Pollination, one of our ecosystem services, is considered to be in critical condition due to a worldwide reduction in pollinators and their biodiversity. As the agricultural landscape becomes more and more intense, the pollinators lose important food and living resources.     In temperate ecosystems, bumblebees (Bombus spp) are an important group of wild pollinators, and as with pollinators in general, they are declining in both abundance and richness, in Sweden as well as other countries.      The purpose of this study was to see if bumblebee species number of a location is linked to the location’s number of flowering angiosperm species in northwestern Scania when examining eight locations, and to see if gene flow existed between four chosen locations.        The result of this study suggests that it is not possible to tell from the flowering angiosperm species how many bumblebee species that will be abundant, but that it might be possible to tell the number of bumblebee individuals. With the number of bumblebee species, the abundant Fabaceae species was more important than the total number of flowering angiosperms of the location. The number of abundant Fabaceae species was strongly correlated to the bumblebee diversity index of the locations, indicating that it is a group of flowers closely linked to bumblebees.      To see if gene flow occurred between the chosen locations, mtDNA sequences were compared in neighbor joining trees. The result showed that though some tendencies of isolation existed, gene flow seemed to occur in general between the locations in that fragmented and human dominated landscape of northwestern Scania.

The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is one of the most commonly used range image processing methods. However, slow operational speeds and high input band-widths limit the use of ICP in high-speed real-time applications. This thesis presents and examines a novel hardware implementation of a high-speed ICP object tracking system that uses stereo vision disparities as input. Although software ICP trackers already exist, this innovative hardware tracker utilizes the efficiencies of custom hardware processing, thus enabling faster high-speed real-time tracking. A custom hardware design has been implemented in an FPGA to handle the inherent bottlenecks that result from the large input and processing band-widths of the range data. The hardware ICP design consists of four stages: Pre-filter, Transform, Nearest Neighbor, and Transform Recovery. This custom hardware has been implemented and tested on various objects, using both software simulation and hardware tests. Results indicate that the tracker is able to successfully track free-form objects at over 200 frames-per-second along arbitrary paths. Tracking errors are low, in spite of substantial noisy stereo input. The tracker is able to track stationary paths within 0.42mm and 1.42degs, linear paths within 1.57mm and 2.80degs, and rotational paths within 0.39degs axis error. With further degraded data by occlusion, the tracker is able to handle 60% occlusion before a slow decline in performance. The high-speed hardware implementation (that uses 16 parallel nearest neighbor circuits), is more then five times faster than the software K-D tree implementation. This tracker has been designed as the hardware component of ‘FastTrack’, a high frame rate, stereo vision tracking system, that will provide a known object’s pose in real-time at 200 frames per second. This hardware ICP tracker is compact, lightweight, has low power requirements, and is integratable with the stereo sensor and stereo extraction components of the FastTrack’ system on a single FPGA platform. High-speed object tracking is useful for many innovative applications, including advanced spaced-based robotics. Because of this project’s success, the ‘FastTrack’ system will be able to aid in performing in-orbit, automated, remote satellite recovery for maintenance. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2008-07-15 22:50:30.369

No description available.

Through the years, there has been a great deal of archaeological research focused on the earliest farming cultures of Europe (i.e. Early Neolithic). However, little effort has been expended to uncover the type and nature of daily activities performed within Early Neolithic dwellings, particularly in the Balkans. This thesis conducts a spatial analysis of the Early Neolithic pit house levels of the Foeni-Salaş site in southeast Romania, in the northern half of the Balkans, to determine the kinds and locations of activities that occurred in these pit houses. Characteristic Early Neolithic dwellings in the northern Balkans are pit houses. The data are analyzed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology in an attempt to identify non-random patterns that will indicate how the pit house inhabitants used their space. Both visual and statistical (Nearest Neighbor) techniques are used to identify spatial patterns. Spreadsheet data are incorporated into the map database in order to compare and contrast the results from the two techniques of analysis. Map data provides precise artefact locations, while spreadsheet data yield more generalized quad centroid information. Unlike the mapped data, the spreadsheet data also included artefacts recovered in sieves. Utilizing both data types gave a more complexand fuller understanding of how space was used at Foeni-Salaş. The results show that different types of activity areas are present within each of the pit houses. Comparison of interior to exterior artifact distributions demonstrates that most activities take place within pit house. Some of the activities present include weaving, food preparation, butchering, hide processing, pottery making, ritual, and other activities related to the running of households. It was found that these activities are placed in specific locations relative to features within the pit house and the physical structure of the pit house itself. This research adds to the growing body of archaeological research that implements GIS to answer questions and solve problems related to the spatial dimension of human behaviour.

