With an increase in processing power, more complex simulations have resulted in larger data size, with higher resolution and more variables. Many techniques have been developed to help the user to visualize and analyze data from such simulations. However, dealing with a large amount of multivariate data is challenging, time- consuming and often requires high-end clusters. Consequently, novel visualization techniques are needed to explore such data. Many users would like to visually explore their data and change certain visual aspects without the need to use special clusters or having to load a large amount of data. This is the idea behind explorable images (EI). Explorable images are a novel approach that provides limited interactive visualization without the need to re-render from the original data [40]. In this work, the concept of EI has been used to create a workflow that deals with explorable iso-surfaces for scalar fields in a multivariate, time-varying dataset. As a pre-processing step, a set of iso-values for each scalar field is inferred and extracted from a user-assisted sampling technique in time-parameter space. These iso-values are then used to generate iso- surfaces that are then pre-rendered (from a fixed viewpoint) along with additional buffers (i.e. normals, depth, values of other fields, etc.) to provide a compressed representation of iso-surfaces in the dataset. We present a tool that at run-time allows the user to interactively browse and calculate a combination of iso-surfaces superimposed on each other. The result is the same as calculating multiple iso- surfaces from the original data but without the memory and processing overhead. Our tool also allows the user to change the (scalar) values superimposed on each of the surfaces, modify their color map, and interactively re-light the surfaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a multi-terabyte combustion dataset. We also illustrate the efficiency and accuracy of our technique by comparing our results with those from a more traditional visualization pipeline.

The diploma thesis focuses on differences in the preparation of consolidated financial statements according to Austrian and Czech legislation. Although the countries are located in the European Union and the legislation of individual countries is increasingly corrected, there are some differences in the preparation of consolidated financial statements according to the legislation of both countries. These differences are explained by selected economic indicators on the results of the consolidation group. The diploma thesis also includes the preparation of a methodological manual for the preparation of consolidated financial statements according to the legislations of both countries, based on information from the user.

Background. Games today are becoming more complex in computational andgraphical areas. Companies today want to develop games with state of the artgraphics while also having complicated and complex game logic. The vast majorityof users rarely meet the computer requirements. This creates an issue which lim-its the target demographic that a company wants to meet. This thesis will focuson two different methods that achieves deferred shading in Vulkan and how the en-vironment is affecting both methods as-well as the number of lights and attachments. Objectives. In Vulkan there are two ways of implementing deferred shading, one isthe traditional way of doing it which is by conducting multiple render-targets. Thesecond way is by utilizing a feature unique to Vulkan known as sub-passes. Our aimis to conduct experiments with these two ways of implementing deferred shading todetermine which one is the most optimal for a given situation. These situations willvary depending on the number of visible objects and number of lights in the scene. Methods. The experiments are conducted by a rendering system that have beenimplemented by us. By implementing both suggested deviations of the renderingtechnique ’deferred shading’ the data collected will suffer less from unexpected andunknown variables than it would if the implementations were taken from a separatesource. The experiments that will be conducted intend to measure performance met-rics in the form of average frames per second as well as average render frame time(inseconds). To measure the time performance metric, the system shall utilize Vulkan’ssupport for gpu-timestamping[7]. To provide reliable measurements without any un-warranted errors each rendering deviation will utilize pre-recorded command buffers. Conclusions. This thesis has shown that using multiple sub-passes within a singlerender-target performs faster write operations to the attached render attachments.This result in less memory bandwidth which leads to a faster geometry pass. Theperformance gain from a faster geometry pass can be used somewhere else to en-hance different aspects of the game or graphical application. Having less memorybandwidth would result in a longer battery life on mobile phones and laptops.

