本研究探討私募對企業經營績效之影響，分別檢驗五種類型應募人之私募，其企業經營績效是否因私募而獲得顯著改善。本文採用配對t檢定，檢驗當應募人分別為策略投資人、內部人、積極投資人、消極投資人及單一投資人時，公司之經營績效於私募前後一年是否有顯著差異，並以營運現金流量報酬率、資產報酬率、股東權益報酬率及公司價值作為績效指標進行迴歸分析，探討不同類型應募人之私募，對經營績效之影響有何不同。 實證結果發現，私募會因應募人之不同，而對經營績效產生不同的影響。當應募人為策略投資人、內部人、積極投資人或單一投資人時，公司私募後一年的經營績效比私募前一年的績效好，表示當應募人為該四類投資人時，四項經營績效衡量指標皆顯示，私募會正面影響公司之經營績效；而當應募人為消極投資人時，私募對公司營運現金流量會造成負面的影響。 / This study classifies private placement investors into five types including strategic investors, insiders, active investors, passive investors, and single investors to investigate whether firm performance has been improved after issuing private placement. I use two-sample paired t-test to examine whether the performance is different between pre-placement and post-placement under each type of private placement investors, and use regression approach to analyze the impact of private placement investors on firm performance measured by operating cash flow returns, returns on assets, returns on equity, and Tobin’s Q. The evidence shows that the impact on performance varies with private placement investors. Firms have better performance after issuing private placement when the private placement investors are strategic investors, insiders, active investors, and single investors. On the contrary, when the private placement investors are passive investors, firms have poorer operating cash flow returns.

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Alstom Transport, entreprise du transport ferroviaire français, s’interroge sur l’émergence de nouveaux usages dans les véhicules de transports publics urbains. Afin de répondre à cette question, l’approche systémique a été choisie comme cadre théorique. Cette approche permet d’interroger l’organisation du système individus-habitacle. Des observations participantes structurées ont été menées dans 12 villes (dans cinq pays). Le traitement des données combinant les méthodes quantitative et qualitative a permis de décrire le placement en fonction de deux échelles (l’échelle de l’habitacle et l’échelle de l’individu). L’importance dans l’organisation du système de la position assise et de la possibilité de s’adosser a été mis en évidence, ainsi qu’une organisation spatiale des activités des individus. Une forme d’usage potentiellement émergente a pu être observée. Celle-ci interroge une évolution possible de l’organisation de placement, et ouvre de nouvelles perspectives de recherche concernant l’organisation spatiale des activités. / The French rail transport company Alstom Transport inquires whether new usages are emerging in urban public transport vehicles. The systemic approach has been chosen as a theoretical frame to respond to this question. This approach enables to examine the organization of the individual-passenger compartment system. Structured observation has been conduct in 12 cities (5 countries). Data analysis combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies, allows describing the placement based on 2 scales (the passengers compartment and the individual). The sense of the sitting position and the possibility to lean on has been brought to light as well as the spatial organization of activities. A potentially emerging usage could be observed. It interrogates a possible evolution of the organization of placement, and opens new research perspectives regarding the spatial organization of activities.

Le Cloud offre le calcul, stockage etréseau en tant que services. Pour réduire le coûtde cette offre, les opérateurs ont tendance à s’appuyer sur des infrastructures centralisées et gigantesques. Cependant, cette configuration entrave la satisfaction des exigences de latence et de bande passante des applications de nouvelle génération. L'Edge cherche à relever ce défi en s'appuyant sur des ressources massivement distribuées. Afin de satisfaire les attentes des opérateurs et des utilisateurs du Edge, des services de gestion ayant des capacités similaires à celles qui ont permis le succès du Cloud doivent être conçus. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur le service de supervision. Nous proposons un canevas logiciel pour la mise en place d’un service holistique. Ce canevas permet de déterminer une architecture de déploiement pair-à-pair pour les fonctions d'observation, de traitement et d'exposition des mesures. Il vérifie que cette architecture satisfait les exigences fonctionnelles et de qualité de service des utilisateurs. Ces derniers peuvent être exprimés à l'aide d'un langage de description offert par le canevas. Le canevas offre également un langage de description pour unifier la description de l'infrastructure Edge. L’architecture de déploiement est déterminée avec l’objectif de minimiser l'empreinte de calcul et réseau du service de supervision. Pour cela, les fonctions de supervision sont mutualisées entre les différents utilisateurs. Les tests que nous avons faits ont montré la capacité de notre proposition à réduire l'empreinte de supervision avec un gain qui atteint -28% pour le calcul et -24% pour leréseau. / Cloud offers compute, storage and network as services. To reduce the offer cost, the operators tend to rely on centralized and massive infrastructures. However, such a configuration hinders the satisfaction of the latency and bandwidth requirements of new generation applications. The Edge aims to rise this challenge by relying on massively distributed resources. To satisfy the operators and the users of Edge, management services similar to the ones that made the success of Cloud should be designed. In this thesis, we focus on the monitoring service. We design a framework to establish a holistic monitoring service. This framework determines a peer-to-peer deployment architecture for the observation, processing, and exposition of measurements. It verifies that this architecture satisfies the functional and quality of service constraints of the users. For this purpose, it relies on a description of users requirement sand a description of the Edge infrastructure.The expression of these two elements can be unified with two languages offered by the Framework. The deployment architecture is determined with the aim of minimizing the compute and network footprint of the monitoring service. For this purpose, the functions are mutualized as much as possible among the different users. The tests we did showed the relevance of our proposal for reducing monitoring footprint with a gain of -28% for the compute and -24% for the network.

