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Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems have been recognised as a compelling platform for parallel computing due to the programming advantages and scalability. DSM systems allow applications to access data in a logically shared address space by abstracting away the distinction of physical memory location. As the location of data is transparent, the sources of overhead caused by accessing the distant memories are difficult to analyse. This memory locality problem has been identified as crucial to DSM performance. Many researchers have investigated the problem using simulation as a tool for conducting experiments resulting in the progressive evolution of DSM systems. Nevertheless, both the diversity of architectural configurations and the rapid advance of DSM implementations impose constraints on simulation model designs in two issues: the limitation of the simulation framework on model extensibility and the lack of verification applicability during a simulation run causing the delay in verification process. This thesis studies simulation modelling techniques for memory locality analysis of various DSM systems implemented on top of a cluster of symmetric multiprocessors. The thesis presents a simulation technique to promote model extensibility and proposes a technique for verification applicability, called a Specification-based Parameter Model Interaction (SPMI). The proposed techniques have been implemented in a new interpretation-driven simulation called DSiMCLUSTER on top of a discrete event simulation (DES) engine known as HASE. Experiments have been conducted to determine which factors are most influential on the degree of locality and to determine the possibility to maximise the stability of performance. DSiMCLUSTER has been validated against a SunFire 15K server and has achieved similarity of cache miss results, an average of +-6% with the worst case less than 15% of difference. These results confirm that the techniques used in developing the DSiMCLUSTER can contribute ways to achieve both (a) a highly extensible simulation framework to keep up with the ongoing innovation of the DSM architecture, and (b) the verification applicability resulting in an efficient framework for memory analysis experiments on DSM architecture.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is presenting a real challenge to our Canadian health care system. As the numbers of infected grow, the greater the realization that health care and social services as they currently exist, are unable to adequately address the overwhelming need. With a special emphasis on hospice/palliative care services, which are seen as essential and very appropriate in the care of persons with AIDS (PWAs), this study seeks to evaluate one such service - the Buddy/Home Care Program offered by AIDS Vancouver - as a means of improving this program and illustrating the need to establish others to achieve an integrated hospice/palliative care service. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Buddy/Home Care Program, four PWA Social Networks composed of four Persons With AIDS, five of their buddies, three Home Care Volunteers, two Buddy/Home Care Client Care Case Managers, and four Outside Agency Affiliated Persons, were interviewed using an interview guide approach. The interview guide was designed to tap the individual experiences of everyone associated with the Program, as well as their perceptions of the Program's strengths and weaknesses. Limitations in the study design and implementation arose from sampling, incomplete data, and researcher-related issues. Data analysis followed the dimensional model of the Glaser and Strauss grounded theory. The results are presented utilizing pertinent social network characteristics as a framework. First, each of the four PWA Social Networks are presented and described in relation to size and density. The networks vary in size from 12 to 25, and are characterized by low levels of density. Since the literature indicates that there is a positive association between network size and health status, it follows that the PWA with 12 individuals in his social network would have the lowest health status, while the PWA with 25 would have the highest. But this has not been found to be the case in this study. What is also unclear, is whether larger sized networks cause improved health, or whether health status determines network size. Although low density is far from the ideal prescribed by the hospice/palliative care approach, the literature is conflicting on the association between density and health status, suggesting that this low density is not necessarily undesirable. Second, an examination of the volunteer-client relationship subsystems reveals that the relationships fulfill the Client Care Case Managers expectations, in that the relationships between volunteers and clients range in intensity from being volunteer-client, to friend-friend, to parent-child oriented, and are characterized by a wide variety of emotional, informational, instrumental, and companionship support functions consistent with these relationship dynamics. And third, an examination of the volunteer-agency relationship subsystems reveals high levels of appreciation of informational support provided by the agency through its volunteer training, relatively infrequent contact between volunteers and Client Care Case Managers, variable experiences of emotional support received from Client Care Case Managers, minimal amounts of emotional support received from the Buddy Support Group, and some confusion about which staff members are responsible for volunteers pre- and post-assignment. Recommendations designed to improve volunteer-client and volunteer-agency relationships in the Buddy/Home Care Program, as well as others designed to promote the establishment of an integrated Canadian hospice/palliative care service are presented in conclusion. / Arts, Faculty of / Social Work, School of / Graduate