Through the years, there has been a great deal of archaeological research focused on the earliest farming cultures of Europe (i.e. Early Neolithic). However, little effort has been expended to uncover the type and nature of daily activities performed within Early Neolithic dwellings, particularly in the Balkans. This thesis conducts a spatial analysis of the Early Neolithic pit house levels of the Foeni-Salaş site in southeast Romania, in the northern half of the Balkans, to determine the kinds and locations of activities that occurred in these pit houses. Characteristic Early Neolithic dwellings in the northern Balkans are pit houses. The data are analyzed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology in an attempt to identify non-random patterns that will indicate how the pit house inhabitants used their space. Both visual and statistical (Nearest Neighbor) techniques are used to identify spatial patterns. Spreadsheet data are incorporated into the map database in order to compare and contrast the results from the two techniques of analysis. Map data provides precise artefact locations, while spreadsheet data yield more generalized quad centroid information. Unlike the mapped data, the spreadsheet data also included artefacts recovered in sieves. Utilizing both data types gave a more complexand fuller understanding of how space was used at Foeni-Salaş. The results show that different types of activity areas are present within each of the pit houses. Comparison of interior to exterior artifact distributions demonstrates that most activities take place within pit house. Some of the activities present include weaving, food preparation, butchering, hide processing, pottery making, ritual, and other activities related to the running of households. It was found that these activities are placed in specific locations relative to features within the pit house and the physical structure of the pit house itself. This research adds to the growing body of archaeological research that implements GIS to answer questions and solve problems related to the spatial dimension of human behaviour.

The work described in this thesis contributes to the development of a system to evaluate sailing performance. This work was motivated by the lack of tools available to evaluate sailing performance. The goal of the work presented is to detect and classify the turns of a sailing yacht. Data was collected using a BlackBerry PlayBook affixed to a J/24 sailing yacht. This data was manually annotated with three types of turn: tack, gybe, and mark rounding. This manually annotated data was used to train classification methods. Classification methods tested were multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) of two sizes in various committees and nearest- neighbour search. Pre-processing algorithms tested were Kalman filtering, categorization using quantiles, and residual normalization. The best solution was found to be an averaged answer committee of small MLPs, with Kalman filtering and residual normalization performed on the input as pre-processing.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Ένα πράγμα που θέτει τους στατιστικολόγους πέρα από άλλους επιστήμονες είναι σχετική άγνοια του κοινού γενικά σχετικά με το τι είναι στην πραγματικότητα το πεδίο της στατιστικής. Ο κόσμος έχει μια μικρή γενική ιδέα του τι είναι η χημεία ή η βιολογία — αλλά τι είναι αυτό ακριβώς που κάνουν οι στατιστικολόγοι; Μία απάντηση στο ερώτημα αυτό έχει ως εξής: στατιστική είναι η επιστήμη που ασχολείται με τη συλλογή, περιληπτική παρουσίαση της πληροφορίας, παρουσίαση και ερμηνεία των δεδομένων. Τα δεδομένα είναι το κλειδί, φυσικά — τα πράγματα από τα οποία εμείς αποκτούμε γνώσεις και βγάζουμε αποφάσεις. Ένας πίνακας δεδομένων παρουσιάζει μια συλλογή έγκυρων δεδομένων, αλλά είναι σαφές ότι είναι εντελώς ανεπαρκής για την σύνοψη ή την ερμηνεία τους.Το πρόβλημα είναι ότι δεν έγιναν παραδοχές σχετικά με τη διαδικασία που δημιούργησε αυτά τα δεδομένα (πιο απλά, η ανάλυση είναι καθαρά μη παραμετρική, υπό την έννοια ότι δεν επιβάλλεται καμία τυπική δομή για τα δεδομένα). Επομένως, καμία πραγματική περίληψη ή σύνοψη δεν είναι δυνατή. Η κλασική προσέγγιση σε αυτή τη δυσκολία είναι να υποθέσουμε ένα παραμετρικό μοντέλο για την υποκείμενη διαδικασία, καθορίζοντας μια συγκεκριμένη φόρμα για την υποκείμενη πυκνότητα. Στη συνέχεια, μπορούν να υπολογιστούν διάφορα στατιστικά στοιχεία και μπορούν να παρουσιαστούν μέσω μιας προσαρμοσμένης πυκνότητας.Δυστυχώς, η ισχύς της παραμετρικής μοντελοποίησης είναι επίσης η αδυναμία της. Συνδέοντας ένα συγκεκριμένο μοντέλο, μπορούμε να έχουμε μεγάλα οφέλη, αλλά μόνο εάν το πρότυπο θεωρείται ότι ισχύει (τουλάχιστον κατά προσέγγιση). Εάν το υποτιθέμενο μοντέλο δεν είναι σωστό, οι αποφάσεις που θα αντλήσουμε από αυτό μπορεί να είναι χειρότερες από άχρηστες, οδηγώντας μας σε παραπλανητικές ερμηνείες των δεδομένων. / A thing that places the statisticians beyond other scientists is relative ignorance of public as generally speaking with regard to what it is in reality the field of statistics. The world does have a small general idea what is chemistry or biology - but what is precisely that statisticians do? An answer in this question has as follows: statistics is the science that deals with the collection, general presentation of information, presentation and interpretation of data. The data are the key, from which we acquire knowledge and make decisions. A table of data presents a collection of valid data, but it is obvious that it is completely insufficient for their synopsis or their interpretation. The problem is that no assumptions have been made about the process that created these data (more simply, the analysis is no parametric, under the significance that is no formal structure is imposed on the data). Consequently, no real summary or synopsis is possible. The classical approach in this difficulty is to assume a parametric model for the underlying process, determining a concrete form for the underlying density. Afterwards, can be calculated various statistical elements and a fitted density can manifest itself. The power of parametric modelling is also its weakness. By linking inference to a specific model, we can have big profits, but only if the model is true. If the assumed model is not correct, the decisions that we will draw from this can be worse than useless, leading us to misleading interpretations of data.

