Fachhochschule der Wirtschaft

In Österreich sind ca zwei Millionen Menschen aller Altersstufen bei Aktivitäten im Alltag eingeschränkt. Diese Zahl wird tendenziell größer, weil Einschränkungen nicht nur „klassisch“ Beeinträchtigte betreffen, sondern auch durch Alter und gestiegene Lebenserwartung das Risiko groß ist, in die Beeinträchtigung hineinzuschlittern. Daher betrifft das Thema Barrierefreiheit alle beeinträchtigten Personen. Das Barrierefreiheitsgesetz (BaFG) soll die Verfügbarkeit barrierefreier Produkte und Dienstleistungen erhöhen und die Barrierefreiheit von Informationen über Produkte und Dienstleistungen verbessern. Es setzt die Richtlinie 2019/882 über die Barrierefreiheitsanforderungen für Produkte und Dienstleistungen (European Accessibility Act) um. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Frage, ob und inwieweit österreichische (Fach-)Hochschulen von diesen Regulativen betroffen sind. Die nachfolgenden Überlegungen sind grundsätzlich für den ganzen tertiären Sektor anwendbar, wobei immer eine Prüfung im Einzelfall erforderlich ist.

Counseling in the sense of a helpful and reflective conversation is a challenging form of action and at the same time an expression of pedagogical professionalism. Taking on counseling tasks in everyday school life and teaching is part of the professional role and the educational mission. In order to fulfil the counseling-related requirements, teachers need counseling knowledge and methods as well as a strong self-awareness and foreign perception such as a highly developed ability to reflect. However, there is still a lack in vocational teacher training, concerning the systematic and comprehensive teaching of these counseling-related skills. The article provides insight into the development and evaluation of a holistic seminar concept to strengthen just these competences. It is part of a design-based research study in vocational and business education to strengthen job-related self-awareness and self-reflection within the first phase of teacher training. The course “Conducting counseling sessions competently” can be understood as a prototype that is used to examine how counseling can be promoted on a microdidactic level. First evaluation results demonstrate how the students perceived and experienced the seminar.

Modelling business processes as stochastic processes has a long tradition. Most models focus on the dynamics of the complete state of the process. In this article we propose a new approach which concentrates on the stochastic paths of measurable quantities like key performance indicators. Using this concept a strong analogy to current results in statistical physics is exposed which leads to a general expression for the entropy of a business process as well as results quantifying the performance loss in processes due to fluctuations. Finally, path probabilities and averages of key performance indicators of a process are given in terms of business constraints expressed as variational principles.

In nature, building block-based biopolymers can adapt to functional and environmental demands by recombination and mutation of the monomer sequence. We present here an analogous, artificial evolutionary optimization process which we have applied to improve the functionality of cell-penetrating peptide molecules. The "evolution" consisted of repeated rounds of in silico peptide sequence alterations using a genetic algorithm followed by in vitro peptide synthesis, experimental analysis, and ranking according to their "fitness" (i.e., their ability to carry the cargo carboxyfluorescein into cultured cells). The genetic algorithm-based optimization method was customized and adapted from former successful applications in the lab to realize an early convergence and a minimum number of in vitro and in silico processing steps by configured settings derived from empirical in silico simulation. We started out with 20 "lead peptides" which we had previously identified as top performers regarding their ability to enter cultured cells. Ten breeding rounds comprising 240 peptides each yielded a peptide population of which the top 10 candidates displayed a 6-fold (median values) increase in its cell-penetration capability compared with the top 10 lead peptides, and two consensus sequences emerged which represent local fitness optima. In addition, the cell-penetrating potential could be proven independently of the carboxyfluorescein cargo in an alternative setting. Our results demonstrate that we have established a powerful optimization technology that can be used to further improve peptides with known functionality and adapt them to specific applications.

The main concepts required for a better understanding of performance losses of machines should be related to observable entities like processes and performance indicator. Consequently, we first lay down the basic definitions for these two notions.

The identification of peptides that optimize several physiochemical properties is an important task in the drug design process. Multi-objective genetic algorithms are efficient and cost-effective methods to scan the highly complex search space for optimal candidate peptides. A multi-objective genetic algorithm called NGSA-II has been proposed in previous work with the aim of producing diverse high-quality peptides in a low number of generations. An important component of NSGA-II is the selection process that determines the high-quality individuals for the succeeding generation. This paper presents two kinds of selection strategies for NSGA-II to guide the search process towards high-quality peptides while maintaining diversity within the genetic material. The proposed selection strategies rely both on tournaments, and use a combination of fitness-proportionate selection and a discerning selection criterion, which is front-based in one case and indicator-based in the other case. The two strategies are compared to each other with respect to the search behavior on a generic three-dimensional molecular minimization problem.