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Educational institutions have increasing needs for professional digital communication. When selecting suitable communication tools, there is a need for appropriate information as a basis for decision-making. Messenger communication in particular is strongly integrated into people's private everyday lives. While needs for extensive data-secure communication in educational contexts are increasing, there is a lack of concepts for data-protected and privacy-preserving support of educational processes through software (Karaboga et al 2014; Digitalcourage e.V. n.d.) , as well as for mandatory training for professionals (Zorn, Tillmann, and Kaminski 2014; Imort and Niesyto 2014), and reliable information for viable software alternatives. This paper outlines the specific requirements of educational institutions when selecting suitable software, using messenger communication as an example. From these requirements, criteria for needed information are presented as a basis for software selection decisions in three categories: data protection/privacy, accessibility/low-barrier, practicability. Since no criteria and good practice suggestions were available so far, a study was conducted to elicit the characteristics of potentially suitable messenger software. To this end, the necessary criteria for the three categories mentioned were first defined and then German and well-known international messengers were tested for data protection criteria. Based on the results for conformity with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as an inclusion criterion, the messengers in question were subjected to a practical test. In the process, additional practicality criteria were developed, in part iteratively.
In addition to institution-internal messengers, six services were identified among the freely available provider-dependent messengers that can be used in a GDPR-compliant manner, at least for users over the age of 16. At the time of publication, this leaves only five: Threema, Wire, SID, Ginlo, Chiffry. Furthermore, provider-independent messenger systems that adhere to the international standard protocol for the exchange of chat messages (XMPP) appear to be a viable option for educational institutions. In-house or commissioned server hosting would then be possible and a corresponding agreement for commissioned data processing can be concluded with an IT service provider.
The decisions to use "Wire" and "Threema Work" in the IDiT project context are explained and justified. The context was vocational training for prospective office management clerks at vocational schools and vocational training centers. Although the underlying considerations are tailored to the project context (application in the Berufsförderungswerk Köln), they can be generalized.
This thesis is aimed for finding a solution for non-gaming application of Virtual Reality technology in data visualization and analysis. Starting by reconstructing the concept of Virtual Reality, the paper then describes the principles, concepts and techniques of designing a Virtual Reality application. In the last part of the thesis, a detailed description of how a prototype implemented is presented to provide a preview of how data visualization and analysis and Virtual Reality technology can be combined together in order to enable users to perceive and comprehend data in a possibly better way.
Configuration of energy transition factors in Inner Mongolia: A qualitative fuzzy logic approach
(2022)
Transitioning towards a low-carbon society is now increasingly becoming a global concern. The goal of successfully achieving this energy transition has become one of most pressing challenge, both among government decision makers and academia. Energy transition has raised up and become one of the top action priorities in China. Inner Mongolia, as the study area in this research, is significant in China's energy transition as one of leading provinces in terms of energy resources and electricity outward transmission.
The main goal of this dissertation is to identify configurations that influence on the energy transition in IMAR. On the basis of a multilevel perspective (MLP) framework, the method of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is applied within the thesis, taking 8 Chinese municipalities or leagues as study cases. A qualitative comparative study is carried out of configurations of diversified factors, which affect China’s energy transition. Eight antecedent conditions extracted from landscape level, regime level and niche level respectively.
It is shown that different transition trajectories can have a similar energy transition outcome. Energy transition itself is induced by multiple factors collaboratively. Coal resource curse does not always have negative effects on energy transition in Inner Mongolia. Within this work, two main energy transition modes (supply and demand balance reversed mode in western IMAR and energy technological transformation mode in eastern IMAR) are constructed based on regional differences and yearly dynamics, illustrating the trajectories with different municipal characteristics. The transition pattern also shows different geographical characteristics. Different east-west distribution of the electricity market distributes differently in eastern and western Inner Mongolia, however, the difference in distinct forms of electricity market does not show enough impact on the energy transition trajectory in this dissertation. Overall, this study shows that the local response and its effects on the process of energy transition, in the light of the encouragement and advocacy by the central government. Meanwhile, this study offers a deeper understanding in the feasibility of the application with a methodological combination of MLP and fsQCA in provincial level for future research.
