The Integration of the Advertising Function in Marketing within the Philips Company, 1959-1975

in Proceedings of the 21st Biennial Conference on Historical Analysis & Research in Marketing (CHARM) (2023, June 26), Vol. 21. Esse quam videri. Marketing history for real.

Conference Report: Borders in Flux and Border Temporalities in and Beyond Europe

in H-Soz-u-Kult (2023, June 24)

International, Regional and National Business and Human Rights (BHR) Developments: Simultaneously Centering and Decentering Africa’s Marginal Position in the Quest to Reduce the Transnational Corporate Accountability Gap?

Speeches/Talks (2023)

Esther Kiobel and three other widows of four Nigerian activists executed in 1995 recently announced, “not without disappointment and frustration” that after years of trying to unsuccessfully pursue ... [more ▼]

Esther Kiobel and three other widows of four Nigerian activists executed in 1995 recently announced, “not without disappointment and frustration” that after years of trying to unsuccessfully pursue justice against corporate giant, Shell, they had decided to end their battle for justice. This case epitomizes the struggles experienced by global south rights- holders to bring large Transnational Corporations (TNCs) to account for violations of human rights and the environment in the global south countries where they operate. TNCs have for a long time “enjoy[ed] substantial rights secured through numerous trade and investment agreements while their human rights and other obligations remain less clear and more difficult to enforce.” This has allowed them to externalize the negative impacts of their transnational corporate activities to vulnerable rights-holders such as local communities and indigenous groups who suffer massive violations as a result. Current efforts to reform international investment law have been critiqued for not doing enough to change this status quo. The burgeoning field of Business and Human Rights (BHR) offers some useful insights into how ongoing attempts to rein in the rogue Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) simultaneously empower and disempower Africa in the processes of BHR law making, interpretation and implementation. This contribution will critically analyse the international process of drafting a Legally Binding Instrument (LBI) in BHR, the proposed European Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and national efforts in countries such as Germany and France to enact and implement mHRDD laws. Ultimately, the contribution will argue that despite comparable developments being made in African countries, the BHR conversation seems to privilege and center European voices rather than African ones. [less ▲]

A Transient And Highly Resolving Multiphase Approach For Blast Furnaces Based On The XDEM Technology

Scientific Conference (2023, June 22)

Understanding multiphase flow with its complex transfer mechanism of mass, momentum and heat between individual phases is of critical importance for design, operation and meeting environmental challenges ... [more ▼]

Understanding multiphase flow with its complex transfer mechanism of mass, momentum and heat between individual phases is of critical importance for design, operation and meeting environmental challenges. A blast furnace is a key reactor in the steel making industry and consumes large amounts of energy and produces app 70 % of the CO2 emissions of a steel plant. Thus, small improvements can have a large impact on production costs and the carbon footprint. In order to support improvements, a novel and innovative numerical approach based on the Extended Discrete Element Method (XDEM) [1] is applied to resolve the complex physics and phase interactions in a blast furnace. For this purpose, independently developed functionality of XDEM [2,3,4] has been integrated into a homogeneous modelling framework for the first time to treat the complex physics of a blast furnace. While the particulate phase i.e. coke and ore particles are treated as discrete entities, the gas and liquid phases i.e. liquid iron and slag are described by a multiphase Euler approach in OpenFoam. The classical Discrete Element Method (DEM) predicts the descend of particles in the blast furnace and the solution differential conservation equations yields the thermodynamic state of each particle such as coke oxidation, drying, reduction and melting of ore particles. This is accompanied by an intensive exchange of momentum, energy and mass between the discrete and continuum phases. An exchange of momentum e.g. drag force describes the flow resistance for the fluid phases and generates an corresponding pressure drop over the height of the blast furnace. Heat transfer between the particles and mainly the gas phase and to a lesser extent with the liquid phases heats up the coke and iron particle for which the resulting temperature is the driving force for chemical reactions. The latter are reactions that form CO (C+1/2 O2 → CO) as a reducing agent through oxidation of coke and though the Boudouard equilibrium (C+ CO2 ↔ 2 CO). The corresponding reaction rates rely heavily on the mass transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the particles and the gas phase. Carbon monoxide transferred to the ore particles causes a reduction of the iron oxides according to: 3 Fe2O3 + CO → 2 Fe3O4 + CO2 Fe3O4 + 3 CO ↔3 FeO + CO2 FeO + CO ↔ Fe + CO2 Once, the ore particles reach the melting temperature of iron and slag, both constituents start melting and the formed liquid phases are transferred to the appropriate continuum phases of the Euler framework that is shown in fig. 1. The left figure depicts the layered distribution of carbon monoxide resulting from the reduction of iron oxide. The centre figure shows the surface temperature of each individual particle that supplies energy for the coke particles to produce carbon monoxide as a reducing agent, to reduce iron oxides with the formed carbon monoxide and to melt reduced iron and slag. The latter are transferred to the multi-phase CFD solver and appear as volume fractions depicted in the right figure and identifying uniquely the location of the cohesive zone. The results agree well with blast furnace operation and promise to shed light on the internal physics of a blast furnace in particular and similar reactors in general. [1] B. Peters, M. Baniasadi, M. Baniasadi, The eXtented Discrete Element Method (XDEM): An Advanced Approach to Model Blast Furnace, ISBN 978-953-51-5824-0. [2] M. Baniasadi, B. Peters, Preliminary Investigation on the Capability of eXtended Discrete Element Method for Treating the Dripping Zone of a Blast Furnace, ISIJ international, 58 (2018), 25-48. [3] Mehdi Baniasadi, Maryam Baniasadi, Gabriele Pozzetti, and Bernhard Peters. A numerical study on the softening process of iron ore particles in the cohesive zone of an experimental blast furnace using a coupled cfd-dem method. Chemical Engineering Science , 2018 [4] Mehdi Baniasadi, Maryam Baniasadi, and Bernhard Peters. Simulation of the softening and melting behaviours of several layers of iron ore particles through a multiphase cfd-dem approach. Chemical Engineering Science , 2018 [less ▲]

