Thesis (Ph.D)--Stanford University, 2000. / Title from pdf t.p. (viewed Mar. 27, 2002). "May 2000." "Adminitrivia V1/Prg/20000602"--Metadata.

Much structured data of scientific interest can be represented as networks, where sets of nodes or vertices are joined together in pairs by links or edges. Although these networks may belong to different research areas, there is one property that many of them do have in common: the network community structure, which means that there exists densely connected groups of vertices, with only sparser connections between groups. The main goal of community mining is to discover these communities in social networks or other similar information network environments. We face many deficiencies in current community structure discovery methods. First, one similarity metric is typically applied in all networks, without considering the differences in network and application characteristics. Second, many existing methods assume the network information is fully available, and one node only belongs to one cluster. However, in reality, a social network can be huge thus it is hard to access the complete network. It is also common for social entities to belong to multiple communities. Finally, relations between entities are hard to understand in heterogeneous social networks, where multiple types of relations and entities exist. Therefore, the thesis of this research is to tackle these community mining problems, in order to discover and evaluate community structures in social networks from various aspects.

Multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide a cost-effective means to enable broadband wireless access (BWA) services to end users. Such WMNs are required to support different classes of traffic where each class requires certain quality of service (QoS) levels. The research direction undertaken in this thesis considers the development of enhanced routing and scheduling algorithms that enable WMNs to support various QoS metrics for the served traffic. A fundamental class of routing problems in WMNs asks whether a given end-to-end flow that requires certain bandwidth, and benefits from routing over a single path (also called non-bifurcated routing), can be routed given that some ongoing flows are being served in the network. In the thesis, we focus on the development of combinatorial algorithms for solving such incremental non-bifurcated problems for two types of WMNs: 1. WMNs where mesh routers use contention-based protocol for medium access control (MAC), and 2. WMNs where mesh routers use time division multiple access (TDMA) for MAC. For WMNs employing contention-based MAC protocols, we present a novel non-bifurcated routing algorithm that employs techniques from the theory of network flows. The main ingredient in our algorithm is a method for computing interference-constrained flow augmenting paths for routing subscriber demands in the network. For WMNs employing TDMA, we develop a number of joint routing and scheduling algorithms, and investigate the use of such algorithms to maximize the number of served flows. In chapter 4, we consider a throughput maximization problem in the well-known class of grid WMNs. We present an iterative algorithm that strives to achieve high throughput by considering routing and scheduling a pair of distinct flows simultaneously to the gateway in each iteration. In chapter 5, we explore joint routing and scheduling in TDMA-based WMNs with arbitrary topologies, and devise an algorithm that can deal with arbitrary interference relations among pairs of transmission links. In particular, our devised algorithm solves a generalized problem where a cost value is associated with using any possible time-slot on any transmission link, and a minimum cost route is sought along which a new flow can be scheduled without perturbing existing slot assignments.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

M.S. / Computer Science & Engineering / The Oregon Graduate Center's Cognitive Architecture Project (CAP) is developing a flexible architecture to evaluate and implement several types of neural networks. Wafer-scale integrated silicon is the targeted technology, allowing higher density and larger networks to be implemented more cheaply than with discrete components. The large size of networks implemented in wafer-scale technology makes it difficult to assess the effects of manufacturing faults on network behavior. Since neural networks degrade gracefully in the presence of faults, and since in larger networks faults tend to interact with each other, it is difficult to determine these effects analytically. This paper discusses a program, FltSim, that simulates wafer manufacturing faults. By building an abstract model of the CAP architecture, the effects of these manufacturing faults can be determined long before proceeding to implementation. In addition, the effects of architectural design trade-offs can be studied during the design process.

Quality of Service (QoS) in real-time media applications is an area of current interest because of the increasing demand for audio/video, and generally multimedia applications, over best effort networks, such as the Internet. Media applications are transported using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and tend to use a disproportionate amount of network bandwidth as they do not perform congestion or flow control. Methods for application QoS control are desirable to enable users to perceive a consistent media quality. This can be accomplished by either modifying current protocols at the transport layer or by implementing new control algorithms at the application layer irrespective of the protocol used at the transport layer. The objective of this research is to improve the QoS delivered to end-users in real-time applications transported over best-effort packet-switched networks. This is accomplished using UDP at the transport layer, along with adaptive predictive and reactive control at the application layer. An end-to-end fluid model is used, including the source buffer, the network and the destination buffer. Traditional control techniques, along with more advanced adaptive predictive control methods, are considered in order to provide the desirable QoS and make a best-effort network an attractive channel for interactive multimedia applications. The effectiveness of the control methods, is examined using a Simulink-based fluid-level simulator in combination with trace files extracted from the well-known network simulator ns-2. The results show that improvement in real-time applications transported over best-effort networks using unreliable transport protocols, such as UDP, is feasible. The improvement in QoS is reflected in the reduction of flow loss at the expense of flow dead-time increase or playback disruptions or both.

