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This thesis investigates methods for the recognition of facial expressions using support vector machines. Rather than trying to recognize facial actions in the face such as raised eyebrow, mouth open and frowns. These facial actions are described in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and are essential facial components, which can be combined to form facial expressions. We perform independent recognition of 6 upper and 10 lower action units in the face, which may occur either individually or in combination. Based on a feature extraction from grey-level values, the system is expected to recognize under real-time conditions. Results are presented with different image resolutions, SVM kernels and variations of low-level features.
The target of this thesis is the introduction of a client management system (CMS) at Haaland Internet Productions (HiP), a web design and hosting company in Burbank, California, USA. The company needs a system to track orders and improve workflow. HiP needs a system which not only tracks orders, but also stores all client information in a database. This client information can be used for a variety of marketing and contact reasons. It is an important and integral part of HiP's client relationship management (CRM). The lack of a cohesive CMS at HiP caused many fundamental business problems, such as lost orders, missed billing statements, and over/under billing. The research done during the investigation and analysis of the company and their needs should lead to a global system which totally fulfils the needs of HiP. This global system could be in the form of an off-the-shelf product with some customizations, or a completely new, in-house system. Either solution will have respective pros and cons; the goal is to reach a decision that best fits HiP's needs and situation. The following is a concise version of the project. Particular emphasis is placed upon the single steps which made up the decision process, as well as the practiced techniques, methods, and their applications.
Towards an integrated theory of economic governance – Conclusions from the governance of ethics
(2004)
This thesis deals with background, theory, design, layout and experimental test results of an analogue CMOS VLSI current-mode analog-to-digital converter. This system supports a project, whose goal it is to build a biologically relevant model of synaptic plasticity, named the Artificial Synapse. A critical part of the design, which is based on analogue CMOS VLSI circuits, is the ability to activate a discrete number of channels by sampling an analogue signal. Since currents are the signal of interest and transistors are biased in weak inversion (subthreshold regime), the system requires a current mode A/D circuit that it can operate at ultra-low power and current levels. To meet this need, two new innovative A/D converter approaches are proposed to replace the system’s previous A/D converter design which suffered from a non-linear resolution, uncoded output code and heavy bit oscillations. The initial technical requirements and key criteria for the new converter comprise a resolution of one nano ampere, an input current range between 0 – 100nA, conversion frequencies of up to 5kHz, and a power supply voltage of less than 1.5V. Temperature range, space occupation and power dissipation aspects were not specified due to the early stage of the related Artificial Synapse project. The novel converters both produce seven bit thermometer codes, their functional principle can be best described as current mode flash analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Due to the fact that the input signal is in the area of a subthreshold current, it is selfevident that the A/D converter design should operate at a subthreshold realm. To support low power operation, clocks or high currents could not be used and were excluded from the design from the very start. To encode the thermometer code into standard binary code, a seven-to-three encoder was designed and integrated on the chip. In October 2003, the design was submitted for production to the MOSIS circuit fabrication service. The AMI Semiconductor 1.5 micron ABN CMOS process was chosen to manufacture the chip. When it was returned in January 2004, simulation results showed that both new A/D converter approaches accomplished excellent results which were expected from SPICE simulation results. With the new chip installed, it became possible to resolve input currents as small as one nano ampere and achieve conversion frequencies of up to 5kHz. The circuits also both meet the requirements which were set at the beginning of the project to operate at a power supply voltage of less than 1.5V, processing input currents in the range between 0 – 100nA. A prototype printed circuit board (PCB) was developed, produced and employed for experiments with the chip. The major application of this test-bed is the ability to generate and measure extremely low currents with high precision. This enables the monitoring of the very small currents that are processed by the chip.
This work treats with the segmentation of 2D environment Laser data, captured by an Autonomous Mobile Indoor Robot. It is part of the data processing, which is necessary to navigate a mobile robot error free in its environment. The whole process can generally be described by data capturing, data processing and navigation. In this project the data processing deals with data, captured by a Laser-Sensor, which provides two dimensional data by a series of distance measurements i.e. point-measurements of the environment. These point series have to be filtered and processed into a more convenient representation to provide a virtual environment map, which can be used of the robot for an error free navigation. This project provides different solutions of the same problem: the conversion from distance points to model segments which should represent the real world environment as close as possible. The advantages and disadvantages of each of the different Segmentation-Algorithms will be shown as well as a comparison taking into account the Computational Time and the Robustness of the results.
