The use of words such as stress-resistant and flexible are frequently used in job advertisements. Two terms often lack a broader definition or explanation, raises the question what actually is being sought. The purpose of this study is to find out what definitions are behind the choice of words. Interviews was conducted with private and public companies. During the encoding process, it turned out that the synonymous word for flexible was availability, customizable and adaptable. While the overall definition of stress is about how individuals can cope with a high workload and sudden changes. But there were also elements that emerged during the interviews which showed that the concept was deeper than that. It turned out that the relationships at work are important for how the individual experiences the situation. The final conclusion is that there are better words to describe what is requested.

The objective of this thesis is to study methods for the flexible and secure storage of sensitive data in an unaltered cloud. While current cloud storage providers make guarantees on the availability and security of data once it enters their domain, clients are not given any options for customization. All availability and security measures, along with any resulting performance hits, are applied to all requests, regardless of the data's sensitivity or client's wishes. In addition, once a client's data enters the cloud, it becomes vulnerable to different types of attacks. Other cloud users may access or disrupt the availability of their peers' data, and cloud providers cannot protect from themselves in the event of a malicious administrator or government directive. Current solutions use combinations of known encoding schemes and encryption techniques to provide confidentiality from peers and sometimes the cloud service provider, but its an all-or-nothing model. A client either uses the security methods of their system, or does not, regardless of whether the client's data needs more or less protection and availability. Our approach, referred to as the Data Storage Facilitating Service (DSFS), involves providing a basic set of proven protection schemes with configurable parameters that encode input data into a number of fragments and intelligently scatters them across the target cloud. A client may choose the encoding scheme most appropriate for the sensitivity of their data. If none of the supported schemes are sufficient for the client's needs or the client has their own custom encoding, DSFS can accept already encoded fragments and perform secure placement. Evaluation of our prototype service demonstrates clear trade-offs in performance between the different levels of security encoding provides, allowing clients to choose how much the importance of their data is worth. This amount of flexibility is unique to DSFS and turns it into more of a secure storage facilitator that can help clients as much or as little as required. We also see a significant effect on overhead from the service's location relative to its cloud when we compare performances of our own setup with a commercial cloud service.

Software products can be categorized into three types namely bespoke, market driven and customizable generic products. Each of these products is facing different problems in their development and to address these problems different software process models have been introduced. The use and validation of different software process models for bespoke and market driven products have been discussed in earlier work. On the other hand, less attention was paid to the customizable generic products. Our thesis will fill this gap by conducting a case study on evolutionary prototyping (EP) for customizable generic products. The main aim of the thesis is to make an initial validation of EP for customizable generic products. In order to fulfill the aforementioned aim we performed a literature study on prototyping and EP, together with development of two customizable generic products. During this development process, we used approach of EP. The results from our investigation will provide researchers and practitioners with a deep insight to the EP and also to guide them in making decision regarding the use of EP. The main findings from our investigation are as follows: • EP is not used standalone as a software process model. Rather it is used as a concept that can be augmented with some iterative software process model. • Negative and positive aspects of EP were highlighted by discussing situations where it could be a better choice, with its advantages and disadvantages. • An initial validation was performed on EP for customizable generic products. Reported results from this case study show that the selected approach is a good choice when you want to have innovative product, clear ambiguous and sketchy requirements, discover new requirements, save resources of software testing, involve and satisfy customer. EP shows vulnerabilities in documentation of product and quality of code. / Mobile number : 0046762183249

A modular and area-efficient 3D graphics accelerator for tile based rendering in FPGA systems has been designed and implemented. The accelerator supports a subset of OpenGL, with features such as mipmapping, multitexturing and blending. The accelerator consists of a software component for projection and clipping of triangles, as well as a hardware component for rasterization, coloring and video output. Trade-offs made between area, performance and functionality have been described and justified. In order to evaluate the functionality and performance of the accelerator, it has been tested with two different applications. / En modulär och utrymmeseffektiv 3D-grafikaccelerator för tile-baserad rendering i FPGA-system har designats och implementerats. Acceleratorn stöder en delmängd av OpenGL med funktioner som mipmapping, multitexturering och blending. Acceleratorn är uppdelad i en mjukvarudel för projektion och klippning av trianglar och en hårdvarudel för rastrering, färgsättning och utritning till skärm. Avvägningar som gjorts mellan area, prestanda och funktionalitet har beskrivits och motiverats. För att evaulera funktionalitet och prestanda har acceleratorn testats med två olika applikationer.

