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Purpose
For the modeling, execution, and control of complex, non-standardized intraoperative processes, a modeling language is needed that reflects the variability of interventions. As the established Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) reaches its limits in terms of flexibility, the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) was considered as it addresses weakly structured processes.
Methods
To analyze the suitability of the modeling languages, BPMN and CMMN models of a Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Esophagectomy and Cochlea Implantation were derived and integrated into a situation recognition workflow. Test cases were used to contrast the differences and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the models concerning modeling, execution, and control. Furthermore, the impact on transferability was investigated.
Results
Compared to BPMN, CMMN allows flexibility for modeling intraoperative processes while remaining understandable. Although more effort and process knowledge are needed for execution and control within a situation recognition system, CMMN enables better transferability of the models and therefore the system. Concluding, CMMN should be chosen as a supplement to BPMN for flexible process parts that can only be covered insufficiently by BPMN, or otherwise as a replacement for the entire process.
Conclusion
CMMN offers the flexibility for variable, weakly structured process parts, and is thus suitable for surgical interventions. A combination of both notations could allow optimal use of their advantages and support the transferability of the situation recognition system.
Autonomous driving is becoming the next big digital disruption in the automotive industry. However, the possibility of integrating autonomous driving vehicles into current transportation systems not only involves technological issues but also requires the acceptance and adoption of users. Therefore, this paper develops a conceptual model for user acceptance of autonomous driving vehicles. The corresponding model is tested through a standardized survey of 470 respondents in Germany. Finally, the findings are discussed in relation to the current developments in the automotive industry, and recommendations for further research are given.
Many start-ups are in search of cooperation partners to develop their innovative business models. In response, incumbent firms are introducing increasingly more cooperation systems to engage with start-ups. However, many of these cooperations end in failure. Although qualitative studies on cooperation models have tried to improve the effectiveness of incumbent start-up strategies, only a few have empirically examined start-up cooperation behavior. Considering the lack of adequate measurement models in current research, this paper focuses on developing a multi-item scale on cooperation behavior of start-ups, drawing from a series of qualitative and quantitative studies. The resultant scale contributes to recent research on start-up cooperation and provides a framework to add an empirical perspective to current research.
Purpose: This study aims to conceptualize and test the effect of consumers´ perceptions of complaint handling quality (PCHQ) in both traditional and social media channels.
Design/methodology/approach: Study 1 systematically reviews the relevant literature and then carries out a consumer and manager survey. This approach aims to conceptualize the dimensionality of PCHQ. Study 2 tests the effect of PCHQ on key marketing outcomes. Using survey data from a German telecommunications company, the study provides an explanation for the differences in outcomes across traditional (hotline) and social media channels.
Findings: Study 1 reveals that PCHQ is best conceptualized as a five dimensional construct with 15 facets. There are significant differences between customers and managers in terms of the importance attached to the various dimensions. The construct shows strong psychometric properties with high reliability and validity, thereby opening up opportunities to treat these facets as measurement indicators for the construct. Study 2 indicates that the effect of PCHQ on consumer loyalty and word-of-mouth (WOM) communication is stronger in social media than in traditional channels. Procedural justice and the overall quality of service solutions emerge as general dimensions of PCHQ because they are equally important in both channels. In contrast, interactional justice, distributive justice and customer effort have varying effects across the two channels.
Research limitations/implications: This study contributes to the understanding of a firm´s channel selection for complaint handling in two ways. First, it evaluates and conceptualizes the PCHQ construct. Second, it compares the effects of different dimensions of PCHQ on key marketing outcomes across traditional and socialmedia channels.
Practical implications: This study enables managers to understand the difference in efficacy attached to different dimensions of PCHQ. It further highlights such differences across traditional and social media service channels. For example, the effect of complaint handling on social media is of particular importance when generating WOM communication.
Originality/value: This study offers a comprehensive conceptualization of the PCHQ construct and reveals the general and channel contingent effects of its different dimensions on key marketing outcomes.
There are several intra-operative use cases which require the surgeon to interact with medical devices. We used the Leap Motion Controller as input device and implemented two use-cases: 2D-Interaction (e.g. advancing EPR data) and selection of a value (e.g. room illumination brightness). The gesture detection was successful and we mapped its output to several devices and systems.
Container virtualization evolved into a key technology for deployment automation in line with the DevOps paradigm. Whereas container management systems facilitate the deployment of cloud applications by employing container based artifacts, parts of the deployment logic have been applied before to build these artifacts. Current approaches do not integrate these two deployment phases in a comprehensive manner. Limited knowledge on application software and middleware encapsulated in container-based artifacts leads to maintainability and configuration issues. Besides, the deployment of cloud applications is based on custom orchestration solutions leading to lock in problems. In this paper, we propose a two-phase deployment method based on the TOSCA standard. We present integration concepts for TOSCA-based orchestration and deployment automation using container-based artifacts. Our two-phase deployment method enables capturing and aligning all the deployment logic related to a software release leading to better maintainability. Furthermore, we build a container management system, which is composed of a TOSCA-based orchestrator on Apache Mesos, to deploy container-based cloud applications automatically.
Automatisierte Analyse von Review-Daten beschäftigt sich mit den Möglichkeiten, freien Text zu analysieren und relevante Informationen daraus zu extrahieren. Die Arbeit setzt sich dabei mit Methoden des unüberwachten Lernens auseinander. Hierbei steht die Methode der Topic Modellierung im Mittelpunkt. Es werden Verfahren betrachtet, die im Bereich der textbasierten Informationsgewinnung bekannt sind. Latent Semantic Indexing LSI, (probabilistic) pLSI und Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) werden erläutert und verglichen. Die Arbeit zeigt, wie LDA genutzt wurde, um einen nhaltlichen Überblick über einen Datenkorpus von 1 Mio. Reviews zu bekommen und diesen auf einen feineren Detailgrad zu betrachten. Die Topic-basierte Analyse wird genutzt, um Erkentnisse für ein Opinion Mining System zu generieren, welches eine tiefergehende Analyse vornehmen wird. Der gesamte Prozess ist als vollständig automatisiert und maschinell unüberwacht konzeptioniert.
Enterprise Architectures (EA) consist of a multitude of architecture elements, which relate in manifold ways to each other. As the change of a single element hence impacts various other elements, mechanisms for architecture analysis are important to stakeholders. The high number of relationships aggravates architecture analysis and makes it a complex yet important task. In practice EAs are often analyzed using visualizations. This article contributes to the field of visual analytics in enterprise architecture management (EAM) by reviewing how state-of-the-art software platforms in EAM support stakeholders with respect to providing and visualizing the “right” information for decision-making tasks. We investigate the collaborative decision-making process in an experiment with master students using professional EAM tools by developing a research study. We evaluate the students’ findings by comparing them with the experience of an enterprise architect.
When forecasting sales figures, not only the sales history but also the future price of a product will influence the sales quantity. At first sight, multivariate time series seem to be the appropriate model for this task. Nonetheless, in real life history is not always repeatable, i.e., in the case of sales history there is only one price for a product at a given time. This complicates the design of a multivariate time series. However, for some seasonal or perishable products the price is rather a function of the expiration date than of the sales history. This additional information can help to design a more accurate and causal time series model. The proposed solution uses an univariate time series model but takes the price of a product as a parameter that influences systematically the prediction based on a calculated periodicity. The price influence is computed based on historical sales data using correlation analysis and adjustable price ranges to identify products with comparable history. The periodicity is calculated based on a novel approach that is based on data folding and Pearson Correlation. Compared to other techniques this approach is easy to compute and allows to preset the price parameter for predictions and simulations. Tests with data from the Data Mining Cup 2012 as well as artificial data demonstrate better results than established sophisticated time series methods.
For large-scale processes as implemented in organizations that develop software in regulated domains, comprehensive software process models are implemented, e.g., for compliance requirements. Creating and evolving such processes is demanding and requires software engineers having substantial modeling skills to create consistent and certifiable processes. While teaching process engineering to students, we observed issues in providing and explaining models. In this paper, we present an exploratory study in which we aim to shed light on the challenges students face when it comes to modeling. Our findings show that students are capable of doing basic modeling tasks, yet, fail in utilizing models correctly. We conclude that the required skills, notably abstraction and solution development, are underdeveloped due to missing practice and routine. Since modeling is key to many software engineering disciplines, we advocate for intensifying modeling activities in teaching.
Theory and practice of implementing a successful enterprise IoT strategy in the industry 4.0 era
(2021)
Since the arrival of the internet and affordable access to technologies, digital technologies have occupied a growing place in industries, propelling us towards a 4th industrial revolution: Industry 4.0. In today’s era of digital upheaval, enterprises are increasingly undergoing transformations that are leading to their digitalization. The traditional manufacturing industry is in the throes of a digital transformation that is accelerated by exponentially growing technologies (e.g., intelligent robots, Internet of Things, sensors, 3D printing). Around the world, enterprises are in a frantic race to implement solutions based on IoT to improve their productivity, innovation, and reduce costs and improve their markets on the international scene. Considering the immense transformative potential that IoTs and big data have to bring to the industrial sector, the adoption of IoT in all industrial systems is a challenge to remain competitive and thus transform the industry into a smart factory. This paper presents the description of the innovation and digitalization process, following the Industry 4.0 paradigm to implement a successful enterprise IoT strategy.
Theoretical foundation, effectiveness, and design artefact for machine learning service repositories
(2022)
Machine learning (ML) has played an important role in research in recent years. For companies that want to use ML, finding the algorithms and models that fit for their business is tedious. A review of the available literature on this problem indicates only a few research papers. Given this gap, the aim of this paper is to design an effective and easy-to-use ML service repository. The corresponding research is based on a multi-vocal literature analysis combined with design science research, addressing three research questions: (1) How is current white and gray literature on ML services structured with respect to repositories? (2) Which features are relevant for an effective ML service repository? (3) How is a prototype for an effective ML service repository conceptualized? Findings are relevant for the explanation of user acceptance of ML repositories. This is essential for corporate practice in order to create and use ML repositories effectively.
Thematic issue on human-centred ambient intelligence: cognitive approaches, reasoning and learning
(2017)
This editorial presents advances on human-centred Ambient Intelligence applications which take into account cognitive issues when modelling users (i.e. stress, attention disorders), and learn users’ activities/preferences and adapt to them (i.e. at home, driving a car). These papers also show AmI applications in health and education, which make them even more valuable for the general society.
