In this work, we study the cache-oblivious computation model, which is inspired by the behaviour of the memory hierarchy of current computers. We study several graph algorithms and techniques of their design in this model. We consider graph searching, identifying connected components and computing maximal matching. We also study sorting and matrix multiplication as subproblems of many graph algorithms. In ad- dition to previously known algorithms, we present several new ones. We study their efficiency both by the means of asymptotic complexity and by benchmarking them on real hardware and we compare them with classical algorithms.

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if there was a relationship between the TCAP test and Pearson Benchmark assessment in elementary students’ reading and language arts and math performance in a northeastern Tennessee school district. This study involved 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students. The study focused on the following subgroups: gender, Title I school status, and socioeconomic status as determined by free and reduced-price meal benefits. Test scores of students taking the Pearson Benchmark assessment in the fall, winter, and spring of the 2011-2012 academic school year and the TCAP in the spring of the 2012 academic school year were compared. Test scores were collected from 5 elementary schools. A total of 1,069 students were included in this study. The analysis focused on 10 research questions. Data collected for this study were entered into an Excel data file for analysis using IBM-SPSS. The research questions were examined using the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients, the t test for independent samples, and the multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to account for differences in a set of 2 dependent variables. Based on the analyses and findings of this study, there appears to be a positive relationship between the TCAP test and Pearson Benchmark assessment in elementary students’ reading and language arts and math performance in a northeastern Tennessee school district. This relationship extended across students’ gender, Title I school status, and socioeconomic status as determined by free and reduced-price meal benefits. Major recommendations from this study included the use of formative assessment benchmark tools to generate timely data aimed at the improvement of student learning and achievement, tracking the time spent on benchmark testing and carefully evaluating whether this is the optimal use of student academic time, analyzing the use of formative assessment and the relationship to teacher growth and development, and considering the development of the whole child as opposed to strictly focusing on quantitative academic measures to define student success.

iiABSTRACTBehavioral finance has been a popular research subject for a while and therefore the understanding of human behavior when it comes to private financial investments has increased. When comparing human behavior to the financial theories one can conclude thatthe assumption of perfect and efficient markets with fully informed and rational investors is not realistic. This study has therefore looked at the investor rationality when choosing which index fund to invest in. Index funds are to a large degree used asa savings tool for either pensions or other specific purposes. It was therefore interesting to look at the behavior of Swedish investors buyingthe Swedishindex funds available in Sweden with a quantitative analysis of the relationship between flow and other features of index funds. The dependent variable reflecting rationality was the fund flow and the independent variables were return, tracking error, size, fee and risk. No previous studies have been made on the investor rationality regarding index funds in the Swedish market, although similar studies havebeen done on the American S&P 500 investors. 17 index funds were included in this study, which is the whole population of index funds following Swedish indices available in Sweden at the point of time when this study was conducted. From this population funds that had been available for more than 3 years was chosen since we wanted to look at the behavior based on a longer time span than one year. In the end, 17index funds with 51observations was included in the study.Five hypotheses were created and tested of whichtwowereaccepted. From the regression model we found that return and standard deviation (SD) weresignificant andhadpositiverelationshipswith the fund flow. This implies that Swedish investors are rational to some degree but not fully rational since they are not taking any of the other variables into account which a rational investor ought to consider. It is therefore useful information for both investors and fund companies to see which factors weight in the most and how rational the behavior is. Conclusions from this study is that Swedish investors are subject to the index fund rationality paradox to some degree and the rational choice theory applies to some extent. One has to fully consider the outcomes of an action and base the decisionon utility maximization that the outcome will give one. To act fully rational is hard even for the most aware investor and even harder for an ordinary investor with gaps in knowledge and limited resources to information.

With the amount of programming languages currently available there is a high risk of confusion anddoubtfulness in aspiring programmers of which to choose. It may be motivating for a beginner tochoose “the perfect language” when starting, to avoid learning multiple languages. This thesiscompares three popular languages on three separate aspects, their syntax, usefulness in differentareas, and performance in terms of speed. Syntax wise the results varied with some aspects beingvery similar across all three languages to completely different in others. In terms of usefulness inspecific areas the languages flexibility allowed them to develop applications in most fields, while beingdominant in different areas. The speed comparison resulted in python being the slowest across alltests, with Java and Javascript (running inside Nodejs) competing for first place.

In its latest neurotoxicity guidelines released by the US EPA Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) in 1998, it is recommended that in a neurobehavioral testing, at a minimum, for acute studies, observations and activity testing should be made before the initiation of exposure, at the estimated TOPE (time of peak effects) within 8 hrs of dosing, and at 7 and 14 days after dosing. It is recommended that estimation of TOPE be made by dosing pairs of rats across a range of doses and making regular observations of gait and arousal. However it is well known that TOPE may vary with end points or exposure conditions. In order to derive quantitative safety measures such as the benchmark doses (BMD), dose-time-response modeling must be done first and a model-based estimate is then implied. In many cases, the overall BMD corresponds to a TOPE estimate. In such cases a substantial variation in the TOPE estimate in turn may result in substantial variation in BMD estimate. Therefore a reliable statistical estimate of TOPE is crucial to the correct determination of BMD. We therefore performed simulation studies to assess the impact of the experiment-based TOPE on the statistical estimation of the true TOPE on the basis of a fitted dose-time-response model. The simulation allows for the determination of the optimal timing range for the 2nd testing. The results indicated that given only four repeated observations, the optimal second testing time was at about midway between time zero and the true TOPE. Choosing the second testing time at the TOPE may not generate statistical estimates closer to the true TOPE.

