information from the
profile to characterise surface roughness.
Wearable activity recognition aims to identify and assess human activities with the help
of computer systems by evaluating signals of sensors which can be attached to the human
body. This provides us with valuable information in several areas: in health care, e.g. fluid
and food intake monitoring; in sports, e.g. training support and monitoring; in entertainment,
e.g. human-computer interface using body movements; in industrial scenarios, e.g.
computer support for detected work tasks. Several challenges exist for wearable activity
recognition: a large number of nonrelevant activities (null class), the evaluation of large
numbers of sensor signals (curse of dimensionality), ambiguity of sensor signals compared
to the activities and finally the high variability of human activity in general.
This thesis develops a new activity recognition strategy, called invariants classification,
which addresses these challenges, especially the variability in human activities. The
core idea is that often even highly variable actions include short, more or less invariant
sub-actions which are due to hard physical constraints. If someone opens a door, the
movement of the hand to the door handle is not fixed. However the door handle has to
be pushed to open the door. The invariants classification algorithm is structured in four
phases: segmentation, invariant identification, classification, and spotting. The segmentation
divides the continuous sensor data stream into meaningful parts, which are related
to sub-activities. Our segmentation strategy uses the zero crossings of the central difference
quotient of the sensor signals, as segment borders. The invariant identification finds
the invariant sub-activities by means of clustering and a selection strategy dependent on
certain features. The classification identifies the segments of a specific activity class, using
models generated from the invariant sub-activities. The models include the invariant
sub-activity signal and features calculated on sensor signals related to the sub-activity. In
the spotting, the classified segments are used to find the entire activity class instances in
the continuous sensor data stream. For this purpose, we use the position of the invariant
sub-activity in the related activity class instance for the estimation of the borders of the
activity instances.
In this thesis, we show that our new activity recognition strategy, built on invariant
sub-activities, is beneficial. We tested it on three human activity datasets with wearable
inertial measurement units (IMU). Compared to previous publications on the same
datasets we got improvement in the activity recognition in several classes, some with a
large margin. Our segmentation achieves a sensible method to separate the sensor data in
relation to the underlying activities. Relying on sub-activities makes us independent from
imprecise labels on the training data. After the identification of invariant sub-activities,
we calculate a value called cluster precision for each sensor signal and each class activity.
This tells us which classes can be easily classified and which sensor channels support
the classification best. Finally, in the training for each activity class, our algorithm selects
suitable signal channels with invariant sub-activities on different points in time and
with different length. This makes our strategy a multi-dimensional asynchronous motif
detection with variable motif length.
The thesis is concerned with the modelling of ionospheric current systems and induced magnetic fields in a multiscale framework. Scaling functions and wavelets are used to realize a multiscale analysis of the function spaces under consideration and to establish a multiscale regularization procedure for the inversion of the considered operator equation. First of all a general multiscale concept for vectorial operator equations between two separable Hilbert spaces is developed in terms of vector kernel functions. The equivalence to the canonical tensorial ansatz is proven and the theory is transferred to the case of multiscale regularization of vectorial inverse problems. As a first application, a special multiresolution analysis of the space of square-integrable vector fields on the sphere, e.g. the Earth’s magnetic field measured on a spherical satellite’s orbit, is presented. By this, a multiscale separation of spherical vector-valued functions with respect to their sources can be established. The vector field is split up into a part induced by sources inside the sphere, a part which is due to sources outside the sphere and a part which is generated by sources on the sphere, i.e. currents crossing the sphere. The multiscale technqiue is tested on a magnetic field data set of the satellite CHAMP and it is shown that crustal field determination can be improved by previously applying our method. In order to reconstruct ionspheric current systems from magnetic field data, an inversion of the Biot-Savart’s law in terms of multiscale regularization is defined. The corresponding operator is formulated and the singular values are calculated. Based on the konwledge of the singular system a regularzation technique in terms of certain product kernels and correponding convolutions can be formed. The method is tested on different simulations and on real magnetic field data of the satellite CHAMP and the proposed satellite mission SWARM.
Nanotechnology is now recognized as one of the most promising areas for technological
development in the 21st century. In materials research, the development of
polymer nanocomposites is rapidly emerging as a multidisciplinary research activity
whose results could widen the applications of polymers to the benefit of many different
industries. Nanocomposites are a new class of composites that are particle-filled
polymers for which at least one dimension of the dispersed particle is in the nanometer
range. In the related area polymer/clay nanocomposites have attracted considerable
interest because they often exhibit remarkable property improvements when
compared to virgin polymer or conventional micro- and macro- composites.
The present work addresses the toughening and reinforcement of thermoplastics via
a novel method which allows us to achieve micro- and nanocomposites. In this work
two matrices are used: amorphous polystyrene (PS) and semi-crystalline polyoxymethylene
(POM). Polyurethane (PU) was selected as the toughening agent for POM
and used in its latex form. It is noteworthy that the mean size of rubber latices is
closely matched with that of conventional toughening agents, impact modifiers.
Boehmite alumina and sodium fluorohectorite (FH) were used as reinforcements.
One of the criteria for selecting these fillers was that they are water swellable/
dispersible and thus their nanoscale dispersion can be achieved also in aqueous
polymer latex. A systematic study was performed on how to adapt discontinuousand
continuous manufacturing techniques for the related nanocomposites.
The dispersion of nanofillers was characterized by transmission, scanning electron
and atomic force microcopy (TEM, SEM and AFM respectively), X-ray diffraction
(XRD) techniques, and discussed. The crystallization of POM was studied by means
of differential scanning calorimetry and polarized light optical microscopy (DSC and
PLM, respectively). The mechanical and thermomechanical properties of the composites
were determined in uniaxial tensile, dynamic-mechanical thermal analysis
(DMTA), short-time creep tests, and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA).
PS composites were produced first by a discontinuous manufacturing technique,
whereby FH or alumina was incorporated in the PS matrix by melt blending with and
without latex precompounding of PS latex with the nanofiller. It was found that direct melt mixing (DM) of the nanofillers with PS resulted in micro-, whereas the latex mediated
pre-compounding (masterbatch technique, MB) in nanocomposites. FH was
not intercalated by PS when prepared by DM. On the other hand, FH was well dispersed
(mostly intercalated) in PS via the PS latex-mediated predispersion of FH following
the MB route. The nanocomposites produced by MB outperformed the DM
compounded microcomposites in respect to properties like stiffness, strength and
ductility based on dynamic-mechanical and static tensile tests. It was found that the
resistance to creep (summarized in master curves) of the nanocomposites were improved
compared to those of the microcomposites. Master curves (creep compliance
vs. time), constructed based on isothermal creep tests performed at different temperatures,
showed that the nanofiller reinforcement affects mostly the initial creep
compliance.
Next, ternary composites composed of POM, PU and boehmite alumina were produced
by melt blending with and without latex precompounding. Latex precompounding
served for the predispersion of the alumina particles. The related MB was produced
by mixing the PU latex with water dispersible boehmite alumina. The composites
produced by the MB technique outperformed the DM compounded composites in
respect to most of the thermal and mechanical characteristics.
Toughened and/or reinforced PS- and POM-based composites have been successfully
produced by a continuous extrusion technique, too. This technique resulted in
good dispersion of both nanofillers (boehmite) and impact modifier (PU). Compared
to the microcomposites obtained by conventional DM, the nanofiller dispersion became
finer and uniform when using the water-mediated predispersion. The resulting
structure markedly affected the mechanical properties (stiffness and creep resistance)
of the corresponding composites. The impact resistance of POM was highly
enhanced by the addition of PU rubber when manufactured by the continuous extrusion
manufacturing technique. This was traced to the dispersed PU particle size being
in the range required from conventional, impact modifiers.
In urban planning, sophisticated simulation models are key tools to estimate future population growth for measuring the impact of planning decisions on urban developments and the environment. Simulated population projections usually result in large, macro-scale, multivariate geospatial data sets. Millions of records have to be processed, stored, and visualized to help planners explore and analyze complex population patterns. We introduce a database driven framework for visualizing geospatial multidimensional simulation data based on the output from UrbanSim, a software for the analysis and planning of urban developments. The designed framework is extendable and aims at integrating empirical-stochastic methods and urban simulation models with techniques developed for information visualization and cartography. First, we develop an empirical model for the estimation of residential building types based on demographic household characteristics. The predicted dwelling type information is important for the analysis of future material use, carbon footprint calculations, and for visualizing simultaneously the results of land usage, density, and other significant parameters in 3D space. Our model uses multinomial logistic regression to derive building types at different scales. The estimated regression coefficients are applied to UrbanSim output in order to predict residential building types. The simulation results and the estimated building types are managed in an object-relational geodatabase. From the database, density, building types, and significant demographic variables are visually encoded as scalable, georeferenced 3D geometries and displayed on top of aerial photographs in a Google Earth visual synthesis. The geodatabase can be accessed and the visualization parameters can be chosen through a web-based user interface. The geometries are encoded in KML, Google's markup language, as ready-to-visualize data sets. The goal is to enhance human cognition by displaying abstract representations of multidimensional data sets in a realistic context and thus to support decision making in planning processes.
Due to the steadily growing flood of data, the appropriate use of visualizations for efficient data analysis is as important today as it has never been before. In many application domains, the data flood is based on processes that can be represented by node-link diagrams. Within such a diagram, nodes may represent intermediate results (or products), system states (or snapshots), milestones or real (and possibly georeferenced) objects, while links (edges) can embody transition conditions, transformation processes or real physical connections. Inspired by the engineering sciences application domain and the research project “SinOptiKom: Cross-sectoral optimization of transformation processes in municipal infrastructures in rural areas”, a platform for the analysis of transformation processes has been researched and developed based on a geographic information system (GIS). Caused by the increased amount of available and interesting data, a particular challenge is the simultaneous visualization of several visible attributes within one single diagram instead of using multiple ones. Therefore, two approaches have been developed, which utilize the available space between nodes in a diagram to display additional information.
Motivated by the necessity of appropriate result communication with various stakeholders, a concept for a universal, dashboard-based analysis platform has been developed. This web-based approach is conceptually capable of displaying data from various data sources and has been supplemented by collaboration possibilities such as sharing, annotating and presenting features.
In order to demonstrate the applicability and usability of newly developed applications, visualizations or user interfaces, extensive evaluations with human users are often inevitable. To reduce the complexity and the effort for conducting an evaluation, the browser-based evaluation framework (BREF) has been designed and implemented. Through its universal and flexible character, virtually any visualization or interaction running in the browser can be evaluated with BREF without any additional application (except for a modern web browser) on the target device. BREF has already proved itself in a wide range of application areas during the development and has since grown into a comprehensive evaluation tool.
The visualization of numerical fluid flow datasets is essential to the engineering processes that motivate their computational simulation. To address the need for visual representations that convey meaningful relations and enable a deep understanding of flow structures, the discipline of Flow Visualization has produced many methods and schemes that are tailored to a variety of visualization tasks. The ever increasing complexity of modern flow simulations, however, puts an enormous demand on these methods. The study of vortex breakdown, for example, which is a highly transient and inherently three-dimensional flow pattern with substantial impact wherever it appears, has driven current techniques to their limits. In this thesis, we propose several novel visualization methods that significantly advance the state of the art in the visualization of complex flow structures. First, we propose a novel scheme for the construction of stream surfaces from the trajectories of particles embedded in a flow. These surfaces are extremely useful since they naturally exploit coherence between neighboring trajectories and are highly illustrative in nature. We overcome the limitations of existing stream surface algorithms that yield poor results in complex flows, and show how the resulting surfaces can be used a building blocks for advanced flow visualization techniques. Moreover, we present a visualization method that is based on moving section planes that travel through a dataset and sample the flow. By considering the changes to the flow topology on the plane as it moves, we obtain a method of visualizing topological structures in three-dimensional flows that are not accessible by conventional topological methods. On the same algorithmic basis, we construct an algorithm for the tracking of critical points in such flows, thereby enabling the treatment of time-dependent datasets. Last, we address some problems with the recently introduced Lagrangian techniques. While conceptually elegant and generally applicable, they suffer from an enormous computational cost that we significantly use by developing an adaptive approximation algorithm. This allows the application of such methods on very large and complex numerical simulations. Throughout this thesis, we will be concerned with flow visualization aspect of general practical significance but we will particularly emphasize the remarkably challenging visualization of the vortex breakdown phenomenon.
In urban planning, both measuring and communicating sustainability are among the most recent concerns. Therefore, the primary emphasis of this thesis concerns establishing metrics and visualization techniques in order to deal with indicators of sustainability.
First, this thesis provides a novel approach for measuring and monitoring two indicators of sustainability - urban sprawl and carbon footprints – at the urban neighborhood scale. By designating different sectors of relevant carbon emissions as well as different household categories, this thesis provides detailed information about carbon emissions in order to estimate impacts of daily consumption decisions and travel behavior by household type. Regarding urban sprawl, a novel gridcell-based indicator model is established, based on different dimensions of urban sprawl.
Second, this thesis presents a three-step-based visualization method, addressing predefined requirements for geovisualizations and visualizing those indicator results, introduced above. This surface-visualization combines advantages from both common GIS representation and three-dimensional representation techniques within the field of urban planning, and is assisted by a web-based graphical user interface which allows for accessing the results by the public.
In addition, by focusing on local neighborhoods, this thesis provides an alternative approach in measuring and visualizing both indicators by utilizing a Neighborhood Relation Diagram (NRD), based on weighted Voronoi diagrams. Thus, the user is able to a) utilize original census data, b) compare direct impacts of indicator results on the neighboring cells, and c) compare both indicators of sustainability visually.
Nowadays, the increasing demand for ever more customizable products has emphasized the need for more flexible and fast-changing manufacturing systems. In this environment, simulation has become a strategic tool for the design, development, and implementation of such systems. Simulation represents a relatively low-cost and risk-free alternative for testing the impact and effectiveness of changes in different aspects of manufacturing systems.
Systems that deal with this kind of data for its use in decision making processes are known as Simulation-Based Decision Support Systems (SB-DSS). Although most SB-DSS provide a powerful variety of tools for the automatic and semi-automatic analysis of simulations, visual and interactive alternatives for the manual exploration of the results are still open to further development.
The work in this dissertation is focused on enhancing decision makers’ analysis capabilities by making simulation data more accessible through the incorporation of visualization and analysis techniques. To demonstrate how this goal can be achieved, two systems were developed. The first system, viPhos – standing for visualization of Phos: Greek for light –, is a system that supports lighting design in factory layout planning. viPhos combines simulation, analysis, and visualization tools and techniques to facilitate the global and local (overall factory or single workstations, respectively) interactive exploration and comparison of lighting design alternatives.
The second system, STRAD - standing for Spatio-Temporal Radar -, is a web-based systems that considers the spatio/attribute-temporal analysis of event data. Since decision making processes in manufacturing also involve the monitoring of the systems over time, STRAD enables the multilevel exploration of event data (e.g., simulated or historical registers of the status of machines or results of quality control processes).
A set of four case studies and one proof of concept prepared for both systems demonstrate the suitability of the visualization and analysis strategies adopted for supporting decision making processes in diverse application domains. The results of these case studies indicate that both, the systems as well as the techniques included in the systems can be generalized and extended to support the analysis of different tasks and scenarios.
Due to remarkable technological advances in the last three decades the capacity of computer systems has improved tremendously. Considering Moore's law, the number of transistors on integrated circuits has doubled approximately every two years and the trend is continuing. Likewise, developments in storage density, network bandwidth, and compute capacity show similar patterns. As a consequence, the amount of data that can be processed by today's systems has increased by orders of magnitude. At the same time, however, the resolution of screens has hardly increased by a factor of ten. Thus, there is a gap between the amount of data that can be processed and the amount of data that can be visualized. Large high-resolution displays offer a way to deal with this gap and provide a significantly increased screen area by combining the images of multiple smaller display devices. The main objective of this dissertation is the development of new visualization and interaction techniques for large high-resolution displays.
This dissertation focuses on the visualization of urban microclimate data sets,
which describe the atmospheric impact of individual urban features. The application
and adaptation of visualization and analysis concepts to enhance the
insight into observational data sets used this specialized area are explored, motivated
through application problems encountered during active involvement
in urban microclimate research at the Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Besides two smaller projects dealing with the analysis of thermographs
recorded with a hand-held device and visualization techniques used for building
performance simulation results, the main focus of the work described in
this document is the development of a prototypic tool for the visualization
and analysis of mobile transect measurements. This observation technique involves
a sensor platform mounted to a vehicle, which is then used to traverse
a heterogeneous neighborhood to investigate the relationships between urban
form and microclimate. The resulting data sets are among the most complex
modes of in-situ observations due to their spatio-temporal dependence, their
multivariate nature, but also due to the various error sources associated with
moving platform observations.
The prototype enables urban climate researchers to preprocess their data,
to explore a single transect in detail, and to aggregate observations from multiple
traverses conducted over diverse routes for a visual delineation of climatic
microenvironments. Extending traditional analysis methods, the suggested visualization
tool provides techniques to relate the measured attributes to each
other and to the surrounding land cover structure. In addition to that, an
improved method for sensor lag correction is described, which shows the potential
to increase the spatial resolution of measurements conducted with slow
air temperature sensors.
In summary, the interdisciplinary approach followed in this thesis triggers
contributions to geospatial visualization and visual analytics, as well as to urban
climatology. The solutions developed in the course of this dissertation are
meant to support domain experts in their research tasks, providing means to
gain a qualitative overview over their specific data sets and to detect patterns,
which can then be further analyzed using domain-specific tools and methods.
The focus of this work is to provide and evaluate a novel method for multifield topology-based analysis and visualization. Through this concept, called Pareto sets, one is capable to identify critical regions in a multifield with arbitrary many individual fields. It uses ideas found in graph optimization to find common behavior and areas of divergence between multiple optimization objectives. The connections between the latter areas can be reduced into a graph structure allowing for an abstract visualization of the multifield to support data exploration and understanding.
The research question that is answered in this dissertation is about the general capability and expandability of the Pareto set concept in context of visualization and application. Furthermore, the study of its relations, drawbacks and advantages towards other topological-based approaches. This questions is answered in several steps, including consideration and comparison with related work, a thorough introduction of the Pareto set itself as well as a framework for efficient implementation and an attached discussion regarding limitations of the concept and their implications for run time, suitable data, and possible improvements.
Furthermore, this work considers possible simplification approaches like integrated single-field simplification methods but also using common structures identified through the Pareto set concept to smooth all individual fields at once. These considerations are especially important for real-world scenarios to visualize highly complex data by removing small local structures without destroying information about larger, global trends.
To further emphasize possible improvements and expandability of the Pareto set concept, the thesis studies a variety of different real world applications. For each scenario, this work shows how the definition and visualization of the Pareto set is used and improved for data exploration and analysis based on the scenarios.
In summary, this dissertation provides a complete and sound summary of the Pareto set concept as ground work for future application of multifield data analysis. The possible scenarios include those presented in the application section, but are found in a wide range of research and industrial areas relying on uncertainty analysis, time-varying data, and ensembles of data sets in general.
The safety of embedded systems is becoming more and more important nowadays. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a widely used technique for analyzing the safety of embedded systems. A standardized tree-like structure called a Fault Tree (FT) models the failures of the systems. The Component Fault Tree (CFT) provides an advanced modeling concept for adapting the traditional FTs to the hierarchical architecture model in system design. Minimal Cut Set (MCS) analysis is a method that works for qualitative analysis based on the FTs. Each MCS represents a minimal combination of component failures of a system called basic events, which may together cause the top-level system failure. The ordinary representations of MCSs consist of plain text and data tables with little additional supporting visual and interactive information. Importance analysis based on FTs or CFTs estimates the contribution of each potential basic event to a top-level system failure. The resulting importance values of basic events are typically represented in summary views, e.g., data tables and histograms. There is little visual integration between these forms and the FT (or CFT) structure. The safety of a system can be improved using an iterative process, called the safety improvement process, based on FTs taking relevant constraints into account, e.g., cost. Typically, relevant data regarding the safety improvement process are presented across multiple views with few interactive associations. In short, the ordinary representation concepts cannot effectively facilitate these analyses.
We propose a set of visualization approaches for addressing the issues above mentioned in order to facilitate those analyses in terms of the representations.
Contribution:
1. To support the MCS analysis, we propose a matrix-based visualization that allows detailed data of the MCSs of interest to be viewed while maintaining a satisfactory overview of a large number of MCSs for effective navigation and pattern analysis. Engineers can also intuitively analyze the influence of MCSs of a CFT.
2. To facilitate the importance analysis based on the CFT, we propose a hybrid visualization approach that combines the icicle-layout-style architectural views with the CFT structure. This approach facilitates to identify the vulnerable components taking the hierarchies of system architecture into account and investigate the logical failure propagation of the important basic events.
3. We propose a visual safety improvement process that integrates an enhanced decision tree with a scatter plot. This approach allows one to visually investigate the detailed data related to individual steps of the process while maintaining the overview of the process. The approach facilitates to construct and analyze improvement solutions of the safety of a system.