Due to the rising need for palliative care in Russia, it is crucial to provide timely and high-quality solutions for patients, relatives, and caregivers. A methodology for remote monitoring of patients in need of palliative care and the requirements will be developed for a hardware-software complex for remote monitoring of patients' health at home.
In recent years, the Graph Model has become increasingly popular, especially in the application domain of social networks. The model has been semantically augmented with properties and labels attached to the graph elements. It is difficult to ensure data quality for the properties and the data structure because the model does not need a schema. In this paper, we propose a schema bound Typed Graph Model with properties and labels. These enhancements improve not only data quality but also the quality of graph analysis. The power of this model is provided by using hyper-nodes and hyper-edges, which allows to present data structures on different abstraction levels. We prove that the model is at least equivalent in expressive power to most popular data models. Therefore, it can be used as a supermodel for model management and data integration. We illustrate by example the superiority of this model over the property graph data model of Hidders and other prevalent data models, namely the relational, object-oriented, XML model, and RDF Schema.
The typed graph model
(2020)
In recent years, the Graph Model has become increasingly popular, especially in the application domain of social networks. The model has been semantically augmented with properties and labels attached to the graph elements. It is difficult to ensure data quality for the properties and the data structure because the model does not need a schema. In this paper, we propose a schema bound Typed Graph Model with properties and labels. These enhancements improve not only data quality but also the quality of graph analysis. The power of this model is provided by using hyper-nodes and hyper edges, which allows to present a data structure on different abstraction levels. We demonstrate by example the superiority of this model over the property graph data model of Hidders and other prevalent data models, namely the relational, object-oriented, and XML model.
The tale of 1000 cores: an evaluation of concurrency control on real(ly) large multi-socket hardware
(2020)
In this paper, we set out the goal to revisit the results of “Starring into the Abyss [...] of Concurrency Control with [1000] Cores” and analyse in-memory DBMSs on today’s large hardware. Despite the original assumption of the authors, today we do not see single-socket CPUs with 1000 cores. Instead multi-socket hardware made its way into production data centres. Hence, we follow up on this prior work with an evaluation of the characteristics of concurrency control schemes on real production multi-socket hardware with 1568 cores. To our surprise, we made several interesting findings which we report on in this paper.
The digital twin concept has been widely known for asset monitoring in the industry for a long time. A clear example is the automotive industry. Recently, there has also been significant interest in the application of digital twins in healthcare, especially in genomics in what is known as precision medicine. This work focuses on another medical speciality where digital twins can be applied, sleep medicine. However, there is still great controversy about the fundamentals that constitute digital twins, such as what this concept is based on and how it can be included in healthcare effectively and sustainably. This article reviews digital twins and their role so far in what is known as personalized medicine. In addition, a series of steps will be exposed for a possible implementation of a digital twin for a patient suffering from sleep disorders. For this, artificial intelligence techniques, clinical data management, and possible solutions for explaining the results derived from artificial intelligence models will be addressed.
Context: Development of software intensive products and services increasingly occurs by continuously deploying product or service increments, such as new features and enhancements, to customers. Product and service developers must continuously find out what customers want by direct customer feedback and usage behaviour observation. Objective: This paper examines the preconditions for setting up an experimentation system for continuous customer experiments. It describes the RIGHT model for Continuous Experimentation (Rapid Iterative value creation Gained through High-frequency Testing), illustrating the building blocks required for such a system. Method: An initial model for continuous experimentation is analytically derived from prior work. The model is matched against empirical case study findings from two startup companies and further developed. Results: Building blocks for a continuous experimentation system and infrastructure are presented. Conclusions: A suitable experimentation system requires at least the ability to release minimum viable products or features with suitable instrumentation, design and manage experiment plans, link experiment results with a product roadmap, and manage a flexible business strategy. The main challenges are proper, rapid design of experiments, advanced instrumentation of software to collect, analyse, and store relevant data, and the integration of experiment results in both the product development cycle and the software development process.
Due to rapidly changing technologies and business contexts, many products and services are developed under high uncertainties. It is often impossible to predict customer behaviors and outcomes upfront. Therefore, product and service developers must continuously find out what customers want, requiring a more experimental mode of management and appropriate support for continuously conducting experiments. We have analytically derived an initial model for continuous experimentation from prior work and matched it against empirical case study findings from two startup companies. We examined the preconditions for setting up an experimentation system for continuous customer experiments. The resulting RIGHT model for Continuous Experimentation (Rapid Iterative value creation Gained through High-frequency Testing) illustrates the building blocks required for such a system and the necessary infrastructure. The major findings are that a suitable experimentation system requires the ability to design, manage, and conduct experiments, create so-called minimum viable products or features, link experiment results with a product roadmap, and manage a flexible business strategy. The main challenges are proper, rapid design of experiments, advanced instrumentation of software to collect, analyse, and store relevant data, and integration of experiment results in the product development cycle, software development process, and business strategy. This summary refers to the article The RIGHT Model for Continuous Experimentation, published in the Journal of Systems and Software [Fa17].
The relevance of technology knowledge in digital transformation especially in small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) that are still largely dependent on physical human capital has become increasingly obvious. This is due to the rapid revolution in business environment coupled with increased living examples of firms disrupted by advancement in technological knowledge. Consequently, we find it progressively vital for SMEs to spot and mitigate both threats and take advantage of opportunities arising from digital transformation dynamism.
Our study aims at exploring the relevance of technology knowledge in SMEs for digital transformation to uncover the opportunities, roadmaps, and models that SMEs can take advantage of in the digital transformation and gain a competitive edge.
We conclude that irrespective relevance of technology knowledge for digital transformation coupled with its low costs and accessibility, SMEs are yet to realize the full potential of technological knowledge. This is mainly due to technologies appearing, changing and also vanishing so rapidly in the digital age, that gaining proper understanding without dedicated resources is utterly difficult for SMEs - making them less competitive as incumbent large firms in the market.
Public transport maps are typically designed in a way to support route finding tasks for passengers, while they also provide an overview about stations, metro lines, and city-specific attractions. Most of those maps are designed as a static representation, maybe placed in a metro station or printed in a travel guide. In this paper, we describe a dynamic, interactive public transport map visualization enhanced by additional views for the dynamic passenger data on different levels of temporal granularity. Moreover, we also allow extra statistical information in form of density plots, calendar-based visualizations, and line graphs. All this information is linked to the contextual metro map to give a viewer insights into the relations between time points and typical routes taken by the passengers. We also integrated a graph-based view on user-selected routes, a way to interactively compare those routes, an attribute- and property-driven automatic computation of specific routes for one map as well as for all available maps in our repertoire, and finally, also the most important sights in each city are included as extra information to include in a user-selected route. We illustrate the usefulness of our interactive visualization and map navigation system by applying it to the railway system of Hamburg in Germany while also taking into account the extra passenger data. As another indication for the usefulness of the interactively enhanced metro maps we conducted a controlled user experiment with 20 participants.
Context: Organizations are increasingly challenged by high market dynamics, rapidly evolving technologies and shifting user expectations. In consequence, many organizations are struggling with their ability to provide reliable product roadmaps by applying traditional roadmapping approaches. Currently, many companies are seeking opportunities to improve their product roadmapping practices and strive for new roadmapping approaches. A typical first step towards advancing the roadmapping capabilities of an organization is to assess the current situation. Therefore, the so-called maturity model DEEP for assessing the product roadmapping capabilities of companies operating in dynamic and uncertain environments has been developed and published by the authors.
Objective: The aim of this article is to conduct an initial validation of the DEEP model in order to understand its applicability better and to see if important concepts are missing. In addition, the aim of this article is to evolve the model based on the findings from the initial validation.
Method: The model has been given to practitioners such as product managers with the request to perform a self-assessment of the current product roadmapping practices in their company. Afterwards, interviews with each participant have been conducted in order to gain insights.
Results: The initial validation revealed that some of the stages of the model need to be rearranged and minor usability issues were found. The overall structure of the model was well received. The study resulted in the development of the version 1.1 of the DEEP product roadmap maturity model which is also presented in this article.
Steady growing research material in a variety of databases, repositories and clouds make academic content more than ever hard to discover. Finding adequate material for the own research however is essential for every researcher. Based on recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence and the identified digital capabilities of future universities a change in the basic work of academic research is predicted. This study defines the idea of how artificial intelligence could simplifiy academic research at a digital university. Today's studies in the field of AI spectacle the true potential and its commanding impact on academic research.
Relationship Marketing (RM) presumes trust as an important antecedent for the performance of interfirm relationships. Current research is dominated by an interpersonal perspective. In this research tack, trust chiefly emerges as a result of interpersonal relationships. But multiple risks arise if customer trust rests solely on elements inextricably linked to single representatives. Hence, this paper evaluates the impact of organizational capabilities and the moderating role of customer preferences on the trust creation process. The framework presented here is tested cross-industry on 220 customers for IT solutions. The results offer significant insight into the effectiveness of individual and organizational RM strategies.
IT Governance (ITG) is crucial due to its significant impact on enabling innovation and enhancing firm performance. Hence, in the last decade ITG has become important in both academic and in practical research. Although several studies have investigated individual aspects of ITG success and its impact on single determinants, the causal relationship of how ITG promotes firm performance remains unclear. Thus, a more comprehensive understanding about the link between ITG and firm performance is needed. To address this gap, this research aims at understanding how ITG and firm performance are related. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review (1) to create an overview on how current research structures the link between ITG mechanisms and firm performance, (2) to uncover key constructs as potential mediators or moderators on the general link between ITG and performance, and (3) to set the basis for future studies on the ITG-firm performance relationship.
Digitization transforms business process models and processes in many enterprises. However, many of them need guidance, how digitization is impacting the design of their information systems. Therefore, this paper investigates the influence of digitization on information system design. We apply a two-phase research method applying a literature review and an exploratory case study. The case study took place in the IT service provider of a large insurance enterprise. The study’s results suggest that a number of areas of information system design are affected, such as architecture, processes, data and services.
