Regional integration gained popularity and is prioritised globally, especially in developing economies, including those on the African continent. This is based on its potential to accelerate trade, stimulate economic growth, and increase access to basic necessities and to induce a sustainable increase in economic output and improved standards of living. Regional integration in the context of developing economies is entirely implicit. Modern literature observes it as a policy option for dealing with a wide variety of issues related to politics, economic factors, and societal welfare. The SACU, existing since 1910, made several trade agreements globally. The union aims at reducing inequalities, ensuring continuous improvement in the general welfare of the population, and sustainable economic growth. Research, though, indicates that the region persistently reflects poor socio-economic conditions. This is accompanied by limited development in infrastructure, lowly skilled and experienced workforce. Primary sector activities dominate their economies, such as mining and agriculture, high levels of inequalities and poverty. Regional integration was implemented differently in several countries globally, and Africa in particular. The research noted that literature on regional integration and its implications on socio-economic development lacks, especially in the context of SACU. A deficiency was also emphasised the universal measurement of regional integration, which is not standardised. Some research employed single variables as a proxy, whilst some composite indices were also compiled and implemented, suiting the diverse setups and environments. The development measurements, therefore, cannot universally be applied attributable to context-specific concerns, prevalent in regions or countries. This study developed the SACU Regional Integration Index (SRII) because the existing indices on regional integration are limited concerning applicability. Most of the indices established in the literature were developed for specific countries and regions with diverse characteristics from those of the SACU region. In addition to a detailed literature review and closing methodological divergencies, this study evaluated the effects of regional integration on socio-economic development in the SACU countries. The objectives of the study were first, to produce the SACU Regional Integration Index. Second, the study aimed at evaluating the effect of regional integration on various socio-economic development factors listed as economic growth, investments, and the Human Development Index (HDI), inequalities and poverty. Third, the study provided policy recommendations to the socio-economic problems encountered by the SACU countries; and lastly, to implement the proposed SRII as a way of providing policymakers with the actual impacts. The study employed the principal component analysis (PCA) to construct the SRII. The Ordinary Least Squares (LSDV), fixed effects and random effects were employed to ascertain the effect of regional integration on socio-economic development in the SACU countries. The constructed SACU index comprises four dimensions. These are trade integration; productive integration; infrastructure integration; and financial and macroeconomic policies integration. The index revealed that SACU countries are dominated by trade and productive integration. Further analysis of the results indicated that collaboration on the financial and macroeconomic policies is lacking and the infrastructure dimension is lagging in the SACU region. Based on the second objective, the results indicate that regional integration is critical in improving trade openness and HDI, especially in Lesotho, Botswana, and Namibia. The effect of regional integration on real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, inequalities, and poverty reduction was realised in the long run through the interaction of all variables under study. This supported the dynamic effects posited by the dynamic theory of regional integration. It was established that growth, though, in infrastructure is insignificant compared to other dimensions of regional integration. This explains why regional integration was unsupportive concerning stimulating investments in all the economies forming the SACU region. The third objective was to proffer policy recommendations. Several practical policy recommendations emerged from this study, based on the literature findings and review. These recommendations include implementing inclusive development programmes, promotion private sector participation in economic activities, and policies, to boost production capacity in the countries in this region. Based on the fourth objective, this study further recommends SACU as a region, to integrate into the global economy. This can be conducted by participating in global production networks for manufacturing and taking advantage of emerging economies. This would diversify their export markets and their sources of finance development. SACU countries should make regional integration and trade a part of their national and sectoral development plans, ensuring coherent trade and industrial policies. They should also improve their labour, education, social protection, and safety nets. With data availability, this research can be extended to incorporate quarterly data or more years of study. Time-series methods can be applied, such as the Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) method. This will increase the sample size and the number of observations, which can improve the outcome from the statistical and econometric analysis. Future studies may also evaluate the applicability of the index constructed in this study. / Economics / D. Phil. (Economics)

Blind source separation (BSS) aims at separating useful signal content from distortions. In the contactless acquisition of vital signs by means of the camera-based photoplethysmogram (cbPPG), BSS has evolved the most widely used approach to extract the cardiac pulse. Despite its frequent application, there is no consensus about the optimal usage of BSS and its general benefit. This contribution investigates the performance of BSS to enhance the cardiac pulse from cbPPGs in dependency to varying input data characteristics. The BSS input conditions are controlled by an automated spatial preselection routine of regions of interest. Input data of different characteristics (wavelength, dominant frequency, and signal quality) from 18 postoperative cardiovascular patients are processed with standard BSS techniques, namely principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA). The effect of BSS is assessed by the spectral signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) of the cardiac pulse. The preselection of cbPPGs, appears beneficial providing higher SNR compared to standard cbPPGs. Both, PCA and ICA yielded better outcomes by using monochrome inputs (green wavelength) instead of inputs of different wavelengths. PCA outperforms ICA for more homogeneous input signals. Moreover, for high input SNR, the application of ICA using standard contrast is likely to decrease the SNR.

