The United States international land boundary is a volatile, security intense area. In 2010, the combined trade was $918 billion within North American nations, with 80% transported by commercial trucks. Over 50 million commercial vehicles cross the Texas/Mexico border every year, not including private vehicles and pedestrian traffic, between Brownsville and El Paso, Texas, through one of over 25 major border crossings called "ports of entry" (POE). Recently, securing our southwest border from terrorist interventions, undocumented immigrants, and the illegal flow of drugs and guns has dominated the need to efficiently and effectively process people, goods and traffic. Increasing security and inspection requirements are seriously affecting transit times. Each POE is configured as a multi-commodity, prioritized queueing network which rarely, if ever, operates in steady-state. Therefore, the problem is about finding a balance between a reduction of wait time and its variance, POE operation costs, and the sustainment of a security level. The contribution of the dissertation is three-fold. The first uses queueing theory on the border crossing process to develop a methodology that decreases border wait times without increasing costs or affecting security procedures. The outcome is the development of the Dynamic Reallocation Methodology (DRM). Currently at the POE, inspection stations are fixed and can only inspect one truck type, FAST or Non-FAST program participant. The methodology proposes moveable servers that once a threshold is met, can be switched to service the other type of truck. Particular emphasis is given to inspection (service) times under time-varying arrivals (demands). The second contribution is an analytical model of the POE, to analyze the effects of the DRM. First assuming a Markovian service time, DRM benefits are evaluated. However, field data and other research suggest a general distribution for service time. Therefore, a Coxian k-phased approximation is implemented. The DRM is analyzed under this new baseline using expected number in the system, and cycle times. A variance reduction procedure is also proposed and evaluated under DRM. Results show that queue length and wait time is reduced 10 to 33% depending on load, while increasing FAST wait time by less than three minutes.

Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq / Synchronous sampling is currently the most widely used analog to digital conversion method, mainly due to its implementation ease, since it employs a constant sampling rate. However, a fixed sampling rate can cause unnecessary activations of the sample and hold circuit, increasing power consumption. Asynchronous analog to digital converters can be used to solve this problem, sampling only when particulars events occur, such as amplitude level crossings. This approach has been intensely studied over the last decades, and arose as an alternative to synchronous sampling. Another asynchronous sampling approach is the one proposed by Voelcker (1966), where sampling instants are the zero crossings of the signal. According to him complex zeros must be sampled for perfect signal reconstruction, in addition to real zeros. Although being physically undetectable, Voelcker proposes that complex zeros can be “transformed” using the real zeros of all nth signal derivatives. Nevertheless this can be unfeasible and this work proposes the use of the Zero Crossing method with a limited number of derivatives. Such approach is justifiable because in consecutive derivatives, real zeros tends to be close or even repeat themselves, thus not aggregating any more information about the original signal. Therefore, this work verifies the applicability of the proposed method for systems that need low power consumption and a good reconstruction of the sampled signal, being suggest from the results of this work as a good solution of compromise between synchronous sampling and Level Crossing. / A amostragem síncrona é o método mais amplamente utilizado na conversão analógica/ digital para sinais do cotidiano, principalmente devido à facilidade de implementálos, pois a taxa de amostragem é constante. Entretanto, a taxa de amostragem fixa pode causar ativações desnecessárias do circuito de Sample and Hold, gerando um alto consumo energético. Os conversores analógicos digitais assíncronos podem ser utilizados para resolver este problema, amostrando somente quando ocorrem eventos particulares, tais como os cruzamentos de níveis de amplitude (em inglês - Level Crossing). Esta abordagem está sendo intensamente estudada nas últimas décadas, e surgiu como alternativa à amostragem síncrona. Outra alternativa de amostragem assíncrona e a abordagem proposta por Voelcker, onde os instantes de amostragem são os cruzamentos por zero do sinal. Segundo ele, para que seja possível obter a perfeita reconstrução do sinal, além dos zeros reais, os zeros complexos devem ser amostrados. Embora eles sejam fisicamente indetectáveis, Voelcker propôs que estes podem ser “transformados” em zeros reais a partir das informações de todos os zeros reais das n-ésimas derivadas do sinal. Contudo isto pode ser impraticável, e neste trabalho é proposto um novo método de Zero Crossing que utiliza somente até a 3a derivada. Tal abordagem é justificada pela possibilidade, aqui apresentada de que ao realizar muitas derivadas do sinal, os zeros reais tendem a ficar muito próximos, ou até se repetir, não agregando mais informação sobre o sinal original. Diante disso, foi verificado neste trabalho a aplicabilidade do método proposto para sistemas que necessitem de um baixo consumo energético e uma boa reconstrução do sinal amostrado, sendo apontado a partir dos resultados deste trabalho como uma boa solução de compromisso entre a amostragem síncrona e o Level Crossing.