The advent of chatbots in customer service solutions received increasing attention by research and practice throughout the last years. However, the relevant dimensions and features for service quality and service performance for chatbots remain quite unclear. Therefore, this research develops and tests a conceptual model for customer service quality and customer service performance in the context of chatbots. Additionally, the impact of the developed service dimensions on different customer relationship metrics is measured across different service channels (hotline versus chatbots). Findings of six independent studies indicate a strong main effect of the conceptualized service dimensions on customer satisfaction, service costs, intention to service reusage, word-of-mouth, and customer loyalty. However, different service dimensions are relevant for chatbots compared to a traditional service hotline.
In our initial DaMoN paper, we set out the goal to revisit the results of “Starring into the Abyss [...] of Concurrency Control with [1000] Cores” (Yu in Proc. VLDB Endow 8: 209-220, 2014). Against their assumption, today we do not see single-socket CPUs with 1000 cores. Instead, multi-socket hardware is prevalent today and in fact offers over 1000 cores. Hence, we evaluated concurrency control (CC) schemes on a real (Intel-based) multi-socket platform. To our surprise, we made interesting findings opposing results of the original analysis that we discussed in our initial DaMoN paper. In this paper, we further broaden our analysis, detailing the effect of hardware and workload characteristics via additional real hardware platforms (IBM Power8 and 9) and the full TPC-C transaction mix. Among others, we identified clear connections between the performance of the CC schemes and hardware characteristics, especially concerning NUMA and CPU cache. Overall, we conclude that no CC scheme can efficiently make use of large multi-socket hardware in a robust manner and suggest several directions on how CC schemes and overall OLTP DBMS should evolve in future.
It is essential for the success of a company to set a strategic direction in which a product offering will be developed over time to achieve the company vision. For this reason, roadmaps are used in practice. in general, roadmaps can be expressed in various forms such as technology roadmaps, product roadmaps or industry roadmaps. From the point of view of industry, the basic purpose of a roadmap is to explore, visualize and communicate the dynamic linkage between markets, products and technology.
Entrepreneurship education is becoming increasingly important in higher education and also drives the development of innovative teaching formats, which can increase student engagement. It does, however, need greater international focus to become more attractive for both domestic and international students. This paper presents the examination and course design of two case studies, which promote entrepreneurship education for domestic and international students. These examples show that entrepreneurship courses are attractive due to their focus on interdisciplinarity, experience-based learning, and project-based work. Following a design-based research approach, this paper provides a practical contribution by offering a detailed overview of course design principles, classroom practice and presents reflections and learnings from an iterative development process.
Globalization has increased the number of road trips and vehicles. The result has been an intensification of traffic accidents, which are becoming one of the most important causes of death worldwide. Traffic accidents are often due to human error, the probability of which increases when the cognitive ability of the driver decreases. Cognitive capacity is closely related to the driver’s mental state, as well as other external factors such as the CO2 concentration inside the vehicle. The objective of this work is to analyze how these elements affect driving. We have conducted an experiment with 50 drivers who have driven for 25 min using a driving simulator. These drivers completed a survey at the start and end of the experiment to obtain information about their mental state. In addition, during the test, their stress level was monitored using biometric sensors and the state of the environment (temperature, humidity and CO2 level) was recorded. The results of the experiment show that the initial level of stress and tiredness of the driver can have a strong impact on stress, driving behavior and fatigue produced by the driving test. Other elements such as sadness and the conditions of the interior of the vehicle also cause impaired driving and affect compliance with traffic regulations.
Context
In a world of high dynamics and uncertainties, it is almost impossible to have a long-term prediction of which products, services, or features will satisfy the needs of the customer. To counter this situation, the conduction of Continuous Improvement or Design Thinking for product discovery are common approaches. A major constraint in conducting product discovery activities is the high effort to discover and validate features and requirements. In addition, companies struggle to integrate product discovery activities into their agile processes and iterations.
Objective
This paper aims at suggests a supportive tool, the “Discovery Effort Worthiness (DEW) Index”, for product owners and agile teams to determine a suitable amount of effort that should be spent on Design Thinking activities. To operationalize DEW, proposals for practitioners are presented that can be used to integrate product discovery into product development and delivery.
Method
A case study was conducted for the development of the DEW index. In addition, we conducted an expert workshop to develop proposals for the integration of product discovery activities into the product development and delivery process.
Results
First, we present the "Discovery Effort Worthiness Index" in form of a formula. Second, we identified requirements that must be fulfilled for systematic integration of product discovery activities into product development and delivery. Third, we derived from the requirements proposals for the integration of product discovery activities with a company's product development and delivery.
Conclusion
The developed "Discovery Effort Worthiness Index" provides a tool for companies and their product owners to determine how much effort they should spend on Design Thinking methods to discover and validate requirements. Integrating product discovery with product development and delivery should ensure that the results of product discovery are incorporated into product development. This aims to systematically analyze product risks to increase the chance of product success.
Study programs in higher education have to reflect important societal and industrial challenges to prepare the next generations of professionals for future tasks. The focus of this paper is the challenge of digitalization and digital transformation. The paper proposes the IS education profile of a Digital Business Architect (DBA). The study program emphasizes design thinking, model centricity, and capability thinking as a response to domain requirements from digital transformation and educational system and structure requirements. Experiences in implementing the DBA include the need for integrating deductive and inductive teaching, a strong basis in real-world cases, and collaborative learning approaches to develop adequate competences in business model management, enterprise modeling, enterprise architecture management, and capability management.
With significant advancements in digital technologies, firms find themselves competing in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Therefore, the logic of business decisions is based on the agility to respond to emerging trends in a proactive way. By contrast, traditional IT governance (ITG) frameworks rely on hierarchy and standardized mechanisms to ensure better business/IT alignment. This conflict leads to a call for an ambidextrous governance, in which firms alternate between stability and agility in their ITG mechanisms. Accordingly, this research aims to explore how agility might be integrated in ITG. A quantitative research strategy is implemented to explore the impact of agility on the causal relationship among ITG, business/IT alignment, and firm performance. The results show that the integration of agile ITG mechanisms contributes significantly to the explanation of business/IT alignment. As such, firms need to develop a dual governance model powered by traditional and agile ITG mechanisms.
Early reduction of risks in a startup or an innovation project is highly important. Appropriate means for risk reduction, such as testing business models with different kinds of experiments exist. However, deciding what to test and how to select the right test, is challenging for many startups and innovation projects. This article presents the so-called Business Experiments Navigator (BEN), a toolkit to assist startup and innovation processes. It compliments other tools such as the Business Model Canvas or the Lean Startup process. The main contribution of BEN is to bridge the gap between the riskiest assumptions of a business model and the multitude of available testing techniques by providing assumption templates. The Business Experiments Navigator has been validated in several workshops. Results show that it creates awareness among the workshop participants that a business model is based on assumptions which impose risks and need to be validated. Further, users of BEN were able to identify relevant assumptions and map different kinds of assumptions to appropriate testing techniques. The process applied in the workshops, as well as the assumption templates, helped the participants understand the main concepts and transfer their learnings, to their own business ideas.
Digital transformation has changed corporate reality and, with that, firms’ IT environments and IT governance (ITG). As such, the perspective of ITG has shifted from the design of a relatively stable, closed and controllable System of a self-sufficient Enterprise to a relatively fluid, open, agile and transformational system of networked co-adaptive entities. Related to this paradigm shift in ITG, this paper aims to clarify how the concept of an effective ITG framework has changed in terms of the demand for agility in organizations. Thus, this study conducted 33 qualitative interviews with executives and senior managers from the banking industry in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Analysis of the interviews focused on the formation of categories and the assignment of individual text parts (codings)
to these categories to allow for a quantitative evaluation of the codings per category. Regarding traditional and agile ITG dimensions, 22 traditional and 25 agile dimensions in terms of structures, processes and relational mechanisms were identified. Moreover, agile strategies within the agile ITG construct and ten ITG patterns were identified from the interview data. The data show relevant perspectives on the implementation of traditional and new ITG dimensions and highlight ambidextrous aspects in ITG in the German-speaking banking industry.
The shift of populations to cities is creating challenges in many respects, thus leading to increasing demand for smart solutions of urbanization problems. Smart city applications range from technical and social to economic and ecological. The main focus of this work is to provide a systematic literature review of smart city research to answer two main questions: (1) How is current research on smart cities structured? And (2) What directions are relevant for future research on smart cities? To answer these research questions, a text-mining approach is applied to a large number of publications. This provides an overview and gives insights into relevant dimensions of smart city research. Although the main dimensions of research are already described in the literature, an evaluation of the relevance of such dimensions is missing. Findings suggest that the dimensions of environment and governance are popular, while the dimension of economy has received only limited attention.
3D assisted 2D face recognition involves the process of reconstructing 3D faces from 2D images and solving the problem of face recognition in 3D. To facilitate the use of deep neural networks, a 3D face, normally represented as a 3D mesh of vertices and its corresponding surface texture, is remapped to image-like square isomaps by a conformal mapping. Based on previous work, we assume that face recognition benefits more from texture. In this work, we focus on the surface texture and its discriminatory information content for recognition purposes. Our approach is to prepare a 3D mesh, the corresponding surface texture and the original 2D image as triple input for the recognition network, to show that 3D data is useful for face recognition. Texture enhancement methods to control the texture fusion process are introduced and we adapt data augmentation methods. Our results show that texture-map-based face recognition can not only compete with state-of-the-art systems under the same precon ditions but also outperforms standard 2D methods from recent years.
Being able to monitor the heart activity of patients during their daily life in a reliable, comfortable and affordable way is one main goal of the personalized medicine. Current wearable solutions lack either on the wearing comfort, the quality and type of the data provided or the price of the device. This paper shows the development of a Textile Sensor Platform (TSP) in the form of an electrocardiogram (ECG)-measuring T-shirt that is able to transmit the ECG signal to a smartphone. The development process includes the selection of the materials, the design of the textile electrodes taking into consideration their electrical characteristics and ergonomy, the integration of the electrodes on the garment and their connection with the embedded electronic part. The TSP is able to transmit a real-time streaming of the ECG-signal to an Android smartphone through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Initial results show a good electrical quality in the textile electrodes and promising results in the capture and transmission of the ECG signal. This is still a working- progress and it is the result of an interdisciplinary master project between the School of Informatics and the School of Textiles & Design of the Reutlingen University.
