Contributions in Merlin

Modular self-reconfigurable robots are robotic systems that are able to change their shape through appropriate reconfiguration of their modules according to the task environment encountered. In recent work, a biologically inspired modular robot called Slimebot has been shown to exhibit amoebic locomotion and obstacle negotiation in a fully emergent manner. The goal of this thesis is to further investigate the capabilities of the Slimebot under a variety of scenarios, which include simple locomotion, obstacle negotiation, locomotion towards a moving light source, malfunction of modules and merging of Slimebots. A special focus is set on optimization, i.e. on the attempt to find parameter values for which the Slimebot performs best in a given task environment.

Community research assumes that mobile tourism communities could change the way how travelers achieve the information needed. A successful community can only be established, if it is able to meet the user's demands. There is a gap in research in this area regarding the required investigation with basic methods. By focusing on the main interests individual travelers had, we tried to figure out in which scenarios they could be put in most possibly where a mobile tourism community could succeed. Therefore we used the methods focus group, field trip and travel diary to clarify which methods suit for further research in this domain. The results show that information about public transportation and accommodation is the most common need. A mobile community could be a good tool to resolve several needs, although we found out that too much information available could reduce travel experience.

The emergence of peer-to-peer systems poses a challenge for network providers, in particular the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Since the routing in such peer-to-peer applications works unaware of the underlying topology, the chosen paths are not always optimal for the ISPs - on the contrary, a lot of unnecessary routes and costly connections are a consequence. ISPs have to pay for certain connections that leave their network and enter the network of another provider. By favouring intradomain traffic over the costly interdomain traffic, the ISPs have the potential to save resources and costs. Different universities and companies formed a project called SmoothIT which set itself the goal to optimise these shortcomings. The critical success factor to overcome these problems was co-operation as opposed to standalone, individual efforts to optimise the network by itself. By creating incentives for all participants the aim is to facilitate collaboration and information exchange in order to find shorter and less expensive routes. A possible architecture to enhance the communication between the ISPs and the application providers, bases on a SmoothIT information system (SIS) that shares information with the applications through a web service. The application can then choose an ideal path to route the traffic that stays within the borders of the ISP as much as possible. For the end users this results in faster download, reduced delay times and a better service quality.

Due to the increase in technology used in the financial sector, which continues to intensify competition, tailoring consulting services is playing a decisive role in differentiating oneself from the competition. The increase in technology has created prerequisites which companies can use to offer the customer better consulting through IT support. Six Swiss banks were interviewed as part of this paper to find out whether these prerequisites are being utilized in investment consulting. The results showed that investment consulting without the help of IT tools is currently unimaginable. However, there is great room for improvement in the information technology deployed. Based on specialist literature and the interviews carried out, this paper shows improvement measures for the investment process of Swiss banks. Durch die zunehmende Technologisierung im Finanzsektor und der dadurch immer intensiver werdende Wettbewerb, spielt die Individualisierung der Beratungsdienstleistungen eine entscheidende Rolle um sich von der Konkurrenz abzuheben. Mit der Technologisierung wurden die Voraussetzungen geschaffen, dass der Kunde durch IT-Unterstu?tzung besser beraten werden kann. Um herauszufinden ob diese Voraussetzungen in der Anlageberatung genutzt werden, wurden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit sechs Schweizer Banken befragt. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass eine Anlageberatung ohne IT-Hilfsmittel heute kaum mehr vorstellbar ist. Dennoch besteht bei der eingesetzten Informationstechnologie ein grosses Verbesserungspotential. Basierend auf die Fachliteratur und die durchgefu?hrten Interviews soll die vorliegende Arbeit Verbesserungsmassnahmen im Anlageprozess von Schweizer Banken aufzeigen.

Sensory-motor coordination is one of the key principles that underlie intelligent and adaptive behaviour of agents. The goal of this work was to explore the sensory-motor coordination in two embodied, situated agents – a ‘dog’ robot “Puppy”, and a ‘fish’ robot “Wanda” – and to discover ways how they can efficiently sense their environment and adapt to it. In particular, in the quadruped platform different gaits and their impact on terrain recognition were investigated. This offered the possibility to adapt its behaviour better to the environmental conditions. The fish robot “Wanda” was also developed further in terms of adaptive behaviour and a whiskered microphone was tested as an additional sensor type. As a result, both robots were able to evolve optimal gaits taking specific environmental conditions into account and react thus autonomously to different, not pre-learned, environmental situations, while exploiting the mechanical properties of their bodies.

Die internationale Verflechtung der Finanzmärkte hat stark zugenommen. Viele kritisieren, dies habe die gegenwärtige Kreditkrise verschärft, wenn nicht gar ausgelöst, und fordern schärfere Regulierungen. Der Autor wendet sich gegen diese Kritik. Die Verteilung von Kreditrisiken über die Welt hinweg bringe Wohlfahrtsgewinne. Zudem würden globalisierte Finanzmärkte mithelfen, die Folgen der Krise zu dämpfen.

In this paper, we combine for the first time the methods of dynamic mechanism design with techniques from decentralized decision making under uncertainty. Consider a multi-agent system with self-interested agents acting in an uncertain environment, each with private actions, states and rewards. There is also a social planner with its own actions, rewards, and states, acting as a coordinator and able to influence the agents via actions (e.g., resource allocations). Agents can only communicate with the center, but may become inaccessible, e.g., when their communication device fails. When accessible to the center, agents can report their local state (and models) and receive recommendations from the center about local policies to follow for the present period and also, should they become inaccessible, until becoming accessible again. Without self-interest, this poses a new problem class which we call partially-synchronized DEC-MDPs, and for which we establish some positive complexity results under reasonable assumptions. Allowing for self-interested agents, we are able to bridge to methods of dynamic mechanism design, aligning incentives so that agents truthfully report local state when accessible and choose to follow the prescribed “emergency policies” of the center.

To enable a better understanding of corrupt activities, I develop the paper around fundamental dimensions: Firstly, corruption is exerted by the supply side, this means I analyze the regulation effects on providers of corruption activities. Second, I enrich existing compliance concepts with the integrity approach and point out the effects on individual behavior.

The paper is concerned with the concept of leadership responsibility. Responsible leadership understood as normatively appropriate conduct in the pursuit of the organizational goals addresses the challenges of nowadays’ leaders in the light of global transformation processes. The paper argues that existing schools of the leadership phenomenon, herein paradigmatically grouped as “positivist” and “post-positivist”, fail to capture the scope of the therein encapsulated implications. Through reviewing existing approaches their normative vacuity, justification deficits and implementation problems are shown. In order to address these, the paper proposes a new approach, based on Habermas’ idea of democratic deliberation, as forwarded in the concept of political corporate social responsibility.

We propose an intelligent data mining (DM) assistant that will combine planning and meta-learning to provide support to users of virtual DM laboratory. A knowledge-driven planner will rely on a data mining ontology to plan the knowledge discovery workflow and determine the set of valid operators for each step of this workflow. A probabilistic meta-learner will select the most appropriate operators by using relational similarity measures and kernel functions over records of past sessions meta-data stored in a DM experiments repository.