The synthesis of 17-hydroxy-oleic acid based oligomeric esters was investigated with immobilized Pseudozyma antarctica Lipase B and hexanediol as co-substrate. The effects of different reaction parameters on velocity and product composition at equilibrium conditions were analyzed. The synthesis of oleic acid esters was used as a reference system for initial evaluation of reaction parameters. The reaction with oleic acid and hexanediol was fastest at an enzyme concentration of 5% at 60 °C and high conversions of > 90 % were achieved in non-polar solvents in the presence of molecular sieves. In heptane an oleic acid conversion of 96 % was reached with a final diester to monoester ratio of > 4:1. In syntheses trials with 17-hydroxy-oleic acid the formation of oligomers was verified with GPC, however; conversion was generally lower than with oleic acid. Removal of hydroxyl fatty acid monomers and dimers and the formation ester functionalities could be verified by GC analysis. An increase of the degree of oligomerization was observed simultaneously by GPC analysis. The number-average molecular weight was around 1400 in the best trials corresponding to a degree of oligomerization of around 4 units of hydroxyl-fatty acid attached to a hexanediol core. Though transformations were not complete, the final oligomer size was in the lower range of polyester diols used for polyurethane manufacturing.
Starmerella bombicola is known to produce sub‐terminally hydroxylated lactonic sophorolipids (SLs), while Candida kuoi synthesizes acidic open chain SLs with terminally hydroxylated fatty acids. Upon feeding glucose and fatty alcohols both strains form long‐chain nonionic SLs. According to structure elucidation the SLs consist of a hydroxylated fatty acid esterified with fatty alcohol and linked via a glycoside bond to the diacetylated sophorose unit. Palmityl, stearyl, and oleyl alcohols lead to products with lipid chain lengths of C32 or C36. Oleyl alcohol is the preferred substrate leading to 45 g L−1 of the double unsaturated C36 SL with S. bombicola and 20 g L−1 with C. kuoi. Scale up from shake flask to 1.5 L fermentations is possible and 65 g L−1 long‐chain SLs are obtained with S. bombicola within 7 days. Mixed feeding of oleic acid and a variety of fatty alcohols leads to new long‐chain SLs. In the presence of oleic acid the yeasts do not oxidize the fatty alcohol and thus the production of biosurfactants with tailored chain length is possible. The long‐chain SLs show good emulsification ability of water/paraffin oil mixtures at low energy input and reduced interfacial tension significantly.
Practical Applications: Sophorolipids are produced by fermentation on industrial scale focusing on cleaning and detergent applications. Mainly lactonic or anionic open‐chain forms are used today. The new long‐chain SLs presented in this manuscript are accessible with existing production technology and can be produced with high titers from cost‐efficient renewable raw materials. In contrast to the commercial products the long‐chain SLs are more hydrophobic and exhibit a strong emulsification behavior. Therefore they have the potential to broaden the application range of SLs in future. They may be useful as novel emulsifiers for cosmetic creams and lotions, pharmaceutical ointments and food products or may find application in oil spill remediation.
Development of renewable energy projects within photovoltaic energy sector has reached unrestrainable pace in recent years and thus the investors are more vigilantly considering the further business deployment towards this sector. Underpinned with clear support from KfW Development Bank, the company MACS Energy & Water GmbH decided to facilitate future verification of credit lines towards these projects by deploying special eSaveTM software which would include technical and financial appraisals specially designed for their clients. Hereof this thesis comprises the initial phase development of this software within the MS Excel and endeavors to provide a proper guideline for the software engineers included in this task in the company. In order to simplify the explanation process this report sticks to 50 kW power plant project in Prokuplje. It is anticipated that this model would enhance, improve and expedite the feasibility analysis between the cooperatives by delivering the projections of energy yield, payback periods and sensitivity analysis of the loan conditions specified for the target country and PV projects in the same. However, besides this main task this report aims to fulfill all the other necessary prerequisites for accomplishing a good due diligence practice. Therefore the thesis places its focus to Republic of Serbia where exceptional due diligence reports were made, among which the Prokuplje project, and compiles the assessments in terms of legal, environmental and risk into one general framework for PV projects in this country. By doing so, the desktop-based model and results obtained with this user-friendly tool can lean on the full due diligence assessment and provide the reader a clear comprehensive overview of possibility to invest into this renewable energy sector in Republic of Serbia.
