000 Informatik, Informationswissenschaft, allgemeine Werke
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This dissertation presents three studies on the design and implementation of interactive surface environments. It puts forward approaches to engineering interactive surface prototypes using prevailing methodologies and technologies. The scholarly findings from each study have been condensed into academic manuscripts, which are conferred herewith.
The first study identifies a communication gap between engineers of interactive surface systems (i.e., originators of concepts) and future developers. To bridge the gap, it explores a UML-based framework to establish a formal syntax for modeling hardware, middleware, and software of interactive surface prototypes. The proposed framework targets models-as-end-products, towards enabling a shared view of research prototypes thereby facilitating dialogue between concept originators and future developers.
The second study positions itself to support developers with an open-source solution for exploiting 3D point clouds for interactive tabletop applications using CPU architectures. Given dense 3D point-cloud representations of tabletop environments, the study aims toward mitigating high computational effort by segmenting candidate interaction regions as a preprocessing step. The study contributes a robust open-source solution for reducing computational costs when leveraging 3D point clouds for interactive tabletop applications. The solution itself is flexible and adaptable to variable interactive surface applications.
The third study contributes an archetypal concept for integrating mobile devices as active components in augmented tabletop surfaces. With emphasis on transparent development trails, the study demonstrates the utility of the open-source tool developed in the second study. In addition to leveraging 3D point clouds for real-time interaction, the research considers recent advances in computer vision and wireless communication to realize a modern, interactive tabletop application. A robust strategy that combines spatial augmented reality, point-cloud-based depth perception, CNN-based object detection, and Bluetooth communication is put forward. In addition to seamless communication between adhoc mobile devices and interactive tabletop systems, the archetypal concept demonstrates the benefits of preprocessing point clouds by segmenting candidate interaction regions, as suggested in the second study.
Collectively, the studies presented in this dissertation contribute; 1—bridging the gap between originators of interactive surface concepts and future developers, 2— promoting the exploration of 3D point clouds for interactive surface applications using CPU-based architectures, and 3—leveraging 3D point clouds together with emerging CNN-based object detection, and Bluetooth communication technologies to advance existing surface interaction concepts.
The current thesis presents research about new methods of citizen participation based on digital technologies. The focus on the research lies on decentralized methods of participation where citizens take the role of co-creators. The research project first conducted a review of the literature on citizen participation, its origins and the different paradigms that have emerged over the years. The literature review also looked at the influence of technologies on participation processes and the theoretical frameworks that have emerged to understand the introduction of technologies in the context of urban development. The literature review generated the conceptual basis for the further development of the thesis.
The research begins with a survey of technology enabled participation applications that examined the roles and structures emerging due to the introduction of technology. The results showed that cities use technology mostly to control and monitor urban infrastructure and are rather reluctant to give citizens the role of co-creators. Based on these findings, three case studies were developed. Digital tools for citizen participation were conceived and introduced for each case study. The adoption and reaction of the citizens were observed using three data collection methods.
The results of the case studies showed consistently that previous participation and engagement with informal citizen participation are a determinining factor in the potential adoption of digital tools for decentralized engagement. Based on these results, the case studies proposed methods and frameworks that can be used for the conception and introduction of technologies for decentralized citizen participation.
In ten chapters, this thesis presents information retrieval technology which is tailored to the research activities that arise in the context of corpus-based digital humanities projects.
The presentation is structured by a conceptual research process that is introduced in Chapter 1. The process distinguishes a set of five research activities: research question generation, corpus acquisition, research question modeling, corpus annotation, and result dissemination. Each of these research activities elicits different information retrieval tasks with special challenges, for which algorithmic approaches are presented after an introduction of the core information retrieval concepts in Chapter 2.
A vital concept in many of the presented approaches is the keyquery paradigm introduced in Chapter 3, which represents an operation that returns relevant search queries in response to a given set of input documents. Keyqueries are proposed in Chapter 4 for the recommendation of related work, and in Chapter 5 for improving access to aspects hidden in the long tail of search result lists.
With pseudo-descriptions, a document expansion approach is presented in Chapter 6. The approach improves the retrieval performance for corpora where only bibliographic meta-data is originally available. In Chapter 7, the keyquery paradigm is employed to generate dynamic taxonomies for corpora in an unsupervised fashion.
