This thesis concerns technical aspects related to the design and operation of the submillimetre common-user bolometer array 2 (SCUBA-2) instrument, a new wide-field camera for submillimetre astronomy currently undergoing commissioning on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Offering unprecedented sensitivity and mapping capabilities, SCUBA-2 is expected to make a major impact in surveys of the sky at submillimetre wavelengths, a largely unexplored part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and provide better understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars and planets by providing large, unbiased samples of such objects. SCUBA-2 uses large arrays of bolometers, with superconducting transition edge sensors (TESs) as the temperature-sensitive element. TES devices are a relatively new technology, utilising the sharp resistance change between the normal and superconducting states to make a sensitive thermistor. Kilopixel arrays of such devices are multiplexed using superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). This thesis derives the key detector performance parameters, and presents analysis of engineering data to confirm the detector performance on array scales. A key issue for bolometric instruments for far infrared and submillimetre astronomy is the need to operate at extremely low temperatures in the sub-kelvin and millikelvin ranges to achieve the necessary detector sensitivity. This work describes the design, testing and performance of the liquid cryogen-free millikelvin cryostat, the first such instrument to be deployed for astronomy. Subsequent chapters detail the design and testing of a magnetic shielding scheme for the instrument, an important aspect of the operation of superconducting devices. Based on experience with the construction and testing of this instrument, a number of potential improvements for future instruments are presented and discussed.

Medical imaging is an important part of the clinical workflow. With the increasing amount and complexity of image data comes the need for automatic (or semi-automatic) analysis methods which aid the physician in the exploration of the data. One specific imaging technique is angiography, in which the blood vessels are imaged using an injected contrast agent which increases the contrast between blood and surrounding tissue. In these images, the blood vessels can be viewed as tubular structures with varying diameters. Deviations from this structure are signs of disease, such as stenoses introducing reduced blood flow, or aneurysms with a risk of rupture. This thesis focuses on segmentation and visualization of blood vessels, consituting the vascular tree, in angiography images. Segmentation is the problem of partitioning an image into separate regions. There is no general segmentation method which achieves good results for all possible applications. Instead, algorithms use prior knowledge and data models adapted to the problem at hand for good performance. We study blood vessel segmentation based on a two-step approach. First, we model the vessels as a collection of linear structures which are detected using multi-scale filtering techniques. Second, we develop machine-learning based level set segmentation methods to separate the vessels from the background, based on the output of the filtering. In many applications the three-dimensional structure of the vascular tree has to be presented to a radiologist or a member of the medical staff. For this, a visualization technique such as direct volume rendering is often used. In the case of computed tomography angiography one has to take into account that the image depends on both the geometrical structure of the vascular tree and the varying concentration of the injected contrast agent. The visualization should have an easy to understand interpretation for the user, to make diagnostical interpretations reliable. The mapping from the image data to the visualization should therefore closely follow routines that are commonly used by the radiologist. We developed an automatic method which adapts the visualization locally to the contrast agent, revealing a larger portion of the vascular tree while minimizing the manual intervention required from the radiologist. The effectiveness of this method is evaluated in a user study involving radiologists as domain experts.

Although grassland bird populations have steadily declined, little research has examined the effect of oil infrastructure on abundances of grassland songbirds. Even less research has identified mechanisms that explain observed effects. To evaluate this, I sampled abundance of 5 songbird species at oil well sites with different pump mechanisms, power sources, and activity levels; I also evaluated the effects of perch and road density and exotic vegetation, all of which are associated with oil development. Both Baird’s sparrows (Ammodramus bairdii) and Sprague’s pipits (Anthus spragueii) had lower abundances at all sites that contained oil infrastructure. The other 3 species, chestnut-collared longspurs (Calcarius ornatus), western meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta), and Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis), were relatively unaffected by oil wells, linear features, or exotic vegetation. Given that oil well sites negatively affected two species of concern, more research is needed to determine mitigation strategies. / October 2016

