In recent years, the network concept has become a central component of administrative scholarship. One cannot ignore the increased use of networks as both an explicit policy choice and a condition of public funding. This trend suggests that the network concept now represents an approach to governance. Regardless, active participation in these multi-organizational, multi-governmental, and multi-sectoral relationships has outpaced empirical description and theoretical explanation. Making the important case that network management has become a critical activity in public administration, researchers have neglected the relationship between front-line participatory behavior and the use of the network approach. As a result, the vocabulary and the imagery needed to describe and theorize about the specific front-line participatory behaviors that accompany the use of the network approach does not exist. Due to the limitations of past research, there is little understanding of the front-line participatory behaviors that could help make this happen. This study refers to these types of behaviors as network behaviors. Relying on surveys and elite interviews with participants from thirteen social welfare networks throughout the state of Virginia, this study addresses two primary research questions: What are the front-line participatory behaviors that accompany the use of the network approach? And, how do these behaviors differ along with variations in the network approach? Through examining 14 hypotheses, the study relates a framework of four degrees (variations) of the network approach (cooperation, coordination, consolidation, and collaboration) to three categories of behavior (knowledge management, communicative behavior, and commitment/identity). The findings support the underlying rationale for this study that variations in the network approach may shape front-line participatory behavior differently, and vice versa. Ultimately, by exploring this relationship and integrating the literature on networks with the literature on front-line work, this study may serve as the foundation for future efforts to establish a theory or rationale for developing and choosing among variations in the network approach. / Ph. D.

The use of digitized information is rapidly gaining acceptance in bio-medical applications. Video compression plays an important role in the archiving and transmission of different digital diagnostic modalities. The present scheme of video compression for low bit-rate networks is not suitable for medical video sequences. The instability is the result of block artifacts resulting from the block based DCT coefficient quantization. The possibility of applying deformable motion estimation techniques to make the video compression standard (H.263) more adaptable for bio-medial applications was studied in detail. The study on the network characteristics and the behavior of various congestion control mechanisms was used to analyze the complete characteristics of existing low bit rate video compression algorithms. The study was conducted in three phases. The first phase involved the implementation and study of the present H.263 compression standard and its limitations. The second phase dealt with the analysis of an external force for active contours which was used to obtain estimates for deformable objects. The external force, which is termed Gradient Vector Flow (GVF), was computed as a diffusion of the gradient vectors associated with a gray-level or binary edge map derived from the image. The mathematical aspect of a multi-scale framework based on a medial representation for the segmentation and shape characterization of anatomical objects in medical imagery was derived in detail. The medial representations were based on a hierarchical representation of linked figural models such as protrusions, indentations, neighboring figures and included figures--which represented solid regions and their boundaries. The third phase dealt with the vital parameters for effective video streaming over the internet in the bottleneck bandwidth, which gives the upper limit for the speed of data delivery from one end point to the other in a network. If a codec attempts to send data beyond this limit, all packets above the limit will be lost. On the other hand, sending under this limit will clearly result in suboptimal video quality. During this phase the packet-drop-rate (PDR) performance of TCP(1/2) was investigated in conjunction with a few representative TCP-friendly congestion control protocols (CCP). The CCPs were TCP(1/256), SQRT(1/256) and TFRC (256), with and without self clocking. The CCPs were studied when subjected to an abrupt reduction in the available bandwidth. Additionally, the investigation studied the effect on the drop rates of TCP-Compatible algorithms by changing the queuing scheme from Random Early Detection (RED) to DropTail.

