Une des priorités des gouvernements chiliens entre 1990 et 2005 était la réduction du déficit de logements. Les progrès ont été significatifs sur le plan quantitatif mais pas sur le qualitatif. Dans ce contexte, la première administration Bachelet a mis en place la Nouvelle politique du logement et d’amélioration de la qualité et l'intégration sociale, qui comprend le premier programme de réhabilitation des quartiers vulnérables, Quiero mi Barrio (PQMB). Une première étape d’étude reconstruit la généalogie et formulation du PQMB et une deuxième examine le développement, notamment à partir d’une étude de cas de deux quartiers. Les résultats indiquent qu’une intégration sociale à l’intérieur des territoires a primé sur une intégration sociale urbaine des quartiers par rapport au reste de la ville. PQMB apparaît comme un programme participatif d’amélioration d’espaces publiques, résultat qui renferme un processus dialectique provenant des décisions et des pratiques de tous les acteurs impliqués. PQMB a toutefois réussi à changer le référentiel des politiques de logement, de la satisfaction de la quantité à la considération de standards de qualité, ainsi qu’à introduire la participation comme un processus indispensable. Plutôt qu’une approche territoriale globale on observe une territorialisation des dépenses publiques, n’étant jamais suffisante pour répondre à la complexité du problème. Nous identifions ainsi trois impératifs pour la réhabilitation chilienne des quartiers défavorisés : le développement d’un système d’appui institutionnel collaboratif, riche et varié, un véritable travail interdisciplinaire, et une pratique d’échanges permanents entre chercheurs et praticiens. / One of the Chilean governments priorities between 1990 and 2005 was the reduction of the housing deficit. Progress has been significant quantitatively, but not qualitatively. In this context, the first Bachelet administration has implemented New housing policy of quality improvement and social integration, which includes the first rehabilitation program for distressed neighborhoods, Quiero mi Barrio (PQMB). A first research stage reconstructs the genealogy and formulation of the PQMB, and a second examines its development, in particular through a case study of two neighborhoods. The results show that a social integration within the territories took precedence over an urban social integration of the neighborhoods in relation to the rest of the city. PQMB appears as a participatory program to improve public spaces, which contains a dialectical process coming from the decisions and practices of all actors involved. However, PQMB has achieved a paradigm shift from quantity to quality in terms of Chilean housing policies, as well as the introduction of citizen participation as an indispensable process. Rather than a comprehensive territorial approach, a territorialization of public spending is observed, which is nonetheless never sufficient to tackle the complexity of the problem. We thus identify three imperatives for the Chilean rehabilitation of disadvantaged neighborhoods: the development of a collaborative institutional support system, rich and varied; a real interdisciplinary work; and a permanent exchange between researchers and practitioners. / Una de las prioridades de los gobiernos chilenos entre 1990 y 2005 fue la reducción del déficit habitacional. Los progresos han sido significativos en el plano cuantitativo, pero no así en el cualitativo. En este contexto, la primera administración de Bachelet implementó la Nueva Política Habitacional de Mejoramiento de la Calidad y la Integración Social, que incluye el primer programa de recuperación de barrios vulnerables, Quiero mi Barrio (PQMB). Una primera etapa de investigación reconstruye la genealogía y formulación del PQMB, y una segunda examina su desarrollo, particularmente a partir de un estudio de caso de dos barrios. Los resultados indican que una integración social al interior de los territorios primó por sobre una integración social urbana de los barrios respecto al resto de la ciudad. El PQMB aparece como un programa participativo de mejoramiento de espacios públicos, resultado que encierra un proceso dialéctico derivado de las decisiones y prácticas de todos los actores implicados. No obstante, el PQMB logró cambiar el referencial de las políticas habitacionales, de la satisfacción de la cantidad a la consideración de estándares de calidad, así como también introducir la participación como un proceso indispensable. En lugar de un enfoque territorial integral, se observa una territorialización del gasto público que nunca es suficiente para satisfacer la complejidad del problema. La tesis identifica tres imperativos para la recuperación de barrios vulnerables en Chile: el desarrollo de un sistema de apoyo institucional y de colaboración, rico y variado, un auténtico trabajo interdisciplinario, y una práctica de intercambio permanente entre investigadores y profesionales ejecutores.

