Zugl.: Stralsund, Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2001

by Donald R. Lessard. / Forthcoming in Edwin Elton and Martin Gruber, eds., International capital markets. / Bibliography: l. [26]

Αυτή η εργασία ασχολείται με το σχεδιασμό των μητροπολιτικών ευρυζωνικών δικτύων οπτικών ινών και ειδικότερα αυτών που δημιουργούνται στην Ελλάδα. Γίνεται η ανάλυση των τεχνολογιών και τεχνικών υλοποίησης τους. Στη συνέχεια παρουσιάζονται τα γεωγραφικά συστήματα πληροφοριών (GIS) που αποτελούν ένα ισχυρό εργαλείο στη σχεδίαση, μελέτη και επέκταση των δικτύων. Επιλύεται το πρόβλημα υπολογισμού αποστάσεων από σημείο σε σημεί ο μιας οπτικής ίνας στο GIS που θα διευκολύνει τη μελέτη και το σχεδιασμό του δικτύου. Με τη χρήση του GIS συστήματος arcgis γίνεται η ψηφιακή χαρτογράφηση του μητροπολιτικού δικτύου οπτικών ινών της Πάτρας όπως αυτό πρόκειται να υλοποιηθεί στα επόμενα χρονιά. Παρουσιάζεται μια μελέτη που θα κάνει αυτόματη τη διαδικασία σχεδίασης των υποδομών του δικτύου και τη συνεχή επέκταση του με το μικρότερο δυνατό κόστος με τη βοήθεια των γεωγραφικών συστημάτων πληροφορίας. Στη συνέχεια υλοποιείται ξανά η ψηφιακή χαρτογράφηση του μητροπολιτικού δικτύου οπτικών ινών της Πάτρας αυτή τη φορά με το μοντέλο αυτόματης σχεδίασης δικτύου που παρουσιάστηκε και γίνεται η σύγκριση του με το πραγματικό δίκτυο που υλοποιείται στην Πάτρα. / -

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Streptococcus uberis is a Gram-positive, catalase-negative member of the family Streptococcaceae and is an important environmental pathogen primarily responsible for a significant amount of bovine intramammary infections. This thesis describes the sequencing and comparison of multiple strains from clinical and sub-clinical infections. Following de novo assembly, these are compared to the single reference strain (0140J). The assemblies of strains sequenced with two technologies (Illumina and SOLiD) were compared. From these assemblies, annotation allowed the comparison of gene content, the pan and core genomes and gene gain/loss of coding sequences associated with clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs), prophage and bacteriocin production. Identification of sequence variants allowed identification of highly conserved and highly variant genes. Inferred intraspecies and interspecies (host-S. uberis) protein-protein interaction networks revealed pathways of bovine proteins enriched with potentially interacting pathogen proteins. These identified known and predicted pathways and also novel interaction partners. This was the first “whole-genome” comparison of multiple S. uberis strains isolated from clinical vs non-clinical intramammary infections including the type virulent vs non-virulent strains. These data allowed the first insight into potential evolutionary forces behind virulence differences.

During the last few years, efficient mobile wireless communication devices have become widely available and easily accessible by a broad range of higher education students around the world in general and in Kuwait in particular. These devices offer the possibility of extending the boundaries of the educational process outside traditional classroom settings by providing communication and collaboration tools for students, instructors and staff members and by facilitating remote access to shared materials and tools. This learning arrangement is referred to as mobile learning or m-learning. The purpose of this thesis was to study and improve the use of m-learning in Kuwaiti higher education so learning in general would improve. This study aimed to develop a conceptual framework for guiding Kuwaiti decision makers in the successful adaptation of mobile learning in the Kuwaiti higher educational system. One of the major focuses of this study was to use mobile learning in places where it was intrinsically valuable such as subjects involving field studies. Three studies were conducted in Kuwait. In the first study, twenty-six instructors from three different Kuwaiti universities were interviewed to reveal the extent of the acceptance of the idea of mobile learning in Kuwaiti higher education. The second study was based on the results of the first study and used ninety-four students from five faculties at two universities to evaluate the trends of mobile learning amongst students and teachers. In the third study, there were forty participants from three faculties at two universities. This study tried to determine how beneficial it is to use a popular social media application as a learning tool under strict monitoring rules and instructions. Based on the results of the three studies conducted in this thesis, a framework was built to address the challenges and barriers facing mobile learning in Kuwait. This framework provides an appropriate environment for the adaptation of successful mobile learning in Kuwaiti higher education. The outcomes of the studies and research conducted for this thesis demonstrated that Kuwait could be a very successful example of adapting mobile learning if the barriers were faced by implementing the appropriate framework. The proposed framework enables Kuwait to be the one of the leaders of mobile learning in the surrounding region.

