Nicolas Bettenburg, Sascha Just, Adrian Schröter, Cathrin Weiss, Rahul Premraj, Thomas Zimmermann, Quality of Bug Reports in Eclipse, In: Proceedings of the 2007 OOPSLA Workshop on Eclipse Technology eXchange, ACM, New York, NY, USA, October 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
The information in bug reports influences the speed at which bugs are fixed. However, bug reports differ in their quality of information. We conducted a survey responses among the ECLIPSE developers to determine the information in reports that they widely used and the problems frequently encountered. Our results show that steps to reproduce and stack traces are most sought after by developers, while inaccurate steps to reproduce and incomplete information pose the largest hurdles. Surprisingly, developers are indifferent to bug duplicates. Such insight is useful to design new bug tracking tools that guide reporters at providing more helpful information. We also present a prototype of a quality-meter tool that measures the quality of bug reports by scanning its content. |
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Stefan Christiani, A study on activity and location recognition using various sensors, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Bachelor's Thesis)
In our everyday life, we move through different environments and undertake different activities. During some of those moments, we can handle disturbances, in others they become intolerable. Because of this, context sensitive mobile-phones become a potentially important part of our future. This paper presents an experiment, in which a series of sensors was analysed for their capacity to predict the context of a mobile phone on which they were attached to. This test device was then used to record data in real world scenarios, and the accuracy of the resulting predictions was measured. It could be shown that both activities and locations could be detected quite reliably in real world conditions and that certain sensors fare better then others. |
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Marc Gasser, A Validation of Action Patterns for Project Managers, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
The goal of this thesis is to validate the principles, procedures, and action alternatives of “good” project management, in order to build an e-learning and e-coaching system for measurement and development of project management skills. Analysis of these principles will serve to increase project success and enhance the development of appropriate project management capabilities. These principles and action alternatives are based on observations, interviews, assisted surveys, and the work undertaken during a project management course attended by 250 students at the University of Zurich and also 50 experts from multinational companies. More than 6000 hours was spent measuring project management success resulting in 1200 fundamental project management rules. The evaluation of these principles, procedures and action alternatives leads to innovative techniques to accelerate the acquisition of experience in project management, as well as the development of new capabilities in measuring leadership skills and computer aided processing. |
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Michael Jehle, Reengineering eines Userinterfaces für Mobile Systeme, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Bachelor's Thesis)
Target of this Bachelor's thesis was to do a reengineering of the userinterface of the mExplorer, a client-server application, written in Java. The mExplorer is a mobile learning game prototype developed by Christoph Go?th. Playing that game, the users can discover a new, unknown environment (for example a complex of buildings). Therefore the mExplorer offers orientation and navigation functions. Within the scope of the reengineering of the userinterface, a toolbar with intuitive symbols should be developed, giving access to most of the important program functions. Additionally a task list, giving an overview over the open tasks and a configuration menu, allowing the user to configure his interface, should be provided. |
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Patrick Reolon, Analytische Betrugserkennung: Evaluation von unbeaufsichtigten, relationalen DataMining-Methoden für die Suche nach Betrugsmustern in den Transaktions- und Kontodaten von Finanzinstituten, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Day by day banking institutes process millions of transactions. When handling such a mass of funds it is easy to find people, who get tempted to illicitally take a piece of the cake. Such cases of fraud, specially when initiated by employees of financial institutes, are particularly severe respecting the loss expenses and loss of reputation. Until a few years ago, fraud detection based only upon the experience of anti-fraud employees and just recently computer systems, build to support the fraud prevention by applying filters on data of monetary transactions, have come up. On the search for further analytic methods to find patterns of fraud, to include these into existing software-systems, TVIS (Transaction Visualization System), a project between the University of Zurich (DDIS group) with a banking institute, has been developed. The goal of this software is to find hotspots algorithmically in the huge amount of data in information systems and to allow a paradigm shift from a case-friven approach to a broader data-monitoring approach. While TVIS uses supervised learning methods, concretely by supporting the visual search for fraud-schemes, which get identified by humans as such, this thesis is dedicated to the analysis of unsupervised methods and how they can support the work of anti-fraud employees. Traditional unsupervised data-mining-based methods require propositional data, while the data used to detect fraud-cases is typically highly relational. The problem-space becomes therefore more complicated, as single objects or attributes acquire their real importance only after analysis of their relations to other objects / entities. This is specially the case in the banking environment, where fraud schemes often encompass a multitude of transactions, accounts, and (unknowing) clients. Traditional approaches cannot deal with such relational data. This forces the search for new practices, which explicitely take relations into account and therefore deal successfully with the present multi-relational data-world. In this work, relational data-mining-methods will be evaluated, where the focus will be set on how good this approaches can be used for the practical search for fraud-patterns. With the inviii sights of this analysis a method will be presented, which shall help to carry out data-mining tasks for fraud-prevention. To prove the validity of this method