Zusammenfassung Heutige Ansätze des 3D-Trackings für die Registrierung in der realen Welt zum Einsatz von Augmented Reality lassen sich in modellbasierte und umgebungsbasierte Verfahren unterteilen. Umgebungsbasierte Verfahren nutzen den SLAM-Algorithmus zur Erzeugung dreidimensionaler Punktwolken der Umgebung in Echtzeit. Modellbasierte Verfahren finden Ihren Ursprung im Canny edge detector und nutzen aus den CAD-Modellen abgeleitete Kantenmodelle. Wird das modellbasierte Verfahren über Kantendetektion und das umgebungsbasierte Verfahren über 3DPunktewolken kombiniert, ergibt sich ein robustes, hybrides 3D-Tracking. Die entsprechenden Algorithmen der verschiedenen Verfahren sind in heute verfügbaren AR-Frameworks bereits implementiert. Der vorliegende Betrag zeigt zwar, welche Effizienz das hybride 3D-Tracking aufweist, jedoch auch die Problematik der erforderlichen geometrischen Ähnlichkeit von idealem CAD-Modell, bzw. Kantenmodell, und realem Objekt. Bei unterschiedlichen Montagestufen an verschiedenen Montagestationen und mit wechselnden Anwendern ist beispielsweise eine erneute Initialisierung erforderlich. Somit bedingt das hybride 3D-Tracking zahlreiche Kantenmodell, die zuvor aus der jeweiligen Montagestufe abgeleitet werden müssen. Hinzu kommen geometrische Abweichungen durch die Fertigung, die je nach Größe der branchenspezifischen Toleranzen keine hinreichend hohe Übereinstimmung mit den abgeleiteten Kantenmodellen aus den idealen CAD-Modellen aufweisen. Die Autoren schlagen daher den Einsatz parametrisch aufgebauter Mastermodelle vor, welche durch eine interaktive Initialisierung geometrisch Instanziiert werden. Zum Einsatz kommt hier ein mobiler Tiefensensor für Smart Devices, welcher mit Hilfe des Anwenders eine Relation der realen geometrischen Merkmale mit den Idealen des CAD-Modells ermöglicht. Des Weiteren wird in dem dargestellten Konzept die Nutzung von speziellen Suchalgorithmen basierend auf geometrischen Ähnlichkeiten vorgeschlagen, sodass eine Registrierung und Instanziierung auch ohne hinterlegtes Mastermodell ermöglicht wird. Der Beitrag fokussiert sich bei der Validierung auf die interaktive Initialisierung anhand eines konkreten anwendungsnahen Beispiels, da die Initialisierung die Grundlage für die weitere Entwicklung des Gesamtkonzeptes darstellt.

In modern gas turbine engines, film cooling is extensively used to cool the components exposed to the hot mainstream gas path. In implementing film cooling on modern gas turbine engines, the trailing edge film poses a particularly challenging design problem. From an aerodynamic point of view, the trailing edge of a blade is designed to be as thin as possible. However, this conflicts with the implementation of the cooling design. The most common method of film cooling the trailing edge is via late pressure surface discrete film cooling holes. Another method of cooling the trailing edge is by using discrete pressure surface slots. This thesis documents a comparative aerodynamic and heat transfer study of three trailing edge cooling configurations. The study was carried out using a large scale, low speed wind tunnel situated at the Southwell Laboratory. The three trailing edge cooling configurations considered were as follows. First is the common late pressure film cooling of the trailing edge via discrete film cooling holes. This configuration is designated as datum configuration. Second is the pressure surface slot coolant ejection. This configuration was designated as cast cutback configuration. The third is the pressure surface ejection via discrete film cooling holes within a step cutback. This configuration was designated the machined cutback configuration. The above configurations were incorporated into three flat plates manufactured using stereolithography. In the aerodynamic study, the static pressure distribution and discharge coefficient for the three configurations were compared. Furthermore, two dimensional total pressure measurements were carried out using a traverse mechanism downstream of the test plates. The total pressure measurements were used to compute the mixed out losses for the three configurations. It was found that the datum and machined cutback configurations have similar discharge coefficients and mixed out losses whilst the cast cutback configuration produces greater mixed out loss. The film effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient on the pressure surface downstream of the coolant ejection was obtained using a steady state heat transfer technique. The effectiveness measurements were compared with those from the literature and correlated against the two dimensional slot model. The heat transfer measurements show that the cast cutback configuration has the potential to give higher effectiveness at the trailing edge.

This examination of Ralph Vaughan Williams' song cycle to poetry of Alfred Edward Housman, "On Wenlock Edge," will follow primarily two avenues of approach. First, following a brief biographical sketch of Vaughan Williams' career prior to the composition of "On Wenlock Edge," will be a discussion of Vaughan Williams' and Housman's respective aesthetic philosophies. In order to lay the background for certain salient characteristics of this cycle, parallels as well as differences in their artistic thinking will be explained. Secondly, a poetic analysis will precede the musical analysis of each song in order to differentiate between the original intent of the poet and the interpretation of the poetry by Vaughan Williams.