In recent years, New Media such as internet not only impacted old media but also widely used by citizenship. For example, Thousands of internet users set up a voluntary "Morakot Typhoon disaster network center" raised supplies and reported the latest disaster in remote mountainous areas in 2009. January 2011 People in Egypt also used a network of new media to raise citizen to demonstrate their anger of government, they finally attracted international attention. These phenomena have demonstrated new media's power and influence. ¡@¡@This study explores the factors and cognitive attitudes of citizens when they through a network use new media to participate in public affairs. The factors were chosen from literatures and corresponded to PAM (integrated public affair management framework). Five decision-making variables (cues) of this study are "selfish - altruism", "support from peer", "self-ability", "anonymous degree ", and "the issue of topic". Questionnaire was based on Social Judgment Theory, SJT. Both physical survey questionnaires and internet questionnaires were disseminated to new media users. Total questionnaires are 152 and valid questionnaires are 88. Through statistical software policy PC to understand the subject's decision-making for these five variables in the cognitive approach. The results are as follows: 1. In the average weights, the most important cue for all groups is "anonymous degree" followed by "self-ability", "selfish - altruism", "support from peer", and "the issue of topic". 2. In the judgment functions, all groups have positive attitude toward the three cues: "selfish - altruism", "self-ability" and "anonymous degree". All groups have U-curve attitude toward the cue:"support from peer". All groups have positive attitude and U-curve attitude toward the cue:"the issue of topic".

The purpose of the present study was to analyze the significance ofcreativity for network behavior. Similar to other network behavioral studiesthe multidimensional approach was utilized where networking was dividedinto sub dimensions with external and internal counterparts. The domainspecific approach to creativity was used in order to attempt to determinewhich creative domain is significant for different networking behaviors.106 individuals participated in the study and the sample is considered anon-random convenience sample. The results showed that certain networkbehaviors interacted with different creative domains. The creative domainof everyday and verbal creativity were both unique predictors of networkbehavior and were the creative domains who were the most relevant.Structural facets in the form of work experience, organizational size andbiological gender were also explored. Work experience was shown to be aweak moderating variable to the relationship of network behavior andcreativity. Organizational size had no significant results and biologicalgender was significant for two of the creative domains: Math / scientificand artistic creativity. Results from the present study provide furtherevidence towards an area which is relatively new. The findings can be usedto create an empirical foundation in recruitment scenarios which mayrequire individuals with particular set of psychological traits. / Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka interaktionen mellannätverksbeteende och kreativitet, samt att analysera om kreativitet är avsignifikant betydelse för nätverksbeteende. I linje med tidigare forskningom nätverksbeteende är denna studie av multidimensionell karaktär, därnätverksbeteende delas upp i interna samt externa komponenter. Dendomänspecifika paradigmen för kreativitet användes för att undersökavilka av de kreativa domänerna som är mest relevanta vidnätverksbeteende. 106 individer deltog i studien och urvalet var ettbekvämlighetsurval. Resultatet visade att några av de kreativa domäneninteragerade med nätverksbeteende, där vardaglig samt verbal kreativitetvar av högst relevans samt även unika prediktorer för nätverksbeteende. Destrukturella faktorerna arbetslivserfarenhet, organisationsstorlek samtbiologiskt kön undersöktes också. Arbetslivserfarenhet visade sig ha enmodererande effekt i relation till sambandet nätverksbeteende ochkreativitet, medan organisationsstorlek inte hade någon signifikant effekt.Resultatet för biologiskt kön indikerade att de kreativa domänenmatematisk/vetenskaplig och konstnärlig kreativitet var signifikanta, därmän skattade sig som något mer kreativa än vad kvinnor gjorde. Studiensresultat kan användas för att skapa en evidensbaserad grund irekryteringssammanhang samt i utformningen av psykometriska tester.

Nowadays, the traffic tomography represents an integral component in converged networks and systems for detecting their behavioral characteristics. The dissertation deals with research of its implementation with the use of evolutionary algorithms. The research was mainly focused on innovation and solving behavioral detection data flows in networks and network anomalies using tomography and evolutionary algorithms. Within the dissertation has been proposed a new algorithm, emerging from the basics of the statistical method survival analysis, combined with a genetics’ algorithm. The proposed algorithm was tested in a model of a self-created network probe using the Python programming language and Cisco laboratory network devices. Performed tests have shown the basic functionality of the proposed solution.

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 76 pages. / Thesis (M.S.E.E.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: The use of digitized information is rapidly gaining acceptance in bio-medical applications. Video compression plays an important role in the archiving and transmission of different digital diagnostic modalities. The present scheme of video compression for low bit-rate networks is not suitable for medical video sequences. The instability is the result of block artifacts resulting from the block based DCT coefficient quantization. The possibility of applying deformable motion estimation techniques to make the video compression standard (H.263) more adaptable for bio-medial applications was studied in detail. The study on the network characteristics and the behavior of various congestion control mechanisms was used to analyze the complete characteristics of existing low bit rate video compression algorithms. The study was conducted in three phases. The first phase involved the implementation and study of the present H.263 compression standard and its limitations. / ABSTRACT: The second phase dealt with the analysis of an external force for active contours which was used to obtain estimates for deformable objects. The external force, which is termed Gradient Vector Flow (GVF), was computed as a diffusion of the gradient vectors associated with a gray-level or binary edge map derived from the image. The mathematical aspect of a multi-scale framework based on a medial representation for the segmentation and shape characterization of anatomical objects in medical imagery was derived in detail. The medial representations were based on a hierarchical representation of linked figural models such as protrusions, indentations, neighboring figures and included figures--which represented solid regions and their boundaries. The third phase dealt with the vital parameters for effective video streaming over the internet in the bottleneck bandwidth, which gives the upper limit for the speed of data delivery from one end point to the other in a network. / ABSTRACT: If a codec attempts to send data beyond this limit, all packets above the limit will be lost. On the other hand, sending under this limit will clearly result in suboptimal video quality. During this phase the packet-drop-rate (PDR) performance of TCP(1/2) was investigated in conjunction with a few representative TCP-friendly congestion control protocols (CCP). The CCPs were TCP(1/256), SQRT(1/256) and TFRC (256), with and without self clocking. The CCPs were studied when subjected to an abrupt reduction in the available bandwidth. Additionally, the investigation studied the effect on the drop rates of TCP-Compatible algorithms by changing the queuing scheme from Random Early Detection (RED) to DropTail. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis focuses on developing of a distributed, efficient and fault tolerant multiresolutional architecture for sensor networks. For demonstrative purpose, a powerful simulation environment using 3D environment model has been developed. The robot network is composed of autonomous robots capable of working cooperatively equipped with single typed simple sensor. The developed layered control architecture is hybrid including both subsumption and motor schema control strategies. In this proposed control method, behaviors in different or in same layer are coordinated with an evaluator unit that overcomes the difficulties of subsumption based architectures in terms of behavioral coordination. The final coordination between these layers is achieved cooperatively. We performed many simulation experiments to test robot deployment, search and task execution. It is shown that some important parameters such as target reaching time, energy consumption, and communication range can be optimized if an approximate prior information about the environment is known. Robots executes task based on a task allocation algorithm. Market based auction method is used as a task allocation algorithm with completely different robot fitness evaluation method allowing a distributive problem solving. Six non-linear fitness functions are developed to increase the fairness, and fault tolerance of task allocation. These functions have been tested to represent the successes and failures of robots in a compact form. Performance analyses test results have shown that fairness increases two times more in task allocation when these fitness functions are used, compared to the results existing fitness evaluation methods used in the market based auction algorithms. Moreover, fault tolerance is increased by using fitness functions devoted to failure conditions.

This thesis is focused on network behavior analysis (NBA) designed to detect network attacks. The goal of the thesis is to increase detection accuracy of obfuscated network attacks. Methods and techniques used to detect network attacks and network traffic classification were presented first. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) in terms of their functionality and possible attacks on them are described next. This work also describes principles of selected attacks against IDS. Further, obfuscation methods which can be used to overcome NBA are suggested. The tool for automatic exploitation, attack obfuscation and collection of this network communication was designed and implemented. This tool was used for execution of network attacks. A dataset for experiments was obtained from collected network communications. Finally, achieved results emphasized requirement of training NBA models by obfuscated malicious network traffic.