Keywords: PV, Due diligence, Serbia, eSaveTM, feasibility, model
This is the fifth time that TH Köln has conducted this study to examine the local XR industry´on behalf of Mediencluster NRW GmbH, a subsidiary of Film- und Medienstiftung NRW. Aside from the two surveys on the North Rhine-Westphalian sector, there have now been three studies on the nationwide XR (extended or cross reality) sector in Germany. By this we mean all companies that create products and services in the field of virtual, mixed or augmented reality (but not firms that employ XR as users).
In this work, we propose a novel data-driven approach to recover missing or corrupted motion capture data, either in the form of 3D skeleton joints or 3D marker trajectories. We construct a knowledge-base that contains prior existing knowledge, which helps us to make it possible to infer missing or corrupted information of the motion capture data. We then build a kd-tree in parallel fashion on the GPU for fast search and retrieval of this already available knowledge in the form of nearest neighbors from the knowledge-base efficiently. We exploit the concept of histograms to organize the data and use an off-the-shelf radix sort algorithm to sort the keys within a single processor of GPU. We query the motion missing joints or markers, and as a result, we fetch a fixed number of nearest neighbors for the given input query motion. We employ an objective function with multiple error terms that substantially recover 3D joints or marker trajectories in parallel on the GPU. We perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on publicly available motion capture datasets, namely CMU and HDM05. From the results, it is observed that the recovery of boxing, jumptwist, run, martial arts, salsa, and acrobatic motion sequences works best, while the recovery of motion sequences of kicking and jumping results in slightly larger errors. However, on average, our approach executes outstanding results. Generally, our approach outperforms all the competing state-of-the-art methods in the most test cases with different action sequences and executes reliable results with minimal errors and without any user interaction.
Online-measurement systems for agricultural and industrial AD plants – A review and practice test
(2014)
Online-measurement systems for AD plants in general are crucial to allow for detailed and comprehensive process monitoring and provide a basis for the development and practical application of process optimisation and control strategies.
Nevertheless, the online measurement of key process variables such as Volatile Fatty Acids (VFA) and Total Alkalinity (TA) has proven to be difficult due to extreme process conditions. High Total Solids (TS) concentrations and extraneous material often damage the sensors or have a strong negative impact on measurement quality and long-term behaviour.
Consequently, there is a need for new robust and accurate online-measurement systems.
The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of existing online-measurement systems, to present the current state of research and to show the results of practice tests at an agricultural and industrial AD plant. It becomes obvious that a broad variety of measurement solutions have been developed over the past few years, but that the main problem is the upscaling from lab-scale to practical application at full-scale AD plants. Results from the practice tests show that an online-measurement of pH, ORP, TS is possible.
Diskussionen über Gleichwertigkeitsbeschlüsse und bilateral ausgehandelte Abkommen wie z. B. das Covered Agreement zur Regelung des Betriebs von Rückversicherungsgeschäft zwischen der EU und den Vereinigten Staaten könnten für international tätige Versicherungsgruppen zukünftig der Vergangenheit angehören. Als Vereinigung von Versicherungsbehörden aus über 200 Ländern arbeitet die International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS) seit 2013 an der Entwicklung eines risikobasierten, global anwendbaren Kapitalstandards (Insurance Capital Standard – ICS). Übergeordnetes Ziel ist die Schaffung eines übergreifenden Regulierungsrahmens für große international tätige Versicherungsgruppen mit Mindeststandards für die Bewertung von Risiken und daraus resultierenden Anforderungen an die Kapitalausstattung.
Es liegt in der Natur der Sache, dass bei der Entwicklung eines globalen Kapitalstandards die Interessen aus vielen verschiedenen Jurisdiktionen mit unterschiedlichen Systemen aufeinandertreffen (insbesondere trifft die verschiedenen Aufsichtsregime aus Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten aufeinander). Das IAIS hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, die Interessengruppen zusammen zu bringen und ohne die lokalen Aufsichtsregime in den Jurisdiktionen auszuklammern, einen globalen Mindestkapitalstandard für international tätige Versicherungsgruppen zu entwickeln.
