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Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is well known as a highly toxic environmental chemical threat. Prolonged exposure to H2S can lead to the formation of pulmonary edema. However, the mechanisms of how H2S facilitates edema formation are poorly understood. Since edema formation can be enhanced by an impaired clearance of electrolytes and, consequently, fluid across the alveolar epithelium, it was questioned whether H2S may interfere with transepithelial electrolyte absorption. Electrolyte absorption was electrophysiologically measured across native distal lung preparations (Xenopus laevis) in Ussing chambers. The exposure of lung epithelia to H2S decreased net transepithelial electrolyte absorption. This was due to an impairment of amiloride-sensitive sodium transport. H2S inhibited the activity of the Na+/K+-ATPase as well as lidocaine-sensitive potassium channels located in the basolateral membrane of the epithelium. Inhibition of these transport molecules diminishes the electrochemical gradient which is necessary for transepithelial sodium absorption. Since sodium absorption osmotically facilitates alveolar fluid clearance, interference of H2S with the epithelial transport machinery provides a mechanism which enhances edema formation in H2S-exposed lungs.
Simulation of thermal behavior during friction stir welding process for predicting residual stresses
(2014)
The usage of the Web has experienced a vertiginous growth in the last few years. Watching video online has been one major driving force for this growth lately. Until the appearance of the HTML5 agglomerate of (still draft) specifications, the access and consumption of multimedia content in the Web has not been standardized. Hence, the use of proprietary Web browser plugins flourished as intermediate solution. With the introduction of the HTML5 VideoElement, Web browser plugins are replaced with a standardized alternative. Still, HTML5 Video is currently limited in many respects, including the access to only file-based media. This paper investigates on approaches to develop video live streaming solutions based on available Web standards. Besides a pull-based design based on HTTP, a push-based architecture is introduced, making use of the WebSocket protocol being part of the HTML5 standards family as well. The evaluation results of both conceptual principles emphasize, that push-based approaches have a higher potential of providing resource and cost efficient solutions as their pull-based counterparts. In addition, initial approaches to instrument the proposed push-based architecture with adaptiveness to network conditions have been developed.
Service Security Revisited
(2014)
SOA-Readiness of REST
(2014)
Social cash transfers (SCTs) are considered a priority in least-developed countries, where the gap between the need for basic social protection and existing provisions is greatest. This study represents one of the first comprehensive treatments of the impact of social cash transfers in low-income sub-Saharan Africa, and the first for Zambia's oldest SCT scheme. The results, based on propensity score matching and fully efficient odds-weighted regression, and data from the Kalomo SCT pilot scheme, confirm positive SCT effects on per capita consumption expenditure. We also discover threshold effects with SCT mostly impacting food expenditure among poorer beneficiary households and non-food expenditure among wealthier beneficiaries.
Dysregulation of IL12 Signaling As a Novel Cause of an Autoimmune Lymphoproliferative like Syndrome
(2014)
After an introduction, we discuss the conflicts that occurred in a highly experimental course setting, in which we implemented a student-centered course in urban higher education with a constructivist, blended-learning design. We analyse to which extent the cultural country profiles from our Learning Culture Survey suffice to prevent intercultural conflicts in education and provide support for the design of respective interventions.
Many e-Learning-basedoffers, such as international programs and MOOCs have long since overcome the concept of national education and are designed to attract learners distributed throughout the world. In order to cope with the differences between learners, related offers often include opportunities to support the particular learning styles and learning pace beyond the advantages, which the technology itself naturally provides. Examples arethe individual configuration of the learning platformand display of contents and the provision of stylistically diverse and supplementary learning material. Such measures are relatively easy to implement andonce established, do not generate further expenses. Just, is it appropriate to lay the full responsibility for designing a comfortable (and supportive) learning environment into the hands of the learners and do they get along with such a responsibility? We asked university students from three continents regarding their expectations towards instructor-support and found major differences.