the aim was to test it in its real environment, a data warehouse, as realistic data-structures and amounts of data are believed to bring more valuable insights than a laboratory environment, where the danger is big that the environment is adapted to the procedure. For this reason an application was developed, which extracts the necessary data from the data warehouse and prepares them for the evaluated algorithms / toolkits (SUBDUE and YALE). The implementation of this software gave already important insights into special peculiarities of the IT-infastructure mada available by the financial institute. Also the first tests with the presented method could be carried out. These have shown, that security aspects and the amount of data proved to make the usage of unsupervised methods in the banking environment rather difficult. It was also experienced that SUBDUE is not suited for the handling of huge amount of data. On the basis of these first experiences, and the insights, recommendations are presented on how the evaluated procedure can be optimized and how relational data-mining-methods and their environment should be designed in future, to be able to successfully accomplish the task of analytic fraud detection within the bank. |
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Werner Winkelmann, Entwicklung und Konzeption eines evolutionären Lernspiels, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Within an interdisciplinary project at the University of Zurich an evolutionary learning game for project management has been developed. The PM-Game is a text-based adventure role-playing game. The users of the PM-Game do as well deliver the content of the game. Besides creating virtual worlds and stories (game content), they define the rules for measuring and coaching (learning content). This reduces the production costs and offers possibilities for levelled learning. In this document, the advantages of a categorisation to four user levels are described. Furthermore the specific problems of introducing a platform with user-generated content are analysed and appropriate measures deduced. |
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Anil Kandrical, Visualizing Metrics using Tree Maps and Evolizer, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Metrics are powerful when it comes to summarize characteristics of a software system. It helps us to understand, steer and control the future development of the software application. But metrics often appear in plain numbers, what makes it sometimes hard to really understand them. This is the point where visualization comes into the play. Visualization has helped, since rembrance of mankind, to easy the understanding of a problem or concept while using graphics, sketches and signs. This benefit can also be used when it comes to metrics and software systems. Visualizing metrics while using treemaps allows to combine different base metrics with each other in a graphic, which can be easier understood rather than using plain numbers only. A second advantage is the fact, that the base metrics can be used to build a customized metric profile which is important. In this bachelor thesis metrics visualization capability is enabled to a research tool called Evolizer, which is a release history databases with the goal to analyze Java projects in terms of releases. Since it is not capable of viewing metrics, it is a perfect candidate for extending with a Treemap plugin,which will be built for this purpose and can be integrated to the existing structure of the Evolizer. |
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Andreas Scherer, Guido Palazzo, Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility. Business and Society Seen From a Habermasian Perspective, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 32 (4), 2007. (Journal Article)
We review two important schools within business and society research, which we label positivist and postpositivist corporate social responsibility (CSR). The former is criticized because of its instrumentalism and normative vacuity and the latter because of its relativism, foundationalism, and utopianism. We propose a new approach, based on Jürgen Habermas's theory of democracy, and we define the new role of the business firm as a political actor in a globalizing society. |
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Gregory S. Crawford, Joseph Cullen, Bundling, product choice, and efficiency: should cable television networks be offered à la carte?, Information Economics and Policy, Vol. 19 (3-4), 2007. (Journal Article)
We conduct a numerical analysis of bundling’s impact on a monopolist’s pricing and product choices and assess the implications for consumer welfare in cable television markets. Existing theory is ambiguous: for a given set of products, bundling likely transfers surplus from consumers to firms but also encourages products to be offered that might not be under à la carte pricing. Simulation of “Full À La Carte” for an economic environment calibrated to an average cable television system suggests that consumers would likely benefit from à la carte sales. If all networks continued to be offered, the average household’s surplus is predicted to increase by $6.80 (65.6%) under à la carte sales (despite a total bundle price that almost doubles) and reduced network profits would have to be such that 41 of 50 offered cable networks have to exit the market to make her indifferent. Simulation of a “Theme Tier” scenario provides intermediate benefits. The incremental marginal costs to cable systems of à la carte sales and its impact in the advertising market and on competition are important factors in determining consumer benefits. |
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Katastrophenmanagement, In: Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium OM-Aus-Blick. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Franck Rousseau, Yan Grunenberger, Vincent Untz, Eryk Jerzy Schiller, Paul Starzetz, Fabrice Theoleyre, Martin Heusse, Olivier Alphand, Andrzej Duda, An architecture for seamless mobility in spontaneous wireless mesh networks, In: Proceedings of 2nd ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture (MobiArch), ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 2007-09-27. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
