The façade as boundary is studied in an attempt to create a public ground floor where boundaries start functioning as thresholds. It could be argued that the boundary [potential threshold] becomes the introduction to the interior space. The study will explore the effect of an interior application on its surrounding urban context and whether an interior intervention can add a positive contribution to the neighbourhood regeneration. The perceived limit of interior design will be extended to include the boundary as an integral part of the design. The project will address the lack of communication between the interior and the exterior context. The boundary will be considered the end of exterior space and the start of interior space. The theory is applied to a site located in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. / Dissertation MInt (Prof)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Architecture / MInt(Prof) / Unrestricted

Rapid growth of Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) provides promising potentials to the advancements of methods and applications in increasing public awareness on climate change. The fundamental principle behind this method is to provide quantifiable calculation approach on several major factors that affect climate change, where one of the most well-known factors is the Greenhouse Gases (GHG) with CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide as major contributors. By utilizing Big Data and IoT, an approximate release of GHG can be calculated and embedded inside common household devices such as thermostats, water/heat/electricity/gas meter. An example is the CO2 released by a cubic of water. By using reverse calculation, an approximate CO2 release can be sequentially retrieved as follows: (1) water meter measures consumption, (2) calculate hp and kWh of pump used to supply one m3 of water, (3) calculate the amount of fossil fuel needed to produce one kWh, and (4) calculate CO2 released to the atmosphere from burning of fossil fuel per metric tons/barrel. Such analytical approaches are then embedded on household devices by providing updated information on GHG produced by hourly/daily/weekly/monthly energy usage, hence educating the public and increasing their awareness of climate change. This approach can be developed to provide an alarm of percentage of GHG released to the atmosphere by the excessive use of electricity/water/gas. Further actions in order to influence socio-economic function can later be established such as by establishing a rewards program by the government for people who can successfully manage their GHG emission.

Triangle counting is a major graph problem with several applications in social network analysis, anomaly detection, etc. A considerable amount of work has contributed to approximately computing the global triangle counts using several computational models. One of the most popular streaming models considered is Edge Streaming in which the edges arrive in the form of a graph stream. We categorize the existing literature into two categories: Fixed Memory (FM) approach, and Fixed Probability (FP) approach. As the size of the graphs grows, several challenges arise such as memory space limitations, and prohibitively long running time. Therefore, both FM and FP categories exhibit some limitations. FP algorithms fail to scale for massive graphs. We identified a limitation of FM category $i.e.$ FM algorithms have higher computational time than their FP variants. In this work, we present a new category called the Hybrid approach that overcomes the limitations of both FM and FP approaches. We present two new algorithms that belong to the hybrid category: Neighbourhood Hybrid Multisampling (NHMS) and Triest/ThinkD Hybrid Sampling (THS) for estimating the number of global triangles in graphs. These algorithms are highly scalable and have better running time than FM and FP variants. We experimentally show that both NHMS and THS outperform state-of-the-art algorithms in space-efficient environments. / Graduate

The aim of this study was to see what effect game fences along road E4 have on moose browsing. I wanted to know if moose browsing escalates close to the game fences or not. I also wanted to know if there is considerable difference in browsing between the east and west side of road E4 in my study area. To test these questions, I performed counts of 60 measurements where I measured moose browsing damage. The measurements were executed 50 to 3000 meters from the fences and were located on both the east and west side of E4. Then I analysed my dataset with correlation analysis to see the relationship between distance from the road and moose browsing. I also compared the amount of browsing damage between the west and east side and used t-test to test the differences in moose browsing. My results showed that moose browsing increased with decreasing distance to the road both measured as percentage damaged and counts of damaged pine trees within each sample. My results also showed that there was significantly more browsing damage on the east side of the road than the west side. The game fences seem to concentrate moose near the fences, and this can result in greater browsing pressure. This should be considered when planning infrastructure and forest management.