電子化政府（e-Government）入口網站扮演的角色，在於提供使用者透過網路取得與利用政府資訊及服務的整合窗口；所謂公共服務（Public Services）則是政府提供一般民眾、企業或非營利組織的經常性施政作為。從文獻以及相關研究、評估報告中可以發現，公共服務確實為電子化政府建置發展的一個重要環節。本研究以資訊提供者的角度出發，著重於以公民為服務對象的公共服務，進行電子化政府公共服務之評估研究。 研究先以文獻探討與內容分析法，探究各國電子化政府公共服務的建置情形，包含電子化政府公共服務之分類以及重要公共服務項目，整理歸納出現代化國家針對公民提供的公共服務應該包含之21個類別，並透過分析的過程決定本研究欲評估的21項電子化政府公共服務。 本研究應用評估研究法，提出一套評估電子化政府基本公共服務項目之準則，包括21項基本公共服務之內涵以及各項服務透過線上實施的四個層次（資訊提供層次、單向互動層次、雙向互動層次與交易處理層次）之操作型定義，並考量評估需求設計了八個版本的電子化政府公共服務評估量表；繼之實際評估臺灣電子化政府入口網、臺北市政府網站、高雄市政府全球資訊網三個政府機關入口網站，驗證本研究建構的評估準則之可行性，同時檢視目前臺灣電子化政府提供公民公共服務之情形。實際使用評估量表發現，評估量表可以適切地使用於入口網站的評估，且評估者可以彈性調整權重；評估結果顯示，中央政府入口網站的整體表現較佳，臺北市與高雄市政府入口網站的表現尚可。 / Web portal of e-Government plays the role as providing terminal users an integrated gateway to access government information and services. Public services means routine policies delivered to general citizens, businesses, or non-profit organizations by the government. The aim of this study is to investigate the assessment of public services for citizens from the viewpoint of information providers. Literature review and content analysis are adopted in the study to make a thorough examination on the development of e-Government in different countries. The classification of important public services is surveyed in particular. 21 public services are identified as the core services in this study. A set of measures on assessing public services of e-Government is proposed by utilizing evaluation research method. We carefully define each public service and corresponding measure. The operational definitions of four-level interaction (information providing level, one-way interaction level, two-way interaction level, and transaction processing level) for each measure are also provided. In addition, 8 assessment forms are designed with considering the flexibility of assessment. In order to verify the feasibility of measures and the assessment forms, Taiwan central government portal, Taipei city government portal, and Kaoshiung city government portal are evaluated using the proposed measures and assessment forms. The results show that these assessment forms are appropriate for tasks of assessing e-Government portals. In addition, the assessors could flexibly adjust weights for measures. The overall performance of e-Government portals of Taiwan central government is better than that of Taipei city government and Kaoshiung city government, while the latter two perform fair.

The problem with which this study is concerned is to determine the status of academic program evaluation in Texas' senior colleges and universities. The purpose of the study is to determine current procedures, timelines, participants, and use of results of academic program evaluation in the surveyed institutions. The presidents of the seventy-three senior colleges and universities in Texas were contacted for permission to conduct the study. Fifty-four presidents gave their permission and supplied designated contact individuals, forty-six of whom responded for a 62 per cent response rate. The twentyitem survey instrument, which was designed to fulfill the purpose of the study, was evaluated by experts in the field of academic program evaluation at the senior institutional level. All data are reported by frequency, percentage, and rank ordering because these data indicate frequency of use and degree of importance.

