Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2001. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 65 p.; also contains graphics. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-64).

Zugl.: Augsburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2009.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-158). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009. / "Submitted to Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--York University, 1997. Graduate Programme in Computer Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-113). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ27391.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-124). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

Mobile advertising has grown rapidly in the United States from a marketing, technology, and consumer acceptance point of view. This professional report will begin with an overview of the current mobile landscape, including device and network history. Various techniques will then be covered, including formats such as messaging (SMS), mobile search, display, and video advertising. Each of these methods will be discussed in detail, highlighting benefits and drawbacks, followed by typical monetization and measurement for each format. This report will then shift from a marketer point of view to a consumer point of view, highlighting consumer use statistics and citing examples of consumer response to specific mobile advertising campaigns. While the majority of this report is focused on the United States and business-to-consumer marketing, global mobile advertising and mobile advertising in a business-to-business context will also be discussed. This report concludes with recommendations for professionals, resulting in a usable guide to creating successful mobile campaigns. / text

Cloud computing becomes popular nowadays. It allows applications to use the enormous resources in the clouds. With the combination of mobile computing, mobile cloud computing is evolved. With the use of clouds, mobile applications can offload tasks to clouds in client-server model. For cloud computing, migration is an important function for supporting elasticity. Lightweight and portable task migration support allows better resource utilization and data access locality, which are essentials for the success of cloud computing. Various migration techniques are available, such as process migration, thread migration, and virtual machine live migration. However, for these existing migration techniques, migrations are too coarse-grained and costly, and this offsets the benefits from migration. Besides, the migration path is monotonic, and mobile and clouds resources cannot be utilized. In this study, we propose a new computation migration technique called stack-on-demand (SOD). This technique is based on the stack structure of tasks. Computation migration is carried out by exporting parts of the execution state to achieve lightweight and flexible migration. Compared to traditional task migration techniques, SOD allows lightweight computation migration. It allows dynamic execution flows in a multi-domain workflow style. With its lightweight feature, tasks of a large process can be migrated from clouds to small-capacity devices, such as iPhone, in order to use the unique resources, such as photos, found in the devices. In order to support its lightweight feature, various techniques have been introduced. To allow efficient access to remote objects in task migration, we propose an object faulting technique for efficient detection of remote objects. This technique avoids the checking of object status. To allow portable, lightweight application-level migration, asynchronous migration technique and twin method hierarchy instrumentation technique are proposed. This allows lightweight task migration from mobile device to cloud nodes, and vice versa. We implement the SOD concept as a middleware in a mobile cloud environment to allow transparent execution migration of Java programs. It has shown that SOD migration cost is pretty low, comparing to several existing migration mechanisms. We also conduct experiments with mobile devices to demonstrate the elasticity of SOD, in which server-side heavyweight processes can run adaptively on mobile devices to use the unique resources in the devices. On the other hand, mobile devices can seamlessly offload tasks to the cloud nodes to use the cloud resources. In addition, the system has incorporated a restorable communication layer, and this allows parallel programs to communicate properly with SOD migration. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Rousing applications of robot teams abound over the past three decades, but ferocious demands for viable systems to coordinate teams of mobile robots in dynamic environments still linger on. To meet this challenge, this project proposes a performance optimisation system for mobile robots to make the team performance more reliable and efficient in dynamic environments. A wide range of applications will benefit from the system, such as logistics, military, and disaster rescue. The performance optimisation system comprises three main modules: (1) a task allocation module to assign tasks to robots, (2) a motion planning module to navigate robots, and (3) a graphical simulation module to visualise robot operations and to validate the methodologies of performance optimisation. The task allocation module features a closed-loop bid adjustment mechanism for auctioning tasks to capable robots. Unlike most traditional open-looped methods, each of the robots evaluates its own performance after completing a task as feedback correction to improve its future bid prices of similar tasks. Moreover, a series of adjustments are weighed and averaged to damp out drastic deviations due to operational uncertainties. As such, the accuracy of bid prices is improved, and tasks are more likely allocated to suitable robots that are expected to perform better by offering more reliable bids. The motion planning module is bio-inspired intelligent, characterised by detection of imminent neighbours and design flexibility of virtual forces to enhance the responsiveness of robot motions. Firstly, while similar methods unnecessarily entail each robot to consider all the neighbours, the detection of imminent neighbours instead enables each robot to mimic creatures to identify and only consider imminent neighbours which pose collision dangers. Hence, redundant computations are reduced and undesirable robot movements eliminated. Secondly, to imitate the responsive motion behaviours of creatures, a virtual force method is adopted. It composes virtual attractive forces that drive the robots towards their targets and, simultaneously, exerts virtual repulsive forces to steer the robots away from one another. To enhance the design flexibility of the virtual forces, a twosection function and, more significantly, a spline-based method are proposed. The shapes of force curves can be flexibly designed and adjusted to generate smooth forces with desirable magnitudes. Accordingly, robot motions are streamlined and likelihood of robot collisions reduced. The graphical simulation module simulates and visualises robot team operations, and validates the proposed methodologies. It effectively emulates the operational scenarios and enables engineers to tackle downstream problems earlier in the design cycle. Furthermore, time and costs of robotic system development in the simulation module are considerably cut, compared with a physical counterpart. The performance optimisation system is indeed viable in improving the operational safety and efficiency of robot teams in dynamic environments. It has substantially pushed the frontiers of this field, and may be adapted as an intelligent control software system for practical operations of physical robot teams to benefit various applications. / HKU 3 Minute Thesis Award, 1st Runner-up (2012) / published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy