Contributions in Merlin

Over the last several years, the vision of a SemanticWeb has gained support from a vast of different fields of application. Meanwhile, there is a large number of datasets available with a tendency to interlink between each other, ready to be analyzed. But RDFS/OWL and SWRL, the standard languages for representing ontological knowledge and rules in RDF lack because of their limited expressiveness. Markov logic provides a good solution to this problem by putting weights on formulas, generalizing first-order logic with a probabilistic approach, allowing also contradictory rules. By successfully implementing and evaluating the execution of loopy belief propagation on Markov networks using the Signal/Collect framework, an elegant, and yet highly efficient solution is ready to be provided for the use in further applications.

Today’s Information Technology has widely pervaded banks in Switzerland. Swiss banks are highly dependent on the use of Information Technology. But with the financial advisory of Swiss banks there exists one exception, where nowadays IT is hardly used. Therefore, customer meetings are held without support of IT. Meanwhile there exist no detailed reasons which could explain these circumstances. The pervading use of IT in the financial advisory could be seen as an adoption of an innovation. Hence, in this thesis there will be a theoretical discussion about the adoption of innovations by using common models of technology acceptance and theories, which explain the diffusion and adoption of innovations. Based on a literature review, barriers which avoid the usage of technology in companies will be identified. Based on this literature review, there will be a classification of potential barriers, which may avoid a usage of technology in the financial advisory of Swiss banks.

I have bought a bottle of milk and now I want to know from which farm and cows the milk came from. Such questions can be answered by provenance applications. There are only a few general solutions which every database can use. MidPerm is a first try to generate such a solution. MidPerm separates the Perm module which is integrated into the Postgres database. Perm calculates the provenance data for a SQL query. A JDBC interface allows a communication with MidPerm. Through this interface MidPerm allows all databases with a JDBC interface to use the provenance calculation.

Software product line engineering is a field of increasing importance in the area of software engineering. The goal is to exploit commonalities between software products and therefore increase the development efficiency and quality. Requirements engineering is central to systematically create the product line as a whole and to generate concrete product specifications. In research and industry there exist different concepts for such a requirements modeling. So far there exists no scientific evidence on the advantages and disadvantages of these concepts. This Bachelor thesis contributes to reduce this gap. An existing case study of a software product line was systematically modeled with different concepts in three modern tools. This modeling was then analyzed in detail, many different quantitative and qualitative measurements were taken and these were used to derive concrete strengths and weaknesses of the different concepts. The results will be useful for industry to guide decision processes for selecting a concrete modeling tool and also for tool developers to understand the potential and opportunities for improvement of the concepts and tools.

P2P networks gain more and more importance in applications that need a high amount of resources. Since On Demand TV applications are very bandwidth intensive, LiveShift has been developed. LiveShift is a fully distributed P2P video streaming application, that allows each peer to publish a channel. The published channels can be watched in a time shifted manner by any peer within the network, since the P2P network serves as storage component. To locate video streams on the network, a basic electronic program guide (EPG) has been implement. The EPG though lacks a possibility to administer certain EPG data privately, such as the schedule of a channel. The modification of a channel schedule should be restricted to the channel publisher only. In addition peers do not have the possibility to create EPG data in a collaborative way. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a secure distributed EPG. The Design chapter explains the security concepts needed to allow a peer to administer EPG data privately and mechanisms to support peer collaboration. The chapter Implementation describes how these concepts are implemented in the distributed secure EPG. The results will be evaluated and conclusions will be drawn.

Collaborative information technology (CIT) such as instant messaging and video conferencing supports collaborative work. A recent international study has shown that utilization of CIT in organizations is still low. This thesis examines impacts of CIT to better understand these circumstances. For this purpose a research framework was constructed to gather information about CIT use and its impacts in an explorative field study. Interviews in 10 Swiss financial institutions were conducted, with users and providers of CIT. The results show support that CIT leads to impacts like higher effectiveness, quality, time savings, but also higher transparency and team cohesiveness. Significant differences in weighting of impacts between users and providers were found. Implications are drawn for further research.

Myoeletric control of robotic prostheses is a widely used approach in medical research. In this work, different algorithms for analyzing the coherence between movement and EMG signals are used and compared. The goal was to find a method which is not only capable of finding coherences between the movement and its directly associated EMG, but also indirectly associated EMG. This aspect is important for later use in upper limb protheses control. An important finding of this work is that EMG signals and movements have a linear, negative or constant coherence, depending on muscle function. This method provides a fast way to compare signals offline. It turned out, that for finding an appropriate method, many factors have to be considered. A challenge for future work is to find a suitable method for analyzing data online. If we know how different movement signals are connected to each other and connected to EMG signals, it would be a big step forward to recognize and predict movements by means of few EMG sensors.

The quality of an evolving system typically disintegrates as time passes, for example, because of new and unforseen requirements. RAPS is a tool used by SwissLife AG for complex calculations of product data. RAPS is written in C and is composed of about 1.5 million lines of code and has evolved for over ten years. We assume that the quality of RAPS can be improved by identifying and fixing quality issues. This thesis evaluates three tools, namely Bauhaus Suite, Imagix 4D and the combination of Sotograph and Sotoarc, that might facilitate the process of recovering the quality of RAPS. The goal is to evaluate what can be achieved by using the tools and to estimate which of the tools is best suited to analyze RAPS or similar systems. Special attention is payed to the role that visualization techniques play in the process of identifying and fixing quality issues.

This paper is a documentation to a `Facharbeit' at the Visualization and Multimedia Lab at the University of Zürich. The task was to implement a framework in C++ to benchmark the performance of different spatial data structures for three dimensional point data. A focus was kept on a direct representation of the theory with clean object orientation and a clear separation of concerns, good maintainability and extensibility of the resulting code. Data is read in from vertices stored in a ply file and loaded into a structure as configured by the user. Various manipulation of this data is performed, such as accessing and moving points or finding neighbours. For benchmarking, the time these operations take is measured. This paper begins with a short introduction into the theoretical background of selected data structures, then the implementation is described by explaining the general approach and specific problems and their solutions. Finally, some initial benchmarking results are shown, that lead to the conclusion that there is no one best data structure among those tested (grid, bucket point region kd-tree and bucket sliding midpoint kd-tree), but the sliding midpoint kd-tree performs more predictably than the point region version. For actual use, the data structures would possibly have to be re-implemented, as their implementations for the benchmark framework is intended for relative performance comparison only, not for absolute efficiency.

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