De nombreuses applications de la vision par ordinateur requièrent la détection, la localisation et le suivi de régions ou d’objets d’intérêt dans une image ou une séquence d’images. De nombreux modèles d’attention visuelle, inspirés de la vision humaine, qui détectent de manière automatique les régions d’intérêt dans une image ou une vidéo, ont récemment été développés et utilisés avec succès dans différentes applications. Néanmoins, la plupart des approches existantes sont limitées à l’analyse de scènes statiques et très peu de méthodes exploitent la nature temporelle des séquences d’images.L'objectif principal de ce travail de thèse est donc l'étude de modèles d'attention visuelle pour l'analyse de scènes dynamiques complexes. Une carte de saliance est habituellement obtenue par la fusion d'une carte statitque (saliance spatiale dans une image) d'une part, et d'une carte dynamique (salience temporelle entre une série d'image) d'autre part. Dans notre travail, nous modélisons les changements dynamiques par un opérateur de texture LBP-TOP (Local Binary Patterns) et nous utilisons l'information couleur pour l'aspect spatial.Les deux cartes de saliances sont calculées en utilisant une formulation discriminante inspirée du système visuel humain, et fuionnées de manière appropriée en une carte de saliance spatio-temporelle.De nombreuses expériences avec des bases de données publiques, montrent que notre approche obteint des résulats meilleurs ou comparables avec les approches de la littérature. / Visual saliency is an important research topic in the field of computer vision due to its numerouspossible applications. It helps to focus on regions of interest instead of processingthe whole image or video data. Detecting visual saliency in still images has been widelyaddressed in literature with several formulations. However, visual saliency detection invideos has attracted little attention, and is a more challenging task due to additional temporalinformation. Indeed, a video contains strong spatio-temporal correlation betweenthe regions of consecutive frames, and, furthermore, motion of foreground objects dramaticallychanges the importance of the objects in a scene. The main objective of thethesis is to develop a spatio-temporal saliency method that works well for complex dynamicscenes.A spatio-temporal saliency map is usually obtained by the fusion of a static saliency mapand a dynamic saliency map. In our work, we model the dynamic textures in a dynamicscene with Local Binary Patterns (LBP-TOP) to compute the dynamic saliency map, andwe use color features to compute the static saliency map. Both saliency maps are computedusing a bio-inspired mechanism of Human Visual System (HVS) with a discriminantformulation known as center surround saliency, and are fused in a proper way.The proposed models have been extensively evaluated with diverse publicly availabledatasets which contain several videos of dynamic scenes. The evaluation is performed intwo parts. First, the method in locating interesting foreground objects in complex scene.Secondly, we evaluate our model on the task of predicting human observers fixations.The proposed method is also compared against state-of-the art methods, and the resultsshow that the proposed approach achieves competitive results.In this thesis we also evaluate the performance of different fusion techniques, because fusionplays a critical role in the accuracy of the spatio-temporal saliency map. We evaluatethe performances of different fusion techniques on a large and diverse complex datasetand the results show that a fusion method must be selected depending on the characteristics,in terms of color and motion contrasts, of a sequence. Overall, fusion techniqueswhich take the best of each saliency map (static and dynamic) in the final spatio-temporalmap achieve best results.

M. Tech. (Information Technology, Department of Information and Communications Technology, Faculty of Applied an Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technolog / One of the main research topics in Semantic Web is the semantic extraction of knowledge stored in relational databases through ontologies. This is because ontologies are core components of the Semantic Web. Therefore, several tools, algorithms and frameworks are being developed to enable the automatic conversion of relational databases into ontologies. Ontologies produced with these tools, algorithms and frameworks needs to be valid and competent for them to be useful in Semantic Web applications within the target knowledge domains. However, the main challenges are that many existing automatic ontology construction tools, algorithms, and frameworks fail to address the issue of ontology verification and ontology competency evaluation. This study investigates possible solutions to these challenges. The study began with a literature review in the semantic web field. The review let to the conceptualisation of a framework for semantic knowledge extraction to deal with the abovementioned challenges. The proposed framework had to be evaluated in a real life knowledge domain. Therefore, a knowledge domain was chosen as a case study. The data was collected and the business rules of the domain analysed to develop a relational data model. The data model was further implemented into a test relational database using Oracle RDBMS. Thereafter, Protégé plugins were applied to automatically construct ontologies from the relational database. The resulting ontologies are further validated to match their structures against existing conceptual database-to-ontology mapping principles. The matching results show the performance and accuracy of Protégé plugins in automatically converting relational databases into ontologies. Finally, the study evaluated the resulting ontologies against the requirements of the knowledge domain. The requirements of the domain are modelled with competency questions (CQs) and mapped to the ontology using SPARQL queries design, execution and analysis against users’ views of CQs answers. Experiments show that, although users have different views of the answers to CQs, the execution of the SPARQL translations of CQs against the ontology does produce outputs instances that satisfy users’ expectations. This indicates that Protégé plugins generated ontology from relational database embodies domain and semantic features to be useful in Semantic Web applications.

