Simon Frey, Fokus-Problem im mExplorer, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
mExplorer is a mobile learning game developed by the Institute for Informatics at the University of Zurich. The game is aimed at familiarizing freshmen students with their new surroundings, the campus. Throughout several user tests, it became apparent, that the users were devoting too much attention to the handling of the mobile device, instead of focusing on the surrounding campus, which is the goal of the game. This thesis attempts to successfully diminish or even solve the focus problem by implementing additional context awareness features, an enhanced audible interface and by offering the ability to create location-based reminders. The new features are exposed to the user community in two separate user tests in order to validate and evaluate them. In conclusion we summarize the gained experience in a design guide for mExplorer's future development, which can also be applied to similar mobile learning games. |
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David Holzer, Digitaler persönlicher Reiseführer, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Travelers have a high need for up to date and complete information about their destinations. Traditional guide books suffer from several weaknesses. As an alternative, a community based system for travel planning and documentation is created in this thesis. The integration of established tools such as wikis, blogs and forums – with adjustments to satisfy the requirements of travelers – allows for an easy planning and documenting of trips. This is augmented by the addition of geographical data to the system. The developed software has been evaluated in repeated tests and was further enhanced, resulting in an easy understandable, user friendly solution. |
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Humard Claude, Entwurf und Implementierung einer modular erweiterbaren Anwendung für Eingabe und Import von heterogenen Daten, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
In the context of the national main research Sesam, an application is required to validate and store the results of research activities including their metadata. The measured data is very heterogeneous as it contains barcodes, questionnaires or even video files. The main challenge of this thesis is the development of an architecture, which can be easily extended to support new data formats. The aim of this diploma thesis is to develop a draft and an implementation of a modular application written in Java, which covers the requirements mentioned above. Additionally, the used concepts, design patterns and frameworks are described in detail. Furthermore, in-depth presentation of the developed architecture is included to support further enhancements of the application. |
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Thomas Rauber, Indoor Navigation, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Navigation systems are generally known from motor vehicle. Founded on the more and more powerful devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are pedestrian navigation systems since some time part of the current research. In the first part of this thesis the basics of navigation systems are illustrated. Among other things it is going into way calculating algorithms and the conditioning of way guidance information. Further we look at some realised pedestrian navigation systems. In the second part of this thesis it is going into the navigation system that has been deployed for the mExplorer. In doing so the architecture, the user interaction and the evaluation of the system are discussed. |
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Bernhard Wasser, Produktentwicklung von E-Learning-Projekten, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
With the growing number of computer networks and the use of the Internet, there are more and more E-Learning based solutions for the presentation of teaching material and the support of learning activities. The development of such an E-Learning tool is a complex matter: next to technical and economical challenges, there are didactic objectives to be realized by choosing appropriate concepts and learning methods which satisfy customer expectations. It is the purpose of this thesis to find out in what way the development process of an E-Learning tool differs from that of a conventional IT-project. A specially devised model for the creation of such tools helps to highlight their special features and to characterize the development process. The thesis shows how given business requirements can be accomplished by applying appropriate didactic concepts. The development of an E-Learning tool to prepare teachers for their staff interviews, which have recently been introduced in the Canton of Aargau, serves as a practical example. |
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Dennis Weiss, Mining Customer Networks and Inter-Product Relations in Internet / Digital Entertainment Provider Data, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Master's Thesis)
Today’s telecommunication companies have at their disposal large quantities of detailed transaction data. Methods of data mining can be utilized for generating information on product use, customer behaviour and interaction between customers. Cross-selling analyses, customer segmentation and social network analysis thereby represent only some of the practices which can be employed for facilitating direct marketing procedures. This present thesis illustrates an approach for identifying customer groups and their networks, from which management implications may be derived by means of propositional as well as relational data mining. In this context triple play customers - i.e. subscribers of broadband internet, fixed-line telephony and digital TV - were segmented on the basis of data generated from product use. In addition, network analysis and the search for multi-relational patterns provided further insight into both customer types and their respective needs. |
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Enrico De Giorgi, János Mayer, Thorsten Hens, Computational aspects of prospect theory with asset pricing applications, Computational Economics, Vol. 29 (3-4), 2007. (Journal Article)
