Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will conc...

Application Development is moving from monolithic systems towards distributed architectures based on middleware technologies such as Web Services. Such a kind of application requires a sophisticated monitoring framework that provides information on all levels from hardware over network up to the application level. Existing monitoring solutions do not provide such an integrated view. The GeneSyS...

We present a hybrid text understanding methodology for the resolution of textual ellipsis. It integrates language-independent conceptual criteria and language-dependent functional constraints. The methodological framework for text ellipsis resolution is the centering model that has been adapted to constraints reflecting the functional information structure within utterances, i.e., the distincti...

We present PR2, a personality recognition system available online, that performs instance-based classification of Big5 personality types from unstructured text, using language-independent features. It has been tested on English and Italian, achieving performances up to f=.68.

Identification and extraction of proper names from Internet-based sources currently suffers from a lack of verification methods that check the validity of these extracted names. A language-independent method for assigning probabilities to extracted proper names using frequency data harvested from the Internet is presented. Verification mechanisms are built on top of this technique to exclude mi...

In this paper cores and stable sets for games with fuzzy coalitions are introduced and their relations studied. For convex fuzzy games it turns out that all cores coincide and that the core is the unique stable set. Also relations between cores and stable sets for fuzzy clan games are discussed. MSC: 90D12; 03E72

Acknowledgments This work would not have been possible without the understanding of my friends, the encouragement of my parents and the support of all the colleagues with whom I worked together. I have to thank them all and I am especially indebted to the following people. I would like to sincerely thank my advisor Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide for giving me the opportunity to choose the direct...