Conception and realization of a REST-based application programming interface for intersession-management in psychology

Mobile software applications have become one enabler in the field of medical treatments. This is comprehensible, since it enables “open access to details about illnesses, diseases, health promotion and healthcare”. Especially in the psychological branch, Home-Based Therapy and medical mobile apps are widespread. Furthermore, the analysis of patient data is difficult because it is rarely received digitally and can hardly be processed. Since 2017, the Alps-Adria-University Klagenfurt has been trying to improve the research progress in this field, exceedingly in the data collection of the patient’s Intersession processes. In detail, they want to develop a multi-device platform to collect, analyse, illustrate and process the data of the patients as simple as possible. In times of Big Data and Public Health Databases, the collection of information has carried through and there is a huge amount of ways to gather as much information as possible. The most common form is probably the Application Programming Interface, which enables easy communication between applications and offers a good possibility to save data to a server

Engineering User-Centric Smart Charging Systems

Die Integration erneuerbarer Energiequellen und die Sektorenkopplung erhöhen den Bedarf an Flexibilität im Elektrizitätssystem. Elektrofahrzeuge koordiniert zu Laden bietet die Chance solche Flexibilität bereitzustellen. Allerdings hängt das Flexibilitätspotential von Elektrofahrzeugen davon ab in welchem Umfang sich die Nutzer der Fahrzeuge dazu entschließen intelligentes Laden zu nutzen. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es Lösungen für intelligente Ladesysteme zu entwickeln, welche die Nutzer zu flexiblerem Laden anreizen und diese dabei zu unterstützen. Anhand eines Literaturüberblicks und einer Expertenbefragung werden zunächst Ziele identifiziert, welche Nutzer zu einer flexiblen Ladung motivieren können. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass neben finanziellen Anreizen auch die Integration erneuer-barer Energien und die Vermeidung von Netzengpässen einen Anreiz für das flexible La-den darstellen können. In der Folge wird untersucht, ob das Framing der Ladesituation hinsichtlich dieser Ziele die Ladeflexibilität von Elektrofahrzeugnutzern beeinflussen kann. Hierzu wird ein Online-Experiment mit Elektrofahrzeugnutzern evaluiert. Das sich ein Teil der Nutzer bei einem Umwelt-Framing flexibler verhält, macht Feedback darüber, wie die CO2-Emissionen von der bereitgestellten Flexibilität abhängen zu einem vielversprechenden Anreiz intelligentes Laden zu nutzen. Um solches Feedback zu er-möglichen werden als Nächstes die CO2-Einsparpotenziale eines optimierten Ladens im Vergleich zu unkontrolliertem Laden untersucht. Dazu werden die marginalen Emissions-faktoren im deutschen Stromnetz mithilfe eines regressionsbasierten Ansatzes ermittelt. Um Echtzeit-Feedback in realen Systemen zu ermöglichen wird darauf aufbauend eine Prognosemethode für Emissionsfaktoren entwickelt. Die Zielerreichung intelligenten Ladens hängt hauptsächlich von der zeitlichen und energetischen Flexibilität der Elektrofahrzeuge ab. Damit Nutzer diese Ladeeinstellungen nicht bei jeder Ankunft an der Ladestation von Hand eingeben zu müssen, könnten sie durch intelligente Assistenten unterstützt werden. Hierfür werden probabilistische Prognosen für die Flexibilität einzelner Ladevorgänge basierend auf historischen Ladevorgängen und Mobilitätsmustern entwickelt. Darüber hinaus zeigt eine Fallstudie, dass probabilistische Prognosen besser als Punktprognosen dazu geeignet sind die Ladung mehrerer Elektrofahrzeuge zu koordinieren

Extracting Secrets from Encrypted Virtual Machines

AMD SEV is a hardware extension for main memory encryption on multi-tenant systems. SEV uses an on-chip coprocessor, the AMD Secure Processor, to transparently encrypt virtual machine memory with individual, ephemeral keys never leaving the coprocessor. The goal is to protect the confidentiality of the tenants' memory from a malicious or compromised hypervisor and from memory attacks, for instance via cold boot or DMA. The SEVered attack has shown that it is nevertheless possible for a hypervisor to extract memory in plaintext from SEV-encrypted virtual machines without access to their encryption keys. However, the encryption impedes traditional virtual machine introspection techniques from locating secrets in memory prior to extraction. This can require the extraction of large amounts of memory to retrieve specific secrets and thus result in a time-consuming, obvious attack. We present an approach that allows a malicious hypervisor quick identification and theft of secrets, such as TLS, SSH or FDE keys, from encrypted virtual machines on current SEV hardware. We first observe activities of a virtual machine from within the hypervisor in order to infer the memory regions most likely to contain the secrets. Then, we systematically extract those memory regions and analyze their contents on-the-fly. This allows for the efficient retrieval of targeted secrets, strongly increasing the chances of a fast, robust and stealthy theft.Comment: Accepted for publication at CODASPY 201

Nonequilibrium magnetic phases in spin lattices with gain and loss

We study the magnetic phases of a nonequilibrium spin chain, where coherent interactions between neighboring lattice sites compete with alternating gain and loss processes. This competition between coherent and incoherent dynamics induces transitions between magnetically aligned and highly mixed phases, across which the system changes from a low to an infinite temperature state. We show that the origin of these transitions can be traced back to the dynamical effect of parity–time-reversal symmetry breaking, which has no counterpart in the theory of equilibrium phase transitions. This mechanism also results in very atypical features and we find first-order transitions without phase coexistence and mixed-order transitions which do not break the underlying U(1) symmetry, even in the appropriate thermodynamic limit. Thus, despite its simplicity, the current model considerably extends the phenomenology of nonequilibrium phase transitions beyond that commonly assumed for driven-dissipative spins and related systems

The bosonic skin effect: boundary condensation in asymmetric transport

We study the incoherent transport of bosonic particles through a one dimensional lattice with different left and right hopping rates, as modelled by the asymmetric simple inclusion process (ASIP). Specifically, we show that as the current passing through this system increases, a transition occurs, which is signified by the appearance of a characteristic zigzag pattern in the stationary density profile near the boundary. In this highly unusual transport phase, the local particle distribution alternates on every site between a thermal distribution and a Bose-condensed state with broken U(1)-symmetry. Furthermore, we show that the onset of this phase is closely related to the so-called non-Hermitian skin effect and coincides with an exceptional point in the spectrum of density fluctuations. Therefore, this effect establishes a direct connection between quantum transport, non-equilibrium condensation phenomena and non-Hermitian topology, which can be probed in cold-atom experiments or in systems with long-lived photonic, polaritonic and plasmonic excitations