Tato doktorská práce je zaměřena na vývoj algoritmu ke zpracování dat naměřených zařízením pro spektrometrii laserem indukovaného plazmatu (angl. LIBS). Zařízení LIBS s tímto algoritmem by mělo být následně schopno provést třídění vzorků a kvantitativní analýzu analytu in-situ a v reálném čase. Celá experimentální část této práce byla provedena ve Spolkovém institutu pro materiálový výzku a testování (něm. BAM) v Berlíně, SRN, kde byl sestaven elementární LIBS systém. Souběžně s experimentílní prací byl vytvořen přehled literárních zdrojů s cílem podat ucelený pohled na problematiku chemometrických metod používaných k analýze LIBS měření. Použití chemometrických metod pro analýzu dat získaných pomocí LIBS měření je obecně doporučováno především tehdy, jsou-li analyzovány vzorky s komplexní matricí. Vývoj algoritmu byl zaměřen na kvantitativní analýzu a třídění vyvřelých hornin na základě měření pomocí LIBS aparatury. Sada vzorků naměřených použitím metody LIBS sestávala z certifikovaných referenčních materiálů a vzorků hornin shromážděných přímo na nalezištích mědi v Íránu. Vzorky z Íránu byly následně na místě roztříděny zkušeným geologem a množství mědi v daných vzorcích bylo změřeno na Univerzitě v Clausthalu, SRN. Výsledné kalibrační křivky byly silně nelineární, přestože byly sestaveny i z měření referenčních vzorků. Kalibrační křivku bylo možné rozložit na několik dílčích tak, že závislost intenzity měděné čáry na množství mědi se nacházela v jiném trendu pro jednotlivé druhy hornin. Rozdělení kalibrační křivky je zpravidla přisuzováno tzv. matričnímu jevu, který silně ovlivňuje měření metodou LIBS. Jinými slovy, pokud určujeme množství analytu ve vzorcích s různou matricí, je výsledná kalibrační křivka sestavená pouze z jedné proměnné (intenzity zvolené spektrální čáry analytu) nepřesná. Navíc, normalizace takto vytvořených kalibračních křivek k intenzitě spektrální čáry matrčního prvku nevedla k výraznému zlepšení linearity. Je obecně nemožné vybrat spektrální čáru jednoho matričního prvku pokud jsou analyzovány prvky s komplexním složením matric. Chemometrické metody, jmenovitě regrese hlavních komponent (angl. PCR) a regrese metodou nejmenších čtverců (angl. PLSR), byly použity v multivariační kvantitatvní analýze, tj. za použití více proměnných/spektrálních čar analytu a matričních prvků. Je potřeba brát v potaz, že PCR a PLSR mohou vyvážit matriční jev pouze do určité míry. Dále byly vzorky úspěšně roztříděny pomocí analýzy hlavních komponent (angl. PCA) a Kohonenových map na základě složení matričních prvků (v anglické literatuře se objevuje termín ‚spectral fingerprint‘) Na základě teorie a experimentálních měření byl navržen algoritmus pro spolehlivé třídění a kvantifikaci neznámých vzorků. Tato studie by měla přispět ke zpracování dat naměřených in-situ přístrojem pro dálkovou LIBS analýzu. Tento přístroj je v současnosti vyvíjen v Brně na Vysokém učení technickém. Toto zařízení bude nenahraditelné při kvantifikaci a klasifikaci vzorků pouze tehdy, pokud bude použito zároveň s chemometrickými metodami a knihovnami dat. Pro tyto účely byla již naměřena a testována část knihoven dat v zaměření na aplikaci metody LIBS do těžebního průmyslu.

