<p> The anthropogenic influences on our climate system has caused an unprecedented increase of carbon emissions amongst other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere resulting in energy imbalances and observed positive feedbacks. The American Southwest is witnessing major urban transformation as its cities are becoming centers for urban growth. Without adopting climatic design, this continued sprawl will greatly compromise the natural environment and, human health and wellbeing. Intensive urbanization has the greatest risk for increasing the carbon footprint, environmental pollution, urban heat island phenomenon, and infrastructure overextension. Increasing ground surface temperatures; the outdoor environment is observing record breaking temperature highs, while the artificial indoor set points stay the same to counter that effect.</p><p> Buildings placed in areas of excessive heat and glaring sun are in need of a comprehensive approach to address their environments. With the advancements in technology, trends have shown that architects and designers are shifting towards engineering solutions to artificially control their environments to a static state. While spaces steer away from passive designs, their operation demand high energy consumption and their occupants are deprived of a sense of nature.</p><p> Climatic design is a key ingredient to the success of an optimized environment, or to its failure. Human Health is one component that is most challenged and could be most responsive to that environment and its built parameters. The important role that these components play are greater when immersed in hot-arid regions where resources are scarce, and the built environment finds itself in a hostile environment where it struggles to survive, relying heavily on the consumption of fossil fuels.</p><p> The goal of this research is to develop a methodology in which the human physiological responses are centered in the role of design. Through examination of this phenomenon and recommendations based on the findings, developers will be informed of the importance of human-centered climatic design. Data driven to optimize both human health and the environmental footprint. Utilization of this method will not only decrease the contribution of the built environment but will also decrease the chronic exposure of humans to these high contrasts and pave the way to cautious practices optimizing health of the environment. The long-term goal is to develop indices based on human-centered climatic design to inform our design decisions and represent a flagship to a sustainable way of living. The objective of this research is to validate the dialogue between climatic design and human physiological comfort. The hypothesis is that a specific list of elements in man-made built environment trigger responses in both the atmosphere and humans. The rationale behind this methodology is based on the role of architecture as a primary instrument that could cause imbalances in both the climate and the human body.</p><p> To accomplish our objective and test our central hypothesis the authors outlined three broad environments; (climate, architecture, and human) to further investigate the relationship centered around the human body and its multisensory experience. Results of this study will allow the identification of an articulate common solution focused on transitional spaces.</p><p> The contribution of knowledge in this research is outlined in three sequential publications. The first adopts a comprehensive approach that redefines space and the elements in three environments that have an impact on it. The second leads with the previous developed relationship (from paper 1) to develop a human physiological comfort index applicable within a broader architecture foundation, and the third utilizes this index to demonstrate techniques developed in this research to measure climatic and human attributes objectively, and non-obtrusively. At the final stage these disciplines will be overlaid to create architecture unity in a sequence of variables which this document will follow. The conclusion outlines a series of concepts that represent human-centered climatic design applications.</p><p> This dissertation graphically articulates the interactive network of dialogue between humans and space to serve as a balanced approach to architectural design. The genesis of this investigation is supported by the development of a protocol that utilizes interdisciplinary research methodology that couples theoretical and empirical based discoveries to inform the fundamentals of the built environment, standards, and operations optimizing occupant health and wellbeing in extreme environments. By combining spatial design with health parameters, architects will be able to make decisions that will reduce energy consumption, decrease the impact on climate change; ultimately protect the natural world and optimally support future life. The actions taken in response to this study will not only decrease the direct impact of large temperature differences that trigger human stress responses, but will also reduce the emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.</p><p>

<p> The expression &ldquo;no man is an island&rdquo; is intended to represent human isolation in its most extreme form depicting man as an isolated body of land. Contrary to the statement, an element unnoticed within this expression frequently is the existence of that Island. The expression is intended as an example of articulating absolute isolation of the human in existence. However, the idea of the human being a location being the island is still declared. As humans who inhabit this earth, we cannot exist without space. There is an undeniable link between the spaces and the inhabitants within them. As a result of Modernity, the majority of the human inhabitants of the world exist throughout their entire lives within the Built Environment. The Built Environment holds an assortment of spaces that have been composed in order to accommodate our existence. A practice of engaging the composition of these spaces for human inhabitance is commonly what is known as Architectural Design. Spaces will continue to exist and Architecture is a mean of addressing the design of them. Understanding these spaces through their Concepts, Conditions, and Components allows for a classification of common spaces that exist within the Built Environment. The classification of these spaces within the Built Environment arrives at the mutual dialogue of the Built Environment Spatial Layers. The ever-demanding human population that is growing exponentially cause many ecological, economical, and social dilemmas through our modern interpretations of spaces composed within the Built Environment. Understanding the Built Environment through the Built Environment Spatial Layers allows for the acknowledged design surrounding these spaces that yield the greatest sustainability through energy efficiency and minimizing environmental impacts without denying the humanity of that concept.</p>

