A difficult issue in stress management is to use biomedical sensor signal in the diagnosis and treatment of stress. Clinicians often make their diagnosis and decision based on manual inspection of physiological signals such as, ECG, heart rate, finger temperature etc. However, the complexity associated with manual analysis and interpretation of the signals makes it difficult even for experienced clinicians. Today the diagnosis and decision is largely dependent on how experienced the clinician is interpreting the measurements.  A computer-aided decision support system for diagnosis and treatment of stress would enable a more objective and consistent diagnosis and decisions. A challenge in the field of medicine is the accuracy of the system, it is essential that the clinician is able to judge the accuracy of the suggested solutions. Case-based reasoning systems for medical applications are increasingly multi-purpose and multi-modal, using a variety of different methods and techniques to meet the challenges of the medical domain. This research work covers the development of an intelligent clinical decision support system for diagnosis, classification and treatment in stress management. The system uses a finger temperature sensor and the variation in the finger temperature is one of the key features in the system. Several artificial intelligence techniques have been investigated to enable a more reliable and efficient diagnosis and treatment of stress such as case-based reasoning, textual information retrieval, rule-based reasoning, and fuzzy logic. Functionalities and the performance of the system have been validated by implementing a research prototype based on close collaboration with an expert in stress. The case base of the implemented system has been initiated with 53 reference cases classified by an experienced clinician. A case study also shows that the system provides results close to a human expert. The experimental results suggest that such a system is valuable both for less experienced clinicians and for experts where the system may function as a second option. / IPOS, PROEK

Abstract The current Internet of Things solutions for simple measurement and monitoring tasks are evolving into ubiquitous sensor networks that are constantly observing both our well being and the conditions of our living environment. The oncoming omnipresent wireless infrastructure is expected to feature artificial intelligence capabilities that can interpret human actions, gestures and even needs. All of this will require processing power on a par with and energy efficiency far beyond that of the current mobile devices. The current Internet of Things devices rely mostly on commercial low power off-the-shelf micro-controllers. Optimized solely for low power, while paying little attention to computing performance, the present solutions are far from achieving the energy efficiency, let alone, the compute capability requirements of the future Internet of Things solutions. Since this domain is application specific by nature, the use of general purpose processors for signal processing tasks is counterintuitive. Instead, dedicated accelerator based solutions are more likely to be able to meet these strict demands. This thesis proposes one potential solution for achieving the necessary low energy, as well as the flexibility and performance requirements of the Internet of Things domain in a cost effective manner using reconfigurable heterogeneous processing solutions. A novel graphics processing unit-style accelerator for the Internet of Things application domain is presented. Since the accelerator can be reconfigured, it can be used for most applications of the Internet of Things domain, as well as other application domains. The solution is assessed using two computer vision applications, and is demonstrated to achieve an excellent combination of performance and energy efficiency. The accelerator is designed using an efficient and rapid co-design flow of software and hardware, featuring ease of development characteristics close to commercial off-the-shelf solutions, which also enables cost-efficient design flow. / Tiivistelmä Esineiden internet tulee muuttamaan tulevaisuudessa elinympäristömme täysin. Se tulee mahdollistamaan interaktiiviset ympäristöt nykyisten passiivisten ympäristöjen sijaan. Lisäksi elinympäristömme tulee reagoimaan tekoihimme ja puheeseemme sekä myös tunteisiimme. Tämä kaikkialla läsnä olevan langaton infrastruktuuri tulee vaatimaan ennennäkemätöntä laskentatehokkuutta yhdistettynä äärimmäiseen energiatehokkuuteen. Nykyiset esineiden internet ratkaisut nojaavat lähes täysin kaupallisiin "suoraan hyllyltä" saataviin yleiskäyttöisiin mikrokontrollereihin. Ne ovat kuitenkin optimoituja pelkästään matalan tehonkulutuksen näkökulmasta, eivätkä niinkään energiatehokkuuden, saati tulevaisuuden esineiden internetin vaatiman laskentatehon suhteen. Kuitenkin esineiden internet on lähtökohtaisesti sovelluskohtaista laskentaa vaativa, joten yleiskäyttöisten prosessoreiden käyttö signaalinkäsittelytehtäviin on epäloogista. Sen sijaan sovelluskohtaisten kiihdyttimien käyttö laskentaan, todennäköisesti mahdollistaisi tavoitellun vaatimustason saavuttamisen. Tämä väitöskirja esittelee yhden mahdollisen ratkaisun matalan energian kulutuksen, korkean suorituskyvyn ja joustavuuden yhdenaikaiseen saavuttamiseen kustannustehokkaalla tavalla, käyttäen uudelleenkonfiguroitavia heterogeenisiä prosessoriratkaisuja. Työssä esitellään uusi grafiikkaprosessori-tyylinen uudelleen konfiguroitava kiihdytin esineiden internet sovellusalueelle, jota pystytään hyödyntämään useimpien laskentatehoa vaativien sovellusten kanssa. Ehdotetun kiihdyttimen ominaisuuksia arvioidaan kahta konenäkösovellusta esimerkkinä käyttäen ja osoitetaan sen saavuttavan loistavan yhdistelmän energia tehokkuutta ja suorituskykyä. Kiihdytin suunnitellaan käyttäen tehokasta ja nopeaa ohjelmiston ja laitteiston yhteissuunnitteluketjua, jolla voidaan saavuttaa lähestulkoon kaupallisten "suoraan hyllyltä" saatavien prosessoreiden kehitystyön helppous, joka puolestaan mahdollistaa kustannustehokkaan kehitys- ja suunnittelutyön.