Open Educational Resources in the Context of School Education: Barriers and possible solutions
(2014)
Due to the increasing professional mobility of their parents, pupils often find themselves in new and unfamiliar learning scenarios in foreign contexts and countries. Besides having to leave their familiar environments, these pupils additionally may face language barriers, different curricula, and have to cope with foreign cultures. Printed textbooks, which are the most commonly used educational resources in schools, provide little support for these pupils to manage the new challenges. Teachers are the professionals designated to provide the necessary support. However, they often may not fully appreciate the pupils’ individual challenges. Possible solutions could be the provision of alternative learning contents in the pupils’ native languages and an international open exchange of knowledge and experiences amongst schoolteachers. These issues are addressed by the Open Discovery Space platform. In order to empower this platform to provide the best possible support to teachers, we explored barriers to adoption of Open Educational Practices in the context of school education and asked for manageable solutions. The investigation took place in an action research scenario. After an introduction of the ODS project, we will present the identified barriers and recommendations for solutions to overcome these, and the mechanisms which we are going to implement in the ODS platform in order to provide the best possible support to the community.
The central concept behind Open Educational Resources (OER) is opening up the access to educational resources for stakeholders who are not the usual target user group. This concept must be perceived as innovative because it describes a general economic and social paradigm shift: Education, which formerly was limited to a specific group of learners, now, is promoted as a public good. However, despite very good intentions, internationally agreed quality standards, and the availability of the required technological infrastructure, the critical threshold is not yet met. Due to several reasons, the usefulness of OER is often limited to the originally targeted context. Questions arise if the existing quality standards for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) actually meet the specific requirements within the OER value chain, if the existing quality standards are applicable to OER in a meaningful way, and under which conditions related standards generally could support the exploitation of OER. We analyze quality standards for TEL and contrast the life cycle model of commercial learning resources against the life cycle model of OER. We investigate special demands on quality from the context of OER and, taking the former results into account, derive emergent quality criteria for OER. The paper concludes with recommendations for the design of OER and a future standard development.
The Learning Culture Survey: An international research project on cultural learning attitudes
(2014)
Dieses Dokument beinhaltet die englische Version des standardisierten Fragebogens für das fortlaufende, internationale Forschungvorhaben "Learning Culture Survey". Die Bereitstellung des Fragebogens in dieser Form dient lediglich der Möglichkeit zur Prüfung und zur Kenntnisnahme. Der Entsprechend dem Forschungsdesign ist der Fragebogen in seiner Onlineversion zu verwenden.
Culture, at least to some extent, is related to particular (individual and collective) experiences. In terms of education, this means that a learner, who experienced particular services in his/her past, might perceive such services as usual for educational culture and thus, expect them to be delivered in any kind of learning scenario. In German universities, education is meant to be a full-time job and usually is designed to provide a broad basis of theoretical and methodological knowledge. Achieving methodological competences is a core goal of German academic education: Once a student leaves the university, he/she is expected to decide about appropriate methods for any kind of problem (in the field of study and beyond) and how to modify the known methods in case of need. In contrast, in professional training, the learners have to study in extra-occupational situations (time is a serious issue) and might expect training that pointedly prepares them for very specific tasks. We assumed that scenarios of professional training have their own educational cultures. When designing learning contents and learning scenarios for professional training, it might be essential for the learning success to meet the learners’ expectations and contextual peculiarities.
We found remarkable differences between the results of the investigated enterprises, but even more significant diversity between the results of the German enterprises and the priory investigated German universities. As a general conclusion we can assume that generalizing research results that were solely achieved from national university students might lead to an inappropriate design of learning scenarios for particular professional contexts. Professional training for a particular enterprise should be developed according to its specific educational culture.
Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners perceive cultural distance as a barrier against the use of social OER environments. The findings indicate how nationality and age of the respondents are strong predictors of cultural distance barrier. The study concludes with identification of context-sensitive interventions for overcoming the related bar riers. These consequences are vital for OER initiatives and educational institutions for aligning their efforts on OER.
