Contributions in Merlin

The Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and IT of the University of Zurich is being certified by the European EQUIS and the American AACSB accreditation authorities. In order to apply for an accreditation, the faculty must provide self-assessment reports that contain comprehensive information about publications, scientific staff, research and teaching as well as service issues on a yearly basis. Currently, this information is gathered by compiling data into Excel sheets. Because of the faculty’s great number of research groups, this results in an almost unmanageable amount of files that must be consolidated and formatted by hand. To improve this process, the idea for a Web-based information management system called Merlin came up. Its main purpose is to be a centralized repository for employee and publication data. The focus of this master thesis lies in the conception and implementation of a role-based security system and the development of user and organizational unit related management functionalities using Java’s next generation Web application framework Grails. The authentication service of the security system was developed to integrate with the University of Zurich’s Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI), which is based on the Shibboleth open source project. The authorization service implements the concepts of a role-based access control (RBAC) model by supporting role hierarchies, multiple role inheritance, role delegations and instance level access control. Merlin was developed to integrate into the existing application landscape and to make use of employee and organizational unit data provided by the University of Zurich’s enterprise resource planning software SAP. Organizational unit data is imported initially by parsing a XML file whereas employee data is integrated based on nightly CSV file imports triggered by a cron job. The employee centric functionality covers customizable profile page containing all necessary information such as personal data, education or appointment. Merlin’s organizational unit centric functionalities aim to provide an editable organizational unit profile, a clear organizational structure of the faculty with a correct affiliation of the its members. To achieve this, an interactive setup wizard with automatic employee membership requests has been implemented. Finally, functionality for CSV employee data export is provided to support the generation of selfassessment reports. For quality assurance purposes, an evaluation based on user tests has been carried out. The users were assigned to groups based on the function they have in the organization. Each group had to perform a defined set of task. The tests showed that the functionality concerning authentication and authorization worked as expected. However, there were some issues with comprehensibility of the workflow related to tasks. The users wish a comprehensive documentation in form of a FAQ and more help texts. With these tests, we were able to fix some issues and thus improve the quality of the application.

The Internet, especially social network sites have become an integral part of our daily lives. Personal data, stored in Internet resources, build a huge data set for social network analyis. This bachelor thesis evaluates the feasibility of an entity resolution system based on face recogntion with the goal to integrate several social networks in an aggregated one.

Although chronic pain is widespread and has a heavy impact on the quality of life, the knowledge about this disease is scarce and the treatment is difficult. We developed a prototype for an online chronic pain information system, which is aimed at gathering and providing chronic pain knowledge. Our prototype enables patients to express their pain sensation with pain drawings and additional verbal descriptions. Multiple such entries can be reviewed in a diary. We implemented an algorithm which identifies similar pain drawings. Based on our prototype, we conducted usability tests and interviews with seven chronic pain patients. Various caretakers were involved in the development process and evaluated our prototype. We were able to show that modern information technology can be used to better understand chronic pain.

The current market of integrated ERP and online shop systems is very small and limited. Big players like Amazon, eBay and Digitec are mainly using unique in-house developed solutions. Meanwhile, small and mid-sized businesses are struggling with the integration of their ERP systems and e-commerce solutions as they cannot afford to spend millions for the integration or a migration to ""one-size fits all"" solutions. This work aims to provide an approach to a universal integration tool between e-commerce solutions and back-end management systems to ease the integration effort for small and midsized businesses. ""Universal"" means that it should be usable for any combination of e-commerce and back-end management system.

A client-focused financial advisory is a great way for banks to differentiate themselves from the competition. It would also be a great opportunity to restore their damaged reputation after the financial crisis. However, studies report poor advisory quality and unsatisfied bank customers. This thesis analyzes how this apparently paradox situation comes about. To do that, the incentive systems, the transparency mechanisms and the business models of the financial advisory sector in Switzerland are being analyzed. Based on the analysis we state the hypothesis that a transparent business model is able to increase customer satisfaction. To validate this hypothesis a transparent business model is presented and finally tested empirically.