California community college leaders are looking for strategies to sustain facilities and maintenance operations because the governor only approved the allocation of $87.5 million in the 2014-2015 Budget Act for facilities maintenance operations. Guided by the change and strategy theories, the purpose of this multicase study was to explore the strategies that a select group of college leaders have used to sustain or improve their facilities maintenance operations. The data collection process included a review of college planning documents and semistructured interviews with 10 senior administrators from 3 large California community colleges who have used strategies to address sustaining or improving their facilities maintenance operations. Saldana coding and an inductive analysis process were used to identify themes. Triangulation was employed to increase the trustworthiness of interpretations. The analysis revealed the central role of planning as the strategy leaders should employ to improve institutional success. Funding was an additional theme leaders regarded as the issue that most often undermined planning and effective maintenance operations. All participants acknowledged the need for the integration of planning and funding to create institutional success. These findings suggest that community college leaders who use planning, funding strategies, maintenance strategies, and who empower people to sustain facility and maintenance operations can improve the teaching-learning environment. When community college leaders transform the teaching-learning environment, they enable student success. Student success increases the earning power of students that contributes to social change by expanding the tax-base and creating greater economic development.

Die StuFo-Expo gibt mir die Möglichkeit meine Forschung im Rahmen meines Promotionsprojektes zugänglich für eine breite, fachübergreifende Öffentlichkeit zu machen. Zudem erhalte ich die Chance, Forschungsthemen, -ergebnisse und -methoden fachübergreifend kennenzulernen. Es ist ein einzigartiges Projekt, welches Studierende miteinander vernetzt und wichtige Fähigkeiten der Studierenden fördert. Das Thema meiner Forschung ist die Wertrelevanz latenter Steuern. Ich untersuche die Fragestellung ob latente Steuern bei der Vorhersage der zukünftigen Unternehmensentwicklung zusätzliche Informationen für verschiedene Stakeholder liefern. Dafür analysiere ich die knapp 1.800 verfügbaren Jahresabschlüsse aller im DAX Prime Standard gelisteten Firmen zwischen 2007 und 2018. Das von mir eingereichte Poster zeigt, dass latente Steuern dabei helfen, die Entwicklung des Marktwertes des Eigenkapitals bis zu zwei Jahren im Voraus zu prognostizieren. Dabei tragen aktive latente Steuern als wahrscheinliche zukünftige Steuerrückzahlungen positiv zum Unternehmenswert und deshalb zum Marktwert bei und passive latente Steuern als wahrscheinliche zukünftige Steuerzahlungen negativ zum Unternehmenswert und deshalb zum Marktwert bei. Ferner kann ich nachweisen, dass die ergänzende Berichterstattung über latente Steuern eher negativ von Marktteilnehmern bewertet wird. Mögliche Gründe hierfür sind die hohe Komplexität der Informationen und die fehlende Überleitbarkeit dieser Informationen auf Bilanz- und Gewinn- und Verlustrechnungszahlen. Auch zeigen Interviewstudien, dass das Vertrauen in latente Steuern und die dazugehörige Berichterstattung gering ist, da Stakeholder vermuten, dass latente Steuern zumindest teilweise für Bilanzpolitik genutzt werden. / The StuFo-Expo gives me the opportunity to make my research accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary public as part of my doctoral project. I also get the chance to get to know research topics, results and methods across disciplines. It is a unique project that connects students with one another and promotes important student skills. The topic of my research is the value relevance of deferred taxes. I am investigating the question of whether deferred taxes provide additional information for various stakeholders when predicting future corporate development. To do this, I analyze the almost 1,800 available annual financial statements of all companies listed in the DAX Prime Standard between 2007 and 2018. The poster I submitted shows that deferred taxes help forecast the development of the market value of equity up to two years in advance. Deferred tax assets as probable future tax repayments contribute positively to the company value and therefore to the market value, and deferred tax liabilities as probable future tax payments contribute negatively to the company value and therefore to the market value. I can also prove that the supplementary reporting on deferred taxes is rated negatively by market participants. Possible reasons for this are the high complexity of the information and the lack of transferability of this information to balance sheet and income statement figures. Interview studies also show that trust in deferred taxes and the associated reporting is low, as stakeholders suspect that deferred taxes are at least partially used for accounting policy.

