Abstract Successful organizations at present, manage their business activities in an effective manner. Since the significance issue to stay in competitive markets is to improve the business process sequentially, well-defined business process management can increase the competitive advantages to an advanced quality at a lower cost. In fact,business process management (BPM) applied as a comprehensive approach for managing the organizational procedures. As a side of process viewpoint, business process management is considered as principal method which assist organizations sustain their objectives.This thesis reviews and inspects the concept of business process management and the importance of business process management in organizations. The focal point of thisthesis is alignment between organization strategy and business process managementhow the business people think about this alignment and managing their business activities. By investigating various literatures, we appreciate the need of holistic approach, which fit the organization strategy and business process management.Subsequently, we turn to survey the approach of the alignment of business process management in SMEs that located in Jönköping.The empirical data, which collected from three organizations, are analyzed and the research approach has been validated. The result demonstrates that SMEs consider alignment between their business process management and organization strategy is crucial and helps to achieve their organization objectives. The alignment improves monitoring and transparency, increased profits and helps to increase the efficiency of staff. They indicate people, management, leadership, information technology,communication, governance and culture are important factors that associated with the alignment of business process management and organization strategy.

Polyimide alignment layer is a very important liquid crystal alignment. The most well-known Liquid crystal display (LCD) alignment methods are homogeneous alignment and homeotropic alignment. This paper research uses different fluff depth and number of rubbing into polyimide,and changes the level of rubbing strength, to observe how electro-optical properties of vertical liquid crystal alignment changes with rubbing strength. By rubbing polyimide with different rubbing strength, this research uses two kind of negative liquid crystal (¡µ£`<0) as samples. This research finds that when rubbing strength increases, the contrast ratio tends to drop.However, the contrast ratio rises after certain level of rubbing strength is applied. Regarding the response time, this research finds that when rubbing strength increases, the response time tends to drop as well. However, the response time rises and falls irregularly after certain level of rubbing strength is applied.

Imposing additional constraints on multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms can often produce more biologically meaningful alignments. Hence, various constrained multiple sequence alignment (CMSA) algorithms have been developed in the literature, where researchers used anchor points, regular expressions, or context-free-grammars to specify the constraints, wherein alignments produced are forced to align around segments that match the constraints. In this thesis, we propose CSA-X, a modularized program of constrained multiple sequence alignment that accepts constraints in the form of regular expressions. It uses an arbitrary underlying multiple sequence alignment program to generate alignments, and is therefore modular. The name CSA-X refers to our proposed program generally, where the letter X is substituted with the name of a (non-constrained) multiple sequence alignment algorithm which is used as underlying MSA engine in the proposed program. We compare the accuracy of our program with another constrained multiple sequence alignment program called RE-MuSiC that similarly uses regular expressions for constraints. In addition, comparisons are also made to the underlying MSA programs (without constraints). The BAliBASE 3.0 benchmark database is used to assess the performance of the proposed program CSA-X, other MSA programs, and CMSA programs considered in this study. Based on the results presented herein, CSA-X outperforms RE-MuSiC, and scores well against the underlying alignment programs. It also shows that the use of regular expression constraints, if chosen well, created from the least conserved region of the correct alignments, improves the alignment accuracy. In this study, ProbCons and T-Coffee are used as the underlying MSA programs in CSA-X, and the accuracy of the alignments are measured in terms of Q score and TC score. On average, CSA-X used with constraints identified from the least conserved regions of the correct alignments achieves results that are 17.65% more for Q score, and 23.7% more for TC score compared to RE-MuSiC. In fact, CSA-X with ProbCons (CSA-PC) achieves a higher score in over 97.9% of the cases for Q score, and over 96.4% of the cases for TC score. In addition, CSA-X with T-Coffee (CSA-TCOF) achieves a higher score in over 97.7% of the cases for Q score, and over 94.8% of the cases for TC score. Furthermore, CSA-X with regular expressions created from the least conserved regions of the correct alignments achieves higher accuracy scores compared to standalone ProbCons and T-Coffee. To measure the statistical significance of CSA-X results, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test are performed, and these tests show that CSA-X results for the least conserved regular expression constraint sets from the correct BAliBASE 3.0 alignments are significantly different than those from RE-MuSiC, ProbCons, and T-Coffee.

This thesis is a proposal of a mobile wheel alignment system for passenger cars. Firstly, basic requirements for the manageability of a vehicle, as well as the most important parameters needed for the proper understanding of wheel alignment are explained. Further on, the text is focused on the construction, functioning and main principles of wheel alignment systems used for checking of the wheel alignment of both passenger cars, as well as race cars. Main differences will be explained. The second part is an analysis of a proposal of a wheel alignment system. Four different solutions are presented, all of them having undergone an analysis of their traction, as well as deformation. Each solution is supplemented with a calculation of price and used materials. Finally, all parts of a system are described in detail.

