While the newly envisioned Smart(er) Grid (SG) will result in a more efficient and reliable power grid, its collection and use of fine-grained meter data has widely raised concerns on consumer privacy. While a number of approaches are available for preserving consumer privacy, these approaches are mostly not very practical to be used due to two reasons: First, since the data is hidden, this reduces the ability of the utility company to use the data for distribution state estimation. Secondly and more importantly, the approaches were not tested under realistic wireless infrastructures that are currently in use. In this thesis, a meter data obfuscation approach to preserve consumer privacy is proposed to implement that has the ability to perform distribution state estimation. Then, its performance on LTE and a large-scale Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network built upon the new IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard are assessed. LTE/EPC(Evolved Packet Core) model is used between the gateway and the utility. EPC's goal is to improve network performance by the separation of control and data planes and through a flattened IP architecture, which reduces the hierarchy between mobile data elements. Using obfuscation values provided via this approach, the meter readings are obfuscated to protect consumer privacy from eavesdroppers and the utility companies while preserving the utility companies' ability to use the data for state estimation.The impact of this approach on data throughput, delay and packet delivery ratio under a variety of conditions are assessed.

While the newly envisioned smart grid will result in a more efficient and reliable power grid, its use of fine-grained meter data has widely raised concerns of consumer privacy. This thesis implements a data obfuscation approach to preserve consumer privacy and assesses its feasibility on a large-scale advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) network built upon the new IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh standard. This obfuscation approach preserves consumer privacy from eavesdroppers and the utility companies while preserving the utility companies' ability to use the fine-grained meter data for state estimation. The impact of this privacy approach is assessed based on its impact on data throughput and delay performance. Simulation results have shown that the approach is feasible to be used even when the network size grows. Additional adaptations to the approach are analyzed for their feasibility in further research.

Com o aumento no uso de aglomerados e grades de computadores, cresce o interesse no estudo de comunicações entre processadores. Em um computador paralelo dedicado, ou em uma rede local homogênea, o tempo de comunicação é geralmente modelado de forma similar, independente de quais processadores estão se comunicando. Em uma rede onde os links entre os computadores são heterogêneos, computadores mais próximos tendem a apresentar menor latência e maior largura de banda do que computadores distantes. Além disso, a largura de banda agregada é diferente dependendo do número de conexões simultâneas existentes entre dois aglomerados distantes. Neste trabalho estudaremos a troca completa de mensagens de tamanhos diferentes entre aglomerados interligados por backbones. Proporemos um novo algoritmo de comunicação baseado em algoritmos conhecidos, apresentaremos simulações de escalonamentos dos algoritmos estudados para esta rede multi-aglomerado e analisaremos os resultados destas simulações. / The growth in popularity of clusters and computational grids caused an increase in the interest in studying interprocessors communications. The comunication time in a dedicated parallel computer or in a local homogeneous network is modeled in a similar way, regardless of which processors are communicating. In a network with heterogeneous links, closer computers generally have lower latency and larger bandwidth than wide area computers. Besides, the aggregated bandwidth depends on the number of simultaneous connections between two wide area clusters. In this work we study the complete exchange of messages of different sizes between interconnected clusters using a backbone. We propose a new comunication algorithm based on known algorithms, we present some scheduling simulations of the studied algorithms in this multi-cluster network and we present the results analysis of these simulations.

The work discussed in this thesis is the product of investigation on information and coding theoretic properties of colluding populations of navigationally relevant mammalian neurons. For brevity and completeness, that work is presented chronologically in the order in which it was investigated. This thesis details coding theoretic properties of (and develop a model for communication between) colluding populations of spatially responsive neurons in the hippocampus (HC) and medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) through a hypothetical layer of interneurons (each of which posesses exclusively excitatory or inhibitory synapses). This work presents analysis of the changes in network structure induced by an anti-Hebbian learning process and translate these analyses into biologically testable hypotheses. Further, it is demonstrated that for appropriately parameterized codes (i.e. populations of grid and place cells in MEC and HC, respectively), this network is able to learn the code and correct for errors introduced by neural noise, potentially explaining the results of a correlational study: Place cell variability sharply decreases at a time that coincides with the maturation of the grid cell network in developing mice. Further, this work predicts that disruption of the grid cell network (e.g. via optogenetic inactivation and lesioning) should increase the variability of place cell firing, and impair decoding from these place cells' activities. Continuing down this avenue, we consider how the inclusion of a population of the somewhat controversial time cells (purportedly residing in HC and MEC) impacts de-noising network structure, coding properties of the population of populations of all three classes of navigatory neuron, and denoisability. These results are translated to testable neurobiological predictions. Additionally, to ensure realistic stimulus statistics, locations and times are taken from real rat paths recorded from navigating rats in the Computational and Experimental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Interestingly, while time cells exhibit some of the coding and information theoretic trends described in chapter 4, in certain cases, they admit surprising connectivity trends. Most surprisingly, after including time cells in this framework it was discovered that some classes of neural noise appear to improve decoding accuracy over the entire path while simultaneously impairing accuracy of decoding position and time independently.

The avalanche of data from scientific instruments and the ensuing interest from geographically distributed users to analyze and interpret it accentuates the need for efficient data dissemination. An optimal data distribution scheme will find the delicate balance between conflicting requirements of minimizing transfer times, minimizing the impact on the network, and uniformly distributing load among participants. We identify several data distribution techniques, some successfully employed by today's peer-to-peer networks: staging, data partitioning, orthogonal bandwidth exploitation, and combinations of the above. We use simulations to explore the performance of these techniques in contexts similar to those used by today's data-centric scientific collaborations and derive several recommendations for efficient data dissemination. Our experimental results show that the peer-to-peer solutions that offer load balancing and good fault tolerance properties and have embedded participation incentives lead to unjustified costs in today's scientific data collaborations deployed on over-provisioned network cores. However, as user communities grow and these deployments scale, peer-to-peer data delivery mechanisms will likely outperform other techniques. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of / Graduate

Bostadsbristen är ett ständigt faktum i Sverige idag och i takt med att boendepriserna ökar så ökar också intresset för att bygga sin egen bostad. Arkitektfirman Tengbom i Karlstad har startat upp ett projekt, Portable Empowerment, som bygger på visionen om att skapa en portabel bostad som ska kunna fungera som en lösning när ett plötsligt behov av bostäder uppstår. För att bostäderna ska kunna flyttas runt krävs det att lösningar för energi- och avloppssystem finns integrerade i bostaden och ska kunna flyttas med för att göra bostaden portabel. För att detta ska vara möjligt krävs det avlopps- och energisystem som är off grid. Off grid betyder att systemet inte är kopplat till kommunalt avlopp eller elnät. Det finns sedan länge sätt att lösa både avlopp och energiförsörjning off grid och några exempel där det tillämpas är husvagnen och den klassiska sommarstugan, men de är allt som oftast inte anpassade för bruk året runt. Målet med denna studie är att identifiera samt värdera avlopps- och energisystem som kan tillgodose behoven i en liten bostad som brukas året runt av två personer. Bostaden har sin utgångspunkt i de ritningar som tagits fram av Tengbom för deras projekt Portable Empowerment. För att identifiera system som kan tillgodose behoven i bostaden har modeller byggts upp och simuleringar skett där system lämpade för off grid inkluderats. Lösningarna har sedan jämförts med varandra med hjälp av värderingsmatriser där portabilitet, kostnad, miljö och användarvänlighet för varje system värderats. Resultatet av studien visar att det finns flera system för både energi och avlopp som kan tillgodose behoven i bostaden året om. Flera av systemen uppfyller kraven för en portabel bostad och det är med andra ord möjligt att uppfylla Tengboms vision om ett fullständigt portabelt boende. Jämfört med en ”vanlig” bostad som är ansluten till vatten- och elnät är dock off grid-lösningarna betydligt mer tidskrävande. Genom att installera ett eget system med lösningar för enbart den egna bostaden tar brukaren också på sig det fulla ansvaret, något som kan tänkas vara en belastning för vissa brukare och en frihet för andra. Ur ekonomisk synpunkt visar studien att på energisidan är det svårt att hitta ett off grid-system som är billigare än on grid-systemet där en luftvärmepump installerats. Däremot är anslutningen till ett kommunalt avlopp betydligt dyrare, mellan 100 000-150 000 kronor mer, än att anlägga till exempel en egen infiltrationsanläggning i anslutning till den egna bostaden. För att utveckla denna studie bör möjligheten att bygga off grid-byar undersökas. Genom att bygga upp ett samhälle om ett stort bostadsbehov skulle uppstå kan energi- och avloppsanläggningar delas. Anläggningarna har större kapacitet och genom att dela på dessa kan både ansvar och kostnad minskas.

