Service integrators in business networks—the importance of relationship values

To realise the potentials of CRM (customer relationship management), relationship-specific processes need to be designed and implemented in companies. This is all the more important and complicated in business networks where two or more actors collaborate to serve the customers. A good collaboration within business networks is the basis for understanding the customer process and identifying customer needs. But, even in these days of customer orientation, transaction orientation is still a matter of strong interest, and the following questions remain to be answered: What is the difference between relationship-oriented processes and transaction-oriented processes, and how can relationship-oriented processes be designed for a business network? The authors give first answers to both questions by using a systematic, goal-oriented specialisation of generic actions. To give an example, one relationship-oriented process will be designed and specified for a certain customer process in the course of this paper.     

Spatially Varying Mixtures Incorporating Line Processes for Image Segmentation

Spatially varying mixture models are characterized by the dependence of their mixing proportions on location (contextual mixing proportions) and they have been widely used in image segmentation. In this work, Gauss-Markov random field (MRF) priors are employed along with spatially varying mixture models to ensure the preservation of region boundaries in image segmentation. To preserve region boundaries, two distinct models for a line process involved in the MRF prior are proposed. The first model considers edge preservation by imposing a Bernoulli prior on the normally distributed local differences of the contextual mixing proportions. It is a discrete line process model whose parameters are computed by variational inference. The second model imposes Gamma prior on the Student’s-t distributed local differences of the contextual mixing proportions. It is a continuous line process whose parameters are also automatically estimated by the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed models are numerically evaluated and two important issues in image segmentation by mixture models are also investigated and discussed: the constraints to be imposed on the contextual mixing proportions to be probability vectors and the MRF optimization strategy in the frameworks of the standard and variational EM algorithm.     

A formally specified ontology management API as a registry for ubiquitous computing systems

Recently, several standards have emerged for ontology markup languages that can be used to formalize all kinds of knowledge. However, there are no widely accepted standards yet that define APIs to manage ontological data. Processing ontological information still suffers from the heterogeneity imposed by the plethora of available ontology management systems. Moreover, ubiquitous computing environments usually comprise software components written in a variety of different programming languages, which makes it particularly difficult to establish a common ontology management API with programming language agnostic semantics. We implemented an ontological Knowledge Base Server, which can expose the functionality of arbitrary off-the-shelf ontology management systems via a formally specified and well defined API. A case study was carried out in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to use a formally specified ontology management API to implement a registry for ubiquitous computing systems.     

Relating the X-band opacity of a tropical tree canopy to sapflow, rain interception and dew formation

During summer and autumn 2007, a 11 GHz microwave radiometer was deployed in an experimental tree plantation in Sardinilla, Panama. The opacity of the tree canopy was derived from incoming brightness temperatures received on the ground. A collocated eddy-covariance flux tower measured water vapor fluxes and meteorological variables above the canopy. In addition, xylem sapflow of trees was measured within the flux tower footprint. We observed considerable diurnal differences between measured canopy opacities and modeled theoretical opacities that were closely linked to xylem sapflow. It is speculated that dielectric changes in the leaves induced by the sapflow are causing the observed diurnal changes. In addition, canopy intercepted rain and dew formation also modulated the diurnal opacity cycle. With an enhanced canopy opacity model accounting for water deposited on the leaves, we quantified the influence of canopy stored water (i.e. intercepted water and dew) on the opacity. A time series of dew formation and rain interception was directly monitored during a period of two weeks. We found that during light rainfall up to 60% of the rain amount is intercepted by the canopy whereas during periods of intense rainfall only 4% were intercepted. On average, 0.17 mm of dew was formed during the night. Dew evaporation contributed 5% to the total water vapor flux measured above the canopy.     

Multi-Modal Dialog Scene Detection Using Hidden Markov Models for Content-Based Multimedia Indexing

A class of audio-visual data (fiction entertainment: movies, TV series) is segmented into scenes, which contain dialogs, using a novel hidden Markov model-based (HMM) method. Each shot is classified using both audio track (via classification of speech, silence and music) and visual content (face and location information). The result of this shot-based classification is an audio-visual token to be used by the HMM state diagram to achieve scene analysis. After simulations with circular and left-to-right HMM topologies, it is observed that both are performing very good with multi-modal inputs. Moreover, for circular topology, the comparisons between different training and observation sets show that audio and face information together gives the most consistent results among different observation sets.     