In this paper, we consider spontaneous wireless mesh networks that can provide wide coverage connectivity to mobile nodes. Our mobility scheme builds upon separation between a persistent node identifier and its current address. When joining the mesh, a mobile node associates with a mesh router that updates a location service managed in the mesh as a distributed hash table. Mobility implies changing addresses while a node moves in the mesh. To keep the rate of location updates and correspondent node notifications low, the address of the new mesh router with which the mobile node is associated needs to be topologically close to the previous one. Thus, such a mobility scheme requires an addressing space with specific properties. We achieve this by defining an algorithm for constructing a pseudo-geographical addressing space: a few nodes know their exact locations and others estimate their relative positions to form a topologically consistent addressing space. Such an addressing space also enables scalable and low overhead routing in the wireless mesh---we propose a trajectory based long distance ballistic geographical routing. |
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Thomas Weinhold, Lydia Bauer, Josef Herget, Sonja Hierl, Joachim Pfister, CHEVAL: Chur Evaluation Laboratory, In: European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation (ECIME), Academic Conferences Ltd, Montpellier, 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
Incorporating novel approaches like visual components, semantic web ideas or Web 2.0 concepts into information retrieval systems poses new challenges for their systematic evaluation. Currently, the development of valid evaluation settings cannot keep up with the development of new search engines and innovative information retrieval concepts. Therefore, the Swiss Institute for Information Research (SII), is currently developing a testbed called CHEVAL (Chur Evaluation Laboratory) to tackle this problem. The vision of CHEVAL is to design an integrated, multi-level and multi-methodological web-based system and framework to support different kinds of evaluation types (e.g. usability tests, IR efficiency measurement, benchmarking studies etc.) of several types of information retrieval systems. In the context of CHEVAL, an evaluation can have multiple dimensions regarding the type of the evaluation (long-term or short-term test phase, comparative or non-comparative evaluation, field or laboratory test environment) and the methods used for the evaluation, which can either be from IR efficiency measurement or usability testing as well as a combination of both. The paper will give an overview of some well-known and widely accepted evaluation initiatives. This also includes background information about the history of these initiatives. Furthermore the strengths and weaknesses of the described evaluation initiatives will be presented and discussed. Based on the deficiencies of current approaches for evaluating information retrieval systems with visual or semantic components the vision and the goals of the Chur Evaluation Laboratory will be explained. Following, the architecture of the testbed will be introduced. An example will illustrate how the system is intended to be used and what advantages CHEVAL will give to evaluators of information retrieval systems. Finally, the paper will present the success factors and a short roadmap for the further development of the Chur Evaluation Laboratory. |
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, F Heinzmann, Finanzierung der wissenschaftlichen Weiterbildung im Zusammenhang mit berufsbegleitenden Masterprogrammen der Universität Zürich, In: Jahrestagung 2007, Deutsche Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Weiterbildung und Fernstudium e.V. DGWF. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Elaine May Huang, Khai Truong, Understanding the paradigm of disposable technology: What happens to old mobile phones?, In: UbiComp 2007. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Elaine May Huang, When does the public look at public displays, In: UbiComp 2007, 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
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Helmut Max Dietl, Egon Franck, Wie Märkte für Sportwetten funktionieren, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 59, 14 September 2007. (Newspaper Article)
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David Seidl, Paul Sanderson , Comply or Explain: The Flexibility of Corporate Governance Codes in Theory and in Practice, In: 2nd Annual Cambridge Conference on Regulation, Inspection & Improvement. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Lorenz Hilty, CO2 Reduction with ICT: Prospects and Barriers, In: Shake, Shaker Verlag, Aachen, 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
The challenge of climate change calls for a systematic effort to utilize ICT for CO2 reduction. This paper shows that the effects of ICT applications on CO2 emissions are manifold and demonstrates a systematic approach to deal with this variety. The approach combines a standard life-cycle approach with a classification of ICT effects in first- to third-order effects. It is applied to the fields of ICT application that are discussed in literature as candidate fields for ICT-related CO2 reduction. High reduction potentials are identified in the following fields: data centers, mobile phone networks, electronic waste recycling, intelligent space heating, virtual meetings, and the organization of services where consumption is traditionally linked with product ownership. Finally, current barriers preventing the exploitation of these potentials are discussed. |
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Martin Waldburger, Burkhard Stiller, Regulatory issues for mobile grid computing in Europe, In: 18th European Regional ITS Conference (ITS 2007), 2007-09-04. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Regulatory issues for communications and value-added services determine a key requirement of study to ensure that a competitive and fair commercial usage within a legal domain can be achieved. Therefore, this paper pursues a comprehensive study identifying the key mobile grid regulations on a European level, while such grid services are considered to be of major importance for upcoming value-added services. The focus is put mainly on those regulatory determinations affecting areas neglected by the eCommunications framework, namely the areas of value-added services in mobile grids and of determinations governing relations among service providers and between service consumers and service providers. Thus, the major achievement here outlines the potential for open and unregulated mobile grid applications as well as services markets. Due to the lack of eCommunications determinations— as shown in a previous study [38]—, this new work ensures the careful consideration of fundamental consumer rights and competition efficiency for value-added services. |
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Martin Waldburger, Burkhard Stiller, Regulatory Issues for Mobile Grid Computing in Europe, In: 18th European Regional ITS Conference (ITS 2007), Istanbul, Turkey, 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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