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Proseminar Technische Informatik

Lecturer: Georg Wittenburg, u.a.
Office Hours: n.V.
Location: K60 K21
Time:

• Vorbesprechung: Dienstag, 14.10.2008, 13:00 Uhr (c.t.)
• Blockseminar: Donnerstag, 29.1.2009, 10:00 - 18:00 Uhr (s.t.), Freitag, 30.1.2009, 10:00 - 18:00 Uhr (s.t.)

ECTS-credits: 3 (2 SWS)
KVV page

Content

The Proseminar Technische Informatik expands on other Bachelor-level lectures with focus on technical computer science. Students pick a topic related to current technology and/or partially covered in the previous lectures and write a report (12 pages) discussing corresponding questions. At the end of the term, the participants present their results in the form a short talk (20 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A) in a meeting. This course places special emphasis on dealing competently with academic and primary literature, structure and legibility of the report, and the style of the presentation (50% of final grade). During the term, there will be deadlines for status reports, but no meetings of the complete seminar group.

Schedule

• 14.10.2008:
  • Organizational Meeting - 13:00 Uhr (c.t.), Raum K60
  • Read the literature linked below.
• 17.10.2008:
  • Last day to choose a topic via e-mail to Georg Wittenburg.
• 3.11.2008:
  • Hand in a preliminary outline and reference list to your advisor via e-mail.
• 19.1.2009:
  • Your report must be handed in to your advisor via e-mail (see below for formatting instructions).
• 26.1.2009:
  • Your slides must be handed in to your advisor via e-mail (see below for formatting instructions).
• 28.1.2009:
  • Hand in possibly revised version of your report and slides to your advisor and to Georg Wittenburg via e-mail.
• 29./30.1.2009:
  • The seminar will take place. Attendance is mandatory.

Attention: Students have to meet all deadlines listed in the timetable. Otherwise, she/he will lose the right to take part in the final presentation.

The talks will be given according to this schedule:

Topics

Advisor: Michael Baar

Operating System Design - Now and Then
Describe the evolution of basic operating design principles like multi-tasking, scheduling, resource arbitration etc. Compare the basic ideas with the solutions in two current operating systems (see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1303.PDF).
Assigned to: Christian Behnert (report, slides)

Advisor: Bastian Blywis

Digital Rights Management
Since several years, content producers and providers try to protect their intellectual property with the help of DRM systems. Discuss how these work. What are their failures? How are content providers, hardware manufacturers, and consumers affected by DRM? Is there a solution that considers the rights and interests of all involved groups and offers a fair solution?
Assigned to: Lyudmila Vaseva (report, slides)

Operating System Kernels
The kernel is the central component of most operating systems. Discuss which kinds of kernel architectures do exist, their features, and advantages. You are required to give a detailed overview of the current Linux, BSD, and Windows kernels and do a sound comparison. Also, have a look at the network protocol stacks. What alternatives do exist to a kernel based architecture?
Assigned to: Patrick Bitterling (report, slides)

Version Control Systems
Large-scale software development is hardly imaginable without the usage of version control systems. It is your task to discuss the following systems: CVS, AccuRev, Aegis, Arch, Bazaar, BitKeeper, ClearCase, CM+, CMSynergy, Co-Op, Darcs, Git, LibreSource Synchronizer, Mercurial, Monotone, OpenCM, Perforce, PureCM, SourceAnywhere, Subversion, Superversion, Surround, svk, Team Foundation Server, Vesta, and Visual SourceSafe. Discuss their feature sets and how these are implemented. Do the version control systems fit for general or particular application scenarios? Can they be used to save file system states?
Assigned to: Stefan Otte (report, slides)

Advisor: Norman Dziengel

Survey: Recommended Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices for Websites
The process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage to increase its relevance on specific search engines is called search engine optimization. The main search engine is google at the moment, due to this we are focusing on google. SEO is a key Web Marketing activity and and considers how search engines work and what people are looking for and how they will do this. As the success of SEO often depends on the structure of a website it is a good idea to optimize websites during the development than afterwards. Websites should use keywords and webmasters should know the meaning of Keyword Density, Webcrawler, Meta Tags, Alt-Tags, Google AdWords in order to position the website in a quiet good manner. How is google ranking a webside and which techniques should be used (find more than described above) in order to reach a reasonable high ranking for the examined site and how do they work? Focus on recommended and legal techniques.
Assigned to: Ralf Kuschel (report, slides)

