För att öka rörligheten på arbetsmarknaden har man i Sverige haft möjlighet att göra skatteavdrag för kostnader som uppstår kring arbetspendling. Idag ifrågasätts det dock om syftet verkligen uppfylls, samt om det är samhällsekonomiskt lönsamt att behålla avdraget. Den ökande bilismen som uppstår som effekt av subventioneringen gör även det hela till en miljöfråga. Syftet med följande kandidatexamensuppsats är ge läsaren och oss författare ökad kunskap kring reseavdraget, samt ge underlag för fortsatt utveckling av styrmedlet. Arbetet är består av fyra större delar: En litteraturstudie med bakgrundsfakta kring reseavdraget och dess historia, tidigare forskning och den politiska debatten idag. En enkätundersökning där allmänhetens åsikter kring avdraget utforskas. En diskussion av möjliga justeringar av reseavdragets olika parametrar förs, där det (enligt vår mening) mest optimala förändringsförslaget tas fram. En styrmedelsanalys av 3 olika sorters reseavdrag; det nuvarande, förändringsförslaget som togs fram, samt ett borttaget. Av resultaten kunde slutsatsen dras att ett förändrat reseavdrag skulle vara märkbart mer samhällsekonomiskt lönsamt samt miljövänligt, gentemot det nuvarande. Ett borttaget reseavdrag skulle dock vara det mest optimala. Dessutom visade enkätundersökningen att allmänheten mestadels är positiv till reseavdraget, men att mångas åsikter kan skiftas snabbt när man presenterar fakta. / The ability to make tax deductions on travel expenses have been present in Sweden since the late 1920s. The main purpose of the state subsidy has been to improve the mobility in the label market. However, in recent years there has been a heated debate as to if the subsidy is truly socio-economically sustainable or not. The favoritism of car users has also made the matter a question of ecological sustainability. The aim of this essay is to analyse and provide general knowledge of the swedish system of deductible travel expenses. The text is divided into four major parts: A litterature review presenting the history of the subsidy, previous research, and the current political debate. A questionnaire survey where the general public’s opinion of tax-deductible travel expenses is examined.  A discussion of possible adjustments of the different parameters of the system, where the most optimal ammendment is chosen An analysis of 3 different scenarios; keeping the current system, using the ammended system obtained in the calibration, and removing the system. From the results we could conclude that an ammended system would be noticeably more socio-economically viable and ecologically sustainable, compared with the current system. However, a complete removal of the system would be the most optimal. In addition, the questionnaire surveys results shows that the public is mostly positive to travel deductions. However, it was apparent that the views of many could shift completely, when presenting facts.

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For many young adults, retrieving information and news from the internet is not an uncommon task. A large portion of said information is shared through social media. However, social media is not always a reliant news source, due to the fact that the content is largely crowdsourced. One of the social media and micro-blogging services is Twitter. Twitter allows anyone to share information about anything through messages called "tweets". This leads to fast propagation of news across the world. However, it lacks a filter to sort out false news. This thesis researches whether higher education has an impact on credibility judgement in young adults. The results show that overall, young academics are more prone to scepticism than non-academics regarding news relayed through a social media such as Twitter. / För många unga vuxna är det inte ovanligt att få information och nyheter från internet. En stor del av denna information delas genom sociala medier. Emellertid är sociala mediers nyhetskällor inte alltid en trovärdig informationskälla, främst på grund av att informationen oftast kommer från användarna. En av dessa sociala medier är mikrobloggtjänsten Twitter. Twitter låter vem som helst dela information om vad som helst genom meddelanden kallade tweets". Detta leder till snabb spridning av nyheter över hela världen, men saknar ett filter för att sortera ut falska nyheter. Denna avhandling undersöker om högre utbildning påverkar trovärdighetsbedömningen hos unga vuxna. Resultaten visar överlag att unga akademiker kan vara mer benägna än icke-akademiker att vara skeptiska till nyheter som delas via sociala medier som Twitter.