The dissertation, 'The information content of deferred tax items', examines the information content of deferred tax items. Technically, deferred taxes are assets or liabilities that arise from temporary differences between the carrying amount of an asset or liability in the financial statements and its tax base. Their recognition intends to record the future tax consequences of these differences. To investigate the information content of deferred tax items, this dissertation uses the systematic literature review methodology (research paper 1) and empirical analyses (research papers 2; 3). The research paper, 'Financial accounting for deferred taxes: A systematic review of empirical evidence', identifies, systematizes, and evaluates the state of the art with the goal of synthesizing evidence on the value relevance of deferred taxes, their use to manage earnings and their ability to identify earnings management. The empirical analyses are based on these findings and evaluate 1.5 thousand German IFRS financial statements. They examine the value relevance of deferred tax items and related disclosures under IAS 12 ('The value relevance of deferred taxes and related disclosures under IAS 12'), as well as the relationship between individual components of deferred taxes and future tax cash flows ('Deferred taxes under IFRS: Which components predict future tax cash flows'). The results of the publications show that deferred tax items have significant information content for capital providers, as they subsume information about future tax cash flows and the performance of an entity. Their information content depends on several factors. These are the association of individual deferred tax components with future tax cash flows, private information signaled by deferred tax items and disclosures, and the suspicion that specific deferred tax items identify earnings management or are used to manage earnings. So, this dissertation makes an important contribution to a deeper understanding of the information content of deferred tax items and related disclosures. Each publication has developed methodological and content-driven novelties to contribute comprehensively to previous research. Due to the considerable size of the underlying database, the results of this dissertation are of statistical relevance.

With growing information availability recommendation systems help users navigate and filter the many options. The home rental market has been pointed out as one of the unexplored areas for recommendations system. This project examines the effects of incorporating historical data for probabilistic weighting and matching algorithms for increased recommendation diversity for a tenant to landlord recommendation system. This was done by implementing two new recommendation systems. The first uses probabilistic weighting to measure the similarity between tenants and landlord homes. The second combines this probabilistic weighting with a variant of the Deferred Acceptance algorithm to enhance recommendation diversity. These two recommendation systems were A/B tested together with the existing tenant recommendation system on the Qasa platform, a digital end-to-end rental apartments marketplace in Sweden. With the objective of having the recommendation system increase landlord engagement a good recommendation was defined as one where the landlord choose to contact the tenant. After the A/B test period, the three recommendation variants were evaluated on Coverage@N, Gini-Index@K, Precision@K and Recall@K. The result revealed that the use of the Deferred Acceptance algorithm did increase the recommendation diversity, but it led to reduced precision in the top recommendations compared to the first new implementation that only used probabilistic weighting. However, the incorporation of historical data for the probabilistic weighting for similarity in booth new recommendation systems showed higher precision and number of contacted tenants compared to the existing tenant recommendation model on the Qasa platform. / Med växande informationstillgänglighet hjälper rekommendationssystem användarna att navigera och filtrera bland många alternativ. Hyresmarknaden har pekats ut som ett av de outforskade områdena för rekommendationssystem. Detta projekt undersöker effekterna av att inkorporera historiska data för statistiska vikter och matchningsalgoritmer för ökad rekommendations mångfald i ett rekommendationssystem från hyresgäster till hyresvärdar. Detta gjordes genom att implementera två nya rekommendationssystem. Det första använder statistiska vikter för att mäta likheten mellan hyresgäster och hyresvärdars bostäder. Det andra kombinerar dessa statistiska vikter med en variant av deferred acceptance algorithm algoritmen för att förbättra rekommendations mångfaldet. Dessa två rekommendationssystem A/B testades tillsammans med det befintliga rekommendationssystemet av hyresgäster på Qasa-plattformen, en digital marknadsplats för andrahandsuthyrning av lägenheter i Sverige. Med målet att rekommendationssystemet skulle öka hyresvärdens engagemang definierades en bra rekommendation som en där hyresvärden valde att kontakta hyresgästen. Efter A/B-testperioden utvärderades de tre rekommendationsvarianterna baserat på Coverage@N, Gini-Index@K, Precision@K och Recall@K. Resultatet visade att användningen av algoritmen för uppskjuten acceptans ökade mångfaldet i ett rekommendationssystem, men det ledde till minskad precision i de första rekommendationerna jämfört med den första nya implementationen som endast använde statistiska vikter. Däremot visade inkorporeringen av historiska data för statistiska vikter vid uträkning av likhet, något som gjordes i båda nya rekommendationssystem, högre precision och fler antal kontaktade hyresgäster jämfört med den befintliga modellen för hyresgästrekommendationer på Qasa-plattformen.

