This thesis addresses the problem of motion planning for autonomous robots, given a map and an estimate of the robot pose within it. The motion planning problem for a mobile robot can be defined as computing a trajectory in an environment from one pose to another while avoiding obstacles and optimizing some objective such as path length or travel time, subject to constraints like vehicle dynamics limitations. More complex planning problems such as multi-robot planning or complete coverage of an area can also be defined within a similar optimization structure. The computational complexity of path planning presents a considerable challenge for real-time execution with limited resources and various methods of simplifying the problem formulation by discretizing the solution space are grouped under the class of discrete planning methods. The approach suggests representing the environment as a roadmap graph and formulating shortest path problems to compute optimal robot trajectories on it. This thesis presents two main contributions under the framework of discrete planning. The first contribution addresses complete coverage of an unknown environment by a single omnidirectional ground rover. The 2D occupancy grid map of the environment is first converted into a polygonal representation and decomposed into a set of convex sectors. Second, a coverage path is computed through the sectors using a hierarchical inter-sector and intra-sector optimization structure. It should be noted that both convex decomposition and optimal sector ordering are known NP-hard problems, which are solved using a greedy cut approximation algorithm and Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) heuristics, respectively. The second contribution presents multi-robot path-planning strategies for recharging autonomous robots performing a persistent task. The work considers the case of surveillance missions performed by a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The goal is to plan minimum cost paths for a separate team of dedicated charging robots such that they rendezvous with and recharge all the UAVs as needed. To this end, planar UAV trajectories are discretized into sets of charging locations and a partitioned directed acyclic graph subject to timing constraints is defined over them. Solutions consist of paths through the graph for each of the charging robots. The rendezvous planning problem for a single recharge cycle is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), and an algorithmic approach, using a transformation to the TSP, is presented as a scalable heuristic alternative to the MILP. The solution is then extended to longer planning horizons using both a receding horizon and an optimal fixed horizon strategy. Simulation results are presented for both contributions, which demonstrate solution quality and performance of the presented algorithms.

This study examines how the media reports on the Pride Festival in Stockholm and what news topics and themes it prioritizes. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the media coverage of Pride highlights political questions related to social and societal problems. One of the main focuses of the study is on how the media covers male and female homosexuality. The newspapers examined are the tabloids Aftonbladet and Expressen and the respected dailies Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. The study extends over three periods: 19-07-2010 to 07-08-2010, 25-07-2011 to 14-08-2011, and 24-07-2012 to 11-08-2012. Several key theories and themes frame the study. One of the theoretical bases of this study is agenda theory, which is based on the idea that issues get more media attention when the audience perceives them as important. Another key theory in the study is the theory of news values, which concerns how potential news items are evaluated editorially. The study also looks at the theme of sex and gender as a power aspect and how the representation of the sexes appears in today's media. Using quantitative content analysis, 291 articles have been studied. The results show that media coverage during the Pride festival includes articles that address both serious and non-serious issues. Furthermore, the results show that the coverage of male homosexuals is more frequent than of female homosexuals. However, the majority of the articles focused on the collective concept “LGBT” and not on gender related issues.

On January 1st, 2014, Indonesia began implementing universal health coverage. Despite the fact that the density of human resources for health (HRH) is far lower than the International Labor Organization’s benchmark, the Indonesian government is ambitiously committed to providing equal, quality, and extended healthcare services to an estimated population of 257.5 million people by 2019 without putting them in financial hardship. In addition, the government expects to ensure a minimum of 85% of the health recipients is satisfied with attained healthcare services. With respect to nurses, the massive international migration of qualified and motivated Indonesian nurses that has taken place over the last decade is alleged to be one of the factors responsible for the low density. However, at this point, very little publicly available information exists that comprehensively displays the phenomenon. As such, to help stakeholders understand the phenomenon, mitigate the recurrence of massive international migration of Indonesian nurses, and make relevant data-driven HRH policies, a proposal for a series of studies to reveal the phenomenon of the international migration of Indonesian nurses is developed. An 18-month research project with various sampling methods, research instruments, and research methods will be conducted to explore four main international nursing migration issues from multiple study populations. The study populations include migrating and returning Indonesian nurses, nursing organizations both in Indonesia and in four foreign countries, local recruitment agencies, two government agencies in Indonesia, and several Indonesian embassies overseas.

