Working in collaborative groups and teams now represents the practice predominantly adopted by organizations aspiring to create innovation. However, this trend towards boundless collaboration at work is harshly criticized for a resulting discrimination of introverted employees - called the New Groupthink. According to this, introverts suffer from working conditions that inhibit individual and quiet work. The current shift towards collaboration overall elicits lower creativity and achievement levels due to the resulting suppression of introverts. This inefficiency hence depicts a relevant issue for companies by reason of creativity and innovation's decisive stake in todays' turbulent environments. Therefore, this quantitative research investigates whether hybrid brainstorming can equate introverts with extraverts by balancing their idea contribution. It suggests solutions to both introverts, with regards to enhancing their stake in ideation, and companies, with regards to how to apply ideation methods in most efficient ways.

Without any doubt, creating links and navigational trails is fundamental to hypertext. The Web is the widest spread representative among all systems in the history of hypertext, although its underlying core concept is kept simple. This is why the Web's widely used link functionality is naive, supporting only embedded, unary and unidirectional links. A strength of the Web is its extensibility, giving us the opportunity to augment the current functionality of links. We showcase a browser plugin, which enables users to create and share complex links over the existing Web. Furthermore, we discuss the CB-OHS Mother, its link model and how this relates to existing work. The implementation adopts latest standardization efforts and is an update to older attempts of enabling external link services for the Web.

Machines in processing plants are frequently generating failures that must be manually fixed by the operators. Machines often lack advanced assistance systems for to address these failure cases. While some new developments try to use only machine data, in many applications, the human knowledge of the operators can be very useful. In this paper, we propose a new assistance system used to merge machine data with the operator’s knowledge. This system is tested with an industry partner. The test results are used to create design considerations, compare different reasoning algorithms, and check the influence on the machine downtime.

Supported titanium dioxide catalysts were used in a photocatalytic flat cell reactor to remove organic micropollutants from real wastewater. Catalysts based on stainless steel mesh with a porous coating made of titanium dioxide nanoparticles with predominantly anatase modification were used. The influence of the retention time, and light output, and the effect of hydrogen peroxide on the degradation were examined. The kinetics of the degradation of the parent substances was determined by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. As a result, first-order degradation kinetics could be confirmed for all substances. The irradiance had no linear influence on the degradation of the compounds. Hydrogen peroxides were added to the wastewater to be treated, as electron acceptors and boosters, and alone had no great oxidative effect on the parent substances. The combination of photocatalysis with the addition of hydrogen peroxide as an electron acceptor had great synergetic effects which can reduce the required energy of the process through a short retention time. The process is suitable for the removal of micropollutants from wastewater.

This paper proposes a novel approach to facilitate air quality aware decision making and to support planning actors to take effective measures for improving the air quality in cities and regions. Despite many improvements over the past decades, air pollutants such as particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ground-level ozone (O3) pose still one of the major risks to human health and the environment. Based on both a general analysis of the air quality situation and regulations in the EU and Germany as well as an in-depth analysis of local management practices requirements for better decision making are identified. The requirements are used to outline a system architecture following a co-design approach, i.e., besides scientific and industry partners, local experts and administrative actors are actively involved in the system development. Additionally, the outlined system incorporates two novel methodological strands: (1) it employs a deep neural network (DNN) based data analytics approach and (2) makes use of a new generation of satellite data, namely Sentinel-5 Precursor (Sentinel-5P). Hence, the system allows for providing areal and high-resolution (e.g., street-level) real-time and forecast (up to 48 hours) data to inform decision makers for taking appropriate short-term measures, and secondly, to simulate air quality under different planning options and long-term actions such as modified traffic flows and various urban layouts.

Fingerprinting is a ready-to-use technology that exploits the diversity and complexity of today’s personal computing devices. Since fingerprinting leaves little to no trace, Do Not Track (DNT) policies are hard to enforce. The upcoming ePrivacy Regulation must consider this technological reality. In this opinion paper, we analyse technical use cases for device fingerprinting as an easy-to-deploy and hard-to-detect tracking technology. The EU has a longstanding tradition in strong data protection norms. To keep this high standards, we call on to the legislator to act, and illustrate vital points that must be considered in the legislative process.

Given the changes in the general conditions it is the purpose of this textbook to provide marketing professionals as well as my own marketing students with the most important theoretical, conceptual and methodological principles of marketing that are relevant in the digital era.
Marketing is a company’s market-oriented management approach which aims to offer customers better solutions to their problems than their competitors – and to generate profits within this transaction process. Marketing is therefore much more than just advertising, attractive brochures and websites that are designed to promote a company’s own products and encourage customers to buy them. This abridged understanding of marketing, which still prevails in Germany, is closely linked to the production-oriented German economy.
However, the world has changed over the past three decades: Globalization and technological progress have not only led to intensified competition and to an increasing convergence of products worldwide in terms of their functionality, quality and design. In the meantime, the market also demands skills in which companies in Germany have, for a long time, invested too little, namely in the digital transformation of the company.
More than ever, companies are faced with the challenge of moving away from their product orientation and instead placing the customer more at the centre of their strategic and operational considerations. Above all, companies should pay more attention to the wishes and needs of their customers in order to better understand their customers and to be able to respond to customer needs with attractive products or solutions. Due to its comprehensive understanding of customers and markets, Marketing is particularly suitable to contribute considerably to systematically developing its company’s competitive advantages and thus successfully differentiating it from its competitors.