Democracy development techniques such as international election monitoring have increasingly become commonplace. Monitors are sent to far off locations to scrutinize the electoral processes and determine whether or not they have met the free and fair standards as established by their mandates. The term free and fair however, has become a catchphrase amongst many of those involved in the election monitoring and democracy development fields. The phrase is often interpreted loosely and is rarely clearly defined. Despite the recognition of the terms often differing interpretations, it remains a commonly used standard. The 2005 Ethiopian Elections demonstrate that free and fair, when interpreted differently by international electoral observers, can have consequential results. <p>The thesis provides a political analysis of the Carter Centers and European Unions international election monitoring final reports of the 2005 Ethiopian elections. Following the 2005 Ethiopian elections the Carter Centers and the European Unions electoral observation reports became highly politicized. In the post election period, the two organizations came to different conclusions in regards to the validity of the electoral process. At the core of these differences were the organizations differing conceptions of what constitutes free and fair electoral practices. In the post election period the European Unions and Carter Centers reports have been pitted against one and other as those concerned with the election results seek to make sense of the reports. <p>This thesis is significant because it asks relevant questions about the consequences of differing understandings of free and fair. The thesis seeks to provide insight into international election monitoring and provide recommendations to improve the process.

The report is focused on the implementation of a data acquisition system that will be used for measuring different parameters which are needed in solar panel behavior analysis. To accomplish the DAQ system a DAQ board has been designed and implemented. This DAQ board acquires measured climatic parameters that affect the PV module behavior and voltage and current of a PV module. The DAQ board may take measurements of multiple analog and digital signals that come from various sensors including solar radiation, temperature, wind sensors and other measurement devices. The DAQ board may also output analog signals for controlling other devices. The DAQ board is the basic part of the DAQ system and several of them can be connected via a single communication bus (RS485). A unique slave ID can be assigned to each DAQ board on the communication bus, which allows the control of all boards via a GUI application installed on a master computer. Therefore, the DAQ system can be used for monitoring a PV module installation as well as logging the measured data in a data storage server. This report outlines the details of the DAQ system design which are helpful in utilizing or upgrading this system. These details also include programming of DAQ board and implementation of MODBUS communication protocol within the DAQ system.

Run-time verification is a technique to reason about a program correctness. Given a set of desirable properties and a program trace from the inspected program as an input, the monitor module verifies that properties hold on this trace. As this process is taking place at a run time, one of the major drawbacks of run-time verification is the execution overhead caused by a monitoring activity. In this thesis, we intend to minimize this overhead by presenting a collection of parallel verification algorithms. The algorithms verify properties correctness in a parallel fashion, decreasing the verification time by dispersion of computationally intensive calculations over multiple cores (first level of parallelism). We designed the algorithms with the intention to exploit a data-level parallelism, thus specifically suitable to run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), although can be utilized on multi-core platforms as well. Running the inspected program and the monitor module on separate platforms (second level of parallelism) results in several advantages: minimization of interference between the monitor and the program, faster processing for non-trivial computations, and even significant reduction in power consumption (when the monitor is running on GPU). This work also aims to provide a solution to automated run-time verification of C programs by implementing the aforementioned set of algorithms in the monitoring tool called GPU-based online and offline Monitoring Framework (GooMF). The ultimate goal of GooMF is to supply developers with an easy-to-use and flexible verification API that requires minimal knowledge of formal languages and techniques.

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Recently, the importance of quantifying the success of stream/river restoration projects has become a priority in restoration. The absence of ecological monitoring of stream restoration has been made very evident, resulting in the questioning of the viability of restoration activities that have taken place, the ecological approaches used and of restoration as a field of study as a whole. Priority has been set towards illustrating what a successfully restored stream should consist of with development of conceptual frameworks. My study builds upon that concept, by drawing a methodological framework that illustrates how successful stream restoration projects should be quantified using a stream restoration monitoring protocol; asking the question whether a stream restoration monitoring protocol can be created and whether it can appropriately quantify the success of restored stream reaches; further, what assessment technique(s) are best suited for monitoring; ecological, geomorphic or a hybrid approach. In Waterloo, Ontario 29 restored test stream reaches were assessed using benthic macroinvertebrates. Benthos community composition was described using Family Richness, Simpson’s Diversity, % EPT, and % Chironomidae. The same reaches were also assessed using a geomorphic assessment technique I designed for this study, which focused on channel stability measures and substrate type as habitat. The methodology was then used to develop information on disturbed (n=7) and natural (n=5) reference reaches in Waterloo. The reference condition approach was used to quantify the relative placement of the restored test streams to reference condition. The ecological assessment technique was best able to quantify the success of a restored reach, by showing linear relationships between benthic metrics in a PCA analysis (0.657). The geomorphic approach, as analyzed by a Non-metric multidimensional scaling test did not consistently evaluate or significantly distinguish between restored reaches and reference conditions, shown by a stress of 25.31. However, a canonical correspondence analysis showed that there are some relationships, although weak, between the ecological approach and geomorphic approach (0.696; p=0.03). This study showed that it is possible to quantify the success or lack of success of restored stream reaches and it is recommended that a hybrid approach be used when monitoring for stream restoration success.

