Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Auteursnaam op omslag: Erica Thrift. Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Carleton University, 1992. / Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Proefschrift Rijksuniversiteit Maastricht. / Lit. opg.: p. 241-253. - Met een samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Multi-object auctions differ in an important way from single-object auctions. When bidders have multi-object demand, equilibria can exist in which bids decrease as values increase! Consider a model with n bidders who receive affiliated one-dimensional types t and whose marginal values are non-decreasing in t and strictly increasing in own type ti. In the first-price auction of a single object, all equilibria are monotone (over the range of types that win with positive probability) in that each bidder's equilibrium bid is non-decreasing in type. On the other hand, some or all equilibria may be non-monotone in many multi-object auctions. In particular, examples are provided for the as-bid and uniform-price auctions of identical objects in which (i) some bidder reduces his bids on all units as his type increases in all equilibria and (ii) symmetric bidders all reduce their bids on some units in all equilibria, and for the as-bid auction of non-identical objects in which (iii) bidders have independent types and some bidder reduces his bids on some packages in all equilibria. Fundamentally, this difference in the structure of equilibria is due to the fact that payoffs fail to satisfy strategic complementarity and/or modularity in these multi-object auctions.

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This dissertation investigates the Patient Input Program, the context from which it arose and the struggles that it evokes for rare disease patients. By drawing on the concepts of boundary work, boundary object, public involvement and needs talk, the dissertation explores a local application of patient involvement as a construction of social participation and site where the needs of rare disease patients are contested among the actors, groups and institutions involved in the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) network. A case study approach was chosen to explain the intrinsic aspects of the Patient Input Program, showing the shaping of the Program and its shaping effect on societal agents and knowledge forms, particularly with respect to rare disease patients. Their experience in the Patient Input Program provides insights on the complexities and controversies rooted within the program, and links more broadly to certain system inadequacies.

Object region detection plays a vital role in many domains ranging from self-driving cars to lane detection, which heavily involves the task of object detection. Improving the performance of object region detection approaches is of great importance and therefore is an active ongoing research in Computer Vision. Traditional sliding window paradigm has been widely used to identify hundreds of thousands of windows (covering different scales, angles, and aspect ratios for objects) before the classification step. However, it is not only computationally expensive but also produces relatively low accuracy in terms of the classifier output by providing many negative samples. Object detection proposals, as discussed in detail in [19, 20], tackle these issues by filtering the windows using different features in the image before passing them to the classifier. This filtering process helps to control the quality as well as the quantity of the windows. EdgeBox is one of the most effective proposal detection approaches that focuses on the presence of dense edges in an image to identify quality proposal windows. This thesis proposes an innovative approach that improves the accuracy of the EdgeBox approach. The improved approach uses both the color properties and the corner information from an image along with the edge information to evaluate the candidate windows. We also describe two variations of the proposed approach. Our extensive experimental results on the Visual Object Classification (VOC) [29,30] dataset clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach together with its two variances to improve the accuracy of the EdgeBox approach.

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Most common object models of distributed object systems have a limited set of object-oriented features, lacking the advanced features of `polymorphism' (an abstraction mechanism that represents a quality or state of being able to assume different forms) and `concurrency' (the ability to have more than one thread of execution in an object simultaneously). The lack of support for advanced features is a serious limitation because it restricts the development of new components and limits reuse of existing of components that use these advanced features. As a result, wrappers must be used that hide the advanced features or components must be re-implemented using only the features of the common object model. In this dissertation, a new direction of research centered on a subset of object-oriented languages, specifically statically typed languages, is considered. One of the major drawbacks of existing distributed object systems is that they cater to a broad domain of programming languages including both object-oriented as well as non object-oriented languages. Mapping an object model into a non object-oriented language is a complex task and it does not appear natural to a native language user. The interoperable common object model (ICOM) proposed in this dissertation is an attempt to elevate common object models (with the advanced features of polymorphism and concurrency) closer to the object models of statically typed object-oriented languages. Specific features of the ICOM object model include: remote inheritance, method overloading, parameterized types, and guard methods. The actor model and reflection techniques are used to develop a uniform implementation framework for the ICOM object model in C++ and Modula-3. Prototype applications were implemented to demonstrate the utility of the advanced features of the ICOM object model. The main contributions of this dissertation are: design and implementation of a powerful common object model, an architecture for distributed compilation, and an implementation of a distributed object model using the actor model. / Ph. D.