Capturing design dynamics : the CONCORD approach

'Computer-Supported Cooperative Work' is a young research area considering applications with strong demands on database technology. Especially design applications need support for cooperation and some means for controlling their inherent dynamics. However, today's CAD systems mostly consisting of a collection of diverse design tools typically do not support these requirements. Therefore, an encompassing processing model is needed that covers the overall design process in general as well as CAD-tool application in particular. As a consequence, this model has to be rich enough to reflect the major characteristics of design processes, e.g., goal-orientation, hierarchical refinement, stepwise improvement as well as team-orientation and cooperation. The CONCORD model that will be described in this paper, reflects the distinct properties of design process dynamics by distinguishing three levels of abstraction. The highest level supports application-specific cooperation control and design process administration, the second considers goal-oriented tool invocation and work-flow management while the third level provides tool processing of design data. To achieve level-spanning control, we rely on transactional facilities provided at the various system layers

Impact of Working Memory Load on fMRI Resting State Pattern in Subsequent Resting Phases

BACKGROUND: The default-mode network (DMN) is a functional network with increasing relevance for psychiatric research, characterized by increased activation at rest and decreased activation during task performance. The degree of DMN deactivation during a cognitively demanding task depends on its difficulty. However, the relation of hemodynamic responses in the resting phase after a preceding cognitive challenge remains relatively unexplored. We test the hypothesis that the degree of activation of the DMN following cognitive challenge is influenced by the cognitive load of a preceding working-memory task. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Twenty-five healthy subjects were investigated with functional MRI at 3 Tesla while performing a working-memory task with embedded short resting phases. Data were decomposed into statistically independent spatio-temporal components using Tensor Independent Component Analysis (TICA). The DMN was selected using a template-matching procedure. The spatial map contained rest-related activations in the medial frontal cortex, ventral anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. The time course of the DMN revealed increased activation at rest after 1-back and 2-back blocks compared to the activation after a 0-back block. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: We present evidence that a cognitively challenging working-memory task is followed by greater activation of the DMN than a simple letter-matching task. This might be interpreted as a functional correlate of self-evaluation and reflection of the preceding task or as relocation of cerebral resources representing recovery from high cognitive demands. This finding is highly relevant for neuroimaging studies which include resting phases in cognitive tasks as stable baseline conditions. Further studies investigating the DMN should take possible interactions of tasks and subsequent resting phases into account

Opportunities and challenges for cross-device interactions in the wild

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Using PRIMA-DBMS as a testbed for parallel complex-object processing

The PRIMA-DBMS approach is explained by introducing PRIMA's architecture and query processing framework. The PRIMA-DBMS constitutes a testbed that is flexible enough to support evaluation and validation of quite a variation of different strategies for complex-object processing taking into account different parallelization levels and different hardware environments. Thus, PRIMA marks an important step towards our main research goal concerning measures for efficient complex-object processing: the measures that are in competition with each other are query optimization, query evaluation strategies, and massive storage, that all benefit from parallelism. The programming environment that supports the parallel DBMS processing is introduced with special emphasis on its ability for parametrization and configuration. A case study of the PRIMA testbed illustrates our first investigations and demonstrates a methodology for evaluation and tuning of PRIMA configurations

PRIMA - a database system supporting dynamically defined composite objects

PRIMA is a non-standard database system developed at the University Kaiserslautern. Its major purpose is the support of engineering design applications, such as VLSI design and software engineering. The applications require tailored application-dependent interfaces which, however, all share basic notions like that of a composite object. Hence, the approach of PRIMA is to offer an application-independent complex-object interface (the moleculeatom data model, shortly called MAD model) and to provide means to easily augment this interface by application-dependent functionality. In the following, we will concentrate on the MAD model and its implementation

On structuring primitives and communication primitives for design environments

The evolution of CAD systems can be described in several stages which reflect an increasing effort for system Integration. It starts from a file-and-translator approach evolving to a data-integrated tool environment, and finally reaching the stage of a data-integrated design environment for CAD (sometimes also called CAD Framework). In the following we will detail some aspects of these stages

Interleukin-6 gene (IL-6): a possible role in brain morphology in the healthy adult brain

Background: Cytokines such as interleukin 6 (IL-6) have been implicated in dual functions in neuropsychiatric disorders. Little is known about the genetic predisposition to neurodegenerative and neuroproliferative properties of cytokine genes. In this study the potential dual role of several IL-6 polymorphisms in brain morphology is investigated. Methodology: In a large sample of healthy individuals (N = 303), associations between genetic variants of IL-6 (rs1800795; rs1800796, rs2069833, rs2069840) and brain volume (gray matter volume) were analyzed using voxel-based morphometry (VBM). Selection of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) followed a tagging SNP approach (e.g., Stampa algorigthm), yielding a capture 97.08% of the variation in the IL-6 gene using four tagging SNPs. Principal findings/results: In a whole-brain analysis, the polymorphism rs1800795 (−174 C/G) showed a strong main effect of genotype (43 CC vs. 150 CG vs. 100 GG; x = 24, y = −10, z = −15; F(2,286) = 8.54, puncorrected = 0.0002; pAlphaSim-corrected = 0.002; cluster size k = 577) within the right hippocampus head. Homozygous carriers of the G-allele had significantly larger hippocampus gray matter volumes compared to heterozygous subjects. None of the other investigated SNPs showed a significant association with grey matter volume in whole-brain analyses. Conclusions/significance: These findings suggest a possible neuroprotective role of the G-allele of the SNP rs1800795 on hippocampal volumes. Studies on the role of this SNP in psychiatric populations and especially in those with an affected hippocampus (e.g., by maltreatment, stress) are warranted.Bernhard T Baune, Carsten Konrad, Dominik Grotegerd, Thomas Suslow, Eva Birosova, Patricia Ohrmann, Jochen Bauer, Volker Arolt, Walter Heindel, Katharina Domschke, Sonja Schöning, Astrid V Rauch, Christina Uhlmann, Harald Kugel and Udo Dannlowsk

A Graphical Interface to a Complex-Object Database Management System

The research in database systems for new application areas has created several new architectural designs for database systems, among them the database kernel architecture. We present a graphical interface which is located on top of such a database kernel system. It provides an interface to the molecule-atom data model, which is a complex-object data model that serves as the basis for the implementation of various applications from new areas such as VLSI design. Our interface is able to display the database schema graphically and allows the graphical formulation of queries. Furthermore, it displays the results of queries as sets of complex objects. Each of these objects corresponds to a directed graph. The level of detail in the presentation of the results may be changed interactively. Initially, for each element of the set one representative is shown. The graph (i.e. the complex-object structure) corresponding to one or several elements of the result can be visualised. For ea..

ProactiveCloud Resources Management at theEdge forefficientReal-time Big Data Processing

<p>ProactiveCloud Resources Management at theEdge forefficientReal-time Big Data Processing.</p