Dans une grappe de bases de données, la réplication préventive peut fournir une cohérence forte sans les limitations d'une réplication synchrone. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons une solution complète pour la réplication préventive qui supporte les configurations multimaîtres et partielles, où les bases de données sont partiellement répliquées sur différents noeuds. Pour augmenter le débit des transactions, nous proposons une optimisation qui élimine le délai d'attente pour l'ordonnancement en contrepartie d'un petit nombre d'abandon des transactions et nous introduisons le rafraîchissement parallèle des copies. Nous décrivons des expérimentations à grande échelle de notre algorithme basées sur notre prototype (RepDB*) sur une grappe de 64 noeuds utilisant le SGBD PostgreSQL. Nos résultats utilisant le banc d'essai TPC-C montrent que notre approche dispose d'un excellent passage à l'échelle et d'une excellente amélioration du débit.

<p><p>Benchmarking of DSP kernel algorithms was conducted in the thesis on a DSP processor for teaching in the course TESA26 in the department of Electrical Engineering. It includes benchmarking on cycle count and memory usage. The goal of the thesis is to evaluate the quality of a single MAC DSP instruction set and provide suggestions for further improvement in instruction set architecture accordingly. The scope of the thesis is limited to benchmark the processor only based on assembly coding. The quality check of compiler is not included. The method of the benchmarking was proposed by BDTI, Berkeley Design Technology Incorporations, which is the general methodology used in world wide DSP industry.</p><p>Proposals on assembly instruction set improvements include the enhancement of FFT and DCT. The cycle cost of the new FFT benchmark based on the proposal was XX% lower, showing that the proposal was right and qualified. Results also show that the proposal promotes the cycle cost score for matrix computing, especially matrix multiplication. The benchmark results were compared with general scores of single MAC DSP processors offered by BDTI.</p></p>

<p>This thesis presents an evaluation of the Solaris version of the Xen virtual machine monitor and a comparison of its performance to the performance of Solaris Containers under similar conditions. Xen is a virtual machine monitor, based on the paravirtualization approach, which provides an instruction set different to the native machine environment and therefore requires modifications to the guest operating systems. Solaris Zones is an operating system-level virtualization technology that is part of the Solaris OS. Furthermore, we provide a basic performance evaluation of the security modules for Xen and Zones, known as sHype and Solaris Trusted Extensions, respectively.</p><p>We evaluate the control domain (know as Domain-0) and the user domain performance as the number of user domains increases. Testing Domain-0 with an increasing number of user domains allows us to evaluate how much overhead virtual operating systems impose in the idle state and how their number influences the overall system performance. Testing one user domain and increasing the number of idle domains allows us to evaluate how the number of domains influences operating system performance. Testing concurrently loaded increasing numbers of user domains we investigate total system efficiency and load balancing dependent on the number of running systems.</p><p>System performance was limited by CPU, memory, and hard drive characteristics. In the case of CPU-bound tests Xen exhibited performance close to the performance of Zones and to the native Solaris performance, loosing 2-3% due to the virtualization overhead. In case of memory-bound and hard drive-bound tests Xen showed 5 to 10 times worse performance.</p>

<p>Aggressive fiscal and monetary policies by governments of countries and central banks in developed markets could somehow push inflation to some very high level in the long run. Due to the decreasing of pension fund benefits and increasing inflation rate, pension companies are selling inflation-linked products to hedge against inflation risk. Such companies are seriously considering the possible effects of inflation volatility on their investment, and some of them tend to include inflationary allowances in the pension payment plan. In this dissertation we study the management of pension funds of the defined contribution type in the presence of inflation-recession. We study how the fund manager maximizes his fund&rsquo / s wealth when the salaries and stocks are affected by inflation. In this regard, we consider the case of a pension company which invests in a stock, inflation-linked bonds and a money market account, while basing its investment on the contribution of the plan member. We use a benchmarking approach and martingale methods to compute an optimal strategy which maximizes the fund wealth.</p>

Industrial robot manipulators are general-purpose machines used for industrial automation in order to increase productivity, flexibility, and product quality. Other reasons for using industrial robots are cost saving, and elimination of hazardous and unpleasant work. Robot motion control is a key competence for robot manufacturers, and the current development is focused on increasing the robot performance, reducing the robot cost, improving safety, and introducing new functionalities.  Therefore, there is a need to continuously improve the mathematical models and control methods in order to fulfil conflicting requirements, such as increased performance of a weight-reduced robot, with lower mechanical stiffness and more complicated vibration modes. One reason for this development of the robot mechanical structure is of course cost-reduction, but other benefits are also obtained, such as lower environmental impact, lower power consumption, improved dexterity, and higher safety. This thesis deals with different aspects of modeling and control of flexible, i.e., elastic, manipulators. For an accurate description of a modern industrial manipulator, this thesis shows that the traditional flexible joint model, described in literature, is not sufficient. An improved model where the elasticity is described by a number of localized multidimensional spring-damper pairs is therefore proposed. This model is called the extended flexible joint model. The main contributions of this work are the design and analysis of identification methods, and of inverse dynamics control methods, for the extended flexible joint model. The proposed identification method is a frequency-domain non-linear gray-box method, which is evaluated by the identification of a modern six-axes robot manipulator. The identified model gives a good description of the global behavior of this robot. The inverse dynamics problem is discussed, and a solution methodology is proposed. This methodology is based on the solution of a differential algebraic equation (DAE). The inverse dynamics solution is then used for feedforward control of both a simulated manipulator and of a real robot manipulator. The last part of this work concerns feedback control. First, a model-based nonlinear feedback control (feedback linearization) is evaluated and compared to a model-based feedforward control algorithm. Finally, two benchmark problems for robust feedback control of a flexible manipulator are presented and some proposed solutions are analyzed.