Contributions in Merlin

It is of a great importance for financial institutions to achieve business and IT alignment. It allows the business to focus on its core function and gives IT department an opportunity to concentrate on providing insights on how technology can help business in developing new capabilities. Achieving such alignment will require IT management and IT employees to possess sufficient business understanding of their core operations and business managers to acquire certain level of technical proficiency of IT solutions used in their organizations. This approach requires that the organization develops and fosters communication platform between business and IT as well as among different IT departments. We believe that such communication approach based on a four-level framework is the most versatile and also the most promising one. This paper defines such communication framework for financial institutions by determining the elements of the communication process and drawing relations between this process, organizational culture and other existing, best-practice Information Management frameworks. Additionally, we stress the importance of the visual representation in communicating complex strategic, organizational and technologically oriented subjects. As an important part of the framework, based on our experience, we define guidelines which address general communication and visualization problems faced by an organization when bridging business and IT perspectives on the alignment challenge. This paper concludes with a presentation of a successful implementation of such a framework at a financial institution.

null

The goal of the distributed systems (DS) laboratory is to provide an attractive environment in which students learn about network programming and apply some fundamental concepts of distributed systems. In the last two years, students had to implement a fully functional peer-to-peer file sharing system called ShareMe. This paper presents the approach the authors used to provide the best possible support and guidance for the students while keeping up with ever-rising participant numbers in the laboratory course (approximately 600 last year), as well as managing budget and personnel constraints. The learning environment is based on Web and Internet technologies and not only offers the description of the laboratory tasks but also covers electronic submission, a discussion forum, automatic grading, and online access to grading and test results. The authors report their experiences of using the automated grading system, the amount of work required to prepare and run the laboratory, and how they deal with students who submit plagiarized solutions. Furthermore, the results of student feedback and evaluation forms are presented, and the overall student course satisfaction is discussed. Detailed information about the DS laboratory is available at http://www.dslab.tuwien.ac.at

The key aim of this thesis work is to design and prototypically implement the Accounting module for an AAA server, based on the Generic AAA Architecture defined in RFC 2903 and Diameter protocol specifications. The resulting protocol and architecture shall provide a solution for offering accounting services to a Mobile Grid. It will also be used at a later stage together with various charging models for creating a charging mechanism for future mobile grids. A mobile grid environment, by its heterogenos nature brings new challenges to all the tree A-s in a traditional AAA environment. Regarding the accounting proccess, new types of resources have to be accounted for which require new parameters that have to be present in accounting records. Besides the traditional accounting of time, bytes, and packets, a grid service might need to account for CPU usage, memory consumption, or even accessed/containing information. The accounting module shall provide generic interfaces for possibly different monitoring entities that adapt to the type of resource being accounted for. The access to accounted for data shall be secure and reliable. Secure in this context means that accounted for records for a certain service can be created by certain entities that are aproved by that service provider. This requirement can be realized using X.509 certificates or other kind of credential tokens. Encryption of accounting messages shall be offered as a communication option between the AAA client and the AAA server. Reliability refers to the posibility of retreiving the accurate accounting information for a certain service/resource usage for charging consumptions.

null

Most mobile learning applications support individual users, although experience with similar conventional learning games indicates that teams may be more appropriate. This paper reports on tests of the MobileGame to see whether individual users, teams of two, teams of three or teams of four are more successful. The test was conducted with over 100 natural users. The significantly increased activity level and team-building show that a preference for teams of two rather than individual players would be justified. There is little significant evidence to prefer teams of two to teams of three. However, the data shows that teams of four are suboptimal: this team size decreases fun and immersion as well as (maybe) learning. There is no evidence that these negative effects are balanced by improved team-building. The relatively high success of teams of two leads to a need for more research on dyadic users not only for mobile learning games, but also for other areas such as tourism, health, museum visitors, and entertainment.

This work is based on the hypothesis that the advisory process of a bank is affected by various inefficiencies. Starting from this affirmation, we are first going to research actual trends within the literature and possible innovative concepts for bank advisory services aiming to improve the advisory process and increase its effectiveness and profitability. In a second step, we are going to explore and examine the real situa tion of the Swiss banking industry by means of several interviews. The result of the interviews should confirm or refute the real potential of the gathered concepts for the advisory process. The result of our research shows that at present, the interest of Swiss banks for new front-end concepts is pretty low, although the here developed concepts have shown to be potentially interesting in future application that will allow to increase efficiency and profitability of the advisory process

null

Exploiting a rich panel data set on anti‐ulcer drug prescriptions, we measure the effects of uncertainty and learning in the demand for pharmaceutical drugs. We estimate a dynamic matching model of demand under uncertainty in which patients learn from prescription experience about the effectiveness of alternative drugs. Unlike previous models, we allow drugs to have distinct symptomatic and curative effects, and endogenize treatment length by allowing drug choices to affect patients' underlying probability of recovery. We find that drugs' rankings along these dimensions differ, with high symptomatic effects for drugs with the highest market shares and high curative effects for drugs with the greatest medical efficacy. Our results also indicate that while there is substantial heterogeneity in drug efficacy across patients, learning enables patients and their doctors to dramatically reduce the costs of uncertainty in pharmaceutical markets.

Representing a triangulated two manifold using a single triangle strip is an NP-complete problem. By introducing a few Steiner vertices, recent works find such a single-strip and hence a linear ordering of edge-connected triangles of the entire triangulation. In this paper, we highlight and exploit this linear order in efficient triangle-strip management for high-performance rendering. We present new algorithms to generate weighted single-strip representations that respect different constraint-based clustering of triangles. These functional constraints can be application dependent; for example, normal-based constraints for efficient visibility culling or spatial constraints for highly coherent vertex-caching. We also present a hierarchical single-strip-management strategy for highperformance interactive 3D rendering.