Pascal Wild, IT-Service-Management an Hochschulen mit Campus Management Systemen, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Due to the proceeding virtualisation of the campus by e-learning and the digitalisation of all administrative processes (e.g.: campus management systems) the IT service provider stands in the responsibility to give the intangible university a face. The stakeholders: students, faculty and administration need a contact point to turn to in case of questions, problems or suggestions. With such a heterogeneous target audience, it is a demanding challenge to develop a support organisation which is able to cover the primary needs of all stakeholders. An additional aspect to consider is that European universities are usually decentralized organisations and each unit has a distinct desire for autonomy. Based on eleven case studies and corresponding literature about best practices for support organisations, a reference model has been developed. The model shows how universities can organise their support organisation to satisfy the different needs of their stakeholders. The reference model is designed in ARIS and shall serve universities as a guideline. The case studies show the current support processes at six European universities, three companies from the private sector and two Anglo-Saxon universities. The case studies about the European universities involve the countries Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. |
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Christoph Wirz, Annotationen im „Mobile Learning Game“, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
In the context of the research field „Mobile Learning Games“, there was developed a mobile game environment, which should help students to learn to know the university better. This diploma thesis implements handwriting, voice and photo annotations for the existing Mobile Game application. Because there are always some problems in mobile environments with the underlying network and because these annotations contain a big amount of data, this paper discusses these circumstances and tries to show some solutions. The result is a functional extension of the Mobile Game, which has been confirmed by a user test. |
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Konstantin Beck, Die Krankenversicherer zeigen sich innovativ: Gründe gegen die Einführung einer Einheitskasse, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 11, 26 February 2007. (Newspaper Article)
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Pascal Kurtansky, Peter Reichl, Burkhard Stiller, The Evaluation of the Efficient Prepaid Scheme TICA for All-IP Networks and Internet Services, In: 10th IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2007), IEEE, Munich, Germany, 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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S A Mason, A Muller, Analyzing economic market interactions as conflicts: new concepts to assess market-based policy instruments, Ecological Economics, Vol. 61 (1), 2007. (Journal Article)
Complementing market-based policy instruments with conflict analysis approaches provides a wider understanding of market situations and allows to identify minimal requirements regarding needs, power and conflict dynamics. If these are not met, a market cannot be successfully introduced or a liberalization process implemented. Conflict analysis offers a language better suited to the concerns of people negatively affected by new markets. Applying this language helps to counterbalance the predominance of economic concepts. This fosters mutual understanding and enhances the prospect for successful implementation of market-based policies. We illustrate the potential of conflict analysis with examples from water privatization and labeling. |
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Jürg Syz, Housing Risk and Property Derivatives: The Role of Financial Engineering, In: Think Tank on the Management & Governance of Housing. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Hans Peter Wehrli, Andrew Mountfield, Damit verbringen Schweizer Manager wirklich ihre Zeit, io management, Vol. 76, 2007. (Journal Article)
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Hermann Wotruba, Thomas Scharrenbach, New developments in sorting technology- the use of microwave excitation and infrared sensors for ore sorting, In: Meddelanden från MinFo No. 37: Conference in Mineral Processing, Luleå, Sweden, February 2007, Stockholm, Sweden, 2007-02-06. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
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Thomas Bocek, Management of Biometric Data in a Distributed Internet Environment, In: CSG Seminar. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Helmut Max Dietl, Egon Franck, Niederlage gegen den «inneren Schweinehund», In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27, p. 63, 2 February 2007. (Newspaper Article)
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Ramazan Gençay, Rajna Gibson, Model risk for European-style stock index options, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, Vol. 18 (1), 2007. (Journal Article)