In dieser Arbeit werden drei verschiedene Testumgebungen vorgestellt, welche in ein iteratives Vorgehen einfließen, um die Entwicklung von Augmented-Reality-Anwendungen zur Darstellung von autonomen Fahrfunktionen zu unterstützen.
Gestaltungsentwürfe und Softwareentwicklungen können in den Testumgebungen für unterschiedliche Zielsetzungen von Personenbefragungen vorgestellt und bewertet werden. Das entwicklungsbegleitende Testen ermöglicht eine frühzeitige Identifizierung von Änderungshinweisen, welche für einen gültigen Lösungsentwurf eingearbeitet werden können. Die entwickelten Testumgebungen sind ein verkleinertes Modell, ein Fahrsimulator und ein reales Fahrzeug. Eigenschaften, Funktionen und Aufbauten resultieren aus Erkenntnissen der Literatur und Erfahrungen aus ersten Entwicklungen. Diese und die Einsatzmöglichkeiten werden mit dieser Arbeit aufgezeigt.
This paper presents the first part of a research-work conducted at the University of Applied Sciences (HFT- Stuttgart). The aim of the research was to investigate the potential of low-cost renewable energy systems to reduce the energy demand of the building sector in hot and dry areas. Radiative cooling to the night sky represents a low-cost renewable energy source. The dry desert climate conditions promote radiative cooling applications. The system technology adopted in this work is based on uncovered solar thermal collectors integrated into the building’s hydronic system. By implementing different control strategies, the same system could be used for cooling as well as for heating applications. This paper focuses on identifying the collector parameters which are required as the coefficients to configure such an unglazed collector for calibrating its mathematical model within the simulation environment. The parameter identification process implies testing the collector for its thermal performance. This paper attempts to provide an insight into the dynamic testing of uncovered solar thermal collectors (absorbers), taking into account their prospective operation at nighttime for radiative cooling applications. In this study, the main parameters characterizing the performance of the absorbers for radiative cooling applications are identified and obtained from standardized testing protocol. For this aim, a number of plastic solar absorbers of different designs were tested on the outdoor test-stand facility at HFT-Stuttgart for the characterization of their thermal performance. The testing process was based on the quasi-dynamic test method of the international standard for solar thermal collectors EN ISO 9806. The test database was then used within a mathematical optimization tool (GenOpt) to determine the optimal parameter settings of each absorber under testing. Those performance parameters were significant to compare the thermal performance of the tested absorbers. The coefficients (identified parameters) were used then to plot the thermal efficiency curves of all absorbers, for both the heating and cooling modes of operation. Based on the intended main scope of the system utilization (heating or cooling), the tested absorbers could be benchmarked. Hence, one of those absorbers was selected to be used in the following simulation phase as was planned in the research-project.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect a large number of children both in the Russian Federation and in Germany. Early diagnosis is key for these children, because the sooner parents notice such disorders in a child and the rehabilitation and treatment program starts, the higher the likelihood of his social adaptation. The difficulties in raising such a child lie in the complexity of his learning outside of children's groups and the complexity of his medical care. In this regard, the development of digital applications that facilitate medical care and education of such children at home is important and relevant. The purpose of the project is to improve the availability and quality of healthcare and social adaptation at home of children with ASD through the use of digital technologies.
Der Kundenservice bietet für das Marketing umfangreiche Ansätze zur Differenzierung. Dabei zahlen positive Serviceerlebnisse der Kunden auf unterschiedliche Marketingziele ein. Durch Social Media stehen darüber hinaus neue Möglichkeiten für den Servicedialog zur Verfügung. Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt die Umsetzung dieser Möglichkeiten bei der Telekom Deutschland GmbH.
Background
Although teledermatology has been proven internationally to be an effective and safe addition to the care of patients in primary care, there are few pilot projects implementing teledermatology in routine outpatient care in Germany. The aim of this cluster randomized controlled trial was to evaluate whether referrals to dermatologists are reduced by implementing a store-and-forward teleconsultation system in general practitioner practices.
Methods
Eight counties were cluster randomized to the intervention and control conditions. During the 1-year intervention period between July 2018 and June 2019, 46 general practitioner practices in the 4 intervention counties implemented a store-and-forward teledermatology system with Patient Data Management System interoperability. It allowed practice teams to initiate teleconsultations for patients with dermatologic complaints. In the four control counties, treatment as usual was performed. As primary outcome, number of referrals was calculated from routine health care data. Poisson regression was used to compare referral rates between the intervention practices and 342 control practices.
Results
The primary analysis revealed no significant difference in referral rates (relative risk = 1.02; 95% confidence interval = 0.911–1.141; p = .74). Secondary analyses accounting for sociodemographic and practice characteristics but omitting county pairing resulted in significant differences of referral rates between intervention practices and control practices. Matched county pair, general practitioner age, patient age, and patient sex distribution in the practices were significantly related to referral rates.
Conclusions
While a store-and-forward teleconsultation system was successfully implemented in the German primary health care setting, the intervention's effect was superimposed by regional factors. Such regional factors should be considered in future teledermatology research.
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnectedness of physical objects, and works by equipping the latter with sensors and actuators as a means to connect to the internet. The number of connected things has increased threefold over the past five years. Consequently, firms expect the IoT to become a source of new business models driven by technology. However, only a few early adopters have started to install and use IoT appliances on a frequent basis. So it is still unclear which factors drive technological acceptance of IoT appliances. Confronting this gap in current research, the present paper explores how IoT appliances are conceptually defined, which factors drive technological acceptance of IoT appliances, and how firms can use results in order to improve value propositions in corresponding business models. lt is discovered that IoT appliance vendors need to support a broad focus as the potential buyers expose a large variety. As conclusions from this insight, the paper illustrates some flexible marketing strategies.
During two researches the influence of technologies on sleep were analyzed. The first one is about the effect of light on the circadian rhythm and as consequence on sleep quality of persons in a vegetative state. The second one, which is still running, surveys the influence of several technical tools on the sleep of elderly people living in a nursing home.
Gescannte Menschmodelle werden zunehmend für Experimente im VR-Bereich verwendet. Doch realistische Bewegungsabläufe bereitzustellen, ist eine zeitaufwendige Arbeit. Ziel der Ausarbeitung ist es, einen Workflow zu finden, der es ermöglicht, eine große Anzahl solcher Modelle innerhalb kürzester Zeit zu verarbeiten. Dafür betrachtet die Arbeit unterschiedliche Methoden zum Automatisieren von Skinning und Rigging, um Modelle in virtuellen Umgebungen auf Basis von Motion Tracking einsetzen zu können. Die Qualität der verarbeiteten Modelle wird anhand von Scans in unterschiedlichen Posen geprüft.
Creating new business models, products or services is challenging in fast changing unpredictable environments. Often, product teams need to make many assumptions (e.g., assumptions about future demands) that might not be true. These assumptions impose risks to the success and these risks need to be mitigated early. One of the principles of the Lean Startup approach is to identify and prioritize the riskiest assumptions in order to validate them as early as possible. This helps to avoid wasting effort and time. In the literature there are several different methods for identifying and prioritizing the riskiest assumptions reported. However, only little research exists about the practical application of these methods in practice and how to teach them. In this paper, we present and empirically analyze a workshop format that we have developed for teaching the prioritization of Lean Startup assumptions. We aim at raising the awareness for assumption thinking among the participants and teach them through group work how to prioritize assumptions. The results of the analysis of a multitude of conducted workshops show that the applied method did lead to reasonable results and accompanying learning effects. In addition, the participants got aware of assumption thinking and liked learning in a practical way.
With the capability of employing virtually unlimited compute resources, the cloud evolved into an attractive execution environment for applications from the High Performance Computing (HPC) domain. By means of elastic scaling, compute resources can be provisioned and decommissioned at runtime. This gives rise to a new concept in HPC: Elasticity of parallel computations. However, it is still an open research question to which extent HPC applications can benefit from elastic scaling and how to leverage elasticity of parallel computations. In this paper, we discuss how to address these challenges for HPC applications with dynamic task parallelism and present TASKWORK, a cloud-aware runtime system based on our findings. TASKWORK enables the implementation of elastic HPC applications by means of higher level development frameworks and solves corresponding coordination problems based on Apache ZooKeeper. For evaluation purposes, we discuss a development framework for parallel branch-and-bound based on TASKWORK, show how to implement an elastic HPC application, and report on measurements with respect to parallel efficiency and elastic scaling.
Context: Agile practices as well as UX methods are nowadays well-known and often adopted to develop complex software and products more efficiently and effectively. However, in the so called VUCA environment, which many companies are confronted with, the sole use of UX research is not sufficient to find the best solutions for customers. The implementation of Design Thinking can support this process. But many companies and their product owners don’t know how much resources they should spend for conducting Design Thinking.
Objective: This paper aims at suggesting a supportive tool, the “Discovery Effort Worthiness (DEW) Index”, for product owners and agile teams to determine a suitable amount of effort that should be spent for Design Thinking activities.
Method: A case study was conducted for the development of the DEW index. Design Thinking was introduced into the regular development cycle of an industry Scrum team. With the support of UX and Design Thinking experts, a formula was developed to determine the appropriate effort for Design Thinking.
Results: The developed “Discovery Effort Worthiness Index” provides an easy-to-use tool for companies and their product owners to determine how much effort they should spend on Design Thinking methods to discover and validate requirements. A company can map the corresponding Design Thinking methods to the results of the DEW Index calculation, and product owners can select the appropriate measures from this mapping. Therefore, they can optimize the effort spent for discovery and validation.
Telemetrie und Homemonitoring werden bereits in vielen Gesundheitsbereichen erfolgreich genutzt. Moderne Herzschrittmacher ermöglichen durch telemetrische Datenübertragung das Homemonitoring aktueller Gesundheits- und Zustandsdaten durch PatientInnen und ÄrztInnen. Für die Weiterentwicklung existierender Produkte ist ein grundlegendes Verständnis der Anforderungen an und des Aufbaus solcher Systeme notwendig. Bisher existieren
herstellerunabhängige Betrachtungen dieser noch nicht. Durch die Verwendung von SysML als semiformale Notationssprache wird das System Herzschrittmacher und Homemonitoring modelliert. Die Anforderungen an ein solches System lassen sich aus bestehenden Produkten ableiten. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt die Systemarchitektur solcher Systeme, anhand derer die Anbindung an Informationssysteme über das Homemonitoringsystem und die dadurch umgesetzten Funktionen gezeigt werden.