Gene expression and cell growth rely on the intracellular concentration of amino acids, which in metazoans depends on extracellular amino acid availability and transmembrane transport. To investigate the impact of extracellular amino acid concentrations on the expression of a concentrative amino acid transporter, we overexpressed the main kidney proximal tubule luminal neutral amino acid transporter B0AT1-collectrin (SLC6A19-TMEM27) in MDCK cell epithelia. Exogenously expressed proteins co-localized at the luminal membrane and mediated neutral amino acid uptake. However, the transgenes were lost over few cell culture passages. In contrast, the expression of a control transgene remained stable. To test whether this loss was due to inappropriately high amino acid uptake, freshly transduced MDCK cell lines were cultivated either with physiological amounts of amino acids or with the high concentration found in standard cell culture media. Expression of exogenous transporters was unaffected by physiological amino acid concentration in the media. Interestingly, mycoplasma infection resulted in a significant increase in transgene expression and correlated with the rapid metabolism of L-arginine. However, L-arginine metabolites were shown to play no role in transgene expression. In contrast, activation of the GCN2 pathway revealed by an increase in eIF2α phosphorylation may trigger transgene derepression. Taken together, high extracellular amino acid concentration provided by cell culture media appears to inhibit the constitutive expression of concentrative amino acid transporters whereas L-arginine depletion by mycoplasma induces the expression of transgenes possibly via stimulation of the GCN2 pathway.
Propionic acidemia in a previously healthy adolescent with acute onset of dilated cardiomyopathy
(2014)
Methylmalonic and propionic acidemia (MMA/PA) are inborn errors of metabolism characterized by accumulation of propionic acid and/or methylmalonic acid due to deficiency of methylmalonyl-CoA mutase (MUT) or propionyl-CoA carboxylase (PCC). MMA has an estimated incidence of ~ 1: 50,000 and PA of ~ 1:100'000 -150,000. Patients present either shortly after birth with acute deterioration, metabolic acidosis and hyperammonemia or later at any age with a more heterogeneous clinical picture, leading to early death or to severe neurological handicap in many survivors. Mental outcome tends to be worse in PA and late complications include chronic kidney disease almost exclusively in MMA and cardiomyopathy mainly in PA. Except for vitamin B12 responsive forms of MMA the outcome remains poor despite the existence of apparently effective therapy with a low protein diet and carnitine. This may be related to under recognition and delayed diagnosis due to nonspecific clinical presentation and insufficient awareness of health care professionals because of disease rarity.
Over the past two decades social protection has gained importance at the international and the national level of many low and middle income countries. Despite reforms in this sector being a global phenomenon, they differ from country to country. Traditional efforts to explain these dif- ferences focus on domestic factors. Yet it remains unclear how international influences and interdependencies contrib- ute to policy change. The study ‘International Policy Learn- ing and Policy Change’ aims at providing an answer to this question, by focusing on ‘soft governance’ via horizontal processes, meaning processes between equal actors. The studie was carried out in two parts. While in Part I the cur- rent state of the art in relevant research fields was assessed, in Part II the findings from Part I were used to conduct a survey which analyses the role of policy networks.
Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for about 40% of the EU’s total energy consumption. However, conscious, sustainable use of this limited resource is hampered by a lack of visibility and materiality of consumption. One of the major challenges is enabling consumers to make informed decisions about energy consumption, thereby supporting the shift to sustainable actions. With the use of Energy-Management-Systems it is possible to save up to 15%. In recent years, design approaches have greatly diversified, but with the emergence of ubiquitous- and context-aware computing, energy feedback solutions can be enriched with additional context information. In this study, we present the concept “room as a context” for eco-feedback systems. We investigate opportunities of making current state-of-the-art energy visualizations more meaningful and demonstrate which new forms of visualizations can be created with this additional information. Furthermore, we developed a prototype for android-based tablets, which includes some of the presented features to study our design concepts in the wild.
When developing new ICT systems and applications for domestic environments, rich qualitative approaches improve the understanding of the user's integral usage of technology in their daily routines and thereby inform design. This knowledge will often be reached through in-home studies, strong relationships with the users and their involvement in the design and evaluation process. However, whilst this kind of research offers valuable context insights and brings out unexpected findings, it also presents methodological, technical and organizational challenges for the study design and its underlying cooperation processes. In particular, due to heterogeneous users in households in terms of technology affinity, individual needs, age distribution, gender, social constellations, personal role assignment, project expectations, etc. it produces particular demands to collaborate with users in the design process and thereby exposes a range of practical challenges. The full-day workshop wishes to identify these practical challenges, discuss best practice and develop a roadmap for sustainable relationships for design with users.