When cultured at high cell densities cyanobacteria shade each other, giving each cell access to less light. This shading causes a decreased energy (ATP) and reductant (NAD(P)H) production, yielding lower carbon dioxide fixation rates and an abating metabolism. Growth arrest through repression of essential genes has been proposed as a work-around of this shading prob-lem but the issue of a decreased metabolic activity persists. Here, we investigated the causes of the abating metabolism of growth arrested cells. We discovered that NADPH is accumulating in butanol-producing growth arrested cells, causing a state of over-reduction. Adding a modified lactate dehydrogenase to more rapidly consume NADPH partly alleviates the clogged metabolism, albeit not enough to keep metabolic activity steady. Among the targets investigated, citrate synthase (GltA) is the most effective at arresting growth and diverting carbon flux to product formation. The gltA repression increased specific CO2 fixation for 6 days and increased specific lactate productivity 6-fold, resulting in final L-lactate titers of 500 mg/L. The maximum achieved carbon partitioning was 94%. / Vid höga celldensiteter skuggar cyanobakterier varandra, vilket skapar en förminskad produktion av energi och reduktion-smedel. Detta gör i sin tur att koldioxidkonsumptionen avtar och metabolismen saktar ned. Undertryckning av essentiella gener för att stoppa tillväxten av celler har provats som lösning på detta problem, men problemet med avtagande metabolisk aktivitet består. I denna studie undersökte vi orsakerna bakom den avtagande metabolismen. Vi fann att NADPH acku-muleras i butanolproducerande tillväxtstoppade celler, vilket skapar överreducerade celler. Introduktion av ett modifierat laktatdehydrogenas för att snabbare konsumera NADPH lindrade de metaboliska problemen, men var inte tillräckligt för att hålla den metaboliska aktiviteten stadig. Bland de prövade generna var citratsyntas (GltA) mest effektiv för stannande av tillväxt och omdirigering av kolflödet till L-laktat. Undertryckandet av gltA ökade den specifika koldioxidkonsumptionen un-der 6 dagar samt ökade den specifika lakatatproduktiviteten 6-dubbelt, vilket resulterade i en slutgiltig L-laktat titer på 500 mg/L. Den maximala kol-fördelningen till produkt var 94 %.

Smart manufacturing is a concept that has taken over the manufacturing sector. The definition of smart manufacturing or the German concept Industry 4.0 has not been clearly stated and the transition from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 is still debated. Large companies have started investing a lot of money to research on concepts like Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), advanced data analytics and cloud computing, that compliment smart manufacturing to fit their manufacturing setup and hence the solutions are not standardized. They have still managed to improve their production systems to make it more flexible, productive, efficient and customer-centric by using the concepts of smart manufacturing. Small and medium-sized enterprises are challenged by problems faced such as low investments, insufficient infrastructure, inefficient production lines and limited time to research on new technology. This thesis studies the concept of Industry 4.0 or smart manufacturing and tries to create a transition from Industry 3.0 concepts to 4.0 concepts by using simple and easy solutions. The main aim of the thesis is to create a business plan to commercialize the simple solutions so that small and medium-sized enterprises could start implementing the smart manufacturing concepts in a simple way. Two concepts namely machine vision system and Bluetooth Low Energy technology were studied, and a product structure was developed. Realworld cases were developed and tested out with the product. Conclusions were made as to how the products and services would benefit the customer and what problems it addresses on a shopfloor setting. A structured business plan to commercialize the product was developed with a customer-centric approach, that helps create a transition from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 concepts as well as provide cost-effective and easy solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises. Validation of the concepts were done using concepts like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices and machine vision systems that provide shop floor data. The limitations of the thesis as well as scope for future work has also been mentioned. / Smart tillverkning är ett koncept som har tagit över tillverkningssektorn. Definitionen av smart tillverkning eller det tyska konceptet Industri 4.0 har inte klart framgått och övergången från Industri 3.0 till 4.0 diskuteras fortfarande. Stora företag har börjat investera mycket pengar för att undersöka koncept som Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), avancerad dataanalys och cloud computing, som komplement tillsmart tillverkning för att passa deras tillverkning och lösningarna är därför inte standardiserade. De har ändå lyckats förbättra sina produktionssystem för att göra dem mer flexibla, produktiva, effektiva och kundcentrerade genom att använda smart tillverkning. För små och medelstora finns utmaningar i form av låga investeringar, otillräcklig infrastruktur, ineffektiva produktionslinjer och begränsad tid för forskning om ny teknik. Denna avhandling studerar begreppet Industry 4.0 eller smart tillverkning och försöker skapa en övergång från Industry 3.0- till 4.0-konceptet med enkla lösningar. Huvudsyftet med avhandlingen är att skapa en affärsplan för att kommersialisera de enkla lösningarna så att små och medelstora företag på ett enkelt sätt kan börja införa smarta tillverkningskoncept. Två koncept, nämligen bildbehandlingsteknik och Bluetooth Low Energy-teknik studerades och en produktstruktur utvecklades. Användningsfall utvecklades och testades med produkten. Slutsatser drogs om hur produkterna och tjänsterna skulle gynna kunden och vilka problem den kan lösa på ett fabriksgolv. En strukturerad affärsplan för att kommersialisera produkten med ett kundcentrerat synsätt utvecklades för att skapa en övergång från Industri 3.0 till 4.0 samt erbjuda kostnadseffektiva och enkla lösningar till små och medelstora företag. Valideringen gjordes med hjälp av Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enheter och bildbehandlingssystem för insamling av data från fabriksgolvet. Avgränsningarna samt möjligheter till framtida arbete har också behandlats.