The topic of the diploma thesis is commercial suburbanization and its relation to concept Edge city. The main objectives of the thesis are an analysis of development of commercial activities in Prague and its hinterland, evaulation of current development of commercial activities on area of Prague airport and prediction of future possibilities of development and comparison of Prague airport with a concept Edge city. First chapters deal with theoretical questions of the suburbanization and Edge city. Next chapter defines the locality of interest - Václav Havel Airport Prague. The tool used for this is development analysis of commercial activities of Prague metropolitan area. In the case study there are analyzed commercial activities at Prague airport and its hinterland and the premises for the future development. Based on this study the locality is compared with concept Edge city. For this purpose are used criteria according Joel Garreau and following concepts and sources. Although the chosen locality is not real Edge city, it is possible to find some similarities typical for its initial phase. Long-term development of Edge cities in the USA shows the possible threats and provides with learnings for the chosen locality like for instance rebuilding or conflict with residential suburbanization.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as a promising technology to handle computation-intensive and latency-sensitive tasks for mobile user equipments (UEs) in next-generation mobile networks. Mobile UEs can offload these tasks to nearby edge servers, which are typically deployed on base stations (BSs) that are equipped with computation resources. Thus, the task execution latency as well as the energy consumption of mobile devices can be reduced. Mobility management has played a fundamental role in MEC, which associates UEs with the appropriate BSs. In the existing handover decision-making process, the communication costs dominate. However, in edge scenario, the computation capacity constraints should also be considered. Due to user mobility, mobile UEs are nonuniformly distributed over time and space. Edge servers in hot-spot areas can be overloaded while others are underloaded. When edge servers are densely deployed, each UE may have multiple choices to offload its tasks. Instead, if edge servers are sparsely deployed, UEs may only have one option for task offloading. This aggravates the unbalanced workload of the deployed edge servers. Therefore, how to serve the dynamic hot-spot areas needs to be addressed in different edge server deployment scenarios. Considering these two scenarios discussed above, two problems are addressed in this thesis: 1) with densely deployed edge servers, for each mobile UE, how to choose the appropriate edge servers independently without full system information is inves- tigated, and 2) with sparsely deployed edge servers, how to serve dynamic hot-spot areas in an efficient and flexible way is emphasized. First, with BSs densely de- ployed in hot-spot areas, mobile UEs can offload their tasks to one of the available edge servers nearby. However, precise full system information such as the server workload can be hard to be synchronized in real time, which also introduces extra signaling overhead for mobility management decision-making. Thus, a user-centric reinforcement-learning-based mobility management scheme is proposed to handle sys- tem uncertainties. Each UE observes the task latency and automatically learns the optimal mobility management strategy through trial and feedback. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme manifests superiority in dealing with system uncer- tainties. When compared with the traditional received signal strength (RSS)-based handover scheme, the proposed scheme reduces the task execution latency by about 30%. Second, fixed edge servers that are sparsely deployed around mobile UEs are not flexible enough to deal with time-varying task offloading. Dispatching mobile servers is formulated as a variable-sized bin-packing problem with geographic constraints. A novel online unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted edge server dispatching scheme is proposed to provide flexible mobile-to-mobile edge computing services. UAVs are dispatched to the appropriate hover locations by identifying the hot-spot areas sequen- tially. Theoretical analysis is provided with the worst-case performance guarantee. Extensive evaluations driven by real-world mobile requests show that, with a given task finish time, the mobile dispatching scheme can serve 59% more users on aver- age when compared with the fixed deployment. In addition, the server utilization reaches 98% during the daytime with intensive task requests. Utilizing both the fixed and mobile edge servers can satisfy even more UE demands with fewer UAVs to be dispatched and a better server utilization. To sum up, not only the communication condition but also the computation lim- itation have an impact on the edge server selection and mobility management in MEC. Moreover, dispatching mobile edge servers can be an effective and flexible way to supplement the fixed servers and deal with dynamic offloading requests. / Graduate

