Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation

3-point measurement in solid state devices: (Novel) artifacts and how to avoid them

There are two common methods to measure the impedance response of only one electrode of a solid-state electrochemical cell, microelectrodes or a three-terminal configuration. In aqueous electrochemistry, three-terminal configurations are widely used, however, implementing this method in solid-state electrochemistry is highly non-trivial. This work summarizes, which method is most suitable for different applications. We show potential error sources and evaluate each of them quantitatively with special emphasis on their impact in thin film electrode measurements. Evaluation is done by means of finite elements analysis (FEA), electric circuit simulations and conducted measurements. Three potential error sources were identified as particularly crucial factors: (i) Asymmetric sample cells (ii) short circuit currents across the reference electrode (RE), (iii) Especially for highly resistive electrode, coupling capacitances between the three electrodes. These error sources can result in different measurement errors such as additional high frequency semicircles, additional low frequency semicircles, inductive loops and even more critical, erroneous electrode properties without indicating of additional features in the impedance spectrum. We propose a novel sample geometry, the “wing geometry”, which was designed to minimize the measurement errors significantly, but still remains affordable and suitable for different applications

Multimedia in learning and instruction. State of the art and research perspectives

Mit den neuen Medien sind Hoffnungen auf eine Verbesserung der Lernwirksamkeit von Unterricht verbunden. Der Beitrag gibt einen zusammenfassenden Überblick über den Stand der empirischen Forschung zum Lernen mit neuen Medien. Berücksichtigung finden Erkenntnisse kognitionspsychologischer, instruktionspsychologischer und mediendidaktischer Provenienz. Im Anschluss an eine methodenkritische Einschätzung der Forschungslage erfolgen zunächst Aussagen über die Lernwirksamkeit neuer Medien im Hinblick auf ihre Gestaltungsmerkmale (i. e. das Zusammenspiel von Text, Bild und Ton, das Zusammenspiel der Codierung von Lernaufgaben und Testaufgaben sowie Ablaufgeschwindigkeit und Strukturierung der präsentierten Informationen). Anschließend wird auf die Lernwirksamkeit der neuen Medien unter Beachtung von Lehr-Lernzielen und von Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen der Schüler (i. e. Interessen und Einstellungen, themenspezifische Vorkenntnisse und medienspezifische Fertigkeiten sowie Lernstrategien) sowie im Hinblick auf mögliche instruktionale Unterstützung näher eingegangen. Auf dieser Basis werden Forschungsperspektiven entwickelt, die insbesondere auf eine Ergänzung der dominierenden Laborstudien um Forschung im realen Alltag von Lehrerinnen und Lehrer zielen. (DIPF/Orig.

Enhancing Fairness of Visual Attribute Predictors

The performance of deep neural networks for image recognition tasks such as predicting a smiling face is known to degrade with under-represented classes of sensitive attributes. We address this problem by introducing fairness-aware regularization losses based on batch estimates of Demographic Parity, Equalized Odds, and a novel Intersection-over-Union measure. The experiments performed on facial and medical images from CelebA, UTKFace, and the SIIM-ISIC melanoma classification challenge show the effectiveness of our proposed fairness losses for bias mitigation as they improve model fairness while maintaining high classification performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to incorporate these types of losses in an end-to-end training scheme for mitigating biases of visual attribute predictors. Our code is available at https://github.com/nish03/FVAP.Comment: Camera Ready, ACCV 202

Assessing the potential for precision medicine in body weight reduction with regard to type 2 diabetes mellitus therapies: A meta‐regression analysis of 120 randomized controlled trials

