spotlight europe 2007/08, November 2007: Europe's Finances - The old system at its limits

The current system of EU revenues is opaque, complicated and unfair. That is the reason why it ought to be changed. The forthcoming budget review therefore offers the opportunity for a significant reform. The European Union needs greater financial flexibility in order to fulfil its global commitments. An EU tax should be considered, which would raise the level of the EU's own resources

spotlight europe 2007/08: Europas Finanzen - Das alte System ist ausgereizt = spotlight europe 2007/08: Europe's Finances - The Old System at its limits

Das aktuelle System der EU-Finanzierung ist intransparent, komplex und ungerecht. Deshalb muss es verändert werden. Zudem braucht die Euro-päische Union mehr finanzielle Beweglichkeit, um ihren globalen Ver-pflichtungen nachkommen zu können. Damit sie wieder über mehr finan-zielle Eigenmittel verfügt, sollte eine EU-Steuer ernsthaft geprüft werden. Klar ist aber auch: Eine stärkere Belastung der Bürger ist ausgeschlossen

A companion-system architecture for realizing individualized and situation-adaptive user assistance

We show how techniques from various research areas – most notably hierarchical planning, dialog management, and interaction management – can be employed to realize individualized and situation-adaptive user assistance. We introduce a modular system architecture that is composed of domain-independent components implementing techniques from the respective areas. Systems based on this architecture – so-called Companion-Systems – can provide intelligent assistance in a broad variety of tasks. They provide a user- and situation-adapted sequence of instructions that show how achieve the respective task. Additional explanations are, like the instructions themselves, automatically derived based on a declarative model of the current task. These systems can react to unforeseen execution failures repairing their underlying plans if required. We introduce a prototype system that assists with setting up a home theater and use it as a running example as well as for an empirical evaluation with test subjects that shows the usefulness of our approach. We summarize the work of more than half a decade of research and development done by various research groups from different disciplines. Here, for the first time, we explain the full integration of all components thereby showing "the complete picture" of our approach to provide individualized and situation-adaptive user assistance

Companion-Technology: Towards User- and Situation-Adaptive Functionality of Technical Systems

Abstract—The properties of multimodality, individuality, adaptability, availability, cooperativeness and trustworthiness are at the focus of the investigation of Companion Systems. In this article, we describe the involved key components of such a system and the way they interact with each other. Along with the article comes a video, in which we demonstrate a fully functional prototypical implementation and explain the involved scientific contributions in a simplified manner. The realized technology considers the entire situation of the user and the environment in current and past states. The gained knowledge reflects the context of use and serves as basis for decision-making in the presented adaptive system