Using our visualization approaches, the MCS analysis, the importance analysis, and the safety improvement process based on the CFT can be facilitated.
The present research combines different paradigm in the area of visual perception of letter and words. These experiments aimed to understand the deficit underlying the problem associated with the faulty visual processing of letters and words. The present work summarizes the findings from two different types of population: (1) Dyslexics (reading-disabled children) and (2) Illiterates (adults who cannot read). In order to compare the results, comparisons were made between literate and illiterate group; dyslexics and control group (normal reading children). Differences for Even related potentials (ERP’s) between dyslexics and control children were made using mental rotation task for letters. According to the ERP’s, the effect of the mental rotation task of letter perception resulted as a delayed positive component and the component becomes less positive when the task becomes more difficult (Rotation related Negativity – RRN). The component was absent for dyslexics and present for controls. Dyslexics also showed some late effects in comparison to control children and this could be interpreted as problems at the decision stage where they are confused as to the letter is normal or mirrored. Dyslexics also have problems in responding to the letters having visual or phonological similarities (e.g. b vs d, p vs q). Visually similar letters were used to compare dyslexics and controls on a symmetry generalization task in two different contrast conditions (low and high). Dyslexics showed a similar pattern of response, and were overall slower in responding to the task compared to controls. The results were interpreted within the framework of the Functional Coordination Deficit (Lachmann, 2002). Dyslexics also showed delayed response in responding to the word recognition task during motion. Using red background decreases the Magnocellular pathway (M-pathway) activity, making more difficult to identify letters and this effect was worse for dyslexics because their M-pathway is weaker. In dyslexics, the M-pathway is worse; using a red background decreases the M activity and increases the difficulty in identifying lexical task in motion. This effect generated worse response to red compared to the green background. The reaction times with red were longer than those with green background. Further, Illiterates showed an analytic approach to responding to letters as well as on shapes. The analytic approach does not result from an individual capability to read, but is a primary base of visual organization or perception.
Today's ubiquity of visual content as driven by the availability of broadband Internet, low-priced storage, and the omnipresence of camera equipped mobile devices conveys much of our thinking and feeling as individuals and as a society. As a result the growth of video repositories is increasing at enourmous rates with content now being embedded and shared through social media. To make use of this new form of social multimedia, concept detection, the automatic mapping of semantic concepts and video content has to be extended such that concept vocabularies are synchronized with current real-world events, systems can perform scalable concept learning with thousands of concepts, and high-level information such as sentiment can be extracted from visual content. To catch up with these demands the following three contributions are made in this thesis: (i) concept detection is linked to trending topics, (ii) visual learning from web videos is presented including the proper treatment of tags as concept labels, and (iii) the extension of concept detection with adjective noun pairs for sentiment analysis is proposed.
In order for concept detection to satisfy users' current information needs, the notion of fixed concept vocabularies has to be reconsidered. This thesis presents a novel concept learning approach built upon dynamic vocabularies, which are automatically augmented with trending topics mined from social media. Once discovered, trending topics are evaluated by forecasting their future progression to predict high impact topics, which are then either mapped to an available static concept vocabulary or trained as individual concept detectors on demand. It is demonstrated in experiments on YouTube video clips that by a visual learning of trending topics, improvements of over 100% in concept detection accuracy can be achieved over static vocabularies (n=78,000).
To remove manual efforts related to training data retrieval from YouTube and noise caused by tags being coarse, subjective and context-depedent, this thesis suggests an automatic concept-to-query mapping for the retrieval of relevant training video material, and active relevance filtering to generate reliable annotations from web video tags. Here, the relevance of web tags is modeled as a latent variable, which is combined with an active learning label refinement. In experiments on YouTube, active relevance filtering is found to outperform both automatic filtering and active learning approaches, leading to a reduction of required label inspections by 75% as compared to an expert annotated training dataset (n=100,000).
Finally, it is demonstrated, that concept detection can serve as a key component to infer the sentiment reflected in visual content. To extend concept detection for sentiment analysis, adjective noun pairs (ANP) as novel entities for concept learning are proposed in this thesis. First a large-scale visual sentiment ontology consisting of 3,000 ANPs is automatically constructed by mining the web. From this ontology a mid-level representation of visual content – SentiBank – is trained to encode the visual presence of 1,200 ANPs. This novel approach of visual learning is validated in three independent experiments on sentiment prediction (n=2,000), emotion detection (n=807) and pornographic filtering (n=40,000). SentiBank is shown to outperform known low-level feature representations (sentiment prediction, pornography detection) or perform comparable to state-of-the art methods (emotion detection).
Altogether, these contributions extend state-of-the-art concept detection approaches such that concept learning can be done autonomously from web videos on a large-scale, and can cope with novel semantic structures such as trending topics or adjective noun pairs, adding a new dimension to the understanding of video content.
This PhD thesis is concerned with the visual analysis of time-dependent scalar field ensembles as occur in climate simulations.
Modern climate projections consist of multiple simulation runs (ensemble members) that vary in parameter settings and/or initial values, which leads to variations in the resulting simulation data.
The goal of ensemble simulations is to sample the space of possible futures under the given climate model and provide quantitative information about uncertainty in the results.
The analysis of such data is challenging because apart from the spatiotemporal data, also variability has to be analyzed and communicated.
This thesis presents novel techniques to analyze climate simulation ensembles visually.
A central question is how the data can be aggregated under minimized information loss.
To address this question, a key technique applied in several places in this work is clustering.
The first part of the thesis addresses the challenge of finding clusters in the ensemble simulation data.
Various distance metrics lend themselves for the comparison of scalar fields which are explored theoretically and practically.
A visual analytics interface allows the user to interactively explore and compare multiple parameter settings for the clustering and investigate the resulting clusters, i.e. prototypical climate phenomena.
A central contribution here is the development of design principles for analyzing variability in decadal climate simulations, which has lead to a visualization system centered around the new Clustering Timeline.
This is a variant of a Sankey diagram that utilizes clustering results to communicate climatic states over time coupled with ensemble member agreement.
It can reveal
several interesting properties of the dataset, such as:
into how many inherently similar groups the ensemble can be divided at any given time,
whether the ensemble diverges in general,
whether there are different phases in the time lapse, maybe periodicity, or outliers.
The Clustering Timeline is also used to compare multiple climate simulation models and assess their performance.
The Hierarchical Clustering Timeline is an advanced version of the above.
It introduces the concept of a cluster hierarchy that may group the whole dataset down to the individual static scalar fields into clusters of various sizes and densities recording the nesting relationship between them.
One more contribution of this work in terms of visualization research is, that ways are investigated how to practically utilize a hierarchical clustering of time-dependent scalar fields to analyze the data.
To this end, a system of different views is proposed which are linked through various interaction possibilities.
The main advantage of the system is that a dataset can now be inspected at an arbitrary level of detail without having to recompute a clustering with different parameters.
Interesting branches of the simulation can be expanded to reveal smaller differences in critical clusters or folded to show only a coarse representation of the less interesting parts of the dataset.
The last building block of the suit of visual analysis methods developed for this thesis aims at a robust, (largely) automatic detection and tracking of certain features in a scalar field ensemble.
Techniques are presented that I found can identify and track super- and sub-levelsets.
And I derive “centers of action” from these sets which mark the location of extremal climate phenomena that govern the weather (e.g. Icelandic Low and Azores High).
The thesis also presents visual and quantitative techniques to evaluate the temporal change of the positions of these centers; such a displacement would be likely to manifest in changes in weather.
In a preliminary analysis with my collaborators, we indeed observed changes in the loci of the centers of action in a simulation with increased greenhouse gas concentration as compared to pre-industrial concentration levels.
Synapses play a central role in the information propagation in the nervous system. A better understanding of synaptic structures and processes is vital for advancing nervous disease research. This work is part of an interdisciplinary project that aims at the quantitative examination of components of the neuromuscular junction, a synaptic connection between a neuron and a muscle cell.
The research project is based on image stacks picturing neuromuscular junctions captured by modern electron microscopes, which permit the rapid acquisition of huge amounts of image data at a high level of detail. The large amount and sheer size of such microscopic data makes a direct visual examination infeasible, though.
This thesis presents novel problem-oriented interactive visualization techniques that support the segmentation and examination of neuromuscular junctions.
First, I introduce a structured data model for segmented surfaces of neuromuscular junctions to enable the computational analysis of their properties. However, surface segmentation of neuromuscular junctions is a very challenging task due to the extremely intricate character of the objects of interest. Hence, such problematic segmentations are often performed manually by non-experts and thus requires further inspection.
With NeuroMap, I develop a novel framework to support proofreading and correction of three-dimensional surface segmentations. To provide a clear overview and to ease navigation within the data, I propose the surface map, an abstracted two-dimensional representation using key features of the surface as landmarks. These visualizations are augmented with information about automated segmentation error estimates. The framework provides intuitive and interactive data correction mechanisms, which in turn permit the expeditious creation of high-quality segmentations.
While analyzing such segmented synapse data, the formulation of specific research questions is often impossible due to missing insight into the data. I address this problem by designing a generic parameter space for segmented structures from biological image data. Furthermore, I introduce a graphical interface to aid its exploration, combining both parameter selection as well as data representation.
Graphs and flow networks are important mathematical concepts that enable the modeling and analysis of a large variety of real world problems in different domains such as engineering, medicine or computer science. The number, sizes and complexities of those problems permanently increased during the last decades. This led to an increased demand of techniques that help domain experts in understanding their data and its underlying structure to enable an efficient analysis and decision making process.
To tackle this challenge, this work presents several new techniques that utilize concepts of visual analysis to provide domain scientists with new visualization methodologies and tools. Therefore, this work provides novel concepts and approaches for diverse aspects of the visual analysis such as data transformation, visual mapping, parameter refinement and analysis, model building and visualization as well as user interaction.
The presented techniques form a framework that enriches domain scientists with new visual analysis tools and help them analyze their data and gain insight from the underlying structures. To show the applicability and effectiveness of the presented approaches, this work tackles different applications such as networking, product flow management and vascular systems, while preserving the generality to be applicable to further domains.
In this thesis viscoelastic material models are established to investigate the nature of continuous calving processes at Antarctic ice shelves. Physics-based descriptions of calving require appropriate fracture criteria to separate icebergs from the remaining ice shelf. Hence, criteria of the stress, the strain, and the self-similarity criterion are considered within finite-element computations. Crucial parameters in the models to determine the position of calving are the accurate knowledge of the geometry, especially the freeboard height, while the material parameters mainly influence the time span between two successive calving events. The extension to nonlinear material models is necessary to properly analyze the internal forces also for large deformations that occur for longer times of the viscous ice flow.
In the presented work, I evaluate if and how Virtual Reality (VR) technologies can be used to support researchers working in the geosciences by providing immersive, collaborative visualization systems as well as virtual tools for data analysis. Technical challenges encountered in the development of theses systems are identified and solutions for these are provided.
To enable geologists to explore large digital terrain models (DTMs) in an immersive, explorative fashion within a VR environment, a suitable terrain rendering algorithm is required. For realistic perception of planetary curvature at large viewer altitudes, spherical rendering of the surface is necessary. Furthermore, rendering must sustain interactive frame rates of about 30 frames per second to avoid sensory confusion of the user. At the same time, the data structures used for visualization should also be suitable for efficiently computing spatial properties such as height profiles or volumes in order to implement virtual analysis tools. To address these requirements, I have developed a novel terrain rendering algorithm based on tiled quadtree hierarchies using the HEALPix parametrization of a sphere. For evaluation purposes, the system is applied to a 500 GiB dataset representing the surface of Mars.
Considering the current development of inexpensive remote surveillance equipment such as quadcopters, it seems inevitable that these devices will play a major role in future disaster management applications. Virtual reality installations in disaster management headquarters which provide an immersive visualization of near-live, three-dimensional situational data could then be a valuable asset for rapid, collaborative decision making. Most terrain visualization algorithms, however, require a computationally expensive pre-processing step to construct a terrain database.
To address this problem, I present an on-the-fly pre-processing system for cartographic data. The system consists of a frontend for rendering and interaction as well as a distributed processing backend executing on a small cluster which produces tiled data in the format required by the frontend on demand. The backend employs a CUDA based algorithm on graphics cards to perform efficient conversion from cartographic standard projections to the HEALPix-based grid used by the frontend.
Measurement of spatial properties is an important step in quantifying geological phenomena. When performing these tasks in a VR environment, a suitable input device and abstraction for the interaction (a “virtual tool”) must be provided. This tool should enable the user to precisely select the location of the measurement even under a perspective projection. Furthermore, the measurement process should be accurate to the resolution of the data available and should not have a large impact on the frame rate in order to not violate interactivity requirements.
I have implemented virtual tools based on the HEALPix data structure for measurement of height profiles as well as volumes. For interaction, a ray-based picking metaphor was employed, using a virtual selection ray extending from the user’s hand holding a VR interaction device. To provide maximum accuracy, the algorithms access the quad-tree terrain database at the highest available resolution level while at the same time maintaining interactivity in rendering.
Geological faults are cracks in the earth’s crust along which a differential movement of rock volumes can be observed. Quantifying the direction and magnitude of such translations is an essential requirement in understanding earth’s geological history. For this purpose, geologists traditionally use maps in top-down projection which are cut (e.g. using image editing software) along the suspected fault trace. The two resulting pieces of the map are then translated in parallel against each other until surface features which have been cut by the fault motion come back into alignment. The amount of translation applied is then used as a hypothesis for the magnitude of the fault action. In the scope of this work it is shown, however, that performing this study in a top-down perspective can lead to the acceptance of faulty reconstructions, since the three-dimensional structure of topography is not considered.
To address this problem, I present a novel terrain deformation algorithm which allows the user to trace a fault line directly within a 3D terrain visualization system and interactively deform the terrain model while inspecting the resulting reconstruction from arbitrary perspectives. I demonstrate that the application of 3D visualization allows for a more informed interpretation of fault reconstruction hypotheses. The algorithm is implemented on graphics cards and performs real-time geometric deformation of the terrain model, guaranteeing interactivity with respect to all parameters.
Paleoceanography is the study of the prehistoric evolution of the ocean. One of the key data sources used in this research are coring experiments which provide point samples of layered sediment depositions at the ocean floor. The samples obtained in these experiments document the time-varying sediment concentrations within the ocean water at the point of measurement. The task of recovering the ocean flow patterns based on these deposition records is a challenging inverse numerical problem, however.
To support domain scientists working on this problem, I have developed a VR visualization tool to aid in the verification of model parameters by providing simultaneous visualization of experimental data from coring as well as the resulting predicted flow field obtained from numerical simulation. Earth is visualized as a globe in the VR environment with coring data being presented using a billboard rendering technique while the
time-variant flow field is indicated using Line-Integral-Convolution (LIC). To study individual sediment transport pathways and their correlation with the depositional record, interactive particle injection and real-time advection is supported.
Virtual Possibilities: Exploring the Role of Emerging Technologies in Work and Learning Environments
(2024)
The present work aims to investigate whether virtual reality can support learning as well as vocational work environments. To this end, four studies were conducted, with the first set investigating the demands for vocational workers and the impact of input methods on participant performance. These studies laid the foundation needed to create studies incorporating virtual reality research. The second set of studies was concerned with the impact of virtual reality on learning performance as well as the influence of binaural stimuli presentation on task performance. Results of each study are discussed individually and in conjunction with one another. The four studies are further supplemented with further research conducted by the author as well as an analysis of the growing field of virtual reality-based research. The thesis closes by embedding the discussed work into the scientific landscape and tries to give an outlook for virtual reality-based use cases in the future.
To improve efficiency of memory accesses, modern multiprocessor architectures implement a whole range of different weak memory models. The behavior of performance-critical code depends on the underlying hardware. There is a rising demand for verification tools that take the underlying memory model into account. This work examines a variety of prevalent problems in the field of program verification of increasing complexities: testing, reachability, portability and memory model synthesis.
We give efficient tools to solve these problems. What sets the presented methods apart is that they are not limited to some few given architectures. They are universal: The memory model is given as part of the input. We make use of the CAT language to succinctly describe axiomatic memory models. CAT has been used to define the semantics of assembly for x86/TSO, ARMv7, ARMv8, and POWER but also the semantics of programming languages such as C/C++, including the Linux kernel concurrency primitives.
This work shows that even the simple testing problem is NP-hard for most memory models. It does so using a general reduction technique that applies to a range of models. It examines the more difficult program verification under a memory model and introduces Dartagnan, a bounded model checker (BMC) that encodes the problem as an SMT-query and makes use of advanced encoding techniques. The program portability problem is shown to be even harder. Despite this, it is solved efficiently by the tool Porthos which uses a guided search to produce fast results for most practical instances. A memory model is synthesized by Aramis for a given set of reachability results. Concurrent program verification is generally undecidable even for sequential consistency. As an alternative to BMC, we propose a new CEGAR method for Petri net invariant synthesis. We again use SMT-queries as a back-end.
Knowing the extent to which we rely on technology one may think that correct programs are nowadays the norm. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Luckily, possible reasons why program correctness is difficult often come hand in hand with some solutions. Consider concurrent program correctness under Sequential Consistency (SC). Under SC, instructions of each program's concurrent component are executed atomically and in order. By using logic to represent correctness specifications, model checking provides a successful solution to concurrent program verification under SC. Alas, SC’s atomicity assumptions do not reflect the reality of hardware architectures. Total Store Order (TSO) is a less common memory model implemented in SPARC and in Intel x86 multiprocessors that relaxes the SC constraints. While the architecturally de-atomized execution of stores under TSO speeds up program execution, it also complicates program verification. To be precise, due to TSO’s unbounded store buffers, a program’s semantics under TSO might be infinite. This, for example, turns reachability under SC (a PSPACE-complete task) into a non-primitive-recursive-complete problem under TSO. This thesis develops verification techniques targeting TSO-relaxed programs. To be precise, we present under- and over-approximating heuristics for checking reachability in TSO-relaxed programs as well as state-reducing methods for speeding up such heuristics. In a first contribution, we propose an algorithm to check reachability of TSO-relaxed programs lazily. The under-approximating refinement algorithm uses auxiliary variables to simulate TSO’s buffers along instruction sequences suggested by an oracle. The oracle’s deciding characteristic is that if it returns the empty sequence then the program’s SC- and TSO-reachable states are the same. Secondly, we propose several approaches to over-approximate TSO buffers. Combined in a refinement algorithm, these approaches can be used to determine safety with respect to TSO reachability for a large class of TSO-relaxed programs. On the more technical side, we prove that checking reachability is decidable when TSO buffers are approximated by multisets with tracked per address last-added-values. Finally, we analyze how the explored state space can be reduced when checking TSO and SC reachability. Intuitively, through the viewpoint of Shasha-and-Snir-like traces, we exploit the structure of program instructions to explain several state-space reducing methods including dynamic and cartesian partial order reduction.
A wide range of methods and techniques have been developed over the years to manage the increasing
complexity of automotive Electrical/Electronic systems. Standardization is an example
of such complexity managing techniques that aims to minimize the costs, avoid compatibility
problems and improve the efficiency of development processes.
A well-known and -practiced standard in automotive industry is AUTOSAR (Automotive
Open System Architecture). AUTOSAR is a common standard among OEMs (Original Equipment
Manufacturer), suppliers and other involved companies. It was developed originally with
the goal of simplifying the overall development and integration process of Electrical/Electronic
artifacts from different functional domains, such as hardware, software, and vehicle communication.
However, the AUTOSAR standard, in its current status, is not able to manage the problems
in some areas of the system development. Validation and optimization process of system configuration
handled in this thesis are examples of such areas, in which the AUTOSAR standard
offers so far no mature solutions.
Generally, systems developed on the basis of AUTOSAR must be configured in a way that all
defined requirements are met. In most cases, the number of configuration parameters and their
possible settings in AUTOSAR systems are large, especially if the developed system is complex
with modules from various knowledge domains. The verification process here can consume a
lot of resources to test all possible combinations of configuration settings, and ideally find the
optimal configuration variant, since the number of test cases can be very high. This problem is
referred to in literature as the combinatorial explosion problem.
Combinatorial testing is an active and promising area of functional testing that offers ideas
to solve the combinatorial explosion problem. Thereby, the focus is to cover the interaction
errors by selecting a sample of system input parameters or configuration settings for test case
generation. However, the industrial acceptance of combinatorial testing is still weak because of
the deficiency of real industrial examples.
This thesis is tempted to fill this gap between the industry and the academy in the area
of combinatorial testing to emphasizes the effectiveness of combinatorial testing in verifying
complex configurable systems.
The particular intention of the thesis is to provide a new applicable approach to combinatorial
testing to fight the combinatorial explosion problem emerged during the verification and
performance measurement of transport protocol parallel routing of an AUTOSAR gateway. The
proposed approach has been validated and evaluated by means of two real industrial examples
of AUTOSAR gateways with multiple communication buses and two different degrees of complexity
to illustrate its applicability.