The professors of the University of Zurich never had the possibility to access their financial information, which are stored and managed in the SAP system. In David Oertle’s bachelor thesis, supported by the Business Applications BAP department of the University of Zurich, a project was conducted that should resolve this issue. It resulted a SAP Web Dynpro based web application, on which access can be granted through the already existing lecturer’s portal. The program allows the users, among other things, to survey the actual status of their cost units as well as to see their bookings and to export them.

Small molecule structure one dimensional (1D) proton (1H) Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) verification has become a vital procedure for drug design and discovery. However, the inefficient throughput of human verification procedure has limited its application only to an arbitral instrument for molecular structural identification. Considering NMR’s unimpeachable advantages in molecular structural identification tasks (compared to other techniques), to popularize NMR technology into routine molecular structural verification procedures (especially in compound library management of the pharmaceutical industry), will dramatically increase the efficiency of drug discovery procedures. As a result, some automatic NMR structure verification software approaches were developed, described in the literature and are commercially available. Unfortunately, all of them are limited in principal (e.g. they heavily depend on the chemical shift prediction) and are shown not to be working in practice. Driven by the strong motivation from the industry, we propose a new approach as an alternative to approach the problem. Specifically, we propose to utilize approaches from artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic the spectroscopist’s NMR molecular structure verification procedure. Guided by this strategy, a human-logic based optimization (i.e. heuristic search) approach is designed to mimic the spectroscopist’s decision process. The approach is based on a probabilistic model that is used to unify the human logic based optimization approach under maximum likelihood framework. Furthermore, a new automatic 1D 1H NMR molecular structural verification system is designed and implemented based on the optimization approach proposed earlier. In order to convince vast NMR spectroscopists and molecular structural identification participators, comprehensive experiments are used to evaluate the system’s decision accuracy and consistency to the spectroscopists. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the system has very high performance in terms of both accuracy and consistency with the spectroscopists on the test datasets we used. This result validates both the correctness of our approach and the feasibility of building industrialized software based on our system to be used in practical industrial structural verification environments. As a result, commercial software based on our system is under development by a major NMR manufacture, and is going to be released to the pharmaceutical industry. Finally, the thesis also discusses similarities and differences between the human logic based optimization and other typically used optimization approaches, and especially focuses on their applicability. Through these discussions, we hope that the human logic based optimization could be used as a reference by other practical computer science participants to solve other automation problems from different domains.

For the classification of instances you can use different methods. The use of geometric distance or semantic distance for the kNN method provides a different result depending on the distribution of the attributes. The semantic distance is because of its incorrect interpretation of the distance significantly less correct with the classifications and thus proves to be unsuitable for a classification. The comparison of the results of the ranking and the normalization as pre-processing methods shows, that the ranking got better results in the classification as the normalization with skew distributed attributes. The normalisation performs better for attributes, that are not skew distributed.

On a global scale, the international tourism market is not only the biggest branch of the economy, it has also the most rapid growth. But because of the emergence of technological advances, the value propositions of traditional market players is increasingly challenged. This thesis examines, with which business models tourist agencies can persist in this market. This is done on the basis of scientific research, identified market gaps and evaluated customer needs. It can be seen, that the most promising are those concepts which rethink a companies revenue streams, increase availability customers, integrate customers into a companies value creation or which allow cost reduction through technical advances. Based on this foundation, four innovative business models are presented, which build the basis for a practical implementation.

Poker offers an interesting domain to investigate some fundamental problems in artificial intelligence. The properties of stochasticity and imperfect information pose new challenging questions, not present in other typical game research subjects like chess; traditional methods for computer game-playing as alpha-beta search are incapable of handling these challenges. This thesis presents the necessary algorithms to tackle these problems with the use of modified game tree search and opponent modeling. A proof-of-concept implementation for the game of No-Limit Texas Hold’em is provided (and benchmarked), based on the Miximax algorithm and an opponent model implemented as a Hoeffding tree.