NoTube – making TV a medium for personalized interaction

In this paper, we introduce NoTube’s vision on deploying semantics in interactive TV context in order to contextualize distributed applications and lift them to a new level of service that provides context-dependent and personalized selection of TV content. Additionally, lifting content consumption from a single-user activity to a community-based experience in a connected multi-device environment is central to the project. Main research questions relate to (1) data integration and enrichment - how to achieve unified and simple access to dynamic, growing and distributed multimedia content of diverse formats? (2) user and context modeling - what is an appropriate framework for context modeling, incorporating task-, domain and device-specific viewpoints? (3) context-aware discovery of resources - how could rather fuzzy matchmaking between potentially infinite contexts and available media resources be achieved? (4) collaborative architecture for TV content personalization - how can the combined information about data, context and user be put at disposal of both content providers and end-users in the view of creating extremely personalized services under controlled privacy and security policies? Thus, with the grand challenge in mind - to put the TV viewer back in the driver's seat – we focus on TV content as a medium for personalized interaction between people based on a service architecture that caters for a variety of content metadata, delivery channels and rendering devices

The prismatic Sigma 3 (10-10) twin bounday in alpha-Al2O3 investigated by density functional theory and transmission electron microscopy

The microscopic structure of a prismatic $\Sigma 3$ $(10\bar{1}0)$ twin boundary in \aal2o3 is characterized theoretically by ab-initio local-density-functional theory, and experimentally by spatial-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), measuring energy-loss near-edge structures (ELNES) of the oxygen $K$-ionization edge. Theoretically, two distinct microscopic variants for this twin interface with low interface energies are derived and analysed. Experimentally, it is demonstrated that the spatial and energetical resolutions of present high-performance STEM instruments are insufficient to discriminate the subtle differences of the two proposed interface variants. It is predicted that for the currently developed next generation of analytical electron microscopes the prismatic twin interface will provide a promising benchmark case to demonstrate the achievement of ELNES with spatial resolution of individual atom columns

Ergebnisse einer Marktstudie zur Kundenbindung im Retail Banking

Das Retail-Geschäft ermöglicht Banken marktunabhängige Refinanzierung und relativ stabile Erträge. Bankleistungen sind jedoch in diesem Bereich schwer differenzierbar. Onlineaffine und informierte Zielgruppen verhalten sich außerdem zusehends hybrid. Gleichzeitig dringen immer mehr Wettbewerber in den Markt ein wie der britische Einzelhändler Tesco, der Finanzprodukte über die hauseigenen Supermärkte sowie das Internet vertreibt. Weitere Konkurrenz entspringt Mobilfunkkonzernen wie Verizon, Online-Bezahlsystemen wie PayPal, Internetgiganten wie Google oder den neu gegründeten Direktbanken. Diese Entwicklungen führen innerhalb des deutschen Bankenmarkts zu hoher Wettbewerbsintensität und sinkenden Margen. Eine Expansionspolitik, die dem entgegenwirken könnte, schwächt dagegen die Eigenkapitalquote, während eine Diversifikation in andere Geschäftsfelder mit höheren Gewinnpotenzialen und Margen in der Regel auch mit höheren Risiken behaftet ist. Kundenbindung und -entwicklung sind deshalb zentrale Ziele von Banken und Sparkassen