Rolling-element bearings are widely used in various mechanical and electrical applications. Accordingly, a reliable bearing health condition monitoring system is very useful in industries to detect incipient defects in bearings, so as to prevent machinery performance degradation and malfunction. Although several techniques have been reported in the literature for bearing fault detection and diagnosis, it is still challenging to implement a bearing condition monitoring system for real-world industrial applications because of the complexity of bearing structures and noisy operating conditions. The objective of this thesis is to develop a novel intelligent system for more reliable bearing fault diagnostics. This system involves two sequential processes: feature extraction and decision-making. The proposed strategy is to develop advanced and robust techniques at each processing stage so as to improve the reliability of bearing condition monitoring. First, a novel wavelet spectrum analysis technique is proposed for the representative feature extraction. This technique applies the wavelet transform to demodulate the resonance signatures that are related to bearing health conditions. A weighted Shannon function is proposed to synthesize the wavelet coefficient functions to enhance feature characteristics. The viability of this technique is verified by experimental tests corresponding to various bearing health conditions. Secondly, an enhanced diagnostic scheme is developed for automatic decision-making. This scheme consists of modules of classification and prediction: a novel neuro-fuzzy classifier is developed to effectively integrate the strengths of the selected fault detection techniques (i.e., the resulting representative features) for a more accurate assessment of bearing health conditions; a novel multi-step predictor is proposed to forecast the future states of bearing conditions, which will be used to further enhance the diagnostic reliability. The investigation results have demonstrated that the developed intelligent diagnostic system outperforms other related bearing fault diagnostic schemes.

An effective way to extract combustion parameters from a spark ignited engine is to measure the level of ionization. One way to do this is to use the spark plug as a sensor. Until now this has been achieved by applying a DC voltage over the spark gap which causes an electrical field. The electrical field together with the ionization process gives cause to an ion current which can be measured and analyzed. Previous research suggests that it would be beneficial to replace the DC voltage with an AC voltage. The focus in this thesis is on the hardware and how to best implement an AC voltage to the existing ion sensing system. Both simulation- and hardware models will be constructed. These models will be tested and analyzed to evaluate both benefits and drawbacks of an AC ion current sensing system.

Since wireless sensor networks are energy constrained, introducing a method that facilitates the efficient use of the available energy in each node is a fundamental design issue. In this work, a mechanism to monitor the residual energy of sensor networks is proposed. The information about the residual energy of each sensor node in the network is saved in a special node called monitoring node. This information can be used as input to other applications to prolong the network lifetime. Each sensor node in the network uses the proposed prediction-based model to forecast its energy consumption rate. The model's performance is measured based on the number of energy packets sent to the monitoring node for various thresholds (prediction errors). The simulation results showed that reducing the threshold will produce more accurate projection of the residual energy of each node in the monitoring node. However, as the threshold is further decreased the number of energy packets sent to the monitoring node grows significantly. This incurs higher energy map construction cost on the network in terms of energy and bandwidth. The simulation results also showed the tradeoff between increasing the accuracy of the prediction model and reducing the cost of energy map construction.

Software monitoring and logging is one of the most important tools a software engineer has when faced with the challenge of auditing or analysing a software system. However, the difficulty in effectively monitoring a system, managing its logs and cross referencing them with source code makes software re-engineering a rigorous and complex task. This thesis aims to address this issue by providing a framework that enables pattern matching between a software log and an event pattern expression that is based on a monitoring policy. The framework consists of parsers and annotators that facilitates transformation of a monitoring policy into a Petri Net as well as source code annotation for gathering data through logged events. It further expands upon this work by proposing an adaptive logging framework that will greatly improve the quality of log management by autonomically adjusting the amount of information logged based on the application’s operational environment. Finally, a prototype system of the policy driven monitoring framework is implemented and tested with applications of different scales as a proof of concept for the proposed framework.

Recently, the importance of quantifying the success of stream/river restoration projects has become a priority in restoration. The absence of ecological monitoring of stream restoration has been made very evident, resulting in the questioning of the viability of restoration activities that have taken place, the ecological approaches used and of restoration as a field of study as a whole. Priority has been set towards illustrating what a successfully restored stream should consist of with development of conceptual frameworks. My study builds upon that concept, by drawing a methodological framework that illustrates how successful stream restoration projects should be quantified using a stream restoration monitoring protocol; asking the question whether a stream restoration monitoring protocol can be created and whether it can appropriately quantify the success of restored stream reaches; further, what assessment technique(s) are best suited for monitoring; ecological, geomorphic or a hybrid approach. In Waterloo, Ontario 29 restored test stream reaches were assessed using benthic macroinvertebrates. Benthos community composition was described using Family Richness, Simpson’s Diversity, % EPT, and % Chironomidae. The same reaches were also assessed using a geomorphic assessment technique I designed for this study, which focused on channel stability measures and substrate type as habitat. The methodology was then used to develop information on disturbed (n=7) and natural (n=5) reference reaches in Waterloo. The reference condition approach was used to quantify the relative placement of the restored test streams to reference condition. The ecological assessment technique was best able to quantify the success of a restored reach, by showing linear relationships between benthic metrics in a PCA analysis (0.657). The geomorphic approach, as analyzed by a Non-metric multidimensional scaling test did not consistently evaluate or significantly distinguish between restored reaches and reference conditions, shown by a stress of 25.31. However, a canonical correspondence analysis showed that there are some relationships, although weak, between the ecological approach and geomorphic approach (0.696; p=0.03). This study showed that it is possible to quantify the success or lack of success of restored stream reaches and it is recommended that a hybrid approach be used when monitoring for stream restoration success.