Computers - Computer Science

IT systems have a high impact on organizations and businesses today and are a key to globalization. Evolution of complexity calls for changes in the way these systems are built and managed. As a consequence, a paradigm shift towards Model-Driven Engineering and Policy-Based Management...

Networked Control Systems are control systems, where the feedback loop is closed by a communication system. Within the past decades, the effects of the properties of the communication system, like loss, delay, or bandwidth constraints, on the control performance have been studied thoroughly. Since...

In August 2013, researchers from Germany, Chile, and China came together in Santiago de Chile to discuss topics like collaborative systems, human computer interaction, context awareness and ubiquitous computing, cultural heritage and virtual museums, energy management systems, and reliable computing and uncertainty. This book...

Many tasks in operations management require the solution of complex optimization problems. Problems in which decisions are taken sequentially over time can be modeled and solved by dynamic programming. Real-world dynamic programming problems, however, exhibit complexity that cannot be handled by conventional solution techniques....

Modern e-learning systems represent a special type of web information systems. Information systems serve multiple users simultaneously. A large number of simultaneous users can slow the information system. Slow interaction with such system is an undesirable problem which can be solved using an appropriate...

Microwave imagers featuring a fully electronic scanning are highly demanded in security, industrial, and medical applications. Planar multistatic arrays operating at close ranges offer exceptional image resolution and illumination coverage compared to conventional far-field imaging. Novel solutions for synthesizing multistatic arrays for close range...

The present thesis introduces a new approach for the generation of Ck - approximants of functions defined on closed submanifolds for arbitrary k in N. In case a function on a surface resembles the three coordinates of a topologically equivalent surface in R3, we...

English summary: Today's globalized business environment is characterized by a strong competitive pressure which requires companies to improve their supply chains' effectiveness and efficiency by coordination. However, the organizational structures are more and more characterized by networks containing equal partners which restricts the application...

Reconfigurable circuit devices have opened up a fundamentally new way of creating adaptable systems. Combined with artificial evolution, reconfigurable circuits allow an elegant adaptation approach to compensating for changes in the distribution of input data, computational resource errors, and variations in resource requirements. Referred...

Security protocols employed in practice are used in our everyday life and we heavily depend on their security. The complexity of these protocols still poses a big challenge on their comprehensive analysis. To cope with this complexity, a promising approach is modular security analysis...

Spatial information describes types, relations, and various different aspects of space. This PhD thesis investigates how modular ontologies can model spatial information. Particularly, different perspectives on space are analyzed. A perspectival framework for spatial ontology modules is presented that allows the integration and combination...

Handling run-time dynamics on embedded system-on-chip architectures has become more challenging over the years. On the one hand, the impact of workload and physical dynamics on the system behavior has dramatically increased. On the other hand, embedded architectures have become more complex as they...

The Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) and its generalization to variables of higher arities - constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) - can arguably be called the most "natural" of all NP-complete problems. The present work is concerned with their algorithmic treatment. It consists of two parts....

This book presents novel methods of fault-tolerant control theory in a discrete-event system framework. Nondeterministic input/output automata are used to model nominal and faulty technological systems. The main contributions are the following: Control design method for discrete-event systems Fault modeling technique for actuator, sensor...

This PhD thesis was written at ETH Zurich, in Prof. Dr. Emo Welzl's research group, under the supervision of Dr. Bernd Garnter. It shows two theoretical results that are both related to quadratic programming. The first one concerns the abstract optimization framework of violator...

There are several anonymity architectures for Internet communication in use today. They are either unsafe or very complex. In this work the design, implementation and evaluation of an anonymity architecture that provides a high level of protection and is still simple enough to enable...

In proof theory we investigate the objects used for computations and arguments in computer science and mathematics. Our starting point is the classical analysis given by Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. We develop this further using a new theory of ordinal notation and connecting...

In modal logic we discuss multiple perspectives on truth - perspectives as given by time, by provability, by knowledge, by agents or by processes. We develop the theory of modal logic and emphasize the connections with and applications within computer science and mathematics. Among...

Das Multi-Ionen Transport und Reaktionsmodell wird fur die Simulation von elektrochemischen Prozessen eingesetzt. Das durch das Modell gegebene System partieller Differentialgleichungen (PDE) wird mit Hilfe einer gemischten Residuen-Distribution und Finiten Elemente Methode diskretisiert und mit dem Newton Verfahren linearisiert. Dabei entstehen eine Reihe linearer...

This work deals with theoretical aspects of creating purposeful self-organization in collective autonomous systems. The core of this approach is closely related to a qualitative dynamics of corresponding models and to the reductive synergetic approach. Changes of qualitative dynamics can be associated with, for...

A zero-knowledge proof of knowledge allows one party to convince another party that it knows a secret piece of information without revealing anything about it. Such protocols are important building blocks for many interesting higher-level cryptographic applications, such as e-voting and e-cash systems, digital...

Today, computer-aided engineering is an integral part of industrial product developement. Rather than only learning from real-life experiments to improve a product during development, the use of computer simulations helps to understand and optimize the product prior to the experimental process. Simulating multiple configurations,...

Analytical Information Systems support decision making within organizations. They allow complex analysis based on integrated datasets. These integrated datasets, also known as data warehouses, are based on systems with different technologies and content. AIS are complex software systems. During their build-up, many technical aspects,...

The paradigm shift towards many-core parallelism is accompanied by two fundamental questions: how should the many processors on a single die communicate to each other and what are suitable programming models for these novel architectures? In this thesis, the author tackles both questions by...

The papers in these proceedings present selected articles from the Fourth International Business Informatics Challenge and Conference, which was hosted at Dublin City University (Ireland). The papers show a wide range of technological innovations and applications of information and communications technology (ICT) and demonstrate...

