Mario Pichler

Software Competence Center Hagenberg | SCCH · Data Analysis Systems Group

For any tourism organisation or company, it is a necessity to know about the factors that are influencing tourists’ travel decisions. The question, however, is how to model and represent heterogeneous influence factors in a way that a) human decision makers can easily understand, and b) allows for computer-based simulation and diagnoses to aid deci...

In this commentary, we introduce the Austrian eTourism research project insightTourism that investigates the gap between increasing spontaneity of tourists' booking and activity decisions and the long-term investment and planning of the tourism sector.

In order to provide practically applicable tools for winter mountaineers to manage uncertainties and to reduce associated risks underneath an acceptable residual risk level, several risk strategies and decision frameworks have been developed. While all of these frameworks are comprehensively described in books, booklets and small paper cards, no fo...

Credible computerized approaches to situation assessment for natural disaster management strongly depend on exploitable expert knowledge. A key problem, however, is to find a suitable knowledge representation method that a) is easy to understand and usable by domain experts of different disciplines, and b) is seamlessly usable by computer-based rea...

Information about the user's environment offers new opportunities and exposes new challenges in terms of time-aware, location-aware, device-aware and personalized applications. Such applications constantly need to monitor the environment - called context - to allow the application to react accordingly to this context. Context-awareness is especiall...

This work shows how we have designed and implemented a digital platform for Smart Villages, which can serve as a knowledge management and decision support system for rural stakeholders, including planners, administrative staff, and decision-makers. Our platform is intended to help pilot a smooth transition into a sustainable administration, help to...

The amount of sensors in process industry is continuously increasing as they are getting faster, better and cheaper. Due to the rising amount of available data, the processing of generated data has to be automatized in a computationally efficient manner. Such a solution should also be easily implementable and reproducible independently of the detai...

Automatic matching of job offers and job candidates is a major problem for a number of organizations and job applicants that if it were successfully addressed could have a positive impact in many countries around the world. In this context, it is widely accepted that semi-automatic matching algorithms between job and candidate profiles would provid...

In recent times, the digitalization of urban areas has got considerable attention from the public. As a side effect, there has also been great interest in the digitalization of the rural world or the so-called Smart Villages. Smart Villages refer to the improvement of infrastructure management and planning to fight against depopulation and low popu...

One of the major problems in the manufacturing industry consists of the fact that, when manufacturing a product, many parts from different lots are supplied and mixed to a certain degree during an indeterminate number of stages, what makes it very difficult to trace each of these parts from its origin to its presence in a final product. In order to...

We are focusing on working environments with an increasing role of AI for solving problems involving detection and classification of patterns and events, optimization, predictions or providing other services that generally are associated with human intelligence such as reasoning and learning. Such AI transformed working environments raise new requi...

The concept of smartness is an essential topic that was only recently extended to rural areas. Although smartness is already incorporated strongly into numerous urban environments, differences between cities and villages prevent direct transfer of the methods and tools used for the smart transformation. To increase the awareness of newly developed...

The constantly increasing electricity and energy demand in residential buildings, as well as the need for higher absorption rates of renewable sources of energy, demand for an increased flexibility at the end-users. This need is further reinforced by the rising numbers of residential Photovoltaic (PV) and battery-storage systems. In this case, flex...

In this work, we have developed the first version of a smartness assessment framework that allows the representatives from a village to make a self-evaluation of its current status based on smartness criteria identified by an international group of experts. The framework allows a detailed evaluation of six different aspects including Mobility, Gove...

One of the major problems in the manufacturing industry consists of the fact that many parts from different lots are supplied and mixed to a certain degree during an indeterminate number of stages, what makes it very difficult to trace each of these parts from its origin to its presence in a final product. In order to overcome this limitation, we h...

This paper provides a snapshot of the globally ongoing decentralization of (business) relations in the energy sector. This tendency can be observed in other domains as well and is accompanied by new digital technological developments. Blockchain technology is assigned disruptive potential when it comes to realize those decentralization ideas. This...

With the advent of Industry 4.0, many companies aim at analyzing historically collected or operative transaction data. Despite the availability of large amounts of data, particular missing values can introduce bias or preclude the use of specific data analytics methods. Historically, a lot of research into missing data comes from the social science...

This paper provides a snapshot of the globally ongoing decentralization of (business) relations in the energy sector. This tendency can be observed in other domains as well and is accompanied by new digital technological developments. Blockchain technology is assigned disruptive potential when it comes to realize those decentralization ideas. This...

Semantic similarity measurement aims to determine the likeness between two text expressions that use different lexicographies for representing the same real object or idea. In this work, we describe the way to exploit broad cultural trends for identifying semantic similarity. This is possible through the quantitative analysis of a vast digital book...

This paper investigates the potential use of a network of distributed battery storage systems to provide flexibility in the form of imbalance energy to a balancing group (BG). A methodology to calculate the flexibility potential of such a network is introduced and applied to a simulated battery storage network (BSN) consisting of 89 storage units....

