BACKGROUND: Globally, 80% of children with cancer live in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and 20% or less are expected to survive. Research demonstrates a gap on recording experiences of planners who have successfully established a pediatric cancer unit (PCU), lack of studies on systematic, evidence-based planning of a PCU, and absence of an actionable, practical framework that guides planners. OBJECTIVES: This qualitative study used a case study approach to examine the key elements in the planning process of effectively establishing a new PCU and identify the challenges that need to be addressed. METHODS: Porter’s Value Chain Model served as the theoretical framework to guide the research agenda. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted in 2017 with a purposive sample of 35 key informants reflecting experiences from 30 countries. An interview guide was developed and recruitment continued until saturation. Participants included physicians, nurses, architects, administrators, consultants, and academicians. Data were also employed from three other sources: document review, observation, and pre-dissertation findings. Interviews were recorded, transcribed using REV, and analyzed using NVIVO. Data were analyzed using a thematic analysis and principles of grounded theory method were applied in the interview guide design and analysis. RESULTS: Respondents reported nine strategic elements essential in the process: leadership, mission, planning principles, organizational structure, situation analysis, medical model, financing, stakeholders, and international partnerships. Corruption, distrustful culture, ineffective communication, and lack of data were cited as key barriers. DISCUSSION: Documenting best practices and implementing a data-driven, systems-based planning is essential in advancing local PCU management know-how in LMIC. The modified Porter’s Value Model showed promise as a generalizable model for future public health practitioners and created a framework for systems-based, multidisciplinary approach in strategic planning. / 2020-06-30T00:00:00Z

The subject of this licentiate thesis is experience feedback from accidents and incidents. The thesis aims to contribute to an understanding of how the learning processes within organizations, companies and authorities could be improved. Essay I (written together with Sven Ove Hansson) reports on an evaluation carried out in 2004 by the Swedish Work Environment Authority’s Accident Investigation Board, called HAKO (Haverikommissionen). An important outcome of this evaluation shows that HAKO have not been able to manage the dissemination of their written reports, which is unfortunate, since the reports are thoroughly written. Essay II (written with Sven Ove Hansson and Carl Rollenhagen) is an overview of the literature on learning from accidents and incidents. The focus in this essay is on literature that evaluates the effectiveness and usefulness of different methods in accident investigations. The conclusions drawn from this literature review are that the dissemination of results and knowledge from accident investigations must be improved, and experience feedback systems should be integrated into overall systems of risk management. The starting point for Essay III was an empirical study conducted in 2005/2006. Twenty-eight supervision cases from eleven local Environment and Health Administrations in Sweden were examined. The overall goal of the study was to find out how, and to what extent, experience feedback occurs between different municipal authorities. Two major problems affecting experience feedback have been found; namely, that the inspectors do not have enough guidance on how to interpret the law, and that they would like more information on what happens to legal cases they have reported to public prosecutors and police. / QC 20101118

Storage systems used for supercomputers and high performance computing (HPC) centers exhibit load imbalance and resource contention. This is mainly due to two factors: the bursty nature of the I/O of scientific applications; and the complex and distributed I/O path without centralized arbitration and control. For example, the extant Lustre parallel storage system, which forms the backend storage for many HPC centers, comprises numerous components, all connected in custom network topologies, and serve varying demands of large number of users and applications. Consequently, some storage servers can be more loaded than others, creating bottlenecks, and reducing overall application I/O performance. Existing solutions focus on per application load balancing, and thus are not effective due to the lack of a global view of the system. In this thesis, we adopt a data-driven quantitative approach to load balance the I/O servers at extreme scale. To this end, we design a global mapper on Lustre Metadata Server (MDS), which gathers runtime statistics collected from key storage components on the I/O path, and applies Markov chain modeling and a dynamic maximum flow algorithm to decide where data should be placed in a load-balanced fashion. Evaluation using a realistic system simulator shows that our approach yields better load balancing, which in turn can help yield higher end-to-end performance. / Master of Science

O objetivo primordial desta tese foi identificar os fatores determinantes para a tradução da estratégia em ações e resultados uma nova competência organizacional denominada de disciplina da execução da estratégia. Para o alcance desse objetivo, realizou-se uma extensa revisão da literatura pertinente às áreas de conhecimento vinculadas ao tema da tese, bem como uma pesquisa de campo junto a empresas envolvidas em processos de modelagem e ação estratégica, com estratégias de pesquisa de caráter quantitativo. Os principais resultados encontrados mostram um conjunto de 23 construtos, agrupados em cinco fatores-chave para o processo de execução da estratégia, que têm impacto significativo na melhoria de resultados em duas categorias: financeira e processos. Como resultado combinado da pesquisa teórica e empírica propõe-se um modelo, denominado de modelo da cadeia de valor da disciplina da execução da estratégia, para orientar e guiar as organizações em seus esforços e iniciativas em busca do sucesso na execução de suas estratégias. / The main objective of this thesis was the identification of the determinant factors to translate the strategy into actions and results a new organizational competence called the discipline of strategy execution. To reach this proposed objective, the methodological selected approach encompass a theoretically based study, through a broad literature search and review concerning the knowledge areas related to the key issues linked to the project research, as well as a field research carried out in companies involved with strategic modeling and action. The main results show a range of 23 constructs, clustered into five key factors in the strategy implementation process, which have significant impact on both the categories of results: financial and processes. As a result of these approaches, the Strategy Execution Value-Chain Model was proposed in order to provide a guide to support companies efforts and initiatives in their successful journey to strategy execution.

