David Hausheer, George D Stamoulis, Burkhard Stiller, Editorial to the special issue on Economic Traffic Management, International Journal on Network Management, Vol. 21 (1), 2011. (Journal Article)
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Guilherme Sperb Machado, Patrik Schnellmann, Matteo Corti, Martin Waldburger, Andrei Aurel Vancea, Burkhard Stiller, AMAAIS Phase 2: Architecture Design and Implementation, Version: 1, 2011. (Technical Report)
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Managing Ubiquitous Communications and Services 2011. Eighth International Workshop, MUCS 2011, Proceedings, Edited by: Burkhard Stiller, Rob Brennan, Sven van der Meer, Tom Pfeifer, Multicon Verlag, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., 2011. (Edited Scientific Work)
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Burkhard Stiller, Future internet foundations: Socio-economic issues - introduction, In: The Future Internet - Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises, Springer, Heidelberg, p. 117 - 119, 2011. (Book Chapter)
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The future internet - Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and technological promises, Edited by: John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, Srdjan Krco, Henning Müller, Man-Sze Li, Hans Schaffers, Volkmar Lotz, Burkhard Stiller, Stamatis Karnouskos, Susanna Avessta, Michael Nilsson, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2011. (Edited Scientific Work)
Irrespective of whether we use economic or societal metrics, the Internet is one of the most important technical infrastructures in existence today. It will be a catalyst for much of our innovation and prosperity in the future. A competitive Europe will require Internet connectivity and services beyond the capabilities offered by current technologies. Future Internet research is therefore a must.
This book is published in full compliance with the Open Access publishing initiative; it is based on the research carried out within the Future Internet Assembly (FIA). It contains a sample of representative results from the recent FIA meetings spanning a broad range of topics, all being of crucial importance for the future Internet.
The book includes 32 contributions and has been structured into the following sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction:
Foundations: architectural issues; socio-economic issues; security and trust; and experiments and experimental design. Future Internet Areas: networks, services, and content; and applications. |
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Costas Kalogiros, Costas Courcoubetis, George D Stamoulis, Michael Boniface, Eric T Meyer, Martin Waldburger, Daniel Field, Burkhard Stiller, An approach to investigating socio-economic tussles arising from building the future internet, In: The Future Internet - Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises, Springer, Heidelberg, p. 145 - 159, 2011. (Book Chapter)
With the evolution of the Internet from a controlled research network to a worldwide social and economic platform, the initial assumptions regarding stakeholder cooperative behavior are no longer valid. Conflicts have emerged in situations where there are opposing interests. Previous work in the literature has termed these conflicts tussles. This article presents the research of the SESERV project, which develops a methodology to investigate such tussles and is carrying out a survey of tussles identified within the research projects funded under the Future Networks topic of the FP7. Selected tussles covering both social and economic aspects are analyzed also in this article. |
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Ioanna Papafili, George D Stamoulis, Rafal Stankiewicz, Simon Oechsner, Konstantin Pussep, Robert Wojcik, Jerzy Domzal, Dirk Staehle, Frank Lehrieder, Burkhard Stiller, Assessment of economic management of overlay traffic: Methodology and results, In: The Future Internet - Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises, Springer, Heidelberg, p. 121 - 131, 2011. (Book Chapter)
Overlay applications generate huge amounts of traffic in the Internet, which determines a problem for Internet Service Providers, since it results in high charges for inter-domain traffic. Traditional traffic management techniques cannot deal successfully with overlay traffic. An incentive-based approach that employs economic concepts and mechanisms is required in order to deal with the overlay traffic in a way that is mutually beneficial for all stakeholders of the Future Internet. This "TripleWin" situation is the target of Economic Traffic Management (ETM). A wide variety of techniques are employed by ETM for optimizing overlay traffic management considering performance requirements of overlay and underlay networks together with cost implications for ISPs. However, the assessment of ETM requires an innovative methodology. In this article this methodology is described and major results are presented as obtained accordingly from the evaluation of different ETM mechanisms. |
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Guilherme Sperb Machado, Burkhard Stiller, Investigations of an SLA Support System for Cloud Computing (SLACC), Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation, Vol. 34 (2), 2011. (Journal Article)