This work is a result of the current state of the art and the measurement of drivers' reactions and their behavior through the eyetracker during the passage through pedestrian crossings on which the pedestrian crossed. The subject of the measurement was the assessment of the design of the pedestrian crossing and its subsequent influence on the reactions of drivers and their behavior.

The aim of the diploma thesis is to propose the connection of a road network on the territory of Černovická Terasa on the D1 motorway - in particular Průmyslová, Tuřanka, Řípská and Šlapanická. This is to find an optimal solution for local, regional and long-distance routes, which primarily enable non-residential use of the site along the D1 motorway. 5 variants of the solution were found in the thesis, 1 variant was elaborated in detail.

Presented diploma thesis deals with problems connected with accidents at railroad crossings from the road and railway drivers´ perspectives. The theoretical part is particularly focused on the explanation of chosen regulations associated with railroad crossings, with their construction and technical design and also with ways and options of marking in connection with railroad crossing safety system. The paper mentions the most frequent causes why dangerous situations occur. These causes arise from the railway and road drivers´ personal experience, supplemented by statistics of accidents at railroad crossings for the previous periods. The practical part analyses the options for averting a collision on two particular railroad crossings. For this purpose, the railroad crossing secured by lights and the railroad crossing secured only by a warning cross were chosen. Here, with Virtual Crash programme support, the origin of the chosen crisis situations is simulated and later options of their averting are evaluated. Finally, proposals for increasing railroad crossings safety are formulated for both cases. The appendix consists of a list of legislative regulations dealing with railroad crossings, a driving record of the rail vehicle and its technical parameters and simulation programme´s outputs.

Les crossing-overs (CO) sont indispensables dans la création variétale pour permettre l'introgression de régions d'intérêt dans les variétés agronomiques d'espèces cultivées telles que le blé tendre (Triticum aesstivum L.). Afin d'évaluer l'impact des facteurs qui influencent leur formation, nous avons entrepris une caractérisation fine de leur distribution sur le plus grand chromosome ( chromosome 3B, 995Mb) du blé tendre en s'appuyant sur la carte physique récemment développée et le séquençage de quelques régions de plusieurs mégabases. La comparaison entre une carte génétique dense (102 marqueurs) et une carte physique de délétion montre que 77% des CO sont présents dans les régions distales couvrant seuleument 25% du chromosome. La comparaison de différentes cartes génétiques montre de plus que cette distribution est conservée entre populations avec cependant des différences de taux de CO locaux entre populations mais également entre méiose mâle et femelle. Cette distribution est influencée par une interférence positive forte à des distances inférieures à 10 cM. Cependant, les faibles fréquences de CO observées au sein des régions proximales restent inexpliquées. En effet, la faible augmentation du taux de CO observée au sein des régions proximales placées en position distale suggère que la position proximale de ces régions sur le chromosome ne semble pas responsable de leur faible fréquence de CO. De plus, nous avons montré que ces faibles fréquences ne seraient pas non plus dues à une divergence de séquence entre chromosomes homologues au sein des régions proximales, la fréquence de CO étant toujours aussi faible au sein de celles-ci entre deux chromosomes homozygotes. En revanche, l'analyse à l'échelle d'une région séquencée de 3.1 Mb indique que les fréquences de CO importantes sont fortement corrélées avec la présence de gènes. L'inhibition de la formation des CO au sein des régions proximales pourrait ainsi s'expliquer par la présence de gènes en quantité moins importante dans ces régions comparées aux régions distales.