Der ICS wird im Rahmen der Konsolidierungsmethode berechnet und weist daher viele Ähnlichkeiten mit Solvency II auf. Der US Alternativansatz wird im Rahmen der Aggregationsmethode berechnet und soll ähnliche Ergebnisse zur Konsolidierungsmethode liefern.
Am Ende stellt sich für die europäischen (Rück-)Versicherungsunternehmen die Frage, ob man akzeptiert, dass US Ansatz äquivalent zum ICS ist, um das Ziel eines globalen Kapitalstandards als Level Playing Field zu etablieren.
In its Renewables 2022 Report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix will increase from 22.8% in 2015 to 38.1% in 2027. This trend goes hand-in-hand with increasing construction of plants for the generation of renewable energies, leading to increased demand for (re)insurance. Comparable to the development of traditional energy sources, the hedging of current risks is a key element in the further development of renewable energies. According to projections by the IEA, by 2027 most of the energy from renewable sources will be generated using photovoltaics or solar as well as onshore and offshore wind.
Due to the present developments of the Internet and its technical components, the skills of the web experts have to be more and more complex and specific. The Internet experts in the creative field are located distributedly around the whole world. As a result, many companies have problems to find the needed experts on site and are dependent on creative cooperations and virtual teams with the help of technical tools. The virtual working place is an important issue, particularly in modern times and the market offers more and more cooperation systems for exactly this purpose: Creative cooperation in distributed working situations. This thesis examines the approaches of creative cooperation and cooperation technologies with an analysis about existing cooperation systems with a creative context. It spans a wide range of tools. On the one hand, there are approaches which offer only straightforward solutions for single design tasks. On the other hand, there are providers which recognised the great need of creative cooperation systems and working at full speed to extend their systems. The examined areas of this work lead to a design process oriented approach with flexible frames and enough space for the creative development of every single user. The cooperation in a creative context stays in the foreground and is the base for future approaches for the web design sector.
Urbanization processes are one of the main factors for habitat loss and fragmentation, driving global biodiversity loss and species extinction. The neotropical Atlantic forest in Brazil is considered a global key biodiversity hotspot and used to be one of the most extensive forests of the Americas. Due to substantial deforestation over centuries, its landscape was transformed into a mosaic of small forest fragments surrounded by a predominantly agricultural matrix. Urban expansion and rural urbanization have created peri-urban zones, which still can harbor natural habitat remnants,
contributing to biological diversity and thus providing essential ecosystem services to urban and rural areas. The maintenance of such ecosystem services requires an understanding of the ecological processes in the ecosystem. A prerequisite for such an in-depth insight is the quantification of the underlying ecosystem functions. The ecosystem function pest control, a trophic interaction between insectivorous birds and herbivorous arthropods, was quantified in an empirical study using artificial caterpillars as prey models. This technique allows the identification of predator groups and the assessment of their predation rates. A total of 888 plasticine caterpillars were distributed at eight sites in secondary forest fragments surrounding the university campus of the federal university of São Carlos (UFScar) in peri-urban Sorocaba, southeastern Brazil. In sixteen point counts, 72 insect-eating birds, belonging to 19 species, were identified as possible artificial caterpillar attackers. Local habitat variables were measured to describe the forest vegetation structure and the landscape context. The study aimed to assess which structural components of the
forest fragments, together with the recorded bird community variables (abundance, richness, αdiversity), best explain the estimated predation rates by birds. The mean predation rate for birds was 8.25 ± 6.3 % for a reference period of eight days, representing the first quantification of the ecosystem function pest control for the study area. The three treatments of caterpillar placement heights (ground, stem: 0.5 -1.0 m, leaf: 1.5 - 2.0 m) were the best and only estimator to explain bird
predation rates. The little dense understory and ground vegetation might have facilitated the accessibility of artificial caterpillars, especially for carnivorous arthropods and birds. The detected contrast in their foraging and predation patterns suggests that arthropods and birds complement each other in their function of pest control. Bird predation rates were found to be negatively related to the vegetation structure. Thus, more open habitats, with less understory and low tree density, but high canopy cover and including dead trees were correlated with the highest predation rates and also exhibited more specialized forest-dependent bird species. This study confirms the importance of the maintenance of forest fragments in peri-urban areas, even if they are small, to preserve forest-associated birds, to contribute to the biological diversity on a broader scale, and to prevent the loss of ecosystem functions and services, mitigating some of the adverse effects of urbanization. Further investigation of the effect among the three treatments of caterpillar
placement on the predation rates is encouraged, including comparative studies among different habitat types. For future studies, it is recommended to model the avian community variables with the vegetation structure measures to predict habitat preferences of insectivorous birds. Therefore, the sampling of more units and on a bigger scale, including over a more extended period, is necessary to improve the robustness of the results, which could provide the basis for a monetary analysis of the ecosystem service pest control by birds.
