In news articles the focus on named entities is quite common and usually a news case is tied around a person, a company, or similar. One challenge from an information retrieval point of view is that one entity often have more than one way of referring to it. This means that when users use news search engines they have to use the exact same name for the entity as the articles they are interested in use. Therefore the usage of synonyms to refer to the same entity forms the basis of this thesis. We explore the idea of using Wikipedia as a data source for building a large dictionary of named entities and their synonyms. An entity dictionary like that would be very interesting because it make it possible to link synonyms to the same entity. The evaluation shows that Wikipedia is well suited as a source of named entities and synonyms as the semi-structure aids in recognizing the entities and related synonyms. The use of the dictionary in a modified search solution shows on the other hand mixed results. On problem with evaluating a solution like this is that the precision of the different synonyms is usually very high for popular entities, and when we combine different synonyms in the same query we end up giving more weight to the results that use multiple synonyms.

This report investigates JACK Intelligent Agents and JACK Teams, and makes a comparison between the two. The main object was to find indications that point out which modeling paradigm that results in least development effort, and which one that is creating the most feasible platform regarding teamwork construction. The application domain is decision-support systems used in oil production. The aspects evaluated are development effort, degree of coupling, encapsulation of functionality, abstraction level, delegation of autonomy, and scalability. The solutions developed in the comparison had static team formations that included few teammembers. This caused less development effort by using JACK Intelligent Agents, and was the main reason why it was considerate to be the preferred modeling paradigm in this case. This was partly experienced because reasoning based on the actual team membership was not used in the JACK Teams version. The use of roles was used instead, causing more JACK entities where it could have been avoided. Dynamic team formations during runtime were not needed due to the reference problem introduced. Maintaince during runtime, for instance introducing new subteams and changing the role structure was not looked into. Introducing teams in large scale was not performed. These four factors could have caused a different result. The question is if JACK Teams shows its potential through the oil production system designed in this report.

This project is a continuation of the work carried out autumn 2008 by the author, which reviewed the digital communication channels currently used for distribution of student information at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and defined the key design decisions for a mobile service called MSIS. The project proposes a new mobile computer system (MSIS) intended to make user-centric information more easily available to students at NTNU. The system is designed using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), providing a number of services which offers functionality such as a dynamic course schedule, and a location search tool. Furthermore, MSIS makes use of context-awareness and elements of mobile computing, in order to provide a service that dynamically adapts to the situation of the user. A geographical positioning module based on Wi-Fi location fingerprinting technology is described, which makes it possible to determine the position of a handheld device within existing wireless network infrastructure. The project has been carried out in accordance with the design-science research model over a number of implementation and evaluation iterations. A user-driven evaluation of the MSIS service has been conducted among a group of NTNU students. The utility and usability of the system were evaluated by applying observational and empirical evaluation methods in a real-world environment on campus. The user tests identified numerous issues with the initial design, and suggested ideas for enhancements which have been implemented in the final version of the system. The Mobile Service Acceptance Model (MSAM) has been used to examine the factors that are influential for user adoption of mobile services in light of our project. The MSAM instrument measures different facets of a mobile information service, such as the perceived usefulness, ease of use, and usage intention. Our findings confirm that the utility of the MSIS system is perceived as very high, and students would likely benefit from such a system. There is no doubt great potential for a service like MSIS, and it is believed to be a useful addition to existing systems.

The master thesis will extend the students depth study. Through the master thesis the student shall study and evaluate how IT Governance, Enterprise Architecture and IT Strategy are related in StatoilHydro. The student shall also research StatoilHydro´s awareness of the concepts. The student shall propose improvements and/or changes based on this evaluation.

During the fall of 2008 a prototype of an educational multiplayer role-playing game called World of Wisdom (WoW) was developed as part of the specialization project TDT4570. WoW focuses on using knowledge for progressing through the game. The goal of this thesis was to design and develop a user-interface for teachers, that could be used to generate new content for WoW. In this thesis we described the design and implementation of such a user-interface called the WoW World Editor. The World Editor supports generating new maps, creatures, objects and questions for World of Wisdom. By making it easier to create the worlds, the course staff can focus on creating the knowledge for the game. For the students to be able to interact with the course staff while playing the game, we suggest a seperate client for the course staff. This client will then have additional functions that can be used to aid the students with problem, and to get valuable feedback from the players.

Nowadays the computer science is extremely important in business; thanks to it you can automate tasks, streamline processes and obtain information. The best resource for the new companies is the information. I mean, today the information is very necessary with the new technologies. Employers who are responsible to decide in their companies, have begun to understand that the information helps their business and also can be one of the best critical factors that can show us if the company work is successfully or not. (1) In recent years organizations have recognized the importance of managing key resources such as the working hours and the raw materials. ERP applications are often used to standardize business processes and unify data; the importance of that software in the companies is growing every day. Although we also can say that in some cases the ERP software doesn´t solve some business problems because there are processes that aren´t standard or common. Moreover, if we would create a module for our company it has to be usable .The usability is very important because that and the automation will help to increase the performance of coordinators. This project is a study of a particular case of a telecommunications company in which it has found a problem with the production process; In This Project we will be able to solve each problem that will appear in various stages of construction our module. These steps include: a study about if there are problems in the selected area of business, whether buying or building a new module, heuristic techniques and methods to improve the usability, quality of build module using polls, usability guidelines, use case... The results have improved the production of the company and the system provides the necessary information to the coordinators but the coordinators want further improvement. The study of the usability helps users to be ready to use the software correctly.