This study aims to investigate how dimensionality reduction of neuroimaging data prior to training support vector machines (SVMs) affects the classification accuracy of bipolar disorder. This study uses principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction. An open source data set of 19 bipolar and 31 control structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) samples was used, part of the UCLA Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics LA5c Study funded by the NIH Roadmap Initiative aiming to foster breakthroughs in the development of novel treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders. The images underwent smoothing, feature extraction and PCA before they were used as input to train SVMs. 3-fold cross-validation was used to tune a number of hyperparameters for linear, radial, and polynomial kernels. Experiments were done to investigate the performance of SVM models trained using 1 to 29 principal components (PCs). Several PC sets reached 100% accuracy in the final evaluation, with the minimal set being the first two principal components. Accumulated variance explained by the PCs used did not have a correlation with the performance of the model. The choice of kernel and hyperparameters is of utmost importance as the performance obtained can vary greatly. The results support previous studies that SVM can be useful in aiding the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and that the use of PCA as a dimensionality reduction method in combination with SVM may be appropriate for the classification of neuroimaging data for illnesses not limited to bipolar disorder. Due to the limitation of a small sample size, the results call for future research using larger collaborative data sets to validate the accuracies obtained. / Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur dimensionalitetsreduktion av neuroradiologisk data före träning av stödvektormaskiner (SVMs) påverkar klassificeringsnoggrannhet av bipolär sjukdom. Studien använder principalkomponentanalys (PCA) för dimensionalitetsreduktion. En datauppsättning av 19 bipolära och 31 friska magnetisk resonanstomografi(MRT) bilder användes, vilka tillhör den öppna datakällan från studien UCLA Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics LA5c som finansierades av NIH Roadmap Initiative i syfte att främja genombrott i utvecklingen av nya behandlingar för neuropsykiatriska funktionsnedsättningar. Bilderna genomgick oskärpa, särdragsextrahering och PCA innan de användes som indata för att träna SVMs. Med 3-delad korsvalidering inställdes ett antal parametrar för linjära, radiala och polynomiska kärnor. Experiment gjordes för att utforska prestationen av SVM-modeller tränade med 1 till 29 principalkomponenter (PCs). Flera PC uppsättningar uppnådde 100% noggrannhet i den slutliga utvärderingen, där den minsta uppsättningen var de två första PCs. Den ackumulativa variansen över antalet PCs som användes hade inte någon korrelation med prestationen på modellen. Valet av kärna och hyperparametrar är betydande eftersom prestationen kan variera mycket. Resultatet stödjer tidigare studier att SVM kan vara användbar som stöd för diagnostisering av bipolär sjukdom och användningen av PCA som en dimensionalitetsreduktionsmetod i kombination med SVM kan vara lämplig för klassificering av neuroradiologisk data för bipolär och andra sjukdomar. På grund av begränsningen med få dataprover, kräver resultaten framtida forskning med en större datauppsättning för att validera de erhållna noggrannheten.

Corruption is a social evil that resonates far and deep in societies, eroding trust in governance, weakening the rule of law, impairing economic development, and exacerbating poverty, social tension, and inequality. It is a multidimensional and complex societal malady that occurs in various forms and contexts. As such, any effort to combat corruption must be accompanied by a thorough examination of the attributes that might play a key role in exacerbating or mitigating corrupt environments. This dissertation identifies a number of attributes that influence corruption, using machine learning techniques, neural network analysis, and time series causal relationship analysis and aggregated data from 113 countries from 2007 to 2017. The results suggest that improvements in technological readiness, human development index, and e-governance index have the most profound impacts on corruption reduction. This dissertation discusses corruption at each phase of infrastructure systems development and engineering ethics that serve as a foundation for corruption mitigation. The dissertation then applies novel analytical efficiency measurement methods to measure infrastructure inefficiencies, and to rank infrastructure administrative jurisdictions at the state level. An efficiency frontier is developed using optimization and the highest performing jurisdictions are identified. The dissertation’s framework could serve as a starting point for governmental and non-governmental oversight agencies to study forms and contexts of corruption and inefficiencies, and to propose influential methods for reducing the instances. Moreover, the framework can help oversight agencies to promote the overall accountability of infrastructure agencies by establishing a clearer connection between infrastructure investment and performance, and by carrying out comparative assessments of infrastructure performance across the jurisdictions under their oversight or supervision.