Web services are, due to the excellent tool support, simple to provide and use in trivial cases. But their use in non-trivial Web service-based systems like I3M poses new difficulties and problems. I3M is an instant messaging and chat system with distributed and local components collaborating via Web services. One difficulty is to make a series of related Web service invocations in a stateful session. A problem is the performance of collaborating collocated, service-oriented components of a system due to the high Web service invocation overheaed as is shown by measurements. Solutions to both the difficulty and the problem are proposed.
The focus of this part of the research project lies on the process of developing a Social Responsibility Standard within a network made up of various stakeholders. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is known as the world´s leading institution for the development of standards. Besides setting standards in the fields of e.g. construction, agriculture and information technology, recently the Technical Management Board (TMB) of ISO proposed to further extend its activities by developing an international standard addressing the social responsibility of organizations. In 2004, a new Working Group was established as a multi-stakeholder group comprised of experts, who are nominated by ISO´s members as well as interested international and regional organizations in order to provide for guidance in setting international standards on social responsibility. In May 2006, the survey was conducted during the third conference of the ISO Working Group in Lisbon, Portugal. This particular empirical study has been designed on the one hand to investigate the motivation of organizations and their delegates to engage in social responsibility. On the other hand, the survey had the objective to evaluate the individual participants' current perception and assessment of the network´s efficiency, effectiveness and legitimacy, a so-called 'snap-shot' of this ISO process1. Overall, the empirical study shows that the organizations and their delegates, who have dealt with the topic SR for several years for diverse reasons, expect a tremendous effect by implementing ISO 26000 in their own organizations. Furthermore, the majority of respondents assess the decision-making process positively within the ISO process with respect to the criteria inclusive, fair, capacity building, legitimate and transparent. Difficulties concerning the distribution of stakeholder influences are being addressed. The results of the survey support the efforts to establish policies and procedures in order to encourage a balanced representation of stakeholders in terms of gender, geographic and stakeholder groups.
There was hardly another development which influenced the life on earth as much as the development of the communication technology in the last decades. The advantages of mobile communication brought the branch enormeous growth rates. However, for some years an increasing saturation has been looming in the markets especially in the developed nations and new marketing strategies are needed in order for companies to be able to distance themselves from their competitors. Against the background of this situation ICT companies all over the world started to look for new growth opportunities and found them in the so called “emerging markets” of the developing nations. To exploit this potential will be the one central challenge for the mobile communication industry for the next years. With this book I want to direct the gaze of all readers towards these markets which hold an enormous potential for the whole industry. Furthermore, I want to introduce some generic strategic approaches which can help firms to successfully participate in these markets.
This diploma thesis is devoted to the design and analysis of a radar signal enabling an object classification capability in surveillance radar systems based on high-resolution radar range profiles. It picks up the research results from Kastinger (2006), who investigated classification algorithms for high-resolution radar range profiles, and Meier (2007), who programmed a MATLAB toolbox for the evaluation of radar signals. A classical, brief, introduction to radar fundamentals is given (Chapter 1) as well as the motivation for this thesis and certain basic parameters used. After high-resolution radar range profiles are discussed with special focus on surveillance radar systems (Chapter 2), the results of Kastinger (2006) are picked up (Chapter 3) as far as necessary for the following chapters of this thesis. Following the chapters on radar basics, high-resolution radar range profiles and classification, basic and advanced radar signals are discussed and analysed, especially their range resolution and sidelobe levels (Chapter 4). This includes linear frequency-modulated pulses and nonlinear frequency-modulated pulses as well as phase-coded pulses, coherent trains of identical pulses, and stepped-frequency waveforms. Their analysis is based on Meier's MATLAB toolbox. In Chapter 5 we will bring up additional points that have to be considered in radar system design for implementing a classification capability, before this thesis ends with an overall conclusion (Chapter 6).
This working paper is part of a PhD research project dealing with the topics Social Responsibility, Stakeholder Theory and Network Governance, run by Maud Schmiedeknecht and supervised by Prof. Dr. habil. Josef Wieland, both from the Konstanz Institute for Intercultural Management, Values and Communication at the Konstanz University of Applied Sciences.