Le développement de la numérisation systématique des formes 3D (conservation du patrimoine national, commerce électronique, reverse engineering, intégration d’objets réels dans des environnements de réalité virtuelle) et le besoin toujours croissant de ces objets géométriques dans de nombreuses applications (conception assistée par ordinateur, calcul de simulations par éléments finis, système d’informations géographiques, loisirs numériques) a entrainé une augmentation vertigineuse du volume de données à traiter, avec l’émergence de nombreuses méthodes de compression de modèles 3D. Ce volume de données devient encore plus difficile à maitriser lorsque l’aspect temporel entre en jeu. Les maillages correspondent au modèle classiquement utilisé pour modéliser les formes numérisées et certaines approches de compression exploitent la propriété qu’une bonne estimation de la connectivité peut être déduite de l’échantillonnage, lorsque ce dernier s’avère suffisamment dense. La compression de la connectivité d’un maillage revient alors au codage de l’écart entre deux connectivités proches. Dans ce mémoire, nous nous intéressons au codage compact de cette différence pour des maillages surfaciques. Nos travaux sont fondés sur l’utilisation de la bascule d’arête (edge flip) et l’étude de ses propriétés. Nos contributions sont les suivantes. Etant donné deux triangulations connexes partageant le même nombre de sommets et un même genre topologique, nous proposons un algorithme direct et efficace pour générer une séquence de bascules d’arêtes permettant de passer d’un maillage `a un autre. Nous nous appuyons sur une correspondance entre les sommets des deux maillages, qui, si elle est non fournie, peut être choisie de manière totalement aléatoire / The development of scanning 3D shapes (national heritage conservation, ecommerce, reverse engineering, virtual reality environments) and the growing need for geometric objects in many applications (computer-aided design, simulations, geographic information systems, digital entertainment) have led to a dramatic increase in the volume of data to be processed, and the emergence of many methods of compression of 3D models. This volume of data becomes even more difficult to control when the temporal aspect comes in. Meshes correspond to the pattern typically used to model the scanned forms and some approaches exploit a property of compression that a good estimation of connectivity can be derived from sampling, when it appears sufficiently dense. Compressing the connectivity of a mesh is equivalent to coding the difference between two close connectivities. In this thesis, we focus on the compact coding of this difference for 2-dimensional meshes. Our work is based on the use and study of the properties of the edge flip. Our contributions are the following : - Given two connected triangulations that share the same number of vertices and the same topological genus, we propose a direct and efficient algorithm to generate a sequence of edge flips to change one mesh into the other. We rely on a correspondence between the vertices of the two meshes, which, if not provided, may be chosen randomly. The validity of the algorithm is based on the fact that we intend to work in a triangulation of a different class from those generally used. - We then generalize the edge flips to triangulations in which we identify each edge with a label. We show that a sequence of edge flips can be used to transpose two labels, under certain conditions. From this result, the edge flip can be generalized to meshes whose faces are not necessarily triangular, which allowed us to develop an algorithm for reducing sequences of edge flips. - Finally, we present a compact coding approach for a sequence of edge flips, and determine under what conditions it is better to use this compact transformation between two connectivities instead of coding them independently by a static algorithm

Neste trabalho investigamos o tunelamento ressonante em estruturas de dupla barreira GaAs/(AlGa)As que foram fabricadas em mesas quadradas de tamanho lateral mesoscópico e macroscópico (&#8764 10&#956m &#215 10&#956m). Uma camada tipo &#948 com diferentes concentrações de Silício foi incorporada no centro do poço quântico. As características I(V) mostram algumas estruturas em posição de voltagem abaixo do pico de ressonância principal que são atribuídas a estados relacionados a impurezas. Tais estados localizados estão presentes no poço quântico com energias de ligação bem maiores do que um doador de Silício isolado. Estes estados de maior energia de ligação são atribuídos a pares de doadores distribuídos aleatoriamente. Em alguns dispositivos onde estados relacionados a impurezas podem ser identificados isoladamente na característica I(V), um efeito destacável pode ser observado. Um pica na característica I(V) aparece nas mais baixas temperaturas medidas (abaixo de 1K) quando o nível de Fermi no emissor se alinha com o estado localizado relacionado a impureza. Tal pico e atribuído a interação Coulombiana entre o elétron no sitio localizado e os elétrons no gás bidimensional (emissor). / We have investigated resonant tunneling in GaAs/(AlGa)As double barrier structures which have been fabricated into square mesoscopic and macroscopic size mesas (&#8764 10&#956m &#215 10&#956m) A &#948 layer with different concentrations of Silicon donors was incorporated at the centre of the quantum well. The I(V) characteristics show some features below the threshold for the main resonance that are due to impurity related state. Such localized states are found to be related to the presence of donor impurities in the vicinity of the quantum well with binding energies much higher than the single isolated hydrogen donor. These higher binding energy states are identified as being due to random pairs of shallow donors. In some devices where an isolated impurity related state can be identified in the 1(V characteristics a remarkable effect is observed. A peak appears at low temperatures (below 1K) in the 1(V) characteristics when the emitter Fermi level matches the localized state. Such feature is attributed to the Coulomb interaction between the electron on the localized site and the electrons in the Fermi sea of the 2DEG.