Survey: Black-Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Practices for Websites
SEO techniques that break search-engine rules or present fake content to get a higher page rank by unethical means are known as black-hat practices. Several techniques like Doorway-Pages, IP-Cloaking, Logfile-Spam, Content-Spam, Bait-and-Switch are in use. Those techniques are unfair competition and therefore lead to an exclusion of the google-index if detected. Due to this it is of interest to know the facts of those techniques by mistake. Furthermore it is important to protect websites being sacrificed by those techniques as it is possible to support other sites unknowingly manipulating their google ranking. Collect and describe techniques that manipulates the google ranking like those noted above and find protections if necessary and possible. How is it possible to avoid mistakes in this context. Which techniques are still in use and how is google detecting them?
Assigned to: Damla Durmaz (report, slides)

Advisor: Thomas Hillebrandt

DVB-T2: 2nd Generation Terrestrial
All over the world DVB-T has proved itself as a brilliantly successful method of broadcasting digital terrestrial TV. At the end of June 2008, the DVB Steering Board approved the DVB-T2 specification, a second generation digital terrestrial transmission system and submitted the specification to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) for standardisation. So what exactly is DVB-T2 going to offer that DVB-T does not? The goal of this topic is to evaluate the technical aspects of DVB-T and DVB-T2 and to highlight the differences among them. Estimate the likelihood of success of DVB-T2 around the world and especially on the german market in the near future and in the long term.
Assigned to: Daniel Seidenstücker (report, slides)

Advisor: Felix Juraschek

Next Generation Mobile Phone Platforms
The mobile phone market is currently making decisive turns as big players with a traditional IT background launch their new products, e.g. Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platform. On the other hand, established companies such as Nokia or RIM adapt their product line to the new requirements. The goal of this assignment is to qualitatively compare and to evaluate the technical merits of these approaches with a focus on system architecture (as opposed to user-visible features). Based on your evaluation you should be able to point out similarities and differences as well as areas for future improvements in system architecture.
Assigned to: Stephan Zeisberg (report, slides)

Advisor: Freddy Lopez Villafuerte

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Brief Introduction
Wireless sensor networks applications include wild life monitoring, earthquake and fire alarming, industry events recognitions and many military applications. Due to the limit characteristics in wireless sensor devices is difficult to put directly into practice security techniques from the traditional networks. In this seminar work the student will discover through an intensive research the challenges for the new mechanism which are leading in the security for wireless sensor networks.
Assigned to: Thomas Weißgerber (report, slides)

Parallel Multiprocessor system: The end of hardware miniaturization?
The develop of hardware for computer and another electronic devices it have been amazing grown up with the microelectronics and the creation of new techniques to put into a really small space millions of transistors and other electric devices. The aim of these seminar is to show the limit of the miniaturization on the electronic hardware (nanotechnology) which have caused the new tendencies to indoctrinate the parallel multiprocessor system.
Assigned to: Ferhat Beyaz (report, slides)

Advisor: Abd Al Basset Al Mamou (Reports must be written in English.)

An overview on Ad Hoc Networks
Mobile computers like Laptops and Personal digital assistances (PDAs) are communicating each other in an Ad Hoc way without any infrastructure required to establish a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET). This pro-seminar looks behind of the Ad Hoc network sense. Missions: 1. Prepare an overview of the Ad Hoc Networks, and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) 2. Their advantages and disadvantages. 3. The most important routing protocols used in these networks.
Assigned to: Martinus Dipobagio (report, slides)

An overview on Wireless Sensor Networks WSNs
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) become an interesting topic in both research and commercial domains because of their vast applications. This pro-seminar topic aims to get know Wireless Sensor Networks. Missions: 1. Prepare an overview of WSN (Components, network topology). 2. The strong and weak points in these networks. 3. The most important routing protocols used in these networks.
Assigned to: Fabian Nack (report, slides)

Advisor: Qasim Mushtaq (Reports must be written in English.)

An overview of Cognitive Radio (WRAN)
With the advent of more and more applications of wireless communications, the bandwidth and frequency assignment is becoming an issue. The IEEE 802.22 standard makes use of the already allocated frequency band by the VHF/UHF TV Broadcasting bands ranging from 54 to 862 MHz. This frequency reuse is on non interference basis. A study of this new technology and its current implementations and future applications will be the focus of this Proseminar topic.
Assigned to: Jessica Kahrs (no report)

Advisor: Tomasz Naumowicz (Reports should be written in English.)

