Contributions in Merlin

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In an environment that is plagued by distrust and intransparency, such as the used car market, blockchain-based certified vehicle data offers a compelling solution to these issues. One particular manifestation of such blockchain-based car data is the cardossier project. While previous research has examined the possibilities and effects of cardossier data, the role of commercial used car dealers has been largely unexplored. Thus, this work is dedicated to the role of used car dealers in a market with cardossier data. Through a design science approach, the role of dealers was incorporated into an existing experimental online market game. Subsequently, the developed software artifact was used for a market simulation experiment. The results thereof are a conceptual abstraction of used car dealers into the domain of an experimental market game, the implementation of said abstraction as well as insights into the effects of blockchain-based certified car data onto a used car market environment, that contains not only sellers and buyers but also dealers.

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Unpredictable events like Covid-19 lead to exceptional situations and make innovation projects and growth strategies obsolete. Customer needs can change radically within a few days and lead to socioeconomic, behavioral changes that are linked to trends like digital transformation and last for a long time. Conventional management concepts no longer work in a business paradigm that calls for quick reactions and business model innovations. Keeping the existing business running as efficiently as possible and at the same time developing new opportunities for the future requires agility, flexibility, and openness. Organizational resilience and behavioral resilience help to reposition over a crisis. For those who are open to novel approaches, the concept of frugal innovation creates new opportunities: targeted and cost-efficient satisfaction of client expectation, reduced to what the user needs at the moment. Creating customer added value with fewer resources is the first step towards responsible corporate management.

The first Global Climate Strike on March 15, 2019, represented a historical turning point in climate activism. We investigate the cross-section of stock price reactions to this event for a large sample of European firms. The strike's unanticipated success caused a decrease in the stock prices of carbon-intensive firms. The effect appears to be driven by the increased public attention to climate activism. Furthermore, after the first Global Climate Strike financial analysts downgraded their longer-term earnings forecasts on carbon-intensive firms.

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged and developed as a new modality to interact with multimedia data. In this paper, we present vitrivr-VR, a prototype of an interactive multimedia retrieval system in VR based on the open source full-stack multimedia retrieval system vitrivr. We have implemented query formulation tailored to VR: Users can use speech-to-text to search collections via text for concepts, OCR and ASR data as well as entire scene descriptions through a video-text co-embedding feature that embeds sentences and video sequences into the same feature space. Result presentation and relevance feedback in vitrivr-VR leverages the capabilities of virtual spaces. Keywords Video Browser Showdown Virtual Reality Interactive video retrieval

The evaluation of the performance of interactive multimedia retrieval systems is a methodologically non-trivial endeavour and requires specialized infrastructure. Current evaluation campaigns have so far relied on a local setting, where all retrieval systems needed to be evaluated at the same physical location at the same time. This constraint does not only complicate the organization and coordination but also limits the number of systems which can reasonably be evaluated within a set time frame. Travel restrictions might further limit the possibility for such evaluations. To address these problems, evaluations need to be conducted in a (geographically) distributed setting, which was so far not possible due to the lack of supporting infrastructure. In this paper, we present the Distributed Retrieval Evaluation Server (DRES), an open-source evaluation system to facilitate evaluation campaigns for interactive multimedia retrieval systems in both traditional on-site as well as fully distributed settings which has already proven effective in a competitive evaluation.

There is a growing use of intelligent systems to support human decision-making across several domains. Trust in intelligent systems, however, is pivotal in shaping their widespread adoption. Little is currently understood about how trust in an intelligent system evolves over time and how it is mediated by the accuracy of the system. We aim to address this knowledge gap by exploring trust formation over time and its relation to system accuracy. To that end, we built an intelligent house recommendation system and carried out a longitudinal study consisting of 201 participants across 3 sessions in a week. In each session, participants were tasked with finding housing that fit a given set of constraints using a conventional web interface that reflected a typical housing search website. Participants could choose to use an intelligent decision support system to help them find the right house. Depending on the group, participants received a variation of accurate or inaccurate advice from the intelligent system throughout each session. We measured trust using a trust in automation scale at the end of each session. We found evidence suggesting that trust development is a slow process that evolves over multiple sessions, and that first impressions of the intelligent system are highly influential. Our results echo earlier research on trust formation in single session interactions, corroborating that reliability, validity, predictability, and dependability all influence trust formation. We also found that the age of the participants and their affinity with technology had an effect on their trust in the intelligent system. Our findings highlight the importance of first impressions and improvement of system accuracy for trust development. Hence, our study is an important first step in understanding trust development, breakdown of trust, and trust repair over multiple system interactions, informing improved system design.

Die Swiss Structured Products Association (SSPA) lanciert das SSPA Lab in Zusammenarbeit mit Universität Zürich. In wenigen Sekunden lassen sich die gängigsten Produkte kreieren und in diversen Bullen- und Bären-Szenarien testen.

Strukturierte Produkte haben sich zum Baustein für Vermögens-Portfolios entwickelt. Wie die Produkte in verschiedenen Marktsituationen reagieren, können Einsteiger nun spielerisch ausprobieren.