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Date: 23rd November, 2009   Level: Master Thesis in International Business and Entrepreneurship (EFO705), 15 credits   Authors: Karakawat Sarasalin (830117-T255)    Thitiporn Watthanachai (831031-T124) ksn08001@student.mdh.se                       twi08001@student.mdh.se Title: The internationalization process of Red Bull from the perspectives of global expansion Supervisor: Jean-Charles Languilaire Problem Statement: How did RED BULL manage to be as an important central international market player? Purpose: The purpose of this research is to describe the internationalization process of Red Bull; how Red Bull created, sustained and developed?   Method: We mainly use secondary data and the qualitative data. Qualitative data in the form of interview questions through e-mailing. But we also use quantitative method based on documental research from books and internet.   Conclusion: Red Bull does not follow the standard pattern of establishment chain presented in the Uppsala model. Its establishment chain is composed of three stages: licensing ,wholly owned sales subsidiaries and jointed venture. Red Bull has developed strong market within the beverage industry network and strong bonds with its external suppliers. The expansion decisions of Red Bull have been influenced by the factors. Red Bull developed in the European market, we found that it careful consideration about both internal and external factors, Red Bull usually prefers to conquer a new market with a relevant low risk entry mode. Keywords: Red Bull, internationalization, network, factors

Due to the globalization trend, the internationalization of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has become a common practice in the last decades. The previous literature suggested that there are many different determinants of the internationalization process. However, in this research study, we focused on only three determinants – institutions, networks, and entrepreneur and their influence on the internationalization process. More specifically, we identified the significance of the three determinants and tested their influence on the internationalization process and compared the similarities and differences between the SMEs in Sweden and China. A qualitative study was carried out to help determine the purpose of the paper, where data was collected through four case studies – two from each country, within the toy industry. The primary data was collected through personal phone-interviews with the CEOs of the four toy companies, complemented with secondary data collected from the companies’ web sites. The empirical findings and analysis brought some interesting conclusions. The three determinants – institutions, networks and entrepreneur influence the internationalization process in one way or another. Firstly, institutions influence both networks and entrepreneur, but there is no evidence showing that networks and entrepreneur influence institutions. The institutions are also the key determinants of the internationalization process of Chinese SMEs. Secondly, networks and entrepreneur are interrelated to each other and play a key role in the internationalization process of Swedish SMEs, and somewhat influence the Chinese SMEs as well. Thus, these three determinants are extremely important for the internationalization process and they have to be taken into consideration during the international expansion.

In this thesis, I proposed a novel framework of all-optical failure restoration which jointly determines network monitoring plane and spare capacity allocation in the presence of either static or dynamic traffic. The proposed framework aims to enable a general shared protection scheme to achieve near optimal capacity efficiency as in Failure Dependent Protection(FDP) while subject to an ultra-fast, all-optical, and deterministic failure restoration process. Simply put, Local Unambiguous Failure Localization(L-UFL) and FDP are the two building blocks for the proposed restoration framework. Under L-UFL, by properly allocating a set of Monitoring Trails (m-trails), a set of nodes can unambiguously identify every possible Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG) failure merely based on its locally collected Loss of Light(LOL) signals. Two heuristics are proposed to solve L-UFL, one of which exclusively deploys Supervisory Lightpaths (S-LPs) while the other jointly considers S-LPs and Working Lightpaths (W-LPs) for suppressing monitoring resource consumption. Thanks to the ``Enhanced Min Wavelength Max Information principle'', an entropy based utility function, m-trail global-sharing and other techniques, the proposed heuristics exhibit satisfactory performance in minimizing the number of m-trails, Wavelength Channel(WL) consumption and the running time of the algorithm. Based on the heuristics for L-UFL, two algorithms, namely MPJD and DJH, are proposed for the novel signaling-free restoration framework to deal with static and dynamic traffic respectively. MPJD is developed to determine the Protection Lightpaths (P-LPs) and m-trails given the pre-computed W-LPs while DJH jointly implements a generic dynamic survivable routing scheme based on FDP with an m-trail deployment scheme. For both algorithms, m-trail deployment is guided by the Necessary Monitoring Requirement (NMR) defined at each node for achieving signaling-free restoration. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the performance of the proposed heuristics in terms of WL consumption, number of m-trails, monitoring requirement, blocking probability and running time. In conclusion, the proposed restoration framework can achieve all-optical and signaling-free restoration with the help of L-UFL, while maintaining high capacity efficiency as in FDP based survivable routing. The proposed heuristics achieve satisfactory performance as verified by the simulation results.