Technical universities beyond marketization: Educating the virtuous engineer

In this paper, I argue that marketization trends affecting universities in general are strongly present in the management and education of technical universities. Partly, this is due to the historical background of the technical university as such, but marketization can nonetheless negatively affect the purpose of technical universities, which I argue should be to educate virtuous engineers. Marketization trends tend to promote technical and administrative reason and culminate in the idea of an engineer that is “tuned” to his future position. As an alternative to the tuned engineer, I discuss the idea of “bildung” of the virtuous engineer, whose education includes a strong reflexive component. This reflective component, I argue, should enable engineers to distance themselves from their disciplines and reflect on their discipline-specific goals by juxtaposing them with their perception of what it means to be a virtuous engineer (how one envisions ones role as engineer in society). Instead of exclusively focusing on sets of skills that are preferred due to societal and business constraints, universities should also encourage students to reflect on their discipline as a whole; not only from a technical, but also from a historical, ethical and political perspectiv

Identifying Patient Groups based on Frequent Patterns of Patient Samples

Grouping patients meaningfully can give insights about the different types of patients, their needs, and the priorities. Finding groups that are meaningful is however very challenging as background knowledge is often required to determine what a useful grouping is. In this paper we propose an approach that is able to find groups of patients based on a small sample of positive examples given by a domain expert. Because of that, the approach relies on very limited efforts by the domain experts. The approach groups based on the activities and diagnostic/billing codes within health pathways of patients. To define such a grouping based on the sample of patients efficiently, frequent patterns of activities are discovered and used to measure the similarity between the care pathways of other patients to the patients in the sample group. This approach results in an insightful definition of the group. The proposed approach is evaluated using several datasets obtained from a large university medical center. The evaluation shows F1-scores of around 0.7 for grouping kidney injury and around 0.6 for diabetes

Laser-to-droplet alignment sensitivity relevant for laser-produced plasma sources of extreme ultraviolet light

We present and experimentally validate a model describing the sensitivity of the tilt angle, expansion and propulsion velocity of a tin micro-droplet irradiated by a 1 {\mu}m Nd:YAG laser pulse to its relative alignment. This sensitivity is particularly relevant in industrial plasma sources of extreme ultraviolet light for nanolithographic applications. Our model has but a single parameter: the dimensionless ratio of the laser spot size to the effective size of the droplet, which is related to the position of the plasma critical density surface. Our model enables the development of straightforward scaling arguments in turn enabling precise control the alignment sensitivity.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

On Modeling and Analyzing Cost Factors in Information Systems Engineering

Introducing enterprise information systems (EIS) is usually associated with high costs. It is therefore crucial to understand those factors that determine or influence these costs. Though software cost estimation has received considerable attention during the last decades, it is difficult to apply existing approaches to EIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these methods to deal with the dynamic interactions of the many technological, organizational and projectdriven cost factors which specifically arise in the context of EIS. Picking up this problem, we introduce the EcoPOST framework to investigate the complex cost structures of EIS engineering projects through qualitative cost evaluation models. This paper extends previously described concepts and introduces design rules and guidelines for cost evaluation models in order to enhance the development of meaningful and useful EcoPOST cost evaluation models. A case study illustrates the benefits of our approach. Most important, our EcoPOST framework is an important tool supporting EIS engineers in gaining a better understanding of the critical factors determining the costs of EIS engineering projects

Refactoring Process Models in Large Process Repositories.

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAIS), large process model repositories have emerged. Over time respective models have to be re-aligned to the real-world business processes through customization or adaptation. This bears the risk that model redundancies are introduced and complexity is increased. If no continuous investment is made in keeping models simple, changes are becoming increasingly costly and error-prone. Though refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address related problems, this does not yet constitute state-of-the art in business process management. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or cannot apply respective techniques at all. This paper proposes a set of behaviour-preserving techniques for refactoring large process repositories. This enables process designers to eectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain