The goal of fully decoding how the brain works requires a detailed wiring diagram of the brain network that reveals the complete connectivity matrix. Recent advances in high-throughput 3D electron microscopy (EM) image acquisition techniques have made it possible to obtain high-resolution 3D imaging data that allows researchers to follow axons and dendrites and to identify pre-synaptic and post-synaptic sites, enabling the reconstruction of detailed neural circuits of the nervous system at the level of synapses. However, these massive data sets pose unique challenges to structural reconstruction because the inevitable staining noise, incomplete boundaries, and inhomogeneous staining intensities increase difficulty of 3D reconstruction and visualization. In this dissertation, a new set of algorithms are provided for reconstruction of neuronal morphology from stacks of serial EM images. These algorithms include (1) segmentation algorithms for obtaining the full geometry of neural circuits, (2) interactive segmentation tools for manual correction of erroneous segmentations, and (3) a validation method for obtaining a topologically correct segmentation when a set of segmentation alternatives are available. Experimental results obtained by using EM images containing densely packed cells demonstrate that (1) the proposed segmentation methods can successfully reconstruct full anatomical structures from EM images, (2) the editing tools provide a way for the user to easily and quickly refine incorrect segmentations, (3) and the validation method is effective in combining multiple segmentation results. The algorithms presented in this dissertation are expected to contribute to the reconstruction of the connectome and to open new directions in the development of reconstruction methods.

“Just as the consumer is becoming more intelligent, the company in parallel should become more intelligent about the customer” (Raisch, 2000, p.4). Internet has become a huge marketplace and to stay competitive in this growing marketplace, companies must improve the way they interact with their customers (Rayport & Jaworski, 2005). As the amount of information online is rapidly growing, customers are becoming more intelligent. Intelligence that in turn makes them more powerful as they with high knowledge becomes high involvement purchasers, which is the opposite to what companies desire. Moreover customers are no longer satisfied with rewards like “bonus-points” or “take three pay for two” campaigns (Kalkota & Robinson 1999). Today’s customers want to be treated individual, they want to feel special, want to feel that the company really take care for them (Newell 2000). The aim with this thesis is to explain how Interactive Agents (IA) as a concept can help companies to attract and retain customers. To do so, we first need to describe what that concept consists of. IA:s can be described as “robots” chatting with the user/customer. They often take graphical form and works with a large knowledgebase that help them deliver the answer a user asks for. The agent is designed to serve customers 24/7 and can, to the opposite of a human, handle more than one case at time. The significant difference between a search-engine and an IA is the technology that allows users to use natural sentences to communicate with the agent instead of only using keywords.  Our findings, that take ground in a literature study followed by an interview with one of the big developers of AI in Sweden, indicates that IA:s could provide companies with an additional value over money savings, which is the main reason according to developers to invest in IA:s. As we can see, two different types of benefits, technical and commercial, can be generated by implementing an IA in an organization. Technical benefits are generated directly from the technology, i.e. make the access to information less complicated and increased knowledge about customers. Commercial benefits are generated as a result of applying this technology and if experienced to a satisfactory level by its target-group, it can generate some commercial benefits, such as goodwill and brand mediation. We would like to conclude our findings to say that IA will be able to generate some value for the system-user and the end-user. However, we believe that to create a value of significance, there are still requirements (see conclusions) that need to be carried out, where the most important part would be interaction with other systems.

Computer Aided Teaching System (CATSY) is an interactive menu driven system that provides an instructor/presenter with an efficient teaching tool using microcomputer technology and a large screen projection system to enhance lecture presentations. Included in this thesis are descriptions of supporting graphics software and the computer peripherals used in the development of CATSY.The development of data structures used in CATSY is stressed in this thesis, along with their application to manipulate graphics and text. This thesis is intended to support and complement the masters thesis presented by Mr. Vincent Pedraza, which presents the system overview and system applications.

