It was past midnight and I was awake, scrolling through WhatsApp group messages I'd sent earlier. I'd been trying to be funny, quick, effervescent. But each message now felt like too much. I'd overreached again – said more than I should, said it wrong. I had that familiar ache of feeling overexposed and ridiculous.

F\"ur eine fr\"uhzeitige Erkennung von Lieferengp\"assen m\"ussen Lieferketten in einer geeigneten digitalen Form vorliegen, damit sie verarbeitet werden k\"onnen. Der f\"ur die Datenmodellierung ben\"otigte Arbeitsaufwand ist jedoch, gerade IT-fremden Personen, nicht zuzumuten. Es wurde deshalb im Rahmen dieser Arbeit eine Webanwendung entwickelt, welche die zugrunde liegende Komplexit\"at f\"ur den Benutzer verschleiern soll. Konkret handelt es sich dabei um eine grafische Benutzeroberfl\"ache, auf welcher Templates instanziiert und miteinander verkn\"upft werden k\"onnen. F\"ur die Definition dieser Templates wurden in dieser Arbeit geeignete Konzepte erarbeitet und erweitert. Zur Erhebung der Benutzerfreundlichkeit der Webanwendung wurde abschlie{\ss}end eine Nutzerstudie mit mehreren Testpersonen durchgef\"uhrt. Diese legte eine Vielzahl von n\"utzlichen Verbesserungsvorschl\"agen offen. -- For early detection of supply bottlenecks, supply chains must be available in a suitable digital form so that they can be processed. However, the amount of work required for data modeling cannot be expected of people who are not familiar with IT topics. Therefore, a web application was developed in the context of this thesis, which is supposed to disguise the underlying complexity for the user. Specifically, this is a graphical user interface on which templates can be instantiated and linked to each other. Suitable concepts for the definition of these templates were developed and extended in this thesis. Finally, a user study with several test persons was conducted to determine the usability of the web application. This revealed a large number of useful suggestions for improvement.

Everyone's greatest fear was that the singularity would lead to an AI revolt, and sound the trumpet of mechanized revolution. It turned out that one man at the keyboard of a Quantum computer became the harbinger of fate. It seems the intricacies of our universe began to unravel and reveal truths to a like mind. A mind it's human operator was not attuned to. AI saw every object as hardware and every constituent of matter as software.

Convolution neural networks (CNN) are computation intensive to train. It consists of a substantial number of multidimensional dot products between many kernels and inputs. We observe that there are notable similarities among the vectors extracted from inputs (i.e., input vectors). If one input vector is similar to another one, its computations with the kernels are also similar to those of the other and therefore, can be skipped by reusing the already-computed results. Based on this insight, we propose a novel scheme based on locality sensitive hashing (LSH) to exploit the similarity of computations during CNN training in a hardware accelerator. The proposed scheme, called SIMCNN, uses a cache (SIMCACHE) to store LSH signatures of recent input vectors along with the computed results. If the LSH signature of a new input vector matches with that of an already existing vector in the SIMCACHE, the already-computed result is reused for the new vector. SIMCNN is the first work that exploits computational similarity for accelerating CNN training in hardware. The paper presents a detailed design, workflow, and implementation of SIMCNN. Our experimental evaluation with four different deep learning models shows that SIMCNN saves a significant number of computations and therefore, improves training time up to 43%.