Systemische Betrachtung des therapeutischen Roboters Paro im Vergleich zu dem Haustierroboter AIBO
(2020)
Roboter sind in der heutigen Zeit nicht nur in der Industrie zu finden, sondern werden immer häufiger in privaten Lebensbereichen eingesetzt. Ein Beispiel hierfür ist der soziale Therapie-Roboter Paro. Dieser ist dem Verhalten und Aussehen einer jungen Robbe nachempfunden, drückt Gefühle aus und wird besonders in Pflegeheimen eingesetzt. Dabei zeigt er positive Auswirkungen auf das Wohlbefinden pflegebedürftiger Menschen. Diese Arbeit stellt den Roboter Paro in einer systemischen Analyse dar: hierbei werden Systemkontext, Anwendungsfälle, Anforderungen und Struktur betrachtet. Anschließend erfolgt eine Analyse des Haustierroboters AIBO, welcher einem Welpen ähnelt und verstärkt der Unterhaltung von Privatpersonen dient. Es werden Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen den Systemen herausgearbeitet. Dabei wird ersichtlich, dass beide Systeme dem Nutzer vorrangig Gesellschaft leisten, jedoch verschiedene Anforderungen besitzen und in unterschiedlichen Anwendungsdomänen eingesetzt werden. Zudem besitzt AIBO vielfältigere Fähigkeiten und einen höheren Bewegungsgrad als Paro. Dies spiegelt sich in einer komplexeren Struktur der Hardware wider.
Organizational agility may be an antidote against threats from volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous corporate environments. While agility has been extensively examined in manufacturing enterprises, comparably less is known about agility in knowledge-intensive organizations. As results may not be transferable, there is still some confusion about how agility in knowledge-intensive organizations can be characterized, what factors facilitate its development, what its organizational effects are, and what environmental conditions favor these effects. This study closes these gaps by presenting a systematic literature review on agility in knowledge-intensive organizations. A systematic literature search led to a sample of 37 relevant papers for our review. Integrating the knowledge-based view and a dynamic capabilities perspective, we (1) present different relevant conceptualizations of organizational agility, (2) discuss relevant knowledge management-related as well as information technology-related capabilities that support the development of organizational agility, and (3) shed light on the moderating role of environmental conditions in enhancing organizational agility and its effect on organizational performance. This academic paper adds value to theory by synthesizing existing research on agility in knowledge-intensive organizations. It furthermore may serve as a map for closing research gaps by proposing an extensive agenda for future research. Our study expands existing literature reviews on agility with its specific focus on a knowledge-intensive context and its integration of the research streams of knowledge management capabilities as well as information technology capabilities. It integrates relevant organizational knowledge management practices and the use of knowledge management systems to ensure superior performance effects. Our study can serve as a base for future examinations of organizational agility by illustrating fruitful topics for further examination as well as open questions. It may also provide value to practitioners by showing what factors favor the development of agility in knowledge-intensive organizations and what organizational effects can be achieved under which conditions.
Zero or plus energy office buildings must have very high building standards and require highly efficient energy supply systems due to space limitations for renewable installations. Conventional solar cooling systems use photovoltaic electricity or thermal energy to run either a compression cooling machine or an absorption-cooling machine in order to produce cooling energy during daytime, while they use electricity from the grid for the nightly cooling energy demand. With a hybrid photovoltaic-thermal collector, electricity as well as thermal energy can be produced at the same time. These collectors can produce also cooling energy at nighttime by longwave radiation exchange with the night sky and convection losses to the ambient air. Such a renewable trigeneration system offers new fields of applications. However, the technical, ecological and economical aspects of such systems are still largely unexplored.
In this work, the potential of a PVT system to heat and cool office buildings in three different climate zones is investigated. In the investigated system, PVT collectors act as a heat source and heat sink for a reversible heat pump. Due to the reduced electricity consumption (from the grid) for heat rejection, the overall efficiency and economics improve compared to a conventional solar cooling system using a reversible air-to-water heat pump as heat and cold source.
A parametric simulation study was carried out to evaluate the system design with different PVT surface areas and storage tank volumes to optimize the system for three different climate zones and for two different building standards. It is shown such systems are technically feasible today. With a maximum utilization of PV electricity for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and other electricity demand such as lighting and plug loads, high solar fractions and primary energy savings can be achieved.
Annual costs for such a system are comparable to conventional solar thermal and solar electrical cooling systems. Nevertheless, the economic feasibility strongly depends on country specific energy prices and energy policy. However, even in countries without compensation schemes for energy produced by renewables, this system can still be economically viable today. It could be shown, that a specific system dimensioning can be found at each of the investigated locations worldwide for a valuable economic and ecological operation of an office building with PVT technologies in different system designs.
Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist die Darstellung und Charakterisierung einheitlicher, mesoporöser Silica-Partikel (MPSM) im Mikrometerbereich mit maßgeschneiderten Partikel- und Porendesign für die Hochleistungsflüssigkeitschromatographie. Die Synthese umfasst die Einlagerung von Silica-Nanopartikeln (SNP) in poröse organische Template, welche anschließend bei 600°C zersetzt werden. Die Impfsuspensionspolymerisation von Polystyrol-Partikeln, unter Verwendung von Glycidylmethacrylat, Ethylenglycoldimethacrylat und Porogenen, ermöglicht die Herstellung hochgradig einheitlicher, poröser p(GMA-co-EDMA)-Template. Der Einfluss wesentlicher Faktoren, einschließlich des Monomer-Porogen-Verhältnisses, des Monomerverhältnisses und der Porogenzusammensetzung, werden systematisch untersucht sowie ihre Auswirkungen auf die Porengröße, das Porenvolumen und die spezifische Oberfläche erläutert. Die Anbindung aminofunktionalisierter Substanzen erfolgt durch die Ringöffnung der Epoxidgruppe. Im anschließenden basischen Sol-Gel-Prozess werden die Silica-Nanopartikel aufgrund der Ladungsunterschiede in die funktionalisierten p(GMA-co-EDMA)-Template eingebaut. Die Partikelgröße der SNP beeinflusst wesentlich die Poreneigenschaften der MPSM und hängt von drei Faktoren ab: (i) der Wachstumsgeschwindigkeit in der kontinuierlichen Phase, die durch die Einstellungen des Sol-Gel-Prozesses gesteuert wird, (ii) der Diffusionsrate, die durch elektrostatische Anziehung reguliert wird und vom Grad der Funktionalisierung abhängt und (iii) der Porosität des Polymer-Templats. Die gezielte Anpassung der Poreneigenschaften durch die Prozesseinstellungen erlaubt die präzise Herstellung von MPSM, die auf spezifische Trennherausforderungen zugeschnitten werden und somit die Qualität der HPLC verbessern. Die vorgestellte Synthesestrategie ermöglicht, aufgrund des stufenweisen molekularen Aufbaus, eine bessere Adaption der stationären Phase an spezifische Trennherausforderungen.
Background
Personalized medicine requires the integration and analysis of vast amounts of patient data to realize individualized care. With Surgomics, we aim to facilitate personalized therapy recommendations in surgery by integration of intraoperative surgical data and their analysis with machine learning methods to leverage the potential of this data in analogy to Radiomics and Genomics.
Methods
We defined Surgomics as the entirety of surgomic features that are process characteristics of a surgical procedure automatically derived from multimodal intraoperative data to quantify processes in the operating room. In a multidisciplinary team we discussed potential data sources like endoscopic videos, vital sign monitoring, medical devices and instruments and respective surgomic features. Subsequently, an online questionnaire was sent to experts from surgery and (computer) science at multiple centers for rating the features’ clinical relevance and technical feasibility.
Results
In total, 52 surgomic features were identified and assigned to eight feature categories. Based on the expert survey (n = 66 participants) the feature category with the highest clinical relevance as rated by surgeons was “surgical skill and quality of performance” for morbidity and mortality (9.0 ± 1.3 on a numerical rating scale from 1 to 10) as well as for long-term (oncological) outcome (8.2 ± 1.8). The feature category with the highest feasibility to be automatically extracted as rated by (computer) scientists was “Instrument” (8.5 ± 1.7). Among the surgomic features ranked as most relevant in their respective category were “intraoperative adverse events”, “action performed with instruments”, “vital sign monitoring”, and “difficulty of surgery”.
Conclusion
Surgomics is a promising concept for the analysis of intraoperative data. Surgomics may be used together with preoperative features from clinical data and Radiomics to predict postoperative morbidity, mortality and long-term outcome, as well as to provide tailored feedback for surgeons.
Besides the optimisation of the car, energy-efficiency and safety can also be increased by optimising the driving behaviour. Based on this fact, a driving system is in development whose goal is to educate the driver in energy efficient and safe driving. It monitors the driver, the car and the environment and gives energy-efficiency and safety relevant recommendations. However, the driving system tries not to distract or bother the driver by giving recommendations for example during stressful driving situations or when the driver is not interested in that recommendation. Therefore, the driving system monitors the stress level of the driver as well as the reaction of the driver to a given recommendation and decideswhether to give a recommendation or not. This allows to suppress recommendations when needed and, thus, to increase the road safety and the user acceptance of
the driving system.
Stress is becoming an important topic in modern life. The influence of stress results in a higher rate of health disorders such as burnout, heart problems, obesity, asthma, diabetes, depressions and many others. Furthermore individual’s behavior and capabilities could be directly affected leading to altered cognition, inappropriate decision making and problem solving skills. In a dynamic and unpredictable environment, such as automotive, this can result in a higher risk for accidents. Different papers faced the estimation as well as prediction of drivers’ stress level during driving. Another important question is not only the stress level of the driver himself, but also the influence on and of a group of other drivers in the near area. This paper proposes a system, which determines a group of drivers in a near area as clusters and it derives the individual stress level. This information will be analyzed to generate a stress map, which represents a graphical view about road section with a higher stress influence. Aggregated data can be used to generate navigation routes with a lower stress influence to decrease stress influenced driving as well as improve road safety.
