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To obtain more financial freedom, universities and especially their chairs and institutes have to establish a well functioning and reliable financial management and accounting system. Currently, chairs have different technical solutions for these systems, each of which must react individually to external changes and require a high effort to adapt their reports. Thus, they rely on either commercial accounting software, which is not tailored to their specific needs, or standard spreadsheet software making use of complex sheets and cross-references which are error-prone and hard to adapt. We have used domain models and code synthesis methods to create an enterprise information system. This paper shows how models reflect user requirements, evolve with changing requirements and how they impact an agile, model-driven engineering process. The resulting system simplifies the planning of financial management and accounting by university chairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the Human Behavior Monitoring and Support (HBMS) project has been to actively assist individuals in activities of daily living and other situations using users' own episodic knowledge. This knowledge is represented and preserved in HBMS in the HCM, the Human Cognitive Model, expressed in the domain specific modelling language HCM-L. HCM also forms the base for reasoning, model matching and support state visualization. Moreover, in the HBMS-System conceptual models are also used to define interfaces to activity recognition systems, support clients and data available in the Semantic Web. Thus, we see HBMS-System as an application of the Model Centered Architecture (MCA) paradigm. This paper describes how the project evolved over time, its main challenges and milestones, its main processes and their dependencies, and what is going to happen in the next future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive impairments are a rising challenge in society. Everybody has experienced events of forgetting what one was going to do when entering a certain room, or where one has put the keys, the purse or the smartphone. Such problems mostly occur under stress or fatigue. And they may increase with age up to diseases like senile dementia or Alzheimer which affect mental tasks like memory or reasoning, and thus often lead to the need of comprehensive assistance. Due to the societal change, the number of people suffering from such impairments is continuously growing. Cognitive modeling may provide human-centered solutions for this challenge since a cognitive model of a person's behavior, regarding activities of daily living, can serve as a knowledge base for support actions. This paper presents a Domain Specific Modeling Language for Ambient Assistance: The Human Cognitive Modeling Language (HCM-L). It was developed to preserve the episodic memory of a person in the form of conceptual behavior models including relevant context. The work is part of the Human Behavior Monitoring and Support (HBMS) project, a research project in the field of Ambient Assisted Living funded by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung gGmbH. HBMS aims at monitoring a person's behavior using activity recognition techniques, generating models from their output, and providing focused and timely support by the use of intelligent reasoning mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as an editorial to the corresponding special issue setting out solutions and future directions of privacy preservation and data protection in information system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the possible relationships among dog owners' perceptions of, and emotional and behavioral responses to, problematic situations involving their dogs, and investigates differences in these in different subgroups of owners. The dominant sequence of the interaction is defined as perception-cognition-emotion-behavior, with this study focusing upon perceptual, emotional and behavioral responses. Fifty-five dog owners were presented with 16 descriptions of everyday problematic situations with a dog, and were asked to record the degree to which they elicited emotions such as irritation, anger, sorrow, and anxiety. They were further asked which disciplinary actions they would use in each situation. The results form a general exploratory model of perceptual-emotional-behavioral responses, within which the two most significant sub-models were power assertion and encouragement/comfort. Some gender differences in these models were also discovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study was to investigate the magnitude and structure of situation-specific owner emotions and behavioral reactions in problematic situations involving a dog. The following questions were addressed: 1. What is the magnitude of situation-specific owner emotions and reactions in a group of dog owners?, and 2. What is the structure of situation-specific owner emotions and reactions in a group of dog owners? In addition, the study considered whether these emotions and behavioral reactions differed between male and female owners. Fifty-five dog owners were presented with 16 descriptions of possible situations with a dog and were asked to record the degree to which they elicited 13 emotions (such as irritation, anger; sorrow, anxiety). They were further asked which disciplinary reactions, such as punishment, demanding compliance, they would use in each situation. Factor analysis of the emotions and behavioral reactions resulted in three emotional factors: anger/initation, compassion/anxiety and compunction, and two behavioral factors: power assertion and encouraging behavior. Though most would modify behavior using power assertion, about 10% of the dog owners chose not to enforce compliance of the rules but would prevent further problems by using encouragement. Investigation of the male and female owners resulted in slightly different scores, especially for the group of the male owners. These results are related to the literature concerning child discipline in problematic situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]