Today we live in a world that is characterized by a constantly changing environment. During the last decade, this highly volatile environment forced companies to implement strategies that identify, track and minimise the risks that entrepreneurial activity entails. Unfortunately, risks only account for a part of the insecurity that is connected to future events. The other and not inferior part of this insecurity consists of possible positive developments – so called opportunities. Due to this reason in economic science and in practice the opinion aggravates that solely focusing on risks is not sufficient to fully exploit the potential of markets and companies. In the 16th century, the Dutch Renaissance humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) said: “It is well known that among the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Transferring this statement in the context of Risk Management, the conclusion becomes apparent: The environmental uncertainty that surrounds entrepreneurial actions includes both opportunities and threats. As commonly practiced though, Risk Management tools only address threats. While this approach is surely better than doing nothing, it still can be seen as a major weakness of the traditional Risk Management approach. Nevertheless, in terms of Erasmus, this approach represents the one-eyed man when compared with the blind. To continue this metaphor a little further, it is possible to conclude that the one-eyed king could be easily relieved of his crown by introducing an emperor who is able to see with two eyes. Although this problem is well known in economic science, up to know only little scientific focus was shifted towards the systematic identification and management of opportunities. In fact, most of the present literature focuses on the identification and handling of risk and even though much of the recently published literature captures the term opportunity, none of it proposes a solid idea of following up on the approach. Still, facing the defiances of the present economic environment, it is not sufficient for companies to focus their attention on reducing risks. Instead, it is imperative to deal with the subject of Opportunity Management as well. With this paper, I want to undermine the importance of Opportunity Management for all companies independently of their size or branch that they operate in. Thereby, this paper is dedicated to all managers who strive to improve the professionalism of their companies in terms of strategic thinking. Furthermore, I hope that this paper can facilitate a practical implementation of a working Opportunity Management System.
Volterra and Wiener series
(2011)
Volterra and Wiener series are two classes of polynomial representations of nonlinear systems. They are perhaps the best understood and most widely used nonlinear system representations in signal processing and system identification. A Volterra or Wiener representation can be thought of as a natural extension of the classical linear system representation. In addition to the convolution of the input signal with the system's impulse response, the system representation includes a series of nonlinear terms that contain products of increasing order of the input signal with itself. It can be shown that these polynomial extension terms allow for representing a large class of nonlinear systems which basically encompasses all systems with scalar outputs that are time-invariant and have noninfinite memory.
In automotive a lot of electromagnetically, pyrotechnically or mechanically driven actuators are integrated to run comfort systems and to control safety systems in modern passenger cars. Using shape memory alloys (SMA) the existing systems could be simplified, performing the same function through new mechanisms with reduced size, weight, and costs. A drawback for the use of SMA in safety systems is the lack of materials knowledge concerning the durability of the switching function (long-time stability of the shape memory effect). Pedestrian safety systems play a significant role to reduce injuries and fatal casualties caused by accidents. One automotive safety system for pedestrian protection is the bonnet lifting system. Based on such an application, this article gives an introduction to existing bonnet lifting systems for pedestrian protection, describes the use of quick changing shape memory actuators and the results of the study concerning the long-time stability of the tested NiTi-wires. These wires were trained, exposed up to 4years at elevated temperatures (up to 140°C) and tested regarding their phase change temperatures, times, and strokes. For example, it was found that A P-temperature is shifted toward higher temperatures with longer exposing periods and higher temperatures. However, in the functional testing plant a delay in the switching time could not be detected. This article gives some answers concerning the long-time stability of NiTi-wires that were missing till now. With this knowledge, the number of future automotive applications using SMA can be increased. It can be concluded, that the use of quick changing shape memory actuators in safety systems could simplify the mechanism, reduce maintenance and manufacturing costs and should be insertable also for other automotive applications.
Using multi-camera matching techniques for 3d reconstruction there is usually the trade-off between the quality of the computed depth map and the speed of the computations. Whereas high quality matching methods take several seconds to several minutes to compute a depth map for one set of images, real-time methods achieve only low quality results. In this paper we present a multi-camera matching method that runs in real-time and yields high resolution depth maps. Our method is based on a novel multi-level combination of normalized cross correlation, deformed matching windows based on the multi-level depth map information, and sub-pixel precise disparity maps. The whole process is implemented completely on the GPU. With this approach we can process four 0.7 megapixel images in 129 milliseconds to a full resolution 3d depth map. Our technique is tailored for the recognition of non-technical shapes, because our target application is face recognition.
To master complexity, we can organize it or discard it. The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering first teaches the tools for organizing complexity, then distinguishes the two paths for discarding complexity: with and without loss of information. Questions and problems throughout the text help readers master and apply these groups of tools. Armed with this three-part toolchest, and without complicated mathematics, readers can estimate the flight range of birds and planes and the strength of chemical bonds, understand the physics of pianos and xylophones, and explain why skies are blue and sunsets are red.