The purpose of this study was to examine the cleaning efficiency of an autonomous vacuum cleaner robot; namely, reducing the cleaning time needed in an empty room. To do this we explored how the path planning could be improved upon given access to a dust map that would allow for more sophisticated algorithms depending on the state of the room. The approach we employed in order to compare different preprogrammed path patterns and our own greedy heuristic was to create a simulation environment in Unity3d. In this environment we could create a two dimensional plane to represent the length and width of a room with the size of our choosing. This plane was then subdivided into squared cells that would discretise the environment, which represented the dust map of the room. The tests were conducted in rooms with different dimensions in order to examine how different strategies' efficiency developed in relation to each other. Employing an algorithm like our greedy heuristic after an initial zigzag sweep resulted in a significant improvement in comparison to a robot that is restricted to template patterns only. Future work could involve finding the optimised solution for our heuristic in order to make full use of the dust map and thereby achieve minimal cleaning time for the robot. / Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka en självstyrande robotdammsugares städningseffektivitet och att minimera tiden som krävs för att städa ett tomt rum. Vi undersökte hur roboten kunde planera sina vägval bättre genom att få tillgång till en dammkarta, det vill säga ett rutnät som håller reda på dammfördelningen i ett rum. Denna dammkarta möjliggör för mer sofistikerade algoritmer som beror på statusen i rummet. Vi jämförde olika rörelsemönster som sicksack, spiralen och väggkramaren med en egendefinierad heuristik. Ett enkelt öppet rum simulerades i Unity3d, där vi testade de olika algoritmerna. Rummet bestod av ett tvådimensionellt plan som representerade längden och bredden av rummet som gick att justera till vårt tycke. Detta plan delades sedan upp i ett rutnät som representerar vår diskretiserade dammkarta för rummet. Testerna utfördes i rum av olika dimensioner för att se hur de olika städstrategiernas effektivitet utvecklades i relation till varandra. Att använda sig av en algoritm så som vår heuristik efter ett första svep med ett sicksackmönster resulterade i en signifikant förbättring jämfört med en robot som är bunden till fördefinierade rörelsemönster. Framtida studier skulle kunna försöka hitta den optimala lösningen till vår heuristik, så att dammkartan kan utnyttjas till fullo, och därmed uppnå minimal städningstid för roboten.

This master thesis tackles the problem of unsupervised learning of visual representations with deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). This is one of the main actual challenges in image recognition to close the gap between unsupervised and supervised representation learning. We propose a novel and simple way of training CNN on fully unlabeled datasets. Our method jointly optimizes a grouping of the representations and trains a CNN using the groups as supervision. We evaluate the models trained with our method on standard transfer learning experiments from the literature. We find out that our method outperforms all self-supervised and unsupervised state-of-the-art approaches. More importantly, our method outperforms those methods even when the unsupervised training set is not ImageNet but an arbitrary subset of images from Flickr. / Detta examensarbete behandlar problemet med oövervakat lärande av visuella representationer med djupa konvolutionella neurala nätverk (CNN). Detta är en av de viktigaste faktiska utmaningarna i datorseende för att överbrygga klyftan mellan oövervakad och övervakad representationstjänst. Vi föreslår ett nytt och enkelt sätt att träna CNN på helt omärkta dataset. Vår metod består i att tillsammans optimera en gruppering av representationerna och träna ett CNN med hjälp av grupperna som tillsyn. Vi utvärderar modellerna som tränats med vår metod på standardöverföringslärande experiment från litteraturen. Vi finner att vår metod överträffar alla självövervakade och oövervakade, toppmoderna tillvägagångssätt, hur sofistikerade de än är. Ännu viktigare är att vår metod överträffar de metoderna även när den oövervakade träningsuppsättningen inte är ImageNet men en godtycklig delmängd av bilder från Flickr.