The effects that cellular (cell) phone conversation may have on pedestrian road-crossing performance is unknown. A series of experiments was conducted using a virtual reality road crossing simulator to examine this issue. The participants were primarily university students aged between 18 and 24 years old, although one study compared a group aged 18 to 24 to a group between 50 and 67 years old. Two experimental situations were used: a gap-choice situation, in which the participants had to choose a gap to cross through; and an infrequency situation, where vehicles were present on only 10% of the trials. Participants were impaired by a simulated phone conversation task when compared to no-conversation task, as evidenced by longer reaction times, slower walking speeds, poorer gap choices, and more cautious behaviours. Most importantly, conversation was related to a decrease in the mean margins of safety, and the participants were hit or nearly hit by vehicles more often when talking. The general performance of the older participants did not differ from that of the younger participants, and both groups were impaired to a similar extent by the conversation task. Participants were found to use irrelevant distance information to inform their gap-choice decisions, a strategy associated with a decrease in safety as the distance between the vehicles increased. It was also found that their use of time-to-arrival information was impaired when engaged in the conversation task. Overall, talking on a cell phone while crossing a road may represent an unnecessary increase in risk; therefore, care should be taken if these two acts are being conducted concurrently.

Electronic Structure Theory has led to a variety of developments and applications. In the Nooijen group the focus is on the development and use of Coupled Cluster based approaches. Coupled Cluster is a very strong and accurate approach to the quantum mechanical problem. The research results presented in the thesis testify to the Similarity Transformed Equation of Motion Coupled Cluster (STEOM-CC) for being a very accurate and yet computationally inexpensive approach for excited states. This study reveals new features about STEOM and provides promise regarding future improvement in the methodology. STEOM can be used as the first step in the construction of the Vibronic model, which is a strong tool to move to paradigms beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Spin-Orbit Coupling (SOC) is a very important ingredient required to study relativistic phenomena and its quantum mechanical implementation for many body systems is not straightforward. The most widely used SOC operator in Chemical Physics is the Breit-Pauli operator, which requires employing non-trivial approximations to the Dirac equation to adapt the theory to many body systems. The integration of electronic structure approaches, Vibronic Coupling, and SOC is essential to study the phenomenon of intersystem crossing (transition between spin states) in fine detail. In this thesis a computational benchmark of STEOM is discussed, while the frameworks of Vibronic Coupling and Spin-Orbit Coupling (SOC) are considered on a theoretical level.

In this thesis we investigate wall-crossing phenomena in the stability manifold of an irreducible principally polarized abelian surface for objects with the same invariants as (twists of) ideal sheaves of points. In particular, we construct a sequence of fine moduli spaces which are related by Mukai flops and observe that the stability of these objects is completely determined by the configuration of points. Finally, we use Fourier-Mukai theory to show that these moduli are projective.

Our ability and capacity to generate, record and store multi-dimensional, apparently unstructured data is increasing rapidly, while the cost of data storage is going down. The data recorded is not perfect, as noise gets introduced in it from different sources. Some of the basic forms of noise are incorrect recording of values and missing values. The formal study of discovering useful hidden information in the data is called Data Mining. Because of the size, and complexity of the problem, practical data mining problems are best attempted using automatic means. Data Mining can be categorized into two types i.e. supervised learning or classification and unsupervised learning or clustering. Clustering only the records in a database (or data matrix) gives a global view of the data and is called one-way clustering. For a detailed analysis or a local view, biclustering or co-clustering or two-way clustering is required involving the simultaneous clustering of the records and the attributes. In this dissertation, a novel fast and white noise tolerant data mining solution is proposed based on the Crossing Minimization (CM) paradigm; the solution works for one-way as well as two-way clustering for discovering overlapping biclusters. For decades the CM paradigm has traditionally been used for graph drawing and VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) circuit design for reducing wire length and congestion. The utility of the proposed technique is demonstrated by comparing it with other biclustering techniques using simulated noisy, as well as real data from Agriculture, Biology and other domains. Two other interesting and hard problems also addressed in this dissertation are (i) the Minimum Attribute Subset Selection (MASS) problem and (ii) Bandwidth Minimization (BWM) problem of sparse matrices. The proposed CM technique is demonstrated to provide very convincing results while attempting to solve the said problems using real public domain data. Pakistan is the fourth largest supplier of cotton in the world. An apparent anomaly has been observed during 1989-97 between cotton yield and pesticide consumption in Pakistan showing unexpected periods of negative correlation. By applying the indigenous CM technique for one-way clustering to real Agro-Met data (2001-2002), a possible explanation of the anomaly has been presented in this thesis.