Alors que l’informatique en brouillard amène les ressources de traitement et de stockage à la périphérie du réseau, il existe un besoin croissant de placement automatisé (c.-à-d. La sélection de l'hôte) pour déployer des applications distribuées. Un tel placement doit être conforme aux besoins en ressources des applications dans une infrastructure de brouillard hétérogène et dynamique, et traiter la complexité apportée par les applications Internet des objets (IoT) liées aux capteurs / actionneurs. Cette thèse présente un modèle, une fonction objective et des heuristiques pour résoudre le problème de la mise en place d'applications IoT distribuées dans le brouillard. En combinant les heuristiques proposées, notre approche est capable de gérer les problèmes à grande échelle et de prendre efficacement des décisions de placement adaptées à l'objectif - en optimisant les performances des applications placées. L'approche proposée est validée par une analyse de complexité et une simulation comparative avec des tailles et des applications de tailles variables. / As fog computing brings processing and storage resources to the edge of the network, there is an increasing need of automated placement (i.e., host selection) to deploy distributed applications. Such a placement must conform to applications' resource requirements in a heterogeneous fog infrastructure, and deal with the complexity brought by Internet of Things (IoT) applications tied to sensors and actuators. This paper presents four heuristics to address the problem of placing distributed IoT applications in the fog. By combining proposed heuristics, our approach is able to deal with large scale problems, and to efficiently make placement decisions fitting the objective: minimizing placed applications' average response time. The proposed approach is validated through comparative simulation of different heuristic combinations with varying sizes of infrastructures and applications.

Desenvolveu-se neste trabalho um método para projeto e fortalecimento de planos de medição, para efeito de estimação de estados. O método proposto permite a obtenção de planos de medição que além de isentos de medidas críticas e de conjuntos críticos de medidas, garantem a observabilidade do sistema, mesmo com a perda simultânea de 1 ou 2 medidas quaisquer, ou, até mesmo, com a perda de 1 UTR. É um método numérico simples, de fácil implantação, que se baseia na análise da estrutura da matriz resultante da decomposição LDU, que é obtida através da fatoração triangular da matriz Jacobiana. Para comprovar a sua eficiência, vários testes foram realizados, utilizando os sistemas de 14 e 30 barras do IEEE, o sistema de 121 barras da ELETROSUL e o sistema de 383 barras da CHESF. / In this work a method to design and to upgrade Measurements Placement Plan for state estimation is proposed. The proposed method allows the obtention of measurements placement plans that, besides free of both critical measurements and critical sets, maintain the system observability when 1 or 2 measurements are lost, at same time, or even when a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) is lost. It is a simple numerical method, easy to implement and based on the analysis of the structure of the resultant matrix of the decomposition LDU, that it is obtained through a triangular factorization of the Jacobian matrix. To prove the efficiency of the proposed method, several tests were made using the IEEE 14 and 30-bus systems, a 121-bus system from ELETROSUL and a 383-bus system from CHESF.

<div>The problem of optimally placing sensors can often be formulated as a facility location problem. In the literature of operations research, facility location problems are mathematical optimization problems where one or more facilities must be placed in relation to a given number of demand points or customers. Within the context of sensor placement, for example, this translates to placing wireless communication nodes that connect to a set of users or placing smoke detectors to adequately cover a region for safety assurances. However, while the classical facility location problem has been extensively studied, its direct applicability to and effectiveness for the optimal sensor placement problem can be diminished when real-world uncertainties are considered. In addition, the physics of the underlying systems in optimal sensor placement problems can directly impact the effectiveness of facility location formulations. Extensions to existing location formulations that are tailored for the system of interest are necessary to ensure optimal sensor network design.</div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation focuses on developing and applying problem-specific optimal sensor placement methods under uncertainty in sensor performance. With the classical discrete facility location problems as a basis, our models are formulated as mixed-integer linear and nonlinear programs that, depending on the specific application, can also be in the form of a stochastic program, a robust optimization framework, or require probability distributions for uncertain parameters. We consider optimal placement problems from three different areas, particularly the optimal placement of data concentrators in Smart Grid communications networks, the optimal placement of flame detectors within petrochemical facilities, and the optimal selection of infectious disease detection sites across a nation. For each application, we carefully consider the underlying physics of the system and the uncertainties and then develop extensions of previous sensor placement formulations that effectively handle these qualities. In addition, depending on the degree of nonlinear complexity of the problem, specific relaxations and iterative solution strategies are developed to improve the ability to find tractable solutions. All proposed models are implemented in Pyomo, a Python-based optimization modeling language, and solved with state-of-the-art optimization solvers, including IPOPT, Gurobi, and BARON for nonlinear, mixed-integer, and mixed-integer nonlinear programs, respectively. Numerical results show that our tailored formulations for the problems of interest are effective in handling uncertainties and provide valuable sensor placement design frameworks for their respective industries. Furthermore, our extensions for placement of sensors under probabilistic failure are appropriately general for application in other areas.<br><b></b><i></i><u></u><br></div>