Mobility of people and their interactions with devices and services that every day become more pervasive in our life is a valuable challenge for system engineers. Locate friends, retrieve multimedia informations from physicals objects, have medical assistance remotely is going to be a commodity for a more and more wide part of the population, including elderly people. In this scenario have an easy way for discovering and communicating with third party services and resources that we encounter in our every day life is going to make the difference between an enjoyable user experience or a frustrating ones that quickly leads to the abandon of a system. Building on the work done in the past about resources discovery and management I study a solution for user-centered interactions with resources and services dynamically discovered and used by the user in nomadic environments. The solution designed make use of embedded devices, addressing the problem encountered in the research from both end-user and developer point of views. The solution proposal make a full use of the service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts focusing on the goal of achieving the most natural human interaction with devices that the user discover on his way, keeping at the same time the framework architecture lightweight and easily extendible by third-party developers, as the SOA paradigm requires. Accessibility and extensibility are achieved on the end-user side by deploying software needed for the personal device (UbiNode) on most common smartphones and providing a easily understable Graphical User Interface; on the developer side by creating a pluggable framework based on xml and Eclipse eRCP runtimes for a fast development of multiple user interface that fits the constrains of the device in which are them deployed in. Work done consists in design and implementation of several platform components and development of prototypes that takes profit from the overall architecture. Developed modules have been deployed end tested on handled devices. UbiCollab provides a solution platform for ubiquitous collaboration scenarios and this thesis has been carried out as a contribution to it. Keywords: Ubiquitous Computing, User Centered collaboration, User Interfaces, Mobile Devices, Discovery Gestures, Object Tagging, UbiCollab.

This report covers the research, design and prototype implementation of a social application for mobile ad-hoc networks, InstantSocial. The main goals of this project has been to look at this exciting field and examine how the European scientific collaborative project MUSIC can be used to develop such an application. The project has been conducted using a Design Science approach. First the field of interest, existing similar applications and technology was examined to get a good view of the current state-of-the-art and choose a suitable prototype application. Then the design of the application was constructed, emphasizing the important features outlined in the project goals. Finally a prototype was developed and tested as a means to prove the correctness and applicability of the design. The results of the project was somewhat divided. Although the developed prototype had limited functionality, mostly because of the current limitations of the used framework, the tests that were performed where positive. Not all of the requirements of the system was successfully implemented, but this was due to limited time available or limitations in the currently available version of the framework rather than a shortage of the design. We conclude that the presented design and approach to context-adaptation is very plausible as a way in which the MUSIC project can be used to develop social application for mobile ad-hoc networks, but that much more work and testing is required before such an application can be fully realized.

The goal for this master thesis is finding trends and behaviors in a highly available database cluster using InfiniBand and RDMA. This will be used to optimize configuration of the segment size in such systems. To find these trends and behaviors, a mockup model has been developed. The model consists of a simple DBMS that uses only the main memory for storing data and a checkpoint method to repair nodes after a node failure. During a repair, the model simulates use of InfiniBand and RDMA during checkpointing. To simulate clients connecting to and using the database, the model includes write operations on the database and measures how many write operations it can process per second. During a repair in a database cluster, one node will flush all of its data to a new node. This is done in small batches, just like in a checkpoint. In this model, it is simulated by a checkpoint module continuously simulating flushing data from one node to another. When the checkpoint is flushing a small part of the database fragment, the model uses Copy on Write to prevent lockout for the transactions. When a node fails the system is repaired by a second node which takes over as fast as possible. The second node must process transactions while transferring all of its data to a spare node. To achieve fast repair time, the system should transfer as big segments as possible. The problem with big segments is that it takes a long time to perform Copy on Write on them. With the mockup model, the repair time is measured, how many write operations are being performed per second and CPU usage depending on the segment size and number of clients using the database. This will give a good indication of what segment size is preferable. The results from the thesis show that there are huge advantages by using state-of-the-art technology such as InfiniBand and RDMA for repair in highly available database clusters. This technology and optimal configuration improves the availability and this thesis gives an indication that the segment size should not be more than 1 % of the database size. With use of InfiniBand and RDMA using this configuration and physical repair, the availability reaches class 9.

This project continues the work started in our depth study project in the fall of 2004, develop- ing a framework for mobile collaborative applications on mobile phones utilizing Personal Area Networks (PANs). This paper describes central, theoretical concepts connected to the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) comput- ing, the Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs) and the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) domains, focusing on "Same-Place-Same-Time" collaboration. We argue how the spread of PAN technology and mobile phones enable for a broad range of new collaborative applications supporting both collocated work and spontaneous interaction. Updated information about relevant technologies and related projects are discussed and evaluated. The requirements for the Peer2Me framework are presented and updated along with a revised and improved design. The design and the requirements are a product of an explorative development effort to develop the next generation of the Peer2Me framework using Java 2 Micro Edition and the Java APIs for Bluetooth wireless technology (JABWT). The Peer2Me framework is then tested on actual developers in a workshop arranged in May 2005. Data gathered from this workshop is used to illustrate the benefits of using a framework like Peer2Me for developing mobile collaborative applications. In addition to the actual Peer2Me framework implementation along with its Bluetooth network module, example applications are designed, implemented and tested in order to verify the suit- ability of the Peer2Me framework in the problem domain. These applications illustrate different kinds of aspects of the Peer2Me framework and the domain of mobile collaborative applications. The tests of these applications are done through enactment of the usage scenarios from which the applications were derived. The main results of this project are the technical products comprised of the Peer2Me framework, the Bluetooth Network module and the example Peer2Me applications, as well as the empirical data supporting the advantages of Peer2Me and the evaluations upon the suitability of the applied technologies.