近年來影城結合商場、娛樂及餐飲，如雨後春筍般出現，建商售屋亦常以影城為吸睛廣告，對消費者而言，影城對周邊住宅價格影響是否存有關聯性係其購屋選擇關心條件之一，然而現今影城的類型大不相同，且觀察到影城大多座落於商圈內或是與百貨商場結合。因此，本研究將影城、商圈與住宅價格的相關程度做交叉分析，以初步了解其關聯程度，並應用集群分析以控制異質樣本，使得形成同質性的房屋屬性來看影城效果，再透過複迴歸模型分析，探討不同類型的影城、商圈與周邊住宅價格之影響關係。 透過複迴歸模型實證結果得知，影城對台北市周邊住宅價格是有影響的，以總價1,000萬元房屋，平均而言，正向的價差介於41萬元至310萬元之間，負向的價差則介於30萬元至271萬元之間，並且正向的價差高於負向的價差。進一步將影城依經營模式及服務方式分類進行實證，採連鎖經營模式的影城周邊房價價差約為40萬元，而提供複合式服務或僅提供單一式服務的影城，對房價的影響差別不大。該結果可提供消費者在評估購買房屋時之參考，亦可作為開發商與銷售業者在預售屋訂價策略及廣告遵循原則。 此外，由於消費型態的改變，消費者習慣將看電影結合其他休閒活動，這些由百貨公司以及電影院異業結盟的商圈更得消費者青睞，影城進駐與商圈發展之關係相輔相成，進而影響新北市周邊住宅價格，以總價1,000萬元房屋，平均來說，影城進駐商圈後能提升房價139萬元。 / These years combination-area of cinemas, malls, recreation and catering are springing up as well as being the eye-catching advertisement of building-contractors. In terms of house-buyers, the correlation between cinemas and the neighborhood housing price is one of the conditions they care. Nevertheless, with the variety of the cineplex-cinema currently and mostly locate in business districts and department stores, our study make a cross analysis between cineplex, cinema, business districts with residential price for their correlation. With cluster analysis to control the heterogeneous samples and to evaluate the price-effect of cineplex-cinemas under the homogeneous housing. Furthermore to multiple regression analyze cinema stationed-in commercial-district and their neighborhood housing price. Our study confirmed the cineplex-cinemas are influential to the Taipei City surrounding-area residential price. For the ten million house, averagely the positive-impact is between four hundred ten thousand to 3.1 million. Negative-impact is between three hundred thousand to 2.71 million. Besides, the housing price different positive effect is higher than the negative one. Further to verify type-mode cinemas: the price difference in neighborhood-area is four hundred thousand with franchise management type-mode. However, there is no price difference with complex and single-service type-mode. Housing-buyer can take the result as consideration during purchasing houses as well as real estate developers and salesman in pricing strategy and advertisement principles of pre-sale houses. Additionally, with the change of consumption patterns, consumers get use to watch movies together with other recreation. Thus commercial-districts combining with department stores and cinemas are more favored. The cinema stationed-in and commercial-district development are complemented each other, therefore to affect the neighborhood housing price in New Taipei City. For the ten million house, averagely, the positive price-different effect is one million and three hundred nighty thousand after the cinema stationed-in.

The goal of this study was to develop Multinomial Logit models for the mode choice behavior of immigrants, with key focuses on neighborhood effects and behavioral assimilation. The first aspect shows the relationship between social network ties and immigrants’ chosen mode of transportation, while the second aspect explores the gradual changes toward alternative mode usage with regard to immigrants’ migrating period in the United States (US). Mode choice models were developed for work, shopping, social, recreational, and other trip purposes to evaluate the impacts of various land use patterns, neighborhood typology, socioeconomic-demographic and immigrant related attributes on individuals’ travel behavior. Estimated coefficients of mode choice determinants were compared between each alternative mode (i.e., high-occupancy vehicle, public transit, and non-motorized transport) with single-occupant vehicles. The model results revealed the significant influence of neighborhood and land use variables on the usage of alternative modes among immigrants. Incorporating these indicators into the demand forecasting process will provide a better understanding of the diverse travel patterns for the unique composition of population groups in Florida.

The 4-genus of a knot in S3 is an important measure of complexity, related to the unknotting number. A fundamental result used to study the 4-genus and related invariants of homology classes is the Thom conjecture, proved by Kronheimer-Mrowka, and its symplectic extension due to Ozsv´ath-Szab´o, which say that closed symplectic surfaces minimize genus. In this thesis, we prove a relative version of the symplectic capping theorem. More precisely, suppose (X, ω) is a symplectic 4-manifold with contact type bounday ∂X and Σ is a symplectic surface in X such that ∂Σ is a transverse knot in ∂X. We show that there is a closed symplectic 4-manifold Y with a closed symplectic submanifold S such that the pair (X, Σ) embeds symplectically into (Y, S). This gives a proof of the relative version of Symplectic Thom Conjecture. We use this to study 4-genus of fibered knots in S3 . We also prove a relative version of the sufficiency part of Giroux’s criterion for Stein fillability, namely, we show that a fibered knot whose mondoromy is a product of positive Dehn twists bounds a symplectic surface in a Stein filling. We use this to study 4-genus of fibered knots in S3 . Using this result, we give a criterion for quasipostive fibered knots to be strongly quasipositive. Symplectic convexity disc bundles is a useful tool in constructing symplectic fillings of contact manifolds. We show the symplectic convexity of the unit disc bundle in a Hermitian holomorphic line bundle over a Riemann surface.

Les problèmes d’optimisation combinatoire sont généralement réputés NP-difficiles, donc il n’y a pas d’algorithmes efficaces pour les résoudre. Afin de trouver des solutions optimales locales ou réalisables, on utilise souvent des heuristiques ou des algorithmes approchés. Les dernières décennies ont vu naitre des méthodes approchées connues sous le nom de métaheuristiques, et qui permettent de trouver une solution approchées. Cette thèse propose de résoudre des problèmes d’optimisation déterministe et stochastique à l’aide de métaheuristiques. Nous avons particulièrement étudié la méthode de voisinage variable connue sous le nom de VNS. Nous avons choisi cet algorithme pour résoudre nos problèmes d’optimisation dans la mesure où VNS permet de trouver des solutions de bonne qualité dans un temps CPU raisonnable. Le premier problème que nous avons étudié dans le cadre de cette thèse est le problème déterministe de largeur de bande de matrices creuses. Il s’agit d’un problème combinatoire difficile, notre VNS a permis de trouver des solutions comparables à celles de la littérature en termes de qualité des résultats mais avec temps de calcul plus compétitif. Nous nous sommes intéressés dans un deuxième temps aux problèmes de réseaux mobiles appelés OFDMA-TDMA. Nous avons étudié le problème d’affectation de ressources dans ce type de réseaux, nous avons proposé deux modèles : Le premier modèle est un modèle déterministe qui permet de maximiser la bande passante du canal pour un réseau OFDMA à débit monodirectionnel appelé Uplink sous contraintes d’énergie utilisée par les utilisateurs et des contraintes d’affectation de porteuses. Pour ce problème, VNS donne de très bons résultats et des bornes de bonne qualité. Le deuxième modèle est un problème stochastique de réseaux OFDMA d’affectation de ressources multi-cellules. Pour résoudre ce problème, on utilise le problème déterministe équivalent auquel on applique la méthode VNS qui dans ce cas permet de trouver des solutions avec un saut de dualité très faible. Les problèmes d’allocation de ressources aussi bien dans les réseaux OFDMA ou dans d’autres domaines peuvent aussi être modélisés sous forme de problèmes d’optimisation bi-niveaux appelés aussi problèmes d’optimisation hiérarchique. Le dernier problème étudié dans le cadre de cette thèse porte sur les problèmes bi-niveaux stochastiques. Pour résoudre le problème lié à l’incertitude dans ce problème, nous avons utilisé l’optimisation robuste plus précisément l’approche appelée « distributionnellement robuste ». Cette approche donne de très bons résultats légèrement conservateurs notamment lorsque le nombre de variables du leader est très supérieur à celui du suiveur. Nos expérimentations ont confirmé l’efficacité de nos méthodes pour l’ensemble des problèmes étudiés. / Combinatorial optimization problems are generally NP-hard problems, so they can only rely on heuristic or approximation algorithms to find a local optimum or a feasible solution. During the last decades, more general solving techniques have been proposed, namely metaheuristics which can be applied to many types of combinatorial optimization problems. This PhD thesis proposed to solve the deterministic and stochastic optimization problems with metaheuristics. We studied especially Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) and choose this algorithm to solve our optimization problems since it is able to find satisfying approximated optimal solutions within a reasonable computation time. Our thesis starts with a relatively simple deterministic combinatorial optimization problem: Bandwidth Minimization Problem. The proposed VNS procedure offers an advantage in terms of CPU time compared to the literature. Then, we focus on resource allocation problems in OFDMA systems, and present two models. The first model aims at maximizing the total bandwidth channel capacity of an uplink OFDMA-TDMA network subject to user power and subcarrier assignment constraints while simultaneously scheduling users in time. For this problem, VNS gives tight bounds. The second model is stochastic resource allocation model for uplink wireless multi-cell OFDMA Networks. After transforming the original model into a deterministic one, the proposed VNS is applied on the deterministic model, and find near optimal solutions. Subsequently, several problems either in OFDMA systems or in many other topics in resource allocation can be modeled as hierarchy problems, e.g., bi-level optimization problems. Thus, we also study stochastic bi-level optimization problems, and use robust optimization framework to deal with uncertainty. The distributionally robust approach can obtain slight conservative solutions when the number of binary variables in the upper level is larger than the number of variables in the lower level. Our numerical results for all the problems studied in this thesis show the performance of our approaches.

The systemic model posits that informal social control directly reduces crime victimization and social networks indirectly reduce crime victimization through informal social control. While empirical testing of the systemic model advanced the theory, important analytical issues remain. First, social networks are inconsistently conceptualized and measured. Second, the conceptual relationship between social networks and informal social control remains unclear. This study addresses these issues by testing an alternative to the systemic model, including new constructs and hypotheses. The goal is to develop better indicators for the model and refine the theory, rethinking and deepening the existing theory about neighborhood effects on crime victimization. The data come from the 2002-2003 Seattle Neighborhoods and Crime Survey (N=2,200). Structural equation modeling (SEM), a multivariate statistical technique, was used to analyze these data. The SEM included five latent constructs (neighboring, neighborhood and non-neighborhood social networks, collective efficacy, and crime victimization) and six social structural variables (racially homogeneous neighborhood, resident tenure, household income, family disruption, male, and non-white ethnicity). One of my 9 hypotheses was supported; the remaining hypotheses were partly supported. The results support my argument that the systemic model is too simplistic, but the relationships among the variables are not exactly as I hypothesized. The results provide insight into the complexities of the systemic model and areas for future research.

