Energieinformatik

Due to the increasing importance of producing and consuming energy more sustainably, Energy Informatics (EI) has evolved into a thriving research area within the CS/IS community. The article attempts to characterize this young and highly dynamic field of research by describing current EI research topics and methods and provides an outlook of how the field might evolve in the future. It is shown that two general research questions have received the most attention so far and are likely to dominate the EI research agenda in the coming years: How to leverage information and communication technology (ICT) to (1) improve energy efficiency, and (2) to integrate decentralized renewable energy sources into the power grid. Selected EI streams are reviewed, highlighting how the respective research questions are broken down into specific research projects and how EI researchers have made contributions based on their individual academic background.     

Perceptual evaluation of backchannel strategies for artificial listeners

Artificial listeners are virtual agents that can listen attentively to a human speaker in a dialog. In this paper, we present two experiments where we investigate the perception of rule-based backchannel strategies for artificial listeners. In both, we collect subjective judgements of humans who observe a video of a speaker together with a corresponding animation of an artificial listener. In the first experiment, we evaluate six rule-based strategies that differ in the types of features (e.g. prosody, gaze) they consider. The ratings are given at the level of a speech turn and can be considered a measure for how human-like the generated listening behavior is perceived. In the second experiment, we systematically investigate the effect of the quantity, type and timing of backchannels within the discourse of the speaker. Additionally, we asked human observers to press a button whenever they thought a generated backchannel occurrence was inappropriate. Both experiments together give insights in the factors, both from an observation and generation point-of-view, that influence the perception of backchannel strategies for artificial listeners.     

How commercial involvement affects open source projects: three case studies on issue reporting

Whereas most research on Internetware has focused on new technologies for keeping track of a changing Internet,little attention has been paid to the software development process.A large portion of the software running the Internet is open source software.Open source software is developed both by volunteers and commercial companies,often jointly.Companies get involved in open source projects for commercial reasons,and bring with them a commercial software development process.Thus,it is important to understand how commercial involvement affects the software development process of open source projects.This article presents case studies of three open source application servers that are being developed jointly by a volunteer community and one primary software company.We are interested in better understanding developer behavior,specifically task distribution and performance,based on whether the developer is an external contributor,e.g.,a volunteer working in their spare time,or a commercial developer from inside the primary backing company who is being paid for their time.To achieve this,we look at issue reporting as an example of commercial involvement in open source projects.In particular,we investigate the distribution of tasks among volunteers and commercial developers by studying the source of reported issues and quantify the task performance on user experience via the issue resolution speed.We construct measures based on historical records in issue tracking repositories.Our results show that,with intensified commercial involvement,the majority of issue reporting tasks would be undertaken by commercial developers,and issue resolution time would be reduced,implying a better user experience.We hope our methods and results provide practical insights for designing an efficient hybrid development process in the Internetware environment.     

Privacy-enhanced architecture for smart metering

The recent deployment of smart grids promises to bring numerous advantages in terms of energy consumption reduction in both homes and businesses. A more transparent and instantaneous measurement of electricity consumption through smart meters utilization leads to an enhancement in the ability of monitoring, controlling and predicting energy usage. Nevertheless, it also has associated drawbacks related to the privacy of customers, since such management might reveal their personal habits, which electrical appliances they are using at each moment, whether they are at home or not, etc. In this work, we present a privacy-enhanced architecture for smart metering aimed at tackling this threat by means of encrypting individual measurements while allowing the electricity supplier to access the aggregation of the corresponding decrypted values.     

Supporting multiple perspectives in feature-based configuration

Feature diagrams have become commonplace in software product line engineering as a means to document variability early in the life cycle. Over the years, their application has also been extended to assist stakeholders in the configuration of software products. However, existing feature-based configuration techniques offer little support for tailoring configuration views to the profiles of the various stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, yet formal and flexible, mechanism to leverage multidimensional separation of concerns in feature-based configuration. We propose a technique to specify concerns in feature diagrams and to generate automatically concern-specific configuration views. Three alternative visualisations are proposed. Our contributions are motivated and illustrated through excerpts from a real web-based meeting management application which was also used for a preliminary evaluation. We also report on the progress made in the development of a tool supporting multi-view feature-based configuration.     

Processing and interactive editing of huge point clouds from 3D scanners

This paper describes a new out-of-core multi-resolution data structure for real-time visualization, interactive editing and externally efficient processing of large point clouds. We describe an editing system that makes use of the novel data structure to provide interactive editing and preprocessing tools for large scanner data sets. Using the new data structure, we provide a complete tool chain for 3D scanner data processing, from data preprocessing and filtering to manual touch-up and real-time visualization. In particular, we describe an out-of-core outlier removal and bilateral geometry filtering algorithm, a toolset for interactive selection, painting, transformation, and filtering of huge out-of-core point-cloud data sets and a real-time rendering algorithm, which all use the same data structure as storage backend. The interactive tools work in real-time for small model modifications. For large scale editing operations, we employ a two-resolution approach where editing is planned in real-time and executed in an externally efficient offline computation afterwards. We evaluate our implementation on example data sets of sizes up to 63 GB, demonstrating that the proposed technique can be used effectively in real-world applications.     

Improving the structure MCMC sampler for Bayesian networks by introducing a new edge reversal move

Applications of Bayesian networks in systems biology are computationally demanding due to the large number of model parameters. Conventional MCMC schemes based on proposal moves in structure space tend to be too slow in mixing and convergence, and have recently been superseded by proposal moves in the space of node orders. A disadvantage of the latter approach is the intrinsic inability to specify the prior probability on network structures explicitly. The relative paucity of different experimental conditions in contemporary systems biology implies a strong influence of the prior probability on the posterior probability and, hence, the outcome of inference. Consequently, the paradigm of performing MCMC proposal moves in order rather than structure space is not entirely satisfactory. In the present article, we propose a new and more extensive edge reversal move in the original structure space, and we show that this significantly improves the convergence of the classical structure MCMC scheme.     

Result Merging Technique for Answering XPath Query over XSLT Transformed Data

Caching stores the results of previously answered queries in order to answer succeeding queries faster by reusing these results. We propose two different approaches for using caches of XSLT transformed XML data in order to answer queries. The first approach checks whether or not a current query Q can be directly answered from the result of a previously answered query Qi stored in the cache. The new query is otherwise submitted to the source over the network, the answer of the query is determined, transmitted back to the client, and stored in the cache. The second approach determines only the intersection Q−Qi and integrates the result of Q−-Qi into the previous results in the cache, which requires applying a numbering scheme for the output of the XSLT stylesheet. We show by experimental results that the second approach can significantly speed up the answering time in comparison to the first approach, but is not significantly slower in few worst cases than the second approach.     

Investigation of Ablation Efficiency of Stainless Steel Using Pulsed Lasers in Burst Mode

Due to its high corrosion resistance and mechanical properties, stainless steel is commonly used in various industrial applications. Although different types of stainless steel are similar in their chemical composition, they can differ significantly in their thermal diffusivity. This property is relevant in the ability of a material to conduct heat and thus, in laser processing. In this frame, this study compares the ablation efficiency and characteristics of polished stainless steel samples of the alloys AISI 304, AISI 420, and AISI 316Ti. They are irradiated with single ultrashort pulses having pulse durations between 250 fs and 10 ps as well as using GHz burst modii. The goal is to investigate the differences in both the ablation threshold and the ablation rate to improve the ablation efficiency. The results show that shorter pulse durations lead to a more efficient ablation process. On the other hand, GHz bursts are found to be, in general, less efficient. In addition, there is a significant difference in the surface morphology depending on the process parameters. The differences in the thermal diffusivity do not significantly influence the ablation threshold fluence but surface morphology and the ablation rate.