Fuzzy-Logik basierte Verarbeitung von Expertenregeln

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag wird aufgezeigt, wie in den unter dem Namen Fuzzy Control bekannten Steuerungsalgorithmen Expertenregeln mittels Fuzzy-Variablen formuliert, mit Fuzzy-Operatoren verknüpft und in aktuellen Situationen verarbeitet werden. Häufig erweisen sich in der Praxis die recht einfach konstruierten Fuzzy-Controller den auf der klassischen Mathematik basierenden Steuerungsverfahren als überlegen, da sie sich leicht auf modifizierte Aufgabenstellungen anpassen lassen und eine hohe Stabilität aufweisen, die sich beim Weglassen einiger Regeln zwar verschlechtert, aber zumeist nicht versagt. Dank der Entwicklung sogenannter Fuzzy-Chips lassen sich diese Fuzzy Control-Verfahren schnell und ohne großen Rechenaufwand durchführen. Desweiteren wird untersucht, ob und wie diese Fuzzy-Logik-Algorithmen auf nicht-technische Expertensyste-me übertragen werden können. Da hier zumeist einmalige Entscheidungen getroffen werden müssen, ist größere Sorgfalt auf die Formulierung der Regeln und deren Verknüpfungen zu legen.     

Specific heat capacity of molybdenum chalcogenides. III. Measurements of the heat capacity of Sn1 − x Ga x Mo5S6. An investigation of the singularities at low temperatures

The heat capacity of molybdenum chalcogenides with different Sn/Ga content was measured at temperatures of T 60 K. The occurrence of two phases of the chalcogenides studied could clearly be seen for higher Ga concentrations. In the miscibility gap there coexists a superconducting phase (T _c= 12.5 K) SnGa_0.25Mo₅S₆ with the ferromagnetic GaMo₅S₆ phase (T _curie = 19 K). As for the pure ternary compound GaMo₅S₆, a singularity of the heat capacity could also be observed in the range of the structural change (T = 45 K). All the singularities are discussed.     

Proximity electron tunneling spectroscopy. IV. Electron-phonon coupling and superconductivity of tantalum

An extensive superconducting electron tunneling study of Ta, using both a proximity method and an optimized conventional spectroscopy, is reported. The results for Ta confirm the electron-phonon origin of superconductivity in this element, and provide slightly improved superconducting parameters: =0.73 and _ph ^* = 0.11. The results from the PET and optimized conventional methods are in substantial agreement, although the proximity method appears to provide somewhat better resolution of structure in the Eliashberg function ² F(E).Operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Iowa State University under contract No. W-7405-Eng-82. This research was supported by the Director for Energy Research, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, WPAS-KC-02-02-02.     

Charge exchange and the “Plateau” effect in YBa2Cu3O7?y

The superconducting properties of YBa₂Cu₃O_7- y, (YBCO) depend strongly on the oxygen content, whereas the transition temperatureT _cremains relatively constant for oxygen content between 6.8 and 7.0 (the Plateau effect) this effect has attracted considerable attention [see, e.g., D. de Fontaineet al., Nature (London) 343, 544 (1990); H. Paulsenet al., Nature (London) 349, 594 (1991); J. Jorgensen,Phys. Today 44, No. 6, 34 (1991)]. In this letter we introduce a microscopic theory of this phenomenon.     

A method to align the coordinate system of accelerometers to the axes of a human body: The depitch algorithm

One of the key problems in accelerometry based gait analyses is that it may not be possible to attach an accelerometer to the lower trunk so that its axes are perfectly aligned to the axes of the subject. In this paper we will present an algorithm that was designed to virtually align the axes of the accelerometer to the axes of the subject during walking sections. This algorithm is based on a physically reasonable approach and built for measurements in unsupervised settings, where the test persons are applying the sensors by themselves. For evaluation purposes we conducted a study with 6 healthy subjects and measured their gait with a manually aligned and a skewed accelerometer attached to the subject's lower trunk. After applying the algorithm the intra-axis correlation of both sensors was on average 0.89±0.1 with a mean absolute error of 0.05g. We concluded that the algorithm was able to adjust the skewed sensor node virtually to the coordinate system of the subject.