Geometric Operator Quantum Speed Limit, Wegner Hamiltonian Flow and Operator Growth

in Quantum (2023)

Formal Verification of Verifiability in E-Voting Protocols

Doctoral thesis (2023)

Election verifiability is one of the main security properties of e-voting protocols, referring to the ability of independent entities, such as voters or election observers, to validate the outcome of the ... [more ▼]

Election verifiability is one of the main security properties of e-voting protocols, referring to the ability of independent entities, such as voters or election observers, to validate the outcome of the voting process. It can be ensured by means of formal verification that applies mathematical logic to verify the considered protocols under well-defined assumptions, specifications, and corruption scenarios. Automated tools allow an efficient and accurate way to perform formal verification, enabling comprehensive analysis of all execution scenarios and eliminating the human errors in the manual verification. The existing formal verification frameworks that are suitable for automation are not general enough to cover a broad class of e-voting protocols. They do not cover revoting and cannot be tuned to weaker or stronger levels of security that may be achievable in practice. We therefore propose a general formal framework that allows automated verification of verifiability in e-voting protocols. Our framework is easily applicable to many protocols and corruption scenarios. It also allows refined specifications of election procedures, for example accounting for revote policies. We apply our framework to the analysis of several real-world case studies, where we capture both known and new attacks, and provide new security guarantees. First, we consider Helios, a prominent web-based e-voting protocol, which aims to provide end-to-end verifiability. It is however vulnerable to ballot stuffing when the voting server is corrupt. Second, we consider Belenios, which builds upon Helios and aims to achieve stronger verifiability, preventing ballot stuffing by splitting the trust between a registrar and the server. Both of these systems have been used in many real-world elections. Our third case study is Selene, which aims to simplify the individual verification procedure for voters, providing them with trackers for verifying their votes in the clear at the end of election. Finally, we consider the Estonian e-voting protocol, that has been deployed for national elections since 2005. The protocol has continuously evolved to offer better verifiability guarantees but has no formal analysis. We apply our framework to realistic models of all these protocols, deriving the first automated formal analysis in each case. As a result, we find several new attacks, improve the corresponding protocols to address their weakness, and prove that verifiability holds for the new versions. [less ▲]

Les manuels scolaires de nos ados sont-ils d'un autre âge ?

