Entwicklung automatischer Installationsroutinen für Services auf Basis von JavaEE

Die Diplomarbeit “Entwicklung von automatischen Installationsroutinen von Services auf Basis von JavaEE” beschreibt den Entwurf und die Entwicklung eines Prototypen, um Services automatisiert auf einem JavaEE- Applikationsserver zu installieren. Zu Beginn werden die Konzepte eines JavaEE-Applikationsservers und der manuelle Installationsvorgang von Services auf diesem erläutert, die bei dem Installationsvorgang auftretenden Probleme dargelegt und analysiert. Im Anschluss daran werden mehrere verfügbare Produkte und eine Eigenentwicklung gegenübergestellt und bewertet. Abschließend werden Problemlösungen für den Installationsprozess erläutert sowie die Implementierung eines Prototypen beschrieben.The diploma thesis "Development of automatic installation routines for services based on JavaEE” describes the design and development of a prototype to automate the deployment process of services on a JavaEE application server. The first part of the thesis explains the concepts of a JavaEE application server and the deployment of services, followed by an analysis of the main problems regarding the manual deployment of services. Subsequently, several available products and one self developed software are compared and evaluated. The final part describes the solutions for the deployment problems and the implementation of a prototype

Towards Improving Low-Resource Speech Recognition Using Articulatory and Language Features

In an increasingly globalized world, there is a rising demand for speech recognition systems. Systems for languages like English, German or French do achieve a decent performance, but there exists a long tail of languages for which such systems do not yet exist. State-of-the-art speech recognition systems feature Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Being a data driven method and therefore highly dependent on sufficient training data, the lack of resources directly affects the recognition performance. There exist multiple techniques to deal with such resource constraint conditions, one approach is the use of additional data from other languages. In the past, is was demonstrated that multilingually trained systems benefit from adding language feature vectors (LFVs) to the input features, similar to i-Vectors. In this work, we extend this approach by the addition of articulatory features (AFs). We show that AFs also benefit from LFVs and that multilingual system setups benefit from adding both AFs and LFVs. Pretending English to be a low-resource language, we restricted ourselves to use only 10h of English acoustic training data. For system training, we use additional data from French, German and Turkish. By using a combination of AFs and LFVs, we were able to decrease the WER from 18.1% to 17.3% after system combination in our setup using a multilingual phone set

Die vielfältigen Facetten der Arzneimitteltherapiesicherheit : mittelbare und unmittelbare Ansatzpunkte zur Verbesserung der Arzneimitteltherapiesicherheit

Ein sicherer Medikationsprozess ist für die Gewährleistung der Patientensicherheit bei der medikamentösen Therapie von vergleichbarer Relevanz wie die Qualität, Unbedenklichkeit und Wirksamkeit des Arzneimittels. Die Prävalenz von Medikationsfehler an verschiedenen Stellen im deutschen Gesundheitswesen begründet den großen Forschungsbedarf zur Arzneimitteltherapiesicherheit (AMTS). In der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es gelungen, Ansatzpunkte zur Verbesserung der AMTS mit direktem und indirektem Einfluss auf den optimalen Medikationsprozess zu identifizieren. Dabei hat sich beispielsweise herausgestellt, dass es zur Etablierung eines funktionaleren AMTS-Systems eine stärkere interprofessionale Verzahnung und Digitalisierung der Versorgungsprozesse sowie eine Weiterentwicklung des apothekerlichen Fortbildungssystems braucht. In dieser Hinsicht wäre insbesondere die flächendeckende, uneingeschränkte Nutzung digitaler Gesundheitsanwendungen, wie der elektronischen Patientenakte, ein wesentlicher AMTS-Fortschritt. Denn dies hat das Potential, existierende Informationslücken zu überwinden, eine datenschutzkonforme Kommunikationsplattform zum fachlichen intra- und interprofessionellen Austausch zu etablieren und die Arbeitslast durch den Wegfall redundanter Dokumentationsprozesse insgesamt zu reduzieren. Alles in allem ist es mit dieser Arbeit also gelungen, einen Beitrag für eine sicherere Gestaltung des Medikationsprozesses in Zukunft zu leisten.As much as patient safety relies on the quality, harmlessness and efficacy of the applied drugs, it also depends on the safety of the underlying medication process. In the German healthcare system, medication errors are prevalent at different key points of the medication process. Hence, an urgent need for medication safety research is required. This present work was able to identify parameters with a direct and indirect influence on the best possible medication process to improve the medication safety. It has turned out that for the establishment of a more functional medication safety system there is a particular need for greater digitalization of the care process and interprofessional collaboration besides the necessity for change in in the pharmacists’ continuing education system. In that regard, the comprehensive, unrestricted usage of digital health applications, such as the electronic patient record, would be a promising medication safety advancement. This bears the potential to overcome existing information deficits, to establish a data protection compliant communication platform for intraprofessional and interprofessional needs and to reduce the workload by withdrawing redundant documentation processes. Altogether, the present work has succeeded in contributing to a safer medication process in future

Institutionelle Pilotregionen: Ein Katalysator für strukturelle Reformen?