Non-epileptic attack disorder (NEAD) is a disorder resembling epilepsy, but is caused by psychological processes rather than neurological disturbance. Approximately 15-30% of patients referred to specialist epilepsy centres have NEAD as opposed to epilepsy. Research into NEAD has largely focused on the differential diagnosis of NEAD and identifying risk factors, such as abuse and psychopathology. Whilst this is important, there remains a paucity of research exploring the processes involved in the development and maintenance of NEAD, which contributes to the lack of research investigating treatment effectiveness and prognosis. Furthermore, there remains a paucity of research investigating patient perceptions and experiences, despite such factors influencing prognosis. Subsequently, the current study used repertory grid methodology to explore the largely overlooked domain of how individuals with NEAD construe their world (i.e. how they perceive themselves, others and their disorder). Twelve individuals with a diagnosis of NEAD were recruited from a clinical neuropsychology department within North-West England. This study was an exploratory, cross-sectional study using the repertory grid technique to explore the participants' construals of themselves and others, including construals of their ideal self and self before NEAD. Based on personal construct theory, this method aimed to overcome some of the methodological limitations inherent within NEAD research, by minimising researcher bias, exploring implicit and explicit perceptions and exploring both individual and group perceptions.A case series of grids was presented. Individual and multiple analyses were used to explore participants' construct systems. A data driven approach enabled hypotheses to be developed from the individual grids, which were explored via a composite grid and SocioNet analysis. Despite some themes being identified, the findings revealed the uniqueness of the participants' ways of construing, including a lack of shared understanding amongst the participants. The participants were unhappy with their current self and no longer construed themselves to be the person they were before the onset of NEAD. They also construed themselves as being distinct and/or alienated from others, although some participants construed positive consequences as a result of their NEAD. Whilst most participants agreed with their NEAD diagnosis 'label', they were less accepting of the psychological factors that characterise the diagnosis. Finally, physical health difficulties were construed as being preferable to experiencing mental health difficulties. The findings were discussed in relation to previous research and theoretical implications were highlighted. Clinical implications were highlighted, particularly how the current diagnostic and treatment system for individuals with NEAD may threaten their self-identity. Methodological considerations and recommendations for future research were also suggested. The repertory grid technique was found to be a useful and effective method to investigate the subjective perceptions of individuals with NEAD.

The thesis presents work across three different subjects of investigations into the modelling of spray development and its interaction with non-reactive and reactive flow. The first part of this research is aimed to create a new and robust family of convective scheme to capture the interface between the dispersed and the carrier phases without the need to build up the interface boundary. The selection of Weighted Average Flux (WAF) scheme is due to this scheme being designed to deal with random flux scheme which is second-order accurate in space and time. The convective flux in each cell face utilizes the WAF scheme blended with Switching Technique for Advection and Capturing of Surfaces (STACS) scheme for high resolution flux limiters. However in the next step, the high resolution scheme is blended with the scheme to provide the sharpness and boundedness of the interface by using switching strategy. The proposed scheme is tested on capturing the spray edges in modelling hollow cone type sprays without need to reconstruct two-phase interface. A test comparison between TVD scheme and WAF scheme using the same flux limiter on convective flow on hollow cone spray is presented. Results show that the WAF scheme gives better prediction than the TVD scheme. The only way to check the accuracy of the presented models are evaluations according to physical droplets behaviour and its interaction with air. In the second part, due to the effect of evaporation the temperature profile in the released fuel vapour has been proposed. The underlying equation utilizes transported vapour mass fraction. It can be used along with the solution of heat transfer inside a sphere. After applying boundary conditions, the equation can provide a solution of existing conditions at liquid-gas interface undergoing evaporation and it is put in a form similar to well-known one-third rule equation. The resulting equation is quadratic type that gives an accurate prediction for the thermo-physical properties due to the non-linear relation between measured properties and temperature. Comparisons are made with one-third rule where both equations are implemented in simulating hollow cone spray under evaporation conditions. The results show the presumed equation performs better than one-third rule in all comparisons. The third part of this research is about a conceptual model for turbulent spray combustion for two combustion regimes that has been proposed and tested for n-heptane solid cone spray type injected into a high-pressure, high-temperature open reactor by comparing to the available experimental data and to results obtained using two well known combustion models named the Combined Combustion Model (CCM) and the unsteady two-dimensional conditional moment closure (CMC) model. A single-zone intermittent beta-two equation turbulent model is suggested to characterise the Lumped zone. This model can handle both unburned and burned zones. Intermittency theory is used to account for the spatially non-uniform distribution of viscous dissipation. The model suggests that the Lumped zone can be identified by using the concept of Tennekes and Kuo-Corrsion of isotropic turbulence that suggests that dissipative eddies are most probably formed as vortex tubes with a diameter of the order of Kolmogorov length scale and a space of the order of Taylor length scale. Due to the complexity of mixture motion in the combustion chamber, there exist coherent turbulent small scale structures containing highly dissipative vortices. The small size eddies play an important role in extinguishing a diffusion spray flame and have an effect on the combustion reaction at molecular scale because small scales turbulence increase heat transfer due to the dissipation. A common hypothesis in constructing part of the model is if the Kolmogorov length scale is larger than the turbulent flame thickness. The Lumped strategy benefits from capturing small reactive scales information provided by numerics to improve the modelling and understand the exact implementation of the underlying chemical hypothesis. The Lumped rate is estimated from the ratio of the turbulent diffusion to reaction flame thickness. Three different initial gas temperature test cases are implemented in simulations. Lumped spray combustion model shows a very good agreement with available experimental data concerning auto-ignition delay points.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis discusses occupancy grid map, collision avoidance system and belief theory, and propose some of the latest and the most effective method such as predictive occupancy grid map, risk evaluation model and OGM role in the belief function theory with the approach of decision uncertainty according to the environment perception with the degree of belief in the driving command acceptability. Finally, how the proposed models mitigate or prevent the occurrence of the collision.