In empirical modeling, there have been two strands for pricing in the options literature, namely the parametric and nonparametric models. Often, the support for the nonparametric methods is based on a benchmark such as the Black-Scholes (BS) model with constant volatility. In this paper, we study the stochastic volatility (SV) and stochastic volatility random jump (SVJ) models as parametric benchmarks against feedforward neural network (FNN) models, a class of neural network models. Our choice for FNN models is due to their well-studied universal approximation properties of an unknown function and its partial derivatives. Since the partial derivatives of an option pricing formula are risk pricing tools, an accurate estimation of the unknown option pricing function is essential for pricing and hedging. Our findings indicate that FNN models offer themselves as robust option pricing tools, over their sophisticated parametric counterparts in predictive settings. There are two routes to explain the superiority of FNN models over the parametric models in forecast settings. These are nonnormality of return distributions and adaptive learning. |
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Bernard Dumas, Jürg Syz, Perspectives: Why not trade pension claims?, Financial Analysts Journal, Vol. 63 (1), 2007. (Journal Article)
Trading pension claims would serve many purposes. Beneficiaries would be able to diversify the idiosyncratic credit risk of their plan sponsors. And systematic risk could be reallocated to comply with individual risk-return preferences. The result would be an alignment of companies' and pension fund managers' incentives to keep fund plans fully funded - in line with beneficiary interests - which would lower agency costs and costs of government bailouts of defined-benefit plans and would improve the general welfare. As an accurate valuation of pension liabilities, trading would provide a measurable yardstick for plan managers. |
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Bruno Frey, Simon Luechinger, Alois Stutzer, Calculating tragedy: Assessing the costs of terrorism, Journal of Economic Surveys, Vol. 21 (1), 2007. (Journal Article)
The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences are only a part of the overall costs of terrorism, possible approaches for estimating the utility losses of the people affected are discussed. Results using the life satisfaction approach, in which individual utility is approximated by self-reported subjective well-being, suggest that people’s utility losses may far exceed the purely economic consequences. |
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Ernst Fehr, Jean R Tyran, Money illusion and coordination failure, Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 58 (2), 2007. (Journal Article)
Economists long considered money illusion to be largely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion has powerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent payoffs in nominal terms, choices converge to the Pareto inefficient equilibrium; however, if we lift the veil of money by representing payoffs in real terms, the Pareto efficient equilibrium is selected. We also show that strategic uncertainty about the other players’ behavior is key for the equilibrium selection effects of money illusion: even though money illusion vanishes over time if subjects are given learning opportunities in the context of an individual optimization problem, powerful and persistent effects of money illusion are found when strategic uncertainty prevails. |
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Christoph Eisenegger, Uwe Herwig, Lutz Jäncke, The involvement of primary motor cortex in mental rotation revealed by transcranial magnetic stimulation, European Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 25 (4), 2007. (Journal Article)
We used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation of the left primary hand motor cortex and motor evoked potentials of the contralateral right abductor pollicis brevis to probe motor cortex excitability during a standard mental rotation task. Based on previous findings we tested the following hypotheses. (i) Is the hand motor cortex activated more strongly during mental rotation than during reading aloud or reading silently? The latter tasks have been shown to increase motor cortex excitability substantially in recent studies. (ii) Is the recruitment of the motor cortex for mental rotation specific for the judgement of rotated but not for nonrotated Shepard & Metzler figures? Surprisingly, motor cortex activation was higher during mental rotation than during verbal tasks. Moreover, we found strong motor cortex excitability during the mental rotation task but significantly weaker excitability during judgements of nonrotated figures. Hence, this study shows that the primary hand motor area is generally involved in mental rotation processes. These findings are discussed in the context of current theories of mental rotation, and a likely mechanism for the global excitability increase in the primary motor cortex during mental rotation is proposed. |
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Fabio Rinaldi, Gerold Schneider, Kaarel Kaljurand, Michael Hess, Christos Andronis, Ourania Konstanti, Andreas Persidis, Mining of Functional Relations between Genes and Proteins over Biomedical Scientific Literature using a Deep-Linguistic Approach, In: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, February 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Objective: The amount of new discoveries (as published in the scientific literature) in the biomedical area is growing at an exponential rate. This growth makes it very difficult to filter the most relevant results, and thus the extraction of the core information becomes very expensive. Therefore, there is a growing interest in text processing approaches that can deliver selected information from scientific publications, which can limit the amount of human intervention normally needed to gather those results. Materials and methods: This paper presents and evaluates an approach aimed at automating the process of extracting functional relations (e.g. interactions between genes and proteins) from scientific literature in the biomedical domain. The approach, using a novel dependency-based parser, is based on a complete syntactic analysis of the corpus. Results: We have implemented a state-of-the-art text mining system for biomedical literature, based on a deep-linguistic, full-parsing approach. The results are validated on two different corpora: the manually annotated genomics information access (GENIA) corpus and the automatically annotated arabidopsis thaliana circadian rhythms (ATCR) corpus. Conclusion: We show how a deep-linguistic approach (contrary to common belief) can be used in a real world text mining application, offering high-precision relation extraction, while at the same time retaining a sufficient recall. |