Risk-based authentication (RBA) is an adaptive security measure to strengthen password-based authentication. RBA monitors additional implicit features during password entry such as device or geolocation information, and requests additional authentication factors if a certain risk level is detected. RBA is recommended by the NIST digital identity guidelines, is used by several large online services, and offers protection against security risks such as password database leaks, credential stuffing, insecure passwords and large-scale guessing attacks. Despite its relevance, the procedures used by RBA-instrumented online services are currently not disclosed. Consequently, there is little scientific research about RBA, slowing down progress and deeper understanding, making it harder for end users to understand the security provided by the services they use and trust, and hindering the widespread adoption of RBA.
In this paper, with a series of studies on eight popular online services, we (i) analyze which features and combinations/classifiers are used and are useful in practical instances, (ii) develop a framework and a methodology to measure RBA in the wild, and (iii) survey and discuss the differences in the user interface for RBA. Following this, our work provides a first deeper understanding of practical RBA deployments and helps fostering further research in this direction.
Online services such as social networks, online shops, and search engines deliver different content to users depending on their location, browsing history, or client device. Since these services have a major influence on opinion forming, understanding their behavior from a social science perspective is of greatest importance. In addition, technical aspects of services such as security or privacy are becoming more and more relevant for users, providers, and researchers. Due to the lack of essential data sets, automatic black box testing of online services is currently the only way for researchers to investigate these services in a methodical and reproducible manner. However, automatic black box testing of online services is difficult since many of them try to detect and block automated requests to prevent bots from accessing them.
In this paper, we introduce a testing tool that allows researchers to create and automatically run experiments for exploratory studies of online services. The testing tool performs programmed user interactions in such a manner that it can hardly be distinguished from a human user. To evaluate our tool, we conducted - among other things - a large-scale research study on Risk-based Authentication (RBA), which required human-like behavior from the client. We were able to circumvent the bot detection of the investigated online services with the experiments. As this demonstrates the potential of the presented testing tool, it remains to the responsibility of its users to balance the conflicting interests between researchers and service providers as well as to check whether their research programs remain undetected.
The southeast of Córdoba province used to be originally covered by hundreds of wetlands that got heavily modified or drained in the last few decades. Since wetlands provide various important ecosystem services (ESS) for human well-being, their degradation created several problems in La Picasa basin, among which floods are the most obvious one. The wise use of wetlands is increasingly acknowledged to be part of nature-based solution approaches reducing disaster risk. However, in the study area these approaches remain a relatively new concept to decision makers and the lack of knowledge on their effectiveness and implementation process poses a serious barrier to their adoption.
To overcome this obstacle, this dissertation applies an ESS perspective on the current problems of La Picasa basin and sets it in a context of socio-ecological system (SES) theory. A comprehensive analysis of (1) the role wetlands have played in the historic development of the SES, (2) important stakeholder dynamics that create opportunities or restrictions for the conservation of wetlands and (3) possible management approaches to inverse negative ESS trade-offs and feedback loops, was performed.
Results demonstrate that the current problems of floods have both natural and anthropogenic causes. In this regard, wetlands hold a vital role in the complex historic interactions between the social and ecological drivers of changes in the water balance. Although a social network between stakeholders exists, several conflicts prevent a proper functioning of a basin-wide integrated management concept based on wetland restoration. Nature-based solution approaches, putting wetlands in the center of attention of future management strategies, were found to hold a high potential to reduce the risk of floods and, as a side-effect boost biodiversity and habitat quality in the study area.
