Universität Passau

The social upheavals happening in Western countries through a drifting apart of society—creating a wealthy minority on the one hand and increasing insecurity on the other—carry a great potential for conflict especially when they seem to become structurally entrenched. Starting with the development and the causes of social inequality today, the process of social reproduction needs to be examined closely, the goal being a step-by-step comprehension of upward mobility in the internet age. To this end, the acquisition of knowledge and qualification (according to Pierre Bourdieu and Martina Löw, among others) must be put in the larger context of socialisation and its spatial contingency in order to be able to identify group-specific mechanisms of privilege and discrimination more thoroughly.

This chapter presents (personalised) data as commodities and demonstrates the related contexts of utilisation. Making concrete the possibilities of recursive reference in the data economy, we return to the physical environment: Using commercially traded data for the cities of Berlin, Munich and Essen, an exemplary and empirical study examines in what manner a data-based logic of utilisation reaches the different districts and their inhabitants and the implications this carries for socialisation and the overall social question.

This final chapter sums up the mechanisms of social stabilisation using a summary diagram, clearly highlighting again the three types of social reproduction (“ternary recursivity”) in the digital age presented in the study. The outlook summarises the changing spatial structures and raises the following question: Which strategies and demands could the identified losers of the digital transformation use for their purposes in a situation where their opportunity for social advancement is increasingly curtailed by the data economy?

Examining the entrenched inequality of opportunity between privileged and disadvantaged segments of society from the vantage point of digitalisation is a matter of urgency. The promise of individual technological empowerment should have an impact on the entire society and provide especially those who are disadvantaged with new opportunities. This guiding question will be elaborated on in the following, highlighting the special relevance of a spatial perspective. With a view on the chapters following, the subsequent approach will be laid out.

This chapter analyses the terms of action and structures in the virtual space, comparing them with the rules of the real space. The initial separation between real space and cyberspace is artificial yet intentional, with the aim of illustrating space-related opportunities. A view of the new opportunities in connection with digitalised reals spaces, and in particular with virtual spaces, also includes the problem that obtaining digital contents can be realised in society only in an unequal manner. In this context, educational research has identified serious limitations which are identified as digital divides and will be looked at from different angles. Incorporating these findings, it will be examined to what extent digitalisation can withstand the previously highlighted restrictions of capital accumulation and in which areas of daily life it is possible to dissolve the existing spatial and social rules.

Personalised data are used in different economic contexts of utilisation to target users with the right products, information and services. The channels through which person-related data are obtained are as various as the possibilities of approaching people individually. While the extensive knowledge about users provides the topic for research looking into (government) surveillance or the loss of privacy, this chapter focuses on the significance of self-mirroring: What are the social implications of targeting every user individually when people are confronted with the economic expression of their own dispositions? Numerous examples will illustrate that such a recursive reference is possible and widely used for the majority of day-to-day activities, online as well as offline.

In recent years, numerous expert contributions point to the importance of ethical or moral sensitivity in the course of therapeutic decision-making processes. It is striking that the scientific terminology has not yet reached a uniform standard and needs clarification. The article aims to clarify what and how an ethical differs from a moral sensitivity. With the help of the theory of communicative action, it tries to explain why subjective ethical sensitivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be able to make a morally justified judgment in the sense of shared decision-making. Methodologically, the article is intended as a scientific commentary from the perspective of applied practical philosophy. It attempts to incorporate the current results of the empirical study literature and to embed them in a discussion of the basic understanding of the terms used. After the Patients’ Rights Act took the first steps towards shared decision-making models by implementing the idea of partnership, current guidelines in oncology take this path further. Although current studies still show deficits in the integration of such models into everyday care, they have the potential to overcome the difference between subjective ethical sensitivity and morally justified decisions.

This article explores the impact of the Nobel Prize in Literature on the acquisition policies of literary archives. Focusing on laureates and the twenty-first-century fate of their manuscripts, it argues that the international reach of the prize is mirrored by a contemporary archival landscape that is at once global and unequal. Although many archives concentrate on collecting material from the linguistic and cultural context of which they themselves form part, the past two decades have also seen the emergence of a competitive international market for the papers of authors whose writings are marked – through high-profile distinctions such as the Nobel Prize – as belonging to the world literary canon. Illustrating its larger argument with the help of three case studies (Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee, Gabriel García Márquez), the article suggests that archivization consecrates laureates’ papers as global heritage at the same time that it reinforces the logic of literary nativism.

