The monitoring of activities around the world that may be connected to the development or deployment of nuclear weapons is traditionally the purview of states, using their national technical means and in pursuit of national security interests. However, technological developments, such as the growth in internet connectivity, online publicly available data and tools, and cheap ubiquitous sensing from mobile cameras to commercial satellites, have extended the privilege of nuclear-activity monitoring to non-state actors that make up today’s so-called nuclear non-state open-source intelligence (OSINT) community. Based mostly in the U.S. and West, the civil-society actors work with open sources and methods and disseminate their analyses through public media channels to raise publics’ awareness of nuclear risks and shape policy responses.

While this development is laudable for its potential to expand efforts at guaranteeing government accountability and increasing nuclear safety and security, the thesis project argues that the community’s efforts contribute instead to the entrenchment of the nuclear order. The thesis project characterizes the order’s entrenchment through the increasing salience of nuclear weapons in military planning by nuclear-weapon states, the insufficiently questioned utility and legitimacy of nuclear deterrence for security and peace, the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear weapons use through accident, misperception, or miscalculation, and internationally inequitable access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

The thesis project advances the argument using Langdon Winner’s framework of ‘autonomous technology’, suggesting that entrenchment can be explained via the increasing autonomy of the large-scale technical system underpinning nuclear non-state OSINT, where the system comprises technologies, technical tools, and technical practices, as well as administrative and market processes. This increasing autonomy progressively removes the system from democratic control, undercutting social and political agency to guide choices around the use and development of the system. ‘Reverse adaptation’ is one mechanism Winner conceived to explain this technological autonomy. In this mechanism, human ends are adjusted to match the character of the available means instead of human ends controlling the technical means. Reverse adaptation is demonstrated in nuclear non-state OSINT along several dimensions: culture, market processes, the international outer space legal regime, the re-purposing of Cold War intelligence and military establishments, and the amplification of nuclear risk discourse and the consolidation of the nuclear risk paradigm in dealing with the nuclear predicament. Regarding the latter, the thesis project dwells on the nuclear non-state OSINT community’s practices’ promoting the paradigmatic nuclear risk reduction approach – an approach that is plagued with indeterminacy and accountability assignment challenges. These challenges provide powerful status-quo nuclear actors a blank cheque to assert their interests using the available means, thus strengthening the nuclear deterrence camp while staging “nuclear politics without politics.”

The thesis project also appropriates Michel Foucault’s ‘panopticon’ to further the understanding of the connection between nuclear non-state OSINT and the entrenchment of the nuclear order, primarily by highlighting the contemporary role of civil-society nuclear-activity monitoring efforts, despite or increasingly perhaps due to the community’s “global transparency” injunction, in consciously or inadvertently democratically legitimizing the policies of the most powerful actors in the nuclear order. Therefore, whereas Foucault was optimistic about the fate of panoptic institutions in view of their full transparency and amenability to democratic control, the thesis project shows how perceived transparency and democratic control of the panoptic mechanism aren’t sufficient safeguards against the entrenchment of the nuclear order.

The thesis project further discusses the challenges of the demand for global transparency as enabled by the extension of the surveillance privileges to civil society. Apart from material and political obstacles, it is shown how nuclear non-state OSINT practices have lent or are lending themselves to co-optation by powerful governments. While democratic legitimization is one consequence, the thesis project notes the implications in terms of the shielding of the states’ secrecy regimes from challenge and amplifying nuclear risk discourse in such a way as to justify the expansion of nuclear non-/anti-/counter-proliferation efforts at the expense of the fulfilment of nuclear disarmament obligations.

The thesis project concludes with a discussion of Winner’s conceptualization of human agency as applied to the context of civil-society nuclear-activity monitoring, with implications for technology assessment efforts. Connections are also made to contemporary forward-looking proposals for a potentially emancipatory practice of citizen monitoring of nuclear activities.