Aims: To assess the potential for precision medicine in type 2 diabetes by quantifying the variability of body weight as response to pharmacological treatment and to identify predictors which could explain this variability. Methods: We used randomized clinical trials (RCTs) comparing glucose‐lowering drugs (including but not limited to sodium‐glucose cotransporter‐2 inhibitors, glucagon‐like peptide‐1 receptor agonists and thiazolidinediones) to placebo from four recent systematic reviews. RCTs reporting on body weight after treatment to allow for calculation of its logarithmic standard deviation (log[SD], i.e., treatment response heterogeneity) in verum (i.e., treatment) and placebo groups were included. Meta‐regression analyses were performed with respect to variability of body weight after treatment and potential predictors. Results: A total of 120 RCTs with a total of 43 663 participants were analysed. A slightly larger treatment response heterogeneity was shown in the verum groups, with a median log(SD) of 2.83 compared to 2.79 from placebo. After full adjustment in the meta‐regression model, the difference in body weight log(SD) was −0.026 (95% confidence interval −0.044; 0.008), with greater variability in the placebo groups. Scatterplots did not show any slope divergence (i.e., interaction) between clinical predictors and the respective treatment (verum or placebo). Conclusions: We found no major treatment response heterogeneity in RCTs of glucose‐lowering drugs for body weight reduction in type 2 diabetes. The precision medicine approach may thus be of limited value in this setting

Potential of FX06 to prevent disease progression in hospitalized non-intubated COVID-19 patients — the randomized, EU-wide, placebo-controlled, phase II study design of IXION

Background: More than 2.7 million hospitalizations of COVID-19-infected patients have occurred in Europe alone since the outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020. Interventions against SARS-CoV-2 are still in high need to prevent admissions to ICUs worldwide. FX06, a naturally occurring peptide in humans and other mammals, has the potential to reduce capillary leak by improving endothelial dysfunction and thus preventing the deterioration of patients. With IXION, we want to investigate the potential of FX06 to prevent disease progression in hospitalized, non-intubated COVID-19 patients. Methods: IXION is an EU-wide, multicentre, placebo-controlled, double-blinded, parallel, randomized (2:1) phase II clinical study. Patient recruitment will start in September 2022 (to Q2/2023) in Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Spain, Romania, Portugal, and France. A total of 306 hospitalized patients (>= 18 years and < 75 years) with a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test and a COVID-19 severity of 4-6 according to the WHO scale will be enrolled. After randomization to FX06 or placebo, patients will be assessed until day 28 (and followed up until day 60). FX06 (2 x 200 mg per day) or placebo will be administered intravenously for 5 consecutive days. The primary endpoint is to demonstrate a difference in the proportion of patients with progressed/worsened disease state in patients receiving FX06 compared to patients receiving placebo. Secondary endpoints are lung function, oxygen saturation and breathing rate, systemic inflammation, survival, capillary refill time, duration of hospital stay, and drug accountability. Discussion: With IXION, the multidisciplinary consortium aims to deliver a new therapy in addition to standard care against SARS-CoV-2 for the clinical management of COVID-19 during mild and moderate stages. Potential limitations might refer to a lack of recruiting and drop-out due to various possible protocol violations. While we controlled for drop-outs in the same size estimation, recruitment problems may be subject to external problems difficult to control for

The GALAH Survey: Chemical tagging and chrono-chemodynamics of accreted halo stars with GALAH+ DR3 and GaiaGaia eDR3

© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab3504Since the advent of $Gaia$ astrometry, it is possible to identify massive accreted systems within the Galaxy through their unique dynamical signatures. One such system, $Gaia$-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE), appears to be an early "building block" given its virial mass $> 10^{10}\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ at infall ($z\sim1-3$). In order to separate the progenitor population from the background stars, we investigate its chemical properties with up to 30 element abundances from the GALAH+ Survey Data Release 3 (DR3). To inform our choice of elements for purely chemically selecting accreted stars, we analyse 4164 stars with low-$\alpha$ abundances and halo kinematics. These are most different to the Milky Way stars for abundances of Mg, Si, Na, Al, Mn, Fe, Ni, and Cu. Based on the significance of abundance differences and detection rates, we apply Gaussian mixture models to various element abundance combinations. We find the most populated and least contaminated component, which we confirm to represent GSE, contains 1049 stars selected via [Na/Fe] vs. [Mg/Mn] in GALAH+ DR3. We provide tables of our selections and report the chrono-chemodynamical properties (age, chemistry, and dynamics). Through a previously reported clean dynamical selection of GSE stars, including $30 < \sqrt{J_R~/~\mathrm{kpc\,km\,s^{-1}}} < 55$, we can characterise an unprecedented 24 abundances of this structure with GALAH+ DR3. Our chemical selection allows us to prevent circular reasoning and characterise the dynamical properties of the GSE, for example mean $\sqrt{J_R~/~\mathrm{kpc\,km\,s^{-1}}} = 26_{-14}^{+9}$. We find only $(29\pm1)\%$ of the GSE stars within the clean dynamical selection region. Our methodology will improve future studies of accreted structures and their importance for the formation of the Milky Way.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Association between physical activity and risk of hepatobiliary cancers : A multinational cohort study