Stress is recognized as a predominant disease with raising costs for rehabilitation and treatment. Currently there are several different approaches that can be used for determining and calculating the stress levels. Usually the methods for determining stress are divided in two categories. The first category do not require any special equipment for measuring the stress. This category useless the variation in the behaviour patterns that occur while stress. The core disadvantage for the category is their limitation to specific use case. The second category uses laboratories instruments and biological sensors. This category allow to measure stress precisely and proficiently but on the same time they are not mobile and transportable and do not support real-time feedback. This work presents a mobile system that provides the calculation of stress. For achieving this, the of a mobile ECG sensor is analysed, processed and visualised over a mobile system like a smartphone. This work also explains the used stress measurement algorithm. The result of this work is a portable system that can be used with a mobile system like a smartphone as visual interface for reporting the current stress level.
Strategy to test mobile apps
(2014)
Nowadays the development of a mobile app implies challenges and difficulties, which have to be faced by mobile app developers. Innovations lead to a rapidly evolving mobile app market, therefore apps should be developed faster and offered in short release cycles to the market. Testing is a decisive activity within the development process that helps to improve the quality of the app. This research paper describes a strategy to test mobile apps that overcomes the challenges that mobile apps confront and permits to test the app in a structural test environment.
Artificial Intelligence-based Assistants AIAs are spreading quickly both in homes and offices. They already have left their original habitats of "intelligent speakers" providing easy access to music collections. The initiated a multitude of new devices and are already populating devices such as TV sets. Characteristic for the intelligent digital assistants is the formation of platforms around their core functionality. Thus, AIS capabilities of the assistants are used to offer new services and create new interfaces for business processes. There are positive network effects between the assistants and the services as well as within the services. Therefore, many companies see the need to get involved in the field of digital assistants but lack a framework to align their initiatives with their corporate strategies. In order to lay the foundation for a comprehensive method, we are therefore investigating intelligent digital assistants. Based on this analysis, we are developing a framework of strategic opportunities and challenges.
Database management systems and K/V-Stores operate on updatable datasets – massively exceeding the size of available main memory. Tree-based K/V storage management structures became particularly popular in storage engines. B+ -Trees [1, 4] allow constant search performance, however write-heavy workloads yield in inefficient write patterns to secondary storage devices and poor performance characteristics. LSM-Trees [16, 23] overcome this issue by horizontal partitioning fractions of data – small enough to fully reside in main memory, but require frequent maintenance to sustain search performance.
Firstly, we propose Multi-Version Partitioned BTrees (MV-PBT) as sole storage and index management structure in key-sorted storage engines like K/V-Stores. Secondly, we compare MV-PBT against LSM-Trees. The logical horizontal partitioning in MV-PBT allows leveraging recent advances in modern B+ -Tree techniques in a small transparent and memory resident portion of the structure. Structural properties sustain steady read performance, yielding efficient write patterns and reducing write amplification.
We integrated MV-PBT in the WiredTiger [15] KV storage engine. MV-PBT offers an up to 2× increased steady throughput in comparison to LSM-Trees and several orders of magnitude in comparison to B+ -Trees in a YCSB [5] workload.
Stent graft visualization and planning tool for endovascular surgery using finite element analysis
(2014)
Purpose: A new approach to optimize stent graft selection for endovascular aortic repair is the use of finite element analysis. Once the finite element model is created and solved, a software module is needed to view the simulation results in the clinical work environment. A new tool for Interpretation of simulation results, named Medical Postprocessor, that enables comparison of different stent graft configurations and products was designed, implemented and tested. Methods Aortic endovascular stent graft ring forces and sealing states in the vessel landing zone of three different configurations were provided in a surgical planning software using the Medical Imaging Interaction Tool Kit (MITK) Software system. For data interpretation, software modules for 2D and 3D presentations were implemented. Ten surgeons evaluated the software features of the Medical Postprocessor. These surgeons performed usability tests and answered questionnaires based on their experience with the system.
Results: The Medical Postprocessor visualization system enabled vascular surgeons to determine the configuration with the highest overall fixation force in 16 ± 6 s, best proximal sealing in 56±24 s and highest proximal fixation force in 38 ± 12 s. The majority considered the multiformat data provided helpful and found the Medical Postprocessor to be an efficient decision support system for stent graft selection. The evaluation of the user interface results in an ISONORMconform user interface (113.5 points).
Conclusion: The Medical Postprocessor visualization Software tool for analyzing stent graft properties was evaluated by vascular surgeons. The results show that the software can assist the interpretation of simulation results to optimize stent graft configuration and sizing.
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which play substantial role in the development of any economy have been on the rise in the recent periods. Consequently, these enterprises are faced with a myriad of challenges which could potentially be solved through adoption of technology. Nonetheless, it has been observed that the new technological uptake among SMEs remains limited with the majority of them opting to maintain the status quo with regards to technology awareness and innovation strategies.
In a literature review, this paper explores three major dynamics curtailing adoption of new technologies by SMEs in the manufacturing: Knowledge absorptive capacity and management factors, organisational structures as well as technological awareness. Firstly, with regards to knowledge absorptive capacity and management factors, this study shows how these factors drive innovation potentials in SMEs.
Secondly, with regards to technological awareness factors, this study documents how perceived usefulness, costs, network and infrastructure, education and skills, training and attitude as well as knowledge influence adoption of new technologies among SMEs in the world. Lastly, the study concludes by analysing how organisational structures drive innovation potentials of SMEs in the wake of swift and profound technological changes in the market.
One of the key challenges for automatic assistance is the support of actors in the operating room depending on the status of the procedure. Therefore, context information collected in the operating room is used to gain knowledge about the current situation. In literature, solutions already exist for specific use cases, but it is doubtful to what extent these approaches can be transferred to other conditions. We conducted a comprehensive literature research on existing situation recognition systems for the intraoperative area, covering 274 articles and 95 cross-references published between 2010 and 2019. We contrasted and compared 58 identified approaches based on defined aspects such as used sensor data or application area. In addition, we discussed applicability and transferability. Most of the papers focus on video data for recognizing situations within laparoscopic and cataract surgeries. Not all of the approaches can be used online for real-time recognition. Using different methods, good results with recognition accuracies above 90% could be achieved. Overall, transferability is less addressed. The applicability of approaches to other circumstances seems to be possible to a limited extent. Future research should place a stronger focus on adaptability. The literature review shows differences within existing approaches for situation recognition and outlines research trends. Applicability and transferability to other conditions are less addressed in current work.
Personalized remote healthcare monitoring is in continuous development due to the technology improvements of sensors and wearable electronic systems. A state of the art of research works on wearable sensors for healthcare applications is presented in this work. Furthermore, a state of the art of wearable devices, chest and wrist band and smartwatches available on the market for health and sport monitoring is presented in this paper. Many activity trackers are commercially available. The prices are continuously reducing and the performances are improving, but commercial devices do not provide raw data and are therefore not useful for research purposes.
Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades, but it is a critically discussed topic. In several waves, different aspects of SPI have been discussed in the past, e.g., large scale company-level SPI programs, maturity models, success factors, and in-project SPI. It is hard to find new streams or a consensus in the community, but there is a trend coming along with agile and lean software development. Apparently, practitioners reject extensive and prescriptive maturity models and move towards smaller, faster and continuous project-integrated SPI. Based on data from two survey studies conducted in Germany (2012) and Europe (2016), we analyze the process customization for projects and practices for implementing SPI in the participating companies. Our findings indicate that, even in regulated industry sectors, companies increasingly adopt in-project SPI activities, primarily with the goal to continuously optimize specific processes. Therefore, with this paper, we want to stimulate a discussion on how to evolve traditional SPI towards a continuous learning environment.
Power line communications (PLC) reuse the existing power-grid infrastructure for the transmission of data signals. As power line the communication technology does not require a dedicated network setup, it can be used to connect a multitude of sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Those IoT devices could be deployed in homes, streets, or industrial environments for sensing and to control related applications. The key challenge faced by future IoT-oriented narrowband PLC networks is to provide a high quality of service (QoS). In fact, the power line channel has been traditionally considered too hostile. Combined with the fact that spectrum is a scarce resource and interference from other users, this requirement calls for means to increase spectral efficiency radically and to improve link reliability. However, the research activities carried out in the last decade have shown that it is a suitable technology for a large number of applications. Motivated by the relevant impact of PLC on IoT, this paper proposed a cooperative spectrum allocation in IoT-oriented narrowband PLC networks using an iterative water-filling algorithm.
Information Systems in Distributed Environment (ISDE) is becoming a prominent standard in this globalization era due to advancement in information and communication technologies. The advent of the internet has supported Distributed Software Development (DSD) by introducing new concepts and opportunities, resulting in benefits such as scalability, flexibility, interdependence, reduced cost, resource pools, and usage tracking. The distributed development of information systems as well as their deployment and operation in distributed environments impose new challenges for software organizations and can lead to business advantages. In distributed environments, business units collaborate across time zones, organizational boundaries, work cultures and geographical distances, something that ultimately has led to an increasing diversification and growing complexity of cooperation among units. The real-world practice of developing, deployment and operation of information systems in globally distributed projects has been viewed from various perspectives, though technical and engineering in conjunction with managerial and organizational viewpoints have dominated the researcher’s attention so far. Successful participation in distributed environments, however, is ultimately a matter of the participants understanding and exploiting the particularities of their respective local contexts at specific points in time and exploring practical solutions through the local resources available.
This special issue of the Computer standards & interfaces journal therefore includes papers received from the public call for papers and extended and improved versions of those papers that were selected from the best of the International Workshop on Information Systems in Distributed Environment (ISDE 2014). It aims to serve as a forum to bring together academics, researchers, practitioners and students in the field of distributed information system, by presenting novel developments and lesson learned from real world cases, and to promote the exchange of ideas, discussion and advancement in these areas.
The very first International Workshop on Software-intensive Business: Start-ups, Ecosystems and Platforms (SiBW 2018) was held in Espoo (Greater Helsinki), Finland on December 3rd, 2018 – just a day before SLUSH 2018, the world’s biggest startup event. Thanks to the collaboration with the organizers of SLUSH, many of the software-intensive business researchers and practitioners took part also in this event.