Given the increasing prevalence of extreme events due to climate change, it becomes imperative to be prepared for their impacts. Simulations of events in virtual environments can be used for the evaluation of these effects. This thesis focuses on how different scenarios can be integrated into virtual environments.

Currently, there is no wholistic approach for simulations of extreme events in virtual reality, but only stand-alone simulations of single (extreme) events. The goal of this thesis is to develop a modular framework for the simulation of scenarios. This enables scholars to integrate customized scenarios into their virtual research environments.

Following a standard software development process, I created a new software called “Situation Control Menu (SitCoM)”. The software has two main components: the visual simulation of scenarios and the impact side of those events. I developed the software in the game engine “Unity”, as the available research environment “Spectra” is based on Unity. In addition, I developed a guideline on how to use this software.

I tested the feasibility of SitCoM with a construction site scenario. The software turns out to be indeed feasible for simulations of (extreme) events. The visual side of an event can be integrated into SitCoM with ease, while programming experience is required for the impact side.

This work is concerned with the simulation of a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidar (light detection and ranging) sensor in the context of automated vehicles. In order to save time and resources, automated driving functions are increasingly safeguarded in virtual environments, which requires respective simulation models of the vehicle’s perception sensors. In the following, the simulation of the FMCW lidar sensor is split into the three components: environment simulation, signal propagation model and signal processing model. The latter represents the main focus of this work and includes all processing steps that are executed within the sensor housing. An externally provided ray tracer realizes the signal propagation model. At the beginning, it is necessary to define the requirements for the FMCW lidar signal processing model. For this purpose, an existing approach is adapted and further developed. As a result, it is specified that the model must be able to accurately reproduce the beam pattern, the range measuring and the direct radial velocity measuring. Next up, a model development methodology is introduced which envisages an iterative step-by-step implementation of the three mentioned requirements with continuous verification and validation. Accordingly, within each iteration the current model is verified and validated after the implementation step. Subsequently, the proposed model development methodology is utilized to realize the signal processing model. The beam pattern, the radial range measuring and the radial velocity measuring are implemented one after the other. For each of the three, experimental reference measurements are conducted to obtain real sensor data. After that, the signal processing model is used within the sensor simulation to re-simulate the real measurements in a virtual environment. To enable this, additional reference sensors such as a laser range finder are employed during the real measurements to precisely determine the range to the target. For the velocity reference measurements, an Automotive Dynamic Motion Analyzer (ADMA) captures the position and velocity of the moving target vehicle. The uncertainties of these reference sensors are also taken into account by the simulation. The resulting simulated data is directly compared to the real reference data to validate the model after each implementation. At the end, a partly validated model is presented that fulfills the basic functions of an FMCW lidar sensor. The findings of this work show that the developed methodologies and approaches are suited for the development of a less complex perception sensor model. However, further improvements are necessary to enable more sophisticated and fully validated models.

Aufgrund von normativen Regelungen der Resttragfähigkeit müssen häufig zeitintensive und kostspielige Bauteilversuche zur Bewertung des Tragverhaltens von Verbundsicherheitsgläser durchgeführt werden. Die statische Konstruktion im Einbauzustand muss bei den Versuchen nachgebildet werden. Um die Resttragfähigkeit von thermisch vorgespannten Scheiben besser absichern zu können, wurden Modelle entwickelt, die die Bruchstückgeometrien von unterschiedlich vorgespannten Scheiben prognostizieren sollen. Dabei stellte sich besonders ein Modell heraus, was auf Basis von experimentell ermittelten, konstanten Parametern zufriedenstellende Vorhersagen ermöglicht. Für eine realitätsnahe Abbildung von Bruchbildern müssen jedoch auch die räumlich abhängigen Bruchstückeigenschaften herangezogen werden. Das in dieser Arbeit entwickelte Modell ermittelt Bruchstückeigenschaften auf Basis stochastischer Annahmen und erzeugt eine ähnliche, räumliche Abbildung der Bruchstücke. Das Modell wurde in einer erweiterbaren Python-Umgebung implementiert und erlaubt so die Weiterentwicklung durch zukünftige Forschungsarbeiten.

