The next-generation business meeting: from i-lands to flexible meeting landscapes

Meetings are an important form of interaction in business settings. However, meetings are often not held in a way that makes all participants feel engaged. Meeting support systems try to overcome this obstacle by helping meeting participants in the meeting workflow. This paper takes a complementary approach by distinguishing between different perspectives of good meetings: the peopleware perspective, the generic groupware perspective, and the roomware perspective. It is argued that all these perspectives have to be considered simultaneously when heading toward an ideal meeting system design. The paper presents excerpts of a pattern language that empowers users to improve their meeting. Besides this, the pattern language can be considered as a tool for the designer. After showing, how both groups made use of the patterns, the paper finally presents LivingAgendas, a meeting support system that can accompany the meeting participant through the meeting life cycle.     

List-based Data Structures for Efficient Management of Advance Reservations

Complex eScience and other sophisticated applications in the field of HPC imply new demands that queuing based resource management systems cannot meet. To guarantee Quality of Service and co-allocation in the Grid, planning based resource management systems implementing advance reservation are needed. These systems face new challenges as a planning based management system has to keep track of the jobs and reservations in the future. Additionally, during the negotiation process of incoming reservations, a good overview of the remaining, not-yet reserved capacity is needed—not only for the current allocation, but also for the whole book-ahead time. Therefore, the resource management problem becomes a two dimensional problem for advance reservations in this field. In this paper different data structures are investigated and discussed in order to fit to planning based resource management. As a result the benefits of using lists of resource allocation or free blocks are exposed. This general idea widely used to manage continuous resources is extended to cover not only the resource dimension but also the time dimension. The list of blocks approach is evaluated in a Grid level and a local resource management system for a computing cluster. The extensive simulations showed a better runtime and higher reservation success rate compared with the currently favored approach of a slotted time and the more sophisticated approach based on AVL trees.     

Exploration of channel width scaling and edge states in transition metal dichalcogenides

We explore the impact of edge states in three types of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), namely metallic Td-phase WTe₂ and semiconducting 2H-phase MoTe₂ and MoS₂, by patterning thin flakes into ribbons with varying channel widths. No obvious charge depletion at the edges is observed for any of these three materials, in contrast to observations made for graphene nanoribbon devices. The semiconducting ribbons are characterized in a three-terminal field-effect transistor (FET) geometry. In addition, two ribbon array designs have been carefully investigated and found to exhibit current levels higher than those observed for conventional one-channel devices. Our results suggest that device structures incorporating a high number of edges can improve the performance of TMD FETs. This improvement is attributed to a higher local electric field, resulting from the edges, increasing the effective number of charge carriers, and the absence of any detrimental edge-related scattering.

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Water Concession Principles for Geothermal Aquifers in the Mura-Zala Basin,NE Slovenia

Demand for thermal water in the Mura-Zala basin, situated between Slovenia, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, is constantly increasing, with the sandy geothermal aquifer within the Neogene Mura formation being the most exploited. During the water concession granting process various problems were identified, together with the need for elaboration of the uniform concession granting principles. The latter were devised according to the specific hydrogeological settings and field inspection of 23 geothermal wells, performed through use of an adapted methodology. The inspection revealed changes in wells performance, low efficiency of energy abstraction and a lack of reinjection. The acquired information was applied to the development of particular principles, including the six key indicators. Firstly, a unified and integrated operational monitoring programme must be established, and upgraded by a national surveillance monitoring. Secondly, an application of the best available techniques is proposed. Stimulation of energetic and balneology efficiency is also needed, with recharge and reinjection conditions evaluated and applied where possible. Limited or full water concessions could be granted based on their fulfilment then. This continuous step-by-step approach should enable the implementation of adequate measures to meet the standards required for the thermal groundwater bodies according to the EU water framework directions.     

Determination of deuterium in dead-sea water by nuclear methods

By using the D(d, p)³H nuclear reaction combined with the Rutherford-backscattering method, the amount of D₂O in relation to H₂O in water from the Dead Sea is measured. The amount of deuterium in the samples is determined from the integrated yield of the D(d, p)³H reaction in relation to the ¹⁶O(d, p₀)¹⁷O or ¹⁶O(d, p₁)¹⁷O reaction. For the low deuteron energies used (E 0.63 MeV), the differential cross section of the ¹⁶O(d, p₀)¹⁷O reaction was determined experimentally. No significant change of deuterium concentration in Dead-Sea water down to a depth of 36 m could be detected.     

Soft Matter Technology at KIT: Chemical Perspective from Nanoarchitectures to Microstructures

Bioinspiration has emerged as an important design principle in the rapidly growing field of materials science and especially its subarea, soft matter science. For example, biological cells form hierarchically organized tissues that not only are optimized and designed for durability, but also have to adapt to their external environment, undergo self‐repair, and perform many highly complex functions. Being able to create artificial soft materials that mimic those highly complex functions will enable future materials applications. Herein, soft matter technologies that are used to realize bioinspired material structures are described, and potential pathways to integrate these into a comprehensive soft matter research environment are addressed. Solutions become available because soft matter technologies are benefitting from the synergies between organic synthesis, polymer chemistry, and materials science.     

Genome-Wide Investigation of Multifocal and Unifocal Prostate Cancer—Are They Genetically Different?

Prostate cancer is widely observed to be biologically heterogeneous. Its heterogeneity is manifested histologically as multifocal prostate cancer, which is observed more frequently than unifocal prostate cancer. The clinical and prognostic significance of either focal cancer type is not fully established. To investigate prostate cancer heterogeneity, the genetic profiles of multifocal and unifocal prostate cancers were compared. Here, we report observations deduced from tumor-tumor comparison of copy number alteration data of both focal categories. Forty-one fresh frozen prostate cancer foci from 14 multifocal prostate cancers and eight unifocal prostate cancers were subjected to copy number variation analysis with the Affymetrix SNP 6.0 microarray tool. With the investigated cases, tumors obtained from a single prostate exhibited different genetic profiles of variable degrees. Further comparison identified no distinct genetic pattern or signatures specific to multifocal or unifocal prostate cancer. Our findings suggest that samples obtained from multiple sites of a single unifocal prostate cancer show as much genetic heterogeneity and variability as separate tumors obtained from a single multifocal prostate cancer.     

Ceramic Diesel Particulate Filters

Twenty-five years of diesel particulate filter (DPF) developments have shown that ceramic materials are well-suited candidates to fulfill the harsh requirements of exhaust after treatment. The introduction of DPF in passenger cars in Europe in 2000 was a real breakthrough from both a scientific and a commercial point of view. Different systems and filter materials can be used as DPF; however, at the moment silicon carbide wall flow filters seem to be at advantage. There is a continual demand for cost-effective and reliable materials and systems forced by increasing legal emission standards.     

FLOW STRESS DATA FOR FINITE ELEMENT SIMULATION IN METAL CUTTING: A PROGRESS REPORT ON MADAMS

To obtain reliable results from Finite Element (FE) simulation of machining processes, it is necessary to have as input the properties of the workpiece and tool materials as well as the characteristics of the tool/chip interface. These input parameters include physical and thermal data, friction and heat transfer, and most importantly the flow stress of the workpiece material under high strain, strain rate and temperature conditions that exist during the process. This paper presents a brief review of FE simulation of machining processes, a review of the approaches used to determine the flow stress at high deformation rate, and the examples of different constitutive equations used to represent such flow stress data. A material property database (MADAMS) has been developed and provides useful information to conduct simulations of machining processes. The main objectives of the material database are to assist researchers in areas of machining analysis and material modeling and to promote collaboration between various international research groups.