Article for general public (2023)

The violent turn in soldier’s letters

Speeches/Talks (2023)

The ego documents, especially war letters from the front of the soldiers, have been studied from many points of view. The letters contain much information about the use of 'violence', whether in terms of ... [more ▼]

The ego documents, especially war letters from the front of the soldiers, have been studied from many points of view. The letters contain much information about the use of 'violence', whether in terms of the striking power of the weapons and the encounters and dealings with locals, prisoners of war or the 'enemy'. As the main task of the soldiers was to use violence to win or avoid being killed, the understanding and use of violence (towards enemy soldiers and locals) is a constant factor in the letters. As authors such as Latzel (Latzel 2004) and Buchbender (Buchbender and Sterz 1983) have studied the expression and use of war letters by soldiers, I, too, have come across many references and hints of the concept of violence in the sources in my current project. In the WARLUX project, we have collected the ego-documents of Wehrmacht soldiers' (letters, diaries and photographs). In my contribution to this conference, I will discuss the use and reference of ‘violence’ in soldiers' letters during the Second World War in the context of an in-depth study of the reading and analysis of the letters. Even if the sources are biased from the interpretative side, these doubts are nevertheless urgent to consider when studying violence and the effects of violence in wars. After a historiographical overview, I will present my current project and the extensive results of the war letters and diaries of Wehrmacht soldiers. With the help of digital tools (e.g. topic modelling and text analysis), I will present the results of the representation and justification and understanding of ‘violence’. Following the conference's theme, I will analyse different sources in which the ‘violent turn’ can be depicted. I will grasp soldiers' perceptions (and beliefs) about using force and the meaning and motivation to hold arms and pull the trigger. Even though the role of soldiers is clearly defined, the use and application of the concept of force are still worth further discussion. Soldiers' letters are one of the most widely circulated sources on the Second World War - over two billion letters were sent between the front and home. These letters are a rich yet controversial source, but they offer multiple opportunities to analyse the use and understanding of violence by millions of individuals. [less ▲]

What Matters in Model Training to Transfer Adversarial Examples

Doctoral thesis (2023)

Despite state-of-the-art performance on natural data, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples, i.e., imperceptible, carefully crafted perturbations of inputs applied at ... [more ▼]

Despite state-of-the-art performance on natural data, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples, i.e., imperceptible, carefully crafted perturbations of inputs applied at test time. Adversarial examples can transfer: an adversarial example against one model is likely to be adversarial against another independently trained model. This dissertation investigates the characteristics of the surrogate weight space that lead to the transferability of adversarial examples. Our research covers three complementary aspects of the weight space exploration: the multimodal exploration to obtain multiple models from different vicinities, the local exploration to obtain multiple models in the same vicinity, and the point selection to obtain a single transferable representation. First, from a probabilistic perspective, we argue that transferability is fundamentally related to uncertainty. The unknown weights of the target DNN can be treated as random variables. Under a specified threat model, deep ensemble can produce a surrogate by sampling from the distribution of the target model. Unfortunately, deep ensembles are computationally expensive. We propose an efficient alternative by approximately sampling surrogate models from the posterior distribution using cSGLD, a state-of-the-art Bayesian deep learning technique. Our extensive experiments show that our approach improves and complements four attacks, three transferability techniques, and five more training methods significantly on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and MNIST (up to 83.2 percentage points), while reducing training computations from 11.6 to 2.4 exaflops compared to deep ensemble on ImageNet. Second, we propose transferability from Large Geometric Vicinity (LGV), a new technique based on the local exploration of the weight space. LGV starts from a pretrained model and collects multiple weights in a few additional training epochs with a constant and high learning rate. LGV exploits two geometric properties that we relate to transferability. First, we show that LGV explores a flatter region of the weight space and generates flatter adversarial examples in the input space. We present the surrogate-target misalignment hypothesis to explain why flatness could increase transferability. Second, we show that the LGV weights span a dense weight subspace whose geometry is intrinsically connected to transferability. Through extensive experiments, we show that LGV alone outperforms all (combinations of) four established transferability techniques by 1.8 to 59.9 percentage points. Third, we investigate how to train a transferable representation, that is, a single model for transferability. First, we refute a common hypothesis from previous research to explain why early stopping improves transferability. We then establish links between transferability and the exploration dynamics of the weight space, in which early stopping has an inherent effect. More precisely, we observe that transferability peaks when the learning rate decays, which is also the time at which the sharpness of the loss significantly drops. This leads us to propose RFN, a new approach to transferability that minimises the sharpness of the loss during training. We show that by searching for large flat neighbourhoods, RFN always improves over early stopping (by up to 47 points of success rate) and is competitive to (if not better than) strong state-of-the-art baselines. Overall, our three complementary techniques provide an extensive and practical method to obtain highly transferable adversarial examples from the multimodal and local exploration of flatter vicinities in the weight space. Our probabilistic and geometric approaches demonstrate that the way to train the surrogate model has been overlooked, although both the training noise and the flatness of the loss landscape are important elements of transfer-based attacks. [less ▲]

Schulbücher: Männer sind Programm

Article for general public (2023)