The organic polymer has gained considerable interest in the field of bioelectronics during the last few decades. Organic materials based devices have several unique characteristics; low-cost and low thermal budget fabrication processes, tunable properties through chemical synthesis, flexibility and biocompatibility. Those entire features make organic materials suitable for new functionalities in comparison to their inorganic counterparts. Moreover, the attributes mentioned earlier give an additional degree of freedom to use organic materials in neuromorphic devices whose functions have the potential to induce biological realism in brain-inspired information processing. Nowadays, neuromorphic devices have attracted the interest in research and industry. The use of organic materials might lead to a new class of neuromorphic devices that has several applications in areas that range from brain-computer interfaces to circuits for local data processing in energy restricted environments. However, flexibility and biocompatibility helps to optimize the mechanical mismatch between electronics and biological substances that might be a new way of signal processing at the interface with biology.

In this thesis project, three-terminal organic polymer-based Organic Electrochemical Transistors (OECTs) have fabricated in cleanroom-based fabrication process. PEDOT:PSS and p(g2T-TT) thin-film polymers were used as active channel materials in OECTs. Ions inject from the liquid electrolytes by using a specific gate bias. The migrated ions modulate the entire bulk-volume conductivity of the organic polymer channel due to the strong coupling between ionic and electronic charges within the channel. Several electrical characterizations of OECTs were investigated in the presence of liquid electrolytes. The memory phenomena of PEDOT:PSS and p(g2T-TT) polymer-based OECTs were systematically studied in this work. It was observed that PEDOT:PSS organic polymer shows no memory properties/negligible memory, and p(g2T-TT) polymer exhibits memory phenomena due to its unique polymer structure. It also seen that the memory process in p(g2T-TT) polymer is a reversible process that can be return to its initial state by applying opposite gate bias. Beside it, the polymer's behavior also was investigated in contact with and without aqueous solutions. Additionally, it observed that p(g2T-TT) polymer is less hydrophilic compared to PEDOT:PSS due to its intrinsic properties. Multiple memory devices were fabricated at different times and reproducible memory phenomenon was observed in OECTs.

This thesis explores the application of the machine learning method physics-informed neural network (PINN) for the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process of pure copper. Given the process parameters, the accuracy of the predictions for relative densities of this method are compared to the traditional methods of a simple artificial neural network (ANN) and a linear regression. The results show the superiority of the PINN method in all tested scenarios, especially for complex and small data sets. Various data sets containing both literature data using red lasers and experimental data using a green laser are employed and show that a transfer of knowledge from red laser data to green laser data is feasible and beneficial. For red laser data from literature, the PINN method produces predictions with a mean squared error (MSE) of 4.58, as opposed to a MSE of 14.84 and 18.47 for a simple ANN and linear regression respectively. Using the transfer of knowledge for green laser data and reduced set of training data, PINN predictions exhibit a MSE of only 2.46, while a simple ANN and linear regression lead to a MSE of 7.29 and 5.19. These error values mean that for red laser data, the PINN method yields predictions that deviate 2.14 percentage points from the actual value and for green laser data the deviation is only 1.57 percentage points.

In addition, this thesis conducts a thorough literature review on the influence of process parameters on density, microstructure, and mechanical and electrical properties. This knowledge provides valuable insights for the further development of PINN for other outcomes, such as the microstructure and related functional properties. Furthermore, a test series for the LPBF process of copper using a green laser is presented for a laser spot diameter of 50 µm using an analytical approach focused on the geometry of the melting pools. This design of experiments serves as a first step for the systematic exploration of LPBF process parameters to achieve a broad analysis on their effects on density, microstructure, and functional properties.

This study pioneers in the application of PINN on the LPBF process of copper and through that, advances the research concerning the analysis of the in-situ influence through the modification of process parameters. The results help to further the LPBF process optimization in the face of lean process development with implications for the broader field of additive manufacturing.

