Building Information Modeling (BIM) has entered the construction industry and has permeated the commercial sector. Research is continually performed to expand the capabilities and applications within the industry. However, research has historically been mostly limited to the commercial sector and has seen little expansion to other sectors of the industry including the residential sector. The potential cause for this may be the limited number of industry professionals who utilize the software to the benefit of their companies. The focus of this study was specifically the custom home building sector of residential construction in the United States because of the unique and potentially complex nature of each project. The study was performed using a Delphi Panel, which utilizes a panel of experts to reach a consensus on a given subject. In this study, the goal was to reach a consensus on the most common uses challenges and benefits of BIM within the residential sector. In the first questionnaires, the experts were asked to identify, with a series of demographic questions including the number of employees in their company, the number of homes they build each year, and the average sale price of each home. Each expert's responses to the demographic questions were cross-referenced with the responses concerning uses, benefits, and challenges to provide other industry members wishing to implement with relatable demographic references to compare with their own company demographics. The experts then identified how they used BIM, what benefits they had seen, and any challenges they faced. The uses, benefits, and challenges identified in this questionnaire were ranked in the following questionnaire to identify the most common uses, greatest benefits, and greatest challenges.The top uses identified by this expert panel were design and visualization, the creation of construction documents, and quantity take-offs. The most common benefits identified by this panel were client visualization, plan accuracy, improved client communication, and ease of plan revisions. The most common challenges identified by this panel were high software costs, the steep learning curve when training employees, and the time-consuming nature of creating and maintain models correctly.

Ce travail porte sur l’étude de la construction du droit civil cambodgien : le code civil de 2007. Ce code civil est le fruit de la combinaison entre la coutume cambodgienne et le droit romano-germanique. Au travers de l'histoire du droit cambodgien, on constate que la civilisation cambodgienne a toujours été une civilisation traditionnelle. La tradition khmère est le résultat d’un mélange entre les religions (hindouisme et bouddhisme) et la croyance des âmes (animisme). Elles persistent encore aujourd’hui et sont un des fondements du droit khmer ancien. En matière de droit de la famille cambodgienne, la coutume a toujours montré un rôle important par rapport au droit positif dans la société cambodgienne, même après l’entrée en application du code civil de 2012. Il est nécessaire d'analyser les enjeux de la place de la coutume en concurrence avec le nouveau droit positif dans le domaine du droit de la famille, notamment sur la formation de couple, la gestion des biens de couple et la liquidation successorale. / This research aims to study the construction of the Cambodian Civil Law through the Civil Code of 2007. This Cambodian Civil Code has been the result of the combination between its own custom and Romano-Germanic Legal Systems.Through history of Cambodian legal system, we observe that the Cambodian Civilization has always been a traditionnal civilization. Khmer Tradition is the result of the mixture between two religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) and the belief of souls (Animism). To date, This tradition still exist and become a corenerstone of the Ancient Khmer Law.Regarding to the Camobodian Family Law, the Custom has always shown an important role as compared to the substantive law in Cambodian society, even after the Civil Code has taken effect in 2012. It’s necessary to analyze the role of Custom regarding the new positive law in the Family Law field, including torque training and particularly the management of goods and torque succesorale liquidation.