The present work deals with the (global and local) modeling of the windfield on the real topography of Rheinland-Pfalz. Thereby the focus is on the construction of a vectorial windfield from low, irregularly distributed data given on a topographical surface. The developed spline procedure works by means of vectorial (homogeneous, harmonic) polynomials (outer harmonics) which control the oscillation behaviour of the spline interpoland. In the process the characteristic of the spline curvature which defines the energy norm is assumed to be on a sphere inside the Earth interior and not on the Earth’s surface. The numerical advantage of this method arises from the maximum-minimum principle for harmonic functions.
In this thesis we classify simple coherent sheaves on Kodaira fibers of types II, III and IV (cuspidal and tacnode cubic curves and a plane configuration of three concurrent lines). Indecomposable vector bundles on smooth elliptic curves were classified in 1957 by Atiyah. In works of Burban, Drozd and Greuel it was shown that the categories of vector bundles and coherent sheaves on cycles of projective lines are tame. It turns out, that all other degenerations of elliptic curves are vector-bundle-wild. Nevertheless, we prove that the category of coherent sheaves of an arbitrary reduced plane cubic curve, (including the mentioned Kodaira fibers) is brick-tame. The main technical tool of our approach is the representation theory of bocses. Although, this technique was mainly used for purely theoretical purposes, we illustrate its computational potential for investigating tame behavior in wild categories. In particular, it allows to prove that a simple vector bundle on a reduced cubic curve is determined by its rank, multidegree and determinant, generalizing Atiyah's classification. Our approach leads to an interesting class of bocses, which can be wild but are brick-tame.
Monte Carlo simulation is one of the commonly used methods for risk estimation on financial markets, especially for option portfolios, where any analytical approximation is usually too inaccurate. However, the usually high computational effort for complex portfolios with a large number of underlying assets motivates the application of variance reduction procedures. Variance reduction for estimating the probability of high portfolio losses has been extensively studied by Glasserman et al. A great variance reduction is achieved by applying an exponential twisting importance sampling algorithm together with stratification. The popular and much faster Delta-Gamma approximation replaces the portfolio loss function in order to guide the choice of the importance sampling density and it plays the role of the stratification variable. The main disadvantage of the proposed algorithm is that it is derived only in the case of Gaussian and some heavy-tailed changes in risk factors.
Hence, our main goal is to keep the main advantage of the Monte Carlo simulation, namely its ability to perform a simulation under alternative assumptions on the distribution of the changes in risk factors, also in the variance reduction algorithms. Step by step, we construct new variance reduction techniques for estimating the probability of high portfolio losses. They are based on the idea of the Cross-Entropy importance sampling procedure. More precisely, the importance sampling density is chosen as the closest one to the optimal importance sampling density (zero variance estimator) out of some parametric family of densities with respect to Kullback - Leibler cross-entropy. Our algorithms are based on the special choices of the parametric family and can now use any approximation of the portfolio loss function. A special stratification is developed, so that any approximation of the portfolio loss function under any assumption of the distribution of the risk factors can be used. The constructed algorithms can easily be applied for any distribution of risk factors, no matter if light- or heavy-tailed. The numerical study exhibits a greater variance reduction than of the algorithm from Glasserman et al. The use of a better approximation may improve the performance of our algorithms significantly, as it is shown in the numerical study.
The literature on the estimation of the popular market risk measures, namely VaR and CVaR, often refers to the algorithms for estimating the probability of high portfolio losses, describing the corresponding transition process only briefly. Hence, we give a consecutive discussion of this problem. Results necessary to construct confidence intervals for both measures under the mentioned variance reduction procedures are also given.
Properties of vapor-liquid interfaces play an important role in many processes, but corresponding data is scarce, especially for mixtures. Therefore, two independent routes were employed in the present work to study them: molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using classical force fields as well as density gradient theory (DGT) in combination with theoretically-based equations of state (EOS). The investigated interfacial properties include: interfacial tension, adsorption, and the enrichment of components, which
quantifies the interesting effect that in many systems the density of certain components in the interfacial region is much higher than in either of the bulk phases. As systematic investigations of the enrichment were lacking, it was comprehensively studied here by considering a large number of Lennard-Jones (LJ) mixtures with different phase behavior; also the dependence of the enrichment on temperature and concentration was elucidated and a conformal solution theory for describing the interfacial properties of LJ mixtures was developed. Furthermore, general relations of interfacial properties and the phase behavior were revealed and the relation between the enrichment and the wetting behavior of fluid interfaces was elucidated. All studies were carried out by both MD and DGT, which were found to agree well in most cases. The results were extended to real mixtures, which were studied not only by simulations but also in laboratory experiments. In connection with these investigations, three literature reviews were prepared which cover: a) simulation data on thermophysical properties of the LJ fluid; b) the performance of different EOS of the LJ fluid on that simulation data; c) data on the enrichment at vapor-liquid interfaces. Electronic databases were established for a) - c). Based on c), a short-cut method for the prediction of the enrichment from readily available vapor-liquid equilibrium data was developed. Last not least, an MD method for studying the influence of mass transfer on interfacial properties was developed and applied to investigate the influence of the enrichment on the mass transfer.
In this work two main approaches for the evaluation of credit derivatives are analyzed: the copula based approach and the Markov Chain based approach. This work gives the opportunity to use the advantages and avoid disadvantages of both approaches. For example, modeling of contagion effects, i.e. modeling dependencies between counterparty defaults, is complicated under the copula approach. One remedy is to use Markov Chain, where it can be done directly. The work consists of five chapters. The first chapter of this work extends the model for the pricing of CDS contracts presented in the paper by Kraft and Steffensen (2007). In the widely used models for CDS pricing it is assumed that only borrower can default. In our model we assume that each of the counterparties involved in the contract may default. Calculated contract prices are compared with those calculated under usual assumptions. All results are summarized in the form of numerical examples and plots. In the second chapter the copula and its main properties are described. The methods of constructing copulas as well as most common copulas families and its properties are introduced. In the third chapter the method of constructing a copula for the existing Markov Chain is introduced. The cases with two and three counterparties are considered. Necessary relations between the transition intensities are derived to directly find some copula functions. The formulae for default dependencies like Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau for defined copulas are derived. Several numerical examples are presented in which the copulas are built for given Markov Chains. The fourth chapter deals with the approximation of copulas if for a given Markov Chain a copula cannot be provided explicitly. The fifth chapter concludes this thesis.
Die Anwendung von tragbare Sensorik im Bereich der Bewegungsanalyse ist mittlerweile zu einem zentralen Bestandteil in der Medizin und im Sport geworden. In den letzten Jahren befinden sich vor allem Inertiale Messeinheiten (IMU) auf dem Vormarsch. Durch die Fusion mehrerer Sensoren erlauben es IMU Systeme komplexe Informationen wie etwa Gelenkwinkel und spatio-temporale Parameter (STP) zu gewinnen. Viele der heute verfügbaren IMU Systeme befinden sich in der Entwicklungsphase und wurden noch nicht adäquat für den klinischen oder den sportspezifischen Einsatz auf Validität und Reliabilität getestet. Dieses Prozedere ist nach wissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten unerlässlich bevor ein System zur biomechanischen Analyse herangezogen und basierend auf dessen Ergebnissen etwa klinische Entscheidungen getroffen werden können. Folglich wurde in der vorliegenden Arbeit ein neu entwickeltes IMU System, dass, basierend auf Akzelerometer und Gyroskop Daten, spatio-temporale Gangparameter und Gelenkswinkel der unteren Extremität berechnet, hinsichtlich dieser Kriterien evaluiert. Zu diesem Zweck wurden mit Hilfe dieses IMU Systems Daten von unterschiedlich dynamischen Bewegungen in zwei verschiedenen Probandengruppen, einer gesunden, jungen Gruppe und einer Gruppe mit Patienten nach totaler Hüftarthroplastik (THA), aufgenommen. Daraus wurden die 3D Winkel des Hüft-, Knie- und Sprunggelenks sowie die globale Bewegung des Beckens berechnet. Weiter wurden gangspezifische STP, z.B. Schrittlänge, Schreitlänge, Kadenz, berechnet. Aber auch STP die typischerweise nur mit alternativen Systemen zuverlässig zu messen sind, z.B. Spurbreite und Durchschwungbreite, wurden erhoben. Die Ergebnisse aus dem IMU System wurden gegen ein etabliertes Referenzsystem im Bereich der Bewegungsanalyse, in Form eines markerbasierten stereophotogrammetrischen Systems, verglichen. Die vorliegenden Ergebnisse zeigen in beiden Gruppen eine starke Korrelation zwischen den Systemen in den Gelenkwinkeln der sagittalen und frontalen Ebene, sowie den STP. Es zeigte sich aber auch, dass die Übereinstimmung des IMU Systems mit dem kamerabasierten System vor allem in den Winkeln der Transversalebene, i.e. Rotationsbewegungen, und hier vor allem im Bereich des Kniegelenks leicht abnimmt. Weiter zeigte sich, dass die Genauigkeit des IMU Systems bei dynamischeren Bewegungen ebenfalls abnimmt. Bezüglich der Test-Retest Reliabilität zeigen die aktuellen Daten eine hohe Verlässlichkeit der Messergebnisse.
In einem zweiten Schritt wurde mit Hilfe der Daten des nun validierten IMU Systems versucht pathologische Gangmuster, in dem konkreten Fall das Gangmuster von Patienten nach THA, von physiologischen zu differenzieren. Hierzu wurde ein Algorithmus des maschinellen Lernens angewandt um an Hand von ausgewählten, klinisch relevanten Parametern eine Klassifikation vorzunehmen. Diese Methode wurde ebenfalls sowohl an Hand von IMU Daten und Daten des Referenzsystems evaluiert. Es zeigte sich kein Unterschied in der Klassifikationsgenauigkeit zwischen den Systemen. Die Genauigkeit, mit der pathologische Gangmuster erkannt wurden, lag in beiden Fällen über 96 %.
Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt im Detail die Vor- und Nachteile eines neu entwickelten, mobilen IMU Systems, das komplexe Parameter der Kinematik mit hoher Genauigkeit und Verlässlichkeit erfasst. Besonders die erfolgreiche Evaluierung dieses Systems in einer klinisch relevanten Applikation zeigt das große Potential von IMU Systemen in der klinischen Anwendung.
Utilization of Correlation Matrices in Adaptive Array Processors for Time-Slotted CDMA Uplinks
(2002)
It is well known that the performance of mobile radio systems can be significantly enhanced by the application of adaptive antennas which consist of multi-element antenna arrays plus signal processing circuitry. In the thesis the utilization of such antennas as receive antennas in the uplink of mobile radio air interfaces of the type TD-CDMA is studied. Especially, the incorporation of covariance matrices of the received interference signals into the signal processing algorithms is investigated with a view to improve the system performance as compared to state of the art adaptive antenna technology. These covariance matrices implicitly contain information on the directions of incidence of the interference signals, and this information may be exploited to reduce the effective interference power when processing the signals received by the array elements. As a basis for the investigations, first directional models of the mobile radio channels and of the interference impinging at the receiver are developed, which can be implemented on the computer at low cost. These channel models cover both outdoor and indoor environments. They are partly based on measured channel impulse responses and, therefore, allow a description of the mobile radio channels which comes sufficiently close to reality. Concerning the interference models, two cases are considered. In the one case, the interference signals arriving from different directions are correlated, and in the other case these signals are uncorrelated. After a visualization of the potential of adaptive receive antennas, data detection and channel estimation schemes for the TD-CDMA uplink are presented, which rely on such antennas under the consideration of interference covariance matrices. Of special interest is the detection scheme MSJD (Multi Step Joint Detection), which is a novel iterative approach to multi-user detection. Concerning channel estimation, the incorporation of the knowledge of the interference covariance matrix and of the correlation matrix of the channel impulse responses is enabled by an MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) based channel estimator. The presented signal processing concepts using covariance matrices for channel estimation and data detection are merged in order to form entire receiver structures. Important tasks to be fulfilled in such receivers are the estimation of the interference covariance matrices and the reconstruction of the received desired signals. These reconstructions are required when applying MSJD in data detection. The considered receiver structures are implemented on the computer in order to enable system simulations. The obtained simulation results show that the developed schemes are very promising in cases, where the impinging interference is highly directional, whereas in cases with the interference directions being more homogeneously distributed over the azimuth the consideration of the interference covariance matrices is of only limited benefit. The thesis can serve as a basis for practical system implementations.
This thesis deals with risk measures based on utility functions and time consistency of dynamic risk measures. It is therefore aimed at readers interested in both, the theory of static and dynamic financial risk measures in the sense of Artzner, Delbaen, Eber and Heath [7], [8] and the theory of preferences in the tradition of von Neumann and Morgenstern [134].
A main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of optimal expected utility (OEU) risk measures as a new class of utility-based risk measures. We introduce OEU, investigate its main properties, and its applicability to risk measurement and put it in perspective to alternative risk measures and notions of certainty equivalents. To the best of our knowledge, OEU is the only existing utility-based risk measure that is (non-trivial and) coherent if the utility function u has constant relative risk aversion. We present several different risk measures that can be derived with special choices of u and illustrate that OEU reacts in a more sensitive way to slight changes of the probability of a financial loss than value at risk (V@R) and average value at risk.
Further, we propose implied risk aversion as a coherent rating methodology for retail structured products (RSPs). Implied risk aversion is based on optimal expected utility risk measures and, in contrast to standard V@R-based ratings, takes into account both the upside potential and the downside risks of such products. In addition, implied risk aversion is easily interpreted in terms of an individual investor's risk aversion: A product is attractive (unattractive) for an investor if its implied risk aversion is higher (lower) than his individual risk aversion. We illustrate this approach in a case study with more than 15,000 warrants on DAX ® and find that implied risk aversion is able to identify favorable products; in particular, implied risk aversion is not necessarily increasing with respect to the strikes of call warrants.
Another main focus of this thesis is on consistency of dynamic risk measures. To this end, we study risk measures on the space of distributions, discuss concavity on the level of distributions and slightly generalize Weber's [137] findings on the relation of time consistent dynamic risk measures to static risk measures to the case of dynamic risk measures with time-dependent parameters. Finally, this thesis investigates how recursively composed dynamic risk measures in discrete time, which are time consistent by construction, can be related to corresponding dynamic risk measures in continuous time. We present different approaches to establish this link and outline the theoretical basis and the practical benefits of this relation. The thesis concludes with a numerical implementation of this theory.
This thesis deals with the relationship between no-arbitrage and (strictly) consistent price processes for a financial market with proportional transaction costs
in a discrete time model. The exact mathematical statement behind this relationship is formulated in the so-called Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing (FTAP). Among the many proofs of the FTAP without transaction costs there
is also an economic intuitive utility-based approach. It relies on the economic
intuitive fact that the investor can maximize his expected utility from terminal
wealth. This approach is rather constructive since the equivalent martingale measure is then given by the marginal utility evaluated at the optimal terminal payoff.
However, in the presence of proportional transaction costs such a utility-based approach for the existence of consistent price processes is missing in the literature. So far, rather deep methods from functional analysis or from the theory of random sets have been used to show the FTAP under proportional transaction costs.
For the sake of existence of a utility-maximizing payoff we first concentrate on a generic single-period model with only one risky asset. The marignal utility evaluated at the optimal terminal payoff yields the first component of a
consistent price process. The second component is given by the bid-ask prices
depending on the investors optimal action. Even more is true: nearby this consistent price process there are many strictly consistent price processes. Their exact structure allows us to apply this utility-maximizing argument in a multi-period model. In a backwards induction we adapt the given bid-ask prices in such a way so that the strictly consistent price processes found from maximizing utility can be extended to terminal time. In addition possible arbitrage opportunities of the 2nd kind vanish which can present for the original bid-ask process. The notion of arbitrage opportunities of the 2nd kind has been so
far investigated only in models with strict costs in every state. In our model
transaction costs need not be present in every state.
For a model with finitely many risky assets a similar idea is applicable. However, in the single-period case we need to develop new methods compared
to the single-period case with only one risky asset. There are mainly two reasons
for that. Firstly, it is not at all obvious how to get a consistent price process
from the utility-maximizing payoff, since the consistent price process has to be
found for all assets simultaneously. Secondly, we need to show directly that the
so-called vector space property for null payoffs implies the robust no-arbitrage condition. Once this step is accomplished we can à priori use prices with a
smaller spread than the original ones so that the consistent price process found
from the utility-maximizing payoff is strictly consistent for the original prices.
To make the results applicable for the multi-period case we assume that the prices are given by compact and convex random sets. Then the multi-period case is similar to the case with only one risky asset but more demanding with regard to technical questions.
Using Enhanced Logic Programming Semantics for Extending and Optimizing Synchronous System Design
(2021)
The semantics of programming languages assign a meaning to the written program syntax.
Currently, the meaning of synchronous programming languages, which are especially designed to develop programs for reactive and embedded systems, is based on a formal semantics definition similar to Fitting`s fixpoint semantics for logic programs.
Nevertheless, it is possible to write a synchronous program code that does not evaluate to concrete values with the current semantics, which means those programs are currently seen to be not constructive.
In the last decades, the theoretical knowledge and representation of semantics for logic programming has increased, but not all theoretical results and achievements have found their way to practice and application in system design.
This thesis, in a first part, focuses on extensions to the semantics of synchronous programming languages to an evaluation similar to a well-founded semantics as defined in logic programming by van Gelder, Ross and Schlipf and to the stable model semantics as defined by Gelfond and Lifschitz. Particularly, this allows an evaluation for some of the currently not constructive programs where the semantics based on Fitting`s fixpoint fails.
It is shown that the extension to well-founded semantics is a conservative extension of Fitting`s semantics, so that the meaning for programs which were already constructive does not change. Finally, it is considered how one can still generate circuits that implement the considered synchronous programs with the well-founded semantics. Again, this is a conservative approach that does not modify the circuits generated by the so-far used synthesis procedures.
Answer set programming and the underlying stable model semantics describe problems by constraints and the related answer set solvers give all solutions to that problem as so-called answers. This allows the formulation of searching and planning problems as well as efficient solutions without having the need to develop special and possibly error-prone algorithms for every single application.
The semantics of the synchronous programming language Quartz is also extended to the stable model semantics. For this extension, two alternatives are discussed: First of all, a direct extension similar to the extension to well-founded semantics is discussed. Second, a transformation of synchronous programs to the available answer set programming languages is given, as this allows to directly use answer set solvers for the synthesis and optimization of synchronous systems.
The second part of the thesis contains further examples of the use of answer set programming in system design to emphasis their benefits for system design in general. The first example is hereby the generation of optimal/minimal interconnection-networks which allow non-blocking connections between n sources and n targets in parallel. As a second example, the stable model semantics is used to build a complete compiler chain, which transforms a given program to an optimal assembler code (called move code) for the new SCAD processor architecture which was developed at the University of Kaiserslautern. As a final part, the lessons learned from the two examples are shown by the means of some enhancement ideas for the synchronous programming language paradigm.
The last couple of years have marked the entire field of information technology with the introduction of a new global resource, called data. Certainly, one can argue that large amounts of information and highly interconnected and complex datasets were available since the dawn of the computer and even centuries before. However, it has been only a few years since digital data has exponentially expended, diversified and interconnected into an overwhelming range of domains, generating an entire universe of zeros and ones. This universe represents a source of information with the potential of advancing a multitude of fields and sparking valuable insights. In order to obtain this information, this data needs to be explored, analyzed and interpreted.
While a large set of problems can be addressed through automatic techniques from fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning or computer vision, there are various datasets and domains that still rely on the human intuition and experience in order to parse and discover hidden information. In such instances, the data is usually structured and represented in the form of an interactive visual representation that allows users to efficiently explore the data space and reach valuable insights. However, the experience, knowledge and intuition of a single person also has its limits. To address this, collaborative visualizations allow multiple users to communicate, interact and explore a visual representation by building on the different views and knowledge blocks contributed by each person.
In this dissertation, we explore the potential of subjective measurements and user emotional awareness in collaborative scenarios as well as support flexible and user- centered collaboration in information visualization systems running on tabletop displays. We commence by introducing the concept of user-centered collaborative visualization (UCCV) and highlighting the context in which it applies. We continue with a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art in the areas of collaborative information visualization, subjectivity measurement and emotion visualization, combinable tabletop tangibles, as well as browsing history visualizations. Based on a new web browser history visualization for exploring user parallel browsing behavior, we introduce two novel user-centered techniques for supporting collaboration in co-located visualization systems. To begin with, we inspect the particularities of detecting user subjectivity through brain-computer interfaces, and present two emotion visualization techniques for touch and desktop interfaces. These visualizations offer real-time or post-task feedback about the users’ affective states, both in single-user and collaborative settings, thus increasing the emotional self-awareness and the awareness of other users’ emotions. For supporting collaborative interaction, a novel design for tabletop tangibles is described together with a set of specifically developed interactions for supporting tabletop collaboration. These ring-shaped tangibles minimize occlusion, support touch interaction, can act as interaction lenses, and describe logical operations through nesting operations. The visualization and the two UCCV techniques are each evaluated individually capturing a set of advantages and limitations of each approach. Additionally, the collaborative visualization supported by the two UCCV techniques is also collectively evaluated in three user studies that offer insight into the specifics of interpersonal interaction and task transition in collaborative visualization. The results show that the proposed collaboration support techniques do not only improve the efficiency of the visualization, but also help maintain the collaboration process and aid a balanced social interaction.