The widely accepted standards of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) have changed the way many organisations conduct their everyday business. The significant popularity of mobile devices has seen a rapid increase in the rate of mobile technology enhancements, which have become widely used for communication, as well as conducting everyday tasks. An increased requirement in many businesses is for staff not to be tied down to the office. Consequently, mobile devices play an important role in achieving the mobility and information access that people desire. Due to the popularity and increasing use of SOA and mobile devices, Mobile Service-Oriented Architecture (Mobile SOA) has become a new industry catch-phrase. Many challenges, however, exist within the Mobile SOA environment. These issues include limitations on mobile devices, such as a reduced screen size, lack of processing power, insufficient processing memory, limited battery life, poor storage capacity, unreliable network connections, limited bandwidth available and high transfer costs. This research aimed to provide an elegant solution to the issues of a mobile device, which hinders the performance of Mobile SOA. The main objective of this research was to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Mobile SOA. In order to achieve this goal, a framework was proposed, which supported intelligent compression of files used within a Web Service. The proposed framework provided a set of guidelines that facilitate the quick development of a system. A proof-of-concept prototype was developed, based on these guidelines and the framework design principles. The prototype provided practical evidence of the effectiveness of implementing a system based on the proposed framework. An analytical evaluation was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the prototype within the Mobile SOA environment. A performance evaluation was conducted to determine efficiency it provides. Additionally, the performance evaluation highlighted the decrease in file transfer time, as well as the significant reduction in transfer costs. The analytical and performance evaluations demonstrated that the prototype optimises the effectiveness and efficiency of Mobile SOA. The framework could, thus, be used to facilitate efficient file transfer between a Server and (Mobile) Client.

Short time-to-bug localization is extremely important for any 24x7 service-oriented application. To this end, we introduce a new debugging paradigm called live debugging. There are two goals that any live debugging infrastructure must meet: Firstly, it must offer real-time insight for bug diagnosis and localization, which is paramount when errors happen in user-facing applications. Secondly, live debugging should not impact user-facing performance for normal events. In large distributed applications, bugs which impact only a small percentage of users are common. In such scenarios, debugging a small part of the application should not impact the entire system. With the above-stated goals in mind, this thesis presents a framework called Parikshan, which leverages user-space containers (OpenVZ) to launch application instances for the express purpose of live debugging. Parikshan is driven by a live-cloning process, which generates a replica (called debug container) of production services, cloned from a production container which continues to provide the real output to the user. The debug container provides a sandbox environment, for safe execution of monitoring/debugging done by the users without any perturbation to the execution environment. As a part of this framework, we have designed customized-network proxies, which replicate inputs from clients to both the production and test-container, as well safely discard all outputs. Together the network duplicator, and the debug container ensure both compute and network isolation of the debugging environment. We believe that this piece of work provides the first of its kind practical real-time debugging of large multi-tier and cloud applications, without requiring any application downtime, and minimal performance impact.

Chan Hing Man. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2004-2005, design report." / ARCHITECTURE ´Ø LAND --- p.pp. 26-30 / SITE AGENDA --- p.pp. 58-77 / SITE ANALYSIS --- p.pp. 78-85 / THESIS STATEMENT --- p.pp. I-XIII / ARCHITECTURE ´Ø SKY --- p.pp. 01-25 / INTERPREATION --- p.pp. 40-57 / PROGREAMME --- p.pp. 86-93 / THESIS DESIGN Second Semester / Design Scheme 1 --- p.pp. 97-103 / Design Scheme 2 --- p.pp. 104-107 / Design Scheme 3 --- p.pp. 108-113 / Design Scheme 4 --- p.pp. 114-117 / Design Scheme 5 --- p.pp. 118-123 / FINAL SCHEME --- p.pp. 124-142 / THESIS RESEARCH / OBSERVATION ACTIVITY --- p.pp. 31-39 / First Semester / PRELIMINARY SCHEME --- p.pp. 94-96