This brief editorial gives a short, two-page overview of the ASHES 2021 workshop. It shall serve as an introduction for this special issue at JCEN.

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag erörtert Spannungsfelder, die sich aus der fortwährenden digitalen Transformation der Gesellschaft und dem „ChatGPT-Schock“ derzeit neu formieren. Anhand des Beispiels der Erschließung handschriftlicher Dokumente werden diese Felder analysiert und es wird versucht, die verschiedenen sich ändernden Rollen und Verständnisse auszuloten. Dies umfasst die Anteilseigner aus Bibliothek als traditionellem Informationsdienstleister, Plattformbetreiber als Mediatoren, Wissenschaft wie auch Gesellschaft, wobei sich die Technik zunehmend vom passiven Werkzeug zum handelnden Akteur wandelt. Aus diesen Überlegungen heraus wird eine Zukunftsperspektive einer prozess-orientierten Wissensschaffung abgeleitet, zu der alle genannten Akteure als „Co-Produzenten“ beitragen.

In task switching, response repetitions (RRs) usually yield performance benefits as compared to response switches, but only when the task also repeats. When the task switches, RR benefits vanish or even turn into costs, yielding an interaction between repeating versus switching the task and the response (the RR effect ). Different theoretical accounts for this RR effect exist, but, in the present study, we specifically tested a prediction derived from binding and retrieval accounts. These maintain that repeating the task retrieves the previous-trial response, thus causing RR benefits. Retrieval is possible due to the task-response binding formed in the previous trial. We employed a task-switching paradigm with three response options that allowed us to differentiate error types. Across two experiments ( N = 46 and N = 107) we showed that response-repetition errors in response-switch trials were more likely in task repetitions than in task switches, supporting the notion that the previous response is retrieved by the repeating task, despite being wrong. Such a finding is in line with binding and retrieval accounts but cannot be easily accommodated by the competing theoretical accounts. Thus, the present study indicates task-response binding as an important mechanism underlying RR benefits in task repetitions.

Detecting intrusions in modern network infrastructures is challenging because of the growing size and, along with it, the increasing complexity of structure. While several approaches try to cope with those challenges, few address problems arising from heterogeneity and changes within those infrastructures. We present a self-forming community approach that integrates federated learning (FL) with distributed intrusion detection systems based on anomaly detection. It autonomously separates the anomaly detection models into communities at runtime with the goal of mutual information exchange using FL techniques to improve detection accuracy. Community formation is realized via the introduction of a similarity score between each pair of models, indicating which models would profit from aggregation. Through a re-evaluation of the similarity score during runtime, changes in the deployed infrastructure can be considered, and the communities adapted. Our experiments show our approach reported no false alarms when evaluated with a real-world dataset and an intrusion detection rate of up to 97%.

Die Corona-Pandemie wirkte mit ihrer Herausforderung, Hochschule ohne Präsenzlehre zu gestalten, als Beschleuniger für Digitalisierung und Innovation in der Hochschulbildung. Um den Lernerfolg in den Modulen Mathematik sowie Informations- und Wissensmanagement zu steigern, setzt die TH Deggendorf in den Prozessen des Blended-Learnings schon länger Methoden der KI wie Benutzermodellierung, Adaptivität, maschinelle Lernverfahren, Chatbots als Teletutoren und semantische Texterkennung ein und erprobt diese. Nun wurde ein Internet of Things (IoT)-Framework für Sensordaten von Smartphone oder Smartwatch für die Lehre entwickelt. Die IoT in Education 4.0-Architektur liefert Echtzeitdaten über die Lernumgebung und die Empfindungen der Studierenden bei der Durcharbeitung bestimmter Lerneinheiten, die für die Gestaltung eines Education 4.0 Learning Labs ausgewertet werden können

