Universität Stuttgart
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Item Open Access Speech interface for human and robot collaboration(2018) Kashif, Moin UddinIn the past, robots and machines were mostly designed to perform specific tasks without much human interaction needed. Nowadays with the advancements in technology, intelligent robots can be designed which can perform multiple tasks, interact with the surrounding environment, assist and give valuable suggestions to humans etc. so an efficient and natural mode of communication is required for this human-robot interaction. In this thesis, we proposed an architecture to develop a speech interface for human-robot interaction. The speech interface is used to give voice commands to the robot, PR2, in order to perform 5 tasks which are designed to test the performance of the speech interface. The tasks are sorting, shaping, stacking, building and balancing of 6 objects on table-top which are designed and ordered by the level of difficulty. First two tasks are comparatively easier as the user doesn't have to follow any order to finish them, next two tasks require to follow the order and in the last task, the stack of objects must be balanced in order to finish it. The speech interface receives voice commands from the user, convert them into text, maps to the corresponding command and send to the task manager to perform the operation. After that, it processes the received command, takes the appropriate decision based on the current status of the task and available actions and sends the command to the PR2 to perform the operation. Additionally, we have designed a feedback mechanism where PR2 sends back the feedback to the task manager which is delivered back to the speech manager so that it can be converted into an audio signal and play for the user. Furthermore, the system uses a TCP connection for the exchange of data and information between the speech manager and the task manager. The speech interface is also compared with other modalities such as text input and graphical user interface with the same tasks and we have also conducted user study to evaluate the system performance. The results show that the participants prefer speech interface as it feels more natural.Item Open Access Orthogonale Dünngitter-Teilraumzerlegungen(2018) Schreiber, ConstantinIn der Simulation treten Häufg hochdimensionale partielle Differentialgleichungen auf. Das Lösen dieser wird für volle Gitter sehr schnell zu teuer. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Verfahren für das Lösen partieller Differentialgleichungen mit Hilfe von Dünnen Gittern, welche für mehrdimensionale Probleme besser skalieren, sowie dessen Implementierung in das Programmpaket SG++ vorgestellt. Durch Funktionsdarstellung in einem Erzeugendensystem wird die Verwendung einer L2-orthogonalen Teilraumzerlegung ermöglicht. Projektionsoperatoren ersetzen hierbei die explizite Transformation in eine Prewavelet-Basis. Diese Zerlegung erlaubt das Lumping der Steifgkeitsmatrix, also das Weglassen von großen Blöcken der Matrix. Hiermit wird ein Algorithmus zur Matrixmultiplikation, welcher dem von Schwab und Todor ähnelt implementiert. Dieser wird in einem konjugierten Gradienten-Verfahren verwendet und auch auf krummberandete Gebieten angewendet. Des Weiteren wird die Teilraumzerlegung durch L2-Projektion mit anderen Zerlegungen in Bezug auf Laufzeit und Fehlerentwicklung verglichen.Item Open Access Interacting with large high-resolution display workplaces(2018) Lischke, Lars; Schmidt, Albrecht (Prof.)Large visual spaces provide a unique opportunity to communicate large and complex pieces of information; hence, they have been used for hundreds of years for varied content including maps, public notifications and artwork. Understanding and evaluating complex information will become a fundamental part of any office work. Large high-resolution displays (LHRDs) have the potential to further enhance the traditional advantages of large visual spaces and combine them with modern computing technology, thus becoming an essential tool for understanding and communicating data in future office environments. For successful deployment of LHRDs in office environments, well-suited interaction concepts are required. In this thesis, we build an understanding of how concepts for interaction with LHRDs in office environments could be designed. From the human-computer interaction (HCI) perspective three aspects are fundamental: (1) The way humans perceive and react to large visual spaces is essential for interaction with content displayed on LHRDs. (2) LHRDs require adequate input techniques. (3) The actual content requires well-designed graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and suitable input techniques. Perceptions influence how users can perform input on LHRD setups, which sets boundaries for the design of GUIs for LHRDs. Furthermore, the input technique has to be reflected in the design of the GUI. To understand how humans perceive and react to large visual information on LHRDs, we have focused on the influence of visual resolution and physical space. We show that increased visual resolution has an effect on the perceived media quality and the perceived effort and that humans can overview