The main goal of this work was the study of the applicability of a polymer film heat exchanger concept for the applications in the chemical industry, such as the condensation of organic solvents. The polymer film heat exchanger investigated is a plate heat exchanger with very thin (0.025 – 0.1 mm) plates or films, which separate the fluids and enable the heat transfer. After a successful application of this concept to seawater desalination in a previous work, a further step is in chemical engineering, where the good chemical resistance of polymers in aggressive fluids is the challenge.
Two approaches were performed in this work. The first one was experimental and included the study of the chemical and mechanical resistance of preselected films, made of polymer materials, such as polyimide (PI), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). To simulate realistic operating conditions in a heat exchanger the films were exposed to a combined thermal (up to 90°C) and mechanical pressure loads (4-6 bar) with permanent contact with the relevant organic solvents, such as toluene, hexane, heptane and tetrahydrofuran (THF). Furthermore, a lab-scale apparatus and a full-scale demonstrator were manufactured in cooperation with two industrial partners. These were used for the investigation of the heat transfer performance for operating modes with and without phase change.
In addition to the experimental work, a coupled finite element –computational fluid dynamics (FEM-CFD)-model was developed, based on the fluid-structure-interaction (FSI). Two major tasks had to be solved here. The first one was the modelling of the condensation process, based on available mathematical models and energy balances. The second one was the consideration of the partially reversible deformation of the used film during operation. Since this deformation changes the geometry of the fluid channels also has an influence on the overall performance of the apparatus, a coupled FEM-CFD model was developed.
During the experimental study of the chemical resistance of the films, the PTFE film showed the best performance, and hence can be used for all four tested solvents. For the polyimide film, failures while exposed to THF were observed, and the PET film can only be used with water and hexane. With the used lab-scale heat exchanger and the full-scale demonstrator competitive overall heat transfer coefficients between 270 W/m²K and 700 W/m²K could be reached for the liquid-liquid (water-water, water-hexane) operation mode without phase change. For the condensation process, overall heat transfer coefficients of up to 1700/m²K could be obtained.
The numerical approach led to a well-functioning coupled model in a very small scale (1 cm²). An upscale, however, failed due to enormous hardware resources necessary required for the simulation of the entire full-scale demonstrator. The main reason for this is the very low thickness of the films, which leads to tiny mesh element sizes (<0.05 mm) necessary to model the deformation of the film. The modelling of the liquid-liquid heat transfer provided an acceptable accuracy (approx. 10%), but at very low rates the deviations were then higher (over 30%). The results of the condensation modelling were ambivalent. One the one hand a physically plausible model was developed, which could map the entire condensation process. On the other hand, the corresponding energy balance revealed major inaccuracy and hence could not be used for the determination of the overall heat transfer and showed the current limits of the FEM-CFD approach.
Urban Design Guidelines have been used in Jakarta for controlling the form of the built environment. This planning instrument has been implemented in several central city redevelopment projects particularly in superblock areas. The instrument has gained popularity and implemented in new development and conservation areas as well. Despite its popularity, there is no formal literature on the Indonesian Urban Design Guideline that systematically explain its contents, structure and the formulation process. This dissertation attempts to explain the substantive of urban design guideline and the way to control its implementation. Various streams of urban design theories are presented and evaluated in term of their suitability for attaining a high urbanistic quality in major Indonesian cities. The explanation on the form and the practical application of this planning instrument is elaborated in a comparative investigation of similar instrument in other countries; namely the USA, Britain and Germany. A case study of a superblock development in Jakarta demonstrates the application of the urban design theories and guideline. Currently, the role of computer in the process of formulating the urban design guideline in Indonesia is merely as a replacement of the manual method, particularly in areas of worksheet calculation and design presentation. Further support of computer for urban planning and design tasks has been researched in developed countries, which shows its potential in supporting decision-making process, enabling public participation, team collaboration, documentation and publication of urban design decisions and so on. It is hoped that the computer usage in Indonesian urban design process can catch up with the global trend of multimedia, networking (Internet/Intranet) and interactive functions that is presented with examples from developed countries.
This Ph.D. project as a landscape research practice focuses on the less widely studied aspects of urban agriculture landscape and its application in recreation and leisure, as well as landscape beautification. I research on the edible landscape planning and design, its criteria, possibilities, and traditional roots for the particular situation of Iranian cities and landscapes. The primary objective is preparing a conceptual and practical framework for Iranian professions to integrate the food landscaping into the new greenery and open spaces developments. Furthermore, finding the possibilities of synthesis the traditional utilitarian gardening with the contemporary pioneer viewpoints of agricultural landscapes is the other significant proposed achievement.
Finished tasks and list of achieved results:
• Recognition the software and hardware principles of designing the agricultural landscape based on the Persian gardens
• Multidimensional identity of agricultural landscape in Persian gardens
• Principles of architectural integration and the characteristics of the integrative landscape in Persian gardens
• Distinctive characteristics of agricultural landscape in Persian garden
• Introducing the Persian and historical gardens as the starting point for reentering the agricultural phenomena into the Iranian cities and landscape
• Assessment the structure of Persian gardens based on the new achievements and criteria of designing the urban agriculture
• Investigate the role of Persian gardens in envisioning the urban agriculture in
Iranian cities’ landscape.
Lithium-ion batteries are broadly used nowadays in all kinds of portable electronics, such as laptops, cell phones, tablets, e-book readers, digital cameras, etc. They are preferred to other types of rechargeable batteries due to their superior characteristics, such as light weight and high energy density, no memory effect, and a big number of charge/discharge cycles. The high demand and applicability of Li-ion batteries naturally give rise to the unceasing necessity of developing better batteries in terms of performance and lifetime. The aim of the mathematical modelling of Li-ion batteries is to help engineers test different battery configurations and electrode materials faster and cheaper. Lithium-ion batteries are multiscale systems. A typical Li-ion battery consists of multiple connected electrochemical battery cells. Each cell has two electrodes - anode and cathode, as well as a separator between them that prevents a short circuit.
Both electrodes have porous structure composed of two phases - solid and electrolyte. We call macroscale the lengthscale of the whole electrode and microscale - the lengthscale at which we can distinguish the complex porous structure of the electrodes. We start from a Li-ion battery model derived on the microscale. The model is based on nonlinear diffusion type of equations for the transport of Lithium ions and charges in the electrolyte and in the active material. Electrochemical reactions on the solid-electrolyte interface couple the two phases. The interface kinetics is modelled by the highly nonlinear Butler-Volmer interface conditions. Direct numerical simulations with standard methods, such as the Finite Element Method or Finite Volume Method, lead to ill-conditioned problems with a huge number of degrees of freedom which are difficult to solve. Therefore, the aim of this work is to derive upscaled models on the lengthscale of the whole electrode so that we do not have to resolve all the small-scale features of the porous microstructure thus reducing the computational time and cost. We do this by applying two different upscaling techniques - the Asymptotic Homogenization Method and the Multiscale Finite Element Method (MsFEM). We consider the electrolyte and the solid as two self-complementary perforated domains and we exploit this idea with both upscaling methods. The first method is restricted only to periodic media and periodically oscillating solutions while the second method can be applied to randomly oscillating solutions and is based on the Finite Element Method framework. We apply the Asymptotic Homogenization Method to derive a coupled macro-micro upscaled model under the assumption of periodic electrode microstructure. A crucial step in the homogenization procedure is the upscaling of the Butler-Volmer interface conditions. We rigorously determine the asymptotic order of the interface exchange current densities and we perform a comprehensive numerical study in order to validate the derived homogenized Li-ion battery model. In order to upscale the microscale battery problem in the case of random electrode microstructure we apply the MsFEM, extended to problems in perforated domains with Neumann boundary conditions on the holes. We conduct a detailed numerical investigation of the proposed algorithm and we show numerical convergence of the method that we design. We also apply the developed technique to a simplified two-dimensional Li-ion battery problem and we show numerical convergence of the solution obtained with the MsFEM to the reference microscale one.
This thesis addresses the need for a new approach to hardware sign-off verification which guarantees the security of processors at the Register Transfer Level (RTL). To this end, we introduce a formal definition of security with respect to microarchitectural vulnerabilities, formulated as a hardware property.
We present a formal proof methodology based on Unique Program Execution Checking (UPEC) which can be used to systematically detect all vulnerabilities to transient execution attacks in RTL designs. UPEC does not exploit any a priori knowledge on known attacks and can therefore detect also vulnerabilities based on new, so far unknown, types of channels. This is demonstrated by the new attack scenarios discovered in our experiments with UPEC. UPEC operates on a verification model consisting of two identical instances of the SoC design under verification. The SoC instances in the model execute the same program.
The only difference between the two instances is the content of the protected part of the memory, i.e., the secret.
The aim of this dissertation is to explain processes in recruitment by gaining a better understanding of how perceptions evolve and how recruitment outcomes and perceptions are influenced. To do so, this dissertation takes a closer look at the formation of fit perceptions, the effects of top employer awards on pre-hire recruitment outcomes, and on how perceptions about external sources are influenced.
Dealing with uncertain structures or data has lately been getting much attention in discrete optimization. This thesis addresses two different areas in discrete optimization: Connectivity and covering.
When discussing uncertain structures in networks it is often of interest to determine how many vertices or edges may fail in order for the network to stay connected.
Connectivity is a broad, well studied topic in graph theory. One of the most important results in this area is Menger's Theorem which states that the minimum number of vertices needed to separate two non-adjacent vertices equals the maximum number of internally vertex-disjoint paths between these vertices. Here, we discuss mixed forms of connectivity in which both vertices and edges are removed from a graph at the same time. The Beineke Harary Conjecture states that for any two distinct vertices that can be separated with k vertices and l edges but not with k-1 vertices and l edges or k vertices and l-1 edges there exist k+l edge-disjoint paths between them of which k+1 are internally vertex-disjoint. In contrast to Menger's Theorem, the existence of the paths is not sufficient for the connectivity statement to hold. Our main contribution is the proof of the Beineke Harary Conjecture for the case that l equals 2.
We also consider different problems from the area of facility location and covering. We regard problems in which we are given sets of locations and regions, where each region has an assigned number of clients. We are now looking for an allocation of suppliers into the locations, such that each client is served by some supplier. The notable difference to other covering problems is that we assume that each supplier may only serve a fixed number of clients which is not part of the input. We discuss the complexity and solution approaches of three such problems which vary in the way the clients are assigned to the suppliers.
In this thesis we address two instances of duality in commutative algebra.
In the first part, we consider value semigroups of non irreducible singular algebraic curves
and their fractional ideals. These are submonoids of Z^n closed under minima, with a conductor and which fulfill special compatibility properties on their elements. Subsets of Z^n
fulfilling these three conditions are known in the literature as good semigroups and their ideals, and their class strictly contains the class of value semigroup ideals. We examine
good semigroups both independently and in relation with their algebraic counterpart. In the combinatoric setting, we define the concept of good system of generators, and we
show that minimal good systems of generators are unique. In relation with the algebra side, we give an intrinsic definition of canonical semigroup ideals, which yields a duality
on good semigroup ideals. We prove that this semigroup duality is compatible with the Cohen-Macaulay duality under taking values. Finally, using the duality on good semigroup ideals, we show a symmetry of the Poincaré series of good semigroups with special properties.
In the second part, we treat Macaulay’s inverse system, a one-to-one correspondence
which is a particular case of Matlis duality and an effective method to construct Artinian k-algebras with chosen socle type. Recently, Elias and Rossi gave the structure of the inverse system of positive dimensional Gorenstein k-algebras. We extend their result by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between positive dimensional level k-algebras and certain submodules of the divided power ring. We give several examples to illustrate
our result.
A main result of this thesis is a conceptual proof of the fact that the weighted number of tropical curves of given degree and genus, which pass through the right number of general points in the plane (resp., which pass through general points in R^r and represent a given point in the moduli space of genus g curves) is independent of the choices of points. Another main result is a new correspondence theorem between plane tropical cycles and plane elliptic algebraic curves.
This thesis is devoted to two main topics (accordingly, there are two chapters): In the first chapter, we establish a tropical intersection theory with analogue notions and tools as its algebro-geometric counterpart. This includes tropical cycles, rational functions, intersection products of Cartier divisors and cycles, morphisms, their functors and the projection formula, rational equivalence. The most important features of this theory are the following: - It unifies and simplifies many of the existing results of tropical enumerative geometry, which often contained involved ad-hoc computations. - It is indispensable to formulate and solve further tropical enumerative problems. - It shows deep relations to the intersection theory of toric varieties and connected fields. - The relationship between tropical and classical Gromov-Witten invariants found by Mikhalkin is made plausible from inside tropical geometry. - It is interesting on its own as a subfield of convex geometry. In the second chapter, we study tropical gravitational descendants (i.e. Gromov-Witten invariants with incidence and "Psi-class" factors) and show that many concepts of the classical Gromov-Witten theory such as the famous WDVV equations can be carried over to the tropical world. We use this to extend Mikhalkin's results to a certain class of gravitational descendants, i.e. we show that many of the classical gravitational descendants of P^2 and P^1 x P^1 can be computed by counting tropical curves satisfying certain incidence conditions and with prescribed valences of their vertices. Moreover, the presented theory is not restricted to plane curves and therefore provides an important tool to derive similar results in higher dimensions. A more detailed chapter synopsis can be found at the beginning of each individual chapter.
Tropical intersection theory
(2010)
This thesis consists of five chapters: Chapter 1 contains the basics of the theory and is essential for the rest of the thesis. Chapters 2-5 are to a large extent independent of each other and can be read separately. - Chapter 1: Foundations of tropical intersection theory In this first chapter we set up the foundations of a tropical intersection theory covering many concepts and tools of its counterpart in algebraic geometry such as affine tropical cycles, Cartier divisors, morphisms of tropical cycles, pull-backs of Cartier divisors, push-forwards of cycles and an intersection product of Cartier divisors and cycles. Afterwards, we generalize these concepts to abstract tropical cycles and introduce a concept of rational equivalence. Finally, we set up an intersection product of cycles and prove that every cycle is rationally equivalent to some affine cycle in the special case that our ambient cycle is R^n. We use this result to show that rational and numerical equivalence agree in this case and prove a tropical Bézout's theorem. - Chapter 2: Tropical cycles with real slopes and numerical equivalence In this chapter we generalize our definitions of tropical cycles to polyhedral complexes with non-rational slopes. We use this new definition to show that if our ambient cycle is a fan then every subcycle is numerically equivalent to some affine cycle. Finally, we restrict ourselves to cycles in R^n that are "generic" in some sense and study the concept of numerical equivalence in more detail. - Chapter 3: Tropical intersection products on smooth varieties We define an intersection product of tropical cycles on tropical linear spaces L^n_k and on other, related fans. Then, we use this result to obtain an intersection product of cycles on any "smooth" tropical variety. Finally, we use the intersection product to introduce a concept of pull-backs of cycles along morphisms of smooth tropical varieties and prove that this pull-back has all expected properties. - Chapter 4: Weil and Cartier divisors under tropical modifications First, we introduce "modifications" and "contractions" and study their basic properties. After that, we prove that under some further assumptions a one-to-one correspondence of Weil and Cartier divisors is preserved by modifications. In particular we can prove that on any smooth tropical variety we have a one-to-one correspondence of Weil and Cartier divisors. - Chapter 5: Chern classes of tropical vector bundles We give definitions of tropical vector bundles and rational sections of tropical vector bundles. We use these rational sections to define the Chern classes of such a tropical vector bundle. Moreover, we prove that these Chern classes have all expected properties. Finally, we classify all tropical vector bundles on an elliptic curve up to isomorphisms.
This thesis is devoted to furthering the tropical intersection theory as well as to applying the
developed theory to gain new insights about tropical moduli spaces.
We use piecewise polynomials to define tropical cocycles that generalise the notion of tropical Cartier divisors to higher codimensions, introduce an intersection product of cocycles with tropical cycles and use the connection to toric geometry to prove a Poincaré duality for certain cases. Our
main application of this Poincaré duality is the construction of intersection-theoretic fibres under a
large class of tropical morphisms.
We construct an intersection product of cycles on matroid varieties which are a natural
generalisation of tropicalisations of classical linear spaces and the local blocks of smooth tropical
varieties. The key ingredient is the ability to express a matroid variety contained in another matroid variety by a piecewise polynomial that is given in terms of the rank functions of the corresponding
matroids. In particular, this enables us to intersect cycles on the moduli spaces of n-marked abstract
rational curves. We also construct a pull-back of cycles along morphisms of smooth varieties, relate
pull-backs to tropical modifications and show that every cycle on a matroid variety is rationally
equivalent to its recession cycle and can be cut out by a cocycle.
Finally, we define families of smooth rational tropical curves over smooth varieties and construct a tropical fibre product in order to show that every morphism of a smooth variety to the moduli space of abstract rational tropical curves induces a family of curves over the domain of the morphism.
This leads to an alternative, inductive way of constructing moduli spaces of rational curves.
Das Ziel dieser Dissertation ist die Entwicklung und Implementation eines Algorithmus zur Berechnung von tropischen Varietäten über allgemeine bewertete Körper. Die Berechnung von tropischen Varietäten über Körper mit trivialer Bewertung ist ein hinreichend gelöstes Problem. Hierfür kombinieren die Autoren Bogart, Jensen, Speyer, Sturmfels und Thomas eindrucksvoll klassische Techniken der Computeralgebra mit konstruktiven Methoden der konvexer Geometrie.
Haben wir allerdings einen Grundkörper mit nicht-trivialer Bewertung, wie zum Beispiel den Körper der \(p\)-adischen Zahlen \(\mathbb{Q}_p\), dann stößt die konventionelle Gröbnerbasentheorie scheinbar an ihre Grenzen. Die zugrundeliegenden Monomordnungen sind nicht geeignet um Problemstellungen zu untersuchen, die von einer nicht-trivialen Bewertung auf den Koeffizienten abhängig sind. Dies führte zu einer Reihe von Arbeiten, welche die gängige Gröbnerbasentheorie modifizieren um die Bewertung des Grundkörpers einzubeziehen.\[\phantom{newline}\]
In dieser Arbeit präsentieren wir einen alternativen Ansatz und zeigen, wie sich die Bewertung mittels einer speziell eingeführten Variable emulieren lässt, so dass eine Modifikation der klassischen Werkzeuge nicht notwendig ist.
Im Rahmen dessen wird Theorie der Standardbasen auf Potenzreihen über einen Koeffizientenring verallgemeinert. Hierbei wird besonders Wert darauf gelegt, dass alle Algorithmen bei polynomialen Eingabedaten mit ihren klassischen Pendants übereinstimmen, sodass für praktische Zwecke auf bereits etablierte Softwaresysteme zurückgegriffen werden kann. Darüber hinaus wird die Konstruktion des Gröbnerfächers sowie die Technik des Gröbnerwalks für leicht inhomogene Ideale eingeführt. Dies ist notwendig, da bei der Einführung der neuen Variable die Homogenität des Ausgangsideal gebrochen wird.\[\phantom{newline}\]
Alle Algorithmen wurden in Singular implementiert und sind als Teil der offiziellen Distribution erhältlich. Es ist die erste Implementation, welches in der Lage ist tropische Varietäten mit \(p\)-adischer Bewertung auszurechnen. Im Rahmen der Arbeit entstand ebenfalls ein Singular Paket für konvexe Geometrie, sowie eine Schnittstelle zu Polymake.
Membrane proteins are generally soluble only in the presence of detergent micelles or other membrane-mimetic systems, which renders the determination of the protein’s molar mass or oligomeric state difficult. Moreover, the amount of bound detergent varies drastically among different proteins and detergents. However, the type of detergent and its concentration have a great influence on the protein’s structure, stability, and functionality and the success of structural and functional investigations and crystallographic trials. Size-exclusion chromatography, which is commonly used to determine the molar mass of water-soluble proteins, is not suitable for detergent-solubilised proteins because
the protein–detergent complex has a different conformation and, thus, commonly exhibits
a different migration behaviour than globular standard proteins. Thus, calibration curves obtained with standard proteins are not useful for membrane-protein analysis. However,
the combination of size-exclusion chromatography with ultraviolet absorbance, static light scattering, and refractive index detection provides a tool to determine the molar mass of protein–detergent complexes in an absolute manner and allows for distinguishing the contributions of detergent and protein to the complex.
The goal of this thesis was to refine the standard triple-detection size-exclusion chromatography measurement and data analysis procedure for challenging membrane-protein samples, non-standard detergents, and difficult solvents such as concentrated denaturant solutions that were thought to elude routine approaches. To this end, the influence of urea on the performance of the method beyond direct influences on detergents and proteins was investigated with the help of the water-soluble bovine serum albumin. On the basis of
the obtained results, measurement and data analysis procedures were refined for different detergents and protein–detergent complexes comprising the membrane proteins OmpLA and Mistic from Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, respectively.