Circular economy (CE) has received considerable interest in recent years as a strategy to resolve some of our modern urban resource challenges, and circular city models often incorporate systems of urban agriculture in their design. Much work has analyzed the benefits of urban agriculture for creating a resilient food system and as a strategy for supporting urban green space and social cohesion, however, the contributions from business models that operate within urban agriculture have not been thoroughly studied. Many urban agriculture businesses often claim high levels of resource recycling and material circularity, though whether a resource efficiency throughout the entire product lifetime (including energy and material footprint for the cultivation equipment) in comparison to current industrial strategies is truly feasible or even possible is still to be debated. This thesis builds upon work that incorporates social dimensions of CE definitions and begins to research whether the potential resource efficiency contradiction can be justified as to make urban agriculture a valid approach for circular city design. This study examined an urban mushroom farm that implements a circular business model. A qualitative summary of the business operations and resource flows were unpacked and sorted into 24 socio-economic contributions based on their interpreted relevance. The interpreted data shows that an urban agriculture business model can contribute to the building blocks of a CE through economic, ecological, social, and spatial contributions. While these contributions can contribute positively to the operationalization of CE, potential trade-offs regarding resource efficiency, use of urban space, and investment priorities need to be considered and addressed to avoid a possible watering down or greenwashing of the CE concept.
Feasibility Study of Wheel Torque Prediction with a Recurrent Neural Network Using Vehicle Data
(2023)
In this paper, we present a feasibility study on predicting the torque signal of a passenger car with the help of a neural network. In addition, we analyze the possibility of using the proposed model structure for temperature prediction. This was carried out with a neural network, specifically a three-layer long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The data used were real road load data from a Jaguar Land Rover Evoque with a Twinster gearbox from GKN. The torque prediction generated good results with an accuracy of 55% and a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 49 Nm, considering that the data were not generated under laboratory conditions. However, the performance of predicting the temperature signal was not satisfying with a coefficient of determination (R2) score of −1.396 and an RMSE score of 69.4 °C. The prediction of the torque signal with the three-layer LSTM network was successful but the transferability of the network to another signal (temperature) was not proven. The knowledge gained from this investigation can be of importance for the development of virtual sensor technology.
Grasping and manipulation with anthropomorphic robotic and prosthetic hands presents a scientific challenge regarding mechanical design, sensor system, and control. Apart from the mechanical design of such hands, embedding sensors needed for closed-loop control of grasping tasks remains a hard problem due to limited space and required high level of integration of different components. In this paper we present a scalable design model of artificial fingers, which combines mechanical design and embedded electronics with a sophisticated multi-modal sensor system consisting of sensors for sensing normal and shear force, distance, acceleration, temperature, and joint angles. The design is fully parametric, allowing automated scaling of the fingers to arbitrary dimensions in the human hand spectrum. To this end, the electronic parts are composed of interchangeable modules that facilitate the echanical scaling of the fingers and are fully enclosed by the mechanical parts of the finger. The resulting design model allows deriving freely scalable and multimodally sensorised fingers for robotic and prosthetic hands. Four physical demonstrators are assembled and tested to evaluate the approach.
Due to the global phenomenon of climate change the region of Mara Siana is projected to increasingly face extreme weather events that particularly comprise prolonged droughts and
heavier rainfalls. To be able to adequately adapt to these changing circumstances and maintain their livelihoods communities need to build respective capacities. As the main objective, this research aims at determining landowners’ climate change adaptative capacity (CCAC) across different villages in Mara Siana. Accordingly, a semi-quantitative approach was carried out including qualitative interviews and the subsequent quantitative calculation of CCAC based on a multidimensional indicator set and a respective coding
system. In addition to predominantly positive results of socio-cultural characteristics and the quality of natural resources, this work reveals clear weaknesses and potential for improvement in the areas of income security and financial stability, the expansion and resilience of infrastructure, and the relationship between communities and local authorities. Moreover, differences in capacity results are not only identified between the investigated villages as well as between individual households but also systemic disadvantage in capacity building affecting female landowners and community members can be indicated from the obtained interview data. Therefore, this research gives concrete recommendations for the implementation and verification of suitable adaptive measures that are particularly tailored for the improvement of low-performance indicators while following a gendertransformative approach and thus hold the potential to increase CCAC in the long-term.