Wintersemester 2017/2018

Traditionally, the tool flow for the realization of digital circuits was purely design-centered, i.e. ensuring the quality through testing and verification was essentially considered as a post-processing step. To this end, mainly approaches based on simulation have been applied in the past. But the growing complexity according to Moore’s law showed the need for more powerful solutions. In the mid-80s, formal techniques have been proposed as a proper alternative – first in the area of verification. In the meantime, elaborated methods exploiting formal methods increasingly find application in industrial practice. This success was possible due to the improvements of the underlying solve engines, but also due to a better understanding of how to effectively apply them. Motivated by these results, applications of formal techniques beyond verification have been studied.

The talk gives an overview of the development of solve engines and automatic decision procedures over the past two decades. It is shown how the core techniques work and what the main paradigms behind a successful automatic engine are. Not only Boolean techniques, like BDD and SAT, are presented, but also extensions to word-level descriptions for decision diagrams and solve engines exploiting additional theories.

The developmental switch to sporulation in the unicellular eukaryote Physarum polycephalum is a phytochrome-mediated far-red light-induced cell fate decision. It synchronously encompasses the entire multinucleate plasmodial cell and is associated with extensive reprogramming of the transcriptome. By repeatedly taking samples of single cells after delivery of a light stimulus pulse, we quantitatively analyse differential gene expression to obtain a time series dataset for each cell. Computational analyses of the gene expression data reveal individually different single cell trajectories eventually leading to sporulation. Characterization of the trajectories as walks through states of gene expression allows to reconstruct Petri nets that model and predict the behavior of single cells. Structural analyses of these Petri nets reveals the global behaviour of the regulatory network, the differential regulation of individual genes, and it gives access to the quasipotential landscape that determines the developmental decision.

It is widely accepted that consumers move through different stages in their buying process, the so-called customer decision journey. Typically, consumers first realize they have a need, then they research and evaluate possible alternatives, and finally they purchase one of them. While the customer decision journey used to be quite organized in previous days, it has become a lot more complex and less predictable with the increasing digitalization. New technology, devices and other trends are increasing the possibilities consumers find, evaluate and purchase products and services. Today’s consumers are exposed to a multitude of touchpoints and a vast number of messages along their decision journey.

In order stand out from the crowd, firms more than ever need to address consumers with valuable messages. One very popular and theoretically appealing attempt in the context of online advertising is personalization, i.e., to tailor ad messages to a consumer’s individual needs and wants. At first glance, this makes sense: Personalization should render an ad more relevant and thus increase its effectiveness. However, in a series of research projects, we demonstrate that this does not necessarily hold true. More precisely, we highlight and explain under which conditions consumers respond favorably or unfavorably to personalization in online advertising along their decision journey.

Kunst ist eine Praxis, die sich durch Originalität und poetisches Vermögen auszeichnet. Ihr Wert manifestiert sich im Individuellen, der erkennbaren „Handschrift“ des Künstlers. Dem steht der Anspruch der Wissenschaft gegenüber, universelle Mechanismen zu beschreiben und diese anwendbar zu machen. Im Vortrag werden künstlerische Experimentalanordnungen und deren Artefakte vorgestellt, welche ermöglichen, die beiden epistemischen Kulturen gegenüberzustellen.

Der Vortrag beschreibt Entscheidungen in künstlerischen Experimentalanordnungen mit besonderem Focus auf einer Kooperation von Kunst und Neurowissenschaft. Hier möchten wir das Verhalten und Erscheinungsformen von Fliegen (Drosophila melanogaster) und Menschen vergleichen. Die Übertragung von Erkenntnissen bei Drosophila zum Menschen ist in der Medizin seit Jahrzehnten etabliert. Unser Projekt versucht sich an einer kulturellen Auswertung dieses Transfers.

Interfaces und Medien sollen Mensch und Fliege erlauben, die Welt des jeweils anderen zu erfahren. Das geschieht spekulativ; indem wir unsere menschliche Erfahrung auf Tiere übertragen und dann zurück zu uns, hoffen wir, anstatt eines hypothetischen Transfers von Erkenntnissen, eine gemeinsame, geteilte sinnliche Erfahrung zu ermöglichen mithilfe von Interfaces oder Apparaten. Indem wir die Äußerungen des einen auf das Reizfenster des anderen anpassen und Echtzeitkommunikation beziehungsweise Feedback mit diesen Tools ermöglichen, können wir überprüfen, ob und mit welchen Folgen sich Information aus der Welt des einen in die Welt des anderen transferieren lässt.

Der Vortrag entwickelt zunächst eine Perspektive, die Entscheiden als ein prozesshaftes soziales Geschehen betrachtet, das sich auf das Entwickeln von alternativen Handlungsoptionen zu einem bestimmten Thema, auf deren Bewertung sowie die Selektion einer von ihnen bezieht. Kulturen des Entscheidens bringen Entscheiden hervor; sie schließen Sprechakte und Erzählungen mit ein und weisen sowohl symbolisch-expressive als auch technisch-instrumentelle Aspekte auf. Kulturen des Entscheidens variieren nach dem Ort, an dem entschieden wird (Universität, Parlamente, Haushalt), und verändern sich über die Zeit hinweg. Ein zweiter Teil des Vortrags identifiziert deshalb Eigenschaften von Kulturen des Entscheidens, die in vormodernen Kulturen - in denen Entscheiden als Handlungsform weniger leicht verfügbar war - weit verbreitet waren. Gegenstand des dritten und letzten Teils des Vortrags sind schließlich Vorgänge, die langfristig eine moderne Entscheidungsgesellschaft hervorgebracht haben.

ow-driven amoeboid motility is a fundamental process in biology, and it provides and interesting paradigm for bio-inspired design because this motility mode is fast and robust to changes in the extracellular environment. This talk will examine the spatiotemporal coordination of traction stress and intracellular flow driving the amoeboid locomotion of Physarum polycephalum microplasmodia. The cytoplasm of physarum is a mechano-chemically active, complex fluid. Cytoplasmic flow and transport of signaling molecules (e.g. calcium ions) occur in a complex regime affected by both convection and diffusion, and take place on a time-dependent geometry caused by fluid-structure interactions at the cell length-scale. The active stresses in this fluid are regulated by calcium ions, whose propagation is in turn governed by the flow. We study this system by a combination of quantitative live-cell experiments and computational modeling to provide a complete characterization of the mechanics of amoeboid migration with high resolution (~ 5μm in space, ~ 1sec in time), and to explore fundamental design principles that could be extrapolated from this system.

Bio. Prof. del Alamo received a B.S., M.S. and Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering at the Polytechnic University in Madrid. He was a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and UC Sand Diego, where he received training in experimental cell mechanics and cardiovascular flows. Prof. del Alamo’s lab at UCSD focuses on biological fluid mechanics, cellular locomotion and non-invasive characterization of cardiac flows.