Das iwe-Institut für Wasser und Energiemanagement an der Hochschule Hof hat eine Metastudie zum Stand der Digitalisierung der Wasserwirtschaft in den deutschsprachigen Ländern durchgeführt. Das Fazit: Die Digitalisierung ist zu einem festen Bestandteil technologischer Lösungen und strategischer Entscheidungen geworden. In einer dreiteiligen Serie wird die WasserWirtschaft über die Ergebnisse der Studie berichten. In dieser Ausgabe beginnen die Autoren mit einer Übersicht: Wo finden sich Digitalisierungselemente verstärkt wieder und welche digitalen Lösungen dominieren aktuell?

Mobility is a central element of the new networked world, and customers expect highly integrated features in their vehicles and want to be able to use services or features at any time in a highly integrated manner. As a result, the entire automotive industry is facing a major change process, both technological as well as in its own core business processes and functions. This chapter examines the impact of this transition on the conduct and sustainability of IT projects in the German automotive industry. Information distilled from in-depth interviews with industry practitioners reveals how project management methods, tools, and culture have to evolve, as value chains in the industry are re-evaluated and re-defined. The chapter puts forward a framework for the interaction of project management methods and digital technologies to achieve sustainable project processes and outcomes. It is hoped this may act as a building block for future research in this field to advance the transitioning of the industry and its inherent IT projects to a more sustainable future.

When it comes to addressing climate change, water is at the centre of many aspects and measures. Especially in urban areas where the negative consequences of heavy rainfall events and prolonged dry periods are increasing worldwide. In the future, urban water management will have to examine water use in terms of its various objectives and provide alternative water resources for different purposes (groundwater, river water, rainwater, treated wastewater, etc.). The technological networking of water management systems requires intelligent and digital systems to manage the challenges of the future. Similarly, the contribution of water management to global CO2 reduction through more efficient procedural treatment processes will only succeed with adequate digital systems ((Balogun, 2020), (Kröhling, 2017), (Randhahn, 2020)) Researchers at Hof University of Applied Sciences have investigated the status quo of digitization within the first meta-study in the German-speaking water industry (WaterExe 4.0 project) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The research was conducted with four methodologically different sub-surveys (literature and market research, survey, expert interview and workshops). 120 industry participants took part in an online survey and 30 water sector experts were interviewed.

Kaum ein Aspekt der digitalen Transformation wird bis heute so intensiv diskutiert, wie das Phänomen der „Plattformökonomie“, der Wirkungsweise der Geschäftsmodelle der großen Tech-Unternehmen wie Google, Facebook oder Amazon. Die daraus erwachsenen Konsequenzen greifen tief in die wirtschaftlichen Ökosphären ein, Plattformmechanismen haben sich inzwischen aber auch als gesellschaftspolitischer Faktor etabliert, insbesondere bei der Nachrichtenverbreitung und der politischen Meinungsbildung. Plattformen sorgen für mehr Effizienz in der Distribution, auf den Produktmärkten wie auch bei der Informationsbereitstellung, aber gleichzeitig eben auch für mehr Konzentration und weniger Ausgewogenheit. Sie haben die Eigenschaft, den Wettbewerb in einem Angebots-Monopol zu absorbieren. Ihr Handlungsprinzip lässt sich dabei durchaus als parasitär beschreiben, mit weitreichenden Folgen für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.

Citizen science allows involving interested citizen in the entire research process in science. In the past, various citizen science projects have been performed in different research fields, especially in human medicine. We conducted a rapid scoping review to determine which citizen projects in human medicine already used software-based systems to engage citizens in the research process. Furthermore, we analysed which of the software-systems are publicly available, especially in the field of rare diseases, how citizens can participate using those tools and whether the usability was rated by the participants. To get insights for our project “SelEe (Seltene Erkrankungen bürgerwissenschaftlich erforschen)”, which is a citizen science project in rare diseases funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), we aimed to identify projects in this research area. We searched PubMed for articles between 2011 and 2021 and performed a title- and abstract screening, as well as a full-text screening. Finally, 12 studies were identified in different research areas like public health, genetic research and infectious diseases. We could not identify any study directly associated with rare diseases. None of the studies investigated usability of those systems. Furthermore, five publicly available citizen science software-systems were identified. Three of them are general systems that allow creating, operating, managing citizen science projects and including citizens in the research process. In further investigations, we will check and compare these systems, if they are appropriate for use in our SelEe-project.

This paper presents the design and the results of a novel approach to predict air pollutants in urban environments. The objective is to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-based system to support planning actors in taking effective and adequate short-term measures against unfavourable air quality situations. In general, air quality in European cities has improved over the past decades. Nevertheless, reductions of the air pollutants particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ground-level ozone (O3), in particular, are essential to ensure the quality of life and a healthy life in cities. To forecast these air pollutants for the next 48 hours, a sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder model with a recurrent neural network (RNN) was implemented. The model was trained with historic in situ air pollutant measurements, traffic and meteorological data. An evaluation of the prediction results against historical data shows high accordance with in situ measurements and implicate the system’s applicability and its great potential for high quality forecasts of air pollutants in urban environments by including real time weather forecast data.