M. Tech. (Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / Computer based assessments have become one of the largest growing sectors in both nonacademic and academic establishments. Successful computer based assessments require security against impersonation and fraud and many researchers have proposed the use of Biometric technologies to overcome this issue. Biometric technologies are defined as a computerised method of authenticating an individual (character) based on behavioural and physiological characteristic features. Basic biometric based computer based assessment systems are prone to security threats in the form of fraud and impersonations. In a bid to combat these security problems, keystroke dynamic technique and facial biometric recognition was introduced into the computer based assessment biometric system so as to enhance the authentication ability of the computer based assessment system. The keystroke dynamic technique was measured using latency and pressure while the facial biometrics was measured using principal component analysis (PCA). Experimental performance was carried out quantitatively using MATLAB for simulation and Excel application package for data analysis. System performance was measured using the following evaluation schemes: False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR), Equal Error Rate (EER) and Accuracy (AC), for a comparison between the biometric computer based assessment system with and without the keystroke and face recognition alongside other biometric computer based assessment techniques proposed in the literature. Successful implementation of the proposed technique would improve computer based assessment’s reliability, efficiency and effectiveness and if deployed into the society would improve authentication and security whilst reducing fraud and impersonation in our society.

<p dir="ltr">Automaticity, an essential attribute of skill, is developed when a task is executed repeatedly with minimal attention and can have both good (e.g., productivity, skill acquisitions) and bad (e.g., accident involvement) implications on workers’ performance. However, the implications of automaticity in construction are unknown despite their significance. To address this knowledge gap, this research aimed to examine methods that are indicative of the development of automaticity on construction sites and its implications on construction safety and productivity. The objectives of the dissertation include: 1) examining the development of automaticity during the repetitive execution of a primary task of roofing construction and a concurrent secondary task (a computer-generated audio-spatial processing task) to measure attentional resources; 2) using eye-tracking metrics to distinguish between automatic and nonautomatic subjects and determine the significant factors contributing to the odds of automatic behavior; 3) determining which personal characteristics (such as personality traits and mindfulness dimensions) better explain the variability in the attention of workers while developing automaticity. To achieve this objective, 28 subjects were recruited to take part in a longitudinal study involving a total of 22 repetitive sessions of a simulated roofing task. The task involves the installation of 17 pieces of 25 ft2 shingles on a low-sloped roof model that was 8 ft wide, 8 ft long, and 4 ft high for one month in a laboratory. The collected data was analyzed using multiple statistical and data mining techniques such as repeated measures analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA), pairwise comparisons, principal component analysis (PCA), support vector machine (SVM), binary logistic regression (BLR), relative weight analyses (RWA), and advanced bootstrapping techniques to address the research questions. First, the findings showed that as the experiment progressed, there were significant improvements in the mean automatic performance measures such as the mean primary task duration, mean primary task accuracy, and mean secondary task score over the repeated measurements (p-value < 0.05). These findings were used to demonstrate that automaticity develops during repetitive construction activities. This is because these automatic performance measures provide an index for assessing feature-based changes that are synonymous with automaticity development. Second, this study successfully used supervised machine learning methods including SVM to classify subjects (with an accuracy of 76.8%) based on their eye-tracking data into automatic and nonautomatic states. Also, BLR was used to estimate the probability of exhibiting automaticity based on eye-tracking metrics and ascertain the variables significantly contributing to it. Eye-tracking variables collected towards safety harness and anchor, hammer, and work area AOIs were found to be significant predictors (p < 0.05) of the probability of exhibiting automatic behavior. Third, the results revealed that higher levels of agreeableness significantly impact increased levels of change in attention to productivity-related cues during automatic behavior. Additionally, higher levels of nonreactivity to inner experience significantly reduce the changes in attention to safety-related AOIs while developing automaticity. The findings of this study provide metrics to assess training effectiveness. The findings of this study can be used by practitioners to better understand the positive and negative consequences of developing automaticity, measure workers’ performance more accurately, assess training effectiveness, and personalize learning for workers. In long term, the findings of this study will also aid in improving human-AI teaming since the AI will be better able to understand the cognitive state of its human counterpart and can more precisely adapt to him or her.</p>