PhotoScope, a novel visualization, visualizes the spatiotemporal coverage of photos in a construction photo collection. It extends the standard photo browsing paradigm in two main ways: visualizing spatial coverage of photos on floor plans, and indexing photos by a combination of spatial coverage, time, and content specifications. This approach enables users to browse and search space- and time-indexed photos more effectively. We designed PhotoScope specifically to address challenges in the construction management industry, where large photo collections are amassed to document project progress. These ideas may also apply to any photo collection that is spatially constrained and must be searched using spatial, temporal, and content criteria. Design choices made when developing PhotoScope are also described. Civil, mechanical and electrical engineers, and professionals from construction management validated the visualization mechanisms and functionalities of PhotoScope in a usability study. Empirical findings on the cognitive behaviors of participants are also discussed in this thesis.

Pietra ratio (Pietra index), also known as Robin Hood index, Schutz coefficient (Ricci-Schutz index) or half the relative mean deviation, is a good measure of statistical heterogeneity in the context of positive-valued data sets. In this thesis, two novel methods namely "adjusted jackknife empirical likelihood" and "extended jackknife empirical likelihood" are developed from the jackknife empirical likelihood method to obtain interval estimation of the Pietra ratio of a population. The performance of the two novel methods are compared with the jackknife empirical likelihood method, the normal approximation method and two bootstrap methods (the percentile bootstrap method and the bias corrected and accelerated bootstrap method). Simulation results indicate that under both symmetric and skewed distributions, especially when the sample is small, the extended jackknife empirical likelihood method gives the best performance among the six methods in terms of the coverage probabilities and interval lengths of the confidence interval of Pietra ratio; when the sample size is over 20, the adjusted jackknife empirical likelihood method performs better than the other methods, except the extended jackknife empirical likelihood method. Furthermore, several real data sets are used to illustrate the proposed methods.

This study explores healthcare coverage disparity using a quantitative analysis on a large dataset from the United States. One of the objectives is to build supervised models including decision tree and neural network to study the efficient factors in healthcare coverage. We also discover groups of people with health coverage problems and inconsistencies by employing unsupervised modeling including K-Means clustering algorithm. Our modeling is based on the dataset retrieved from Medical Expenditure Panel Survey with 98,175 records in the original dataset. After pre-processing the data, including binning, cleaning, dealing with missing values, and balancing, it contains 26,932 records and 23 variables. We build 50 classification models in IBM SPSS Modeler employing decision tree and neural networks. The accuracy of the models varies between 76% and 81%. The models can predict the healthcare coverage for a new sample based on its significant attributes. We demonstrate that the decision tree models provide higher accuracy that the models based on neural networks. Also, having extensively analyzed the results, we discover the most efficient factors in healthcare coverage to be: access to care, age, poverty level of family, and race/ethnicity.

This thesis is an examination of representations of Muslim women in the American print media. I focus on one particular publication, The New York Times within a time frame surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. Articles were selected from this publication that fell within the time period of September 11, 2000 to September 11, 2002, in selecting articles, I chose those based on their inclusion of any discussion that clearly identified those discussed as Muslim women, through the use of the words "Muslim" or "Islamic" in their descriptions. The case study was carried out by reading through each daily edition of The New York Times in order to identify any articles that fell within my criteria. I also used an online database containing abstracts of the publication to verify that no article of relevance was overlooked. I then devised 5 categories within which to analyze the representations of Muslim women that were found within these articles, "Veil", "Biographical", "Women's Issues", "Politics" and "Muslims in the West". The main goal of this thesis is to determine how Muslim women are represented within this particular publication and to analyze whether the events of September 11, 2001 had any effect on how Muslim women were portrayed in The New York Times articles.