Orthogonal drawings, i.e., embeddings of graphs into grids, are a classic topic in Graph Drawing. Often the goal is to find a drawing that minimizes the number of bends on the edges. A key ingredient for bend minimization algorithms is the existence of an orthogonal representation that allows to describe such drawings purely combinatorially by only listing the angles between the edges around each vertex and the directions of bends on the edges, but neglecting any kind of geometric information such as vertex coordinates or edge lengths. In this work, we generalize this idea to ortho-radial representations of ortho-radial drawings, which are embeddings into an ortho-radial grid, whose gridlines are concentric circles around the origin and straight-line spokes emanating from the origin but excluding the origin itself. Unlike the orthogonal case, there exist ortho-radial representations that do not admit a corresponding drawing, for example so-called strictly monotone cycles. An ortho-radial representation is called valid if it does not contain a strictly monotone cycle. Our first main result is that an ortho-radial representation admits a corresponding drawing if and only if it is valid. Previously such a characterization was only known for ortho-radial drawings of paths, cycles, and theta graphs (Hasheminezhad et al. in Australas J Combin 44:171–182, 2009), and in the special case of rectangular drawings of cubic graphs (Hasheminezhad et al. in Comput Geom 43(9):767–780, 2010), where the contour of each face is required to be a combinatorial rectangle. Additionally, we give a quadratic-time algorithm that tests for a given ortho-radial representation whether it is valid, and we show how to draw a valid ortho-radial representation in the same running time. Altogether, this reduces the problem of computing a minimum-bend ortho-radial drawing to the task of computing a valid ortho-radial representation with the minimum number of bends, and hence establishes an ortho-radial analogue of the topology-shape-metrics framework for planar orthogonal drawings by Tamassia (SIAM J Comput 16(3):421–444, 1987).

Polar slice sampling, a Markov chain construction for approximate sampling, performs, under suitable assumptions on the target and initial distribution, provably independent of the state space dimension. We extend the aforementioned result of Roberts and Rosenthal (Stoch Model 18(2):257–280, 2002) by developing a theory which identifies conditions, in terms of a generalized level set function, that imply an explicit lower bound on the spectral gap even in a general slice sampling context. Verifying the identified conditions for polar slice sampling yields a lower bound of 1/2 on the spectral gap for arbitrary dimension if the target density is rotationally invariant, log-concave along rays emanating from the origin and sufficiently smooth. The general theoretical result is potentially applicable beyond the polar slice sampling framework.

We propose a unified abstract architecture for describing IT security goals and risks within AI systems. The architecture facilitates effective interdisciplinary communication among AI developers, data scientists, and security professionals. The architecture is abstract enough to cover a wide range of AI methods (not limited to machine learning) while it can still be used to sufficiently describe and map existing AI-specific attacks. It emphasises the importance of identifying at-risk processes or at-risk data within the AI system for a targeted increase of the overall system’s security. This systematic approach could help to optimise resource allocation while achieving desired protection targets for AI systems.

The design of the Internet of Things (IoT) system is a complex process, not only in terms of the balance between resource consumption and extensive functionality but also in the context of security. As various technical devices are now widespread and have access to all kinds of critical information, they become one of the main targets for attackers. Consequently, it is vital to consider the IT security aspect during the development of any system. A practical way to do it is to use security patterns. There are many different patterns that can address particular problems, but not all of them are suitable due to the wide range of requirements in such systems. In this paper, we present a systematic collection and categorisation of IoT-applicable security patterns and analyse gaps in recent research works related to security. We provide a catalogue of 61 patterns organised in a top-down approach that follows the World Forum’s IoT Architecture Reference Model, this collection is able to play an important role in the future development of secure IoT solutions.

ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have attracted hundreds of millions of users and have become part of the public discourse. Many believe that such models will disrupt society and lead to significant changes in the education system and information generation. So far, this belief is based on either colloquial evidence or benchmarks from the owners of the models—both lack scientific rigor. We systematically assess the quality of AI-generated content through a large-scale study comparing human-written versus ChatGPT-generated argumentative student essays. We use essays that were rated by a large number of human experts (teachers). We augment the analysis by considering a set of linguistic characteristics of the generated essays. Our results demonstrate that ChatGPT generates essays that are rated higher regarding quality than human-written essays. The writing style of the AI models exhibits linguistic characteristics that are different from those of the human-written essays. Since the technology is readily available, we believe that educators must act immediately. We must re-invent homework and develop teaching concepts that utilize these AI models in the same way as math utilizes the calculator: teach the general concepts first and then use AI tools to free up time for other learning objectives.