Die vorliegende Arbeit fokussiert sich auf die Herausforderungen der Zement- und Kalkindustrie im Kontext des Klimawandels und der CO2-Reduktion. Diese Industrien stehen für erhebliche Treibhausgasemissionen und die Technologie der Kohlenstoffabscheidung und -nutzung (CCU) bietet vielversprechende Ansätze zur Bewältigung dieser Problematik. Das Hauptziel der Arbeit besteht darin, zu untersuchen, inwieweit der Baustoffsektor durch die Integration von CCU-Technologien sein eigenes CO2 nutzen kann. Dies wird anhand zweier Hauptfragen beleuchtet: Wie viel CO2 wird derzeit durch die Herstellung von Zementklinker und Kalk in Deutschland erzeugt und wie viel davon kann mithilfe von Kohlenstoffabscheidetechnologien in nachhaltige Baumaterialien umgewandelt werden?

Mithilfe einer Kohlenstoffbilanzierung ergab sich, dass jährlich 13,53 Mio. t unvermeidbare CO2-Emissionen durch die Zement- und Kalkindustrie entstehen. Diese können nur durch den Einsatz von Kohlenstoffabscheidetechnologien reduziert werden. Unter den Kohlenstoffabscheidetechnologien wurde das Projekt LEILAC als vielversprechendste Technologie identifiziert. Weiterhin wurden drei Baumaterialien identifiziert, die von der Kohlenstoffnutzung profitieren können, wobei die vollständige Integration der CCU-Technologie etwa 30% der unvermeidbaren Emissionen nutzen könnte. Die mineralische Karbonatisierung zeigt dabei ein besonderes Potential, CO2 langfristig in Baustoffen zu binden. Die Arbeit betont die Bedeutung einer ganzheitlichen Betrachtung der CCU im Rahmen der CO2-Wertschöpfungskette, wobei die Logistik als besondere Herausforderung betont wird. Die zukünftige Forschung sollte sich auf die Optimierung des Kohlenstoffeinsatzes in Baumaterialien, die Einheitlichkeit im Nutzungspotenzial sowie auf Ökobilanzierungen konzentrieren. Die Implementierung von CCU-Technologien wird nicht nur zum Klimaschutz beitragen, sondern auch nachhaltige Baumaterialien für die Zukunft schaffen.

Local-First Software has been proposed in 2019 by Kleppmann et al. [11] to address concerns with the growing number of cloud-only web-applications, as these move control from the end users to the cloud providers. Local-First Software stores all necessary data locally, and has the cloud only as an optional utility, to support cross-device synchronization and collaboration with other users.

Enterprise Applications are traditionally implemented with a client-server architecture, and are nowadays also following the trend of cloud-only web-applications. The move to the cloud raises similar concerns about vendor lock-in, resilience and business continuity, data protection, and privacy.

In this master thesis, we investigate if the ideals of Local-First Software can be applied to Enterprise Applications. We look at three business processes to understand the business requirements for Enterprise Applications. We then discuss how these match with the ideals of Local-First Software, and propose 12 requirements for Local-First Enterprise Applications. We will see that these still require centralized systems, albeit with a weaker dependency than traditional Enterprise Applications.

We develop a prototype to further analyze and discuss if and how Enterprise Applications can be developed based on the ideals of Local-First Software. For this, we develop two underlying libraries as a foundation for connection management and CRDT state replication over a hierarchical peer-to-peer network.

Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies might solve issues originating from research data being published by independent providers. For maximum benefit from these technologies, metadata should be provided as standardized as possible. The Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) is a W3C recommendation of potential value for Linked Data exposure of research data metadata.

The suitability of DCAT for institutional research data repositories was investigated using the TUdatalib repository as study case. A model for TUdatalib metadata was developed based on the analysis of selected resources and guided by a draft of DCAT 3. The model allowed for providing the essential information about the repository structure and contents indicating suitability of the vocabulary and, conceptually, should permit automated data conversion from the repository system to DCAT 3. A loss of expressiveness comes from the omission of dataset series. Conformance with DCAT 3 class definitions led to a highly complex model, thus creating challenges with actual technical realizations. A comparative study revealed simpler models to be used at two other repositories, but implementation of the TUdatalib or a similar model would have potential to improve alignment to DCAT specifications.