By the end of 2015, more than 36,000 battery storage systems in combination with PV systems had been installed in Austria and Germany. As yet, these battery storage systems are mainly used to increase the on-site consumption of local PV generation. However, charging the battery without considering the current generation of the PV system and the cur...

This work reports on hitherto experiences gained in an ongoing research effort aiming at the development of a tourism knowledge model. The overall research challenge, to which this work contributes, is about identifying relevant tourism knowledge artefacts and finding a suitable way to represent existing tourism knowledge in an integrative way. Cur...

Kurzfassung Das Wissen über Einflussfaktoren auf die Lawinengefahr (LG) ist in vielen Büchern beschrieben. Für Unerfahrene ist es allerdings schwierig, den Überblick über die oftmals komplexen Zusammenhänge zu behalten und eigene Entscheidungen im Gelände hinsichtlich ihrer Qualität zu überprüfen. Dieser Beitrag stellt einen Ansatz vor, um Experten...

Der Großteil der Lawinenunfälle in Österreich betrifft touristische Lawinen, also Unfälle die vorwiegend bei Freizeitaktivitäten im freien Gelände passieren. Schnee- und Lawinenexperten, alpine Vereine sowie Alpinschulen sind daher bemüht, durch entsprechende Ausbildungsprogramme und Lehrmaterialien ihr Wissen zur Einschätzung der Lawinengefahr an...

Semantic similarity measurement aims to determine the likeness between two text expressions that use different lexicographies for representing the same real object or idea. In this work, we describe the way to exploit broad cultural trends for identifying semantic similarity. This is possible through the quantitative analysis of a vast digital book...

Industrial manufacturing environments are typically supported by a backbone network of technical control- and business information systems. To carry out daily work routines like maintaining technical processes or managing business information like sales and orders, different user groups as, e.g., IT management or engineers, need different forms of...

We introduce RDFreduce that provides a framework for creating semantic aggregations based on RDF datasets. The vision of this work is to enable operational IT management to build custom semantic aggregates (aggregated views) on different domains in a sustainable and repeatable way. Semantic aggregates, as applied in this work, provide abstractions...

Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, einen Einblick in das Thema ‚Vulkanismus am Rhein‘ zu geben. Die Arbeit dient als Vorbereitung für die in der Zeit zwischen 16. – 30. August 2012 von zwei Professoren des Instituts für Geographie der Universität Innsbruck und einer Gruppe von Studenten absolvierten Rhein Exkursion, und ist Teil des dafür erstell...

The main contribution of this work is an analysis of recently appeared agent-based modeling (ABM) approaches to study the implications of climate change on tourism dynamics. This analysis is motivated by criticism on other studies investigating the impacts on (winter) tourism for being primarily supply side (i.e. the destinations) oriented, while n...

Im Rahmen der Lehrveranstaltung Exkursion zur Regionalen Geographie am Institut für Geographie der Universität Innsbruck fand von 5. – 9. September 2011 eine Exkursion zum Thema Gletscher der Ötztaler Alpen statt. Aus geomorphologischer Sicht wurden dabei auch die Themen (alpiner) Permafrost und Blockgletscher diskutiert. Das Ziel des vorliegenden...

Im Rahmen der Übungen zur Physischen Geographie am Institut für Geographie der Universität Innsbruck im Sommersemester 2011 bestand die Aufgabenstellung darin, eine geomorphologische Kartierung des Gletschervorfeldes des Waxeggkeeses und angrenzender Bereiche durchzuführen. Als Gletschervorfeld wird der Bereich von der größten neuzeitlichen Gletsch...

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, einen Überblick über die nacheiszeitliche (holozäne) Waldgrenzentwicklung im Alpenraum zu geben. Zunächst werden dafür Begriffe zur Waldgrenze vorgestellt, denen im weiteren Verlauf der Arbeit besondere Bedeutung zukommt. Im Anschluss daran werden drei Fallstudien zur holozänen Waldgrenzvariabilität im Alpen...

Die Zielsetzung des vorliegenden Beitrags ist es, einen Überblick über die klimatischen Verhältnisse im Exkursionsraum Ötztal zu geben. Die Orte Niederthai und Vent werden dabei näher betrachtet. Explizit werden die im Gebirgsraum maßgeblichen Klimafaktoren mit ihren messbaren Auswirkungen auf die jeweiligen Klimaelemente näher untersucht. Es soll...

This doctoral thesis takes a critical view on the increasing technology penetration of our everyday life. Often, it is not clear what these technologies are good for and what value they bring to our life. Especially in Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) ― a young research discipline investigating the ubiquity of computing technology in our everyday lif...

Presentation slides of PhD thesis "A Novel View on Requirements Engineering for Ubiquitous Computing: The Innovation Perspective" at July, 4, 2007, JKU Linz.

Nowadays tracking data from activity checkpoints of unit transactions within an organization’s business processes becomes an important data resource for business analysts and decision-makers to provide essential strategic and tactical business information. In the context of business process-oriented solutions, business-activity monitoring (BAM) arc...