Cloud Providers (CP) and Cloud Users (CU) need to agree on a set of parameters expressed through Service Level Agreements (SLA) for a given Cloud service. However, even with the existence of many CPs in the market, it is still impossible today to see CPs who guarantee, or at least offer, an SLA specification tailored to CU's interests: not just offering percentage of availability, but also guaranteeing, for example, specific performance parameters for a certain Cloud application. Due to (1) the huge size of CPs' IT infrastructures and (2) the high complexity with multiple inter-dependencies of resources (physical or virtual), the estimation of specific SLA parameters to compose Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with trustful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tends to be inaccurate. This paper investigates an SLA Support System for CC (SLACC) which aims to estimate in a formalized methodology – based on available Cloud Computing infrastructure parameters – what CPs will be able to offer/accept as SLOs or KPIs and, as a consequence, which increasing levels of SLA specificity for their customers can be reached. |
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Managing the Dynamics of Networks and Services, Edited by: Isabelle Chrisment, Alva Couch, Remi Badonnel, Martin Waldburger, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2011. (Proceedings)
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7th Workshop on “Internet Charging and QoS Technologies, Edited by: Johanne Cohen, Patrick Maillé, Burkhard Stiller, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2011. (Proceedings)
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Dengping Wei, Ting Wang, Ji Wang, Abraham Bernstein, SAWSDL-iMatcher: A customizable and effective Semantic Web Service matchmaker, Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Vol. 9 (4), 2011. (Journal Article)
As the number of publicly available services grows, discovering proper services becomes an important issue and has attracted amount of attempts. This paper presents a new customizable and effective matchmaker, called SAWSDL-iMatcher. It supports a matchmaking mechanism, named iXQuery, which extends XQuery with various similarity joins for SAWSDL service discovery. Using SAWSDL-iMatcher, users can flexibly customize their preferred matching strategies according to different application requirements. SAWSDL-iMatcher currently supports several matching strategies, including syntactic and semantic matching strategies as well as several statistical-model-based matching strategies which can effectively aggregate similarity values from matching on various types of service description information such as service name, description text, and semantic annotation. Besides, we propose a semantic matching strategy to measure the similarity among SAWSDL semantic annotations. These matching strategies have been evaluated in SAWSDL-iMatcher on SAWSDL-TC2 and Jena Geography Dataset (JGD). The evaluation shows that different matching strategies are suitable for different tasks and contexts, which implies the necessity of a customizable matchmaker. In addition, it also provides evidence for the claim that the effectiveness of SAWSDL service matching can be significantly improved by statistical-model-based matching strategies. Our matchmaker is competitive with other matchmakers on benchmark tests at S3 contest 2009. |
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Helmut Hauser, Gerhard Neumann, Auke J Ijspeert, Wolfgang Maass, Biologically inspired kinematic synergies enable linear balance control of a humanoid robot, Biological Cybernetics, Vol. 104 (4-5), 2011. (Journal Article)
Despite many efforts, balance control of humanoid robots in the presence of unforeseen external or internal forces has remained an unsolved problem. The difficulty of this problem is a consequence of the high dimensionality of the action space of a humanoid robot, due to its large number of degrees of freedom (joints), and of non-linearities in its kinematic chains. Biped biological organisms face similar difficulties, but have nevertheless solved this problem. Experimental data reveal that many biological organisms reduce the high dimensionality of their action space by generating movements through linear superposition of a rather small number of stereotypical combinations of simultaneous movements of many joints, to which we refer as kinematic synergies in this paper. We show that by constructing two suitable non-linear kinematic synergies for the lower part of the body of a humanoid robot, balance control can in fact be reduced to a linear control problem, at least in the case of relatively slow movements. We demonstrate for a variety of tasks that the humanoid robot HOAP-2 acquires through this approach the capability to balance dynamically against unforeseen disturbances that may arise from external forces or from manipulating unknown loads. |
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Oliver Baumann, Dirk Martignoni, Evaluating the New The Contingent Value of a Pro-Innovation Bias, Schmalenbachs Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung, 2011. (Journal Article)
It is a central tenet in the literature on organizational change that firms need to
explore novel courses of action in order to adapt and survive. Should firms thus
exhibit a “pro-innovation bias” when evaluating novel decision alternatives? or should
firms rather assess new opportunities as objectively as possible? our analysis of a
simulation model suggests that a pro-innovation bias can have exploration-enhanc-
ing effects that increase long-run performance in complex and stable environments,
but can also decrease performance substantially if the bias becomes too pronounced.