Wireless Sensor Networks in Environmental Sciences
Research in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has primarily focused on hardware design, self-organization, various routing algorithms, or energy saving patterns. This trend is changing and an interest in real-world scenarios leveraging WSNs is now evident. Several research groups have started to deploy testbeds and there have already been some examples of the use of WSN in ecological research. Describe representative deployments and identify common issues and ways of addressing them.
Assigned to: Andreas Nuesslein (no report)

Advisor: Stephan Schröder

Injecting Dependencies instead of locating them
Highly coupled code has long been recognized as a marker for badly designed software. Therefore, in OOP you often program against an interface and not against an implementation. But how does an instance acquire an implementation of the interfaces it works with? After the long time use of the locator pattern a new pattern has emerged in recent years: dependency injection (aka Inversion of Control)! The aim of the topic is to compare different Java-IoC-Container like EJB3.0, Spring, Seam, Guice, HiveMind and PicoContainer in order to explore the Feature-space of Dependency Injection implementations.
Assigned to: Dennis Mitze (no report)

Advisor: Kirsten Terfloth

ePaper
Electronic paper, currently pushing into the market, has been a topic of intense research since the 1970's. With the promise to be more convenient to read, holding libraries efficiently on a chip yet cheap to manufacture and requiring only ultra-low power consumption, this technology is worth to be studied. Therefore, the goal of this work is to introduce the technological background of ePaper, discuss whether it has the potential to revolutionize mass media and give an outlook on future developments that can be anticipated.
Assigned to: Markus Rudolph (report, slides)

The Cloud vs. The Grid
Projects such as SETI@home where millions of private computers contribute their processing capabilities to help in searching for extra-terrestrial life have demonstrated the immense power that clusters of loosely-coupled systems, or grids, bear. Lately however, the term grid computing as well as the term cloud computing have both been discussed in the context of distributed computing. The goal of this work is to explain both concepts, discuss similarities and differences and provide an evaluation of likely application areas.
Assigned to: Björn Karger (report, slides)

Ultra-wideband (UWB)
In january 2008 the usage of UWB, a radio technology for short-range high-bandwidth data communication, has been approved for usage in Germany. The goal of this work is to take a look at the standard, describe how UWB works, evaluate it against other short-range technologies and outline usage scenarios that will benefit from it in the near future.
Assigned to: Lutz Freitag (report, slides)

Advisor: Heiko Will

Power Management in Linux Systems
2008 is the year of „green computing“. Modern Mikroprocessors have several techniques to save power and special low-power cpu's like intels Atom are selling in big marges. But energy saving is not only implemented in hardware but also in Software. Especially modern operation Systems have several mechanisms to put the energy consumption as low as possible. Some of these efforts directly make use of underlying hardware possibilities, other are completly implemented in software. For this assignment you have to take a deep look into the linux operation system and identify its power-saving options. Work out where and how energy consumption is decreased and what are the limits of these techniques.
Assigned to: Sascha Hanse (no report)

Advisor: Georg Wittenburg

USB vs. Firewire
With increasing data volumes to be transferred between peripherals and computers, bus systems have to adjust to these demands. The specification for USB 3.0 is expected to be published before the end of the year and Wireless USB as well as Wireless FireWire are hot topics in discussion forums. The goal of this topic is to contrast these different standards, provide insights on the current discussion on wireless counterparts and evaluate their likelihood of success as next generation standards.
Assigned to: Amadeus Perschau (report, slides)

The Technology behind Solid-state Drives
Solid-state drives (SSDs) have the potential to displace traditional hard-disk drives, especially in growing markets such mobile computing. But how do they actually work, and how can their architectural benefits be exploited? The goal of this assignment is describe in technical detail how SSDs operate and identify the new challenges faced by operating systems to make best use of this new technology. Ideally, your work will also discuss technical limitations and estimate the point in time when SSDs become a viable alternative for consumer products.
Assigned to: Matthias Niemann (report, slides)

Engineering Reliability
Reliability is a key property of large-scale and possibly distributed systems. While a well established body of knowledge comprising both theory and engineering practises exists, prominent cases of complete system failure still appear in the news in regular intervals. The goal of this assignment is gain insights into the tools reliability theory provides and how they can be applied in designing highly reliable systems. In your work, you should illustrate this process using several examples.
Assigned to: Sebastian Kalwa (report, slides)

Literature

• Searching for Literature, Writing a Report and Giving a Talk.
• Henning Schulzrinne. Writing Technical Articles. May 2006.
• Michael J. Hanson and Dylan J. McNamee. Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology. January 2000.
• Roy Levin and David D. Redell. An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions, or How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper. Operating Systems Review, 17(3), July 1983.
• Mark Jason Dominus. Conference Presentation Judo. Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC'02) Saint Louis, U.S.A., June 2002. (movie)
• Information for LNCS Authors - Proceedings and Other Multiauthor Volumes
• Freie Universität Berlin Corporate Design - Presentation Template

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