Syfte – Att skapa en ny produkt inom kategorin mingelbord, som erbjuder fler användningsområden för att bli mer anpassad för privatpersoner och i hemmamiljö. Att genom en innovativ konstruktion och en kombination av moduliserade- och hantverksdelar skapa en unik produkt på marknaden. Metod – Grundmetoden för det här arbetet är den första fasen i en produkts liv: produktutvecklingsprocessen; identifiera behovet, planera designprocessen, ta fram kundkraven, utveckla konceptet och till sist utveckla produkten. Resultat – Designkoncept på ett mingelbord har tagits fram och redovisas i bilder. Dessa bilder är resultatet av en uppmodellering i datorn med hjälp av 3D-progam. För att få en mer realistisk känsla för material och form har bilderna även renderats. Implikationer – Resultatet av denna studie visar att mingelbord, genom konstruktionsändringar, kan utöka dess användningsområde utan att förändra grundfunktionen. Med utveckling av det framlagda konceptet kan ytterligare användningsområden skapas.  Begränsningar – I denna rapport har fokus lagts på de skeden innan själva tillverkningen och resultatet innebär då inte färdigt produktionsunderlag. Nyckelord – Hemmamiljö, justerbar, hantverk, funktionalitet, produktutveckling, design, mingelbord. / Purpose – To come up with a new product within the category of mingling table that provides an expanded area of use. This to be better adapted to individuals and at a home environment. Through an innovative construction and a combination of modulated- and hand made parts is the purpose to create a unique product on the market. Method – The first part of the life of a product: the product development process; identify the need, plan the process of the design, identify the customer demands, develop the concept and finally develop the product.  Findings – A mingling table has been created and is presented in pictures. These pictures are computer aided visualized. By rending the images is a more realistic feeling given to the table. Implications – The results of this thesis shows that tables within the category of mingling tables, through changes in its construction, could broaden its field of use. Through further development of the presented concept additional areas of usage  may be achieved. Limitations – This thesis has its focus on the time before the actual manufacturing of the product. This project emphasizes the product development process only.   Keywords – Home environment, customizable , functionality, product development, design, mingling table.

This thesis describes our experience of creating an interactive and customizable graph visualization engine, referred to as SVG graph visualization engine, or SVG Editor for short, implemented entirely in SVG and ECMAScript. Typical operations of this visualization engine include filtering, searching, collapsing, expanding of graph elements, and hierarchical as well as historical viewing of graphs and subgraphs. This visualization engine has great potential because it runs on many platforms and in many applications due to the availability of SVG plug-ins. SVG Editor can be customized to fit various domains. To illustrate the editor's customizability, we discuss three sample applications of SVG Editor. The first example is the instantiation of SVG Editor for the visualization of software structures. This kind of visualization is used by reverse engineering tools to support program comprehension. The second example is the instantiation of SVG Editor for information modeling with the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). Another example is to use SVG Editor to show three distinct viewpoints of a subject Web site: developer-view, server-view, and client-view in a web site reverse engineering tool, and for a reverse engineer to explore and navigate mappings between them. Also, we assess selected aspects of SVG Editor’s scalability, extensibility, customizability, usability, and reusability.

abstract: Reducing device dimensions, increasing transistor densities, and smaller timing windows, expose the vulnerability of processors to soft errors induced by charge carrying particles. Since these factors are inevitable in the advancement of processor technology, the industry has been forced to improve reliability on general purpose Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). With the availability of increased hardware resources, redundancy based techniques are the most promising methods to eradicate soft error failures in CMP systems. This work proposes a novel customizable and redundant CMP architecture (UnSync) that utilizes hardware based detection mechanisms (most of which are readily available in the processor), to reduce overheads during error free executions. In the presence of errors (which are infrequent), the always forward execution enabled recovery mechanism provides for resilience in the system. The inherent nature of UnSync architecture framework supports customization of the redundancy, and thereby provides means to achieve possible performance-reliability trade-offs in many-core systems. This work designs a detailed RTL model of UnSync architecture and performs hardware synthesis to compare the hardware (power/area) overheads incurred. It then compares the same with those of the Reunion technique, a state-of-the-art redundant multi-core architecture. This work also performs cycle-accurate simulations over a wide range of SPEC2000, and MiBench benchmarks to evaluate the performance efficiency achieved over that of the Reunion architecture. Experimental results show that, UnSync architecture reduces power consumption by 34.5% and improves performance by up to 20% with 13.3% less area overhead, when compared to Reunion architecture for the same level of reliability achieved. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