We develop an algorithm to compute asset allocations for Kahneman and Tversky’s (Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291, 1979) prospect theory. An application to benchmark data as in Fama and French (Journal of Financial Economics, 47(2), 427–465, 1992) shows that the equity premium puzzle is resolved for parameter values similar to those found in the laboratory experiments of Kahneman and Tversky (Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291, 1979). While previous studies like Benartzi and Thaler (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110(1), 73–92, 1995), Barberis, Huang and Santos (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(1), 1–53, 2001), and Grüne and Semmler (Asset prices and loss aversion, Germany, Mimeo Bielefeld University, 2005) focussed on dynamic aspects of asset pricing but only used loss aversion to explain the equity premium puzzle our paper explains the unconditional moments of asset pricing by a static two-period optimization problem. However, we incorporate asymmetric risk aversion. Our approach allows reducing the degree of loss aversion from 2.353 to 2.25, which is the value found by Tversky and Kahneman (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5, 297–323, 1992) while increasing the risk aversion from 1 to 0.894, which is a slightly higher value than the 0.88 found by Tversky and Kahneman (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5, 297–323, 1992). The equivalence of these parameter settings is robust to incorporating the size and the value portfolios of Fama and French (Journal of Finance, 47(2), 427–465, 1992). However, the optimal prospect theory portfolios found on this larger set of assets differ drastically from the optimal mean-variance portfolio. |
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Peter Woehrmann, Thorsten Hens, Strategic asset allocation and market timing: a reinforcement learning approach, Computational Economics, Vol. 29 (3-4), 2007. (Journal Article)
We apply the recurrent reinforcement learning method of Moody, Wu, Liao, and Saffell (1998) in the context of the strategic asset allocation computed for sample data from US, UK, Germany, and Japan. It is found that the optimal asset allocation deviates substantially from the fixed-mix rule. The investor actively times the market and he is able to outperform it consistently over the almost two decades we analyze. |
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Elaine May Huang, Talking about 'stuff': Artifacts and expectation in social communication, In: CHi 2007, 2007. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
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Helmut Max Dietl, Egon Franck, Korruption im Sumo, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 97, p. 62, 27 April 2007. (Newspaper Article)
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Peter Racz, Grid Accounting based on Diameter, In: Research Group Retreat. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Thomas Bocek, Java-based Management of Biometric Data in a Distributed Internet Environment, In: Sonthofen doctoral research retreat. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Thomas Bocek, Fast Similarity Search in Large Dictionaries, In: Sonthofen doctoral research retreat. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Martin Waldburger, Legal Compliance in Commercial Service Provisioning Across Administrative Domains, In: Research Group Retreat. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Hasan Hasan, SLA Compliance Auditing for Internet Services, In: CSG Retreat. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Financing Higher Education in Switzerland: Policies, Mechanisms, Tools, Opportunities and Risks, In: International Search Conference on Governance, Financing and Quality Assurance of Higher Education in China and Switzerland. 2007. (Conference Presentation)
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Peter Sune Jørgensen, Michael Böhlen, Versioned relations: Support for conditional schema changes and schema versioning, In: DASFAA 2007: Support for Conditional Schema Changes and Schema Versioning; Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4443/2008 page 1058-1061, ISBN 978-3-540-71702-7, Springer, 2007-04-09. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
We introduce the versioned relational data model, which allows a user to apply conditional schema changes to a populated database without breaking applications compiled against an existing schema, and without loss of existing data. Our model is based on keeping a history of conditional schema changes, and converting tuples on demand to fit the correct schema in any schema version. We provide a concrete defnition of schema versioning: The ability to specify an operator on any schema version, such that the tuples in the result are unaffected by schema versions created after the specified schema version. Finally, we show that our model supports schema versioning. |
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Bruno Staffelbach, M Bannwart, Vom Hörsaal in die Arbeitswelt, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 25, 3 April 2007. (Newspaper Article)
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Daniel Rohner, Trusts in der Vermögensverwaltung, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2007. (Bachelor's Thesis)
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Simon Broda, Marc Paolella, Kai Carstensen, Bias-adjusted estimation in the ARX(1) model, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Vol. 51 (7), 2007. (Journal Article)
A new point estimator for the AR(1) coefficient in the linear regression model with arbitrary exogenous regressors and stationary AR(1) disturbances is developed. Its construction parallels that of the median--unbiased estimator, but uses the mode as a measure of central tendency. The mean--adjusted estimator is also considered, and saddlepoint approximations are used to lower the computational burden of all the estimators. Large--scale simulation studies for assessing their small--sample properties are conducted. Their relative performance depends almost exclusively on the value of the autoregressive parameter, with the new estimator dominating over a large part of the parameter space. |
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