Open Access

Visual effects and elements in video games and interactive virtual environments can be applied to transfer (or delegate) non-visual perceptions (e.g. proprioception, presence, pain) to players and users, thus increasing perceptual diversity via the visual modality. Such elements or efects are referred to as visual delegates (VDs). Current fndings on the experiences that VDs can elicit relate to specifc VDs, not to VDs in general. Deductive and comprehensive VD evaluation frameworks are lacking. We analyzed VDs in video games to generalize VDs in terms of their visual properties. We conducted a systematic paper analysis to explore player and user experiences observed in association with specifc VDs in user studies. We conducted semi-structured interviews with expert players to determine their preferences and the impact of VD properties. The resulting VD framework (VD-frame) contributes to a more strategic approach to identifying the impact of VDs on player and user experiences.

AlphaGo’s victory against Lee Sedol in the game of Go has been a milestone in artificial intelligence. After this success, the team behind the program further refined the architecture and applied it to many other games such as chess or shogi. In the following thesis, we try to apply the theory behind AlphaGo and its successor AlphaZero to the game of Abalone. Due to limitations in computational resources, we could not replicate the same exceptional performance.

Die Arbeit hat das Ziel, Volumendaten effizient zu visualisieren, ohne diese in ein alternatives Repräsentationsformat wie Polygonnetze zu überführen. Dafür werden Voxel sowie ein Raycasting-Ansatz verwendet. Die Elemente des Volumens werden als Voxel (=volumetrische Pixel), das Volumen nachfolgend als ein dreidimensionales Array aus Voxel bezeichnet. Für jeden Pixel wird ein Strahl erzeugt, der das Array iterativ traversiert, wobei in jeder Iteration geprüft wird, ob das gegebene Volumenelement ein Datum hält oder nicht. Maßgeblich hierfür ist der von (Amanatides, Woo et al., 1987) vorgestellte Ansatz, den Strahl in solche Segmente zu zerlegen, die immer jeweils so lang wie der momentan zu untersuchende Voxel groß ist: In einer Iteration wird also immer genau ein Voxel untersucht. Die Arbeit wird diese Idee verfolgen, praktisch aber anders umsetzen und sie um eine zusätzliche Beschleunigungsstruktur ergänzen. Im Idealfall soll dieser Ansatz es erlauben, mindestens 512^3 Voxel in Echtzeit zu rendern. Der beschriebene Ansatz hat zusätzlich den Vorteil, dass Änderungen direkt sichtbar werden, weil für das anschließende Rendering, auf die modifizierten Daten zurückgegriffen wird.

Decision support systems for traffic management systems have to cope with a high volume of events continuously generated by sensors. Conventional software architectures do not explicitly target the efficient processing of continuous event streams. Recently, event-driven architectures (EDA) have been proposed as a new paradigm for event-based applications. In this paper we propose a reference architecture for event-driven traffic management systems, which enables the analysis and processing of complex event streams in real-time and is therefore well-suited for decision support in sensor-based traffic control sys- tems. We will illustrate our approach in the domain of road traffic management. In particular, we will report on the redesign of an intelligent transportation management system (ITMS) prototype for the high-capacity road network in Bilbao, Spain.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a modern software technology for the dynamic analysis of continuous data streams. CEP is able of searching extremely large data streams in real time for the presence of event patterns. So far, specifying event patterns of CEP rules is still a manual task based on the expertise of domain experts. This paper presents a novel batinspired swarm algorithm for automatically mining CEP rule patterns that express the relevant causal and temporal relations hidden in data streams. The basic suitability and performance of the approach is proven by extensive evaluation with both synthetically generated data and real data from the traffic domain.

