abstract: In this thesis we deal with the problem of temporal logic robustness estimation. We present a dynamic programming algorithm for the robust estimation problem of Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) formulas regarding a finite trace of time stated sequence. This algorithm not only tests if the MTL specification is satisfied by the given input which is a finite system trajectory, but also quantifies to what extend does the sequence satisfies or violates the MTL specification. The implementation of the algorithm is the DP-TALIRO toolbox for MATLAB. Currently it is used as the temporal logic robust computing engine of S-TALIRO which is a tool for MATLAB searching for trajectories of minimal robustness in Simulink/ Stateflow. DP-TALIRO is expected to have near linear running time and constant memory requirement depending on the structure of the MTL formula. DP-TALIRO toolbox also integrates new features not supported in its ancestor FW-TALIRO such as parameter replacement, most related iteration and most related predicate. A derivative of DP-TALIRO which is DP-T-TALIRO is also addressed in this thesis which applies dynamic programming algorithm for time robustness computation. We test the running time of DP-TALIRO and compare it with FW-TALIRO. Finally, we present an application where DP-TALIRO is used as the robustness computation core of S-TALIRO for a parameter estimation problem. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2013

Nos livros das Odes Horácio empregou treze esquemas métricos distribuídos por poemas de temas diversos. A influência da tradição eólica representada pelos dois musicistas de Lesbos, Safo e Alceu, pautou a maioria das escolhas temáticas e formais do poeta. Odes compostas em metros asclepiadeus e jônicos kataV stivcon, em estrofes sáficas, alcaicas e asclepiadéias e em dísticos de formação variada (cola datílicos, sáficos, jâmbicos e trocaicos), mostram ritmos próprios, capazes de imprimir, no ânimo do ouvinte, sensações diferenciadas, de acordo com a natureza da seqüência métrica empregada. A teoria do ethos métrico leva em consideração o conceito da conveniência (Prevpon, decorum): conteúdo e forma em harmonia na criação poética. Os efeitos impressivos das medidas gregas, naturalizadas por Horácio, que deu feição datílica aos versos eólicos, fixou quantidades livres e disciplinou as estrofes, devem-se ao caráter psicagógico dos metros, herdado da antiga teoria musical. Desde Platão e Aristóteles, passando por Cícero, Demétrio, Dionísio de Halicarnasso, Longino e Quintiliano, registramse a preocupação de classificar os metros de acordo com sua adequação a cada tipo de composição e a censura de seu uso indiscriminado na prosa e na poesia. A análise rítmico-semântica de algumas odes de Horácio revelou o zelo do poeta em combinar forma e conteúdo e em selecionar palavras de composição sonora e formação métrica em harmonia com o sentido. Nas Odes a musicalidade do ritmo métrico tem implicações semânticas, realçando a expressão textual. / It has been observed in Horace\'s Odes books that he has employed thirteen metrical schemes distributed among thematic different poems. Aeolic tradition influence, represented by the two Lesbian musicians Sappho and Alcaeus, was responsible for most of the formal and thematic choices of the poet. Odes written in asclepiadean meters and ionic kataV stivcon, in sapphic, alcaic end asclepiadean strophes and in various distics (cola datctylics, sapphics, iambics and trochaics) show their own rhythms, which are able to impress different sensations to their listeners, according to the nature of the metrical sequence used. The theory of metrical ethos considers the convenience concept (Prevpon, decorum): subject and form harmonically living in poetic creation. The impressive effects of greek measures, (which were naturalized by Horace, gave dactylic features to the aeolic verses, fixed free amounts and regulated the strophes), are due to the psychagogic character of the meters, inherited by the old musical theory. Since Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Longinus and Quintilianus, there is a worry at classifying meters according to their adequacy to each kind of composition and disapproval of its nonrestrictive use in prose and poetry. The rhythmic-semantics analysis of some odes from Horace revealed the poet care to combine form and subject and to select sonorous words and metrics in harmony with sense. In Odes, metrics rhythm musicality has semantic implications that highlight the textual expression.

Real social graphs datasets are fundamental to understanding a variety of phenomena, such as epidemics, crowd management and political uprisings, yet releasing digital recordings of such datasets exposes the participants to privacy violations. A safer approach to making real social network topologies available is to anonymize them by modifying the graph structure enough as to decouple the node identity from its social ties, yet preserving the graph characteristics in aggregate. At scale, this approach comes with a significant challenge in computational complexity. This thesis questions the need to structurally anonymize very large graphs. Intuitively, the larger the graph, the easier for an individual to be “lost in the crowd”. On the other hand, at scale new topological structures may emerge, and those can expose individual nodes in ways that smaller structures do not. To answer this problem, this work introduces a set of metrics for measuring the indistinguishability of nodes in large-scale social networks independent of attack models and shows how different graphs have different levels of inherent indistinguishability of nodes. Moreover, we show that when varying the size of a graph, the inherent node indistinguishability decreases with the size of the graph. In other words, the larger a graph of a graph structure, the higher the indistinguishability of its nodes.

In this thesis, we will present examples of Voronoi diagrams that are not tessellations. Moreover, we will find sufficient conditions on subspaces of E2, S2 and the Poincaré disk and the sets of sites that guarantee that the Voronoi diagrams are pre-triangulations. We will also study g-spaces, which are metric spaces with ‘extendable’ geodesics joining any 2 points and give properties for a set of sites in a g-space that again guarantees that the Voronoi diagram is a pre-triangulation.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has become an intense research area in recent years. The main goal of this topic is to recognize and match individuals over time at the same or different locations. This task is challenging due to the variation of illumination, viewpoints, pedestrians’ appearance and partial occlusion. Previous works mainly focus on finding robust features and metric learning. Many metric learning methods convert the Re-ID problem to a matrix decomposition problem by Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA). Mahalanobis distance metric learning is a popular method to measure similarity; however, since directly extracted descriptors usually have high dimensionality, it’s intractable to learn a high-dimensional semi-positive definite (SPD) matrix. Dimensionality reduction is used to project high-dimensional descriptors to a lower-dimensional space while preserving those discriminative information. In this paper, the kernel Fisher discriminant analysis (KLFDA) [38] is used to reduce dimensionality given that kernelization method can greatly improve Re-ID performance for nonlinearity. Inspired by [47], an SPD matrix is then learned on lower-dimensional descriptors based on the limitation that the maximum intraclass distance is at least one unit smaller than the minimum interclass distance. This method is proved to have excellent performance compared with other advanced metric learning.

The main objective of this thesis is to design dashboards proposals for MBI metrics. In the theoretical part, the concept of a metric is set in the context of MBI methodology and the concept of dashboard is set in contexts of Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management in small and medium-sized enterprises. The theoretical part is resolved by the analysis of information sources. MS Excel PowerPivot tool is used for designing dashboards proposals. Designing dashboards, assessment of the importance of Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management in SMEs and the proposed extension of the existing MBI metric classification system are main contributions of the author.

The master thesis „IP traffic performance“ is focused on traffic testing in IP networks. Theoretical section explains routing issue in an autonomous system. This work contains a detailed description of OSPF protocol. This work also deals with behavior of a link failure. There are described mechanisms that are used to link failure detection and subsequent traffic rerouting. The next section describes mechanisms to ensure quality of service. In master thesis are explained InterServ and DiffServ mechanisms. A large part is devoted to DiffServ mechanism that ensures distinction of data flows and classification packets into different classes. The routers than can process the individual data streams with different priorities. The practical section includes the design of experimental network and creation of simulation in Opnet Modeler. By using several scenarios are compared the characteristics of routing protocols and impact of QoS on the transmission characteristics of the network. Part of practical section is the improvement of OSPF protocol by adding a new metric and implementing a new metric in software suite Quagga.