This thesis explores connections between the Gaudin Hamiltonians in type A and the combinatorics of tableaux. The cactus group acts on standard tableaux via the Schützenberger involution. We show in this thesis that the action of the cactus group on standard tableaux can be recovered as a monodromy action of the cactus group on the simultaneous spectrum of the Gaudin Hamiltonians. More precisely, we consider the action of the Bethe algebra, which contains the Gaudin Hamiltonians, on the multiplicity space of a tensor product of irreducible glr-modules. The spectrum of this algebra forms a flat and finite family over M0,n+1(C). We use work of Mukhin, Tarasov and Varchenko, who link this spectrum to certain Schubert intersections, and work of Speyer, who extends these Schubert intersections to a flat and finite map over the entire moduli space of stable curves M0,n+1(C). We show the monodromy over the real points M0,n+1(R) can be identified with the action of the cactus group on a tensor product of irreducible glr-crystals. Furthermore we show this identification is canonical with respect to natural labelling sets on both sides.

O objetivo primordial desta tese foi identificar os fatores determinantes para a tradução da estratégia em ações e resultados uma nova competência organizacional denominada de disciplina da execução da estratégia. Para o alcance desse objetivo, realizou-se uma extensa revisão da literatura pertinente às áreas de conhecimento vinculadas ao tema da tese, bem como uma pesquisa de campo junto a empresas envolvidas em processos de modelagem e ação estratégica, com estratégias de pesquisa de caráter quantitativo. Os principais resultados encontrados mostram um conjunto de 23 construtos, agrupados em cinco fatores-chave para o processo de execução da estratégia, que têm impacto significativo na melhoria de resultados em duas categorias: financeira e processos. Como resultado combinado da pesquisa teórica e empírica propõe-se um modelo, denominado de modelo da cadeia de valor da disciplina da execução da estratégia, para orientar e guiar as organizações em seus esforços e iniciativas em busca do sucesso na execução de suas estratégias. / The main objective of this thesis was the identification of the determinant factors to translate the strategy into actions and results a new organizational competence called the discipline of strategy execution. To reach this proposed objective, the methodological selected approach encompass a theoretically based study, through a broad literature search and review concerning the knowledge areas related to the key issues linked to the project research, as well as a field research carried out in companies involved with strategic modeling and action. The main results show a range of 23 constructs, clustered into five key factors in the strategy implementation process, which have significant impact on both the categories of results: financial and processes. As a result of these approaches, the Strategy Execution Value-Chain Model was proposed in order to provide a guide to support companies efforts and initiatives in their successful journey to strategy execution.

A wireless sensor network consists of a number of sensor devices and coordinator(s) or sink(s). A coordinator collects the sensed data from the sensor devices for further processing. In such networks, sensor devices are generally powered by batteries. Since wireless transmission of packets consumes significant amount of energy, it is important for a network to adopt a medium access control (MAC) technology which is energy efficient and satisfies the communication performance requirements. Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), which is a popular access technique because of its simplicity, flexibility and robustness, suffers poor throughput and energy inefficiency performance in wireless sensor networks. On the other hand, time division multiple access (TDMA) is a collision free and delay bounded access technique but suffers from the scalability problem. For this reason, this thesis focuses on design and analysis of hybrid channel access schemes which combine the strengths of both the CSMA/CA and TDMA schemes. In a hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA scheme, the use of the CSMA/CA period and the TDMA period can be optimized to enhance the communication performance in the network. If such a hybrid channel access scheme is not designed properly, high congestion during the CSMA/CA period and wastage of bandwidth during the TDMA period result in poor communication performance in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. To address this issue, distributed and centralized channel access schemes are proposed to regulate the activities (such as transmitting, receiving, idling and going into low power mode) of the sensor devices. This regulation during the CSMA/CA period and allocation of TDMA slots reduce traffic congestion and thus improve the network performance. In this thesis work, time slot allocation methods in hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA schemes are also proposed and analyzed to improve the network performance. Finally, such hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA schemes are used in a cellular layout model for the multihop wireless sensor network to mitigate the hidden terminal collision problem.