Chapter 8 turns to the exploration of annotated corpora, and presents scoped facets as a conceptual extension to faceted search systems, which is particularly useful in exploratory search settings. For the purpose of highlighting the major topical differences in a sequence of sub-corpora, an algorithm called topical sequence profiling is presented in Chapter 9.
The thesis concludes with two pilot studies regarding the visualization of (re)search results for the means of successful result dissemination: a metaphoric interpretation of the information nutrition label, as well as the philosophical bodies, which are 3D-printed search results.
Tropical coral reefs, one of the world’s oldest ecosystems which support some of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet, are currently facing an unprecedented ecological crisis during this massive human-activity-induced period of extinction. Hence, tropical reefs symbolically stand for the destructive effects of human activities on nature [4], [5]. Artificial reefs are excellent examples of how architectural design can be combined with ecosystem regeneration [6], [7], [8]. However, to work at the interface between the artificial and the complex and temporal nature of natural systems presents a challenge, i.a. in respect to the B-rep modelling legacy of computational modelling.
The presented doctorate investigates strategies on how to apply digital practice to realise what is an essential bulwark to retain reefs in impossibly challenging times. Beyond the main question of integrating computational modelling and high precision monitoring strategies in artificial coral reef design, this doctorate explores techniques, methods, and linking frameworks to support future research and practice in ecology led design contexts.
Considering the many existing approaches for artificial coral reefs design, one finds they often fall short in precisely understanding the relationships between architectural and ecological aspects (e.g. how a surface design and material composition can foster coral larvae settlement, or structural three-dimensionality enhance biodiversity) and lack an integrated underwater (UW) monitoring process. Such a process is necessary in order to gather knowledge about the ecosystem and make it available for design, and to learn whether artificial structures contribute to reef regeneration or rather harm the coral reef ecosystem.
For the research, empirical experimental methods were applied: Algorithmic coral reef design, high precision UW monitoring, computational modelling and simulation, and validated through parallel real-world physical experimentation – two Artificial Reef Prototypes (ARPs) in Gili Trawangan, Indonesia (2012–today). Multiple discrete methods and sub techniques were developed in seventeen computational experiments and applied in a way in which many are cross valid and integrated in an overall framework that is offered as a significant contribution to the field. Other main contributions include the Ecosystem-aware design approach, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for coral reef design, algorithmic design and fabrication of Biorock cathodes, new high precision UW monitoring strategies, long-term real-world constructed experiments, new digital analysis methods and two new front-end web-based tools for reef design and monitoring reefs. The methodological framework is a finding of the research that has many technical components that were tested and combined in this way for the very first time.
In summary, the thesis responds to the urgency and relevance in preserving marine species in tropical reefs during this massive extinction period by offering a differentiated approach towards artificial coral reefs – demonstrating the feasibility of digitally designing such ‘living architecture’ according to multiple context and performance parameters. It also provides an in-depth critical discussion of computational design and architecture in the context of ecosystem regeneration and Planetary Thinking. In that respect, the thesis functions as both theoretical and practical background for computational design, ecology and marine conservation – not only to foster the design of artificial coral reefs technically but also to provide essential criteria and techniques for conceiving them.
Keywords: Artificial coral reefs, computational modelling, high precision underwater monitoring, ecology in design.
Cultural Heritage on Mobile Devices: Building Guidelines for UNESCO World Heritage Sites' Apps
(2021)
Technological improvements and access provide a fertile scenario for creating and developing mobile applications (apps). This scenario results in a myriad of Apps providing information regarding touristic destinations, including those with a cultural profile, such as those dedicated to UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS). However, not all of the Apps have the same efficiency. In order to have a successful app, its development must consider usability aspects and features aligned with reliable content. Despite the guidelines for mobile usability being broadly available, they are generic, and none of them concentrates specifically into cultural heritage places, especially on those placed in an open-air scenario. This research aims to fulfil this literature gap and discusses how to adequate and develop specific guidelines for a better outdoor WHS experience. It uses an empirical approach applied to an open-air WHS city: Weimar and its Bauhaus and Classical Weimar sites. In order to build a new set of guidelines applied for open-air WHS, this research used a systematic approach to compare literature-based guidelines to industry-based ones (based on affordances), extracted from the available Apps dedicated to WHS set in Germany. The instructions compiled from both sources have been comparatively tested by using two built prototypes from the distinctive guidelines, creating a set of recommendations collecting the best approach from both sources, plus suggesting new ones the evaluation.