This thesis presents an approach to automatically adjust the parameters of a Java application run on the IBM J9 Virtual Machine in order to improve its performance. It works by analyzing the logfile the VM generates and searching for specific behavioral patterns. These patterns are matched against a list of known patterns for which rules exist that specify how to adapt the VM to the given application. Adapting the application is done by adding parameters and changing existing ones, for example to achieve a better heap usage. The process is fully automated and carried out by a toolkit developed for this thesis. The toolkit iteratively cycles through multiple possible parameter sets, benchmarks them and proposes the best alternative to the user. The user can, without any prior knowledge about the Java application or the VM improve the performance of the deployed application.
The latest advances in the field of smart card technologies allow modern cards to be more than just simple security tokens. Recent developments facilitate the use of interactive components like buttons, displays or even touch-sensors within the cards body thus conquering whole new areas of application. With interactive functionalities the usability aspect becomes the most important one for designing secure and popularly accepted products. Unfortunately the usability can only be tested fully with completely integrated hence expensive smart card prototypes. This restricts application specific research, case studies of new smart card user interfaces, concerning applications and the performance of useability tests in smart card development. Rapid development and simulation of smart card interfaces and applications can help to avoid this restriction. This paper presents SCUIDtextsuperscript{Sim} a tool for rapid user-centric development of new smart card interfaces and applications based on common smartphone technology.
As soon as data is noisy, knowledge as it is represented in an information system becomes unreliable. Features in databases induce equivalence relations—but knowledge discovery takes the other way round: given a relation, what could be a suitable functional description? But the relations we work on are noisy again. If we expect to record data for learning a classification of objects then it can well be the real data does not create a reflexive, symmetric and transitive relation although we know it should be. The usual approach taken here is to build the closure in order to ensure desired properties. This, however, leads to overgeneralisation rather quickly.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Relational and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science, RAMiCS 2014 held in Marienstatt, Germany, in April/May 2014. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 37 submissions. The papers are structured in specific fields on concurrent Kleene algebras and related formalisms, reasoning about computations and programs, heterogeneous and categorical approaches, applications of relational and algebraic methods and developments related to modal logics and lattices.
On nothing
(2014)
Humans exhibit flexible and robust behavior in achieving their goals. We make suitable substitutions for objects, actions, or tools to get the job done. When opportunities that would allow us to reach our goals with less effort arise, we often take advantage of them. Robots are not nearly as robust in handling such situations. Enabling a domestic service robot to find ways to get a job done by making substitutions is the goal of our work. In this paper, we highlight the challenges faced in our approach to combine Hierarchical Task Network planning, Description Logics, and the notions of affordances and conceptual similarity. We present open questions in modeling the necessary knowledge, creating planning problems, and enabling the system to handle cases where plan generation fails due to missing/unavailable objects.
We are happy to present you the special issue on Best Practice in Robot Software Development of the Journal on Software Engineering for Robotics! The spark for this special issue came during the eighth workshop on Software Development and Integration in Robotics (SDIR) at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The workshop focused on Robot Software Architectures, and the fruitful discussions made it clear that the design, development, and deployment of robot software is always an interplay between competing aspects. These are often couched in antagonistic pairs, such as dependability versus performance, and prominently include quality attributes as well as functional, nonfunctional, and application requirements.
PhD Project Management
(2014)
The Fifth International Workshop on Domain-Specific Languages and Models for Robotic Systems (DSLRob'14) was held in conjunction with the 2014 International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR 2014), October 2014 in Bergamo, Italy. The main topics of the workshop were Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and Model-driven Software Development (MDSD) for robotics. A domain-specific language is a programming language dedicated to a particular problem domain that offers specific notations and abstractions that increase programmer productivity within that domain. Model-driven software development offers a high-level way for domain users to specify the functionality of their system at the right level of abstraction. DSLs and models have historically been used for programming complex systems. However recently they have garnered interest as a separate field of study. Robotic systems blend hardware and software in a holistic way that intrinsically raises many crosscutting concerns (concurrency, uncertainty, time constraints, ...), for which reason, traditional general-purpose languages often lead to a poor fit between the language features and the implementation requirements. DSLs and models offer a powerful, systematic way to overcome this problem, enabling the programmer to quickly and precisely implement novel software solutions to complex problems within the robotics domain.