Traceability describes the ability of stakeholders to understand and follow relationships between artifacts that play some role in software development. It is essential for many development tasks, e.g., quality assurance, requirements management, or software maintenance. Aiming to overcome various deficiencies of existing traceability concepts,...

This thesis addresses optimal control of discrete-time switched linear systems with application to networked embedded control systems (NECSs). Part I focuses on optimal control and scheduling of discrete-time switched linear systems. The objective is to simultaneously design a control law and a switching (scheduling)...

This short book is a complete introduction to logic and computations. As computations we use finite state automata and turing machines. In logic we use sequent calculus and show its completeness. The interrelation between logic and computations is stressed by using predicate logic to...

Analogous to visualization, the auralization of virtual environments describes the simulation of sound propagation inside enclosures where methods of Geometrical Acoustics are mostly applied for a high-quality synthesis of aural stimuli that go along with a certain realistic behavior. In the course of this...

This thesis is concerned with the development of interactive systems for smart environments. One of the characteristic of smart environments is the need to support different interaction paradigms at runtime. On the one hand interaction is performed explicitly: the user performs an action in...

Duplicated passages of source code - code clones - are a common property of software systems. While clones are beneficial in some situations, their presence causes various problems for software maintenance. Most of these problems are strongly related to change and include, for example,...

In this thesis, three fundamental issues of mobile robotics are addressed: self-localization, mapping, and area coverage. Self-localization denotes the robot's task to determine its position with respect to a given map. Mapping is the procedure to create such a map of the environment. In...

Nowadays, human-object and human-human interactions are often facilitated by computational means. Interaction designers aim at designing such interactions to make them more effective and pleasant. Sonic Interaction Design emphasizes the role of sound as a mediator of meaningful interactions. A COST Action on Sonic...

Superconducting quantum circuits are promising candidates for solid-state based quantum computation. However, minimizing dissipation caused by external noise sources remains a tough challenge. Here, we present an analytic dissipative theory for a complex circuit of two resonators coupled via a flux qubit. In this...

Every cell in a human body contains thousands, even hundreds of thousands of tiny RNA genes, which lay mostly undiscovered until the year 2000. Some of these 22-24 nucleotide microRNAs are incredibly conserved across millions of years while other are more species specific and...

Computer vision aims to teach machines and algorithms to 'see' with the ultimate goal of creating 'intelligent' applications and devices that can provide assistance to humans in a wide array of scenarios. This thesis presents an investigation of computer vision on three layers: low-level...

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) has proven to be a valuable ingredient for the specification of UML models. It allows to formulate logical propositions for models that typically cannot be expressed in the visual modeling paradigms of UML. A similar textual ingredient is required...

Auf Grund des hervorragenden Weichteilkontrasts und neuen innovativen Aufnahmesequenzen wurde die Magnetresonanztomographie zu einer der meist verwendeten bildgebenden Modalitat im modernen Gesundheitswesen. In den Aufnahmen konnen Artefakte allerdings eine stark verminderte Bildqualitat bewirken. Die Storungen erschweren die Sichtung der Daten und konnen schlimmstenfalls sogar...

Computer networks and embedded systems are ubiquitous and critical parts of our daily life. Therefore performance and reliability guarantees for these systems are crucial. To this end, versatile probabilistic modelling and analysis techniques have been developed. However existing probabilistic analysis methods are inherently limited...

This dissertation demonstrates that graphics processors (GPUs) as representatives of emerging many-core architectures are very well-suited for the fast and accurate solution of large, sparse linear systems of equations, using parallel multigrid methods on heterogeneous compute clusters. Such systems arise for instance in the...

Multi-camera systems play an increasingly important role in computer vision. They enable applications like 3D video reconstruction, motion capture, smart homes, wide area surveillance, etc. Most of these require or benefit from a calibration of the multi-camera system. This book presents a novel approach...

In this work, novel contributions towards the emerging field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) are introduced. AAL is a concept envisioned in the early 2000s by the European Commission, aiming at supporting specifically senior people by means of technology and thus helping them to...

The goal of this thesis was to develop a secure and user friendly authentication scheme for public wireless networks (PWLANs). In contrast to private wireless networks, public wireless networks need a proper authentication scheme for several reasons. First of all, the network operator must...

An ontology is a knowledge representation structure made up of concepts and their interrelations. It represents shared understanding delineated by some domain. The building of an ontology can be addressed from the perspective of natural language processing. This thesis discusses the validity and theoretical...

Modern computer networks or wireless ad-hoc networks offer a wide range of interesting optimization problems. Usual optimization goals are the minimization of the message delay in a Peer-to-Peer system or the minimization of the energy consumption of a wireless network. This thesis presents different...

In this book the fully automatic generation of semantic annotations for medical imaging data by means of medical image segmentation and labeling is addressed. In particular, the focus is on the segmentation of the human brain and related structures from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)...

There exist very few concepts in computational algebra which are as central to theory and applications as Grobner bases. This thesis describes theory, algorithms and applications for the special case of Boolean polynomials. These parts form the mathematical foundations of the PolyBoRi framework (developed...

Database transformations consist of queries and updates which are two fundamental types of computations in any databases - the first provides the capability to retrieve data and the second is used to maintain databases in light of ever-changing application domains. This dissertation aims to...

Conditional compilation with preprocessors like cpp is a simple but effective means to implement variability. By annotating code fragments with #ifdef and #endif directives, different program variants with or without these fragments can be created, which can be used (among others) to implement software...

In this dissertation, we present a systematic, comprehensive, and formally founded quality assurance process, which allows automated co-verification of digital hardware/software systems that are modeled in SystemC. The main idea is to apply model checking to verify that an abstract design meets a requirements...