One Million or One Hundred Million Casualties? – The Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on the Least Developed and Developing Countries and the EU Sustainable Finance Agenda

in Beate Sjåfjell, Georgina Tsagas, Charlotte Villiers (eds.), Sustainable Value Creation in the European Union (in press)

Generating Picard modular forms by invariant theory

in Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly (in press)

AI-based Question Answering Assistance for Analyzing Natural-language Requirements

in In Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'23), Melbourne 14-20 May 2023 (in press)

Abstract—By virtue of being prevalently written in natural language (NL), requirements are prone to various defects, e.g., inconsistency and incompleteness. As such, requirements are frequently subject to ... [more ▼]

Abstract—By virtue of being prevalently written in natural language (NL), requirements are prone to various defects, e.g., inconsistency and incompleteness. As such, requirements are frequently subject to quality assurance processes. These processes, when carried out entirely manually, are tedious and may further overlook important quality issues due to time and budget pressures. In this paper, we propose QAssist – a question-answering (QA) approach that provides automated assistance to stakeholders, including requirements engineers, during the analysis of NL requirements. Posing a question and getting an instant answer is beneficial in various quality-assurance scenarios, e.g., incompleteness detection. Answering requirements-related questions automatically is challenging since the scope of the search for answers can go beyond the given requirements specification. To that end, QAssist provides support for mining external domain-knowledge resources. Our work is one of the first initiatives to bring together QA and external domain knowledge for addressing requirements engineering challenges. We evaluate QAssist on a dataset covering three application domains and containing a total of 387 question-answer pairs. We experiment with state-of-the-art QA methods, based primarily on recent large-scale language models. In our empirical study, QAssist localizes the answer to a question to three passages within the requirements specification and within the external domain-knowledge resource with an average recall of 90.1% and 96.5%, respectively. QAssist extracts the actual answer to the posed question with an average accuracy of 84.2%. Index Terms—Natural-language Requirements, Question Answering (QA), Language Models, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Generation (NLG), BERT, T5. [less ▲]

Siegel modular forms of degree two and three and invariant theory

in The art of doing algebraic geometry (in press)

Identifier et formaliser les compétences transversales dans un référentiel de formation pour un master Enseignement secondaire

in Raus, Tonia; Lentz, Caroline (Eds.) Libre cours. Perspectives didactiques dans l’enseignement du français au Luxembourg, (in press)

At a time when transversal skills are increasingly giving rise to questions and discussion among both the education and youth employment communities and also institutions and ministries, we set out in ... [more ▼]

At a time when transversal skills are increasingly giving rise to questions and discussion among both the education and youth employment communities and also institutions and ministries, we set out in this contribution to explore the importance of including recognition of such skills in university programmes. What is the best way to provide for the continued development of transversal skills with the aim of better preparing students on the Master in Secondary Teaching (French track) at the University of Luxembourg for their future role at a school in Luxembourg? Based on a study of three frameworks – two careers frameworks and one skills framework –, a trial was carried out with 18 students on the Master in Secondary Teaching and the Director of the French track of the Master. The results highlight the skills attained in the second semester of the Master and those expected by the end of the programme. The “Processing information and knowledge” skill particularly needs to be improved. [less ▲]

Zufriedenheit - Wohlbefinden - Anerkennung. Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen non-formaler Bildungseinrichtungen in Luxemburg

Book published by Barbara Budrich Verlag (in press)

Zufriedenheit mit der institutionellen Betreuung von Kindern im Alter von bis zu 4 Jahren

in Zufriedenheit - Wohlbefinden - Anerkennung. Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen non-formaler Bildungseinrichtungen in Luxemburg (in press)

Multiperspektivische Einblicke in die Forschungslage zur non-formalen Bildung in Luxemburg. Eine Zusammenfassung.

in Zufriedenheit - Wohlbefinden - Anerkennung. Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen non-formaler Bildungseinrichtungen in Luxemburg (in press)

FedFog: Network-Aware Optimization of Federated Learning over Wireless Fog-Cloud System

in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (in press)

Federated learning (FL) is capable of performing large distributed machine learning tasks across multiple edge users by periodically aggregating trained local parameters. To address key challenges of ... [more ▼]

Federated learning (FL) is capable of performing large distributed machine learning tasks across multiple edge users by periodically aggregating trained local parameters. To address key challenges of enabling FL over a wireless fogcloud system (e.g., non-i.i.d. data, users’ heterogeneity), we first propose an efficient FL algorithm based on Federated Averaging (called FedFog) to perform the local aggregation of gradient parameters at fog servers and global training update at the cloud. Next, we employ FedFog in wireless fog-cloud systems by investigating a novel network-aware FL optimization problem that strikes the balance between the global loss and completion time. An iterative algorithm is then developed to obtain a precise measurement of the system performance, which helps design an efficient stopping criteria to output an appropriate number of global rounds. To mitigate the straggler effect, we propose a flexible user aggregation strategy that trains fast users first to obtain a certain level of accuracy before allowing slow users to join the global training updates. Extensive numerical results using several real-world FL tasks are provided to verify the theoretical convergence of FedFog. We also show that the proposed co-design of FL and communication is essential to substantially improve resource utilization while achieving comparable accuracy of the learning model. [less ▲]

Energy performance comparison of ventilation-based heating versus water-based heating systems in an efficient residential building

in Fluid Dynamics & Material Processing (in press)

The application of air-based heating systems as a possible approach to reduce the construction costs in highly efficient residential buildings is becoming popular. Air-based heating systems have been well ... [more ▼]

The application of air-based heating systems as a possible approach to reduce the construction costs in highly efficient residential buildings is becoming popular. Air-based heating systems have been well-known for their usage in passive houses during the past three decades. Available studies on such systems tend mostly to focus only on comparing exhaust air heat pump technology with conventional systems in efficient buildings. Moreover, most of the existing studies ignore the usual presence of the electrical heaters as backup. Besides, a comprehensive study and comparison between different air-based heating system concepts is still missing. In this study, four different air-based heating system concepts separated by the type of heat source of heat pump for heating and domestic hot water are defined. These systems are compared to four conventional heating system, including floor heating and direct electrical system employing dynamic annual simulations. According to simulation results, the systems with floor heating have shown the best system efficiencies and the lowest energy demand in comparison to the other systems. The main reason for this was the lower supply temperatures of the floor heating systems. Between the air heating systems, the system equipped with an outdoor air heat pump showed a better energy performance than an exhaust air system. The main reason for this could be attributed to the power limitation of exhaust air heat pump systems. [less ▲]