However, under most other conditions, an unbiased, objective evaluation of novel
opportunities is most effective. We also identify a set of contingency factors that
strongly affect the value of a pro-innovation bias, which may explain why it is that we
see so few firms with such a bias. |
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Jean-Charles Rochet, Jean Tirole, Must-take cards: Merchant discounts and avoided costs, Journal of the European Economic Association, Vol. 9 (3), 2011. (Journal Article)
Antitrust authorities often argue that merchants cannot reasonably turn down payment cards and therefore must accept excessively high merchant discounts. The paper attempts to shed light on this must-take cards view from two angles. First, the paper gives some operational content to the notion of must-take card through the avoided-cost test or tourist test: would the merchant want to refuse a card payment when a non-repeat customer with enough cash in her pocket is about to pay at the cash register? It analyzes its relevance as an indicator of excessive interchange fees. Second, it identifies four key sources of potential social biases in the payment card systems' determination of interchange fees and compares the industry and social optima both in the short term (fixed number of issuers) and the long term (in which issuer offerings and entry respond to profitability). |
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Giuseppe Ugazio, C Lamm, Tania Singer, The Role of Emotions for Moral Judgments Depends on the Type of Emotion and Moral Scenario, Emotion, 2011. (Journal Article)
Emotions seem to play a critical role in moral judgment. However, the way in which emotions exert their influence on moral judgments is still poorly understood. This study proposes a novel theoretical approach suggesting that emotions influence moral judgments based on their motivational dimension. We tested the effects of two types of induced emotions with equal valence but with different motivational implications (anger and disgust), and four types of moral scenarios (disgust-related, impersonal, personal, and beliefs) on moral judgments. We hypothesized and found that approach motivation associated with anger would make moral judgments more permissible, while disgust, associated with withdrawal motivation, would make them less permissible. Moreover, these effects varied as a function of the type of scenario: the induced emotions only affected moral judgments concerning impersonal and personal scenarios, while we observed no effects for the other scenarios. These findings suggest that emotions can play an important role in moral judgment, but that their specific effects depend upon the type of emotion induced. Furthermore, induced emotion effects were more prevalent for moral decisions in personal and impersonal scenarios, possibly because these require the performance of an action rather than making an abstract judgment. We conclude that the effects of induced emotions on moral judgments can be predicted by taking their motivational dimension into account. This finding has important implications for moral psychology, as it point towards a previously overlooked mechanism linking emotions to moral judgments. |
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Pamela Bethke-Langenegger, Philippe Mahler, Bruno Staffelbach, Effectiveness of talent management strategies, European Journal of International Management, Vol. 5 (5), 2011. (Journal Article)
This paper investigates the effects of different types of talent management strategies on organisational performance. We introduce four different strategies and show how they affect organisational performance. For this purpose, we use a particularly detailed dataset of 138 Swiss companies. We find that talent management focusing on retaining and developing talents as job satisfaction, motivation, commitment and trust in leaders. Moreover, talent management practices with a strong focus on corporate strategy have a statistically higher significant impact on organisational outcomes such as company attractiveness, the achievement of business goals, customer satisfaction and, above all, corporate profit, more so than any other areas that talent management focuses upon. |
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Hasan Hasan, Burkhard Stiller, SLO Auditing Task Analysis, Decomposition, and Specification, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Vol. 8 (1), 2011. (Journal Article)