觀光旅遊業已成為二十一世紀的明星產業，根據觀光局統計2015年來臺觀光旅客已達到1,043萬人次，觀光外匯收入更達到4,528億元。觀光旅遊業的迅速發展，不僅可藉由吸引外來觀光客增加外匯收入、創造就業機會，政府亦能以創新思維，推動整合性政策及各縣市行銷策略來振興經濟，藉此提升國民的生活品質。若能找出臺灣觀光發展特色並永續經營，必讓臺灣成為新的區域中心點、成為亞太新觀光中心。 基於上述研究動機，本研究主要探討2014年來臺觀光旅客所參與活動的特性。以交通部觀光局所提供之問卷，進行資料整理並使用決策樹分析，找出來臺旅客所參與各項活動之特徵，進而瞭解來臺旅客旅遊動機、消費情形及休憩滿意度，以供政府及民間相關單位研擬國際觀光宣傳與行銷策略、提昇國內觀光服務品質與國際旅遊觀光競爭力之參考，並持續提升臺灣觀光品質形象，更努力建構質量並進的觀光環境，希望能奠定觀光產業從量變到質變的基礎，達到擴大觀光服務輸出的目的。 / Tourism has become a major industry in Taiwan in the 21st century. According to the Tourism Bureau, Taiwan received over 10 million international visitors in 2015, which generates over 4.5 billion New Taiwan dollars in revenue. With the industry fast booming, tourism revenue is increased and new jobs are created. The government is thus able to boost the economy through innovation in all comprehensive policies and collaboration between cities and counties on marketing strategies, which in turn raises the living standards of Taiwanese citizens. If the industry is developed efficiently and sustainably, Taiwan has the potential to be the next focal point of Asian-Pacific tourism. With the information mentioned above in mind, this study aims to analyze international visitors to Taiwan and activities they engaged in in the year 2014. Based on surveys provided by the Tourism Bureau, it utilizes decision tree analysis to identify the characteristics of visitors and their activities. It further explores their purpose of visit, spending during and overall satisfaction with their stay. In doing so, it could make a positive contribution when the government and tourism-related industries intend to devise future marketing strategies, improve service performance, and build a global image to attract more tourists. All in all, more emphasis should be laid on quality than quantity in order for the tourism industry to expand efficiently and sustainably.

On its own, the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is not a solution to either inequalities or unemployment, but it is an important strategy to address access to education and training for those previously excluded (SAQA, 2003a, p. 31) This study deals with the search for valid and sustainable mechanisms for the implementation of the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) in South Africa. Some of the elements that facilitate implementation include stringent quality criteria and common benchmarks that build trust in the process and ensures the protection of the integrity of the system. In an education and training system, which is subject to intense change, RPL has an important contribution to make to the opening up of access to education and training for individuals previously denied the privilege. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Curriculum Studies / Unrestricted

