Modern vehicles use advanced information systems in vehicles to provide and control a wide variety of functions and features. Even modest vehicles today are equipped with systems that control diverse functions from air-conditioning to high quality audio/video systems. Since driving requires the use of eyes and hands, voice interaction has become more widely used by in-vehicle systems. Due to the technical complexity involved in voice recognition, focus has been on issues of speech ecognition. Speech generation is comparatively simple, but what effect does the choice of voice have on the driver? We know from human-human interaction that social cues of the voice itself influence attitude and interpretation of information. Introducing speech based communication with the car changes the relationship between driver and vehicle. So, for in-vehicle information systems, does the spoken voice matter? The work presented in this thesis studies the effects of the voice used by invehicle systems. A series of studies were used to answer the following questions: Do the characteristics of voices used by an in-vehicle system affect driver’s attitude? Do the characteristics of voice used by an in-vehicle system affect driver’s performance? Are social reactions to voice communication the same in the car environment as in the office environment? Results show that voices do matter! Voices trigger social and emotional effects that impact both attitude and driving performance. Moreover, there is not one effective voice that works for all drivers. Therefore an in-vehicle system that knows its driver and possibly adapts to its driver can be the most effective. Finally, an interesting observation from these studies is that social reactions to voice communication in the car are different than in the office, Similarity attraction, an otherwise solid finding in social science, did not hold all studies. It is hypothesized that this difference can be related to the different kinds of task demands when driving a car or working in an office environment. / Dagens fordon är oftast utrustade med avancerade informationssystem för att tillhandahålla och styra ett brett utbud av funktioner och tjänster från klimatsystem till audio- och videosystem. Eftersom bilkörning kräver förarens ögon på vägen och händer på ratten så blir talstyrda system allt vanligare. Utveckling av talbaserade bilsystem är oftast fokuserad på taligenkänningen, eftersom generering av förståeligt tal är jämförelsevis enkelt. Men vilken inverkan får den valda rösten? Vi vet att röster påverkar såväl attityd som tolkning av information i kommunikation mellan människor. Införandet av talbaserade bilsystem kommer därför att förändra relationen mellan förare och fordon. Frågan är dock hur röstens egenskaper påverkar föraren? Det arbete som presenteras här studerar effekterna av de röster som används av talsystem i bilar, där en rad studier utförts för att besvara följande frågor: Påverkar egenskaperna hos en röst i ett bilinformationsystem förarens attityd? Påverkar egenskaperna hos en röst i ett bilinformationsystem förarens körförmåga? Är reaktioner på talbaserade system i bilar desamma som för talbaserade system i hem- eller kontorsmiljö? Resultaten visar att röster påverkar förare! Röster utlöser sociala och emotionella reaktioner som påverkar både attityd och körbeteende. En röst passar dessutom inte alla! Ett bilsystem som känner och anpassar sig till sin förares sinnesstämning är mest effektivt. Dessutom visar resultaten att det förefaller som om reaktioner på röster och talbaserade system inte är densamma i bilar som i hem eller kontor. Så kallad similarity-attraction – att man attraheras av personer eller egenskaper om liknar en själv, en faktor som vanligtivs visats spela stor roll – observerades inte i alla studier. En hypotes är att skillnad i reaktion kan vara relaterad till arten av uppgift – att köra bil ställer andra krav än arbete i hem- eller kontorsmiljö.

Värdet av utvecklingen och användningen av värderingsmodeller inför beslutet om anskaffning av JAS 1982 beskrivs och analyseras i denna avhandling. Inom försvaret har datorimplementerade modeller av verksamhet - värderingsmodeller - använts som stöd för beslut sedan 1960-talet. Litteratur som belyser värdet av värderingsmodeller är dock sparsam. Kunskapen om värderingsmodellers möjligheter för att stödja lärande, kommunikation och beslut är begränsad. IT-utvecklingen ger nya tekniska möjligheter och intresset för värderingsmodeller ökar. Det finns därför en ökad risk för felinvesteringar. Det övergripande syftet med avhandlingen är att söka förståelse för hur värderingsmodeller kan bidra till att skapa, utveckla och kommunicera mentala modeller av verksamhet som stöd för beslut. Vilket värde värderingsmodellerna hade i det valda fallet och hur det skapades beskrivs och analyseras utgående från teorier om kunskap, kommunikation och beslutsfattande samt utgående från intervjuer med aktörer som medverkade i beslutsprocessen. Det framkommer att de som utveckla och använde modellerna utvecklade gemensam kunskap om flygplansalternativens förmåga, som kunde användas som underlag för beslut. Modellerna bidrog till detta. men de aktörer som medverkade och det arbetssättet som tillämpades var avgörande för det värde som skapades. En slutsats är att värderingsmodeller kan bidra till att skapa, utveckla och kommunicera mentala systemmodeller av verksamhet, men att de krävs mycket för att de skall göra det. Det ställs framförallt stora krav på beslutsfattarna och på de aktörerna som utvecklar och använder modellerna för att de skall vara av värde.