DCAT 3 was observed to be a promising option for Linked Data exposure of institutional research data repository metadata and the TUdatalib model might serve towards developing a general DCAT 3 application profile for institutional and other research data repositories.

Kalton and Mitrea characterized complex interpolation spaces of quasi-Banach function spaces as Calderón products if both interpolants are separable. We show that one separability assumption may be omitted and establish a Wolff-reiteration result with one non-separable endpoint space.

Überraschung verweist auf eine grundlegende Charakteristik menschlichen Denkens: Es ist einerseits veränderlich und reagiert beständig auf neue Umstände und Erfahrungen, und es ist gleichzeitig stabil, so dass wir aus einmal gemachten Erfahrungen einen längerfristig verfügbaren Orientierungsrahmen für künftiges Handeln gewinnen, dem wir so lange vertrauen, bis uns eine neue Erfahrung eines Besseren belehrt. Dieses Verhältnis zwischen Plastizität und Stabilität wurde in der KI-Forschung oft als „Dilemma“ adressiert, da es bis heute nicht gelungen ist, es für das maschinelle Lernen auf eine geeignete Formel zu bringen. Nachzuspüren, wie die Fähigkeit, sich überraschen zu lassen, beschaffen ist und was sie für Voraussetzungen hat, ist auch philosophisch aus mehreren Gründen interessant. Als Phänomen des Bewusstseins erschließt das Überraschungsgeschehen auf spezifische Weise, wie wir selbst und die Welt uns in der Erfahrung gegeben sind. Als Geschehen, in dem uns Erwartungen, Überzeugungen oder Weltbilder fraglich werden können, lehrt die Überraschung etwas über (falsche) Gewissheiten, die Dimensionen des bloßen Meinens und das Lernen aus Fehlern. Daraus entstehen auch technikethische Fragestellungen: Wo wollen und können wir es uns leisten, bei Maschinen auf an das Überraschungsgeschehen angelehnte Korrekturmöglichkeiten zu verzichten? Unter Rückgriff auf Arbeiten aus verschiedenen Disziplinen und Theorierichtungen (Phänomenologie, Philosophie der Digitalität, Emotionstheorien, Kognitionswissenschaften, Kritische Theorie,...) wird hier versucht, philosophisch ein umfassendes Grundverständnis des Überraschungsgeschehens zu entwickeln.

Im Bauwesen gewinnen Materialien mit feuchtavariablen Dampfdurchlässigkeiten zunehmend an Relevanz. Insbesondere als feuchtevariable Dampfbremse finden Materialien mit feuchtavariablen Dampfdurchlässigkeiten Anwendung in Dach- und Wandaufbauten. Die Verwendung einer solchen Dampfbremse ermöglicht die Vermeidung übermäßiger Auffeuchtungen innerhalb der Konstruktion im Winter sowie ein Abtrocknen der Konstruktion im Sommer. Da Dampfbremsen ausschließlich aus Kunststoffen hergestellt werden, beschäftigt sich diese Arbeit mit der Erschließung des recyclingfähigen Materials „Papier” für eine solche Anwendung. Dafür ist eine chemische Funktionalisierung der Papiere notwendig. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Sorptions- und Desorptionseigenschaften, die Wasserdampfdurchlässigkeit sowie den statischen Kontaktwinkel unterschiedlicher Beschichtungen. Ziel ist es, das Potential von funktionalisierten Papieren zur Nutzung als feuchtevariable Dampfbremse zu evaluieren. Des Weiteren werden numerische Simulationen eines Wand- sowie eines Dachaufbaus durchgeführt, um Anforderungen an eine innerhalb dieser Konstruktionen befindliche feuchtevariable Dampfbremse zu definieren.