Application systems are often advertised with features, and features are used heavily for requirements man- agement. However, often software manufacturers only have incomplete information about the features of their software. The information is distributed over different sources, such as requirements documents, issue trackers, user manuals, and code. In this paper, we research the occurrence of feature information in open source software engineering data. We report on a case study with three open source systems. We analyze what information about features can be found in issue trackers and user documentation. Furthermore, we study the abstraction levels on which the features are described, how feature information is related, and we discuss the possibility to discover such information semi-automatically. To mirror the diversity of software development contexts, we choose open source systems, which are quite different, e.g., in the rigor of issue tracker usage. The results differ accordingly. One main result is that the user documentation did not provide more accurate information than the issue tracker compared to a provided feature list. The results also give hints on how the management of feature relevant information can be supported.
The perceived direction of “up” is determined by gravity, visual information, and an internal estimate of body orientation (Mittelstaedt, 1983; Dyde et al., 2006). Is the gravity level found on other worlds sufficient to maintain gravity’s contribution to this perception? Difficulties in stability reported anecdotally by astronauts on the lunar surface (NASA 1972) suggest that the moon’s gravity may not be, despite this value being far above the threshold for detecting linear acceleration. Knowing how much gravity is needed to provide a reliable orientation cue is required for training and preparing astronauts for future missions to the moon, mars and beyond.
Breadth-First Search is a graph traversal technique used in many applications as a building block, e.g., to systematically explore a search space or to determine single source shortest paths in unweighted graphs. For modern multicore processors and as application graphs get larger, well-performing parallel algorithms are favorable. In this paper, we systematically evaluate an important class of parallel algorithms for this problem and discuss programming optimization techniques for their implementation on parallel systems with shared memory. We concentrate our discussion on level-synchronous algorithms for larger multicore and multiprocessor systems. In our results, we show that for small core counts many of these algorithms show rather similar performance behavior. But, for large core counts and large graphs, there are considerable differences in performance and scalability influenced by several factors, including graph topology. This paper gives advice, which algorithm should be used under which circumstances.
Updating a shared data structure in a parallel program is usually done with some sort of high-level synchronization operation to ensure correctness and consistency. The realization of such high-level synchronization operations is done with appropriate low-level atomic synchronization instructions that the target processor architecture provides. These instructions are costly and often limited in their scalability on larger multi-core / multi-processor systems. In this paper, a technique is discussed that replaces atomic updates of a shared data structure with ordinary and cheaper read/write operations. The necessary conditions are specified that must be fulfilled to ensure overall correctness of the program despite missing synchronization. The advantage of this technique is the reduction of access costs as well as more scalability due to elided atomic operations. But on the other side, possibly more work has to be done caused by missing synchronization. Therefore, additional work is traded against costly atomic operations. A practical application is shown with level-synchronous parallel Breadth-First Search on an undirected graph where two vertex frontiers are accessed in parallel. This application scenario is also used for an evaluation of the technique. Tests were done on four different large parallel systems with up to 64-way parallelism. It will be shown that for the graph application examined the amount of additional work caused by missing synchronization is neglectible and the performance is almost always better than the approach with atomic operations.
People are getting older because of the demographic changes and the rate of disabled people is also going up. This article shows the challenge for BPMTool developer due to these circumstances. It illustrates how these changes impact the usage of BPM-Tools based on an Evaluation of an exemplary BPMTool (Cooper & Patterson, 2007) in terms of IT-Usability and IT-Accessibility. This evaluation was conducted in a research laboratory at the university.
We investigated graphene structures grafted with fullerenes. The size of the graphene sheets ranges from 6400 to 640,000 atoms. The fullerenes (C60 and C240) are placed on top of the graphene sheets, using different impact velocities we could distinguish three types of impact. Furthermore, we investigated the changes of the vibrational properties. The modified graphene planes show additional features in the vibronic density of states.
Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are matrix-degrading enzymes that are over-expressed in joints of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. However, the contribution of specific MMPs for the development of arthritic joints is unknown. This study is aimed at studying the role of matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) in mice, using the K/BxN serum-transfer model of RA. Arthritis was induced in Balb/c mice by injecting K/BxN serum. Development of arthritis was followed in these mice by measuring ankle thickness and clinical index score. MMP-9 expression in the joints of mice killed at various time points during the disease progression was determined by gelatin zymography using ankle lysates. We found that MMP-9 expression increased with the severity of arthritis. Importantly MMP-9 deficient mice injected with K/BxN serum showed a milder form of arthritis in comparison to the control C57BL/6 mice injected with K/BxN serum. We therefore conclude that MMP-9 promotes arthritis in mice.