The investigations on mass and shape of different detergent micelles and the compositions of protein–detergent complexes in aqueous buffer and concentrated urea solutions
showed that triple-detection size-exclusion chromatography provides valuable information
about micelle masses and shapes under various conditions. Moreover, it is perfectly suited for the straightforward analysis of detergent-suspended proteins in terms of composition and oligomeric state not only under native but, more importantly, also under denaturing conditions.
In conventional radio communication systems, the system design generally starts from the transmitter (Tx), i.e. the signal processing algorithm in the transmitter is a priori selected, and then the signal processing algorithm in the receiver is a posteriori determined to obtain the corresponding data estimate. Therefore, in these conventional communication systems, the transmitter can be considered the master and the receiver can be considered the slave. Consequently, such systems can be termed transmitter (Tx) oriented. In the case of Tx orientation, the a priori selected transmitter algorithm can be chosen with a view to arrive at particularly simple transmitter implementations. This advantage has to be countervailed by a higher implementation complexity of the a posteriori determined receiver algorithm. Opposed to the conventional scheme of Tx orientation, the design of communication systems can alternatively start from the receiver (Rx). Then, the signal processing algorithm in the receiver is a priori determined, and the transmitter algorithm results a posteriori. Such an unconventional approach to system design can be termed receiver (Rx) oriented. In the case of Rx orientation, the receiver algorithm can be a priori selected in such a way that the receiver complexity is minimum, and the a posteriori determined transmitter has to tolerate more implementation complexity. In practical communication systems the implementation complexity corresponds to the weight, volume, cost etc of the equipment. Therefore, the complexity is an important aspect which should be taken into account, when building practical communication systems. In mobile radio communication systems, the complexity of the mobile terminals (MTs) should be as low as possible, whereas more complicated implementations can be tolerated in the base station (BS). Having in mind the above mentioned complexity features of the rationales Tx orientation and Rx orientation, this means that in the uplink (UL), i.e. in the radio link from the MT to the BS, the quasi natural choice would be Tx orientation, which leads to low cost transmitters at the MTs, whereas in the downlink (DL), i.e. in the radio link from the BS to the MTs, the rationale Rx orientation would be the favorite alternative, because this results in simple receivers at the MTs. Mobile radio downlinks with the rationale Rx orientation are considered in the thesis. Modern mobile radio communication systems are cellular systems, in which both the intracell and intercell interferences exist. These interferences are the limiting factors for the performance of mobile radio systems. The intracell interference can be eliminated or at least reduced by joint signal processing with consideration of all the signals in the considered cell. However such joint signal processing is not feasible for the elimination of intercell interference in practical systems. Knowing that the detrimental effect of intercell interference grows with its average energy, the transmit energy radiated from the transmitter should be as low as possible to keep the intercell interference low. Low transmit energy is required also with respect to the growing electro-phobia of the public. The transmit energy reduction for multi-user mobile radio downlinks by the rationale Rx orientation is dealt with in the thesis. Among the questions still open in this research area, two questions of major importance are considered here. MIMO is an important feature with respect to the transmit power reduction of mobile radio systems. Therefore, first questionconcerns the linear Rx oriented transmission schemes combined with MIMO antenna structures. The investigations of the MIMO benefit on the linear Rx oriented transmission schemes are studied in the thesis. Utilization of unconventional multiply connected quantization schemes at the receiver has also great potential to reduce the transmit energy. Therefore, the second question considers the designing of non-linear Rx oriented transmission schemes combined with multiply connected quantization schemes.
Hydrogels are known to be covalently or ionic cross-linked, hydrophilic three-dimensional
polymer networks, which exist in our bodies in a biological gel form such as the vitreous
humour that fills the interior of the eyes. Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (poly(NIPAAm))
hydrogels are attracting more interest in biomedical applications because, besides others, they
exhibit a well-defined lower critical solution temperature (LCST) in water, around 31–34°C,
which is close to the body temperature. This is considered to be of great interest in drug
delivery, cell encapsulation, and tissue engineering applications. In this work, the
poly(NIPAAm) hydrogel is synthesized by free radical polymerization. Hydrogel properties
and the dimensional changes accompanied with the volume phase transition of the
thermosensitive poly(NIPAAm) hydrogel were investigated in terms of Raman spectra,
swelling ratio, and hydration. The thermal swelling/deswelling changes that occur at different
equilibrium temperatures and different solutions (phenol, ethanol, propanol, and sodium
chloride) based on Raman spectrum were investigated. In addition, Raman spectroscopy has
been employed to evaluate the diffusion aspects of bovine serum albumin (BSA) and phenol
through the poly(NIPAAm) network. The determination of the mutual diffusion coefficient,
\(D_{mut}\) for hydrogels/solvent system was achieved successfully using Raman spectroscopy at
different solute concentrations. Moreover, the mechanical properties of the hydrogel, which
were investigated by uniaxial compression tests, were used to characterize the hydrogel and to
determine the collective diffusion coefficient through the hydrogel. The solute release coupled
with shrinking of the hydrogel particles was modelled with a bi-dimensional diffusion model
with moving boundary conditions. The influence of the variable diffusion coefficient is
observed and leads to a better description of the kinetic curve in the case of important
deformation around the LCST. A good accordance between experimental and calculated data
was obtained.
This thesis aims to establish a transient electro-thermomechanical model capable of characterizing the shape-morphing capabilities of shape memory alloy hybrid composites (SMAHCs). The particular SMAHC type examined in this study comprises a rigid substrate, a soft interlayer, and SMA wires sewed on top. The model was synthesized from the bottom up using well-established equations, methodologies, and solution procedures, taking into account appropriate simplifications and assumptions. The implementation was done with open-source solutions to ensure free availability. The model extends existing models to include aspects of external influences so that, for example, the efficiency and dynamics of the SMAHC can be predicted as a function of external mechanical loads and different ambient temperatures. Inputs to the model include geometric and material design factors and Joule’s heat and ambient conditions, while outputs include the SMAHC’s deflection, load-carrying capacities, bandwidth, and energy consumption. Individual components of the SMAHC were characterized to create simulation input parameters, and methodologies for characterization were devised. The thermomechanical and electro-thermomechanical model was validated by comparing experimental and simulated data. Regardless of the various assumptions and simplifications, the findings demonstrate that the transient deformation behavior during the electrically induced thermal activation of a SMAHC at room temperature and external loads of less than 19.2 N can be predicted with variations of less than 20 percent. With increasing mechanical stresses in the shape memory alloy attributable to external loads or rigid substrates and temperatures above the austenite start temperature or below -10°C, the model’s applicability may become unreasonable.
Transferfilm-Luminance-Analysis: A comprehensive transfer film detection and evaluation method
(2022)
In the field of polymer tribology, the deposition of wear debris on the counter-facing
wear track during dry sliding, also known as transfer film, is a fundamental process.
These typically discontinuous and heterogeneous films are often assumed to be di-
rectly responsible for or at least be involved in the progression of friction and wear.
Nevertheless, the state of the art shows that the determination and evaluation of such
transfer film formations are most frequently reported either only qualitatively, ex-post, or
derived from local, possibly unrepresentative inspection areas. This reporting state is
valid for determining the extent of transfer film formation and other transfer film-related
attributes, e.g. its formation speed, coverage, adhesion, and thickness.
Because of this data situation, transferring results from one study to another is challeng-
ing and risks misinterpretation. Furthermore, without temporally resolved and quanti-
tative results, correlation analyses between friction or wear and the extent of transfer
film formation, or other attributes, are difficult if conductible at all. As a consequence,
the long lasting research question on the role of transfer film, whether it is the cause or
consequence of friction or wear, is still unanswered.
In order to come closer to the answer, new transfer film detection and evaluation meth-
ods are needed whose results overcome these shortcomings.
The following elaboration develops such a concept based on photo-optical techniques
combined with automation programs. The developed transfer film luminance analy-
sis (TLA) was demonstrated on a material composition study based on polyphenylene
sulfide (PPS) and PPS compositions incorporated with various fillers, including carbon
fibers, graphite, and polytetrafluoroethylene. The results demonstrate the tempo-spatial
dynamics of the transfer film formation process in a quantitative manner.
Based on this data, transfer film metrics were developed in the form of transfer film ki-
netic properties, spatial uniformity, temporal stability, and transfer film thickness. Finally,
based on this information, an integrated data model was developed to identify correla-
tions of various parameters and their contribution to friction and wear. Furthermore,
new hypotheses on transfer film formation mechanisms were formulated.
Overall, with the help of TLA and the data-driven model, the understanding of transfer
films was improved, and a step towards the answer on the role of transfer films was
achieved.
To assess ergonomic aspects of a (future) workplace already in the design phase where no physical prototypes exist, the use of digital human models (DHMs) becomes essential. Thereby, the prediction of human motions is a key aspect when simulating human work tasks. For ergonomic assessment e.g. the resulting postures, joint angles, the duration of the motion and muscle loads are important quantities. From a physical point of view, there is an infinite number of possible ways for a human to fulfill a given goal (trajectories, velocities...), which makes human motions and behavior hard to predict. A common approach used in state of the art commercial DHMs is the manual definition of joint angles by the user, which requires expert knowledge and is limited to postural assessments. Another way is to make use of pre-recorded motions from a real human that operates on a physical prototype, which limits assessments to scenarios which have been measured before. Both approaches need further post processing and inverse dynamics calculations with other software tools to get information about inner loads and muscle data, which leads to further uncertainties concerning validity of the simulated data.
In this thesis work a DHM control and validation framework is developed, which allows to investigate in how far the implemented human like actuation and control principles directly lead to human like motions and muscle actuations. From experiments performed in the motion laboratory, motion data is captured and muscle activations are measured using surface electromyography measurements (EMG). From the EMG data, time invariant muscle synergies are extracted by the use of a non-negative Matrix Factorization algorithm (NMF). Muscle synergies are one hypothesis from neuroscience to explain how the human central nervous system might reduce control complexity: instead of activating each muscle separately, muscles are grouped into functional units, whereas each muscle is present in each unit with a fixed amplitude. The measured experiment is then simulated in an optimal control framework. The used framework allows to build up DHMs as multibody system (MBS): bones are modeled as rigid bodies connected via joints, actuated by joint torques or by Hill type muscle models (1D string elements transferring fundamental characteristics of muscle force generation in humans). The OC code calculates the actuation signals for the modeled DHM in a way that a certain goal is fulfilled (e.g. reach for an object) while minimizing some cost function (e.g. minimizing time) and considering the side constraints that the equations of motion of the MBS are fulfilled. Therefore, three different Actuation Modes (AM) can be used (joint torques (AM-T), direct muscle actuation (AM-M) and muscle synergy actuation (AM-S), using the before extracted synergies as control parameters)). Simulation results are then compared with measured data, to investigate the influence of the different Actuation Modes and the solved OC cost function. The approach is applied to three different experiments, the basic reaching test, the weight lift test and a box lifting task, where a human arm model actuated by 29 Hill muscles is used for simulation. It is shown that, in contrast to a joint torque actuation (AM-T), using muscles as actuators (AM-M & AM-S) leads to very human like motion trajectories. Muscle synergies as control parameters, resulted in smoother velocity profiles, which were closer to those measured and appeared to be more robust, concerning the underlying muscle activation signals (compared to AM-M). In combination with a developed biomechanical cost function (a mix of different OC cost functions), the approach showed promising results, concerning the simulation of valid, human like motions, in a predictive manner.
Like many other bacteria, the opportunistic pathogen P. aeruginosa encodes a broad network of enzymes that regulate the intracellular concentration of the second messenger c-di-GMP. One of these enzymes is the phosphodiesterase NbdA that consists of three domains: a membrane anchored, putative sensory MHYT domain, a non-functional diguanylate cyclase domain with degenerated GGDEF motif and an active PDE domain with EAL motif. Analysis of the nbdA open reading frame by 5’-RACE PCR revealed an erroneous annotation of nbdA in the Pseudomonas database with the ORF 170 bp shorter than previously predicted. The newly defined promoter region of nbdA contains recognition sites for the alternative sigma-factor RpoS as well as the transcription factor AmrZ. Promoter analysis within PAO1 wt as well as rpoS and amrZ mutant strains utilizing transcriptional fusions of the nbdA promoter to the reporter gene lacZ revealed transcriptional activation of nbdA by RpoS in stationary growth phase and transcriptional repression by AmrZ. Additionally, no influence of nitrite and neither exogenous nor endogenous NO on nbdA transcription could be shown in this study. However, deletion of the nitrite reductase gene nirS led to a strong increase of nbdA promoter activity which needs to be characterized further. Predicted secondary structures of the 5’-UTR of the nbdA mRNA indicated either an RNA thermometer function of the mRNA or post-transcriptional regulation of nbdA by the RNA binding proteins RsmA and RsmF. Nevertheless, translational studies using fusions of the 5’ UTR of nbdA to the reporter gene bgaB did not verify either of these hypotheses. In general, nbdA translational levels were very low and neither the production of the reporter BgaB nor genomically encoded NbdA could be detected on a western blot. Overproduction of NbdA variants induced many phenotypic changes in motility and biofilm formation. But strains overproducing variants containing the MHYT domain revealed greatly elongated cells and were impaired in surface growth, indicating a misbalance in the membrane protein homeostasis. Therefore, these phenotypes have to be interpreted very critically. Microscopic studies with fluorescently tagged NbdA revealed either a diffuse fluorescent signal of NbdA or the formation of fluorescent foci which were located mainly at the cell poles. Co-localization studies with the polar flagellum and the chemotaxis protein CheA showed that NbdA is not generally localizing to the flagellated cell pole. NbdA localization indicates the control of a specific local c-di-GMP pool in the cell which is most likely involved in MapZ mediated chemotactic flagellar motor switching.
The simulation of physical phenomena involving the dynamic behavior of fluids and gases
has numerous applications in various fields of science and engineering. Of particular interest
is the material transport behavior, the tendency of a flow field to displace parts of the
medium. Therefore, many visualization techniques rely on particle trajectories.
Lagrangian Flow Field Representation. In typical Eulerian settings, trajectories are
computed from the simulation output using numerical integration schemes. Accuracy concerns
arise because, due to limitations of storage space and bandwidth, often only a fraction
of the computed simulation time steps are available. Prior work has shown empirically that
a Lagrangian, trajectory-based representation can improve accuracy [Agr+14]. Determining
the parameters of such a representation in advance is difficult; a relationship between the
temporal and spatial resolution and the accuracy of resulting trajectories needs to be established.
We provide an error measure for upper bounds of the error of individual trajectories.
We show how areas at risk for high errors can be identified, thereby making it possible to
prioritize areas in time and space to allocate scarce storage resources.
Comparative Visual Analysis of Flow Field Ensembles. Independent of the representation,
errors of the simulation itself are often caused by inaccurate initial conditions,
limitations of the chosen simulation model, and numerical errors. To gain a better understanding
of the possible outcomes, multiple simulation runs can be calculated, resulting in
sets of simulation output referred to as ensembles. Of particular interest when studying the
material transport behavior of ensembles is the identification of areas where the simulation
runs agree or disagree. We introduce and evaluate an interactive method that enables application
scientists to reliably identify and examine regions of agreement and disagreement,
while taking into account the local transport behavior within individual simulation runs.
Particle-Based Representation and Visualization of Uncertain Flow Data Sets. Unlike
simulation ensembles, where uncertainty of the solution appears in the form of different
simulation runs, moment-based Eulerian multi-phase fluid simulations are probabilistic in
nature. These simulations, used in process engineering to simulate the behavior of bubbles in
liquid media, are aimed toward reducing the need for real-world experiments. The locations
of individual bubbles are not modeled explicitly, but stochastically through the properties of
locally defined bubble populations. Comparisons between simulation results and physical
experiments are difficult. We describe and analyze an approach that generates representative
sets of bubbles for moment-based simulation data. Using our approach, application scientists
can directly, visually compare simulation results and physical experiments.
The use of trading stops is a common practice in financial markets for a variety of reasons: it provides a simple way to control losses on a given trade, while also ensuring that profit-taking is not deferred indefinitely; and it allows opportunities to consider reallocating resources to other investments. In this thesis, it is explained why the use of stops may be desirable in certain cases.
This is done by proposing a simple objective to be optimized. Some simple and commonly-used rules for the placing and use of stops are investigated; consisting of fixed or moving barriers, with fixed transaction costs. It is shown how to identify optimal levels at which to set stops, and the performances of different rules and strategies are compared. Thereby, uncertainty and altering of the drift parameter of the investment are incorporated.
The association between social origin and educational attainment has been repeatedly confirmed and studied in social science research. Much of the international comparative research to date has shown that countries differ in the extent of educational inequality. This research suggests that the institutional design of the education system can affect multiple dimensions of educational inequality, such as school performance and educational decisions. In addition to international comparative research, other research also suggests that institutional characteristics moderate the link between social origin and educational inequality. Thus, the institutional features of the education system provide opportunities for policy interventions to influence the relationship between social origin and educational inequality and to reduce educational inequalities. The literature examines and discusses various institutional characteristics of the education system for their respective effects on or associations to educational inequalities. In this respect, tracking is also an institutional characteristic that has been studied repeatedly and could be an important link between social origin and education. Tracking is the practice of separating students by performance. This separation can occur between schools or within schools. Thus, students are placed in a particular school type (between-school tracking) or class (within-school tracking) based on their performance. National and international research demonstrate the importance of tracking in relation to the emergence of educational inequalities. In this context, previous research has often shown that early and strict tracking leads to greater educational inequality. However, there is also research that finds no effects from tracking or even inequality-reducing effects from early and strict tracking. Against this background, further research on the associations with - and effects of - tracking, including under different settings and contexts, is important for a better understanding of tracking and may be particularly interesting for the German education system. This is because, apart from some deviations, the German education system is characterized by an early and strict separation of students into different school types in secondary education. Over the years, there have been many different educational reforms in Germany with different scopes, goals, and at different phases in the education system. The fact that the federal states in Germany can decide independently on education policy (Kulturhoheit der Länder - Cultural sovereignty of the states) means that they partially developed in different directions. The following contribution is therefore limited to three selected aspects of tracking in the education systems of the federal states in Germany and its influences on features of educational inequality: integrated comprehensive schools, timing of tracking, and strictness of tracking.
In the avionics domain, “ultra-reliability” refers to the practice of ensuring quantifiably negligible residual failure rates in the presence of transient and permanent hardware faults. If autonomous Cyber- Physical Systems (CPS) in other domains, e.g., autonomous vehicles, drones, and industrial automation systems, are to permeate our everyday life in the not so distant future, then they also need to become ultra-reliable. However, the rigorous reliability engineering and analysis practices used in the avionics domain are expensive and time consuming, and cannot be transferred to most other CPS domains. The increasing adoption of faster and cheaper, but less reliable, Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware is also an impediment in this regard.
Motivated by the goal of ultra-reliable CPS, this dissertation shows how to soundly analyze the reliability of COTS-based implementations of actively replicated Networked Control Systems (NCSs)—which are key building blocks of modern CPS—in the presence of transient hard- ware faults. When an NCS is deployed over field buses such as the Controller Area Network (CAN), transient faults are known to cause host crashes, network retransmissions, and incorrect computations. In addition, when an NCS is deployed over point-to-point networks such as Ethernet, even Byzantine errors (i.e., inconsistent broadcast transmissions) are possible. The analyses proposed in this dissertation account for NCS failures due to each of these error categories, and consider NCS failures in both time and value domains. The analyses are also provably free of reliability anomalies. Such anomalies are problematic because they can result in unsound failure rate estimates, which might lead us to believe that a system is safer than it actually is.
Specifically, this dissertation makes four main contributions. (1) To reduce the failure rate of NCSs in the presence of Byzantine errors, we present a hard real-time design of a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocol for Ethernet-based systems. (2) We then propose a quantitative reliability analysis of the presented design in the presence of transient faults. (3) Next, we propose a similar analysis to upper-bound the failure probability of an actively replicated CAN-based NCS. (4) Finally, to upper-bound the long-term failure rate of the NCS more accurately, we propose analyses that take into account the temporal robustness properties of an NCS expressed as weakly-hard constraints.
By design, our analyses can be applied in the context of full-system analyses. For instance, to certify a system consisting of multiple actively replicated NCSs deployed over a BFT atomic broadcast layer, the upper bounds on the failure rates of each NCS and the atomic broadcast layer can be composed using the sum-of-failure-rates model.