large visual spaces without being overwhelmed. When the display is wider than 2 m users perceive higher physical effort. When multiple users share an LHRD, they change their movement behavior depending whether a task is collaborative or competitive. For building LHRDs consideration must be given to the increased complexity of higher resolutions and physically large displays. Lower screen resolutions provide enough display quality to work efficiently, while larger physical spaces enable users to overview more content without being overwhelmed. To enhance user input on LHRDs in order to interact with large information pieces, we built working prototypes and analyzed their performance in controlled lab studies. We showed that eye-tracking based manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing can enhance target pointing to distant targets. MAGIC pointing is particularly beneficial when the interaction involves visual searches between pointing to targets. We contributed two gesture sets for mid-air interaction with window managers on LHRDs and found that gesture elicitation for an LHRD was not affected by legacy bias. We compared shared user input on an LHRD with personal tablets, which also functioned as a private working space, to collaborative data exploration using one input device together for interacting with an LHRD. The results showed that input with personal tablets lowered the perceived workload. Finally, we showed that variable movement resistance feedback enhanced one-dimensional data input when no visual input feedback was provided. We concluded that context-aware input techniques enhance the interaction with content displayed on an LHRD so it is essential to provide focus for the visual content and guidance for the user while performing input. To understand user expectations of working with LHRDs we prototyped with potential users how an LHRD work environment could be designed focusing on the physical screen alignment and the placement of content on the display. Based on previous work, we implemented novel alignment techniques for window management on LHRDs and compared them in a user study. The results show that users prefer techniques, that enhance the interaction without breaking well-known desktop GUI concepts. Finally, we provided the example of how an application for browsing scientific publications can benefit from extended display space. Overall, we show that GUIs for LHRDs should support the user more strongly than GUIs for smaller displays to arrange content meaningful or manage and understand large data sets, without breaking well-known GUI-metaphors. In conclusion, this thesis adopts a holistic approach to interaction with LHRDs in office environments. Based on enhanced knowledge about user perception of large visual spaces, we discuss novel input techniques for advanced user input on LHRDs. Furthermore, we present guidelines for designing future GUIs for LHRDs. Our work creates the design space of LHRD workplaces and identifies challenges and opportunities for the development of future office environments.Item Open Access Erstellung von CryptoExamples in C#(2018) Rusam, NicoKontext: Kryptografie und Softwaresicherheit werden in der heutigen Zeit immer wichtiger. Jedoch fehlt Softwareentwicklern häufig das Wissen über diese Themengebiete. Das führt dazu, dass entwickelte Software immer wieder Sicherheitslücken aufweist oder von vornherein nicht sicher ist. Daraus können Angriffe resultieren, was zu einer Gefahr für Länder, Firmen und Privatleute werden kann. Es existieren kryptografische Bibliotheken die entsprechende Algorithmen bereitstellen. Jedoch sind diese häufig schlecht dokumentiert und Beispiele, die zeigen wie die Bibliothek verwendet wird, sind veraltet. Die Probleme mit den veralteten Beispielen reichen von geänderten Schnittstellen bis hin zur Verwendung von nicht mehr sicheren kryptografischen Methoden. Ziel: Für die Plattform CryptoExamples werden sichere Codebeispiele für die Sprache C# entwickelt. Zusätzlich werden Richtlinien erarbeitet, die die Anforderungen der Plattform abdecken, sodass mit deren Verwendung die Entwicklung weiterer Beispiele einfacher wird. Verfahren: Für verschiedene kryptografische Szenarien werden Codebeispiele erstellt und fortlaufend verbessert. Währenddessen fließen die Erfahrungen, die beim Erstellen der Beispiele gesammelt wurden, in die Erstellung der Richtlinien ein. Ergebnis: In dieser Arbeit werden Beispiele für die Sprache C# und die Richtlinien für die Umsetzung weiterer Beispiele mit dieser Sprache erarbeitet. Die Beispiele decken die Szenarien Hashing, digitale Signatur, symmetrische Verschlüsselung sowie asymmetrische Verschlüsselung ab. Des Weiteren werden 25 Richtlinien für die Sprache C# angepasst oder neu erstellt. Fazit: Auf der Plattform CryptoExamples wird der Beispielcode bereitgestellt, von dem garantiert wird, dass er sichere kryptografische Verfahren verwendet. Außerdem werden die Beispiele fortlaufend aktualisiert, womit die zukünftige Sicherheit des Codes gewährleistet wird. Zusätzlich gibt es Richtlinien für die Entwicklung neuer Beispiele. Damit soll die Einhaltung der Anforderungen der Plattform sichergestellt werden. Zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt ist die Plattform noch recht