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

M.Tech. / Threats to information assets have increased significantly since the adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Gone are the days when organisations could just secure the perimeter of their applications. The study adopted a threat vulnerability control framework and game theory as a theoretical lens. It investigated the various facets behind decision making under uncertainty in SOA and the perceived industry best practices. Game theory is a way to model complex SOA security interactions under uncertainty. Intelligent attackers require intelligent analysis. Game theory helps us implement strategies that take into account the attackers’ intentions since it can be applied in situations of uncertainty. The data was collected primarily through semi structured interviews at a Top I.T company based in Sandton. Grounded theory techniques were employed as a chief methodology for data analysis...

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Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are being adopted by organisations in order to integrate disparate computational assets. A major hurdle they face is the decision on how to integrate the UI in an SOA. In addition, technological advances have allowed complex applications and complex user interfaces (UIs) to be realised and the increase in accessibility to computers enables a diverse population of users with different characteristics, preferences and needs to use these complex computer applications. Adaptive user interfaces (AUIs) have been proposed as a solution to cater for the differences in user traits by adapting the UI to meet the diverse needs of users. AUIs have, however, traditionally been developed using client/server architectures This research, therefore, set out to investigate how to develop an AUI using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In order to successfully achieve the goal of this research, literature concerning SOAs was investigated to gain an understanding of SOAs. A literature review of AUIs was also undertaken to gain an understanding of AUIs. A model-based approach was used to develop a model for UI adaptation using knowledge gained in the literature reviews. The model generates different UIs depending on various users‘ inferred level of expertise. The model describes the interaction between AUI services that use design-time documents and run-time user-interaction to adapt the UI. A prototype of the model was implemented and evaluated using an evolution strategy devised to assess different aspects of the research. The evaluation strategy proved the following: The service components of the prototype adhere to SOA design principles; The implementation was effective based on software engineering metrics; and, The implementation was usable and did not negatively affect the performance of users. The successful implementation of the prototype provides evidence that the design of AUIs using SOA is feasible. This dissertation therefore makes a contribution to the development of AUIs using SOAs. The model could be used to provide UI adaptation for business software applications.

In this thesis, we first propose a distributed QoS evaluation framework for Web services, named WS-DREAM. Inspired by the recent success of Web 2.0, our evaluation framework employs the concept of user-collaboration. In our framework, users in different geographic locations collaborative with each other to evaluate the target Web services and share their observed Web service QoS information. Based on our Web service evaluation framework, several large-scale distributed evaluations are conducted on 5,825 real-world Web services and the detailed evaluation results are publicly released for future research. / The predicted Web service QoS values can be employed to build fault-tolerant service-oriented systems. In the area of service computing, the cost for developing multiple redundant components is greatly reduced, since the functionally equivalent Web services are provided by different organizations and are accessible via Internet. Hence, based on the predicted QoS values, we propose two methods for building fault tolerance Web services. Firstly, we propose an adaptive fault tolerance strategy for Web services. Then, we present an optimal fault tolerance strategy selection framework for Web services. / Web service evaluation is time and resource consuming. Moreover, in some scenarios, Web service evaluation may not be possible (e.g., the Web service invocation is charged, too many service candidate, etc.). Therefore, Web service QoS prediction approaches are becoming more and more attractive. In order to prediction the Web service QoS as accurate as possible, we propose three prediction methods. The first prediction method employs the information of neighborhoods for making missing value prediction. The second method engages matrix factorization techniques to enhance the prediction accuracy. The third method predicts the ranking of the target Web services instead of QoS values. / Web service is becoming a major technique for building loosely-coupled distributed systems. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely employed in e-business, e-government, automotive systems, multimedia services, process control, finance, and a lot of other domains. Quality-of-Service (QoS) is usually employed for describing the non-functional characteristics of Web services and employed as an important differentiating point of different Web services. With the prevalence of Web services on the Internet, Web service QoS management is becoming more and more important. / Zheng, Zibin. / Adviser: Michael R. Lyu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-04, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-198). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.