隨著經濟市場自由競爭和資本主義的高度發展，一個良好、健全的破產制度是維持國家金融秩序和經濟穩定的重要環節。實務上，當公司陷入財務困難時，通常在進入正式的破產程序前會要求與往來銀行協議非正式的暫緩還款安排。本文以探討小型企業為目標，藉由賽局模型的設定建立兩種制度，並用逆向求導法由最後一期開始求解。討論當企業發生財務危機時，優先與債權銀行協議暫緩清償，將還款日期延至一期投資計畫所需的時間結束之後，與直接進入破產程序，何者才是最適策略。 / Through the free competition of the market and the highly development of capitalism, a solid and sound bankruptcy system is a crucial pillar to sustain the stability of economy and to preclude the financial market from serious crash as well. In practice, usually a firm in financial distress would negotiate with banks an informal arrangement of deferred payment rather than go into a formal bankruptcy process directly. In this paper we focus our study on small firms and set up two systems by means of building model of game theory. Furthermore, we utilize backward induction, which starts from the last period, to obtain the solution. More specifically speaking, we discuss the optimal strategy for distressed firms choosing between a debt negotiation in which the payment date is postponed for one period and going bankruptcy.

No description available.

Executive pay research has traditionally focused on salary, severance payments and longterm incentives. A systematic rigorous empirical examination of short-term annual bonuses is lacking. To address this omission, this research empirically examines the relationship between short-term bonuses and firm performance (TSR and EPS), in the UK. It also considers the association between form of bonus payment (i.e. cash/shares), and type of performance target (i.e. hard/soft and simple/complex) with bonus and performance. Furthermore, firm size and particular corporate governance factors are included (i.e. NED ratio on remuneration committee, CEO presence on nominations committee, CEO/Chair duality, tenure, and power) to examine their relationship with bonus value. From a sample of 299 firms listed in the FTSE-350 (1,542 executives including 300 CEOs), this study uses two competing theories (i.e. agency and power theory) to provide a fuller explanation of the subtleties of the pay-performance relation. The main findings support the agency view, since bonus is positively and significantly associated with financial performance. As with previous studies on executive bonus pay this association remains weak. By implication, power theory is not supported. However, other findings indicate: (1) although firm size may change, the proportion of bonus pay relative to salary does not vary. This suggests that large and small firms pay out proportionally similar bonuses; (2) cash bonuses are not positively related with the total value of bonus pay, suggesting that they are not any more open to abuse than other methods of compensation, as agency theory would predict; (3) cash bonuses encourage short-term achievement, as predicted by power theory; (4) consistent with agency theory, share-based bonuses are positively related to bonus pay and performance (weak association), suggesting that share-based bonuses (rather than cash bonuses) may be more effective at aligning pay with performance; (5) in line with agency theory, transparency (i.e. hard (external/published) and simple bonus conditions) is positively associated with performance, providing support for the alignment between principals' and agents' interests; (6) detailed bonus scheme characteristics are generally insensitive to performance and are becoming increasingly softer (i.e. more internal/unspecified targets) and complex (i.e. multiple targets). On the power view, these may create opportunities for executives to mask weak performance and extract greater rents; (7) governance factors are insignificant, suggesting that efforts to improve this area may be wasted, since they mainly leave pay-performance sensitivities unaffected. However, based on power theory, weak governance may foster the rise of powerful executives and widen the pay-performance gap. Therefore, it is suggested that close monitoring of executive pay must continue and shareholders should remain vigilant.