klein, sodass die Auswahl an Beispielen zu verschiedenen Programmiersprachen stark eingeschränkt ist.Item Open Access Efficient fault tolerance for selected scientific computing algorithms on heterogeneous and approximate computer architectures(2018) Schöll, Alexander; Wunderlich, Hans-Joachim (Prof. Dr.)Scientific computing and simulation technology play an essential role to solve central challenges in science and engineering. The high computational power of heterogeneous computer architectures allows to accelerate applications in these domains, which are often dominated by compute-intensive mathematical tasks. Scientific, economic and political decision processes increasingly rely on such applications and therefore induce a strong demand to compute correct and trustworthy results. However, the continued semiconductor technology scaling increasingly imposes serious threats to the reliability and efficiency of upcoming devices. Different reliability threats can cause crashes or erroneous results without indication. Software-based fault tolerance techniques can protect algorithmic tasks by adding appropriate operations to detect and correct errors at runtime. Major challenges are induced by the runtime overhead of such operations and by rounding errors in floating-point arithmetic that can cause false positives. The end of Dennard scaling induces central challenges to further increase the compute efficiency between semiconductor technology generations. Approximate computing exploits the inherent error resilience of different applications to achieve efficiency gains with respect to, for instance, power, energy, and execution times. However, scientific applications often induce strict accuracy requirements which require careful utilization of approximation techniques. This thesis provides fault tolerance and approximate computing methods that enable the reliable and efficient execution of linear algebra operations and Conjugate Gradient solvers using heterogeneous and approximate computer architectures. The presented fault tolerance techniques detect and correct errors at runtime with low runtime overhead and high error coverage. At the same time, these fault tolerance techniques are exploited to enable the execution of the Conjugate Gradient solvers on approximate hardware by monitoring the underlying error resilience while adjusting the approximation error accordingly. Besides, parameter evaluation and estimation methods are presented that determine the computational efficiency of application executions on approximate hardware. An extensive experimental evaluation shows the efficiency and efficacy of the presented methods with respect to the runtime overhead to detect and correct errors, the error coverage as well as the achieved energy reduction in executing the Conjugate Gradient solvers on approximate hardware.Item Open Access Vision assisted biasing for robot manipulation planning(2018) Puang, En YenSampling efficiency has been one of the major bottlenecks of sampling-based motion planner. Although being more reliable in complex environments, Rapidly-exploring Random Tree for example often requires longer planning time than its optimisation-based counterpart. Recent developments have introduced numerous methods to bias sampling in configuration-space. Gaussian mixture model, in particular, was proposed to estimate feasible regions in configuration-space for low-variance task. Unfortunately this method does not adapt its biases according to individual planning scene during inference. Therefore, this work proposes vision assisted biasing to adapt biases by changing the weights of Gaussian components upon query. It uses autoencoder to extract features directly from depth image, and the resulted latent code is then used for either nearest neighbours search or direct weights prediction. With a modified pipeline, these extensions show improvements on not only the sampling efficiency but also path optimality of simple motion planner.Item Open Access Modeling recommendations for pattern-based mashup plans(2018) Das, SomeshData mashups are modeled as pipelines. The pipelines are basically a chain of data processing steps in order to integrate data from different data sources into a single one. These processing steps include data operations, such as join, filter, extraction, integration or alteration. To create and execute data mashups, modelers need to have technical knowledge in order to understand these data operations. In order to solve this issue, an extended data mashup approach was created - FlexMash developed at the University of Stuttgart - which allows users to define data mashups without technical knowledge about any execution details. Consquently, modelers with no or limited technical knowledge can design their own domain-specific mashup based on their use case scenarios. However, designing data mashups graphically is still difficult for non-IT users. When users design a model graphically, it is hard to understand which patterns or nodes should be modeled and connected in the data flow graph. In order to cope with this issue, this master thesis aims to provide users modeling recommendations during modeling time. At each modeling step, user can query for recommendations. The recommendations are