Digitalization and Industry 4.0 have led organizations to adopt technology-driven approaches in various business segments. Integrated environments in organizations mandate the requirement of having in-depth knowledge of process, data and technology integration. This is also a requirement for organizations to develop towards sustainability, as data-driven business models can help to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Hence, universities have to provide skills in Industry 4.0 and in developing integrated systems across companies. Furthermore, online learning methods are required to prepare students for distributed teams in global industries. Consequently, you need a holistic approach to teach integrated thinking and working in distributed teams at the same time. The problems addressed by this paper are how to teach complex and heterogeneous aspects of Industry 4.0 concepts and how to integrate data-driven business processes. The paper describes didactic solutions with reduced complexity in a fictitious company to understand interrelationships between business segments in end-to-end processes. A virtual teaching concept encourages the exchange between students in distributed teams. Empirical runs of the concept show that students develop own approaches, learn to estimate the complexity of integrated systems and develop practical skills to find suitable solutions in a value-adding network. 

This paper presents a way for the hypertext community to gain strength and contribute to other fields of research by joining forces. It discusses the challenges that need to be addressed with respect to geographically scattered students and scholars, interdisciplinary courses, and students with various foreknowledge. We propose the INTR/HT project, a platform that aims for bringing hypertext scholars and students together worldwide. The interdisciplinary approach fosters creativity in the context of hypertext and is valuable for educating and supporting the next generation of hypertext scholars and researchers.

Modern browsers, as we know them from the Web, are used to query and present a variety of different resources. This usually happens by traversing links (i.e., URIs) in hypertext documents. The creation of new links however, is impossible to ordinary users, because they usually are recipients, but not owners of the received resource. In this paper, we demonstrate a browser plugin called "Weblinks", which offers its users an additional and rich linking layer over the existing Web. This enhances the notion of links as strings (i.e., URIs) in today's Web context to links as rich objects (n-ary, unidirectional, or bidirectional), which can be created, traversed or shared by anyone using the Weblinks browser plugin.

Information retrieval systems support users in finding relevant information in data sets. List layouts are wide-spread, but spatial layouts are catching up. User studies that systematically show their benefits for users are missing. We report on a comparative between-subject study with 43 participants comparing a spatial layout with a list layout. One group performed a task with a system providing semantic visualization, and the other group performed the same task with a system without semantic visualization. The results show that the users of the spatial layout had significantly more interaction with the system in shorter time, with a slightly higher outcome and higher satisfaction.

Der Einsatz von Künstlicher Intelligenz und maschinellem Lernen verändern die Bedingungen für Mediaplanung nachhaltig. Das wirkt sich gerade auch auf das Daten basierte Programmatic Advertising aus.

Auch Minderjährige können nun gegen COVID-19 geimpft werden. Was müssen Ärzte bei der Indikationsstellung beachten? Welche Besonderheiten gelten bei Aufklärung und Einwilligung? Und was passiert, wenn Eltern und Kind unterschiedlicher Meinung über die Impfung sind?

Human Factors in Hypertext 2021 (HUMAN'21) is the 4th workshop in this series. It is sponsored by ACM SIGWEB and is associated to the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2021, which took place between August 30th and September 2nd as a virtual event. HUMAN'21 took place on August 30th-the conference's workshop day. This year's workshop is held in a difficult time: the global Corona pandemic makes attending meetings or traveling risky for our health. It almost seems as a contradiction to the 2019 ACM Hypertext motto "tear down the wall". However, today's digital media enables us to communicate over distance or even attend larger meetings online. This also opens the question about the role of hypertext as a medium for communication-a perfect topic match for the HUMAN workshop series, which has a user-centric focus on hypertext. The user-centric view not only includes user interfaces and interaction, but also discussions about hypertext application domains. Furthermore, the workshop raises the question of how original hypertext ideas (e.g., Doug Engelbart's "augmenting human intellect" or Frank Halasz' "hypertext as a medium for thinking and communication") can improve today's hypertext systems. As such, the HUMAN workshop also appreciates previous work on hypertext systems. In order to support this, we invite researchers to give demos of vintage hypertext systems. Last year we started with Norman Meyrowitz presenting Intermedia; this year Mark Anderson has been invited to give a demo of Microcosm.

Are the success factors of Research-based spin-offs (RBSO) transferable to the context of Corporate spin-offs (CSO)? We posit that certain success factors are independent from the spin-off’s institutional background and are viable for both types of ventures. This study provides comparative, comprehensive and concrete evidence on the performance of both types of entrepreneurial venturing. Our comparative approach, taking in RBSOs and CSOs at the same time, contains a comprehensive set of success factors and provides concrete results in the form of management lessons for spin-offs in general. We apply logistic regression and non-parametric propensity score matching and use data from a RBSO sample and a CSO sample from Germany. We find that factors such as age, starting size, the introduction of regional and national market novelties as well as business contacts with the parent are success factors for both kinds of spin-offs and therefore highly relevant for both types, independent of the context from which they emanate.