Separation Mitt projekt rör sig kring temat separation, separation av funktioner, separation i fysisk bemärkelse och separation av människor. Jag spenderade mycket tid åt att undersöka kreamtoriet som anläggning, dess programdelar och platsen som vi fått till förfogande. Hela tiden rörde sig undersökningen tillbaka till separation, krematoriets funktionsseparering, åtskillnaden av industri och ceremoni. Jag valde att använda detta som en språngbräda för projektet. Krematoriet är som byggnad tydligt indelad i olika funktioner som försöker distansiera sig från varandra, den industriella och den ceremoniella, men även den del av programmet som berör personalen då de inte är i arbete. Tre olika funktioner som drar i olika riktningar, så jag började fundera över om jag ville arbeta för att överbrygga eller förstärka denna separation och hur detta skulle kunna representeras fysiskt fysiskt genom en byggnad. Tidigt i den undersökningen insåg jag att det var förstärknigen av det rådande förhållandet mellan funktionerna och rummen som jag ville arbeta med. När jag sedan började arbeta med formen började jag därför med att dela upp programmet i tre olika volymer och försökte få dem att förhålla sig till varandra utan att förenas till en helhet. Av praktiska skäl (för personalen) så valde jag istället att försöka få in tydligt separerade funktioner i en dammanhängade byggnad. Här kom ideén att använda mig av ett förvrängt gridsystem för att generera spännande former ch samtidigt uppfylla min strävan efter rum som fysiskt ger sken av att försöka separera sig från varandra. Resultatet är mitt krematorium, som bygger på ett rutnät på1500x1500mm soms edan har manipulerats genom att jag dragit de trte huvudfunktionerna i olika riktning. att komma fram till en metod för att förvränga gridet på ett sätt som inte blev helt och hållet godtyckligt var en lång process. Först ville jag att sträckan mellan punkterna i gridet skulle vara konstant och att bara mötespunkterna skulle förändras. Jag testade detta i modell, med ett intressant resultat men när jag sedan försökte mig på samma sak digitalt så visade det sig ganska snabbt att det fanns mycket begränsade möjligheter. Så jag valde slutligen att låta sträckan mellan punkterna vara flexibla och behandla gridet genom att låta punkterna flyttas utefter ett förutbestämt mönster. Då min byggnad är så tydligt format av det förvrängda gridet så ville jag visa upp det även för besökaren och då det hade varit omöjligt att låta alla punkter bli pelare av användningstekniska skäl så fick vissa punkter bli pelare, andra rumsskapande Byggnadens struktur består både av bärande väggar och pelare som är utplacerade enligt det bestämda gridet. Materialen som används i strukturen är i huvudsak massivträ, förutom i källarplanet och i de väggar om omsluter ugnshallen. Innerväggarna är obeklädda och materialet på interiören är därmed samma som i strukturen. Förutom de bärande pelarna återfinns även en mängd tunnare pelare som finns till enbart för atmosfärens skull. hela projektet är en process & en undersökning av hur man kan arbeta med gridsystem och hur man arbetar med och överbrygger de begränsningar som ett bestämt systen medför. En undersökning i att sätta upp striktearegler för sig själv och att sedan våga ta steget att bryta dem när man måste. / Separation This project follows a theme of separation, separation of functions, fysical separation and separation of people. A Chrematory is in its nature in a constant state of conflict, very different and complicated functions forced together into the same building, functions wich are trying to move in away from each other, trying to separate. There are basically three different parts of the chrematory, the industrial side, the part for the family an friends of the diseaced and the parts for the employes. All with verya specific demands and different atmospheres. I Wanted to enhance this state of separation between the functions but still keep them in the same building and i came up with a strategi to make that possible. I was going to use a distorted grid system to let the separation show in the built form. The project became a study of grids, how you can distort them in diferent ways and how you can use them to create different atmospheres and interesting forms. But also a study of how to make strict rules for yourself, how to keep them, and work with the difficulties you face when you have these rules to follow. And last but not least how to learn how to break your own rules when they have to be broken.