Ce mémoire de maitrise explore l’hétérogénéité et la diversité dans le Village de Montréal. Il s’intéresse à ce quartier au-delà de ce que sa vitrine commerciale laisse voir. Ses lieux de sortie et de rencontres, tout comme ses autres commerces et ses tissus résidentiel et communautaires, ne seraient pas des blocs homogènes, mais des mosaïques qui sont investies par une multitude de personnes, de groupes et de communautés. Ceux-ci, dépendamment de leurs trajectoires et de leurs parcours, ont des perceptions et des vécus forts différents les uns des autres des mêmes lieux, d’une part, et du Village dans son ensemble, d’autre part. Sur la base d’une analyse documentaire et de six (6) entrevues menées auprès de personnes qui fréquentent les milieux communautaires et activistes LGBTQ, ce mémoire révèle les multiples stratégies et manières d’occuper l’espace urbain dans le Village, et les réseaux et les lieux où s’observe cette diversité. / This Master’s thesis explores the diversity and heterogeneity of space within Montréal’s (gay) Village. It seeks to analyze this neighborhood beyond what its ‘commercial showcase’ might reveal at first sight. The Village’s bars and clubs, as well as its shops, community organizations and sociodemographic composition, are not thought as homogeneous, but rather mosaics of multiple people, groups and communities across space. These latter, depending on their trajectories and routes, often have different perceptions and experiences of a single place or of the Village as a whole. Based on a document analysis and interviews with six (6) LGBTQ activists, this thesis reveals multiple strategies and ways to engage space, as well as the networks and spaces within Montreal’s Village where this diversity can be experienced.

This thesis addresses three interrelated challenges of disease mapping and contributes a new approach for improving visualization of disease burdens to enhance disease surveillance systems. First, it determines an appropriate threshold choice (smoothing parameter) for the adaptive kernel density estimation (KDE) in disease mapping. The results show that the appropriate threshold value depends on the characteristics of data, and bandwidth selector algorithms can be used to guide such decisions about mapping parameters. Similar approaches are recommended for map-makers who are faced with decisions about choosing threshold values for their own data. This can facilitate threshold selection. Second, the study evaluates the relative performance of the adaptive KDE and spatial empirical Bayes for disease mapping. The results reveal that while the estimated rates at the state level computed from both methods are identical, those at the zip code level are slightly different. These findings indicate that using either the adaptive KDE or spatial empirical Bayes method to map disease in urban areas may provide identical rate estimates, but caution is necessary when mapping diseases in non-urban (sparsely populated) areas. This study contributes insights on the relative performance in terms of accuracy of visual representation and associated limitations. Lastly, the study contributes a new approach for delimiting spatial units of disease risk using straightforward statistical and spatial methods and social determinants of health. The results show that the neighborhood risk map not only helps in geographically targeting where but also in tailoring interventions in those areas to those high risk populations. Moreover, when health data is limited, the neighborhood risk map alone is adequate for identifying where and which populations are at risk. These findings will benefit public health tasks of planning and targeting appropriate intervention even in areas with limited and poor-quality health data. This study not only fills the identified gaps of knowledge in disease mapping but also has a wide range of broader impacts. The findings of this study improve and enhance the use of the adaptive KDE method in health research, provide better awareness and understanding of disease mapping methods, and offer an alternative method to identify populations at risk in areas with limited health data. Overall, these findings will benefit public health practitioners and health researchers as well as enhance disease surveillance systems.

The aim of this master’s thesis is to describe the Robotic Vision for Bin Picking usage and creating an application for the realization of this task. This application will be able to distinguish several objects based on data from a camera with deep perception and should find the location of object, recognize it and determine its location and orientation. Bin Picking is one of the biggest challenges in today's automation.

This thesis deals with a path planning using cellular automata algorithms in a rectangular grid environment. Theoretical part starts with an overview of commonly used approaches for path planning and later on focuses on existing cellular automata solutions and capabilities in detail. Implemented cellular automata algorithms and the commonly used path planning algorithms are together with a map generator described in the practical part. Conclusion of this thesis contains results completed in a special application.