Attention-awareness is a key topic for the upcoming generation of computer-human interaction. A human moves his or her eyes to visually attends to a particular region in a scene. Consequently, he or she can process visual information rapidly and efficiently without being overwhelmed by vast amount of information from the environment. Such a physiological function called visual attention provides a computer system with valuable information of the user to infer his or her activity and the surrounding environment. For example, a computer can infer whether the user is reading text or not by analyzing his or her eye movements. Furthermore, it can infer with which object he or she is interacting by recognizing the object the user is looking at. Recent developments of mobile eye tracking technologies enable us
to capture human visual attention in ubiquitous everyday environments. There are various types of applications where attention-aware systems may be effectively incorporated. Typical examples are augmented reality (AR) applications such as Wikitude which overlay virtual information onto physical objects. This type of AR application presents augmentative information of recognized objects to the user. However, if it presents information of all recognized objects at once, the over
ow of information could be obtrusive to the user. As a solution for such a problem, attention-awareness can be integrated into a system. If a
system knows to which object the user is attending, it can present only the information of
relevant objects to the user.
Towards attention-aware systems in everyday environments, this thesis presents approaches
for analysis of user attention to visual content. Using a state-of-the-art wearable eye tracking device, one can measure the user's eye movements in a mobile scenario. By capturing the user's eye gaze position in a scene and analyzing the image where the eyes focus, a computer can recognize the visual content the user is currently attending to. I propose several image analysis methods to recognize the user-attended visual content in a scene image. For example, I present an application called Museum Guide 2.0. In Museum Guide 2.0, image-based object recognition and eye gaze analysis are combined together to recognize user-attended objects in a museum scenario. Similarly, optical character recognition
(OCR), face recognition, and document image retrieval are also combined with eye gaze analysis to identify the user-attended visual content in respective scenarios. In addition to Museum Guide 2.0, I present other applications in which these combined frameworks are effectively used. The proposed applications show that the user can benefit from active information presentation which augments the attended content in a virtual environment with
a see-through head-mounted display (HMD).
In addition to the individual attention-aware applications mentioned above, this thesis
presents a comprehensive framework that combines all recognition modules to recognize the user-attended visual content when various types of visual information resources such as text, objects, and human faces are present in one scene. In particular, two processing strategies are proposed. The first one selects an appropriate image analysis module according to the user's current cognitive state. The second one runs all image analysis modules simultaneously and merges the analytic results later. I compare these two processing strategies in terms of user-attended visual content recognition when multiple visual information resources are present in the same scene.
Furthermore, I present novel interaction methodologies for a see-through HMD using eye gaze input. A see-through HMD is a suitable device for a wearable attention-aware system for everyday environments because the user can also view his or her physical environment
through the display. I propose methods for the user's attention engagement estimation with the display, eye gaze-driven proactive user assistance functions, and a method for interacting
with a multi-focal see-through display.
Contributions of this thesis include:
• An overview of the state-of-the-art in attention-aware computer-human interaction
and attention-integrated image analysis.
• Methods for the analysis of user-attended visual content in various scenarios.
• Demonstration of the feasibilities and the benefits of the proposed user-attended visual content analysis methods with practical user-supportive applications.
• Methods for interaction with a see-through HMD using eye gaze.
• A comprehensive framework for recognition of user-attended visual content in a complex
scene where multiple visual information resources are present.
This thesis opens a novel field of wearable computer systems where computers can understand the user attention in everyday environments and provide with what the user wants. I will show the potential of such wearable attention-aware systems for everyday
environments for the next generation of pervasive computer-human interaction.
Private data analytics systems preferably provide required analytic accuracy to analysts and specified privacy to individuals whose data is analyzed. Devising a general system that works for a broad range of datasets and analytic scenarios has proven to be difficult.
Despite the advent of differentially private systems with proven formal privacy guarantees, industry still uses inferior ad-hoc mechanisms that provide better analytic accuracy. Differentially private mechanisms often need to add large amounts of noise to statistical results, which impairs their usability.
In my thesis I follow two approaches to improve the usability of private data analytics systems in general and differentially private systems in particular. First, I revisit ad-hoc mechanisms and explore the possibilities of systems that do not provide Differential Privacy or only a weak version thereof. Based on an attack analysis I devise a set of new protection mechanisms including Query Based Bookkeeping (QBB). In contrast to previous systems QBB only requires the history of analysts’ queries in order to provide privacy protection. In particular, QBB does not require knowledge about the protected individuals’ data.
In my second approach I use the insights gained with QBB to propose UniTraX, the first differentially private analytics system that allows to analyze part of a protected dataset without affecting the other parts and without giving up on accuracy. I show UniTraX’s usability by way of multiple case studies on real-world datasets across different domains. UniTraX allows more queries than previous differentially private data analytics systems at moderate runtime overheads.
As the complexity of embedded systems continuously rises, their development becomes more and more challenging. One technique to cope with this complexity is the employment of virtual prototypes. The virtual prototypes are intended to represent the embedded system’s properties on different levels of detail like register transfer level or transaction level. Virtual prototypes can be used for different tasks throughout the development process. They can act as executable specification, can be used for architecture exploration, can ease system integration, and allow for pre- and post-silicon software development and verification. The optimization objectives for virtual prototypes and their creation process are manifold. Finding an appropriate trade-off between the simulation accuracy, the simulation performance, and the implementation effort is a major challenge, as these requirements are contradictory.
In this work, two new and complementary techniques for the efficient creation of accurate and high-performance SystemC based virtual prototypes are proposed: Advanced Temporal Decoupling (ATD) and Transparent Transaction Level Modeling (TTLM). The suitability for industrial environments is assured by the employment of common standards like SystemC TLM-2.0 and IP-XACT.
Advanced Temporal Decoupling enhances the simulation accuracy while retaining high simulation performance by allowing for cycle accurate simulation in the context of SystemC TLM-2.0 temporal decoupling. This is achieved by exploiting the local time warp arising in SystemC TLM-2.0 temporal decoupled models to support the computation of resource contention effects. In ATD, accesses to shared resource are managed by Temporal Decoupled Semaphores (TDSems) which are integrated into the modeled shared resources. The set of TDSems assures the correct execution order of shared resource accesses and incorporates timing effects resulting from shared resource access execution and resource conflicts. This is done by dynamically varying the data granularity of resource accesses based on information gathered from the local time warp. ATD facilitates modeling of a wide range of resource and resource access properties like preemptable and non-preemptable accesses, synchronous and asynchronous accesses, multiport resources, dynamic access priorities, interacting and cascaded resources, and user specified schedulers prioritizing simultaneous resource accesses.
Transparent Transaction Level Modeling focuses on the efficient creation of virtual prototypes by reducing the implementation effort and consists of a library and a code generator. The TTLM library adds a layer of convenience functions to ATD comprising various application programming interfaces for inter module communication, virtual prototype configuration and run time information extraction. The TTLM generator is used to automatically generate the structural code of the virtual prototype from the formal hardware specification language IP-XACT.
The applicability and benefits of the presented techniques are demonstrated using an image processing centric automotive application. Compared to an existing cycle accurate SystemC model, the implementation effort can be reduced by approximately 50% using TTLM. Applying ATD, the simulation performance can be increased by a factor of up to five while retaining cycle accuracy.
Towards standardized operating procedures for eDNA-based monitoring of marine coastal ecosystems
(2022)
Marine coastal ecosystems are exposed to a variety of anthropogenic impacts, which
often manifest themselves in the pollution of the surrounding ecosystem. Especially on
densely populated coasts or in regions heavily used for aquaculture, changes in the natural
marine habitat can be observed. In order to protect nature and thus its ecosystem services
for humans, more and more environmental protection laws are coming into force.
Exemplary, operators of facilities known to contribute to pollution are obliged to regularly
monitor the condition of the surrounding environment. The purpose of such so-called
compliance monitoring is to determine whether the prescribed regulations are being
followed. The traditional routine involves sampling by ship, during which sediment
samples are taken from the seabed below the aquaculture cages and all macrofauna
organisms found, such as mussels or worms, are taxonomically determined and quantified
by experts. Based on the community of organisms the ecological status of the sample can
then be inferred. Since this method is very labor- and time-consuming, a reorientation of
the scientific community towards alternative monitoring methods is currently taking place.
A bacteria-based eDNA (environmental DNA) metabarcoding system in particular has
proven to be a suitable monitoring tool. With this molecular method, the composition of
the benthic bacterial community is determined using high-throughput sequencing. The
great advantage of this method is that bacteria, due to their short generation times, react
rapidly to various environmental influences. The composition of this community can then
be used to infer the ecological status of the sample under investigation via sequencing
without the need for laborious enumeration and identification of organisms. Additionally,
sequencing costs are more and more decreasing, proposing eDNA metabarcoding-based
monitoring as a faster and cheaper alternative to traditional monitoring. In order to
implement the method in legislation in the long term, standard protocols need to be
developed. Once these are sufficiently validated, the novel methodology can be
incorporated into regulations to support or even replace traditional monitoring. However,
some steps of the eDNA metabarcoding method, from sampling to ecosystem assessment,
are not yet sufficiently standardized, which is why the development of this work was
necessary. Since there is no consensus in the scientific community on (i) the preservation of
environmental samples during transport, (ii) the reproducibility of ecosystem assessment
among different laboratories, (iii) the most appropriate bioinformatic method for ecosystem
assessment, and (iv) the minimum sequencing depth required to determine ecosystem
status, these sub-steps were investigated. It was found that the most common methods
currently used to preserve samples during transport had no discernible effect on the final
ecosystem assessment. Furthermore, sample processing in independent laboratories
allowed the same ecological interpretations based on the bacterial community, which
resulted in concordant ecosystem assessments among laboratories. This indicates the
overall reproducibility of the eDNA metabarcoding-based method, thus enabling its
implementation in standard protocols. Furthermore, it was shown that corresponding
ecosystem assessments can be obtained with the currently used methods for determining
ecological status based on eDNA data. Critical to predictive accuracy is not the method
itself, but a sufficient number of samples that accounts for the natural spatial and temporal
variability of bacterial communities. It was demonstrated that a very shallow sequencing
depth per sample can be sufficient to use machine learning to prediction the ecological
status of the environmental sample. The quality of this classifications did not depend on
the sequencing depth as assumed but was determined by the separability of individual
categories. The results and recommendations of this work contribute directly to the
standardization of ecological assessment of nearshore marine ecosystems. By establishing
these standard protocols, it will be possible to integrate the eDNA metabarcoding-based
method for monitoring compliance of coastal marine ecosystems into legislative
regulations in the future.
Interactive visualization of large structured and unstructured data sets is a permanent challenge for scientific visualization. Large data sets are for example created by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) finite element method (FEM), and computer aided design (CAD). For visualizing those data sets not only accelerated rasterization by means of using specialized hardware i.e. graphics cards is of interest, but also ray casting, as it is perfectly suited for scientific visualization. Ray casting does not only support many rendering modes (e.g., opaque rendering, semi transparent rendering, iso surface rendering, maximum intensity projection, x-ray, absorption emitter model, ...) for which it allows the creation of high quality images, but it also supports many primitives (e.g., not only triangles but also spheres, curved iso surfaces, NURBS, implicit functions, ...). It furthermore scales basically linear to the amount of processor cores used and - this makes it highly interesting for the visualization of large data sets - it scales for static scenes sublinear to data size. Interactive ray casting is currently not widely used within the scientifc visualization community. This is mainly based on historical reasons, as just a few years ago no applicable interactive ray casters for commodity hardware did exist. Interactive scientific visualization has only been possible by using graphics cards or specialized and/or expensive hardware. The goal of this work is to broaden the possibilies for interactive scientific visualization, by showing that interactive CPU based ray casting is today feasible on commodity hardware and that it may efficiently be used together with GPU based rasterization. In this thesis it is first shown that interactive CPU based ray casters may efficiently be integrated into already existing OpenGL frameworks. This is achieved through an OpenGL friendly interface that supports multiple threads and single instruction multiple data (SIMD) operations. For the visualization of rectilinear (and not necessarily cartesian) grids are new implicit kd-trees introduced. They have fast construction times, low memory requirements, and allow ontoday's commodity desktop machines interactive iso surface ray tracing and maximum intensity projection of large scalar fields. A new interactive SIMD ray tracing technique for large tetrahedral meshes is introduced. It is very portable and general and is therefore suited for portation upon different (future) hardware and for usage upon several applications. The thesis ends with a real life commercial application which shows that CPU-based ray casting has already reached the state where it may outperform GPU-based rasterization for scientific visualization.
The generally unsupervised nature of autoencoder models implies that the main training metric is formulated as the error between input images and their corresponding reconstructions. Different reconstruction loss variations and latent space regularization have been shown to improve model performances depending on the tasks to solve and to induce new desirable properties like disentanglement. Nevertheless, measuring the success in, or enforcing properties by, the input pixel space is a challenging endeavor. In this work, we want to make more efficient use of the available data and provide design choices to be considered in the recording or generation of future datasets to implicitly induce desirable properties during training. To this end, we propose a new sampling technique which matches semantically important parts of the image while randomizing the other parts, leading to salient feature extraction and a neglection of unimportant details. Further, we propose to recursively apply a previously trained autoencoder model, which can then be interpreted as a dynamical system with desirable properties for generalization and uncertainty estimation.
The proposed methods can be combined with any existing reconstruction loss. We give a detailed analysis of the resulting properties on various datasets and show improvements on several computer vision tasks: image and illumination normalization, invariances, synthetic to real generalization, uncertainty estimation and improved classification accuracy by means of simple classifiers in the latent space.
These investigations are adopted in the automotive application of vehicle interior rear seat occupant classification. For the latter, we release a synthetic dataset with several fine-grained extensions such that all the aforementioned topics can be investigated in isolation, or together, in a single application environment. We provide quantitative evidence that machine learning, and in particular deep learning methods cannot readily be used in industrial applications when only a limited amount of variation is available for training. The latter can, however, often be the case because of constraints enforced by the application to be considered and financial limitations.
Mechanical ventilation of patients with severe lung injury is an important clinical treatment to ensure proper lung oxygenation and to mitigate the extent of collapsed lung regions. While current imaging technologies such as Computed Tomography (CT) and chest X-ray allow for a thorough inspection of the thorax, they are limited to static pictures and exhibit several disadvantages, including exposure to ionizing radiation and high cost. Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a novel method to determine functional processes inside the thorax such as lung ventilation and cardiac activity. EIT reconstructs the internal electrical conductivity distribution within the thorax from voltage measurements on the body surface. Conductivity changes correlate with important clinical parameters such as lung volume and perfusion. Current EIT systems and algorithms use simplified or generalized thorax models to solve the reconstruction problem, which reduce image quality and anatomical significance. In this thesis, the development of a clinically relevant workflow to compute sophisticated three-dimensional thorax models from patient-specific CT data is described. The method allows medical experts to generate a multi-material segmentation in an interactive and fast way, while a volumetric mesh is computed automatically from the segmentation. The significantly improved image quality and anatomical precision of EIT images reconstructed with these 3D models is reported, and the impact on clinical applicability is discussed. In addition, three projects concerning quantitative CT (qCT) measurements and multi-modal 3D visualization are presented, which demonstrate the importance and productivity of interdisciplinary research groups including computer scientists and medical experts. The results presented in this thesis contribute significantly to clinical research efforts to pave the way towards improved patient-specific treatments of lung injury using EIT and qCT.
Towards PACE-CAD Systems
(2022)
Despite phenomenal advancements in the availability of medical image datasets and the development of modern classification algorithms, Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) has had limited practical exposure in the real-world clinical workflow. This is primarily because of the inherently demanding and sensitive nature of medical diagnosis that can have far-reaching and serious repercussions in case of misdiagnosis. In this work, a paradigm called PACE (Pragmatic, Accurate, Confident, & Explainable) is presented as a set of some of must-have features for any CAD. Diagnosis of glaucoma using Retinal Fundus Images (RFIs) is taken as the primary use case for development of various methods that may enrich an ordinary CAD system with PACE. However, depending on specific requirements for different methods, other application areas in ophthalmology and dermatology have also been explored.
Pragmatic CAD systems refer to a solution that can perform reliably in day-to-day clinical setup. In this research two, of possibly many, aspects of a pragmatic CAD are addressed. Firstly, observing that the existing medical image datasets are small and not representative of images taken in the real-world, a large RFI dataset for glaucoma detection is curated and published. Secondly, realising that a salient attribute of a reliable and pragmatic CAD is its ability to perform in a range of clinically relevant scenarios, classification of 622 unique cutaneous diseases in one of the largest publicly available datasets of skin lesions is successfully performed.
Accuracy is one of the most essential metrics of any CAD system's performance. Domain knowledge relevant to three types of diseases, namely glaucoma, Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), and skin lesions, is industriously utilised in an attempt to improve the accuracy. For glaucoma, a two-stage framework for automatic Optic Disc (OD) localisation and glaucoma detection is developed, which marked new state-of-the-art for glaucoma detection and OD localisation. To identify DR, a model is proposed that combines coarse-grained classifiers with fine-grained classifiers and grades the disease in four stages with respect to severity. Lastly, different methods of modelling and incorporating metadata are also examined and their effect on a model's classification performance is studied.
Confidence in diagnosing a disease is equally important as the diagnosis itself. One of the biggest reasons hampering the successful deployment of CAD in the real-world is that medical diagnosis cannot be readily decided based on an algorithm's output. Therefore, a hybrid CNN architecture is proposed with the convolutional feature extractor trained using point estimates and a dense classifier trained using Bayesian estimates. Evaluation on 13 publicly available datasets shows the superiority of this method in terms of classification accuracy and also provides an estimate of uncertainty for every prediction.
Explainability of AI-driven algorithms has become a legal requirement after Europe’s General Data Protection Regulations came into effect. This research presents a framework for easy-to-understand textual explanations of skin lesion diagnosis. The framework is called ExAID (Explainable AI for Dermatology) and relies upon two fundamental modules. The first module uses any deep skin lesion classifier and performs detailed analysis on its latent space to map human-understandable disease-related concepts to the latent representation learnt by the deep model. The second module proposes Concept Localisation Maps, which extend Concept Activation Vectors by locating significant regions corresponding to a learned concept in the latent space of a trained image classifier.
This thesis probes many viable solutions to equip a CAD system with PACE. However, it is noted that some of these methods require specific attributes in datasets and, therefore, not all methods may be applied on a single dataset. Regardless, this work anticipates that consolidating PACE into a CAD system can not only increase the confidence of medical practitioners in such tools but also serve as a stepping stone for the further development of AI-driven technologies in healthcare.
With the burgeoning computing power available, multiscale modelling and simulation has these days become increasingly capable of capturing the details of physical processes on different scales. The mechanical behavior of solids is oftentimes the result of interaction between multiple spatial and temporal scales at different levels and hence it is a typical phenomena of interest exhibiting multiscale characteristic. At the most basic level, properties of solids can be attributed to atomic interactions and crystal structure that can be described on nano scale. Mechanical properties at the macro scale are modeled using continuum mechanics for which we mention stresses and strains. Continuum models, however they offer an efficient way of studying material properties they are not accurate enough and lack microstructural information behind the microscopic mechanics that cause the material to behave in a way it does. Atomistic models are concerned with phenomenon at the level of lattice thereby allowing investigation of detailed crystalline and defect structures, and yet the length scales of interest are inevitably far beyond the reach of full atomistic computation and is rohibitively expensive. This makes it necessary the need for multiscale models. The bottom line and a possible avenue to this end is, coupling different length scales, the continuum and the atomistics in accordance with standard procedures. This is done by recourse to the Cauchy-Born rule and in so doing, we aim at a model that is efficient and reasonably accurate in mimicking physical behaviors observed in nature or laboratory. In this work, we focus on concurrent coupling based on energetic formulations that links the continuum to atomistics. At the atomic scale, we describe deformation of the solid by the displaced positions of atoms that make up the solid and at the continuum level deformation of the solid is described by the displacement field that minimize the total energy. In the coupled model, continuum-atomistic, a continuum formulation is retained as the overall framework of the problem and the atomistic feature is introduced by way of constitutive description, with the Cauchy-Born rule establishing the point of contact. The entire formulation is made in the framework of nonlinear elasticity and all the simulations are carried out within the confines of quasistatic settings. The model gives direct account to measurable features of microstructures developed by crystals through sequential lamination.
The rising demand for machine learning (ML) models has become a growing concern for stakeholders who depend on automatic decisions. In today's world, black-box solutions (in particular deep neural networks) are being continuously implemented for more and more high-stake scenarios like medical diagnosis or autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately, when these opaque models make predictions that do not align with our expectations, finding a valid justification is simply not possible.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged in response to our need for finding reasons that justify what a machine sees, but we don't. However, contributions in this field are mostly centered around local structures such as individual neurons or single input samples. Global characteristics that govern the behavior of a model are still poorly understood or have not been explored yet. An aggravating factor is the lack of a standard terminology to contextualize and compare contributions in this field. Such lack of consensus is depriving the ML community from ultimately moving away from black-boxes, and start creating systematic methods to design models that are interpretable by design.
So, what are the global patterns that govern the behavior of modern neural networks, and what can we do to make these models more interpretable from the start?