The international workshop gathered together 35 registered attendees, from Sweden, Germany, Latvia, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands representing both academia as well as industry. The event itself was sponsored by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the workshop was organized by the newly founded Software-intensive Business research community together with Software Startup Research Network (SSRN).
Software scripts for sensor data extraction in Rasberry Pi: user-space and kernel-space comparison
(2024)
This paper compares two popular scripting implementations for hardware prototyping: Python scripts execut from User-Space and C-based Linux-Driver processes executed from Kernel-Space, which can provide information to researchers when considering one or another in their implementations. Conclusions exhibit that deploying software scripts in the kernel space makes it possible to grant a certain quality of sensor information using a Raspberry Pi without the need for advanced real-time operational systems.
The implementation of a web based portal QA solution will lead to a high acceptance of the staff as the usage of commonly known standard software (e.g. web browser) allows intuitive handling. In the daily use a significant simplification of the workflow and Performance enhancement can be achieved by easy access to the check documents. As the data is now saved in a database it can easily be processed and long-term trends can be displayed. Therefore possible errors can be detected much easier and earlier. By the usage of time stamps and user authentication procedures and user responsibilities are comprehensibly documented. As the software is browser based, integration into an existing software Environment is not critical. As only technical QA data is processed, no further data security measures are necessary. A certification as a medical product is not required.
Software process improvement (SPI) has been around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new trends and emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer these questions about the current state of SPI and related research. In this article, we present results from an updated systematic mapping study to shed light on the field of SPI, to develop a big picture of the state of the art, and to draw conclusions for future research directions. An analysis of 769 publications draws a big picture of SPI-related research of the past quarter-century. Our study shows a high number of solution proposals, experience reports, and secondary studies, but only few theories and models on SPI in general. In particular, standard SPI models like CMMI and ISO/IEC 15,504 are analyzed, enhanced, and evaluated for applicability in practice, but these standards are also critically discussed, e.g., from the perspective of SPI in small to-medium-sized companies, which leads to new specialized frameworks. New and specialized frameworks account for the majority of the contributions found (approx. 38%). Furthermore, we find a growing interest in success factors (approx. 16%) to aid companies in conducting SPI and in adapting agile principles and practices for SPI (approx. 10%). Beyond these specific topics, the study results also show an increasing interest into secondary studies with the purpose of aggregating and structuring SPI-related knowledge. Finally, the present study helps directing future research by identifying under-researched topics awaiting further investigation.
Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer the question for what is the current state of SPI and related research? In this paper, we present initial results from a systematic mapping study to shed light on the field of SPI and to draw conclusions for future research directions. An analysis of 635 publications draws a big picture of SPI-related research of the past 25 years. Our study shows a high number of solution proposals, experience reports, and secondary studies, but only few theories. In particular, standard SPI models like CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504 are analyzed, enhanced, and evaluated for applicability, whereas these standards are critically discussed from the perspective of SPI in small-to- medium-sized companies, which leads to new specialized frameworks. Furthermore, we find a growing interest in success factors to aid companies in conducting SPI.
Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer the question for what is the current state of SPI and related research? We present initial results from a systematic mapping study to shed light on the field of SPI and to draw conclusions for future research directions. An analysis of 635 publications draws a big picture of SPI-related research of the past 25 years. Our study shows a high number of solution proposals, experience reports, and secondary studies, but only few theories. In particular, standard SPI models are analyzed and evaluated for applicability, especially from the perspective of SPI in small-to-medium-sized companies, which leads to new specialized frameworks. Furthermore, we find a growing interest in success factors to aid companies in conducting SPI.
This summary refers to the paper Software process improvement : where is the evidence? [Ku15].
This paper was published as full research paper in the ICSSP’2015 proceedings.
In current times, a lot of new business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems. Enterprises are presently transforming their strategy, culture, processes, and their information systems to become more digital. The digital transformation deeply disrupts existing enterprises and economies. Digitization fosters the development of IT environments with many rather small and distributed structures, like Internet of Things. This has a strong impact for architecting digital services and products. The change from a closed-world modeling perspective to more flexible open-world and living software and system architectures defines the moving context for adaptable and evolutionary software approaches, which are essential to enable the digital transformation. In this paper, we are putting a spotlight to service oriented software evolution to support the digital transformation with micro granular digital architectures for digital services and products.
Software development as an experiment system : a qualitative survey on the state of the practice
(2015)
An experiment-driven approach to software product and service development is gaining increasing attention as a way to channel limited resources to the efficient creation of customer value. In this approach, software functionalities are developed incrementally and validated in continuous experiments with stakeholders such as customers and users. The experiments provide factual feedback for guiding subsequent development. Although case studies on experimentation in industry exist, the understanding of the state of the practice and the encountered obstacles is incomplete. This paper presents an interview-based qualitative survey exploring the experimentation experiences of ten software development companies. The study found that although the principles of continuous experimentation resonated with industry practitioners, the state of the practice is not yet mature. In particular, experimentation is rarely systematic and continuous. Key challenges relate to changing organizational culture, accelerating development cycle speed, and measuring customer value and product
success.
Modern enterprises reshape and transform continuously by a multitude of management processes with different perspectives. They range from business process management to IT service management and the management of the information systems. Enterprise Architecture (EA) management seeks to provide such a perspective and to align the diverse management perspectives. Therefore, EA management cannot rely on hierarchic - in a tayloristic manner designed - management processes to achieve and promote this alignment. It, conversely, has to apply bottom-up, information-centered coordination mechanisms to ensure that different management processes are aligned with each other and enterprise strategy. Social software provides such a bottom-up mechanism for providing support within EAM-processes. Consequently, challenges of EA management processes are investigated, and contributions of social software presented. A cockpit provides interactive functions and visualization methods to cope with this complexity and enable the practical use of social software in enterprise architecture management processes.
Business process models provide a considerable number of benefits for enterprises and organizations, but the creation of such models is costly and time-consuming, which slows down the organizational adoption of business process modeling. Social paradigms pave new ways for business process modeling by integrating stakeholders and leveraging knowledge sources. However, empirical research about the impact of social paradigms on costs of business process modeling is sparse. A better understanding of their impact could help to reduce the cost of business process modeling and improve decision-making on BPM activities. The paper constributes to this field by reporting about an empirical investigation via survey research on the perceived influence of different cost factors among experts. Our results indicate that different cost components, as well as the use of social paradigms, influence cost.
Social media usage in business-to-business sales : conceptualization, antecedents, and outcomes
(2015)
In recent years, the rise of social media received significant importance in marketing research. Social media applications now provide executives with a raft of new options. Consequently, interfaces to social media platforms have also been integrated into Business to-Business (B2B) salesforce applications, although very little is as yet known about their usage and general impact on B2B sales performance. This paper evaluates 1) the conceptualization of social media usage in a dyadic B2B relationship; 2) the effects of a more differentiated usage construct on customer satisfaction; 3) antecedents of social media usage on multiple levels; and 4) the effectiveness of social media usage for different types of customers. The framework presented here is tested cross-industry against data collected from dyadic buyer seller relationships in the IT service industry. The results elucidate the preconditions and the impact of social media usage strategies in B2B sales relations.
In recent years, the rise of social media received significant importance in marketing research and practice. Consequently, interfaces to social media platforms have also been integrated into Business-to-Business (B2B) salesforce applications, although very little is as yet known about their usage and general impact on B2B sales performance. This paper evaluates 1) the conceptualization of social media usage in dyadic B2B relationships; 2) the effects of a more differentiated usage construct on customer satisfaction; 3) antecedents of social media usage on multiple levels; and 4) the effectiveness of social media usage for different types of cus-tomers. The framework presented here is tested cross-industry against data collected from dyadic buyer-seller relationships in the IT service industry. The results elucidate the precondi-tions and the impact of social media usage strategies in B2B sales relations.
Nach Charles Darwin bestimmt die Kompetenz im Bereich Veränderungsmanagement zunehmend die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Organisationen: »It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.« Diese Sichtweise gewinnt auf Basis der mit Social Media verbundenen Veränderung der Unternehmensumwelt weiter an Bedeutung. Social Media eröffnet neue Freiheitsgrade in der unternehmensinternen aber auch gesellschaftlichen Kommunikation, die unumkehrbar und in einer rasanten Geschwindigkeit Unternehmen mit sich selbst konfrontieren. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen legen nahe, dass die meisten Unternehmen die Bedeutung ihrer eigenen Veränderungskompetenz noch nicht vollständig erfasst haben. Der Umgang mit Wandel ist in vielen Fällen naiv und folgt tradierten Organisationsmodellen. Unternehmen lassen sich jedoch nicht mechanisch im Stile einer Maschine verändern. Daher sind Ansätze gefragt, die den Fokus eher auf kulturelle und mikropolitische Faktoren lenken, prozessorientiert vorgehen und Social Media schrittweise in das eigene Geschäftsmodell integrieren. Der wichtigste Faktor ist und bleibt jedoch die Qualität der Führung. Das Top Management und final die Shareholder von Unternehmen müssen sich daher erneut überlegen, ob sie speziell in dieser Hinsicht optimal aufgestellt sind.
Im Kundenbeziehungsmanagement besteht ein großes Interesse an der Nutzung von Social Media. Allerdings finden sich aktuell kaum konzeptionell durchdachte und empirisch überprüfte Lösungen für Social CRM.
Social Media bieten innovative Perspektiven für das Management der Kundenbeziehung. Die Nutzung dieser Möglichkeiten ist jedoch mit hohen Anforderungen an die Marketingstrategie verbunden, was zuweilen vernachlässigt wird.
Das Internet gewinnt für das Marketing zunehmend an Bedeutung. Dabei liegt der Fokus auf sogenannten Social-Media-Anwendungen wie Facebook, Twitter oder XING. Für Unternehmen stellt sich die Frage, ob das veränderte Mediennutzungsverhalten der Kunden eine neue Marketinglogik induziert. Eine aktuelle Untersuchung gibt Einblicke in die Chancen und Risiken, Anwendungsbedingungen und Kontextfaktoren für die Nutzung von Social Media im Marketing.