In this paper, we are emphasizing our perfect appreciation of using visualization means in requirements engineering as key success factor in any complex (software) development project. We are discussing our experiences with requirements engineering visualization, in the large part gained in the course of a three years multidisciplinary software dev...

Presentation slides of the workshop paper "Business Process-based Requirements Modeling and Management" at the Requirements Engineering Visualization Workshop in Minneapolis, 2006.

The objective of this paper is to report on the challenges and experiences gained during a three years multidisciplinary software development project in the insurance domain, focusing on the employed requirements process. Although, there has been consensus on an agile development process among the project partners, this approach stands in some cont...

Presentation slides of the paper "Agile Requirements Engineering for a Social Insurance for Occupational Risks Organization: A Case Study" at RE 2006 Conference in Minneapolis/St.Paul, Minnesota, USA.

The aim of the paper is to outline a doctoral thesis investigating the question about how members of outdoor communities can be provided with community-specific services while carrying out community activities. Strong emphasis is laid on describing the background and motivation to justify the selection of the research problem. The research problem,...

Presentation slides of the Doctoral Colloquium paper "Context-based Community Support" at Context 2005 Conference in Paris, France.

In this paper, we describe our contribution to the question about how to provide added-value to mobile people through novel mobile applications. The experienced advantages and drawbacks of various ap-proaches, we applied to identify the information needs of mobile people, are presented. These approaches are scenario development, field studies, and...

Presentation slides of the workshop paper "Communities in the Wild: A Promising Domain for Novel Mobile Applications" at C&T 2005 Workshop Design of Relevant Novel Scenarios in Milano, Italy.

Developers and information professionals must have a clear understand-ing of the information needs of mobile people, in order to provide them with ade-quate information access means. However, compared to designing systems for static indoor contexts, mobility of people raises new challenges for user needs identifica-tion. The aim of this article is...

Context-Awareness plays a major role for the success of mobile applications; this is true for context-aware (software) services as well as for the used devices themselves. Therefore, within this paper, we want to discuss the usage of context-specific mobile devices as target platforms for new mobile applications. Nowadays, the primary application p...

Presentation slides of the workshop paper "Designing for the Wild: There is More than Mobiles, Smartphones, PDAs and Tablet PCs" at HCI in Mobile Guides Workshop in Glasgow, 2004.

This paper describes the idea of subdividing the real world into areas that represent a specific context, like railway stations, airports, sport stadiums, concert halls etc., and to provide mobile people therein with services that are context specific. The suitability of the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) Service Platform and Multi-User Pu...

Presentation slides of the Doctoral Colloquium paper "Enabling Contextual Services in Wireless Context Area Networks" at Pervasive 2004 Conference in Linz and Vienna, Austria.

This article advocates the viewpoint that a close cooperation between the artificial intelli- gence community and researchers studying context-aware mobile and ubiquitous appli- cations will be indispensable for the future success of context-aware applications. The notions of context and context-awareness are introduced. It is shown that typical is...

This paper provides a survey of application domains for experience logging and sharing. The process of capturing and sharing of experiences is discussed for each of the given examples. It is made obvious that it makes a difference if someone can rely on a pervasive computing environment with sensors, actuators, and computing components for capturin...

This paper tries to address the question of how to provide added value to mobile people through mobile applications. Our suggestion for the next generation of value added mobile applications following the support for (i) communication and (ii) information access, is (iii) to provide mobile people with services that are very specific for the context...

Presentation slides of the workshop paper "Enabling Communities in Physical and Logical Context Areas as Added Value of Mobile and Ubiquitous Applications" at the Mobile HCI 03 Workshop on Mobile and Ubiquitous Information Access in Udine, Italy, 2003.

Presentation at Summer School on Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, August 7-14, 2002, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany: In this talk I want to ask the question about the open issues (what is still missing?) that have to be solved in order to achieve spontaneous interaction and interoperation in mobile and ubiquitous systems. Is service discovery still a...

Presentation slides of the workshop paper "Considerations and requirements for tools supporting mobile teams" at the Mobile Teamwork Workshop in Vienna, 2002.

Presentation slides of the workshop paper "Bringing Together People: Social Benefit of Mobile Ad Hoc Applications" at the Mobile Ad Hoc Collaboration Workshop in Minneapolis, 2002.

The market penetration on the part of mobile devices (e.g. mobile phones, personal digital assistants, etc.) supporting wireless communication and interaction opens high-potential application areas in our everyday lives. Furthermore, we think this will cause dramatically changes in the way people interact with each other and therefore we have to in...

Product development processes increasingly happen in cooperations, where cooperation partners are dislocated in time and space. This leads to the fact that teamworkers have to be more and more mobile and brings us to the presumption that the support of spontaneous information exchange and mobile ad hoc interaction among team members will gain in im...

To remain competitive on the market it is increasingly necessary to make business decisions ever faster. As work is becoming more flexible and mobile this implies that required information is accessible from everywhere at anytime. In addition, by thinking of our daily information overload, there is strong desire for more personalized information in...