Contributions in Merlin

With the advent of ever evolving software systems, often fueled by crucial new technology developments or changes in policies public and private, reengineering has become an important part of the software engineering process. Old legacy software systems are often too valuable or too interwoven with existing mission critical applications. Replacing them is simply not a viable option. The process of reengineering allows further development of such legacy systems, even if the original developer team is not available anymore. To facilitate the reengineering process, a wealth of tools have emerged to support such endeavors. Source code change detection is an important technique to understand the evolution of a software system. While still many change detection algorithms of common software development tools focus on detecting simple line by line changes in source code files, much research effort was invested into more sophisticated tools to grasp the additional value of syntactical and contextual information. Context information, for instance, is offered by the representation of an inheritance relationship of two classes or the affiliation of an attribute to a data type class. Being able to track changes within the context of source code structures allows to better understand changes of software systems. This thesis describes new techniques of using a FAMIX model extracted from subsequent software system releases in order to visualize changes within a source code's specific scope. We give an introduction into source code differentiation using FAMIX models with an algorithm based on Chawathe's change detection. An evaluation of such source code differentiation with specially designed and real-life source code projects is provided to prove the effectiveness and accuracy of the solution.

The growing number of SemanticWeb applications producesmore and more data in RDF/OWLformat. The persistent storage of this strongly interlinked data is not trivial. The data is often mapped to relational databases, even if they are not relational, but rather graph-based. There are already various approaches to storing this data in a persistent way. Frequently these systems neglect some requirements. Hexastore was developed at the University of Zurich. This sixfold indexing approach for Semantic Web Data is scalable, does not discriminate any RDF-Elements and is applicable to any datasets without knowing anything about the dataset beforehand. The idea of Hexastore was implemented as an in-memory prototype. This work presents an approach to storing Hexastore persistently on disk. The suitability of this method is documented in several queries over two datasets and is evaluated against some reference systems.

Software development is dominated by projects that cannot be compared with industrial mass production. Its uniqueness demands that the development process is adjusted to suit the characteristics specific to each project and organisation. The situation is considered at UBS Wealth Management & Business Banking. It appears that customisation according to RUP is not feasible. The first procedure envisaged for customisation is the provision of ready-made software development processes, adjusted to suit the project types specified by the organisation. This method was contrasted with a new approach. This approach uses a partially automated transformation. A project-specific software development process has been generated from a process framework based on the Software Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM). This concept was inspired by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Problems such as serviceability and the rapidly increasing expenditure when providing ready-made processes are addressed by this. Key words: software development process, tailoring, transformation, project characteristics, RUP, EUP, MDA, SPEM

Every sixth months prior to a semester a student of the University of Zurich performs the same steps to get an idea of the upcoming semester and what courses she should take. This process involves the consideration of regulations and publications which is a cumbersome task. The creator of this thesis could imagine that a suitable information system can help out. The module directory of University of Zurich, which is accessible through a web interface, only provides categorized module information. A software could use the very same information for implementing a tool to plan a semester and even an entire study. This is the idea of MyMaster. To implement this idea with an achievable bachelor thesis project, the outlined planning tool was limited to the new master study programs of the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich. That is why its name is MyMaster. The software is realized as a Ruby on Rails web application and was developed in an Agile way. The two main features are a schedule editor for planning a single semester and a study plan editor for developing a plan over a entire study time. The study plan editor includes a recommender that generates a ?lled study plan on the base of interests the student speci?es. To make use of the existing module information system (the university calendar), the MyMaster application has an interface to import and synchronize data. The evaluation by students showed that the tool works and in addition has potential to get expanded with supplementary features.

Continuous change is a major challenge in modern distributed business systems. The more distributed parts a system has, the more problems are rising with it. Questions of mitigating technological risks, smooth migration paths or reengineering needs or potentials are key questions for managing evolutionary changes. This diploma thesis addresses such continuous changes in data and business logic components in a distributed system. The goal is to identify, describe and devise strategies for a smooth evolution path. Thereby challenges and problems should be isolated, described, categorized and analyzed in a design and architectural view. The resolution methods will be formulated with patterns and reengineering recommendations. The frame of this diploma thesis is a case study in the UBS AG IT-System, which is one of the largest distributed systems in Switzerland.