The quality of (economic) institutions in the crisis countries of the European Union (EU) is relatively poor along several dimensions, despite the adoption of the acquis communautaire of the EU. Economic literature suggests that efficient institutions matter for macroeconomic growth and stability as well as for good enterprise performance. Against this background, the idea to support European crisis countries by the establishment of institutional pilot regions seems promising. Like the well-known special economic zones, they might exert positive spill-over effects on neighboring regions and trigger country-wide structural reforms. However, the concept is new and opaque and hard to fix in concrete terms. Examples with similar intentions abound, but the heterogeneity of these attempts with respect to problems addressed, measures invoked and the size of the targeted region is huge. Therefore, it is hard to draw robust conclusions from these experiences. In contrast to free trade zones, institutional pilot regions do not put direct monetary and/or fiscal incentives at center stage. Instead, they focus on reforms of institutions that are expected to play a decisive role for business and the functioning of a society; hence, these institutions are service-factors for firms and citizens. Our analysis demonstrates the scope of these service-factors ranging from good governance and low levels of corruption to help in setting up of business networks and improving physical infrastructure. The wide range of possible institutional measures implies that deliberate choices have to be made when selecting and designing institutional reform measures. This selection has to be based on a thorough analysis of the institutional setting and shortcomings in a specific country or region. At the same time, numerous constraints limit the scope for institutional pilot regions. First, institutions are embedded into a country-specific societal background that determines their functioning. As a consequence, no blueprints for institutional reforms exist; before designing reform measures, a careful country analysis is thus required. Second, institutional reforms produce no - or even adverse - effects if they are not implemented and managed efficiently. Thus, the measures have to be accepted by political elites, have to be carried out by competent administrative staff, and have to be carefully explained to the public. Third, if business is to be attracted, the pay-off for enterprises has to be positive; money saved by better service must outweigh additional transaction costs in a new business environment. Fourth, in the low-value-added segments prevailing in free trade zones, institutional pilot regions will not be competitive. So they have to be focused on innovative and high-skill-sectors. Legal constraints add to these economic considerations. First, European Law limits the possibilities of regulatory differentials across nations and regions. Checking the limits, justifying and passing exemptions, although possible in general, is not always promising and certainly requires time. Second, implementation has to be carried out at the national level. Again, solutions may be found, but they are not always promising and require time. Third, there is no supranational institution that could safeguard the new regulations from outside. Legislative capacities at the local, regional or national level would have to be trained and educated to carry out this task. To align the results of our economic and legal analysis, we recommend to make use of already existing instruments of European Regional Policy and to shape European Regional Policy of the future period by stronger focusing on the so far regrettably neglected role of institutions

Impact of 5-formylcytosine on the melting kinetics of DNA by 1H NMR chemical exchange

5-Formylcytosine (5fC) is a chemically edited, naturally occurring nucleobase which appears in the context of modified DNA strands. The understanding of the impact of 5fC on dsDNA physical properties is to date limited. In this work, we applied temperature-dependent 1H Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) NMR experiments to non-invasively and site-specifically measure the thermodynamic and kinetic influence of formylated cytosine nucleobase on the melting process involving dsDNA. Incorporation of 5fC within symmetrically positioned CpG sites destabilizes the whole dsDNA structure—as witnessed from the ∼2°C decrease in the melting temperature and 5–10 kJ mol−1 decrease in ΔG°—and affects the kinetic rates of association and dissociation. We observed an up to ∼5-fold enhancement of the dsDNA dissociation and an up to ∼3-fold reduction in ssDNA association rate constants, over multiple temperatures and for several proton reporters. Eyring and van’t Hoff analysis proved that the destabilization is not localized, instead all base-pairs are affected and the transition states resembles the single-stranded conformation. These results advance our knowledge about the role of 5fC as a semi-permanent epigenetic modification and assist in the understanding of its interactions with reader proteins

Using the Abstract Computer Architecture Description Language to Model AI Hardware Accelerators

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has witnessed remarkable growth, particularly through the proliferation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). These powerful models drive technological advancements across various domains. However, to harness their potential in real-world applications, specialized hardware accelerators are essential. This demand has sparked a market for parameterizable AI hardware accelerators offered by different vendors. Manufacturers of AI-integrated products face a critical challenge: selecting an accelerator that aligns with their product's performance requirements. The decision involves choosing the right hardware and configuring a suitable set of parameters. However, comparing different accelerator design alternatives remains a complex task. Often, engineers rely on data sheets, spreadsheet calculations, or slow black-box simulators, which only offer a coarse understanding of the performance characteristics. The Abstract Computer Architecture Description Language (ACADL) is a concise formalization of computer architecture block diagrams, which helps to communicate computer architecture on different abstraction levels and allows for inferring performance characteristics. In this paper, we demonstrate how to use the ACADL to model AI hardware accelerators, use their ACADL description to map DNNs onto them, and explain the timing simulation semantics to gather performance results.Comment: Accepted Version for: MBMV'2

Electrical control of inter-dot electron tunneling in a quantum dot molecule

We employ ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy to directly monitor electron tunneling between discrete orbital states in a pair of spatially separated quantum dots. Immediately after excitation, several peaks are observed in the pump-probe spectrum due to Coulomb interactions between the photo-generated charge carriers. By tuning the relative energy of the orbital states in the two dots and monitoring the temporal evolution of the pump-probe spectra the electron and hole tunneling times are separately measured and resonant tunneling between the two dots is shown to be mediated both by elastic and inelastic processes. Ultrafast (< 5 ps) inter-dot tunneling is shown to occur over a surprisingly wide bandwidth, up to ~8 meV, reflecting the spectrum of exciton-acoustic phonon coupling in the system