DNA-binding proteins (DBPs) such as repair proteins, DNA polymerases, re- combinases, transcription factors, etc. manifest diverse stochastic behaviours dependent on physiological conditions inside the cell. Now that multiple independent in vitro studies have extensively characterised different aspects of the biochemistry of DBPs, computational and mathematical tools that would be able to integrate this information into a coherent framework are in huge demand, especially when attempting a transition to in vivo characterisation of these systems. ChIP-Seq is the method commonly used to study DBPs in vivo. This method generates high resolution sequencing data { population scale readout of the activity of DBPs on the DNA. The mathematical tools available for the analysis of this type of data are at the moment very restrictive in their ability to extract mechanistic and quantitative details on the activity of DBPs. The main trouble that researchers experience when analysing such population scale sequencing data is effectively disentangling complexity in these data, since the observed output often combines diverse outcomes of multiple unsynchronised processes reflecting biomolecular variability. Although being a static snapshot ChIP-Seq can be effectively utilised as a readout for the dynamics of DBPs in vivo. This thesis features a new approach to ChIP-Seq analysis { namely accessing the concealed details of the dynamic behaviour of DBPs on DNA using probabilistic modelling, statistical inference and numerical optimisation. In order to achieve this I propose to integrate previously acquired assumptions about the behaviour of DBPs into a Markov- Chain model which would allow to take into account their intrinsic stochasticity. By incorporating this model into a statistical model of data acquisition, the experimentally observed output can be simulated and then compared to in vivo data to reverse engineer the stochastic activity of DBPs on the DNA. Conventional tools normally employ simple empirical models where the parameters have no link with the mechanistic reality of the process under scrutiny. This thesis marks the transition from qualitative analysis to mechanistic modelling in an attempt to make the most of the high resolution sequencing data. It is also worth noting that from a computer science point of view DBPs are of great interest since they are able to perform stochastic computation on DNA by responding in a probabilistic manner to the patterns encoded in the DNA. The theoretical framework proposed here allows to quantitatively characterise complex responses of these molecular machines to the sequence features.

Proteins are essential parts of living organisms that initiate and control almost all cellular processes. Despite the widely accepted belief that all functional proteins fold into stable and well-defined three-dimensional (3D) structures mandatory for protein activity, the existence of biologically functional disordered proteins has been increasingly recognized during past two decades. Proteins with inherent structural disorder, commonly known as intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), play many roles in a biological context. However, in contrast to their folded counterparts, they are dynamically unstructured and typically fluctuate among many conformations even while performing biological functions. In fact, it is this dynamical structural heterogeneity that that allows for IDPs to interact with other biological macromolecules in unique ways. Moreover, while a majority of proteins in eukaryotic proteomes have been found to have intrinsically disordered regions (IDR), the mechanisms by which protein disorder fives rise to biological functionality is still not well understood. Through a series of simulation studies on specific systems, this thesis probes several aspects of the emerging structure-function paradygm of IDPs, namely the mechanics, intermolecular assembly, and structural transitions occurring in these proteins. The lack of well-defined 3D structure in IDPs gives rise to distinct mechanical properties, the subject of the first study in the thesis on the elasticity of a elastomeric gluten-mimetic polypeptide with an intrinsically disordered character. This disordered polypeptide was shown to exhibit distinctively variable elastic response to a wide range of tensions, which a classical worm-like chain model failed to accurately describe, thus requiring a molecular-level analysis. IDPs frequently are frequently involved in protein-protein interactions, the focus of the second study on the propensity of an IDR, the B domain in dynamin-related protein 1 (Dpr1), to self-assemble into dimer structures while remaining disordered in all solution conditions. Despite a hypothesized auto-inhibitory role for this domain in Dpr1 that was assumed to be triggered by an disordered-to-order transition, the B domains in solution showed no tendency to form ordered structures even in the presence of order promoting osmolytes. Instead, self-association in the presence of osmolyte was found to occur by favorable intermolecular intereactions between specific region on the surface of the B-domains. Other IDPs do undergo a disorder-to-order transition in response to environmental cues, in ways that are unique disordered proteins, the focus of the last study on intermolecular ordering transitions in silk-like proteins. Factors such as protein sequence and physical tension were investigated, and results suggested that tyrosine residues in the key silk sequence motifs promote templating of beta structure from disordered precursors and that elongational stresses preferentialy stabilize antiparallel beta-sheet order. Together, these three computational studies provide insight into the nature of the structure-function mechanisms of IDPs.

Title: The future of Real estate lies in the Internet of Things Date: 2018-05-22 Grade: Bachelor Thesis Authors: Fabian Henningsson & Harley Ljungdahl Supervisor: Navid Ghannad Purpose: Understand how IoT can create value when implemented within real estate companies Frame of reference: In this part we will present our frame of reference. Our key concepts when gathering this secondary data was IoT, Value creation. These key concepts formed how our model for Value Creation in IoT for real estate companies would look like. Method: In this chapter we have described the method we used to collect our primary data. We have also presented a discussion about why we have chosen the methods we have used and what relevance they have for our survey. Finally, we present the reliability and validity of our sources and research. Empiric: We have interviewed three companies active on the Swedish real estate market. How they use and how they look at the use of IoT technology in an enterprise perspective. Analysis: We have made both a within and cross case analysis on the empirical findings and this has resulted in our model explaining the primary value drivers of IoT in real estate companies. Conclusion: With the help of our primary value drivers in our model and innovation, it´s suggested that the real estate companies can create value with the help of IoT solutions. Keywords: IoT, IoT and real estate, Smart cities, value creation, IT and value creation, IoT value creation and value chain model. Examiner: Thomas Helgesson