Contributions in Merlin

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People are subjected to a multitude of interruptions, which in some situations are detrimental to their work performance. Consequently, the capability to predict a person’s degree of interruptability (i.e., a measure of detrimental an interruption would be to her current work) can provide a basis for a ?ltering mechanism. This paper introduces a novel approach to predict a person’s presence and interruptability in an of?ce-like environment based on audio, multi-sector motion detection using video, and the time of the day collected as sensor data. Conducting an experiment in a real of?ce environment over the length of more than 40 work days we show that the multisector motion detection data, which to our knowledge has been used for the ?rst time to this end, outperforms audio data both in presence and interruptability. We, furthermore, show, that the combination of all three data-streams improves the interruptability prediction accuracy and robustness. Finally, we use these data to predict a subject’s phone behavior (ignore or accept the incoming phone call) by combining interruptability and the estimated importance of call. We call such an application an arti?cial receptionist. Our analysis also show that the results improve when taking the temporal aspect of the context into account.

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The Intranet has been set up in the enterprises as a medium of information. Even if it was seen as a technical feature of the IT department some years ago, a paradigm change has recently taken place during the last years. The Intranet is no longer settled into the IT department, but is now an integral component of the corporate communication. It is becoming more and more important because the organization members use the Intranet systematic for the spreading of information. On higher demands of the company and his members towards the procurement and distribution of information, and also as the steady pressure to the effectiveness and efficiency increase, the Intranet is transforming from an information medium to a communication medium to a working instrument. From the fact that more and more information is distributed through the Intranet, the organization members are increasingly confronted with the problem of flooding information: Documents cannot be found, information does not reach the suitable receivers or important instructions of the management are overlooked. As a consequence, discouragement and frustration spreads among the users. On the other hand, the company wants to make information available to all of its employees in order to reassure that knowledge is on the same level or to improve the effectiveness and raise the employees' contentment. In doing so, the company often does not know whether the action taken have led to success. The reality is often another where the company thinks that the employees are provided with the desired information, whereas the employees are disappointed because of the lack of information quality. We have first conducted interviews to find out how the opinion of the enterprises towards the Intranet is, and also to find out how they use it to counteract against the flood of information and mismatch. Therefore, three signs which have validity for all enterprises can be chosen. First, the Intranet is recognized as a central tool of the corporate communication and is no longer considered as a mere toy of technology freaks. Second, the Intranet is regarded as an important information medium. Lastly, controlling the improvement of information quality is carried out by the least enterprises. Furthermore, the results from the interviews showed that the enterprises want to speed up the transformation of the Intranet. However, it is also clear that they are only at the beginning of the transformation path. To raise the quality of information, we have developed a web controlling framework. This contains a web controlling process, which arranges the steps for the creation of the information space and a web perspective pattern, which generates different views of this space. Through this procedure and with the different views, the ability to form the information space is conducted. As we have explained above, it is insufficient only to provide information and to believe that the needs of the users are satisfied with that. The information mismatches between employees and company can be caused either by excessive demand of the employees with the exposure to the medium, or when the information is not present where the users logically expects it to be. In order to find out how the user moves in the information space, we have developed the generic filter pipeline. This filter pipeline derives the user behavior on the basis of web log file data. This user behavior reflects the real behavior of the information space users. In this way it is possible to indicate the discrepancy between the information offer of the company and the information search of the users. On the basis of the results ascertained from above, the information space can be adapted to the user with the help of a derived Boehmian spiral, in order to achieve a continuous improvement of the needs and the surfing behavior of the user. However, since the information offer and the needs of the user change dynamically, the Boehmian spiral runs through regularly.

Collaborative document processing has been addressed by many approaches so far, most of which focus on document versioning and collaborative editing. We address this issue from a different angle and describe the concept and architecture of a pervasive document editing and managing system. It exploits database techniques and real-time updating for sophisticated collaboration scenarios on multiple devices. Each user is always served with upto- date documents and can organize his work based on document meta data. For this, we present our conceptual architecture for such a system and discuss it with an example.

Refactoring is one means of improving the structure of existing software. Locations where to apply refactoring are often based on subjective perceptions such as ”bad smells”, which are vague suspicions of design shortcomings. We exploit historical data extracted from repositories such as CVS and focus on change couplings: if some software parts change at the same time very often over several releases, this data can be used to point to candidates for refactoring. We adopt the concept of bad smells and provide additional change smells. Such a smell is hardly visible in the code, but easy to spot when viewing the change history. Our approach enables the detection of such smells allowing an engineer to apply refactoring on these parts of the source code to improve the evolvability of the software. For that, we analyzed the history of a large industrial system for a period of 15 months, proposed spots for refactorings based on change couplings, and performed them with the developers. After observing the system for another 15 months we finally analyzed the effectiveness of our approach. Our results support our hypothesis that the combination of change dependency analysis and refactoring is applicable and effective.