In an effort to reduce the cost and size of government public service delivery has become more decentralized, flexible and responsive. Public entrepreneurship entailed, among other things, the establishment of special-purpose governments to finance public services and carry out development projects. Community Development Districts (CDDs) are a type of special-purpose governments whose purpose is to manage and finance infrastructure improvements in the State of Florida. They have important implications for the way both growth management and service delivery occur in the United States. This study examined the role of CDDs for growth management policy and service delivery by analyzing the CDD profile and activity, the contribution of CDDs to the growth management and infrastructure development as well as the way CDD perceived pluses and minuses impact service delivery. The study used a mixed methods research approach, drawing on secondary data pertaining to CDD features and activity, semi-structured interviews with CDD representatives and public officials as well as on a survey of public officials within the counties and cities that have established CDDs. Findings indicated that the CDD institutional model is both a policy and a service delivery tool for infrastructure provision that can be adopted by states across the United States. Results showed that CDDs inhibit rather than foster growth management through their location choices, type and pattern of development. CDDs contributed to the infrastructure development in Florida by providing basic infrastructure services for the development they supported and by building and dedicating facilities to general-purpose governments. Districts were found to be both funding mechanisms and management tools for infrastructure services. The study also pointed to the fact that specialized governance is more responsive and more flexible but less effective than general-purpose governance when delivering services. CDDs were perceived as being favorable for developers and residents and not as favorable for general-purpose governments. Overall results indicated that the CDD is a flexible institutional mechanism for infrastructure delivery which has both advantages and disadvantages. Decision-makers should balance districts’ institutional flexibility with their unintended consequences for growth management when considering urban public policies.

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) is a method which dynamically varies the spatio-temporal resolution of localized mesh regions in numerical simulations, based on the strength of the solution features. Due to high resolution discretization of localized regions of interests into rectangular mesh units called patches, AMR provides low cost of computations and high degree of accuracy. General purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) with their support for fine-grained parallelism, offer an attractive option for obtaining high performance for AMR applications. The data parallel computations of the finite difference schemes of AMR can be efficiently performed on GPGPUs. This research deals with challenges and develops techniques for efficient executions of AMR applications with uniform and non-uniform patches on GPUs. In the first part of the thesis, we optimize an AMR model with uniform patches. We have developed strategies for continuous online visualization of time evolving data for AMR applications executed on GPUs. In-situ visualization plays an important role for analyzing the time evolving characteristics of the domain structures. Continuous visualization of the output data for various time steps results in better study of the underlying domain and the model used for simulating the domain. We reorder the meshes for computations on the GPU based on the users input related to the subdomain that he wants to visualize. This makes the data available for visualization at a faster rate. We then perform asynchronous executions of the visualization steps and fix-up operations on the coarse meshes on the CPUs while the GPU advances the solution. By performing experiments on Tesla S1070 and Fermi C2070 clusters, we found that our strategies result in up to 60% improvement in response time and 16% improvement in the rate of visualization of frames over the existing strategy of performing fix-ups and visualization at the end of the time steps. The second part of the thesis deals with adaptive strategies for efficient execution of block structured AMR applications with non-uniform patches on GPUs. Most AMR approaches use patches of uniform sizes over regions of interests. Since this leads to over-refinement, some efforts have focused on forming patches of non-uniform dimensions to improve computational efficiency since the dimensions of a patch can be tuned to the geometry of a region of interest. While effective hybrid execution strategies exist for applications with uniform patches, our work considers efficient execution of non-uniform patches with different workloads. Our techniques include a geometric bin-packing method to load balance GPU computations and reduce thread idling, adaptive determination of amount of work to maximize asynchronism between CPU and GPU executions using a knapsack formulation, and scheduling communications for multi-GPU executions. We test our strategies for synthetic inputs as well as for traces from real applications. Our experiments on Tesla S1070 and Fermi C2070 clusters with both single-GPU and multi-GPU executions show that our strategies result in up to 69% improvement in performance over existing strategies. Our bin-packing based load balancing gives performance gains up to 39%, kernel optimizations give an improvement of up to 20%, and our strategies for adaptive asynchronism between CPU-GPU executions give performance improvements of up to 17% over default static asynchronous executions.

The theoretical part of this thesis explains the process of real estate project financing, describes its main features, characterizes participants of the process and main forms of project loans. It also depicts the feasibility study as a key source of project bank loan application, describe collection of loan documents, guarantees and hedging agreements and provide an overview of the methods used to evaluate the effectiveness of the project. The analytical part describes a particular project of development of a residential real estate and its project finance funding. Furthermore, the final section analyses the effectiveness of given project and the parameters of provided project bank loan.