The evolution of the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) over the last decade, has reinforced general purpose computing while sustaining a steady performance growth in graphics intensive applications. However, the immense performance improvement is generally associated with a steep rise in GPU power consumption. Consequently, GPUs are already close to the abominable power wall. With a massive popularity of the mobile devices running general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications, it is of utmost importance to ensure a high energy efficiency, while meeting the strict performance requirements. In this work, we demonstrate that, customizing a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) of a GPU, at a lower frequency, is significantly more energy efficient, compared to employing Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) on an SM, designed for a high frequency operation. Using a system level Computer Aided Design (CAD) technique, we propose SSAGA - Streaming Multiprocessors Sculpted for Asymmetric GPGPU Applications, an energy efficient GPU design paradigm. SSAGA creates architecturally identical SM cores, customized for different voltage-frequency domains.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Administración (MBA) / Oscar Guillermo Azócar Campos [Parte I. Análisis estratégico y de mercado] -- Gregory Allen Krupa [Parte II. Análisis organizativo - financiero.] / El presente plan de negocios está enfocado en presentar la oportunidad de negocio que ofrece la empresa Chile CustomWine, y la forma en cómo desarrolla sus actividades. La empresa responde a la creciente demanda por productos a medida, para lo cual ofrece un servicio de customización de vinos en un nicho del mercado de hoteles, restaurantes y catering (HORECA) enfocado en los cuatro estados de los Estados Unidos – Massachusetts, Illinois, Nueva York y New Jersey – en donde el consumo de vino y vino importado es mayor y que son además estados no controlados. La compañía espera ser reconocida como la primera empresa chilena dedicada cien por ciento a la customización de productos vitivinícolas para el mercado HORECA, de esta forma ganar prestigio y ser líder en un nuevo mercado. Nuestro servicio entrega a nuestros clientes la oportunidad de vender un producto con marca propia y de oferta exclusiva generando valor en ellos y mayores oportunidades de márgenes para nuestros clientes. A su vez nuestros clientes obtendrán productos de igual calidad que muchas marcas premium pero a mayor costo FOB que marcas en que se cobra por el posicionamiento que ha adquirido en el mercado. El vino importado chileno presenta un crecimiento de 8% anual en Estados Unidos. Las barreras de entradas para la venta tradicional de vino son altas, pero dado nuestro modelo de negocios innovador se espera capturar rápidamente un alto porcentaje de mercado de un 0,4%. Los competidores de Chile CustomWine son principalmente las viñas chilenas, pero que sin embargo compiten de manera tradicional con altos costos en maejo de campos y bodegas. Nuestra estrategia competitiva será de nicho con enfoques en la diferenciación, la estrategia de entrada consistirá en formar alianzas con actores claves (importadores/distribuidores) en la industria junto a estrategias de promoción en los puntos de ventas (HORECA). La estrategia de crecimiento está dada por la continua penetración del mercado utilizando la misma estrategia de promoción. La estrategia de precios será equiparar el monto del mercado con un vino premium por exclusividad. La estrategia de distribución es indirecta, tanto el proveedor como el distribuidor son los encargados de proveer y entregar el servicio respectivamente. La estrategia de ventas se enfoca en la continua búsqueda de clientes y la alianza que se forma con ellos. Nuestro servicio corresponde a Business to Business, ya que vendemos a mercados HORECA y nuestro modo de operación es Engineering to Order entregando un producto totalmente customizado. Nuestra instalación estará ubicada en Talca, tanto oficina como bodega, dado que ahí se encuentran nuestros principales proveedores. Se presenta en la empresa una estructura organizacional vertical con ocho empleados desde el tercer año los cuales son compuestos por: Gerente General/Ventas, Gerente de Operaciones, Jefe de Marketing, Encargado de Exportaciones, Encargado de Bodega, Diseñador, Operario y Etiquetador. La TIR del proyecto en una situación moderada, da un 51%, mientras que el VPN corresponde a 405.031.000 CLP. El payback ocurre en el cuarto año. El costo de capital corresponde a 12,4%. La inversión inicial corresponde a 62.755.000 CLP la cual está compuesta por la maquinaria (etiquetadora y carro para mover pallets), instalaciones de bodega, de oficina, y capital de trabajo. El proyecto es sumamente rentable, las utilidades crecen de forma constante a través de los años, y dado el modelo de negocios propuesto, Chile CustomWine ofrece una posibilidad real de alcanzar rápidamente las ventas estimadas en el presente plan.

As embedded systems designers increasingly turn to programmable logic technologies in place of off-the-shelf microprocessors, there is a growing interest in the development of optimised custom processing cores that can be designed on a per-application basis. FPGAs blur the traditional distinction between hardware and software and offer the promise of application specific hardware acceleration. But realizing this in a general sense requires a significant departure from traditional embedded systems development flows. Whereas off-the-shelf processors have a fixed architecture, the same cannot be said of purpose-built FPGA-based processors. With this freedom comes the challenge of empirically determining the optimal boundary point between hardware and software. The fluidity of the hardware/software partition also poses an interesting challenge for compiler developers. This thesis presents a tool and methodology that addresses these codesign challenges in a new way. Described as 'compiler-directed codesign', it makes use of a suitably modified compiler to help direct the development of a custom processor core on a per-application basis. By exposing the compiler's internal representation of a compiled target program, visibility into those instructions, and hardware resources, that are most sought after by the compiler can be gained. This information is then used to inform further processor development and to determine the optimal partition between hardware and software. At each design iteration, the machine model is updated to reflect the available hardware resources, the compiler is rebuilt, and the target application is compiled once again. By including the compiler 'in-the-loop' of custom processor design, developers can accurately quantify the impact on performance caused by the addition or removal of specific hardware resources and iteratively converge on an optimal solution. Compiler Directed Codesign has advantages over existing codesign methodologies because it offers both a concrete point from which to begin the partitioning process as well as providing quantifiable and rapid feedback of the merits of different partitioning choices. When applied to an Adaptive PCM Encoder/Decoder case study, the Compiler Directed Codesign technique yielded a custom processor core that was between 36% and 73% smaller, consumed between 11% to 19% less memory, and performed up to 10X faster than comparable general-purpose FPGA-based processor cores. The conclusion of this work is that a suitably modified compiler can serve a valuable role in directing hardware/software partitioning on a per-application basis.

