Contributions in Merlin

While regulatory issues on telecommunications and data handling have been established in a generic and service-neutral manner, typically independent of detailed technical applications or application domains, the uprise of new technology and new systems requires always a revisiting of those regulations. Thus, since the new trend of mobile grids — including an integrated traditional grid computing, knowledge handling, and multi-domain dynamics — has started most recently, a careful analysis of regulatory effects within the European Union (EU) is highly essential for potential new stakeholders. Therefore, this paper summarizes the most relevant regulatory aspects for mobile grid systems on a EU level, such as contractual agreements, security, and data protection. In this respect, the eCommunications framework serves as the starting point to assess relevance of existing EU regulations. In turn, mobile grid characteristics and respective roles are depicted. This is followed by presenting the eCommunications framework. Finally, those existing regulations are evaluated on how well they reflect relevant aspects of service provisioning in a mobile grid.

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How does an organization, operating in what has been historically a relatively stable environment such as banking, use IT to transform itself as that environment changes to one of hypercompetition? We argue that a key contribution of IT in this context is its potential role in the development of architectural ambidexterity which we define as the capacity to manage complex and apparently conflicting task demands ' such as efficiency and innovation, commoditization and customization, control and entrepreneurship - through the dynamic reconfiguration of resources and capabilities. The concept of architectural ambidexterity is developed building upon organization design and dynamic capabilities literature. Architectural ambidexterity is a collective ability that enables an organization to integrate know-how and processes and systems to enact forms of connectivity that ensure endurance and accommodation to an unpredictable future by building an overarching basis for stability, requisite uniformity, facilitatory flexibility and anticipative connectivity.

Hardware accelerated point-based rendering (PBR) algorithms have suffered in the past from multiple rendering passes; possibly a performance limiting factor. Two passes over the point geometry have been necessary because a first visibility-splatting pass has been necessary for conservative e-z-buffer visibility culling in the following point-interpolation rendering pass. This separation into visibility-splatting and point-blending, hence processing the point geometry twice, is a fundamental drawback of current GPU-based PBR algorithms. In this paper we introduce a new framework for GPU accelerated PBR algorithm whose basic idea is deferred blending. In contrast to prior algorithms, we formulate the smooth point interpolation problem as an image compositing post-processing task. This is achieved by separating the input point data in a pre-process into not self-overlapping minimal independent groups of points. As an extension of this concept, we can for the first time render transparent point surfaces as well on the GPU. For simple transparency effects, our novel algorithm only needs a single geometry rendering pass. For high-quality transparent image synthesis an extra rendering pass is sufficient. Furthermore, per-fragment reflective and refractive multilayer effects are supported in our algorithm.

Linking the biomedical literature to other data resources is notoriously difficult and requires text mining. Text mining aims to automatically extract facts from literature. Since authors write in natural language, text mining is a great natural language processing challenge, which is far from being solved. We propose an alternative: If authors and editors summarize the main facts in a controlled natural language, text mining will become easier and more powerful. To demonstrate this approach, we use the language Attempto Controlled English (ACE). We define a simple model to capture the main aspects of protein interactions. To evaluate our approach, we collected a dataset of 459 paragraph headings about protein interaction from literature. 56% of these headings can be represented exactly in ACE and another 23% partially. These results indicate that our approach is feasible.

To assess the potential impact of ICT on environmental sustainability in the European Union within a time horizon until 2020, we developed a System Dynamics model. In our contribution we make a critical, retrospective evaluation of the model with regard to the requirements and expectations of the project commissioners and of experts involved in the modeling and simulation process. The issues addressed are problem adequacy, validity, transparency, communicability and receptivity of the model. We conclude that modeling approaches that better support a modular model design than System Dynamics does would lead to better results regarding these requirements, and that a modeling language based on a more domain-specific ontology than System Dynamics would be needed to create models that are communicable and have an adequate epistemic connectivity to the scientific and political discourse.

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