Electronic systems have become highly complex, which results in a dramatic increase of both design and production cost. Recently a core-based system-on-chip (SoC) design methodology has been employed in order to reduce these costs. However, testing of SoCs has been facing challenges such as long test application time and high temperature during test. In this thesis, we address the problem of minimizing test application time for SoCs and propose three techniques to generate efficient test schedules. First, a defect-probability driven test scheduling technique is presented for production test, in which an abort-on-first-fail (AOFF) test approach is employed and a hybrid built-in self-test architecture is assumed. Using an AOFF test approach, the test process can be aborted as soon as the first fault is detected. Given the defect probabilities of individual cores, a method is proposed to calculate the expected test application time (ETAT). A heuristic is then proposed to generate test schedules with minimized ETATs. Second, a power-constrained test scheduling approach using test set partitioning is proposed. It assumes that, during the test, the total amount of power consumed by the cores being tested in parallel has to be lower than a given limit. A heuristic is proposed to minimize the test application time, in which a test set partitioning technique is employed to generate more efficient test schedules. Third, a thermal-aware test scheduling approach is presented, in which test set partitioning and interleaving are employed. A constraint logic programming (CLP) approach is deployed to find the optimal solution. Moreover, a heuristic is also developed to generate near-optimal test schedules especially for large designs to which the CLP-based algorithm is inapplicable. Experiments based on benchmark designs have been carried out to demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed techniques. / <p>2007</p>

Triangular linear systems are fundamental in numerical linear algebra. A triangular linear system has a straight-forward and efficient solution strategy, namely forward substitution for lower triangular systems and backward substitution for upper triangular systems. Triangular systems, or, more generally, systems of triangular type occur frequently in algorithms for more complex problems. This thesis addresses three systems that involve linear systems of triangular type. The first system concerns quasi-triangular matrices. Quasi-triangular matrices are block triangular with 1-by-1 and 2-by-2 blocks on the diagonal. Quasi-triangular systems arise in the computation of eigenvectors from the real Schur form for the non-symmetric eigenvalue problem. This thesis contributes two algorithms for the eigenvector computation, which solve shifted quasi-triangular linear systems in an efficient and scalable way. The second system addresses scaled triangular linear systems. During the solution of a triangular linear system, the entries of the solution can grow. This growth can exceed the representable range of floating-point numbers. Such an overflow can be avoided by solving a scaled triangular system. The solution is scaled prior to every operation that would otherwise result in an overflow. After scaling, the operations can be executed safely. This thesis analyzes the scalability of a recently developed tiled, robust solver for scaled triangular systems, which ensures that at no point in the computation the overflow threshold is exceeded. The third system tackles the scaled continuous-time triangular Sylvester equation, which couples two quasi-triangular matrices. The solution process is prone to overflow. This thesis contributes a robust, tiled solver and demonstrates its practicability. These three systems can be addressed with a variation of forward or backward substitution. Compared to the highly optimized and scalable implementations of standard forward and backward substitution available in HPC libraries,the existing implementations of these three systems run at a smaller fraction of the peak performance. This thesis presents techniques to improve on the performance and robustness of the implementations of the three systems.

Context: The context of this research is to detect and track humans in an underwater environment using deep learning algorithms which can, in turn, reduce the deaths caused due to accidental drowning. Objectives: This study first investigates to find the suitable deep learning algorithms that can be used to detect objects and then an experiment is performed with the chosen algorithms to state the possibility to detect humans in an underwater environment and then evaluate the performance of algorithms. Methods: Firstly, a Literature review is used to find suitable deep learning algorithms and then based on findings an experiment is performed to evaluate the chosen deep learning algorithms. Results: Results from the literature review showed evidence that Faster RCNN and SSD are suitable algorithms and the experimental results showed that Faster RCNN performed better than SSD in detecting humans in an underwater environment. Conclusions: Analyzing the results obtained and considering the real world scenario this thesis is aiming at, it can be concluded that Faster RCNN is the algorithm of choice to detect and track humans in an underwater environment.

Modeling and analysis of imperfection in network data is essential in many applications such as protein–protein interaction networks, ad-hoc networks and social influence networks. In the study of imperfect network data, three issues have to be considered: first the type of imperfection, second the aspects of networks such as existence of nodes/edges or attributes of nodes/edges in which imperfection occurs and third the theory that has been used to represent imperfection. This thesis, first, reviews the different types of imperfection and consolidates the meaning of the terms used in literature. Second, it discusses network aspects and theories through which imperfect network data is represented and analyzed. Amongst all, the most applied model is uncertainty about existence of edges which is represented using probability theory, called probabilistic networks. Third, this thesis surveys queries and algorithms which have been applied over probabilistic networks. Fourth and the main focus of this dissertation is to look deeply at nodes' local properties in probabilistic networks. In our first contribution we have shown that two nodes with the same expected degree can have different properties. In this work we have highlighted the role of other summary information of degree distribution such as variance and skewness in addition to the expected value. In our second contribution, we have introduced two possible definitions of probabilistic ego networks and we have studied the concepts of degree, ego betweenness and ego closeness. One of the main applications of the proposed local properties could be in the sparsification process, in which a network's edges and the probability of the edges are altered, but nodes' local properties are preserved.

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