Sammanfattning Titel: Bockmanuskripet - en kritisk diskursanalys av en alldeles speciell bock Författare: Adam Larsson och David Alin Handledare: Ylva Habel Ämne: Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap Syfte: Syftet med den här studien har varit att undersöka Aftonbladets gestaltning av Gävlebockens öde mellan åren 1996, 2001, 2005, 2009 samt 2016. Teoretiska utgångspunkter: Studien baseras på teorier om nyhetsvärdering. Frågeställningar: Studien har följande frågeställningar:På vilka sätt kan Lotten Gustafsson Reinius “traditionsmanuskript” ha relevans för en studie av Aftonbladets bockbevakning?Har Aftonbladets journalistik rörande Gävlebocken förändrats och i så fall på vilka sätt?Går det att urskilja specifika diskursiva mönster i textmaterialet och i så fall vilka? Metod: För att besvara undersökningens frågeställningar har kritiska diskursanalyser enligt van Dijks metod utförts. Analyserna har kartlagt nyhetstexternas mikro- samt makrodiskurser. Material: Studiens material bestod av 14 artiklar från Aftonbladet publicerade i pap-persform samt digital utgåva från åren 1996, 2001, 2005, 2009 och 2016. Resultat: Aftonbladets rapportering rörande Gävlebocken har förändrats. Journalisten väljer att erhålla en mer neutral position i form av nyhetsrapporteringen men fler aktörer får istället ge uttryck för de åsikterna om förekommer. Artiklarnas perspektiv har skiftat, fler aktörer kommer till tals och bockens benämning har förändrats i och med publikens förförståelse och kunskap. Nyckelord: Gävlebocken, julbocken, diskurs, journalistik, nyhetsvärdering, Aftonbladet / Title: The Goat Manuscript - A critical discourse analysis about a special goat Author: Adam Larsson and David Alin Supervisor: Ylva Habel Subject: Media and communication studies Purpose: The purpose of this study has been to investigate Aftonbladets news reporting regarding the Gävle Christmas goat between 1996, 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2016. Theoretical points of departure: The study is based on theories regarding news evalu-ation. Objectives and focus: The study has the following questions:In what ways may Lotten Gustafsson Reinius concept "tradition manuscript" have relevance to Aftonbladets news reporting on the Gävle Christmas goat?Has Aftonbladets journalism about the Gävle goat changed in a discoursively way?Is it possible to identify specific discursive patterns in the texts? Method: In order to answer the survey's questions, critical discourse analyzes according to Theu Van Dijk´s method have been conducted. The analyzes have mapped the news texts micro disciplinary- and macro-courses. Material: The study material consists of 14 articles from Aftonbladet published in pa-per form and digital edition from 1996, 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2016. Result: Aftonbladets reporting regarding the Gävle Christmas goat has changed over the last 20 years, where journalists uses a more neutral position in the news reporting. The research proves that more people who represent different organizations gets to speak about the accidents. The way journalists refer to the goat has changed and the way me-dia refer to the perpetrator has changed. Keywords: Gävle Christmas goat, yule goat, straw goat, discourse, discourse analysis, journalism, “traditional manuscript”, news evalutation, Aftonbladet

The thesis deals the actual analysis in an evaluation system of workers, who work for the Domažlice Centre of Social Services. The result of my thesis the proposal of an evaluation system, which includes the metodology and the forms of the evaluation concentrated in the chosen work positions.

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