Background & Aims: To date, evidence on the association between physical activity and risk of hepatobiliary cancers has been inconclusive. Weexamined this association in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohort (EPIC). Methods: We identified 275 hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cases, 93 intrahepatic bile duct cancers (IHBCs), and 164 non-gallbladder extrahepatic bile duct cancers (NGBCs) among 467,336 EPIC participants (median follow-up 14.9 years). We estimated cause-specific hazard ratios (HRs) for total physical activity and vigorous physical activity and performed mediation analysis and secondary analyses to assess robustness to confounding (e.g. due to hepatitis virus infection). Results: In the EPIC cohort, the multivariable-adjusted HR of HCC was 0.55 (95% CI 0.38-0.80) comparing active and inactive individuals. Regarding vigorous physical activity, for those reporting >2 hours/week compared to those with no vigorous activity, the HR for HCC was 0.50 (95% CI 0.33-0.76). Estimates were similar in sensitivity analyses for confounding. Total and vigorous physical activity were unrelated to IHBC and NGBC. In mediation analysis, waist circumference explained about 40% and body mass index 30% of the overall association of total physical activity and HCC. Conclusions: These findings suggest an inverse association between physical activity and risk of HCC, which is potentially mediated by obesity. Lay summary: In a pan-European study of 467,336 men and women, we found that physical activity is associated with a reduced risk of developing liver cancers over the next decade. This risk was independent of other liver cancer risk factors, and did not vary by age, gender, smoking status, body weight, and alcohol consumption. (C) 2019 European Association for the Study of the Liver. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

The GALAH+ Survey : Third Data Release

© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab1242The ensemble of chemical element abundance measurements for stars, along with precision distances and orbit properties, provides high-dimensional data to study the evolution of the Milky Way. With this third data release of the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey, we publish 678 423 spectra for 588 571 mostly nearby stars (81.2% of stars are within 75 stellar clusters. We derive stellar parameters $T_\text{eff}$, $\log g$, [Fe/H], $v_\text{mic}$, $v_\text{broad}$ & $v_\text{rad}$ using our modified version of the spectrum synthesis code Spectroscopy Made Easy (SME) and 1D MARCS model atmospheres. We break spectroscopic degeneracies in our spectrum analysis with astrometry from $Gaia$ DR2 and photometry from 2MASS. We report abundance ratios [X/Fe] for 30 different elements (11 of which are based on non-LTE computations) covering five nucleosynthetic pathways. We describe validations for accuracy and precision, flagging of peculiar stars/measurements and recommendations for using our results. Our catalogue comprises 65% dwarfs, 34% giants, and 1% other/unclassified stars. Based on unflagged chemical composition and age, we find 62% young low-$\alpha$, 9% young high-$\alpha$, 27% old high-$\alpha$, and 2% stars with $\mathrm{[Fe/H]} \leq -1$. Based on kinematics, 4% are halo stars. Several Value-Added-Catalogues, including stellar ages and dynamics, updated after $Gaia$ eDR3, accompany this release and allow chrono-chemodynamic analyses, as we showcase.Peer reviewe