Modern cryptography has become an often ubiquitous but essential part of our daily lives. Protocols for secure authentication and encryption protect our communication with various digital services, from private messaging, online shopping, to bank transactions or exchanging sensitive information. Those high-level protocols can naturally be only as secure as the authentication or encryption schemes underneath. Moreover, on a more detailed level, those schemes can also at best inherit the security of their underlying primitives. While widespread standards in modern symmetric-key cryptography, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), have shown to resist analysis until now, closer analysis and design of related primitives can deepen our understanding.
The present thesis consists of two parts that portray six contributions: The first part considers block-cipher cryptanalysis of the round-reduced AES, the AES-based tweakable block cipher Kiasu-BC, and TNT. The second part studies the design, analysis, and implementation of provably secure authenticated encryption schemes.
In general, cryptanalysis aims at finding distinguishable properties in the output distribution. Block ciphers are a core primitive of symmetric-key cryptography which are useful for the construction of various higher-level schemes, ranging from authentication, encryption, authenticated encryption up to integrity protection. Therefore, their analysis is crucial to secure cryptographic schemes at their lowest level. With rare exceptions, block-cipher cryptanalysis employs a systematic strategy of investigating known attack techniques. Modern proposals are expected to be evaluated against these techniques. The considerable effort for evaluation, however, demands efforts not only from the designers but also from external sources.
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most widespread block ciphers nowadays. Therefore, it is naturally an interesting target for further analysis. Tweakable block ciphers augment the usual inputs of a secret key and a public plaintext by an additional public input called tweak. Among various proposals through the previous decade, this thesis identifies Kiasu-BC as a noteworthy attempt to construct a tweakable block cipher that is very close to the AES. Hence, its analysis intertwines closely with that of the AES and illustrates the impact of the tweak on its security best. Moreover, it revisits a generic tweakable block cipher Tweak-and-Tweak (TNT) and its instantiation based on the round-reduced AES.
The first part investigates the security of the AES against several forms of differential cryptanalysis, developing distinguishers on four to six (out of ten) rounds of AES. For Kiasu-BC, it exploits the additional freedom in the tweak to develop two forms of differential-based attacks: rectangles and impossible differentials. The results on Kiasu-BC consider an additional round compared to attacks on the (untweaked) AES. The authors of TNT had provided an initial security analysis that still left a gap between provable guarantees and attacks. Our analysis conducts a considerable step towards closing this gap. For TNT-AES - an instantiation of TNT built upon the AES round function - this thesis further shows how to transform our distinguisher into a key-recovery attack.
Many applications require the simultaneous authentication and encryption of transmitted data. Authenticated encryption (AE) schemes provide both properties. Modern AE schemes usually demand a unique public input called nonce that must not repeat. Though, this requirement cannot always be guaranteed in practice. As part of a remedy, misuse-resistant and robust AE tries to reduce the impact of occasional misuses. However, robust AE considers not only the potential reuse of nonces. Common authenticated encryption also demanded that the entire ciphertext would have to be buffered until the authentication tag has been successfully verified. In practice, this approach is difficult to ensure since the setting may lack the resources for buffering the messages. Moreover, robustness guarantees in the case of misuse are valuable features.
The second part of this thesis proposes three authenticated encryption schemes: RIV, SIV-x, and DCT. RIV is robust against nonce misuse and the release of unverified plaintexts. Both SIV-x and DCT provide high security independent from nonce repetitions. As the core under SIV-x, this thesis revisits the proof of a highly secure parallel MAC, PMAC-x, revises its details, and proposes SIV-x as a highly secure authenticated encryption scheme. Finally, DCT is a generic approach to have n-bit secure deterministic AE but without the need of expanding the ciphertext-tag string by more than n bits more than the plaintext.
From its first part, this thesis aims to extend the understanding of the (1) cryptanalysis of round-reduced AES, as well as the understanding of (2) AES-like tweakable block ciphers. From its second part, it demonstrates how to simply extend known approaches for (3) robust nonce-based as well as (4) highly secure deterministic authenticated encryption.
