Contributions in Merlin

In diesem Beitrag stellen wir praxisnah vor, wie die globalen Assurance of Learning (AoL) Standards der amerikanischen Qualitätssicherungsinstitution AACSB International (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) in einen spezifischen Fakultätskontext auf effiziente Weise eingebettet werden können. Unser Ziel ist, die Verbreitung bestehender Praktiken in diesem Bereich voranzutreiben. Um ihre Studiengänge kontinuierlich zu verbessern, entwickelte die Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät (WWF) der Universität Zürich ein standardisiertes Modell zur Messung studentischer Kompetenzen. Grundlage für die Entwicklung des Modells ist einerseits die langjährige Erfahrung der AACSB im Bereich der Akkreditierung in den USA. Andererseits berücksichtigt das Modell die „Standards und Richtlinien für Qualitätssicherung im europäischen Hochschulbereich“, welche das Europäische Netzwerk für Qualitätssicherung (ENQA) 2003 im Auftrag der Minister der Unterzeichnerstaaten des Bologna-Prozesses entwickelte.

The UNESCO World Heritage List contains the 900 most treasured sites of humanity's culture and landscapes. This List is beneficial where heritage sites are undetected, disregarded by national decision‐makers, not commercially exploitable, and where national financial resources, political control, and technical knowledge for conservation are inadequate. Alternatives such as market and national conservation lists are more beneficial where the cultural and natural sites are already popular, markets work well, and where inclusion in the List does not raise the destruction potential by excessive tourism, and in times of war, or by terrorists.

The biological hypothesis of spinal engine states that the locomotion is mainly achieved by the spine, while legs only serve as assistance. Inspired by this spinal engine hypothesis, a compliant, multi-DOF, biologically inspired spine has been developed and embedded into a quadruped robot without actuation on legs. The experimental results support this spinal engine hypothesis and reveal that this kind of robot can achieve rapid, stable, and even dynamical locomotion by appropriately tuning the spine’s morphological parameters, e.g., rearranging the silicone blocks.

The popularity of video sharing over the Internet has increased significantly. High traffic generated by such applications at the source can be better distributed using a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay. Unlike most P2P systems, LiveShift combines both live and on-demand video streaming — while video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner. This paper describes an adaptive fully-distributed mesh-pull protocol that supports the envisioned use case and a set of policies that enable efficient usage of resources, discussing interesting trade-offs encountered. User-focused evaluation results, including both channel switching and time shifting behavior, show that the proposed system provides good quality of experience for most users, in terms of infrequent stalling, low playback lag, and a small proportion of skipped blocks in all the scenarios studied, even in presence of churn.

We present a new way to solve principal agent problems by polynomial programming techniques. We study the case where the agent's actions are unobservable by the principal but the outcomes are. We assume that the agent's actions lie in an interval and the space of outcomes is a finite set. Furthermore the agent's expected utility is a rational function in his actions. The resulting problem is a bilevel optimization problem with the principal's problem as the upper and the agent's problem as the lower level. The key idea is to find an exact reformulation of the agent's problem as a semidefinite optimization problem. Since this is a convex optimization problem, we then have necessary and sufficient global optimality conditions for the agent's problem. The reformulation can be done by using classical results from real algebraic geometry linking positive polynomials and semidefinite matrices. We obtain a nonlinear program. If all functions are rational functions, we then can solve it to global optimality.

The talk will give an overview on sustainability issues of ICT, starting from the Green IT perspective and extending it in several directions: Life-Cycle thinking, issues beyond energy (scarce metals), enabling effects of ICT, and systemic effects of ICT. Based on a review of studies assessing the potential of ICT to reduce the carbon footprint of the economy, the conditions will be discussed under which ICT could substantially contribute to sustainable development.

Humans are noted for their capacity to over-ride self-interest in favor of normatively valued goals. We examined the neural circuitry that is causally involved in normative, fairness-related decisions by generating a temporarily diminished capacity for costly normative behavior, a 'deviant' case, through non-invasive brain stimulation (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) and compared normal subjects' functional magnetic resonance imaging signals with those of the deviant subjects. When fairness and economic self-interest were in conflict, normal subjects (who make costly normative decisions at a much higher frequency) displayed significantly higher activity in, and connectivity between, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex (pVMPFC). In contrast, when there was no conflict between fairness and economic self-interest, both types of subjects displayed identical neural patterns and behaved identically. These findings suggest that a parsimonious prefrontal network, the activation of right DLPFC and pVMPFC, and the connectivity between them, facilitates subjects' willingness to incur the cost of normative decisions.

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