Service Level Objectives (SLOs) - the core of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) - reflect major Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of customers on a service for a given price. SLOs need to be updated, if those requirements change. This leads to an update of the SLO auditing implementation. However, in many existing implementations, efforts are required to adapt to SLO changes, and even more efforts are needed for dynamic adaptations. Thus, a new SLO auditing design is essential to be able to reduce such efforts to the bare minimum. This is especially essential, if the service landscape and relevant QoS parameters are changing frequently. Thus, to meet this core functional requirement of an automated auditing, a generic auditing framework, applicable to any SLO, is presented in this paper, where the analysis of a general audit task, the identification of its sequence of subtasks (functional decomposition), and the development of a respective audit specification for each subtask has been performed. A use case and examples are presented to describe and apply the concept in detail. An SLO auditing application, which was prototyped, is not restricted to a certain set of QoS parameters, but it is dynamically reconfigurable and extensible according to changing demands. The work shows that it has become quite easy to instantiate an auditing application for new SLOs. Additionally, third parties would be able to offer SLO auditing services to a service provider separately. |
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Margit Osterloh, Bruno Frey, Hossam Zeitoun, Corporate governance as an institution to overcome social dilemmas, In: Corporate Governance and Business Ethics, Springer, Dordrecht [etc.], p. 49 - 73, 2011. (Book Chapter)
During the current international financial crisis, the effectiveness of existing corporate governance institutions has been questioned both in the scientific community and in the media. A special focus of this discussion is on the containment of opportunistic behavior. In the corporate governance literature, the dominant approaches axiomatically assume individuals with self-interest or opportunistic behavior. The modern research stream of psychological economics, however, has shown that prosocial preferences exist and do matter. When the determinants of prosocial behavior are considered, the implications for the design of corporate governance institutions may clash with conventional wisdom. We suggest that the following measures help to overcome social dilemmas at the firm level: board representation of knowledge workers who invest in firm-specific human capital, attenuation of variable pay-for-performance, selection of directors and managers with prosocial preferences, and employee participation in decision-making and control. With our approach, we make a rare attempt to apply psychological economics to a complex institution, namely corporate governance. |
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M Piccirelli, MRI of the orbit during eye movement, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Dissertation)
Ein grundlegenderes Verständnis der peripheren okulomotorischen Pathophysiologie könnte zur Verbesserung der Strabismuschirurgie beitragen. Konventionelle strabologische Untersuchungsmethoden sind hilfreich, um Augenmotilitätsstörungen zu erkennen. Dennoch ist in komplexen Fällen eine präzise Diagnose mit den pathophysiologischen Erkenntnissen, die durch diese Untersuchungen und mit einem quasi agonist-antagonist extraokular Muskel-Modell gegeben sind, nicht möglich; besonders nach einer Chirurgie der extraokularen Muskeln, welcher sich das okulomotorische System anpasst. Das Problem liegt in der Verbindung von Daten der dynamischen Augenbewegung mit statischen Orbitagewebe-Konformationen. Das unvollständige Verständnis der Umwandlung der neuronalen Steuerungssignale in mechanische Augenbewegungen provozierte eine jahrzehntelange Kontroverse über die aktive oder passive Rolle des orbitalen Bindegewebes, die noch geklärt werden muss. Momentan stehen keine geeigneten dynamischen Daten zur Beurteilung des orbitalen Gewebeverhaltens zur Verfügung, selbst wenn dynamische (Un-)Gleichgewichte existieren, wie z.B. bei Verletzungen des Listingschen Gesetzes während schnellen Augenbewegungen, in bestimmten Fällen. Dies hat, zusammen mit der Komplexität der orbitalen Biomechanik, die Entwicklung eines angemessenen neuro-biomechanischen Orbitamodells verzögert. Gleichzeitige hohe räumliche und zeitliche Auflösung