The study focuses on and explores the Southern African Development Community’s activities to determine whether the intended objectives have been accomplished as stated in its purpose statement. The study argues that the achievement of the Southern Africa Development Community’s purpose statement is important with regard to the implementation of developmental initiatives. This is because the SADC objectives are measured in the operationalisation and implementation of policies and the operationalisation of key activities. The Southern African region is rich in natural resources but lacks the political will and capacity for the institutionalisation of key processes to, among others, alleviate poverty and HIV/AIDS and address human security matters. This study revealed that SADC did not achieve all its intended objectives. Several challenges, such as the full convertibility of regional currencies among member states still need to be addressed. One of the major challenges impacting negatively on the implementation and completion of SADC’s projects are the capacity, skills and expertise to drive key business processes. This study has found that in spite of complexities and challenges to implement SADC’s policies and programmes as stated in its purpose statement, there is a need to align the member states’ priorities with SADC’s objectives to maximise impact and overall successful execution thereof. Coupled with this challenge is another crucial challenge relating to the SADC structure, mechanisms and methodologies that are used for achieving SADC’s objectives. The study revealed that the structures, mechanisms and methodologies are inadequate to successfully implement and evaluate SADC’s projects. Consequently, this study proposes some reforms in SADC’s Regional Indicative Strategic Plan that should be considered and integrated into the national plans, budgets and priorities of all SADC member states. Critically, it is important to ensure the alignment and buy-in of member states with regard to the development and implementation of SADC’s projects and programmes in the Southern African region. Firstly, the study proposes that partnerships with research institutions should be explored to strengthen the limited capacity of SADC’s Secretariat. Benchmarking and best practices with other international government organisations such as the African Union and the United Nations will provide a platform to improve the current activities of SADC to be more focused towards the desired outcomes. Secondly, v SADC’s activities that are linked to its objectives should be intensified through the mobilisation of resources and expertise that are geared to all key result areas to improve regional integration and ultimately the achievement of SADC’s objectives as stated in its purpose statement. / Public Administration and Management / M.P.A.

Den europeiska marknaden för värdepapperisering punkterades av den senaste finanskrisen och har fortfarande inte återhämtat sig trots att ett decennium har passerat. För att få igång marknaden igen har EU tagit fram den nya värdepapperiseringsförordningen som gäller sedan årsskiftet 2019/2020. Värdepapperiseringsförordningen har sin amerikanska motsvarighet i Dodd Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act. Sakinnehållet i de respektive regleringarna är mycket likt men den största skillnaden ligger i motivet till att regleringarna instiftades. Värdepapperiseringsförordningen instiftades med syftet att harmonisera reglerna kring värdepapperisering och på så sätt skapa bättre förutsättningar för de bolag som vill bidra till marknadens återuppbyggnad. Dodd-Frank instiftades redan 2010 som en helreformation av finansmarknaderna som under finanskrisen 2007-2008 visats vara i stort behov av återreglering. Finanskrisens påverkan på finansmarknaderna visade att den avreglering som löpande gjorts av marknaderna sedan 1980-talet hade skapat en ohållbar situation där finansmarknadsaktörerna kunde verka relativt ostört av myndigheter och lagstiftning.  En annan aspekt som finanskrisen synliggjorde var riskerna kopplade till det globala finansiella systemet. Finanskrisen innebar konkurser för europeiska banker och insolvens för europeiska stater, trots att krisen hade sin början i en amerikansk investmentbank. Den systemrisk som uppdagades har lagstiftare både i USA och EU försökt reglera. Delvis genom förbud mot vissa verksamheter, investeringar och avtal, men även genom krav på bland annat transparens och due diligence. Inom EU återfinns dessa förbud och regler främst i kapitaltäckningsförordningen och kapitaltäckningsdirektivet som båda syftar till att säkerställa att bankerna har kapitalbuffertar. I och med det nya Baselregelverket som också genomgick en omarbetning efter finanskrisen kan kapitaltyperna lätt identifieras.  Kapitaltäckningsregleringarna och värdepapperiseringsförordningen är de viktigaste verktygen för EU:s arbete med att återställa värdepapperiseringsmarknaden inom unionen. Uppsatsens komparativa analys av värdepapperiseringsförordningen och Dodd-Frank Act visar på att just motivet till värdepapperiseringsförordningen, att den ska möjliggöra för marknaden att växa men också reglera marknaden så att en finanskris kan undvikas, skulle kunna hindra tillämpningen från att bli sådan som lagstiftaren åsyftat.

This diploma thesis deals with the reconstruction and rehabilitation of a real cultural monument in Fulnek. It is a four-winged object with almost rectangular atrium. The main subject of the diploma thesis is the change in the use of the building and the proposals for remediation of damp walls. Knurr's palace has three above-ground floors and is non-decked, covered by a classic shell with fiber cement. The use of the object is mainly designed as a civic amenities, now the building is not used. The building is located in close proximity to the slope and the building is adjacent to the building. The project is solved at the level of the documentation for construction.