Ultrasound, composed of sound waves with frequencies above the human audible range, has become widely used in various technological fields for digital communications. In the past, acoustic and ultrasonic waves were employed in military and commercial un-derwater wireless communication systems due to their superior performance compared to electromagnetic waves. Ultrasound has also emerged as a viable alternative to radio and wired transmission for data transmission through solid bodies like metal plates and pipe walls. Notably, ultrasound offers high-security features as it is nearly undetectable from outside the room, minimizing the risks of wireless interception and attacks like Bluesniping and jamming. In any digital communication system, understanding the propagation channel between the transmitter and receiver is crucial. The ultrasound communication channel comprises three main components: transmitting and receiving transducers and the medium through which the sound propagates. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier scheme that divides the available spectrum into multiple non-overlapping subcarriers for digital communication. In the context of ultrasound communication, the channel consists of two parts: the combined response of the transducers used as the transmitter and receiver, and the im-pulse response of the propagation medium. When dealing with a thin plate with parallel surfaces, this results in a reverberating channel. The reverberating channel comprises a primary pulse along with echo pulses that possess similar shapes but decaying amplitudes. The amplitude decay occurs due to four prominent factors: power losses in the trans-ducers at each side, transmission losses at the boundaries of the plate and transducer, ultrasound pulse attenuation within the plate, and beam spreading as the ultrasound pulse travels over distance. The reverberations elongate the impulse response of the channel, thus require a long cyclic prefix to prevent data symbols to overlap. However, this limitation restricts the achievable bit rate and energy efficiency of the system. In this thesis, we present a model for the reverberating ultrasound channel suitable for various plate materials. We propose a novel system-level path loss model that accounts for losses at the transducers, transmission losses, material attenuation, and diffraction losses. Based on this model, we calculate a comprehensive link budget that explicitly considers plate thickness. Furthermore, we conduct a quantitative analysis to evaluate the impact of Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) and Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) on the performance of the OFDM system. Through computer simulations, we evaluate the system’s performance and demonstrate that for a metal plate with a thickness of 5 mm, an uncoded data rate of 32 Mbps can be achieved.

Stragglers, which are tasks that operate significantly slower than other tasks in a system, are a big issue in distributed systems. A system can contain relatively few tasks that qualify as stragglers but that have a great impact on the overall system performance. For example, a study of a large data center showed that as few as 3.48 % of the tasks constituting various jobs were stragglers, and that these had a negative performance impact on almost 50 % of all total jobs. The purpose of this study is to utilize distributed tracing to detect stragglers in a service-oriented, distributed system. Distributed tracing is a tool that tracks requests across system boundaries and offers observability into which services a request has interacted with, and in which order. It also measures the duration of each service interaction which could act as a measurement for defining stragglers. Distributed tracing was utilized in this project to track a request in a case-study system constituting four nodes, to find services with straggling behavior. Specifically developed for this project was a program measuring the usage of CPU, memory, disk bandwidth and network bandwidth by a process. This program was used for services with which a request did interact, as well as for other services co-allocated on the same node. The metrics obtained were used as a basis when evaluating the reason for experienced straggling behavior. It was concluded that consuming certain resources together, for example CPU and memory, entailed straggling behavior. It was also shown that making conscious choices regarding how to co-allocate processes with respect to these results could improve a request round-trip time by up to 60 %. However, although time was insufficient to test this theory, it is believed that these results are highly system and application dependent and that the stragglers experienced in this project might not emerge in other systems. Therefore, it is believed that these experiments must be performed on each system of interest to get accurate results for that particular system. Nevertheless, these results demonstrate how severe the performance impact could possibly be due to stragglers caused by resource contention.

This project explores the possibilities for energy cost reduction and revenue generation forindustrial actors in the harbor of Oskarshamn, Sweden. First, a literature review describing theapplicable renewable energy technologies, business models, and electricity markets is included.Then, an optimization problem is formulated to get the optimum sizing and an estimation of theeconomic and environmental gains is solved. Finally, recommendations for the implementation ofan energy system that would achieve these gains are given.