Contributions in Merlin

Irrespective of whether we use economic or societal metrics, the Internet is one of the most important technical infrastructures in existence today. It will be a catalyst for much of our innovation and prosperity in the future. A competitive Europe will require Internet connectivity and services beyond the capabilities offered by current technologies. Future Internet research is therefore a must. This book is published in full compliance with the Open Access publishing initiative; it is based on the research carried out within the Future Internet Assembly (FIA). It contains a sample of representative results from the recent FIA meetings spanning a broad range of topics, all being of crucial importance for the future Internet. The book includes 32 contributions and has been structured into the following sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction: Foundations: architectural issues; socio-economic issues; security and trust; and experiments and experimental design. Future Internet Areas: networks, services, and content; and applications.

Overlay applications generate huge amounts of traffic in the Internet, which determines a problem for Internet Service Providers, since it results in high charges for inter-domain traffic. Traditional traffic management techniques cannot deal successfully with overlay traffic. An incentive-based approach that employs economic concepts and mechanisms is required in order to deal with the overlay traffic in a way that is mutually beneficial for all stakeholders of the Future Internet. This "TripleWin" situation is the target of Economic Traffic Management (ETM). A wide variety of techniques are employed by ETM for optimizing overlay traffic management considering performance requirements of overlay and underlay networks together with cost implications for ISPs. However, the assessment of ETM requires an innovative methodology. In this article this methodology is described and major results are presented as obtained accordingly from the evaluation of different ETM mechanisms.

As the number of publicly available services grows, discovering proper services becomes an important issue and has attracted amount of attempts. This paper presents a new customizable and effective matchmaker, called SAWSDL-iMatcher. It supports a matchmaking mechanism, named iXQuery, which extends XQuery with various similarity joins for SAWSDL service discovery. Using SAWSDL-iMatcher, users can flexibly customize their preferred matching strategies according to different application requirements. SAWSDL-iMatcher currently supports several matching strategies, including syntactic and semantic matching strategies as well as several statistical-model-based matching strategies which can effectively aggregate similarity values from matching on various types of service description information such as service name, description text, and semantic annotation. Besides, we propose a semantic matching strategy to measure the similarity among SAWSDL semantic annotations. These matching strategies have been evaluated in SAWSDL-iMatcher on SAWSDL-TC2 and Jena Geography Dataset (JGD). The evaluation shows that different matching strategies are suitable for different tasks and contexts, which implies the necessity of a customizable matchmaker. In addition, it also provides evidence for the claim that the effectiveness of SAWSDL service matching can be significantly improved by statistical-model-based matching strategies. Our matchmaker is competitive with other matchmakers on benchmark tests at S3 contest 2009.

It is a central tenet in the literature on organizational change that firms need to explore novel courses of action in order to adapt and survive. Should firms thus exhibit a “pro-innovation bias” when evaluating novel decision alternatives? or should firms rather assess new opportunities as objectively as possible? our analysis of a simulation model suggests that a pro-innovation bias can have exploration-enhanc- ing effects that increase long-run performance in complex and stable environments, but can also decrease performance substantially if the bias becomes too pronounced. However, under most other conditions, an unbiased, objective evaluation of novel opportunities is most effective. We also identify a set of contingency factors that strongly affect the value of a pro-innovation bias, which may explain why it is that we see so few firms with such a bias.

Emotions seem to play a critical role in moral judgment. However, the way in which emotions exert their influence on moral judgments is still poorly understood. This study proposes a novel theoretical approach suggesting that emotions influence moral judgments based on their motivational dimension. We tested the effects of two types of induced emotions with equal valence but with different motivational implications (anger and disgust), and four types of moral scenarios (disgust-related, impersonal, personal, and beliefs) on moral judgments. We hypothesized and found that approach motivation associated with anger would make moral judgments more permissible, while disgust, associated with withdrawal motivation, would make them less permissible. Moreover, these effects varied as a function of the type of scenario: the induced emotions only affected moral judgments concerning impersonal and personal scenarios, while we observed no effects for the other scenarios. These findings suggest that emotions can play an important role in moral judgment, but that their specific effects depend upon the type of emotion induced. Furthermore, induced emotion effects were more prevalent for moral decisions in personal and impersonal scenarios, possibly because these require the performance of an action rather than making an abstract judgment. We conclude that the effects of induced emotions on moral judgments can be predicted by taking their motivational dimension into account. This finding has important implications for moral psychology, as it point towards a previously overlooked mechanism linking emotions to moral judgments.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) - the core of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) - reflect major Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of customers on a service for a given price. SLOs need to be updated, if those requirements change. This leads to an update of the SLO auditing implementation. However, in many existing implementations, efforts are required to adapt to SLO changes, and even more efforts are needed for dynamic adaptations. Thus, a new SLO auditing design is essential to be able to reduce such efforts to the bare minimum. This is especially essential, if the service landscape and relevant QoS parameters are changing frequently. Thus, to meet this core functional requirement of an automated auditing, a generic auditing framework, applicable to any SLO, is presented in this paper, where the analysis of a general audit task, the identification of its sequence of subtasks (functional decomposition), and the development of a respective audit specification for each subtask has been performed. A use case and examples are presented to describe and apply the concept in detail. An SLO auditing application, which was prototyped, is not restricted to a certain set of QoS parameters, but it is dynamically reconfigurable and extensible according to changing demands. The work shows that it has become quite easy to instantiate an auditing application for new SLOs. Additionally, third parties would be able to offer SLO auditing services to a service provider separately.