generated by analyzing the existing models. To generate the recommendations from existing models, association rule mining algorithms are used in this thesis. If users accept a recommendation, the recommended node is automatically added to the partial model and connected with the node for which recommendations were given.Item Open Access Evaluating mobile monitoring strategies for native iOS applications(2018) Sassano, MatteoThe success of a company is often influenced by the service and by a product they offer. If the supplied service or the offered product is a software system, a good performance will be essential to achieve desired goals such as high product sales. Slow applications and server responses due to performance issues, may cause a negative chain reaction. The amount of actual and potential users will probably decrease, and so does the users’ satisfaction and the number of product sales. Application Performance Management (APM) is necessary to avoid these cases. The usage of APM could help detecting eventual software problems and to remediate performance issues afterwards. Meanwhile, the usage of mobile devices, e.g., smartphones and tablets, for accessing enterprise systems is increasing in every application category. This expands the space where a potential software problem might be located in. Performance of mobile applications is more influenced by external circumstances, e.g., user location and access from bandwidth limited networks. APM tools not supporting mobile monitoring, are not able to recognize the mentioned performance issues. There are different implementation strategies for application monitoring agents such as call stack sampling and full source code instrumentation. The goal of this thesis is to research agent strategies for mobile devices, to develop an own version of each agent type, to analyze and evaluate the different agent approaches in combination of various mobile application types. The evaluation will be done with a series of experiments, by measuring the outcoming overhead of the developed agents, integrated into previously selected representative iOS open-source applications.Item Open Access API diversity for microservices in the domain of connected vehicles(2018) Gajek, FabianWeb services in the domain of connected vehicles are subject to various requirements including high availability and large workloads. Microservices are an architectural style which can fulfill those requirements by fostering the independence and decoupling of software components as reusable services. To achieve this independence, microservices have to implement all aspects of providing the services themselves, including different API technologies for heterogeneous consumers and supporting features like authentication. In this work, we examine the use of a service proxy that externalizes these concerns into a sidecar that provides multiple APIs and common service functionality in a platform-independent manner. We look at how different kinds of API styles and technologies solve selected classes of problems and how we can translate between API technologies. We design and implement a framework for building gateways that enables the creation and composition of reusable components, in the fashion of Lego bricks, to maximize flexibility, while reducing the effort for building gateway components. We design and implement selected components of common and reusable API functionality enabling us to build a reference setup with a service proxy as a sidecar using our framework. Finally, we evaluate the proposed solution to identify benefits and drawbacks of the approach of using our framework as a service proxy. We conclude that the examined approach provides benefits for the development of many polyglot microservices, but splitting one service into two components adds additional complexity that has to be managed.Item Open Access Benutzerinteraktion in Virtual Reality mittels Eye Tracking(2018) Groß, AnjaIn den vergangenen Jahren nahmen VR und AR eine immer bedeutendere Rolle sowohl im wirtschaftlichen, als auch forschungsorientierten Bereich ein. Die verfügbare Hardware wurde zunehmend erschwinglicher und leistungsfähiger. Im Hinblick auf den Bereich der Immersive Analytics und der auftretenden Ermüdungserscheinungen bei herkömmlichen VR Systemen, beschäftigt sich diese Arbeit mit Eye Tracking als Eingabemechanismus für VR Anwendungen. Es werden zuerst allgemeine Probleme bei System, welche Eye Tracking als Eingabemedium verwenden, dargestellt, sowie bereits entwickelte Formen der Interaktion mithilfe von Eye Tracking vorgestellt. Mithilfe des FOVE VR HMD, welches über integriertes Eye Tracking verfügt, wird ein im Rahmen dieser Arbeit entwickelte Prototyp zur Manipulation von Objekten im virtuellen Raum vorgestellt. Die Interaktionen bestehen dabei aus einer Kombination aus Eye Tracking Input und einfachen Eingaben in Form eines Knopfdruckes eines Controllers statt. Mithilfe einer Benutzerstudie werden die entwickelten Konzepte evaluiert und anschließend die Ergebnisse präsentiert und diskutiert. Auf dieser Basis werden mögliche Verbesserungen der Konzepte und Erweiterungen der Anwendung vorgestellt. Die aus dieser Arbeit gewonnenen Erkenntnisse können ebenfalls für AR Anwendungen verwendet werden.