The Federal Government is dedicated to improving student achievement through technology. This dedication is most apparent in the area of federal spending. One explanation for the lack of results in student achievement is that teachers need appropriate training to effectively teach with technology. This study integrates the interactive whiteboard and professional development in order to develop middle school mathematics teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content knowledge (TPACK) in an urban school. Teacher TPACK is measured on a modified version of Survey of Teacher Knowledge to Teach with Technology. Student achievement is measured on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), a standardized mathematics assessment. Teachers in this study receive three weeks of professional development during their team planning periods to help them integrate the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) into their mathematics instruction. Mean difference effect sizes are used to measure teacher gain in TPACK. Student achievement scores before and after the professional development are analyzed by Multi-way ANOVA after propensity scores are used to match participant students to a separate group of control students for comparison. The results indicate that the professional development increased teacher TPACK and that student achievement is differentiated across ethnicities. Implications for the technology professional development design and IWB integration in urban settings are provided.

Tone mapping is a computational task of significance in the context of displaying high dynamic range images on low dynamic range devices. While a number of tone mapping algorithms have been proposed and are in common use, there is no single operator that yields optimal results under all conditions. Moreover, obtaining satisfactory mappings often requires the manual tweaking of parameters. This thesis proposes interactive evolution as a computational tool for tone mapping. An evolution strategy that blends the results from several tone mapping operators while at the same time adapting their parameters is proposed. As well, the results are adapted such that such that approximately uniform perceptual distances between offspring candidate solutions and the parent are ensured. The introduction of a perceptually based step size adaptation technique enhances the control of the variability between newly generated offspring, when compared to parameter space step size adaptation.

In a data centre, server clusters are typically used to provide the required processing capacity to provide acceptable response time performance to interactive applications. The workload of each application may be time-varying. Static allocation to meet peak demand is not an efficient usage of resources. Dynamic resource allocation, on the other hand, can result in efficient resource utilization while meeting the performance goals of individual applications. In this thesis, we develop a new interactive system model where the number of logon users changes over time. Our objective is to obtain results that can be used to guide dynamic resource allocation decisions. We obtain approximate analytic results for the response time distribution at steady state for our model. Using numerical examples, we show that these results are acceptable in terms of estimating the steady state probabilities of the number of logon users. We also show by comparison with simulation that our results are acceptable in estimating the response time distribution under a variety of dynamic resource allocation scenarios. More importantly, we show that our results are accurate in terms of predicting the minimum number of processor nodes required to meet the performance goal of an interaction application. Such information is valuable to resource provisioning and we discuss how our results can be used to guide dynamic resource allocation decisions.

In a data centre, server clusters are typically used to provide the required processing capacity to provide acceptable response time performance to interactive applications. The workload of each application may be time-varying. Static allocation to meet peak demand is not an efficient usage of resources. Dynamic resource allocation, on the other hand, can result in efficient resource utilization while meeting the performance goals of individual applications. In this thesis, we develop a new interactive system model where the number of logon users changes over time. Our objective is to obtain results that can be used to guide dynamic resource allocation decisions. We obtain approximate analytic results for the response time distribution at steady state for our model. Using numerical examples, we show that these results are acceptable in terms of estimating the steady state probabilities of the number of logon users. We also show by comparison with simulation that our results are acceptable in estimating the response time distribution under a variety of dynamic resource allocation scenarios. More importantly, we show that our results are accurate in terms of predicting the minimum number of processor nodes required to meet the performance goal of an interaction application. Such information is valuable to resource provisioning and we discuss how our results can be used to guide dynamic resource allocation decisions.

<p>I am interested, broadly, in the relationship of aesthetics to politics. More specifically, I am interested in the importance of aesthetics to leftist political organizing, particularly in regard to music. This interest reflects my goals as a composer and as an activist, or, I should say, as a composer/activist: the project is the same&mdash;musical composition is a large piece of a larger puzzle. <italic>SuperConductors</italic> explores the (structural) relationships between musical objects, their means of production, and the corresponding social formations. I am especially concerned with how formal aspects of a musical composition (which, for me, include the means of performance/consumption) reflect social relations, but more importantly also forge them. So: is there a way for me to write music that challenges dominant/hegemonic social relationships? Is there a way for me to write a more democratic music?</p><p><italic>SuperConductors</italic> consists of three divisions. The introductory division discusses the theoretical background of the project and traces historical lineages of other music and art that have been influential to this project. The second division is comprised by a series of musical compositions devoted to exploring the political and aesthetic possibilities that arise from participatory music-making. The final division consists of an article examining the emergence of web-based interactive music, pieces sometimes dubbed &ldquo;sound toys&rdquo;, as well as a series of my own pieces in this genre.</p><p>As a result of my work on this project, I have developed a paradigm for the production of democratic musical works through the discerning implementation of dynamically configurable forms; these principles, designed to facilitate the composition of new works in this style, are codified in a section entitled, &ldquo;Guidelines for a new democratic music&rdquo;.</p> / Dissertation

