Contributions in Merlin

Embryogenic evolution emulates in silico cell-like entities to get more powerful methods for complex evolutionary tasks. As simulations have to abstract from the biological model, implicit information hidden in its physics is lost. Here, we propose to use cell-like entities as a real-world in vitro testbed. In analogy to evolutionary robotics, where solutions evolved in simulations may be tested in real-world on macroscale, the proposed vesicular testbed would do the same for the embryogenic evolutionary tasks on mesoscale. As a first step towards a vesicular testbed emulating growth, cell division, and cell differentiation, we present a modified vesicle production method, providing custom-tailored chemical cargo, and present a novel self-assembly procedure to provide vesicle aggregates of programmable composition.

This article is concerned with gradient flows in asymmetric metric spaces, that is, spaces with a topology induced by an asymmetric metric. Such an asymmetry appears naturally in many applications, e.g., in mathematical models for materials with hysteresis. A framework of asymmetric gradient flows is established under the assumption that the metric is weakly lower-semicontinuous in the second argument (and not necessarily on the first), and an existence theorem for gradient flows defined on an asymmetric metric space is given.

Reputation formation pervades human social life. In fact, many people go to great lengths to acquire a good reputation, even though building a good reputation is costly in many cases. Little is known about the neural underpinnings of this important social mechanism, however. In the present study, we show that disruption of the right, but not the left, lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) with low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) diminishes subjects' ability to build a favorable reputation. This effect occurs even though subjects' ability to behave altruistically in the absence of reputation incentives remains intact, and even though they are still able to recognize both the fairness standards necessary for acquiring and the future benefits of a good reputation. Thus, subjects with a disrupted right lateral PFC no longer seem to be able to resist the temptation to defect, even though they know that this has detrimental effects on their future reputation. This suggests an important dissociation between the knowledge about one's own best interests and the ability to act accordingly in social contexts. These results link findings on the neural underpinnings of self-control and temptation with the study of human social behavior, and they may help explain why reputation formation remains less prominent in most other species with less developed prefrontal cortices.

We study the short-run effect of involuntary job loss on comprehensive measures of public health costs. We focus on job loss induced by plant closure, thereby addressing the reverse causality problem as job displacements due to plant closure are unlikely caused by workers' health status, but potentially have important effects on individual workers' health and associated public health costs. Our empirical analysis is based on a rich data set from Austria providing comprehensive information on various types of health care costs and day-by-day work history at the individual level. Our central findings are: (i) overall expenditures on medical treatments are not strongly affected by job displacement; (ii) job loss significantly increases expenditures for antidepressants and related drugs, as well as for hospitalizations due to mental health problems for men (but not for women) although the effects are economically rather small; and (iii) sickness benefits strongly increase due to job loss.

Over the years relational databases were optimized to handle large amounts of data. While they provide scalability, they do not fully preserve the semantics of the application domain. The Semantic Web however provides a common framework to give the data a well defined meaning using RDF to describe the data and OWL to define the vocabulary. The explicit definition of the semantics facilitates the exchange and integration of data, hence the data from relational databases could be mapped to a Semantic Web representation to gain ontology-based access. To bridge the conceptual gap between the relational model and an ontology, we must create a mapping of an existing relational database schema. This process should be largely automated since creating a mapping manually is time-consuming and error-prone. Certainly, an automated mapping generation cannot meet all user needs, therefore customization is necessary afterwards. However, it is highly desirable to provide additional tool support for customization to further decrease the user effort and error rate. In this thesis, we present how such a mapping can be generated automatically from an existing relational database schema. Therefore we implement a Mapping Library that is applicable to a wide range of database systems and can be embedded into other applications. In addition, we provide graphical tool support to customize the generated mapping. The prototype is developed as a plugin for the ontology editor Protege.

Biometry and its appliance in everyday life is used today and assures an increasing scope of application for the future. The advantages which result from connecting access keys to the human body will reduce the complexity and costs of managing access information to a minimum. Furthermore, technical improvements and the resulting enhanced reliability on the devices assure increased application of biometric identication and verication in many elds of application for the future. In this bachelor thesis a conceptual design of a distributed solution has been composed that allows the management of biometric devices and data. The archetype for this applica- tion is the management software Bioxes (developed at the University of Zurich). Further, a prototype was developed with help of the Google Web Toolkit that implements two screens of the original application and their functionality. On the device screen the management of biometric devices is provided and with help of the user screen all user and their biometric templates are administrable. An evaluation on GWT Widget Libraries has been performed to nd the best tting Widget Library for the planned application and its requirements. This comparison is based on dierent criteria concerning the licensing, the size of the community, the diversity of the widgets and the code itself as well as its documentation. The evaluation illustrates that GWT Mosaic is the most suitable Widget Library for this application and its requirements.

Self-Assembly is a process where simple parts autonomously form organized structures, simulations are used in research to find or optimize new promising parts and structures. This thesis describes the extension of a self-assembly simulator by a graphical user interface to configure experiments and the reengineering of certain parts of the simulator. The development is documented in three parts: requirements, design and implementation. In the end an evaluation of the chosen solution is made and an outlook is given on how to further improve the application.

This paper outlines the outcome of a socioeconomics (SE) and incentives work group during the "Management of the Future Internet" seminar, held in Dagstuhl, Germany. This covers an indication of key questions and issues, which are classified as important for next steps in network management. Furthermore, the process of dealing with aspects of "Socio-economic Management" is discussed, which determines a hybrid and innovative approach besides traditional network management approaches. This determines a network management in which control is delegated via socio-economic means and to a certain extent to the user and provider with the goal to maximize the overall social welfare and the networks technical efficiency at the same time. This is refined by a set of SE-driven management mechanisms, the discussion of abstract user/network interfaces (stakeholder relations), and an example case for managing overlay traffic in such a network management system. Finally, based on a set of ideal SE requirements derived from the analysis of existing approaches, a set of preliminary conclusions is drawn.