der Kinetik des Orbitalgewebes während der Augenbewegung würde die Umwandlung des neuronalen Signals in eine mechanische Wirkung besser beschreiben. Daraus ergeben sich die Ziele dieser Arbeit: Erstens soll ein klinisch benutzbarer visueller Reiz entwickelt werden, welcher periodisch wiederholende Augenbewegungen im Inneren des Scanners erzeugt. Damit sollen segmentierte Magnetresonanz-Bilder (MR-Bilder) ohne Bewegungsartefakte in einer genügend kurzen Zeit synchron aufgenommen werden. Zweitens soll die Bildaufnahme mit Hilfe von TFEPI durch Wahl eines reduziertes Sichtfeldes (FOV) und k-t BLAST beschleunigt werden. Drittens soll die Bewegung (CDENSE, CSPAMM) und Geschwindigkeit (Q-Flow) direkt in Bilder der Augenhöhlen kodiert werden, um zusätzliche Bewegungsdaten in der begrenzten Aufnahmezeit zu liefern. Viertens ist die dynamische Verformung der Orbitagewebe durch neue, bildrauschresistente, modellfreie Methoden zu quantifizieren. Weiter war die Messung der (vermuteten) inhomogenen Kontraktion entlang den Augenmuskeln und die Differenzierung der normalen gegenüber der pathologischen Deformation während den Augenbewegungen ein wichtiges Ziel. Diese neue Messgrößen der Augenhöhlenmechanik und deren Steuerung sollten das Verständnis der Strabismusätiologie verbessern. Die ersten hoch aufgelösten anatomischen, bewegungs- und geschwindigkeitskodierten Bilder der Deformationsdynamik der Augenhöhlen wurden mit der beschriebenen Methode erfolgreich aufgenommen. Dreidimensionale anatomische und bewegungskodierte MR-Bilder konnten mit hoher räumlicher und zeitlicher Auflösung in weniger als 10 Minuten durch eine Beschleunigung der Bildaufnahme gewonnen werden. Die Verformung des Orbitagewebes während der Augenbewegung konnte quantifiziert werden. Zum ersten Mal konnten die räumlich-zeitlichen Verformungsmuster des Glaskörpers visualisiert und viskoelastische Modellparameter quantifiziert werden. Verschiedene Arten von Deformationsmustern des Glaskörpers konnten beschrieben werden. Die Viskosität und Elastizität des Glaskörpers wurden durch ein viskoelastisches Modell bestimmt. Somit sind relevante Modellierungsparameter der Augenhöhlebiomechanik in vivo quantifiziert worden. Die Differenzierung des dynamischen Deformationsprofils entlang der Augenmuskeln von Duane-Syndrom Patienten gegenüber physiologischen Deformationsprofilen erlaubte die nicht funktionellen Segmente der pathologischen Muskeln zu bestimmen und lieferte neue Einblicke in die okulomotorische Steuerung. Das erweiterte Verständnis der Physiologie des Orbitagewebes und deren neuronalen Kontrollmechanismen könnte bisher unerkannte Ursachen des Schielens klären, welche traditionelle Konzepte verbessern oder alternative Behandlungen vorschlagen könnten. Die Ursachen von Krankheiten wie neuronal bedingte Lähmung, verzögerte neuromuskuläre Übertragung, mechanische Beschränkung und Entzündung der Augenmuskeln voneinander zu differenzieren kann jetzt geplant werden. |
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Susanne Suter, José A Iglesias Guitian, F Marton, M Agus, Andreas Elsener, C P E Zollikofer, M Gopi, E Gobbetti, Renato Pajarola, Interactive multiscale tensor reconstruction for multiresolution volume visualization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 17 (12), 2011. (Journal Article)
Large scale and structurally complex volume datasets from high-resolution 3D imaging devices or computational simulations pose a number of technical challenges for interactive visual analysis. In this paper, we present the first integration of a multiscale volume representation based on tensor approximation within a GPU-accelerated out-of-core multiresolution rendering framework. Specific contributions include (a) a hierarchical brick-tensor decomposition approach for pre-processing large volume data, (b) a GPU accelerated tensor reconstruction implementation exploiting CUDA capabilities, and (c) an effective tensor-specific quantization strategy for reducing data transfer bandwidth and out-of-core memory footprint. Our multiscale representation allows for the extraction, analysis and display of structural features at variable spatial scales, while adaptive level-of-detail rendering methods make it possible to interactively explore large datasets within a constrained memory footprint. The quality and performance of our prototype system is evaluated on large structurally complex datasets, including gigabyte-sized micro-tomographic volumes. |
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