Das Konzept der Agilität stiftet insbesondere im Kontext der Softwareentwicklung einen Nutzen. Es stellt sich die Frage, wie auch die öffentliche Verwaltung agiler werden und schlussendlich davon profitieren kann. Bislang liefern nur wenige Schriften eine dedizierte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema der agilen Verwaltung. In dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, ob agile Softwareentwicklung Ausgangspunkt einer potenziell agilen Verwaltung in Deutschland sein kann. Im Rahmen einer theorievergleichenden Gegenüberstellung wird ein Zielbild einer agilen Verwaltung ausgehend von den Merkmalen agiler Softwareentwicklung hergeleitet. Anschließend werden mögliche Spannungslinien zwischen dem entwickelten Zielbild und dem von Max Weber beschriebenen Idealtypus einer bürokratischen Verwaltung aufgedeckt. Im Ergebnis kennzeichnet eine agile Verwaltung ein Konglomerat unterschiedlicher Merkmale, die den Dimensionen Strategie, Struktur, Prozesse, Führung, Personal und Kultur zugeordnet werden können. Die öffentliche Verwaltung wird das Konzept der Agilität nicht vollständig, im Sinne der Ausprägung aller herausgearbeiteten Merkmale, organisational etablieren können. Die wesentlichen Spannungslinien ergeben sich aus den Bürokratiemerkmalen Amtshierarchie und Regelgebundenheit. Der Idealtypus einer agilen Verwaltung kann nur insofern eine Alternative zum Idealtypus der bürokratischen Verwaltung sein, als dass diejenigen Merkmale der Bürokratie, die sich mit den wesentlichen Strukturprinzipien des deutschen Staates decken, unberührt bleiben.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents our learnings of the process to perform a Master of Science class with eduScrum integrating real world problems as projects. We prepared, performed, and evaluated an agile educational concept for the new Master of Science program Digital Transformation organized and provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts - Hochschule Hannover in Germany. The course deals with innovative methodologies of agile project management and is attended by 25 students. We performed the class due the summer term in 2019 and 2020 as a teaching pair. The eduScrum method has been used in different educational contexts, including higher education. During the approach preparation, we decided to use challenges, problems, or questions from the industry. Thus, we acquired four companies and prepared in coordination with them dedicated project descriptions. Each project description was refined in the form of a backlog (list of requirements). We divided the class into four eduScrum teams, one team for each project. The subdivision of the class was done randomly. Since we wanted to integrate realistic projects into industry partners’ implementation, we decided to adapt the eduScrum approach. The eduScrum teams were challenged with different projects, e.g., analyzing a dedicated phenomenon in a real project or creating a theoretical model for a company’s new project management approach. We present our experiences of the whole process to prepare, perform and evaluate an agile educational approach combined with projects from practice. We found, that the students value the agile method using real world problems. However, the results are mainly based on the summer term 2019, this paper also includes our learnings from virtual distance teaching during the Covid 19 pandemic in summer term 2020. The paper contributes to the distribution of methods for higher education teaching in the classroom and distance learning.

In 2020, the world changed due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Containment measures to reduce the spread of the virus were planned and implemented by many countries and companies. Worldwide, companies sent their employees to work from home. This change has led to significant challenges in teams that were co-located before the pandemic. Agile software development teams were affected by this switch, as agile methods focus on communication and collaboration. Research results have already been published on the challenges of switching to remote work and the effects on agile software development teams. This article presents a systematic literature review. We identified 12 relevant papers for our studies and analyzed them on detail. The results provide an overview how agile software development teams reacted to the switch to remote work, e.g., which agile practices they adapted. We also gained insights on the changes of the performance of agile software development teams and social effects on agile software development teams during the pandemic.

Nowadays, problems related with solid waste management become a challenge for most countries due to the rising generation of waste, related environmental issues, and associated costs of produced wastes. Effective waste management systems at different geographic levels require accurate forecasting of future waste generation. In this work, we investigate how open-access data, such as provided from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), can be used for the analysis of waste data. The main idea of this study is finding the links between socioeconomic and demographic variables that determine the amounts of types of solid wastes produced by countries. This would make it possible to accurately predict at the country level the waste production and determine the requirements for the development of effective waste management strategies. In particular, we use several machine learning data regression (Support Vector, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest) and clustering models (k-means) to respectively predict waste production for OECD countries along years and also to perform clustering among these countries according to similar characteristics. The main contributions of our work are: (1) waste analysis at the OECD country-level to compare and cluster countries according to similar waste features predicted; (2) the detection of most relevant features for prediction models; and (3) the comparison between several regression models with respect to accuracy in predictions. Coefficient of determination (R2), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), respectively, are used as indices of the efficiency of the developed models. Our experiments have shown that some data pre-processings on the OECD data are an essential stage required in the analysis; that Random Forest Regressor (RFR) produced the best prediction results over the dataset; and that these results are highly influenced by the quality of available socio-economic data. In particular, the RFR model exhibited the highest accuracy in predictions for most waste types. For example, for “municipal” waste, it produced, respectively, R2 = 1 and MAPE = 4.31 global error values for the test set; and for “household” waste, it, respectively, produced R2 = 1 and MAPE = 3.03. Our results indicate that the considered models (and specially RFR) all are effective in predicting the amount of produced wastes derived from input data for the considered countries.

During the transition from conventional towards purely electrical, sustainable mobility, transitional technologies play a major part in the task of increasing adaption rates and decreasing range anxiety. Developing new concepts to meet this challenge requires adaptive test benches, which can easily be modified e.g. when progressing from one stage of development to the next, but also meet certain sustainability demands themselves. The system architecture presented in this paper is built around a service-oriented software layer, connecting a modular hardware layer for direct access to sensors and actuators to an extensible set of client tools. Providing flexibility, serviceability and ease of use, while maintaining a high level of reusability for its constituent components and providing features to reduce the required overall run time of the test benches, it can effectively decrease the CO2 emissions of the test bench while increasing its sustainability and efficiency.