The problem of aircraft concept selection has become increasingly difficult in recent years due to changes in the primary evaluation criteria of concepts. In the past, performance was often the primary discriminator whereas modern programs have placed increased emphasis on factors such as environmental impact, economics, supportability, aesthetics, and other metrics. The revolutionary nature of the vehicles required to simultaneously meet these conflicting requirements has prompted a shift from design using historical data regression techniques for metric prediction to the use of sophisticated physics-based analysis tools that are capable of analyzing designs outside of the historical database. The use of optimization methods with these physics-based tools, however, has proven difficult because of the tendency of optimizers to exploit assumptions present in the models and drive the design towards a solution which, while promising to the computer, may be infeasible due to factors not considered by the computer codes. In addition to this difficulty, the number of discrete options available at this stage may be unmanageable due to the combinatorial nature of the concept selection problem, leading the analyst to select a sub-optimum baseline vehicle. Some extremely important concept decisions, such as the type of control surface arrangement to use, are frequently made without sufficient understanding of their impact on the important system metrics due to a lack of historical guidance, computational resources, or analysis tools. This thesis discusses the difficulties associated with revolutionary system design, and introduces several new techniques designed to remedy them. First, an interactive design method has been developed that allows the designer to provide feedback to a numerical optimization algorithm during runtime, thereby preventing the optimizer from exploiting weaknesses in the analytical model. This method can be used to account for subjective criteria, or as a crude measure of un-modeled quantitative criteria. Other contributions of the work include a modified Structured Genetic Algorithm that enables the efficient search of large combinatorial design hierarchies and an improved multi-objective optimization procedure that can effectively optimize several objectives simultaneously. A new conceptual design method has been created by drawing upon each of these new capabilities and aspects of more traditional design methods. The ability of this new technique to assist in the design of revolutionary vehicles has been demonstrated using a problem of contemporary interest: the concept exploration of a supersonic business jet. This problem was found to be a good demonstration case because of its novelty and unique requirements, and the results of this proof of concept exercise indicate that the new method is effective at providing additional insight into the relationship between a vehicle's requirements and its favorable attributes.

Ever since the internet technology was developed in 90's, like radio, television andnews paper, it has become one of the most influencial medias. Comparing withtraditional media, internet performs significantly better on on-time information providing, communication, geography limitation and globalization. Not only the cost of seting it up is low, but also the speed of its information transmitting is fast. Therefore lots of firms set up their corporate websites and use its functionalaities to help their marketing and customer service. The most important factor that decides the quality of a corporate website is the website functionalities. The definition of "website functionalities" is wide. It contains many kinds of abilities that a website has. To help corporates/firms build corporate websites that can help their sales and services the best, this research intends to find out the relationship between companies' stock prices and their corporate website functionalities, and finally find out the website functionalities that can help firms' business performance and rank the website functionalities from the most important one to the least important one. This research takes stock information from the "Taiwan Stock Exchange Market Observation System" website. The information taken are the stock price, capital size and industry category. The size of the sample is 150 companies. This research developes a grading system that evaluates companies' performances on functionalities that were defined by Liu (1997)'s research on "Corporate Website Content" and Ghose& Dou(1998)'s research on "Corporate Website's Interactive Functionalities". This grading system gives a score to each of the 150 companies, and then analyzes the relationships between each company¡¦s score and its stock price/capital size/industry category. This research has a result showing that for the website functionalities that are related to a corporate's stock price, from the most significant related to least significant related can be ranked as "Customer Surpporting Functionality", "Website Information Functioanlity", "Advertising/Exhibiting/Broadcasting Functionality" and "Personalization Functionality". Considering industry category, companies in "Finance/Insurance" and "Transpotation industry" have highest scores on website functionalities. Companies in "high-tech industry" are the second. Companies in "conventional industries" score the lowest. Considering capital size, companies with capital size of "more than 5 billion NTD" have the highest score on website functionalities. Companies which have capital sizes of "2 ~ 5 billion" and "less than 2billion" have lower scores.