abstract: K-Nearest-Neighbors (KNN) search is a fundamental problem in many application domains such as database and data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, pattern recognition and plagiarism detection. Locality sensitive hash (LSH) is so far the most practical approximate KNN search algorithm for high dimensional data. Algorithms such as Multi-Probe LSH and LSH-Forest improve upon the basic LSH algorithm by varying hash bucket size dynamically at query time, so these two algorithms can answer different KNN queries adaptively. However, these two algorithms need a data access post-processing step after candidates' collection in order to get the final answer to the KNN query. In this thesis, Multi-Probe LSH with data access post-processing (Multi-Probe LSH with DAPP) algorithm and LSH-Forest with data access post-processing (LSH-Forest with DAPP) algorithm are improved by replacing the costly data access post-processing (DAPP) step with a much faster histogram-based post-processing (HBPP). Two HBPP algorithms: LSH-Forest with HBPP and Multi- Probe LSH with HBPP are presented in this thesis, both of them achieve the three goals for KNN search in large scale high dimensional data set: high search quality, high time efficiency, high space efficiency. None of the previous KNN algorithms can achieve all three goals. More specifically, it is shown that HBPP algorithms can always achieve high search quality (as good as LSH-Forest with DAPP and Multi-Probe LSH with DAPP) with much less time cost (one to several orders of magnitude speedup) and same memory usage. It is also shown that with almost same time cost and memory usage, HBPP algorithms can always achieve better search quality than LSH-Forest with random pick (LSH-Forest with RP) and Multi-Probe LSH with random pick (Multi-Probe LSH with RP). Moreover, to achieve a very high search quality, Multi-Probe with HBPP is always a better choice than LSH-Forest with HBPP, regardless of the distribution, size and dimension number of the data set. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

In this thesis, the problem of online adaptive hashing for fast similarity search is studied. Similarity search is a central problem in many computer vision applications. The ever-growing size of available data collections and the increasing usage of high-dimensional representations in describing data have increased the computational cost of performing similarity search, requiring search strategies that can explore such collections in an efficient and effective manner. One promising family of approaches is based on hashing, in which the goal is to map the data into the Hamming space where fast search mechanisms exist, while preserving the original neighborhood structure of the data. We first present a novel online hashing algorithm in which the hash mapping is updated in an iterative manner with streaming data. Being online, our method is amenable to variations of the data. Moreover, our formulation is orders of magnitude faster to train than state-of-the-art hashing solutions. Secondly, we propose an online supervised hashing framework in which the goal is to map data associated with similar labels to nearby binary representations. For this purpose, we utilize Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOCs) and consider an online boosting formulation in learning the hash mapping. Our formulation does not require any prior assumptions on the label space and is well-suited for expanding datasets that have new label inclusions. We also introduce a flexible framework that allows us to reduce hash table entry updates. This is critical, especially when frequent updates may occur as the hash table grows larger and larger. Thirdly, we propose a novel mutual information measure to efficiently infer the quality of a hash mapping and retrieval performance. This measure has lower complexity than standard retrieval metrics. With this measure, we first address a key challenge in online hashing that has often been ignored: the binary representations of the data must be recomputed to keep pace with updates to the hash mapping. Based on our novel mutual information measure, we propose an efficient quality measure for hash functions, and use it to determine when to update the hash table. Next, we show that this mutual information criterion can be used as an objective in learning hash functions, using gradient-based optimization. Experiments on image retrieval benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our formulation, both in reducing hash table recomputations and in learning high-quality hash functions.