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Michael à Porta, Erweiterung der Lektionsbeurteilung in der MIO-Lernumgebung, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
The following dissertation is an introduction into the theoretical bases of evaluations at universities and colleges. It provides instructions for the successful realisation and analysis of surveys. A prototype developed in the year 2002, and a market analysis of online questionnaire systems, define the implementation requirements for the evaluation environment in the MIO diploma studies. The dissertation is presenting and documenting the development of the evaluated background, which is integrated into the MIO learning facilities in the shape of lecture assessments. Questionnaires can be individually created with the Questionnaire Editor and subsequently be made available to a specified circle of participants. A tracking system is delivering detailed information to the people responsible for the survey. It comprises data regarding the current status of a specific opinion poll. Tabular, graphical and statistical aids are supporting the evaluation of the actual data. Automatically generated invitations and reminders enable an autonomous procedure. |
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Lukas Eberli, BioLANCC Usability and GUI Design, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Usually, users interact with software by graphical user interfaces. The graphical user interface has to be user-friendly to perform tasks with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. This goal can be reached by a consistent and intuitively comprehensible user interface, which also facilitates the usage of the software for beginners. The software BioLANCC (Biometric Local Area Network Control Center) manages biometric access control devices, which are distributed in a TCP/IP network. BioLANCC shows large deficiencies concerning the usability of the user interface. Design guidelines are being developed to eliminate these deficits. These guidelines are built on existent and established design principles of interactive systems. The usability of the user interface of BioLANCC should be improved by applying these design guidelines. In addition, a new user interface for the user group management and the attendance overview are being developed by applying these design guidelines. Finally, a usability test evaluates the developed design guidelines and the improved user interface of BioLANCC. The two versions of BioLANCC, one without and one including the improvements concerning the usability, are compared. The results show an evident improvement in the satisfaction of the new version of BioLANCC. In the re-designed user group management, the test subjects solved the given tasks with a superior effectiveness and efficiency. |
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Manuel Feier, Design and Prototypical Implementation of a User-based IP Accounting Module for Linux, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Obtaining information about the usage of network ressources by individual users forms the basis for establishing network billing systems or network management operations. While there are already widely used accounting techniques available for measuring IP Network traffic on a per-host basis, there is no adequate solution for charging users on a multi-user operating system. This thesis provides a survey on existing aproaches to this problem and identifies the requirements for a user-based IP accounting module. It develops a suitable software architecture and proposes a prototypical implementation for the Linux 2.6 operating system which is capable of providing per-user accounting for both the IPv4 and the IPv6 protocols. The thesis ends with the evaluation of the prototype, the discussion of problems that have turned up and deals with possible future extensions. |
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Veronica Garcia, Sicherheit für BioLANCC Design und Implementierung, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Biometrics has experienced its growth in the last years and is used more frequently in the field of identity verification within passport and access control systems, such as BioLANCC. The target of evaluation for this thesis is the BioLANCC access control system. BioLANCC is a software system that centrally administers the data and biometric hardware and transfers biometric traits to the biometric hardware over a TCP/IP network. New security-relevant questions arise when attaching a software system to a network and exchanging information over it. Also, general concerns about capturing and storing biometric data need consideration. With an overall security protection concept the drawbacks can be avoided and the advantages of biometric access control systems strengthened. This thesis deals with the security-relevant aspects in biometric management software and how security is improved and sustained in BioLANCC. |
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