This application software system of Tree Alignment and Reconstruction (TAAR) is an X Window based interactive system developed mainly for sequence analysis. It provides a user-friendly graphical interface and convenient operations for performing Pairwise Alignment, 3-Star Alignment, Phylogeny Reconstruction and Generalized Tree Alignment algorithms. The algorithms for Phylogeny Reconstruction and Generalized Tree Alignment are designed based on heuristic stepwise addition and internal node sequence alignment induction methods. All above algorithms are space-efficiently implemented. For each algorithm, both fast and optimal versions are provided for user's convenience. TAAR can be used for DNA, RNA and PROTEIN sequences analysis. In general, as long as the sequence characters are in the range of a-z and A-Z, and the score matrix alphabet contains the sequence alphabet, the sequence would be accepted by this application and all calculations could be carried out. This software system is programmed in C, Motif and X Window Library functions. It is intended to be running in a UNIX and X Window environment. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

This thesis deals with topic model evaluation and new topic detection in microblogs. Microblogs are short and thus may not carry any contextual clues. Hence it becomes challenging to apply traditional natural language processing algorithms on such data. Graphical models have been traditionally used for topic discovery and text clustering on sets of text-based documents. Their unsupervised nature allows topic models to be trained easily on datasets meant for specific domains. However the advantage of not requiring annotated data comes with a drawback with respect to evaluation difficulties. The problem aggravates when the data comprises microblogs which are unstructured and noisy. We demonstrate the application of three types of such models to microblogs - the Latent Dirichlet Allocation, the Author-Topic and the Author-Recipient-Topic model. We extensively evaluate these models under different settings, and our results show that the Author-Recipient-Topic model extracts the most coherent topics. We also addressed the problem of topic modeling on short text by using clustering techniques. This technique helps in boosting the performance of our models. Topical alignment is used for large scale assessment of topical relevance by comparing topics to manually generated domain specific concepts. In this thesis we use this idea to evaluate topic models by measuring misalignments between topics. Our study on comparing topic models reveals interesting traits about Twitter messages, users and their interactions and establishes that joint modeling on author-recipient pairs and on the content of tweet leads to qualitatively better topic discovery. This thesis gives a new direction to the well known problem of topic discovery in microblogs. Trend prediction or topic discovery for microblogs is an extensive research area. We propose the idea of using topical alignment to detect new topics by comparing topics from the current week to those of the previous week. We measure correspondence between a set of topics from the current week and a set of topics from the previous week to quantify five types of misalignments: \textit{junk, fused, missing} and \textit{repeated}. Our analysis compares three types of topic models under different settings and demonstrates how our framework can detect new topics from topical misalignments. In particular so-called \textit{junk} topics are more likely to be new topics and the \textit{missing} topics are likely to have died or die out. To get more insights into the nature of microblogs we apply topical alignment to hashtags. Comparing topics to hashtags enables us to make interesting inferences about Twitter messages and their content. Our study revealed that although a very small proportion of Twitter messages explicitly contain hashtags, the proportion of tweets that discuss topics related to hashtags is much higher. / text

This research examines a new concept called information systems (IS) control alignment, which refers to the degree that controls within an IS process such as systems development are similar to an ideal profile of controls. IS controls are used to influence the behaviour of employees, often via approaches such as formal policies or managerial oversight. Many companies continue to struggle with ineffective IS controls, as evidenced by underperforming systems development projects, ongoing security breaches, and inconsistent service from third-party providers. A qualitative case study approach is adopted, drawing on data collected via interviews and company documents. IS controls are found to most effectively achieve their objectives when they are grouped into mutually reinforcing profiles characterized by either agile attributes (e.g. evolution, innovation), traditional attributes (e.g. stability, prevention), or hybrid attributes that are employed based on unique organizational circumstances. Findings from this research will help organizations to better achieve their goals by identifying IS controls that complement, rather than conflict, with one another. By more closely examining the implications of IS control choice, organizations can better understand how to influence employee behaviour and oversee day-to-day operations, a topic that is increasingly on the minds of executives and shareholders in light of the rash of business failures in recent years. Findings will also contribute to the academy by conceptualizing and empirically evaluating the new concept of IS control alignment, as well as building theory regarding the relationships between IS processes, controls, and employee behaviour. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2013-04-17 13:14:32.122

This work presents a novel loss-reduced photonic liquid-crystal fiber (PLCF) using the non-contact photo-alignment method. The photo-excited and adsorbed azo dye on the capillary surface of a PLCF induces uniform and highly ordered orientation of the LC. The anchoring force of the photo-alignment effect is combined with that generated by surface boundary conditions of the photonic crystal fiber (PCF). Transmission loss resulting from LC scattering can be reduced from -2.8db/cm to -1.3db/cm within 10min. This photo-induced alignment yields a permanent boundary for the LC in the PCF that reduces scattering loss, and can be further modulated by electrical fields. The electrical tunable effect and fast dynamic response of the photo-aligned PLCF are also presented. This low-loss PLCF can be applied conveniently in various PLCF devices.

The most complicated and important step in optical packaging is coupling alignment. It is very difficult to handle too many parameters at the same time during the coupling alignment process. Most of the parameters are neglected in coupling alignment process, especially the parameters of angles. According to the analysis, we found that the misalignment of angles do not have influence on the position of highest coupling efficiency in XY plane. A 2+2 freedom searching method has been developed to reach the four axis coupling alignment. An automatic coupling alignment system has been carried out. And it can reach higher coupling efficiency and faster coupling alignment process.

This paper presents a novel active-alignment technique to fabricate one-dimensional optical fiber array. The advantages of this technique are providing simple structure on silicon- based optoelctronic device and individually adjusting relative position error of fiber array and laser diode array. The way to adjust fiber displacement is applying electric force to pull the adhesive which used to fix fibers and microholders. Then the adhesive has adhesive force with fiber surface that bring fiber moving away from its original position. The method has to consider some issues including choosing the adhesive viscosity, controlling adhesive volume in the microholder, confirming adjusting precision of fiber displacement, compensating the fiber Offset after curing. So we can obtain the minimum adjusting precision 0.5£gm and control the fiber traveling distance at ¡Ó0.4£gm. The way to improve those issues of adjusting the fiber array to achieve the best coupling position is described in this paper.