The analytical pyrolysis technique hyphenated to gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) has extended the range of possible tools for the characterization of synthetic polymers and copolymers. Pyrolysis involves thermal fragmentation of the analytical sample at temperatures of 500–1400 °C. In the presence of an inert gas, reproducible decomposition products characteristic for the original polymer or copolymer sample are formed. The pyrolysis products are chromatographically separated using a fused-silica capillary column and are subsequently identified by interpretation of the obtained mass spectra or by using mass spectra libraries. The analytical technique eliminates the need for pretreatment by performing analyses directly on the solid or liquid polymer sample. In this article, application examples of analytical pyrolysis hyphenated to GC–MS for the identification of different polymeric materials in the plastic and automotive industry, dentistry, and occupational safety are demonstrated. For the first time, results of identification of commercial light-curing dental filling material and a car wrapping foil by pyrolysis–GC–MS are presented.
Gas chromatography with flame-ionization detection (FID) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS) with electron impact ionization (EI) and chemical ionization (PCI and NCI) were successfully used for separation and identification of commercially available longchain primary alkyl amines. The investigated compounds were used as corrosion inhibiting and antifouling agents in a water-steam circuit of energy systems in the power industry. Solidphase extraction (SPE) with octadecyl bonded silica (C18) sorbents followed by gas chromatography were used for quantification of the investigated Primene JM-T™ alkyl amines in boiler water, condensate and superheated steam samples from the power plant. Amine formulations from Kotamina group favor formation of protective layers on internal surfaces and keep them free from corrosion and scale. Alkyl amines contained in those formulations both render the environment alkaline and limit the corrosion impact of ionic and gaseous impurities by formation of protective layers. Moreover, alkyl amines limit scaling on heating surfaces of boilers and in turbine, ensuring failure-free operation. Application of alkyl amine formulation enhances heat exchange during boiling and condensation processes. Alkyl amines with branched structure are more thermally stable than linear alkyl amines, exhibit better adsorption and effectiveness of surface shielding. As a result, application of thermostable long-chain branched alkyl amines increases the efficiency of anti-corrosive protection. Moreover, the concentration of ammonia content in water and in steam was also considerably decreased.
Analytical pyrolysis technique hyphenated to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS) has extended the range of possible tools for characterization of synthetic polymers/copolymers. Pyrolysis involves thermal fragmentation of the analytical sample at elevated temperature between 500 and 1400 °C. In the presence of an inert gas, reproducible decomposition products characteristic for the original polymer/copolymer sample are formed. The pyrolysis products are chromatographically separated by using a fused silica capillary column and subsequently identified by interpretation of the obtained mass spectra or by using mass spectra libraries. The analytical technique eliminate the need for pre-treatment by performing analyses directly on the solid or liquid polymer sample.
In this paper, application examples of the analytical pyrolysis hyphenated to gas chromatography/mass spectrometry for the identification of different polymeric materials in the plastic and automotive industry, dentistry and occupational safety are demonstrated. For the first time results of identification of commercially light-curing dental filling material and a car wrapping foil by pyrolysis-GC/MS are presented.
The work being described in this paper is the result of a cooperation project between the Institute of Visual Computing at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany and the Laboratory of Biomedical Engineering at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil. The aim of the project is the development of a virtual environment based training simulator which enables for better and faster learning the control of upper limb prostheses. The focus of the paper is the description of the technical setup since learning tutorials still need to be developed as well as a comprehensive evaluation still needs to be carried out.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away’. While it may be true that a balanced diet is a prerequisite for good health, how good is what we eat and drink every day? And is it actually possible to fulfil every customer desire with the vast array of foodstuffs on offer? BSE, dioxin in eggs, EHEC sprouts: in the light of repeated food safety crises, the issue of quality assurance as well as customer-oriented quality management has become of prime importance for the agri-food industry.
The RoCKIn@Home Challenge
(2014)
The RoCKIn@Work Challenge
(2014)
The title of the annual report 2013 "Shaping change: The University Addresses Society‘s Probing Challenges" reveals the great importance placed on social, economic and technological changes at the university.