Educators within higher education and online course designers face a significant challenge when working within multicultural teams. In current user interfaces, the ‘one size fits all’ approach is a critical limitation of online systems, because cultural differences in design are ignored. This thesis addresses these issues through the design and evaluation of an adaptive approach that is based upon individual differences in the cultural dimension (Individualism and Collectivism). In this research, the design strategies developed for teamwork activities are culturally relevant, as well as being effective and original. Two versions of the IdeasRoom system are designed and presented in this study. One version will appeal more to individualist users (IND version), whilst the second version will appeal more to collectivist users (COL version). Both qualitative and quantitative measures were deployed in order to evaluate the two versions for both individualist users and collectivist users, and include: students’ perceptions of free-riding behaviour, perceptions of fairness toward assessment in teamwork, participation in teamwork, satisfaction with teamwork, perceived usability and preference of design. The findings of this study reveal that students demonstrate greater positive reactions to the system version that recognises their cultural background. In addition, the findings suggest that current team working systems used in a number of educational institutions should consider both collectivist and individualist approaches. Evidence provided in this study emphasises the need for adaptation and personalisation approaches to meet the cultural inclinations of students working within educational teamwork learning systems.

Classifying items using temporal data, i.e. several readings of the same attribute in different time points, has many applications in the real world. The pivotal question which motivates this study is: ''Is it possible to quantify behavioural change in temporal data? And what is the best reference point to compare the behaviour change with?". The focus of this study will be in applications in economics such as playing many rounds of public goods games and share price moves in the stock market. There are many methods for classifying temporal data and many methods for measuring the change of items' behaviour in temporal data. However, the available methods for classifying temporal data produce complicated rules, and their models are buried in deep decision trees or complex neural networks that are hard for human experts to read and understand. Moreover, methods of measuring cluster changes do not focus on the individual item's behaviour rather; they concentrate on the clusters and their changes over time. This research presents methods for classifying temporal data items and measuring their behavioural changes between time points. As case of studies, public goods game and stock market price data are used to test novel methods of classification and behaviour change measure. To represent the magnitude of the behaviour change, we use cluster validity measures in a novel way by measuring the difference between item labels produced by the same clustering algorithm at each time point and a behaviour reference point. Such a reference point might be the first time point, the previous time point or a point representing the general overall behaviour of the items in the temporal data. This method uses external cluster validity indices to measure the difference between labels provided by the same clustering method in different time points rather than using different clustering methods for the same data set as it is the case for relative clustering indices. To create a general behavioural reference point in temporal data, we present a novel temporal rule-based classification method that consists of two stages. In the first stage, initial rules are generated based on experts' definition for the classes in the form of aggregated attributes of the temporal readings. These initial rules are not crisp and may overlap in their representation for the classes. This provides flexibility for the rules so that they can create a pool of classifiers that can be selected from. Then this pool of classifiers will be optimised in the second stage so that an optimised classifier will be selected among them. The optimised classifier is a set of discrete classification rules, which generates the most compact classes over all time points. Class compactness is measured by using statistical dispersion measures or Euclidean distance within class items. The classification results of the public goods game show that the proposed method for classification can produce better results for representing players than the available methods by economists and general temporal classification methods. Moreover, measuring players' behaviour supports economists' view of the players' behaviour change during game rounds. For the stock market data, we present a viable method for classifying stocks according to their stability which might help to provide insights for stock market predictability.

Characterising the relationships between conscious and unconscious processes is one of the most important goals in cognitive neuroscience. Behavioural studies as well as neuroimaging techniques have been conducted to understand the nature of conscious perception in the brain. Functional brain imaging and EEG (Electroencephalogram) methods allow for detailed exploration of neural and computational correlates of conscious and unconscious cognition. Using a high density EEG dataset, recorded from 129 electrodes over the scalp, we studied the neural responses of the brain to auditory stimuli. To this end, we employed an auditory oddball paradigm, called the local-global experiment. Bekinschtein et al (2009) designed this experiment to explore the neural dynamics at the early auditory cortex, associated with the MMN (mismatch negativity) component, generated by the local violation of auditory stimuli. They also investigated a later novelty response, associated with the P3 (a late positive response) component, which was generated by the global violation of auditory stimuli. Their findings suggest that the global response, corresponding to working memory updating, independently from the local response, is a signature of conscious processing. But our investigations shows that the local and global effects are not fully independent from one another. Therefore, we looked for other potential signatures of conscious processing. To do this, we studied 18 healthy participants who had been sedated. Using SPM (Statistical Parametric Mapping), which is a mass univariate approach, we analysed the sedation dataset in an omnibus statistical setting. We found an interaction between the local and global effects. In addition, we investigated the impact of sedation on both the early and late temporal components (i.e. the local and global effects), and their interaction. In addition to SPM analysis, we performed single-trial analysis. Unlike SPM analysis, which explores ERPs (average effect across replications) to assess significance, single-trial analysis looks for variation across replications, from one experimental level to another. More specifically, we looked at amplitude variation and temporal jitter when participants are sedated versus recovered. In the cases, when the null hypothesis is not rejected (i.e. there is no significant difference across different levels), we calculated Bayes factors to search for evidence in favour of the null hypothesis. With the exception of latency dispersion under dual (global and local) deviance, we could find no evidence for increased variability in single trial responses under sedation. This suggests the effects of reduced conscious level are systematic and can be summarised as an attenuation of dependency of (or interaction between) local and global processing.