Il est important d'évaluer régulièrement les produits de l'innovation technologique afin d'estimer le niveau de maturité atteint par les technologies et d'étudier les cadres applicatifs dans lesquels elles pourront être exploitées. Le traitement automatique des langues (TAL) relève à la fois de la recherche et de l'innovation technologique et a pour but la modélisation et le développement d'outils permettant de traiter automatiquement le langage naturel. Pendant longtemps, les différentes briques technologiques issues du TAL étaient développées séparément. Par conséquent, les méthodes d'évaluation existantes sont dans la plupart modulaires et ne permettent d'évaluer qu'un seul module à la fois, alors qu'aujourd'hui nombreuses applications nécessitent de combiner plusieurs modules de TAL pour résoudre des tâches complexes. Le nouveau défi en terme d'évaluation est alors de pouvoir évaluer les différents modules (ou briques) tout en prenant en compte le contexte applicatif.Notre travail porte sur l'évaluation des systèmes de reconnaissance automatique de la parole (RAP) en contexte applicatif, en particulier, celui de la reconnaissance d'entités nommées (REN).En première partie, nous abordons la problématique de l'évaluation des systèmes de RAP en contexte applicatif à travers une étude de l'état de l'art. Nous y décrivons les tâche de RAP et de REN proposées dans les campagnes d'évaluation ainsi que les protocoles mis en place pour leurs évaluation. Nous y discutons également les limites des approches d'évaluations modulaires et nous y exposons les mesures alternatives proposées dans la littératures. En deuxième partie, nous décrivons la tâche de détection, classification et décomposition d'entités nommées étudiée et nous proposons une nouvelle métriques ETER (Entity Tree Error Rate) permettant de prendre en compte les spécificité de cette tâche et le contexte applicatif lors de l'évaluation. ETER permet également de supprimer les biais observés avec les métriques existantes. En troisième partie, nous définissons une nouvelle mesure ATENE (Automatic Transcriptions Evaluation for Named Entities) qui permet d'évaluer la qualité des systèmes de RAP et l'impact de leurs erreurs pour des systèmes de REN appliqués en aval. ATENE consiste à comparer les probabilités de présence d'entités sur les transcriptions de référence et d'hypothèse plutôt qu'une comparaison directe des graphèmes. Elle est composée de deux mesures élémentaires. Une première permettant l'évaluation de risque d'erreur d'omission et de substitution d'entités et une seconde permettant d'évaluer le risque d'erreur d'insertion d'entités causé par les erreurs de RAP.Nos expériences de validation montrent que les mesures données par ATENE corrèlent mieux que les autres mesures de l'état de l'art avec les performances des systèmes de REN. / It is important to regularly assess the technological innovation products in order to estimate the level of maturity reached by the technology and study the applications frameworks in which they can be used. Natural language processing (NLP) aims at developing modules and applications that automatically process the human language. That makes the field relevant to beth research and technological innovation. For years, the different technological modules from the NLP were developed separately. Therefore, the existing evaluation methods are in most modular. They allow to evaluate only one module at a time, while today, many applications need to combine several NLP modules to solve complex tasks. The new challenge in terms of evaluation is then to evaluate the different modules while taking into account the applicative context.Our work addresses the evaluation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems according to the applicative context. We will focus on the case of Named Entities Recognition (NER) from spoken documents transcriped automatically. In the first part, we address the issue of evaluating ASR systems according to the application context through a study of the state of the art. We describes the tasks of ASR and NER proposed during several evalution campaigns and we discuss the protocols established for their evaluation. We also point the limitations of modular evaluation approaches and we expose the alternatives measures proposed in the literature. In the second part we describe the studied task of named entities detection, classification and decomposition and we propose a new metric ETER (Entity Tree Error Rate) which allows to take into account the specificity of the task and the applicative context during the evaluation. ETER also eliminates the biases observed with the existing metrics. In the third part, we define a new measure ATENE (Automatic Transcriptions Evaluation for Named Entities) that evaluates the quality of ASR systems and the impact of their errors for REN systems applied downstream. Rather than directly comparing reference and hypothesis transcriptions, ATENE measure how harder it becames to identify entities given the differences between hypothesis and reference by comparing an estimated likelihood of presence of entities. It is composed of two elementary measurements. The first aims to assess the risk of entities deletions and substitutions and the second aims to assess the risk of entities insertions caused by ASR errors.Our validation experiments show that the measurements given by ATENE correlate better than other measures from the state of the art with the performance of REN systems.

In this dissertation we study a special sub-collection of Polish metric spaces: complete separable ultrametric spaces. Polish metric spaces have been studied for quite a long while, and a lot of results have been obtained. Motivated by some of earlier research, we work on the following two main parts in this dissertation. In the first part, we show the existence of Urysohn Polish R-ultrametric spaces, for an arbitrary countable set R of non-negative numbers, including 0. Then we give point-by-point construction of a countable R-ultra-Urysohn space. We also obtain a complete characterization for the set R which corresponding to a R-Urysohn metric space. From this characterization we conclude that there exist R-Urysohn spaces for a wide family of countable R. Moreover, we determine the complexity of the classification of all Polish ultrametric spaces. In the second part, we investigate the isometry groups of Polish ultrametric spaces. We prove that isometry group of an Urysohn Polish R-ultrametric space is universal among isometry groups of Polish R-ultrametric spaces. We completely characterize the isometry groups of finite ultrametric spaces and the isometry groups of countable compact ultrametric spaces. Moreover, we give some necessary conditions for finite groups to be isomorphic to some isometry groups of finite ultrametric spaces.

The partial specific Gibbs1 free energy or the chemical potential has been shown to be the most desirable thermodynamic function for describing soil-water systems. The absolute value of the chemical potential of soil water cannot be determined. If pure water at standard temperature and pressure is taken as the reference, the difference between the chemical potential of soil water and that of the reference can be measured and is called "soil water potential," which has the dimension of energy per unit mass. The barometric pressure at the sea level has been accepted as the standard reference pressure. Thus, any device that measures a certain property with respect to local barometric pressure should be standardized to the pressure at sea level. In case of a tensiometer, a device for measuring soil water potential operating at different locations with varying altitudes, the reference pressure changes from place to place and time to time. In pressure plate or pressure membrane apparatus, on the other hand, the soil water potential, there would be a problem with respect to pressure in evaluation of water potential. The effect of external pressure on soil water potential has been neglected by most workers in the past. That is, they have assumed that soil water behaves the same way toward pressure as pure free water. The main objective of this investigation is to evaluate the validity of this assumption and to determine the nature of the pressure dependence of soil water potential.