This thesis delves into both issues, unveiling patterns about existing models, and establishing strategies that lead to more interpretable architectures. These include biases coming from imbalanced datasets, quantification of model capacity, and robustness against adversarial attacks. When looking for new models that are interpretable by design, this work proposes a strategy to add more structure to neural networks, based on auxiliary tasks that are semantically related to the main objective. This strategy is the result of applying a novel theoretical framework proposed as part of this work. The XAI framework is meant to contextualize and compare contributions in XAI by providing actionable definitions for terms like "explanation" and "interpretation."
Altogether, these contributions address dire demands for understanding more about the global behavior of modern deep neural networks. More importantly, they can be used as a blueprint for designing novel, and more interpretable architectures. By tackling issues from the present and the future of XAI, results from this work are a firm step towards more interpretable models for computer vision.
Visualization is vital to the scientific discovery process.
An interactive high-fidelity rendering provides accelerated insight into complex structures, models and relationships.
However, the efficient mapping of visualization tasks to high performance architectures is often difficult, being subject to a challenging mixture of hardware and software architectural complexities in combination with domain-specific hurdles.
These difficulties are often exacerbated on heterogeneous architectures.
In this thesis, a variety of ray casting-based techniques are developed and investigated with respect to a more efficient usage of heterogeneous HPC systems for distributed visualization, addressing challenges in mesh-free rendering, in-situ compression, task-based workload formulation, and remote visualization at large scale.
A novel direct raytracing scheme for on-the-fly free surface reconstruction of particle-based simulations using an extended anisoptropic kernel model is investigated on different state-of-the-art cluster setups.
The versatile system renders up to 170 million particles on 32 distributed compute nodes at close to interactive frame rates at 4K resolution with ambient occlusion.
To address the widening gap between high computational throughput and prohibitively slow I/O subsystems, in situ topological contour tree analysis is combined with a compact image-based data representation to provide an effective and easy-to-control trade-off between storage overhead and visualization fidelity.
Experiments show significant reductions in storage requirements, while preserving flexibility for exploration and analysis.
Driven by an increasingly heterogeneous system landscape, a flexible distributed direct volume rendering and hybrid compositing framework is presented.
Based on a task-based dynamic runtime environment, it enables adaptable performance-oriented deployment on various platform configurations.
Comprehensive benchmarks with respect to task granularity and scaling are conducted to verify the characteristics and potential of the novel task-based system design.
A core challenge of HPC visualization is the physical separation of visualization resources and end-users.
Using more tiles than previously thought reasonable, a distributed, low-latency multi-tile streaming system is demonstrated, being able to sustain a stable 80 Hz when streaming up to 256 synchronized 3840x2160 tiles and achieve 365 Hz at 3840x2160 for sort-first compositing over the internet, thereby enabling lightweight visualization clients and leaving all the heavy lifting to the remote supercomputer.
Rapid growth in sensors and sensor technology introduces variety of products to the market. The increasing number of available sensor concepts and implementations demands more versatile sensor electronics and signal conditioning. Nowadays signal conditioning for the available spectrum of sensors is becoming more and more challenging. Moreover, developing a sensor signal conditioning ASIC is a function of cost, area, and robustness to maintain signal integrity. Field programmable analog approaches and the recent evolvable hardware approaches offer partial solution for advanced compensation as well as for rapid prototyping. The recent research field of evolutionary concepts focuses predominantly on digital and is at its advancement stage in analog domain. Thus, the main research goal is to combine the ever increasing industrial demand for sensor signal conditioning with evolutionary concepts and dynamically reconfigurable matched analog arrays implemented in main stream Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors (CMOS) technologies to yield an intelligent and smart sensor system with acceptable fault tolerance and the so called self-x features, such as self-monitoring, self-repairing and self-trimming. For this aim, the work suggests and progresses towards a novel, time continuous and dynamically reconfigurable signal conditioning hardware platform suitable to support variety of sensors. The state-of-the-art has been investigated with regard to existing programmable/reconfigurable analog devices and the common industrial application scenario and circuits, in particular including resource and sizing analysis for proper motivation of design decisions. The pursued intermediate granular level approach called as Field Programmable Medium-granular mixed signal Array (FPMA) offers flexibility, trimming and rapid prototyping capabilities. The proposed approach targets at the investigation of industrial applicability of evolvable hardware concepts and to merge it with reconfigurable or programmable analog concepts, and industrial electronics standards and needs for next generation robust and flexible sensor systems. The devised programmable sensor signal conditioning test chips, namely FPMA1/FPMA2, designed in 0.35 µm (C35B4) Austriamicrosystems, can be used as a single instance, off the shelf chip at the PCB level for conditioning or in the loop with dedicated software to inherit the aspired self-x features. The use of such self–x sensor system carries the promise of improved flexibility, better accuracy and reduced vulnerability to manufacturing deviations and drift. An embedded system, namely PHYTEC miniMODUL-515C was used to program and characterize the mixed-signal test chips in various feedback arrangements to answer some of the questions raised by the research goals. Wide range of established analog circuits, ranging from single output to fully differential amplifiers, was investigated at different hierarchical levels to realize circuits like instrumentation amplifier and filters. A more extensive design issues based on low-power like for e.g., sub-threshold design were investigated and a novel soft sleep mode idea was proposed. The bandwidth limitations observed in the state of the art fine granular approaches were enhanced by the proposed intermediate granular approach. The so designed sensor signal conditioning instrumentation amplifier was then compared to the commercially available products in the market like LT 1167, INA 125 and AD 8250. In an adaptive prototype, evolutionary approaches, in particular based on particle swarm optimization with multi-objectives, were just deployed to all the test samples of FPMA1/FMPA2 (15 each) to exhibit self-x properties and to recover from manufacturing variations and drift. The variations observed in the performance of the test samples were compensated through reconfiguration for the desired specification.
To support scientific work with large and complex data the field of scientific visualization emerged in computer science and produces images through computational analysis of the data. Frameworks for combination of different analysis and visualization modules allow the user to create flexible pipelines for this purpose and set the standard for interactive scientific visualization used by domain scientists.
Existing frameworks employ a thread-parallel message-passing approach to parallel and distributed scalability, leaving the field of scientific visualization in high performance computing to specialized ad-hoc implementations. The task-parallel programming paradigm proves promising to improve scalability and portability in high performance computing implementations and thus, this thesis aims towards the creation of a framework for distributed, task-based visualization modules and pipelines.
The major contribution of the thesis is the establishment of modules for Merge Tree construction and (based on the former) topological simplification. Such modules already form a necessary first step for most visualization pipelines and can be expected to increase in importance for larger and more complex data produced and/or analysed by high performance computing.
To create a task-parallel, distributed Merge Tree construction module the construction process has to be completely revised. We derive a novel property of Merge Tree saddles and introduce a novel task-parallel, distributed Merge Tree construction method that has both good performance and scalability. This forms the basis for a module for topological simplification which we extend by introducing novel alternative simplification parameters that aim to reduce the importance of prior domain knowledge to increase flexibility in typical high performance computing scenarios.
Both modules lay the groundwork for continuative analysis and visualization steps and form a fundamental step towards an extensive task-parallel visualization pipeline framework for high performance computing.
Recommender systems recommend items (e.g., movies, products, books) to users. In this thesis, we proposed two comprehensive and cluster-induced recommendation-based methods: Orthogonal Inductive Matrix Completion (OMIC) and Burst-induced Multi-armed Bandit (BMAB). Given the presence of side information, the first method is categorized as context-aware. OMIC is the first matrix completion method to approach the problem of incorporating biases, side information terms and a pure low-rank term into a single flexible framework with a well-principled optimization procedure. The second method, BMAB, is context-free. That is, it does not require any side data about users or items. Unlike previous context-free multi-armed bandit approaches, our method considers the temporal dynamics of human communication on the web and treats the problem in a continuous time setting. We built our models' assumptions under solid theoretical foundations. For OMIC, we provided theoretical guarantees in the form of generalization bounds by considering the distribution-free case: no assumptions about the sampling distribution are made. Additionally, we conducted a theoretical analysis of community side information when the sampling distribution is known and an adjusted nuclear norm regularization is applied. We showed that our method requires just a few entries to accurately recover the ratings matrix if the structure of the ground truth closely matches the cluster side information. For BMAB, we provided regret guarantees under mild conditions that demonstrate how the system's stability affects the expected reward. Furthermore, we conducted extensive experiments to validate our proposed methodologies. In a controlled environment, we implemented synthetic data generation techniques capable of replicating the domains for which OMIC and BMAB were designed. As a result, we were able to analyze our algorithms' performance across a broad spectrum of ground truth regimes. Finally, we replicated a real-world scenario by utilizing well-established recommender datasets. After comparing our approaches to several baselines, we observe that they achieved state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy. Apart from being highly accurate, these methods improve interpretability by describing and quantifying features of the datasets they characterize.
Towards A Non-tracking Web
(2016)
Today, many publishers (e.g., websites, mobile application developers) commonly use third-party analytics services and social widgets. Unfortunately, this scheme allows these third parties to track individual users across the web, creating privacy concerns and leading to reactions to prevent tracking via blocking, legislation and standards. While improving user privacy, these efforts do not consider the functionality third-party tracking enables publishers to use: to obtain aggregate statistics about their users and increase their exposure to other users via online social networks. Simply preventing third-party tracking without replacing the functionality it provides cannot be a viable solution; leaving publishers without essential services will hurt the sustainability of the entire ecosystem.
In this thesis, we present alternative approaches to bridge this gap between privacy for users and functionality for publishers and other entities. We first propose a general and interaction-based third-party cookie policy that prevents third-party tracking via cookies, yet enables social networking features for users when wanted, and does not interfere with non-tracking services for analytics and advertisements. We then present a system that enables publishers to obtain rich web analytics information (e.g., user demographics, other sites visited) without tracking the users across the web. While this system requires no new organizational players and is practical to deploy, it necessitates the publishers to pre-define answer values for the queries, which may not be feasible for many analytics scenarios (e.g., search phrases used, free-text photo labels). Our second system complements the first system by enabling publishers to discover previously unknown string values to be used as potential answers in a privacy-preserving fashion and with low computation overhead for clients as well as servers. These systems suggest that it is possible to provide non-tracking services with (at least) the same functionality as today’s tracking services.
Topology-Based Characterization and Visual Analysis of Feature Evolution in Large-Scale Simulations
(2019)
This manuscript presents a topology-based analysis and visualization framework that enables the effective exploration of feature evolution in large-scale simulations. Such simulations pose additional challenges to the already complex task of feature tracking and visualization, since the vast number of features and the size of the simulation data make it infeasible to naively identify, track, analyze, render, store, and interact with data. The presented methodology addresses these issues via three core contributions. First, the manuscript defines a novel topological abstraction, called the Nested Tracking Graph (NTG), that records the temporal evolution of features that exhibit a nesting hierarchy, such as superlevel set components for multiple levels, or filtered features across multiple thresholds. In contrast to common tracking graphs that are only capable of describing feature evolution at one hierarchy level, NTGs effectively summarize their evolution across all hierarchy levels in one compact visualization. The second core contribution is a view-approximation oriented image database generation approach (VOIDGA) that stores, at simulation runtime, a reduced set of feature images. Instead of storing the features themselves---which is often infeasable due to bandwidth constraints---the images of these databases can be used to approximate the depicted features from any view angle within an acceptable visual error, which requires far less disk space and only introduces a neglectable overhead. The final core contribution combines these approaches into a methodology that stores in situ the least amount of information necessary to support flexible post hoc analysis utilizing NTGs and view approximation techniques.
The purpose of Exploration in Oil Industry is to "discover" an oil-containing geological formation from exploration data. In the context of this PhD project this oil-containing geological formation plays the role of a geometrical object, which may have any shape. The exploration data may be viewed as a "cloud of points", that is a finite set of points, related to the geological formation surveyed in the exploration experiment. Extensions of topological methodologies, such as homology, to point clouds are helpful in studying them qualitatively and capable of resolving the underlying structure of a data set. Estimation of topological invariants of the data space is a good basis for asserting the global features of the simplicial model of the data. For instance the basic statistical idea, clustering, are correspond to dimension of the zero homology group of the data. A statistics of Betti numbers can provide us with another connectivity information. In this work represented a method for topological feature analysis of exploration data on the base of so called persistent homology. Loosely, this is the homology of a growing space that captures the lifetimes of topological attributes in a multiset of intervals called a barcode. Constructions from algebraic topology empowers to transform the data, to distillate it into some persistent features, and to understand then how it is organized on a large scale or at least to obtain a low-dimensional information which can point to areas of interest. The algorithm for computing of the persistent Betti numbers via barcode is realized in the computer algebra system "Singular" in the scope of the work.
To increase situational awareness of the crane operator, the aim of this thesis is to develop a vision-based deep learning object detection from crane load-view using an adaptive perception in the construction area. Conventional worker detection methods are based on simple shape or color features from the worker's appearances. Nonetheless, these methods can fail to recognize the workers who do not wear the protective gears. To find out an image representation of the object from the top view manually or handcrafted feature is crucial. We, therefore, employed deep learning methods to automatically learn those features.
To yield optimal results, deep learning methods require mass amount of data.
Due to the data deficit especially in the construction domain, we developed the photorealistic world to create the data in addition to our samples collected from the real construction area. The simulated platform does not benefit only from diverse data types, but also concurrent research development which speeds up the pipeline at a low cost.
Our research findings indicate that the combination of synthetic and real training samples improved the state-of-the-art detector. In line with previous studies to bridge the gap between synthetic and real data, the results of preprocessed synthetic images are substantially better than using the raw data by approximately 10%.
Finding the right deep learning model for load-view detection is challenging.
By investigating our training data, it becomes evident that the majority of bounding box sizes are very small with a complex background.
In addition, we gave the priority to speed over accuracy based on the construction safety criteria. Finally, RetinaNet is chosen out of the three primary object detection models.
Nevertheless, the data-driven detection algorithm can fail to handle scale invariance, especially for detectors whose input size is changed in an extremely wide range.
The adaptive zoom feature can enhance the quality of the worker detection.
To avoid further data gathering and extensive retraining, the proposed automatic zoom method of the load-view crane camera supports the deep learning algorithm, specifically in the high scale variant problem. The finite state machine is employed for control strategies to adapt the zoom level to cope not only with inconsistent detection but also abrupt camera movement during lifting operation. Consequently, the detector is able to detect a small size object by smooth continuous zoom control without additional training.
The adaptive zoom control not only enhances the performance of the top-view object detection but also reduces the interaction of the crane operator with camera system, reducing the risk of fatality during load lifting operation.
Today’s pervasive availability of computing devices enabled with wireless communication and location- or inertial sensing capabilities is unprecedented. The number of smartphones sold worldwide are still growing and increasing numbers of sensor enabled accessories are available which a user can wear in the shoe or at the wrist for fitness tracking, or just temporarily puts on to measure vital signs. Despite this availability of computing and sensing hardware the merit of application seems rather limited regarding the full potential of information inherent to such senor deployments. Most applications build upon a vertical design which encloses a narrowly defined sensor setup and algorithms specifically tailored to suit the application’s purpose. Successful technologies, however, such as the OSI model, which serves as base for internet communication, have used a horizontal design that allows high level communication protocols to be run independently from the actual lower-level protocols and physical medium access. This thesis contributes to a more horizontal design of human activity recognition systems at two stages. First, it introduces an integrated toolchain to facilitate the entire process of building activity recognition systems and to foster sharing and reusing of individual components. At a second stage, a novel method for automatic integration of new sensors to increase a system’s performance is presented and discussed in detail.
The integrated toolchain is built around an efficient toolbox of parametrizable components for interfacing sensor hardware, synchronization and arrangement of data streams, filtering and extraction of features, classification of feature vectors, and interfacing output devices and applications. The toolbox emerged as open-source project through several research projects and is actively used by research groups. Furthermore, the toolchain supports recording, monitoring, annotation, and sharing of large multi-modal data sets for activity recognition through a set of integrated software tools and a web-enabled database.
The method for automatically integrating a new sensor into an existing system is, at its core, a variation of well-established principles of semi-supervised learning: (1) unsupervised clustering to discover structure in data, (2) assumption that cluster membership is correlated with class membership, and (3) obtaining at a small number of labeled data points for each cluster, from which the cluster labels are inferred. In most semi-supervised approaches, however, the labels are the ground truth provided by the user. By contrast, the approach presented in this thesis uses a classifier trained on an N-dimensional feature space (old classifier) to provide labels for a few points in an (N+1)-dimensional feature space which are used to generate a new, (N+1)-dimensional classifier. The different factors that make a distribution difficult to handle are discussed, a detailed description of heuristics designed to mitigate the influences of such factors is provided, and a detailed evaluation on a set of over 3000 sensor combinations from 3 multi-user experiments that have been used by a variety of previous studies of different activity recognition methods is presented.
Today, information systems are often distributed to achieve high availability and low latency.
These systems can be realized by building on a highly available database to manage the distribution of data.
However, it is well known that high availability and low latency are not compatible with strong consistency guarantees.
For application developers, the lack of strong consistency on the database layer can make it difficult to reason about their programs and ensure that applications work as intended.
We address this problem from the perspective of formal verification.
We present a specification technique, which allows specifying functional properties of the application.
In addition to data invariants, we support history properties.
These let us express relations between events, including invocations of the application API and operations on the database.
To address the verification problem, we have developed a proof technique that handles concurrency using invariants and thereby reduces the problem to sequential verification.
The underlying system semantics, technique and its soundness proof are all formalized in the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL.
Additionally, we have developed a tool named Repliss which uses the proof technique to enable partially automated verification and testing of applications.
For verification, Repliss generates verification conditions via symbolic execution and then uses an SMT solver to discharge them.
Ethernet has become an established communication technology in industrial automation. This was possible thanks to the tremendous technological advances and enhancements of Ethernet such as increasing the link-speed, integrating the full-duplex transmission and the use of switches. However these enhancements were still not enough for certain high deterministic industrial applications such as motion control, which requires cycle time below one millisecond and jitter or delay deviation below one microsecond. To meet these high timing requirements, machine and plant manufacturers had to extend the standard Ethernet with real-time capability. As a result, vendor-specific and non-IEEE standard-compliant "Industrial Ethernet" (IE) solutions have emerged.
The IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Task Group specifies new IEEE-conformant functionalities and mechanisms to enable the determinism missing from Ethernet. Standard-compliant systems are very attractive to the industry because they guarantee investment security and sustainable solutions. TSN is considered therefore to be an opportunity to increase the performance of established Industrial-Ethernet systems and to move forward to Industry 4.0, which require standard mechanisms.
The challenge remains, however, for the Industrial Ethernet organizations to combine their protocols with the TSN standards without running the risk of creating incompatible technologies. TSN specifies 9 standards and enhancements that handle multiple communication aspects. In this thesis, the evaluation of the use of TSN in industrial real-time communication is restricted to four deterministic standards: IEEE802.1AS-Rev, IEEE802.1Qbu IEEE802.3br and IEEE802.1Qbv. The specification of these TSN sub-standards was finished at an early research stage of the thesis and hardware prototypes were available.
Integrating TSN into the Industrial-Ethernet protocols is considered a substantial strategical challenge for the industry. The benefits, limits and risks are too complex to estimate without a thorough investigation. The large number of Standard enhancements makes it hard to select the required/appropriate functionalities.
In order to cover all real-time classes in the automation [9], four established Industrial-Ethernet protocols have been selected for evaluation and combination with TSN as well as other performance relevant communication features.
The objectives of this thesis are to
(1) Provide theoretical, simulation and experimental evaluation-methodologies for the timing performance analysis of the deterministic TSN-standards mentioned above. Multiple test-plans are specified to evaluate the performance and compatibility of early version TSN-prototypes from different providers.
(2) Investigate multiple approaches and deduce migration strategies to integrate these features into the established Industrial-Ethernet protocols: Sercos III, Profinet IRT, Profinet RT and Ethernet/IP. A scenario of coexistence of time-critical traffic with other traffic in a TSN-network proves that the timing performance for highly deterministic applications, e.g. motion-control, can only be guaranteed by the TSN scheduling algorithm IEEE802.1Qbv.
Based on a requirements survey of highly deterministic industrial applications, multiple network scenarios and experiments are presented. The results are summarized into two case studies. The first case study shows that TSN alone is not enough to meet these requirements. The second case study investigates the benefits of additional mechanisms (Gigabit link-speed, minimum cycle time modeling, frame forwarding mechanisms, frame structure, topology migration, etc.) in combination with the TSN features. An implementation prototype of the proposed system and a simulation case study are used for the evaluation of the approach. The prototype is used for the evaluation and validation of the simulation model. Due to given scalability constraints of the prototype (no cut-through functionalities, limited number of TSN-prototypes, etc…), a realistic simulation model, using the network simulation tool OMNEST / OMNeT++, is conducted.
The obtained evaluation results show that a minimum cycle time ≤1 ms and a maximum jitter ≤1 μs can be achieved with the presented approaches.