Mitigating Risks of Corruption in Construction: A theoretical rationale for BIM adoption in Ethiopia
(2021)
This PhD thesis sets out to investigate the potentials of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to mitigate risks of corruption in the Ethiopian public construction sector. The wide-ranging capabilities and promises of BIM have led to the strong perception among researchers and practitioners that it is an indispensable technology. Consequently, it has become the frequent subject of science and research. Meanwhile, many countries, especially the developed ones, have committed themselves to applying the technology extensively. Increasing productivity is the most common and frequently cited reason for that.
However, both technology developers and adopters are oblivious to the potentials of BIM in addressing critical challenges in the construction sector, such as corruption. This particularly would be significant in developing countries like Ethiopia, where its problems and effects are acute. Studies reveal that bribery and corruption have long pervaded the construction industry worldwide. The complex and fragmented nature of the sector provides an environment for corruption. The Ethiopian construction sector is not immune from this epidemic reality. In fact, it is regarded as one of the most vulnerable sectors owing to varying socio-economic and political factors. Since 2015, Ethiopia has started adopting BIM, yet without clear goals and strategies. As a result, the potential of BIM for combating concrete problems of the sector remains untapped. To this end, this dissertation does pioneering work by showing how collaboration and coordination features of the technology contribute to minimizing the opportunities for corruption. Tracing loopholes, otherwise, would remain complex and ineffective in the traditional documentation processes.
Proceeding from this anticipation, this thesis brings up two primary questions: what are areas and risks of corruption in case of the Ethiopian public construction projects; and how could BIM be leveraged to mitigate these risks? To tackle these and other secondary questions, the research employs a mixed-method approach. The selected main research strategies are Survey, Grounded Theory (GT) and Archival Study. First, the author disseminates an online questionnaire among Ethiopian construction engineering professionals to pinpoint areas of vulnerability to corruption. 155 responses are compiled and scrutinized quantitatively. Then, a semi-structured in-depth interview is conducted with 20 senior professionals, primarily to comprehend opportunities for and risks of corruption in those identified highly vulnerable project stages and decision points. At the same time, open interviews (consultations) are held with 14 informants to be aware of state of the construction documentation, BIM and loopholes for corruption in the country. Consequently, these qualitative data are analyzed utilizing the principles of GT, heat/risk mapping and Social Network Analysis (SNA). The risk mapping assists the researcher in the course of prioritizing corruption risks; whilst through SNA, methodically, it is feasible to identify key actors/stakeholders in the corruption venture. Based on the generated research data, the author constructs a [substantive] grounded theory around the elements of corruption in the Ethiopian public construction sector. This theory, later, guides the subsequent strategic proposition of BIM. Finally, 85 public construction related cases are also analyzed systematically to substantiate and confirm previous findings.
By ways of these multiple research endeavors that is based, first and foremost, on the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data analysis, the author conveys a number of key findings. First, estimations, tender document preparation and evaluation, construction material as well as quality control and additional work orders are found to be the most vulnerable stages in the design, tendering and construction phases respectively. Second, middle management personnel of contractors and clients, aided by brokers, play most critical roles in corrupt transactions within the prevalent corruption network. Third, grand corruption persists in the sector, attributed to the fact that top management and higher officials entertain their overriding power, supported by the lack of project audits and accountability. Contrarily, individuals at operation level utilize intentional and unintentional 'errors’ as an opportunity for corruption.
In light of these findings, two conceptual BIM-based risk mitigation strategies are prescribed: active and passive automation of project audits; and the monitoring of project information throughout projects’ value chain. These propositions are made in reliance on BIM’s present dimensional capabilities and the promises of Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). Moreover, BIM’s synchronous potentials with other technologies such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and Radio Frequency technologies are topics which received a treatment. All these arguments form the basis for the main thesis of this dissertation, that BIM is able to mitigate corruption risks in the Ethiopian public construction sector. The discourse on the skepticisms about BIM that would stem from the complex nature of corruption and strategic as well as technological limitations of BIM is also illuminated and complemented by this work. Thus, the thesis uncovers possible research gaps and lays the foundation for further studies.
The computational analysis of argumentation strategies is substantial for many downstream applications. It is required for nearly all kinds of text synthesis, writing assistance, and dialogue-management tools. While various tasks have been tackled in the area of computational argumentation, such as argumentation mining and quality assessment, the task of the computational analysis of argumentation strategies in texts has so far been overlooked.