Les besoins croissants continuels de la médecine et de la santé accentuent la nécessité de systèmes d'alertes médicales bien adaptés. Ces systèmes d'alerte peuvent être utilisés par une variété de patients et d'acteurs médicaux. Ils devraient permettre de contrôler un large éventail de variables médicales. Nous proposons Tempas, un système d'alertes paramétrées par les utilisateurs. Aux alertes détectées on associées deux indices de qualité. L'indice d'applicabilité qui exprime dans quelle mesure un patient est concerné par l'alerte, et l'indice de confiance qui exprime la fiabilité de l'alerte concernant la fraicheur des données utilisées lors de sa détection. Les indices de qualité associés à une alerte détectée se calculent grâce aux informations liées à une situation d'alerte paramétrée par l'utilisateur. Une situation d'alerte est définie à partir d'une composition de conditions d'activation. Une condition d'activation est construite à partir d'une valeur linguistique exprimant l'état (par exemple température élevée) ou la tendance (par exemple tension systolique à la hausse) d'une entité observable (la température, la tension systolique, etc.). Lorsque la situation d'alerte est évaluée, le système utilise les connaissances préparées préalablement par les utilisateurs concernant les valeurs linguistiques. C'est-à-dire, quelle valeur linguistique représente le mieux une valeur quantitative sous un contexte spécifique. Les alertes détectées pouvant être nombreuses, nous définissons un politique de notification pour ne notifier que les alertes pertinentes dans le but de ne pas fatiguer les utilisateurs. D'abord les alertes sont filtrées à partir des indices de qualité. Parmi les alertes restantes, le système filtre par expressivité : choisir les tendances plus durables et les valeurs linguistiques les plus expressives. Ensuite, dans le cas d'alertes consécutives, le système ne garde que les alertes qui accomplissent les préférences des utilisateurs, comme celles dont l'indice d'applicabilité augmente. L'objectif final est de fidéliser l'utilisateur au système d'alertes en lui fournissant un service de qualité. Il s'approprie le système en même temps qu'il définit les situations d'alerte. Ainsi, il est capable de l'adapter lui-même au contexte afin d'obtenir des alertes de meilleure qualité. L'adaptation est guidée par les indices de qualité utilisés pour réduire les faux-positifs et faux-négatifs ainsi que pour contrôler la sur-notification d'alertes. Nous proposons de nous appuyer sur les systèmes existants en apportant des fonctionnalités de dynamisme et d'évolution, ainsi que des facilités de paramétrage et d'adaptation en temps réel au contexte d'utilisation afin d'exploiter au mieux les observations. / The continuous increasing needs in medicine and healthcare, accentuate the need of well-adapted medical alert systems. Such alert systems may be used by a variety of patients and medical actors. These systems should allow monitoring a wide range of medical variables. We work on Tempas an alert system setup by users. Detected alerts have two quality indices. The applicability index which indicates how well a patient is affected by the alert, and the confidence index, which expresses the reliability of the alert concerning the freshness of the data used in its detection. Quality indices associated with a detected alert are calculated using information related to an alert situation configured by the user. An alert situation is defined from multiple activation conditions. An activation condition is constructed from a linguistic value expressing the state (e.g. high temperature) or trend (e.g. systolic blood pressure rising) of an observable entity (temperature, systolic blood pressure, etc.). When the alert condition is evaluated, the system uses knowledge previously prepared by users regarding linguistic values. That is, what linguistic value best represents a quantitative value in a specific context. Since many alerts can be detected, we define a notification policy to notify only the relevant alerts in order to keep the users' interest. First alerts are filtered from the quality indices. Of the remaining alerts, the system filters by expressiveness: to keep more sustainable trends and the most expressive linguistic values. Then, in the case of consecutive alerts, the system keeps only those that fulfill the user preferences, such as those whose applicability index increases. The ultimate goal is to keep the user loyalty to the alert system by providing quality service. The user appropriates the system while he defines the alert situation. Thus, he is able to adapt the alert situation by himself to the context to obtain better alerts. The adaptation is guided by quality indices used to reduce false positives and false negatives as well as to control the over-alerting. We propose to leverage existing systems by providing dynamism and evolution features, as well as facilities for setup and real-time adaptation to the context of use in order to fully exploit the observations.

This paper explores the appeal of customizable user interfaces (UI) in video games, and the choices players make when this option is available to them. In the video game industry at present, players aren't given much choice in regards to the UI, even though it is usually a vital element that will support them throughout their whole experience. To determine the value of customizable UIs, players were provided a testing environment with tools that allowed them to modify their UI, and quantitative data was collected during this test. A qualitative study has also been conducted with a focus on the players attitude towards the subject. The results of the study show a high favor for UI customization among the players. It does however show that players are split on several aspects within the topic and further research is required. This can hopefully lead to developers adapting more uses of user experience (UX) and implementing UI customization within their games.

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