Due to their economic potential and widespread application areas, wireless sensor networks have emerged as an active research topic during the last five years. One of the fundamental challenges in wireless sensor network research is the provision of sufficient coverage while maintaining energy efficiency and longevity under sensor mobility. The purpose of this thesis is to observe the coverage and energy consumption dynamics of a mobile wireless sensor network in a hierarchical architecture. To achieve this goal iv we implemented a simulation environment with flat and hierarchical topologies. Defining performance metrics and network parameters we performed simulations in MATLAB test-bed. With the help of results obtained from simulations and performance metrics&rsquo / relation to networks parameters we investigated the effect of hierarchical organization on mobile wireless sensor network coverage.

Every healthcare system faces unlimited demands and limited resources, creating a need to make decisions that may limit access to some new, potentially effective technologies. It has become increasingly clearer that such decisions are more than technical ones. They require social value judgements - statements of the publics distributive preferences for healthcare across the population. However, these value judgements largely remain ill-defined. The purpose of this thesis was to explicate distributive preferences of the public to inform funding/coverage decisions on new health technologies. It contains six papers. The first comprises a systematic review of current coverage processes around the world, including value assumptions embedded within them. The second paper presents findings from an expert workshop and key-informant interviews with senior-level healthcare decision-makers in Canada. A technology funding decision-making framework, informed by the results of the first paper and the experiences of these decision-makers, was developed. Their input also highlighted the lack of and need for information on values that reflect those of the Canadian public. The third paper provides a systematic review of empirical studies attempting to explicate distributive preferences of the public. It also includes an analysis of social value arguments found in appeals to negative coverage decisions. From the results of both components, possible approaches to eliciting social values from the public and a list of factors around which distributive preferences may be sought were compiled. Such factors represented characteristics of unique, competing patient populations. Building on findings from the third paper, the fourth paper describes a citizens jury held to explicate distributive preferences for new health technologies in Alberta, Canada. The jury involved a broadly representative sample of the public, who participated in decision simulation exercises involving trade-offs between patient populations characterized by different combinations of factors. A list of preference statements, demonstrating interactions among such factors, emerged. The fifth and sixth papers address methodological issues related to citizens juries, including the comparability of findings from those carried out in the same way but with different samples of the public, and the extent to which they changed the views of individuals who participate in them.

本研究探討的是楊淑君被取消資格事件，發生在2010年11月17日。基於框架理論背景，研究的目的是探索新聞平面媒體如何使用框架來報導楊淑君事件。具體來說，本研究旨在探討不同國家的新聞報導框架差異。 本研究使用自2010年11月18日起至12月17日止的相關事件新聞報導作為樣本，進行台灣與韓國的報導框架比較。台灣蘋果日報和自由時報有150則相關新聞文章，而韓國的相關新聞文章只有28篇。 本研究發現，台灣媒體所使用的主要框架為責任框架，而韓國媒體所使用的框架為情感框架。台灣的主要新聞消息來源為台灣政府，而韓國新聞消息來源主要來自於台灣媒體。 / This research studies the framing and its application to the Yang Shu-chun disqualification incident, which happened in November 17, 2010. Based on the theoretical background of Framing, this study aims at exploring how the news print media framed one of the recent controversies between Taiwan and Korea, Yang Shu-chun disqualification. Specifically, this tried to see how different each country’s news coverage framed it and how different they used news sources. A comparative case study is conducted with the news stories regarding the incident from November 18, 2010 to December 17, 2010 in Taiwan and Korea. Because of the large difference of the number of the articles between Taiwan and Korea, only two Taiwanese newspapers, the Taiwan Apple Daily and the Liberty Times, are selected among many papers, while Korean news articles are chosen all. They are 150 stories and 28 stories respectively. This research finds that Taiwan media used the responsibility frame most while Korean one did the human interest frame. Both have the majority of episodic frames. As of the news sources, Taiwan’s papers used the news source from Taiwanese government, while Korean ones mostly used Taiwan’s media source. Taiwan used diverse sources from Taiwan side but Korea heavily depended on foreign sources. News coverage with the source of politicians has a tendency of having political consequences framing.