<p>Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA with integrated PowerPC core offers an opportunity to implementing a software and hardware codesign. The software application executes on the PowerPC processor while the FPGA implementation of hardware cores coprocess with PowerPC to achieve the goals of acceleration. Another benefit of coprocessing with the hardware acceleration core is the release of processor load. This thesis demonstrates such an FPGA based software and hardware codesign by implementing a real time video processing project on Xilinx ML310 development platform which is featured with a Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA. The software part in this project performs video and memory interface task which includes image capture from camera, the store of image into on-board memory, and the display of image on a screen. The hardware coprocessing core does a contrast enhancement function on the input image. To ease the software development and make this project flexible for future extension, an Embedded Operating System MontaVista Linux is installed on the ML310 platform. Thus the software video interface application is developed using Linux programming method, for example the use of Video4Linux API. The last but not the least implementation topic is the software and hardware interface, which is the Linux device driver for the hardware core. This thesis report presents all the above topics of Operating System installation, video interface software development, contrast enhancement hardware implementation, and hardware core’s Linux device driver programming. After this, a measurement result is presented to show the performance of hardware acceleration and processor load reduction, by comparing to the results from a software implementation of the same contrast enhancement function. This is followed by a discussion chapter, including the performance analysis, current design’s limitations and proposals for improvements. This report is ended with an outlook from this master thesis.</p>

<p>Syftet med denna studie är att få en förståelse för hur mäklare uppfattar att de förhåller sig till, och tillämpar, lagar och etiska riktlinjer i sin yrkesutövning.</p> / <p>The purpose of this essay is to understand how estate agents interpret and how they relate to, and applies, laws and ethical guiding lines in their practise.</p>

Background: Family Businesses’ way of doing marketing has similarities with B2B marketing. Usuallyfamily firms focus on what they have traditionally done well and diversify in related areas using their knowledge of how to perform in certain markets with certain customers and by offering certain productsand services. In order to do this, it is important for family firms, as for firms operating in B2Bmarkets, to create and keep good relationships with their stakeholders, so that at the end their customersare satisfied in the best possible manner. The process towards establishing long-term relationships between stakeholders and businesses requires certain characteristics and acts aimed at developingcommitment and trust. Since many of the most successful firms that have survived the longest arefamily businesses as well as B2B marketing is mainly about building and maintaining business relationships,we have decided to focus our study on the similarities between family firms’ marketing and B2Bmarketing within a specific context. B2B firms and Family firms make use of trade shows as an importantmarketing tool for improving relationships in networks. Trade shows are considered as the primary marketing tool to gain and sustain relationships with key stakeholders. Therefore, we chose the tradeshow context to execute our empirical survey. Purpose: The overall purpose of this thesis consists in testing and comparing practices and principleswithin two apparently separate fields of study - B2B marketing and Family Business Development -with the aim of finding and developing associations that can complement and contribute to both fields of study on a marketing level. Method: A quantitative method study has been conducted testing 50 companies participating at theBilsport Performance &amp; Custom Motor show 2009 at Elmia – Jonkoping, Sweden. The primary data was gathered through a survey and a semi-structured interview, which constitutes our case study. The sample was chosen out of a population of 223 firms exhibing at the trade show, using a disproportionate stratified random method. Most secondary data involves research articles, books, reports, bachelorand master theses, and journals in order to determine marketing practices similarities between business-to-business firms and family business. Conclusions: Our empirical findings confirmed most of the hypotheses derived from theory. Hence,we found that most exhibiting firms at the trade show are family-controlled and operate in B2C markets;B2B firms in our sample have a tendency to use more relationship marketing than transactional marketing; family firms in our sample are more likely to use long-term oriented than short-termoriented marketing; and the overlap between B2B marketing and Family firms’ marketing in the tradeshow context is characterized by the common marketing principles and practices of family and B2Bfirms that aim at gaining and sustaining long-term business relationships.

Syftet med denna studie är att få en förståelse för hur mäklare uppfattar att de förhåller sig till, och tillämpar, lagar och etiska riktlinjer i sin yrkesutövning. / The purpose of this essay is to understand how estate agents interpret and how they relate to, and applies, laws and ethical guiding lines in their practise.

With the advances in very large scale integration (VLSI) technology, hardware is going parallel. Software, which was traditionally designed to execute on single core microprocessors, now faces the tough challenge of taking advantage of this parallelism, made available by the scaling of hardware. The work presented in this dissertation studies the acceleration of electronic design automation (EDA) software on several hardware platforms such as custom integrated circuits (ICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and graphics processors. This dissertation concentrates on a subset of EDA algorithms which are heavily used in the VLSI design flow, and also have varying degrees of inherent parallelism in them. In particular, Boolean satisfiability, Monte Carlo based statistical static timing analysis, circuit simulation, fault simulation and fault table generation are explored. The architectural and performance tradeoffs of implementing the above applications on these alternative platforms (in comparison to their implementation on a single core microprocessor) are studied. In addition, this dissertation also presents an automated approach to accelerate uniprocessor code using a graphics processing unit (GPU). The key idea is to partition the software application into kernels in an automated fashion, such that multiple instances of these kernels, when executed in parallel on the GPU, can maximally benefit from the GPU?s hardware resources. The work presented in this dissertation demonstrates that several EDA algorithms can be successfully rearchitected to maximally harness their performance on alternative platforms such as custom designed ICs, FPGAs and graphic processors, and obtain speedups upto 800X. The approaches in this dissertation collectively aim to contribute towards enabling the computer aided design (CAD) community to accelerate EDA algorithms on arbitrary hardware platforms.