<p>Protein malfunction can cause human diseases, which makes the protein a target in the process of drug discovery. In-depth knowledge of how protein functions can widely contribute to the understanding of the mechanism of these diseases. Protein functions are determined by protein structures and their dynamic properties. Protein dynamics refers to the constant physical movement of atoms in a protein, which may result in the transition between different conformational states of the protein. These conformational transitions are critically important for the proteins to function. Understanding protein dynamics can help to understand and interfere with the conformational states and transitions, and thus with the function of the protein. If we can understand the mechanism of conformational transition of protein, we can design molecules to regulate this process and regulate the protein functions for new drug discovery. Protein Dynamics can be simulated by Molecular Dynamics (MD) Simulations.</p> <p>The MD simulation data generated are spatial-temporal and therefore very high dimensional. To analyze the data, distinguishing various atomic interactions within a protein by interpreting their 3D coordinate values plays a significant role. Since the data is humongous, the essential step is to find ways to interpret the data by generating more efficient algorithms to reduce the dimensionality and developing user-friendly visualization tools to find patterns and trends, which are not usually attainable by traditional methods of data process. The typical allosteric long-range nature of the interactions that lead to large conformational transition, pin-pointing the underlying forces and pathways responsible for the global conformational transition at atomic level is very challenging. To address the problems, Various analytical techniques are performed on the simulation data to better understand the mechanism of protein dynamics at atomic level by developing a new program called Probing Long-distance interactions by Tapping into Paired-Distances (PLITIP), which contains a set of new tools based on analysis of paired distances to remove the interference of the translation and rotation of the protein itself and therefore can capture the absolute changes within the protein.</p> <p>Firstly, we developed a tool called Decomposition of Paired Distances (DPD). This tool generates a distance matrix of all paired residues from our simulation data. This paired distance matrix therefore is not subjected to the interference of the translation or rotation of the protein and can capture the absolute changes within the protein. This matrix is then decomposed by DPD</p> <p>using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce dimensionality and to capture the largest structural variation. To showcase how DPD works, two protein systems, HIV-1 protease and 14-3-3 σ, that both have tremendous structural changes and conformational transitions as displayed by their MD simulation trajectories. The largest structural variation and conformational transition were captured by the first principal component in both cases. In addition, structural clustering and ranking of representative frames by their PC1 values revealed the long-distance nature of the conformational transition and locked the key candidate regions that might be responsible for the large conformational transitions.</p> <p>Secondly, to facilitate further analysis of identification of the long-distance path, a tool called Pearson Coefficient Spiral (PCP) that generates and visualizes Pearson Coefficient to measure the linear correlation between any two sets of residue pairs is developed. PCP allows users to fix one residue pair and examine the correlation of its change with other residue pairs.</p> <p>Thirdly, a set of visualization tools that generate paired atomic distances for the shortlisted candidate residue and captured significant interactions among them were developed. The first tool is the Residue Interaction Network Graph for Paired Atomic Distances (NG-PAD), which not only generates paired atomic distances for the shortlisted candidate residues, but also display significant interactions by a Network Graph for convenient visualization. Second, the Chord Diagram for Interaction Mapping (CD-IP) was developed to map the interactions to protein secondary structural elements and to further narrow down important interactions. Third, a Distance Plotting for Direct Comparison (DP-DC), which plots any two paired distances at user’s choice, either at residue or atomic level, to facilitate identification of similar or opposite pattern change of distances along the simulation time. All the above tools of PLITIP enabled us to identify critical residues contributing to the large conformational transitions in both HIV-1 protease and 14-3-3σ proteins.</p> <p>Beside the above major project, a side project of developing tools to study protein pseudo-symmetry is also reported. It has been proposed that symmetry provides protein stability, opportunities for allosteric regulation, and even functionality. This tool helps us to answer the questions of why there is a deviation from perfect symmetry in protein and how to quantify it.</p>

Malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which is responsible for over 500,000 deaths per year worldwide. Although malaria medicines are working well in many parts of the world, antimalarial drug resistance has emerged as one of the greatest challenges facing malaria control today. Since the malaria parasites are once again developing widespread resistance to antimalarial drugs, this can cause the spread of malaria to new areas and the re-emergence of malaria in areas where it had already been eradicated. Therefore, the discovery and characterization of novel antimalarials is extremely urgent. A previous drug screen in Dr. Chakrabarti's lab identified several natural products (NPs) with antiplasmodial activities. The focus of this study is to characterize the hit compounds using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to determine structural uniqueness compared to known antimalarial drugs. This study will compare multiple libraries of different compounds, such as known drugs, kinase inhibitors, macrocycles, and top antimalarial hits discovered in our lab. Prioritizing the hit compounds by their chemical uniqueness will lessen the probability of future drug resistance. This is an important step in drug discovery as this will allow us to increase the interpretability of the datasets by creating new uncorrelated variables that will successively maximize variance. Characterization of the Natural Product inspired compounds will enable us to discover potent, selective, and novel antiplasmodial scaffolds that are unique in the 3-dimensional chemical space and will provide critical information that will serve as advanced starting points for the antimalarial drug discovery pipeline.

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