During our daily lives, we are confronted with vast amounts of data, the processing of which can dramatically influence our lives, both positively and negatively. The enormous amount of data (images, texts, tables, and time series), its variety and possible applications are not always obvious. Due to advancements in the internet of things (IoT), there exist billions of sensors that produce time series which can be found everywhere, whether in medicine, the financial sector or the agricultural economy. This incredible amount of time series data has many hidden features which are useful for industry as well as for daily use, e.g. improving the cancer prediction can save real human lives. Recently, several deep learning methods have been proposed for analyzing this time series data. However, due to their black box nature, their applicability is limited in critical sectors like medicine, finance, and communication. In addition, it is now a compulsion as per artificial intelligence (AI) Act and per General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect any sensitive data and provide explanations in safety-critical domains. To enable use of DNNs in a broader domain scope, this thesis presents a framework for privacy-preserved and interpretable time series analysis. TimeFrame consists of four main components, namely, post-hoc interpretability, intrinsic interpretability, direct privacy, and indirect privacy. Interpretability is indispensable to avoid damaging people or the infrastructure. In the past years, the development mostly focused on image data, which prevented the full potential of DNNs in time series processing from being exploited. To overcome this limitation, TimeFrame introduces five (Time to Focus, TSViz, TimeREISE, TSInsight, Data Lens) novel post-hoc and two (PatchX, P2ExNet) novel intrinsic interpretability components. TimeFrame addresses multiple perspectives such as attribution, compression, visualization, influence, prototyping, and hierarchical splitting. Compared to existing methods, the components show better explanations, robustness, and scalability. Another crucial factor is the privacy when dealing with sensitive data and deep learning. In this context, TimeFrame introduces two (PPML, PPML x XAI) components for direct and one (From Private to Public) component for indirect privacy. These components benchmark privacy approaches, their effect on interpretability, and the synthetic generation of data to overcome privacy concerns. TimeFrame offers a large set of interpretability and privacy components that can be combined and consider numerous different aspects. Furthermore, the novel approaches have shown to consistently outperform twenty existing state-of-the-art methods across up to 20 different datasets. To guarantee the fairness, various metrics were used including performance change, Sensitivity, Infidelity, Continuity, runtime, model dependency, compression rate, and others. This broad set of metrics makes it possible to provide guidelines for a more appropriate use of existing state-of-the-art approaches as well as the novel components included in TimeFrame.
The wireless spectrum is already a scarce good, shared by multiple competing technologies such as Bluetooth, ZigBee and Wi-Fi, and the hunger for traffic is only increasing. Due to the heterogeneity of the existing wireless technologies and the real threat that interference poses to network performance, sophisticated techniques must be developed to ensure acceptable levels of quality of service.
In this thesis, we present a passive channel sensing scheme based on both energy and signal detection, that primarily considers the spectrum occupation of foreign traffic while allowing for additional complementary information such as the signal-to-noise ratio. The resulting channel quality metric is first corrected for the spectrum occupation of internal transmissions and later aggregated with help of a moving average followed by an exponential weighted moving average. This aggregation keeps the metric both sufficiently stable and adaptive to significant changes in channel usage. Moreover, the channel quality metric is made volatility-aware by penalizing qualities proportionally to their downward volatility. This yields a conservative metric and allows to differentiate channels with similar aggregated qualities but different volatility behavior.
Our second main contribution is in the form of a schedule-based channel sensing protocol, in which nodes possess two network interfaces, one for communication and one for channel sensing. Channel sensing schedules are derived from communication schedules, i.e. channel hopping sequences used for communication, with help of a stochastic local search-based heuristic that attempts to minimize channel sensing bias, the channel overlap between both schedules and to maximize overlap fairness. This minimizes the effect of internal transmissions in the resulting channel quality metric, allowing nodes to derive channel quality primarily based on foreign traffic in an unbiased manner.
Finally, we propose and implement a stabilization protocol for keeping nodes in an ad-hoc network tick-synchronized and schedule-consistent w.r.t. a communication schedule. This stabilization protocol makes use of special messages, namely tick frames for synchronization, channel quality reports for sharing local views of channel conditions and schedule reports for disseminating the global communication hopping sequence. The communication schedules are computed by a master node based on an aggregation of local channel quality views and the re-computation of these schedules is triggered by significant changes in channel conditions. The resulting protocol is robust against changes in topology and channel conditions.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der Untersuchung von Absorptionseigenschaften und elektronischer Kurzzeit-Dynamik von organischen Farbstoffmolekülen und supramolekularen Photokatalysatoren in der Gasphase. Dabei wurde erstmals sehr intensiv ein eine relativ unbekannte experimentelle Methode eingesetzt, nämlich die zeitaufgelöste, pump-probe (Anregung-Abfrage) Photofragmentations-Spektroskopie. Die Kombination eines kommerziellen Quadrupol Ionenfallen Massenspektrometers mit einem Femtosekunden Lasersystem erlaubt es die intrinsischen, elektronischen Eigenschaften molekularer, ionischer Systeme abzubilden. Neben Populationsdynamik angeregter Zustände wurden erstmals Schwingungs- und Rotationswellenpaket-Dynamik mit dieser Methode beobachtet und dokumentiert.
Im ersten Teil der Arbeit werden die Ergebnisse der Untersuchungen an einigen ausgewählten Fluoresecein-Derivaten und eines Carbocyanin-Farbstoffes präsentiert. Obwohl diese Modellsysteme zunächst nur dem Zweck dienen sollten die Möglichkeiten des experimentellen Aufbaus zu evaluieren, ergaben die Untersuchungen weiterhin tiefgreifende Einblicke in die elektronische Struktur isolierter organischer Farbstoffe, die bis heute in Literatur nicht dokumentiert worden sind.
Der zweite Teil befasst sich mit der Untersuchung an drei supramolekularen, ionischen Systemen zur photokatalytischen Wasserstofferzeugung. Dabei dienten wieder zwei der Systeme dem Zweck den experimentellen Aufbau zu evaluieren. Neben der elektronischen Populationsdynamik wurde mittels polarisationsabhängiger Messungen weitere Einblicke in den Elektronentransferprozess erhalten – ein Kernpunkt in der Wirkweise supramolekularer Katalysatoren. Die neugewonnen Erkenntnisse wurden schließlich verwendet um einen neuartigen Katalysator zu untersuchen. Dabei stellte sich heraus, dass die Labilität der Ligandensphäre am katalytischen Metallzentrum Untersuchungen am intakten System in Lösung stark beeinträchtigt und somit nur aussagekräftige Ergebnisse mittels einer Gasphasen Methode, einer wie der hier verwendeten, erhalten werden können.
Die experimentellen Ergebnisse werden unterstützt durch quantenchemische Berechnungen von energetischen Minimum-Strukturen, den Strukturen von Übergangszuständen, sowie der Berechnung von Schwingungs- und UV/Vis-Absorptionsspektren mittels (zeitabhängiger) Dichtefunktionaltheorie (DFT & TD-DFT).
Constructing accurate earth models from seismic data is a challenging task. Traditional methods rely on ray based approximations of the wave equation and reach their limit in geologically complex areas. Full waveform inversion (FWI) on the other side seeks to minimize the misfit between modeled and observed data without such approximation.
While superior in accuracy, FWI uses a gradient based iterative scheme that makes it also very computationally expensive. In this thesis we analyse and test an Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI) scheme in order to reduce the costs of the two dimensional time domain algorithm for solving the acoustic wave equation. The ADI scheme can be seen as an intermediate between explicit and implicit finite difference modeling schemes. Compared to full implicit schemes the ADI scheme only requires the solution of much smaller matrices and is thus less computationally demanding. Using ADI we can handle coarser discretization compared to an explicit method. Although order of convergence and CFL conditions for the examined explicit method and ADI scheme are comparable, we observe that the ADI scheme is less prone to dispersion. Furhter, our algorithm is efficiently parallelized with vectorization and threading techniques. In a numerical comparison, we can demonstrate a runtime advantage of the ADI scheme over an explicit method of the same accuracy.
With the modeling in place, we test and compare several inverse schemes in the second part of the thesis. With the goal of avoiding local minima and improving speed of convergence, we use different minimization functions and hierarchical approaches. In several tests, we demonstrate superior results of the L1 norm compared to the L2 norm – especially in the presence of noise. Furthermore we show positive effects for applying three different multiscale approaches to the inverse problem. These methods focus on low frequency, early recording, or far offset during early iterations of the minimization and then proceed iteratively towards the full problem. We achieve best results with the frequency based multiscale scheme, for which we also provide a heuristical method of choosing iteratively increasing frequency bands.
Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the different methods first on the Marmousi model and then on an extract of the 2004 BP model, where we are able to recover both high contrast top salt structures and lower contrast inclusions accurately.
Channel estimation is of great importance in many wireless communication systems, since it influences the overall performance of a system significantly. Especially in multi-user and/or multi-antenna systems, i.e. generally in multi-branch systems, the requirements on channel estimation are very high, since the training signals or so called pilots that are used for channel estimation suffer from multiple access interference. Recently, in the context with such systems more and more attention is paid to concepts for joint channel estimation (JCE) which have the capability to eliminate the multiple access interference and also the interference between the channel coefficients. The performance of JCE can be evaluated in noise limited systems by the SNR degradation and in interference limited systems by the variation coefficient. Theoretical analysis carried out in this thesis verifies that both performance criteria are closely related to the patterns of the pilots used for JCE, no matter the signals are represented in the time domain or in the frequency domain. Optimum pilots like disjoint pilots, Walsh code based pilots or CAZAC code based pilots, whose constructions are described in this thesis, do not show any SNR degradation when being applied to multi-branch systems. It is shown that optimum pilots constructed in the time domain become optimum pilots in the frequency domain after a discrete Fourier transformation. Correspondingly, optimum pilots in the frequency domain become optimum pilots in the time domain after an inverse discrete Fourier transformation. However, even for optimum pilots different variation coefficients are obtained in interference limited systems. Furthermore, especially for OFDM-based transmission schemes the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmit signal is an important decision criteria for choosing the most suitable pilots. CAZAC code based pilots are the only pilots among the regarded pilot constructions that result in a PAPR of 0 dB for the transmit signal that origins in the transmitted pilots. When summarizing the analysis regarding the SNR degradation, the variation coefficient and the PAPR with respect to one single service area and considering the impact due to interference from other adjacent service areas that occur due to a certain choice of the pilots, one can conclude that CAZAC codes are the most suitable pilots for the application in JCE of multi-carrier multi-branch systems, especially in the case if CAZAC codes that origin in different mother codes are assigned to different adjacent service areas. The theoretical results of the thesis are verified by simulation results. The choice of the parameters for the frequency domain or time domain JCE is oriented towards the evaluated implementation complexity. According to the chosen parameterization of the regarded OFDM-based and FMT-based systems it is shown that a frequency domain JCE is the best choice for OFDM and a time domain JCE is the best choice for FMT applying CAZAC codes as pilots. The results of this thesis can be used as a basis for further theoretical research and also for future JCE implementation in wireless systems.
The nondestructive testing of multilayered materials is increasingly applied in
both scientific and industrial fields. In particular, developments in millimeter
wave and terahertz technology open up novel measurement applications, which
benefit from the nonionizing properties of this frequency range. One example is
the noncontact inspection of layer thicknesses. Frequently used measuring and
analysis methods lead to a resolution limit that is determined by the bandwidth
of the setup. This thesis analyzes the reliable evaluation of thinner layer thicknesses
using model-based signal processing.
Formaldehyde is an important intermediate in the chemical industry. In technical processes, formaldehyde is used in aqueous or methanolic solutions. In these, it is bound in oligomers that are formed in reversible reactions. These reactions and also the vapor-liquid equilibria of mixtures containing formaldehyde, water, and methanol have been thoroughly studied in the literature. This is, however, not the case for solid-liquid equilibria of these mixtures, even though the precipitation of solids poses important problems in many technical processes. Therefore, in the present thesis, a fundamental study on the formation of solid phases in the system (formaldehyde + water + methanol) was carried out. Based on the experiments, a physico-chemical model of the solid-liquid equilibrium was developed. Furthermore, also kinetic effects, which are important in practice, were described. The results enable, for the first time, to understand the solid formation in these mixtures, which previously was considered to be hard to predict.
The studies on the solid formation in formaldehyde-containing systems were carried out as a part of a project dealing with the production of poly(oxymethylene) dimethyl ethers (OME). OME are formaldehyde-based synthetic fuels that show cleaner combustion than fossil diesel. Different aspects of the OME production were studied. First, a conceptual design for a OME production process based on dimethyl ether (DME) was carried out based on process simulation. This study revealed that the DME route is principally attractive. However, basic data on the formation of OME from DME were missing, and had to be estimated for the conceptual design study. Therefore, in a second step an experimental study on the formation of OME from DME was carried out. In this reaction, trioxane, a cyclic trimer of formaldehyde is used as a water-free formaldehyde source. Trioxane is currently produced from aqueous formaldehyde solution in energy-intensive processes. Therefore, a new trioxane production process was developed in which trioxane is obtained from a crystallization step. In process simulations, the new process was compared to the best previously available process and was found to be promising.
While OME are excellent synthetic fuels, it is also attractive to use them in blends with hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO), which is available on a large scale. However, blends of OME and HVO that are initially homogenous tend to demix after a while in technical applications. This phenomenon was poorly understood previously. Therefore, in this work, liquid-liquid equilibria in mixtures of individual components of the two fuels in combination with water were systematically studied and a corresponding model was developed.
Thermodynamic Modeling of Poorly Specified Mixtures using NMR Fingerprinting and Machine Learning
(2023)
Poorly specified mixtures, i.e., mixtures of unknown or incompletely known composition,
are common in many fields of process engineering. Dealing with such mixtures in process
design is challenging as their properties cannot be described with classical thermodynamic
models, which require a full specification. As a workaround, pseudo-components
can be introduced, which are generally defined using ad-hoc assumptions. In the present
thesis, a new framework is developed for the thermodynamic modeling of such mixtures
using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments in combination with machine-learning
(ML) methods. In the framework, a characterization of a mixture in terms of
structural groups (“NMR fingerprint”) is obtained by using the ML concept of support
vector classification. Based on the group-specific fingerprint, quantum-chemical descriptors
of the unknown part of the mixture as well as activity coefficients can already be
predicted. Furthermore, a meaningful definition of pseudo-components is achieved by
clustering the structural groups into pseudo-components with the K-medians algorithm
based on their self-diffusion coefficients measured by pulsed-field gradient (PFG) NMR.
It is demonstrated that the characterization of poorly specified mixtures in terms of
pseudo-components can be combined with several thermodynamic group-contribution
methods. The resulting thermodynamic models were applied to various poorly specified
mixtures and used for solving two typical tasks from conceptual fluid separation process
design: the solvent screening for liquid-liquid extraction processes and the simulation
of open evaporation processes. The predictions with the methods developed here show
very good agreement with the results obtained for the fully specified mixtures.
In the present work the modelling and numerical treatment of discontinuities in thermo-mechanical solids is investigated and applied to diverse physical problems. From this topic a structure for this work results, which considers the formulation of thermo-mechanical processes in continua in the first part and which forms the mechanical and thermodynamical framework for the description of discontinuities and interfaces, that is performed in the second part. The representation of the modelling of solid materials bases on the detailed derivation of geometrically nonlinear kinematics, that yields different strain and stress measures for the material and spatial configuration. Accordingly, this results in different formulations of the mechanical and thermodynamical balance equations. On these foundations we firstly derive by means of the concepts of the plasticity theory an elasto-plastic prototype-model, that is extended subsequently. In the centre of interest is the formulation of damage models in consideration of rate-dependent material behaviour. In the next step follows the extension of the isothermal material models to thermo-mechanically coupled problems, whereby also the special case of adiabatic processes is discussed. Within the representation of the different constitutive laws, the importance is attached to their modular structure. Moreover, a detailed discussion of the isothermal and the thermo-mechanically coupled problem with respect to their numerical treatment is performed. For this purpose the weak forms with respect to the different configurations and the corresponding linearizations are derived and discretized. The derived material models are highlighted by numerical examples and also proved with respect to plausibility. In order to take discontinuities into account appropriate kinematics are introduced and the mechanical and thermodynamical balance equations have to be modified correspondingly. The numerical description is accomplished by so-called interface-elements, which are based on an adequate discretization. In this context two application fields are distinguished. On the one side the interface elements provide a tool for the description of postcritical processes in the framework of localization problems, which include material separation and therefore they are appropriate for the description of cutting processes. Here in turn one has to make the difference between the domain-dependent and the domain-independent formulation, which mainly differ in the definition of the interfacial strain measure. On the other side material properties are attached to the interfaces whereas the spatial extension is neglectable. A typical application of this type of discontinuities can be found in the scope of the modelling of composites, for instance. In both applications the corresponding thermo-mechanical formulations are derived. Finally, the different interface formulations are highlighted by some numerical examples and they are also proved with respect to plausibility.
The work presented in this thesis discusses the thermal and power management of multi-core processors (MCPs) with both two dimensional (2D) package and there dimensional (3D) package chips. The power and thermal management/balancing is of increasing concern and is a technological challenge to the MCP development and will be a main performance bottleneck for the development of MCPs. This thesis develops optimal thermal and power management policies for MCPs. The system thermal behavior for both 2D package and 3D package chips is analyzed and mathematical models are developed. Thereafter, the optimal thermal and power management methods are introduced.
Nowadays, the chips are generally packed in 2D technique, which means that there is only one layer of dies in the chip. The chip thermal behavior can be described by a 3D heat conduction partial differential equation (PDE). As the target is to balance the thermal behavior and power consumption among the cores, a group of one dimensional (1D) PDEs, which is derived from the developed 3D PDE heat conduction equation, is proposed to describe the thermal behavior of each core. Therefore, the thermal behavior of the MCP is described by a group of 1D PDEs. An optimal controller is designed to manage the power consumption and balance the temperature among the cores based on the proposed 1D model.
3D package is an advanced package technology, which contains at least 2 layers of dies stacked in one chip. Different from 2D package, the cooling system should be installed among the layers to reduce the internal temperature of the chip. In this thesis, the micro-channel liquid cooling system is considered, and the heat transfer character of the micro-channel is analyzed and modeled as an ordinary differential equation (ODE). The dies are discretized to blocks based on the chip layout with each block modeled as a thermal resistance and capacitance (R-C) circuit. Thereafter, the micro-channels are discretized. The thermal behavior of the whole system is modeled as an ODE system. The micro-channel liquid velocity is set according to the workload and the temperature of the dies. Under each velocity, the system can be described as a linear ODE model system and the whole system is a switched linear system. An H-infinity observer is designed to estimate the states. The model predictive control (MPC) method is employed to design the thermal and power management/balancing controller for each submodel.
The models and controllers developed in this thesis are verified by simulation experiments via MATLAB. The IBM cell 8 cores processor and water micro-channel cooling system developed by IBM Research in collaboration with EPFL and ETHZ are employed as the experiment objects.
Within this thesis we present a novel approach towards the modeling of strong discontinuities in a three dimensional finite element framework for large deformations. This novel finite element framework is modularly constructed containing three essential parts: (i) the bulk problem, ii) the cohesive interface problem and iii) the crack tracking problem. Within this modular design, chapter 2 (Continuous solid mechanics) treats the behavior of the bulk problem (i). It includes the overall description of the continuous kinematics, the required balance equations, the constitutive setting and the finite element formulation with its corresponding discretization and required solution strategy for the emerging highly non-linear equations. Subsequently, we discuss the modeling of strong discontinuities within finite element discretization schemes in chapter 3 (Discontinuous solid mechanics). Starting with an extension of the continuous kinematics to the discontinuous situation, we discuss the phantom-node discretization scheme based on the works of Hansbo & Hansbo. Thereby, in addition to a comparison with the extended finite element method (XFEM), importance is attached to the technical details for the adaptive introduction of the required discontinuous elements: The splitting of finite elements, the numerical integration, the visualization and the formulation of geometrical correct crack tip elements. In chapter 4 (The cohesive crack concept), we consider the treatment of cohesive process zones and the associated treatment of cohesive tractions. By applying this approach we are able to merge all irreversible, crack propagation accompanying, failure mechanisms into an arbitrary traction separation relation. Additionally, this concept ensures bounded crack tip stresses and allows the use of stress-based failure criteria for the determination of crack growth. In summary, the use of the discontinuous elements in conjunction with cohesive traction separation allows the mesh-independent computation of crack propagation along pre-defined crack paths. Therefore, this combination is defined as the interface problem (ii) and represents the next building block in the modular design of this thesis. The description and the computation of the evolving crack surface, based on the actual status of a considered specimen is the key issue of chapter 5 (Crack path tracking strategies). In contrast to the two-dimensional case, where tracking the path in a C0-continuous way is straightforward, three-dimensional crack path tracking requires additional strategies. We discuss the currently available approaches regarding this issue and further compare the approaches by means of usual quality measures. In the modular design of this thesis these algorithms represent the last main part which is classified as the crack tracking problem (iii). Finally chapter 6 (Representative numerical examples) verifies the finite element tool by comparisons of the computational results which experiments and benchmarks of engineering fracture problems in concrete. Afterwards the finite element tool is applied to model folding induced fracture of geological structures.