Social Media
(2011)
In jüngerer Zeit gewinnt die Nutzung des Internet für das Inbound Marketing zunehmend an Bedeutung. Dabei liegt der Fokus auf den so genannten Social Media Plattformen wie Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, XING, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare und Posterous. Die Entwicklung dieser Medien ist auf eine Veränderung bei der Nutzung des Internet zurückzuführen, die häufig unter dem Schlagwort Web 2.0 zusammengefasst wird. Das gewandelte Mediennutzungsverhalten der Kunden induziert Chancen und Risiken für das Marketing.
Die Simulation menschlichen Gruppenverhaltens kann bei der Kapazitäten-, Risiko- und Evakuierungs Planung von Gebäuden hilfreich sein, bei der Produktion von Filmen für eindrucksvolle Massen-Szenen eingesetzt werden oder virtuelle Schauplätze in Echtzeit-Anwendungen beleben. Die Herausforderungen liegen vor allem in einem realistischen Erscheinungsbild der virtuellen Crowd, glaubwürdigem Verhalten innerhalb eines sozialen Verbundes, realitätsnahen Animationen und der Wahrung der Echtzeitfähigkeit interaktiver Anwendungen. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird der aktuelle Stand der Technik vorgestellt, Technologien evaluiert und ein Crowd Simulation Prototyp mit der Unity Engine implementiert.
Der vorliegende Artikel beleuchtet die grundsätzlichen Möglichkeiten der Integration von Funktionalitäten der sozialen Medien in Unternehmen. Darauf aufbauend wird Social Commerce als zentraler Gegenstand der Unternehmensführung hergeleitet. Dabei stehen der kundenseitige Kaufprozess und dessen Schnittstellen zu Kommunikationsinstrumenten des Social Webs im Vordergrund. Gezeigt wird die Beeinflussung des individuellen Kaufprozesses durch Social Media. Diese Wirkungsdynamiken sind nachfolgend die Grundlage für die Deskription von möglichen strategischen Einsatzfeldern und Bereichen des Social Commerce in der Unternehmensführung.
Although still in the early stages of diffusion, smartwatches represent the most popular type of wearable devices. Yet, little is known why some people are more likely to adopt smartwatches than others. To deepen the understanding of underlying factors prompting adoption behavior, the authors develop a theoretical model grounded in technology acceptance and social psychology literature. Empirical results reveal perceived usefulness and visibility as important factors that drive intention. The magnitude of these antecedents is influenced by an individual’s perception of viewing smartwatches as a technology and/or as a fashion accessory. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
Smart meter based business models for the electricity sector : a systematical literature research
(2017)
The Act on the Digitization of the Energy Transition forces German industries and households to introduce smart meters in order to save engery, to gain individual based electricity tariffs and to digitize the energy data flow. Smart meter can be regarded as the advancement of the traditional meter. Utilizing this new technology enables a wide range of innovative business models that provide additional value for the electricity suppliers as well as for their customers. In this study, we followed a two-step approach. At first, we provide a state-of-the-art comparison of these business models found in the literature and identify structural differences in the way they add value to the offered products and services. Secondly, the business models are grouped into categories with respect to customer segmetns and the added value to the smart grid. Findings indicate that most business models focus on the end-costumer as their main customer.
The shift of populations to cities is creating challenges in many respects, thus leading to increasing demand for smart solutions of urbanization problems. Smart city applications range from technical and social to economic and ecological. The main focus of this work is to provide a systematic literature review of smart city research to answer two main questions: (1) How is current research on smart cities structured? and (2) What directions are relevant for future research on smart cities? To answer these research questions, a text-mining approach is applied to a large number of publications. This provides an overview and gives insights into relevant dimensions of smart city research. Although the main dimensions of research are already described in the literature, an evaluation of the relevance of such dimensions is missing. Findings suggest that the dimensions of environment and governance are popular, while the dimension of economy has received only limited attention.
Purpose
Computerized medical imaging processing assists neurosurgeons to localize tumours precisely. It plays a key role in recent image-guided neurosurgery. Hence, we developed a new open-source toolkit, namely Slicer-DeepSeg, for efficient and automatic brain tumour segmentation based on deep learning methodologies for aiding clinical brain research.
Methods
Our developed toolkit consists of three main components. First, Slicer-DeepSeg extends the 3D Slicer application and thus provides support for multiple data input/ output data formats and 3D visualization libraries. Second, Slicer core modules offer powerful image processing and analysis utilities. Third, the Slicer-DeepSeg extension provides a customized GUI for brain tumour segmentation using deep learning-based methods.
Results
The developed Slicer-DeepSeg was validated using a public dataset of high-grade glioma patients. The results showed that our proposed platform’s performance considerably outperforms other 3D Slicer cloud-based approaches.
Conclusions
Developed Slicer-DeepSeg allows the development of novel AI-assisted medical applications in neurosurgery. Moreover, it can enhance the outcomes of computer-aided diagnosis of brain tumours. Open-source Slicer-DeepSeg is available at github.com/razeineldin/Slicer-DeepSeg.
To evaluate the quality of a person´s sleep it is essential to identify the sleep stages and their durations. Currently, the gold standard in terms of sleep analysis is overnight polysomnography (PSG), during which several techniques like EEG (eletroencephalogram), EOG (electrooculogram), EMG (electromyogram), ECG (electrocardiogram), SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) and for example respiratory airflow and respiratory effort are recorded. These expensive and complex procedures, applied in sleep laboratories, are invasive and unfamiliar for the subjects and it is a reason why it might have an impact on the recorded data. These are the main reasons why low-cost home diagnostic systems are likely to be advantageous. Their aim is to reach a larger population by reducing the number of parameters recorded. Nowadays, many wearable devices promise to measure sleep quality using only the ECG and body-movement signals. This work presents an android application developed in order to proof the accuracy of an algorithm published in the sleep literature. The algorithm uses ECG and body movement recordings to estimate sleep stages. The pre-recorded signals fed into the algorithm have been taken from physionet1 online database. The obtained results have been compared with those of the standard method used in PSG. The mean agreement ratios between the sleep stages REM, Wake, NREM-1, NREM-2 and NREM-3 were 38.1%, 14%, 16%, 75% and 54.3%.
The respiratory rate is a vital sign indicating breathing illness. It is necessary to analyze the mechanical oscillations of the patient's body arising from chest movements. An inappropriate holder on which the sensor is mounted, or an inappropriate sensor position is some of the external factors which should be minimized during signal registration. This paper considers using a non-invasive device placed under the bed mattress and evaluates the respiratory rate. The aim of the work is the development of an accelerometer sensor holder for this system. The normal and deep breathing signals were analyzed, corresponding to the relaxed state and when taking deep breaths. The evaluation criterion for the holder's model is its influence on the patient's respiratory signal amplitude for each state. As a result, we offer a non-invasive system of respiratory rate detection, including the mechanical component providing the most accurate values of mentioned respiratory rate.
A sleep study is a test used to diagnose sleep disorders and is usually done in sleep laboratories. The golden standard for evaluation of sleep is overnight polysomnography (PSG). Unfortunately, in-lab sleep studies are expensive and complex procedures. Furthermore, with a minimum of 22 wire attachments to the patient for sleep recording, this medical procedure is invasive and unfamiliar for the subjects. To solve this problem, low-cost home diagnostic systems, based on noninvasive recording methods requires further researches.
For this intention it is important to find suitable bio vital parameters for classifying sleep phases WAKE, REM, light sleep and deep sleep without any physical impairment at the same time. We decided to analyse body movement (BM), respiration rate (RR) and heart rate variability (HRV) from existing sleep recordings to develop an algorithm which is able to classify the sleep phases automatically. The preliminary results of this project show that BM, RR and HRV are suitable to identify WAKE, REM and NREM stage.
Purpose
Digital transformation of organizations has major implications for required skills and competencies of the workforce, both as a prerequisite for implementation, and, as a consequence of the transformation. The purpose of this study is to analyze required skills and competencies for digital transformation using the context of robotic process automation (RPA) as an example.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on an explorative, thematic coding analysis of 119 job advertisements related to RPA. The data was collected from major online job platforms, qualitatively coded and subsequently analyzed quantitatively.
Findings
The research highlights the general importance of specific skills and competencies for digital transformation and shows a gap between available skills and required skills. Moreover, it is concluded that reskilling the existing workforce might be difficult. Many emerging positions can be found in the consulting sector, which raises questions about the permanent vs temporary nature of the requirements, as well as the difficulty of acquiring the required knowledge.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to knowledge by providing new empirical findings and a novel perspective to the ongoing discussion of digital skills, employment effects and reskilling demands of the existing workforce owing to recent technological developments and automation in the overall context of digital transformation.
Recognizing human actions is a core challenge for autonomous systems as they directly share the same space with humans. Systems must be able to recognize and assess human actions in real-time. To train the corresponding data-driven algorithms, a significant amount of annotated training data is required. We demonstrate a pipeline to detect humans, estimate their pose, track them over time and recognize their actions in real-time with standard monocular camera sensors. For action recognition, we transform noisy human pose estimates in an image like format we call Encoded Human Pose Image (EHPI). This encoded information can further be classified using standard methods from the computer vision community. With this simple procedure, we achieve competitive state-of-the-art performance in pose based action detection and can ensure real-time performance. In addition, we show a use case in the context of autonomous driving to demonstrate how such a system can be trained to recognize human actions using simulation data.
Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, die Infrastruktur einer modernen Fahrzeug-zu Fahrzeug-Kommunikation auf ihre Sicherheit zu prüfen. Dazu werden die Sicherheitsstandards für die Funkkommunikation genauer beschrieben und anschließend mit möglichen Angriffsmodellen geprüft. Mit dem erläuterten Wissen der VANET Architektur werden verschiedene Angriffe verständlicher. Dadurch werden die Schwachstellen offengelegt und Gegenmaßnahmen an passenden Punkten in der Architektur verdeutlicht.
Die Arbeit stellt die Vision des Internet of Things (IoT) vor und betrachtet sowohl Möglichkeiten der Nutzung als auch Gefahrenpotentiale für die Sicherheit der Nutzer. Insbesondere wird hierbei der Anwendungsfall Smart Home näher betrachtet und am Beispiel ZigBee gravierende Schwächen dieser Geräte aufgezeigt.