This thesis principally approaches the analysis of the strategies manifested in the persuasive argumentative discourses that aim for persuasion as well as in the deliberative argumentative discourses that aim for consensus. To this end, the thesis presents a novel view of argumentation strategies for the above two goals. Based on this view, new models for pragmatic and stylistic argument attributes are proposed, new methods for the identification of the modelled attributes have been developed, and a new set of strategy principles in texts according to the identified attributes is presented and explored.
Overall, the thesis contributes to the theory, data, method, and evaluation aspects of the analysis of argumentation strategies. The models, methods, and principles developed and explored in this thesis can be regarded as essential for promoting the applications mentioned above, among others.
Modern immersive telepresence systems enable people at different locations to meet in virtual environments using realistic three-dimensional representations of their bodies. For the realization of such a three-dimensional version of a video conferencing system, each user is continuously recorded in 3D. These 3D recordings are exchanged over the network between remote sites. At each site, the remote recordings of the users, referred to as 3D video avatars, are seamlessly integrated into a shared virtual scenery and displayed in stereoscopic 3D for each user from his or her perspective.
This thesis reports on algorithmic and technical contributions to modern immersive telepresence systems and presents the design, implementation and evaluation of the first immersive group-to-group telepresence system in which each user is represented as realistic life-size 3D video avatar. The system enabled two remote user groups to meet and collaborate in a consistent shared virtual environment. The system relied on novel methods for the precise calibration and registration of color- and depth- sensors (RGBD) into the coordinate system of the application as well as an advanced distributed processing pipeline that reconstructs realistic 3D video avatars in real-time. During the course of this thesis, the calibration of 3D capturing systems was greatly improved. While the first development focused on precisely calibrating individual RGBD-sensors, the second stage presents a new method for calibrating and registering multiple color and depth sensors at a very high precision throughout a large 3D capturing volume. This method was further refined by a novel automatic optimization process that significantly speeds up the manual operation and yields similarly high accuracy. A core benefit of the new calibration method is its high runtime efficiency by directly mapping from raw depth sensor measurements into an application coordinate system and to the coordinates of its associated color sensor. As a result, the calibration method is an efficient solution in terms of precision and applicability in virtual reality and immersive telepresence applications. In addition to the core contributions, the results of two case studies which address 3D reconstruction and data streaming lead to the final conclusion of this thesis and to directions of future work in the rapidly advancing field of immersive telepresence research.
In computer-aided design (CAD), industrial products are designed using a virtual 3D model. A CAD model typically consists of curves and surfaces in a parametric representation, in most cases, non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS). The same representation is also used for the analysis, optimization and presentation of the model. In each phase of this process, different visualizations are required to provide an appropriate user feedback. Designers work with illustrative and realistic renderings, engineers need a
comprehensible visualization of the simulation results, and usability studies or product presentations benefit from using a 3D display. However, the interactive visualization of NURBS models and corresponding physical simulations is a challenging task because of the computational complexity and the limited graphics hardware support.
This thesis proposes four novel rendering approaches that improve the interactive visualization of CAD models and their analysis. The presented algorithms exploit latest graphics hardware capabilities to advance the state-of-the-art in terms of quality, efficiency and performance. In particular, two approaches describe the direct rendering of the parametric representation without precomputed approximations and timeconsuming pre-processing steps. New data structures and algorithms are presented for the efficient partition, classification, tessellation, and rendering of trimmed NURBS surfaces as well as the first direct isosurface ray-casting approach for NURBS-based isogeometric analysis. The other two approaches introduce the versatile concept of programmable order-independent semi-transparency for the illustrative and comprehensible visualization of depth-complex CAD models, and a novel method for the hybrid reprojection of opaque and semi-transparent image information to accelerate stereoscopic rendering. Both approaches are also applicable to standard polygonal geometry which contributes to the computer graphics and virtual reality research communities.
The evaluation is based on real-world NURBS-based models and simulation data. The results show that rendering can be performed directly on the underlying parametric representation with interactive frame rates and subpixel-precise image results. The computational costs of additional visualization effects, such as semi-transparency and stereoscopic rendering, are reduced to maintain interactive frame rates. The benefit of this performance gain was confirmed by quantitative measurements and a pilot user study.