Ein grundlegenderes Verständnis der peripheren okulomotorischen Pathophysiologie könnte zur Verbesserung der Strabismuschirurgie beitragen. Konventionelle strabologische Untersuchungsmethoden sind hilfreich, um Augenmotilitätsstörungen zu erkennen. Dennoch ist in komplexen Fällen eine präzise Diagnose mit den pathophysiologischen Erkenntnissen, die durch diese Untersuchungen und mit einem quasi agonist-antagonist extraokular Muskel-Modell gegeben sind, nicht möglich; besonders nach einer Chirurgie der extraokularen Muskeln, welcher sich das okulomotorische System anpasst. Das Problem liegt in der Verbindung von Daten der dynamischen Augenbewegung mit statischen Orbitagewebe-Konformationen. Das unvollständige Verständnis der Umwandlung der neuronalen Steuerungssignale in mechanische Augenbewegungen provozierte eine jahrzehntelange Kontroverse über die aktive oder passive Rolle des orbitalen Bindegewebes, die noch geklärt werden muss. Momentan stehen keine geeigneten dynamischen Daten zur Beurteilung des orbitalen Gewebeverhaltens zur Verfügung, selbst wenn dynamische (Un-)Gleichgewichte existieren, wie z.B. bei Verletzungen des Listingschen Gesetzes während schnellen Augenbewegungen, in bestimmten Fällen. Dies hat, zusammen mit der Komplexität der orbitalen Biomechanik, die Entwicklung eines angemessenen neuro-biomechanischen Orbitamodells verzögert. Gleichzeitige hohe räumliche und zeitliche Auflösung der Kinetik des Orbitalgewebes während der Augenbewegung würde die Umwandlung des neuronalen Signals in eine mechanische Wirkung besser beschreiben. Daraus ergeben sich die Ziele dieser Arbeit: Erstens soll ein klinisch benutzbarer visueller Reiz entwickelt werden, welcher periodisch wiederholende Augenbewegungen im Inneren des Scanners erzeugt. Damit sollen segmentierte Magnetresonanz-Bilder (MR-Bilder) ohne Bewegungsartefakte in einer genügend kurzen Zeit synchron aufgenommen werden. Zweitens soll die Bildaufnahme mit Hilfe von TFEPI durch Wahl eines reduziertes Sichtfeldes (FOV) und k-t BLAST beschleunigt werden. Drittens soll die Bewegung (CDENSE, CSPAMM) und Geschwindigkeit (Q-Flow) direkt in Bilder der Augenhöhlen kodiert werden, um zusätzliche Bewegungsdaten in der begrenzten Aufnahmezeit zu liefern. Viertens ist die dynamische Verformung der Orbitagewebe durch neue, bildrauschresistente, modellfreie Methoden zu quantifizieren. Weiter war die Messung der (vermuteten) inhomogenen Kontraktion entlang den Augenmuskeln und die Differenzierung der normalen gegenüber der pathologischen Deformation während den Augenbewegungen ein wichtiges Ziel. Diese neue Messgrößen der Augenhöhlenmechanik und deren Steuerung sollten das Verständnis der Strabismusätiologie verbessern. Die ersten hoch aufgelösten anatomischen, bewegungs- und geschwindigkeitskodierten Bilder der Deformationsdynamik der Augenhöhlen wurden mit der beschriebenen Methode erfolgreich aufgenommen. Dreidimensionale anatomische und bewegungskodierte MR-Bilder konnten mit hoher räumlicher und zeitlicher Auflösung in weniger als 10 Minuten durch eine Beschleunigung der Bildaufnahme gewonnen werden. Die Verformung des Orbitagewebes während der Augenbewegung konnte quantifiziert werden. Zum ersten Mal konnten die räumlich-zeitlichen Verformungsmuster des Glaskörpers visualisiert und viskoelastische Modellparameter quantifiziert werden. Verschiedene Arten von Deformationsmustern des Glaskörpers konnten beschrieben werden. Die Viskosität und Elastizität des Glaskörpers wurden durch ein viskoelastisches Modell bestimmt. Somit sind relevante Modellierungsparameter der Augenhöhlebiomechanik in vivo quantifiziert worden. Die Differenzierung des dynamischen Deformationsprofils entlang der Augenmuskeln von Duane-Syndrom Patienten gegenüber physiologischen Deformationsprofilen erlaubte die nicht funktionellen Segmente der pathologischen Muskeln zu bestimmen und lieferte neue Einblicke in die okulomotorische Steuerung. Das erweiterte Verständnis der Physiologie des Orbitagewebes und deren neuronalen Kontrollmechanismen könnte bisher unerkannte Ursachen des Schielens klären, welche traditionelle Konzepte verbessern oder alternative Behandlungen vorschlagen könnten. Die Ursachen von Krankheiten wie neuronal bedingte Lähmung, verzögerte neuromuskuläre Übertragung, mechanische Beschränkung und Entzündung der Augenmuskeln voneinander zu differenzieren kann jetzt geplant werden.