One of the most prominent trends of our time is the emergence of an information society. The amount of data available is absolutely surging, at the same time as we are becoming more and more dependent on constant access to updated and relevant information. To derive high quality information from a large quantity of textual data, we need efficient methods for structuring and querying the data. One way is to use the Vector Space Model (VSM), a mathematical way of representing the relationship between words and documents. Wellknown examples of this approach are Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Random Indexing (RI). This thesis describes the implementation of an information retrieval system based on the VSM that uses fragments of parse trees to index data.

In game development, performance is everything and the Playstation 3 provides a unique platform for utilizing parallelization of code to achieve extremely high performance. In this master’s thesis the issue of animation with smooth skinning is migrated from being a GPU process to becoming a parallelized and 358% faster process. This method is incorporated in an existing commercial game engine and integrated in a currently in development title for the Playstation 3. An in-depth study covers parallel processors, the CELL processor, used in the Playstation 3, and how contemporary industry leading game developers are utilizing the same unique architecture to increase their own games’ performance.

TRIMMA Affärsutveckling AB is developing and marketing a business intelligence solution called INSIGHT. INSIGHT presents tables showing possibly very large data sets and the performance and user experience is sometimes suffering. The main objective of this thesis is an evaluation of the pros and cons of replacing the existing ASP.NET/HTML table component in INSIGHT with a component developed in Silverlight.This thesis examines two techniques to speed up a Silverlight application showing a lot of data: UI- and data virtualization. UI virtualization intends to render only the user interface elements that appear on the screen and are visible to the user, while data virtualization intends to fetch (from the data source) only the section of the data that is visible to the user. The result of the project is a fully working prototype integrated into a test version of INSIGHT. Performance testing results indicate that the prototype performs approximately the same as the ASP.NET/HTML version of INSIGHT for small tables but significantly better for large data sets.  The prototype also contains a few extra features, not available in INSIGHT, exemplifying the possibilities to create highly responsive user interfaces in Silverlight

Searching for information has become a natural task in today's society. Nowadays more than 2 billion people are connected to the Internet and using some kind of search functionality for finding information is a central activity. The amount of digital information that is produced puts high constraints on the design of search interfaces.This master thesis report presents a proof-of-concept design and implementation of a search user interface. The main focus of the project is usability, especially in the aspects of navigation and content presentation. There are many features that can support the user during the search activity and this interface has been developed on the basis of these features. The report describes an iterative user-centered design process that served as the foundation during the proof-of-concept development. The target user group has been involved throughout the project and the design has been evaluated on several stages in the design process and the proposed interface was well received by the target users. An interactive high- delity prototype was implemented in Adobe Flex 3 for the purpose of evaluation and demonstration.

In common households today the awareness of the electricity, water and waste consumption are rather low. This generates a behavior that conicts with the existing goals of sustainable living. Together with Stockholm City and other companies The Interactive Institute is working with a project called Stockholm Royal Seaport, where the goal is to implement a solution for how smart grids and visualizations in the household could motivate a change of this behavior. This master thesis examines how to do this using an in-home display and ambient interfaces in an apartment. In order to motivate the users the goal was to create a dynamic and exploring solution, that would not cause them to loose interest. The result was an in-home display interface based on dynamic home screens, social comparison and achievements, and a couple of ambient interfaces located in the household. A presentation video was made in order to visualize the coherent solution.

The field of databases have exploded in the last couple of years. New architectures try to meet the need to store more and more data and new kinds of data. The old relational model is no longer the only way and the NoSQL movement is not a trend but a new way of making the database fit the data, not the other way around.This master thesis report aims to find an efficient and well designed solution for storing and retrieving huge amounts of software project data at Tieto. It starts by looking at different architectures and trying three to see if any of them can solve the problem. The three databases selected are the relational database PostgreSQL, the graph database Neo4j and the key value store Berkeley DB. These are all implemented as a Web service and time is measured to find out which, if any, can handle the data at Tieto. In the end it is clear that the best database for Tieto is Berkeley DB. Even if Neo4j is almost as fast, it is still new and not as mature as Berkeley DB.

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Quality inspection of a product is central of many manufacturing processes. While inspection on flat surfaces can be made fairly autonomous today, highly reflective free-form objects is problematic in many ways. This thesis is one part out of a two-part project investigating in an autonomous way to recognize, model, store relevant information and inspect these kind of work pieces. This part will focus on the recognition, modeling and database design. The system, established in this thesis will use a robotic manipulator, an industrial camera and the handheld 3-D scanner Exascanner. We present a methodology for preparing a work piece to be inspected autonomously and a simple implementation of the proposed methodology. The implementation recognizes workpieces with a support vector machine trained on histogram of oriented gradients features. These features are extracted from several pictures taken from different angles around the workpiece. The use of different angles are to make the classifier more versatile and robust to object being rotated or moved. If the workpeice is not recognized a spiral shaped dome path is created, scaled with the help of the pictures already taken. This shape helps ensuring a high quality scan of objects were there is no shape information to be used. The robotic manipulator is used to move the scanner along the path around the object, creating a surface profile of the object. This profile is built up of triangular facets of various size and needs to be processed before inspection of the surface can be made. A recursive splitting algorithm is used to make the facets as equilateral as possible and to make their size more suitable for the viewing range of the surface inspection camera. As a final step this information is stored in a database to be used later as support during inspection.

The purpose of this project was theimprovement of navigation on the forumsite Familjeliv.se. The forum containsover two million threads, and sitemanagement wanted a system to recommendthreads to users, alleviating the problemswith navigating all the data. The choicefell on a thread-to-thread similaritybased system, recommending threads similarto the one currently read. Two differentsimilarity measures were tried out, withthe first (cosine similarity) beingabandoned due to performance issues,replaced with a binary vector similaritysolution. The data still needed to bereduced to get execution times down toacceptable levels, and sampling andpartitioning were used. A live testshowed, after a week and about ten millionpage views, that the system provided abenefit a bit above 10% over a controlcondition in terms of number of clicks.

Studien undersöker hur instruktionsanimationer produceras kostnadseffektivt samtidigt som de håller god pedagogisk nivå. På uppdrag från Scania har fyra animationer som förklarar funktionen av en mekanisk komponent producerats, varav två animationer var interaktiva. Samtidigt med produktionen studerades vilka arbetsmetoder som är tidskrävande. Studien visar att 3D i detta fall var överflödigt men kan i andra projekt vara ett mer pedagogiskt alternativ. Resultatet av forskningen ska i senare studier hos Scania ligga som grund för djupare forskning i ämnet.