<div><div><div><p>The increasing cost of cloud services and the need for decentralization of servers has led to a rise of interest in edge computing. In recent years, edge computing has become a popular choice for latency-sensitive applications like facial recognition and augmented reality because it is closer to the end users compared to the cloud. However, the presence of multiple edge servers adversely affects the reliability due to difficulty in maintenance of heterogeneous servers. In this thesis, we first evaluate the performance of various server configuration models in edge computing using EdgeCloudSim, a popular simulator for edge computing. The performance is evaluated in terms of service time and percentage of failed tasks for an Augmented Reality application. We evaluated the performance of the following edge computing models, Exclusive: Mobile only, Edge only, Cloud only; and Hybrid: Edge & Cloud hybrid with load-balancing on the Edge, and Mobile & Edge hybrid. We analyzed the impact of variation of different parameters such as WAN bandwidth, cost of cloud resources, heterogeneity of edge servers, etc., on the performance of the edge computing mod- els. We show that due to variation in the above parameters, the exclusive models are not sufficient for computational requirements and there is a need for hybrid edge computing models. </p><p>Next, we introduce a novel edge computing model called unmanaged edge computing and propose an orchestration scheme in this scenario. Although infrastructure providers are working toward creating managed edge networks, personal devices such as laptops, desktops, and tablets, which are widely available and are underutilized, can also be used as potential edge devices. We call such devices Unmanaged Edge Devices (UEDs). Scheduling application tasks on such an unmanaged edge system is not straightforward because of three fundamental reasons—heterogeneity in the computational capacity of the UEDs, uncertainty in the availability of the UEDs (due to the devices leaving the system), and interference among multiple tasks sharing a UED. In this work, we present I-BOT, an interference-based orchestration scheme for latency sensitive tasks on an Unmanaged Edge Platform (UEP). It minimizes the completion time of applications and is bandwidth efficient. I-BOT brings forth three innovations. First, it profiles and predicts the interference patterns of the tasks to make scheduling decisions. Second, it uses a feedback mechanism to adjust for changes in the computational capacity of the UEDs and a prediction mechanism to handle their sporadic exits, both of which are fundamental characteristics of a UEP. Third, it accounts for input dependence of tasks in its scheduling decision (such as, two tasks requiring the same input data). To demonstrate the effectiveness of I-BOT, we run real-world unit experiments on UEDs to collect data to drive our simulations. We then run end-to-end simulations with applications representing autonomous driv- ing, composed of multiple tasks. We compare to two basic baselines (random and round-robin) and two state-of-the-arts, Lavea [SEC-2017] and Petrel [MSN-2018] for scheduling these applications on varying-sized UEPs. Compared to these baselines, I-BOT significantly reduces the average service time of application tasks. This reduction is more pronounced in dynamic heterogeneous environments, which would be the case in a UEP.</p></div></div></div>

Quality inspection is an indispensable part of the production process of screws for hardware manufactories. In general, hardware manufactories do the quality test of screws by using an electric screwdriver to twist screws. However, there are some limitations and shortcomings in the manual inspection. Firstly, the efficiency of manual inspection is low. Second, manual inspection is difficult to achieve continuous working for 24 hours, which will make a high wage cost. In this thesis, in order to enhance the inspection efficiency and save test costs, we propose to use the image recognition technology of memristor neural networks to check the quality of screws. Here, we discuss different training models of neural networks, namely: convolutional neural networks, one-layer memristor neural network with fixed learning rates. By using the dataset of 8,202 screw head images, experimental results show that the classification accuracy of CNNs and memristor neural networks can achieve 96% and 90%, respectively, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Edge beams in Sweden are subjected to harsh environmental conditions, such as de-icing salts and numerous freeze-thaw cycles, which result in large expenditures for the maintenance of these items. Driven by that fact, a project was initiated to investigate the life of edge beams in more detail.   The main objective of the work was to determine and provide reliable input for establishment of investment cost of edge beams. The data was later utilized in an application of life-cycle cost analysis - created by a Ph.D student. Case studies - ongoing bridge construction projects in Askersund, Rotebro and Kallhäll - gave the basis for the research. Site visits were performed and engineers were consulted for data collection.   As an outcome of the project, costs for the edge beams in the case studies were calculated and comparative charts were presented that reveal the magnitude of cost contributors to the bridge edge beam system.   The work illustrates that the construction of edge beams is a workforce demanding process. Hence it is suggested that, to find the most optimal edge beam solution in terms of investment cost and life-cycle considerations, various construction methods such as prefabrication of edge beams should be tested and analysed.

With an ever-increasing percentage of the human population connected to the internet, the amount of data produced and processed is at an all-time high. Edge Computing has emerged as a paradigm to handle this growth and, combined with 5G, enables complex time-sensitive applications running on resource-restricted devices. This master thesis investigates the use of WebAssembly in the context of computa¬tional offloading at the Edge. The focus is on utilizing WebAssembly to move computa¬tional heavy parts of a system from an end device to an Edge Server. An objective is to improve program performance by reducing the execution time and energy consumption on the end device. A proof-of-concept offloading system is developed to research this. The system is evaluated on three different use cases; calculating Fibonacci numbers, matrix multipli¬cation, and image recognition. Each use case is tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 4 comparing execution of the WebAssembly module both locally and offloaded. Each test will also run natively on both the server and the end device to provide some baseline for comparison.

A graph G is diameter 2-critical if its diameter is two, and the deletion of any edge increases the diameter. Murty and Simon conjectured that the number of edges in a diameter 2-critical graph of order n is at most n2/4 and that the extremal graphs are complete bipartite graphs with equal size partite sets. We use an association with total domination to prove the conjecture for the graphs whose complements have diameter three.

A set S of vertices in a graph G is a total dominating set of G if every vertex of G is adjacent to some vertex in S. The minimum cardinality of a total dominating set of G is the total domination number γt(G). The graph G is 3t-critical if γt(G)=3 and γt(G+e)=2 for every edge e in the complement of G. We show that no bipartite graph is 3t-critical. The tripartite 3 t-critical graphs are characterized. For every k<3, we prove that there are only a finite number of 3t-critical k-partite graphs. We show that the 5-cycle is the only 3t-critical K3-free graph and that there are only a finite number of 3t-critical K4-free graphs.