Major search engines are briefly described after a short introduction of different search methods with a special focus on Google‘s revolutionary PageRank algorithm. After this introduction, a more recent search method called social search is explained. Special focus is put on social bookmarking and tagging. An empirical study about subjective and objective tags in different settings shows no huge difference for subjective and objective tags in terms of data retrieval in the web. Furthermore, it is indicated that a tag search might be more helpful than conventional search for brainstorming or inspiration. Conventional search, on the other hand, is more helpful to find specific information.

The java code that was worked out to generate synthetic bank transactions with real distribution figures is explained in the present bachelor thesis: The Transaction Evaluator analyses the structure of the original data, before the Transaction Builder generates the synthetic data based on the ascertained properties. Further, the performance of the program is evaluated on the basis of two test sets. It turns out that the implementation works and the results are pleasant; however it still remains to find the ideal settings.

In the rehabilitation of people who have lost one of their limbs, the application of robotic prosthetic devices is therefore a next step worth investigating. Already, some very promising results have been achieved with the appliance of an artifical hand with which it is tried to fill the gap in a human's body image. The trick seems to be to not only let a patient control the hand in some ways, but also provide some feedback about the state of the robot back to the user. However, there are still a lot of open questions---quite too many for only one device. And unfortunately, the prototype is also requiring a lot of maintenance to produce reliable results during experiments and studies. In a recent study a simulation of the robot hand was developed in order to investigate the dynamical evolution of a motion controller. Building on this, the task was to develop a modular framework for data acquisition, processing and actuation and integrate this with the virtual environment. Furthermore, heavy focus had to be put on cross-platform-portability, modularity and speed. In the end, it should not only be a viable alternative to the robot hand with respect to performance, accuracy and behaviour, but also a platform for testing new approaches in control anad stimulation, with as little additional effort as possible.

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a crossmodal stimulus-response compatibility paradigm to identify modality-independent aspects of rule processing and cued response facilitation. Participants responded to a lateralized target with the ipsilateral (compatible) or contralateral (incompatible) hand. Cue-target modality and cue-target order were manipulated. The cue preceded the target in half of the trials, and the target preceded the cue in the other half. For half of the participants, a visual cue signalled the response rule to an auditory target, while in other half, an auditory cue signalled the response rule to a visual target. Behavioural results showed a significant cue facilitation effect with response times faster for trials when the cue preceded the target, regardless of cue-target modality. The overall fastest response times were obtained in auditory cue-visual target trials. We performed groupwise independent component analysis of the cortical potentials and identified two modality-independent spatiotemporal patterns related to experimental effects. The first pattern, which resembled the early part of a contingent-negative waveform, was associated with response rule processing, regardless of cue-target presentation order and modality. The second pattern showed amplitude modulations that were dependent on stimulus modality. However, this pattern also correlated with faster response times only when the cue preceded the target and regardless of cue-target modality. Source analysis suggested that the response rule processing pattern originated from the posterior parietal, motor and cingulate regions. The pattern associated with the cue-first facilitation effect originated from cingulate and medial frontal regions. The effects carried by both patterns showed temporal overlap in the interval between the first and second stimulus presentation, but with differences in their relation to response rule processing and behavioural facilitation.

Human social interaction is strongly shaped by other-regarding preferences. These preferences are key for a unique aspect of human sociality – large scale cooperation with genetic strangers – but little is known about their developmental roots. We show here that young children’s other-regarding preferences assume a particular form – inequality aversion – that develops strongly between the ages of 3 and 8. At age 3-4, the overwhelming majority of children behave selfishly, while the vast majority at age 7-8 prefers resource allocations that remove advantageous or disadvantageous inequality. Moreover, inequality aversion is strongly shaped by parochialism, a preference for favouring the members of one’s own social group. These results indicate that human egalitarianism and parochialism have deep developmental roots, and the simultaneous emergence of altruistic sharing and parochialism during childhood is intriguing in view of recent evolutionary theories which predict that the same evolutionary process jointly drives both human altruism and parochialism.