Observing the evolution of very large software systems is difficult because of the sheer amount of information that needs to be analyzed and because the changes performed in the system are at a very low granularity level. In recent approaches software metrics have been used to compute condensed graphical visualizations of these data also reflecting metrics. However, most techniques concentrate on visualizing data of one particular release providing only insufficient support for visualizing data of several selected releases. In this paper we present the RelVis visualization approach that provides integrated condensed graphical views on source code and release history data of up to n releases of a software system. Measurements of metrics of n releases are composed to views that facilitate spectators to spot trends of metrics of source code entities and relationships. Critical trends are highlighted: This allows the user to direct perfective maintenance activities to source code entities involved. The paper provides needed background information and evaluation of the approach with a large open source software project.

Language definition is always an important topic in the field of computer science. For textual specification and programming languages, there are already lots of mature methods of language definition. However, for visual specification languages, especially the so called wide spectrum graphical modeling languages, the existing solutions are far from satisfactory. ADORA is a modelling technique for requirements and software architecture that is being developed in the Requirement Engineering Research Group, University of Zurich. The acronym stands for Analysis and Description of Requirements and Architecture. ADORA and UML are typical examples of wide spectrum graphical modeling languages. In this dissertation, we propose a new method of defining visual specification languages, which shall overcome the drawbacks of the existing definition methods. The ADORA Language, which is used to model system requirements and software architecture, is selected as a vehicle for demonstrating our method. The following four aspects of language definition are particularly addressed: · Syntax and static semantics definition A text-based technique is given for the syntax and static semantics definition. We exploit the fact that in a visual specification language, most syntactic features are independent of the layout of the graph. So we map the graphical elements to textual ones and define the context-free syntax of this textual language in EBNF. Using our mapping, this grammar also defines the syntax of the graphical language. Simple spatial and context-sensitive constraints are then added by attributing the context-free grammar. Finally, for handling complex structural and dynamic information in the syntax, most of which is also called static semantics in the literature, we give a set of operational rules that work on the attributed EBNF. We also extend this set of operational rules to specify an advanced feature of \textscAdora, which supports the description of partial and evolutionary specifications. · Dynamic semantics definition We propose a strategy of dynamic semantics definition for ADORA: instead of defining a formal semantics for the whole language at one time, which can be too complex to be understood and used, we define semantics first only for each simple sublanguage. Then an integration semantics, which specifies the interrelations and constraints among the sublanguages, is defined to keep the language self-consistent. Examples on the integration semantics are given to show how our strategy works. Our solution is also valid for other wide spectrum graphical modeling languages. · Refinement calculus We define a formal refinement calculus for the structural view, behavioral view and user view of the ADORA language. This ensures that evolutionary specifications are written in a controlled and systematic way, while the consistency and integrity checking during the system refinement can be mechanically carried out by a tool based on our formal definition. · The reciprocal influences between the language definition and language design During the process of formal definition of ADORA, we also continue to design the language (e.g. the extension of ADORA for supporting partial and evolutionary specification). We conclude that language design and language definition are not two independent tasks. The study of the reciprocal influences between these two tasks improves the quality of the language definition. A set of principles derived from our development of ADORA is presented. Our methods can also be used to define UML or any other wide-spectrum modeling languages in the near future. Compared with the existing works on the graphical modeling language definition, our language definition is more understandable, easier to apply and practically more useful. The achieved results on the refinement calculus, syntax and semantics definition are also valuable for the similar research. At the end of this dissertation, limitations, open questions and future works are discussed.

In the past decade, Switzerland has experienced a large increase in the number of individuals going into early retirement. This paper examines the determinants of such early retirement using data from the newly implemented social-security module of the 2002 Swiss Labor Force Survey. In the sixteen-month period from January 2001 to April 2002, more than 36,000 older individuals, representing 8% of all workers within nine years of legal retirement age, became early retirees. One of the most important determinants of early retirement is the wage rate, yet its effect is not linear: both high and low wages reduce the probability. Other factors that play an important role include partner's employment status, education, industry, occupation, and coverage in the three social-security pillars. A major finding of this study is that about 30% of all early retirees continue working after retirement - and mostly for the same employer.

We review how technological advances and changes in regulation may shape the (future) geographical scope of banking. We first review how both physical distance and the presence of borders currently affect bank lending conditions (loan pricing and credit availability) and market presence (branching and servicing). Next we discuss how technology and regulation have altered this impact and analyse the current state of the European banking sector. We discuss both theoretical contributions and empirical work and highlight open questions along the way. We draw three main lessons from the current theoretical and empirical literature: (i) bank lending to small businesses in Europe may be characterized both by (local) spatial pricing and resilient (regional and/or national) market segmentation; (ii) because of informational asymmetries in the retail market, bank mergers and acquisitions seem the optimal route of entering another market, long before cross-border servicing or direct entry are economically feasible; and (iii) current technological and regulatory developments may, to a large extent, remain impotent in further dismantling the various residual but mutually reinforcing frictions in the retail banking markets in Europe. We conclude the paper by offering pertinent policy recommendations based on these three lessons.