In complex environments, increasing demand for exploring natural resources by both decision makers and the public is driving the search for sustainable planning initiatives. Among these is the use of virtual environments to support effective communication and informed decision-making. Central to the use of virtual environments is their development at low cost and with high realism. / This paper explores intelligent approaches to objects placement, orientation and scaling in virtual environments such that the process is both accurate and cost-effective. The work involves: (1) determining of the key rules to be applied for the classification of vegetation objects and the ways to build an object library according to ecological classes; (2) exploring rules for the placement of vegetation objects based on vegetation behaviours and the growth potential value collected for the research area; (3) developing GIS algorithms for implementation of these rules; and (4) integrating of the GIS algorithms into the existing SIEVE Direct software in such a way that the rules find expression in the virtual environment. / This project is an extension of an integrated research project SIEVE (Spatial Information Exploration and Visualization Environment) that looks at converting 2D GIS data into 3D models which are used for visualization. The aims of my contribution to this research are to develop rules for the classification and intelligent placement of objects, to build a normative object database for rural objects and to output these as 2D billboards or 3D models using the developed intelligent placement algorithms. / Based on Visual Basic Language and ArcObjects tools (ESRI ArcGIS and Game Engine), the outcomes of the intelligent placement process for vegetation objects are shown in the SIEVE environment with 2D images and 3D models. These GIS algorithms were tested in the integrated research project. According to the case study in Victoria, rule-based intelligent placement is based on the idea that certain decision-making processes can be codified into rules which, if followed automatically, would yield results similar to those which would occur in the natural environment. Final product produces Virtual Reality (VR) scenes similar to the natural landscapes. Considering the 2D images and 3D models represented in the SIEVE scenario and the rules (for natural and plantation vegetation) developed in conjunction with scientists in the Victorian Department of Primary Industries (DPI) and other agencies, outcomes will contribute to the development of policies for better land and resource management and link to wide ranging vegetation assessment projects.

Product placement, an advertising trend that places a brand within the context of an information medium, has emerged as an effective means of increasing brand recognition. The practice has not been thoroughly examined in the different media in which it occurs. The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the effectiveness of prominent and subtle product placements in books on different forms of memory. The effectiveness of the placements was evaluated by measuring explicit and implicit memory for the placed brands. Additionally, effectiveness was measured with two types of preference judgments: a forced choice scenario and a shopping list scenario. Results from Experiment 1 showed that participants demonstrated implicit memory for brands mentioned in the novel with a word stem completion task and a category exemplar generation task. The centrality of placement only affected performance on these tasks for test-aware participants. Experiment 2 used a forced choice task and showed that consumer preference was unaffected by subtle and prominent placements. Experiment 3 used a shopping list scenario and showed that brand placement affected participants’ preferences for previously studied brands regardless of the placement centrality. The experiments also showed that participants had explicit memory for the brands with prominent placements leading to better recall than subtle placements. Taken together, the findings show that the placement of brands in books is a valid means of influencing consumer awareness and behavior toward the brand.

The study explored the relationship between program placement policies regarding the education of recently immigrated students and selected outcomes for these newcomers in urban high schools located in Texas under the implementation of NCLB. In an effort to better understand the impact of such policies on immigrant learning opportunities, this research investigated how newcomers’ identification and promotion, which were based upon English language proficiency testing, affected recent immigrant students’ program placement, course completion and educational achievement. In addition, this study used secondary data analysis to examine how newcomers’ background characteristics were associated with their grade retention rates. Finally, the relationship between students’ background characteristics and newcomers’ academic performance in language arts and mathematics subject areas were examined. This research attempted to answer questions including: 1) How do newly arrived youth students enrolled in newcomer programs, schools, and those enrolled in traditional English as a Second Language (ESL) programs differ with regard to characteristics, such as race, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), course completion, grade retention, and language spoken at home?, 2) How do the differences in characteristics of newly arrived youth students relate to grade retention?, 3) What is the relationship between the growth in academic achievement and newly arrived youth students’ demographic characteristics while enrolled in different programs?, and 4) What kinds of learning opportunities and educational supports are provided by traditional ESL programs, newcomer programs, and newcomer schools for newly arrived youth students in northern and central Texas? Findings indicated newly arrived immigrant adolescents are consistently the most disadvantaged group due to their later start age with limited English proficiency facing a new culture. In general, recently arrived immigrant youths appear to benefit more from teachers with ESL certification as well as even much more experience for serving immigrant adolescents in a safe and caring environment, newcomer schools. / text