This key aspect thus runs through the contents of the 90-page annual report like a common thread, without losing track of the enormous variety of research and teaching at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University. Whether the exploration of gaps in robot safety during a European Intensive Programme, a report about the Philipines crisis region from a graduate who has worked as an organizer for Care International, or the chapter "What does change look like?" – The annual report provides the full spectrum of opportunities, activities and findings of university members.
Rendering techniques for design evaluation and review or for visualizing large volume data often use computationally expensive ray-based methods. Due to the number of pixels and the amount of data, these methods often do not achieve interactive frame rates. A view direction based rendering technique renders the users central field of view in high quality whereas the surrounding is rendered with a level of detail approach depending on the distance to the users central field of view thus giving the opportunity to increase rendering efficiency. We propose a prototype implementation and evaluation of a focus-based rendering technique based on a hybrid ray tracing/sparse voxel octree rendering approach.
This paper gives an overview of the development of Fair Trade in six European countries: Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. After the description of the food retail industry and its market structures in these countries, the main European Fair Trade organizations are analyzed regarding their role within the Fair Trade system. The following part deals with the development of Fair Trade sales in general and with respect to the products coffee, tea, bananas, fruit juice and sugar. An overview of the main activities of national Fair Trade organizations, e.g. public relation activities, completes the analysis. This study shows the enormous upswing of Fair Trade during the last decade and the reasons for this development. Nevertheless, it comes to the conclusion that Fair Trade is still far away from being an essential part of the food retail industry in Europe.
Software repository data, for example in issue tracking systems, include natural language text and technical information, which includes anything from log files via code snippets to stack traces. However, data mining is often only interested in one of the two types e.g. in natural language text when looking at text mining. Regardless of which type is being investigated, any techniques used have to deal with noise caused by fragments of the other type i.e. methods interested in natural language have to deal with technical fragments and vice versa. This paper proposes an approach to classify unstructured data, e.g. development documents, into natural language text and technical information using a mixture of text heuristics and agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The approach was evaluated using 225 manually annotated text passages from developer emails and issue tracker data. Using white space tokenization as a basis, the overall precision of the approach is 0.84 and the recall is 0.85.
We explore the potential of stereoscopic 3D (S3D) vision in offering distinct gameplay using an S3D-specific game called Deepress3D. Our game utilizes established S3D design principles for optimizing GUI design, visual comfort and game mechanics which rely on depth perception in time-pressured spatial conflicts. The game collects detailed S3D player metrics and allows players to choose between different, evenly matched strategies. We conducted a between subjects study comparing S3D and monoscopic versions of Deepress3D that examined player behavior and performance and measured user-reported data on presence, simulator sickness, and game experience.
Deep Gaming
(2014)
How to create a distinct user experience of Stereo 3D in Interactive Entertainment & Virtual Reality Gaming Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) vision offers spatial visual perception by presenting two separate and different This article or re envision the, creative economy different versions of games in it up. By authors behind the same sheet, of primary medical dental and operator. If I gently rubbed miles chest wouldn't know. Listing infohere at a way through, sixth grade level by the layout and memory. Hats off adjust the bass and restart automatic benefit. Try to be fooled into serious topics by playing with a lot. Creating general many other people, with new digital games allow their impact! The hunt for example my google, searches has learned. These badges this development phases to work it is in my year.
This review is divided into two interconnected parts, namely a biological and a chemical one. The focus of the first part is on the biological background for constructing tissue-engineered vascular grafts to promote vascular healing. Various cell types, such as embryonic, mesenchymal and induced pluripotent stem cells, progenitor cells and endothelial- and smooth muscle cells will be discussed with respect to their specific markers. The in vitro and in vivo models and their potential to treat vascular diseases are also introduced. The chemical part focuses on strategies using either artificial or natural polymers for scaffold fabrication, including decellularized cardiovascular tissue. An overview will be given on scaffold fabrication including conventional methods and nanotechnologies. Special attention is given to 3D network formation via different chemical and physical cross-linking methods. In particular, electron beam treatment is introduced as a method to combine 3D network formation and surface modification. The review includes recently published scientific data and patents which have been registered within the last decade.