Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Mining operations negatively impact the environment and, as a result, South African legislation requires that, as part of an Environmental Impact Assessment, an Environmental Management Programme (EMPRs) be developed and implemented to manage all the impacts identified. The Coal Mining Sector was selected for this research because of the important role it plays within the South African economy. In this research, the quality of Environmental Management Programmes within the Coal Mining Sector of South Africa was reviewed. Based on Lee and Colley’s method for reviewing the quality of Environmental Impact Reports, a review package was developed and used for the evaluation of the quality of the Environmental Management Programmes. According to the results, 62% of the Environmental Management Programmes achieved satisfactory quality grades despite omissions and inadequacies still being present. Distinct areas of weaknesses were found, such as confusion about what is required from an EMPR according to the guidelines and regulations of Department of Mineral Resources. Some EMPRs were generic documents with action plans presented that could not practically manage the impacts identified, and in some cases the Environmental Assessment Practitioner (EAP) did not possess the technical knowledge of the mining operation to develop effective action plans to manage the impact identified. All these factors influenced the outcome of the quality evaluation of the EMPRs reviewed. / Master of Environmental Management, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Mining operations negatively impact the environment and, as a result, South African legislation requires that, as part of an Environmental Impact Assessment, an Environmental Management Programme (EMPRs) be developed and implemented to manage all the impacts identified. The Coal Mining Sector was selected for this research because of the important role it plays within the South African economy. In this research, the quality of Environmental Management Programmes within the Coal Mining Sector of South Africa was reviewed. Based on Lee and Colley’s method for reviewing the quality of Environmental Impact Reports, a review package was developed and used for the evaluation of the quality of the Environmental Management Programmes. According to the results, 62% of the Environmental Management Programmes achieved satisfactory quality grades despite omissions and inadequacies still being present. Distinct areas of weaknesses were found, such as confusion about what is required from an EMPR according to the guidelines and regulations of Department of Mineral Resources. Some EMPRs were generic documents with action plans presented that could not practically manage the impacts identified, and in some cases the Environmental Assessment Practitioner (EAP) did not possess the technical knowledge of the mining operation to develop effective action plans to manage the impact identified. All these factors influenced the outcome of the quality evaluation of the EMPRs reviewed. / Master of Environmental Management, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Objective quality evaluation is a key element for the success of the emerging Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies. Although there are extensive economic incentives for the convergence of voice, data, and video networks, packet networks such as the Internet have inherent incompatibilities with the transport of real time services. Under this paradigm, network planners and administrators are interested in ongoing mechanisms to measure and ensure the quality of these real time services. Objective quality assessment algorithms can be broadly divided into a) intrusive (methods that require a reference signal), and b) non intrusive (methods that do not require a known reference signal). The latter group, typically requires knowledge of the network conditions (level of delay, jitter, packet loss, etc.), and that has been a very active area of research in the past decade. The state of the art methods for objective non-intrusive quality assessment provide high correlations with the subjective tests. Although good correlations have been achieved already for objective non-intrusive quality assessment, the current large voice transport networks are in a hybrid state, where the necessary network parameters cannot easily be observed from the packet traffic between nodes. This thesis proposes a new process, the Network Conditions Estimator (NCE), which can serve as bridge element to real-world hybrid networks. Two classifications systems, an artificial neural network and a C4.5 decision tree, were developed using speech from a database collected from experiments under controlled network conditions. The database was composed of a group of four female speakers and three male speakers, who conducted unscripted conversations without knowledge about the details of the experiment. Using mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) as the feature-set, an accuracy of about 70% was achieved in detecting the presence of jitter or packet loss on the channel. This resulting classifier can be incorporated as an input to the E-Model, in order to properly estimate the QoS of a network in real time. Additionally, rather than just providing an estimation of subjective quality of service provided, the NCE provides an insight into the cause for low performance.

Blogs serve multiple purposes, resulting in several types of blogs that vary greatly in terms of quality and content. It is important to evaluate the quality of blogs, which requires appropriate evaluation criteria. Unfortunately, there are minimal studies on framework and the specific criteria and indicators for evaluating the quality of blogs. Moreover, quality is related to user perception, and should therefore be evaluated by the receivers. This dissertation examines the criteria and indicators that blog users consider important for evaluating the quality of blogs, and develops a user-centered framework for evaluating quality by conducting user surveys and post-survey email interviews. The personal characteristics that affect the users’ choices of criteria to evaluate the quality of blogs are examined as well. The study’s findings include 1) the criteria that users consider important when evaluating the quality of blogs are content quality, usability, authority, and blog credibility; 2) the indicators that blog users consider most important for evaluating the quality of blogs are understandability, accuracy, believability, currency, ease of use, and navigation; and 3) gender, education level, age, profession, purpose of use, and specific interests affect the user’s choices of criteria for evaluating the quality of blogs. Future research may involve exploring and applying the framework developed in this study to build automatic quality blog identification system for the purpose of assisting web users and information specialists to identify quality blogs.

Enterprise information systems are increasingly being developed as distributed information systems. Quality attributes of distributed information systems, as in the centralised case, should be evaluated as early and as accurately as possible in the software engineering process. In particular, software measures associated with quality attributes of such systems should consider the characteristics of modern distributed technologies. Early design decisions have a deep impact on the implementation of distributed enterprise information systems and thus, on the ultimate quality of the software as an operational entity. Due to the fact that the distributed-software engineering process affords software engineers a number of design alternatives, it is important to develop tools and guidelines that can be used to assess and compare design artefacts quantitatively. This dissertation makes a contribution to the field of Software Engineering by proposing and evaluating software design measures for distributed enterprise information systems. In previous research, measures developed for distributed software have been focused in code attributes, and thus, only provide feedback towards the end of the software engineering process. In contrast, this thesis proposes a number of specific design measures that provide quantitative information before the implementation. These measures capture attributes of the structure and behaviour of distributed information systems that are deemed important to assess their quality attributes, based on the analysis of the problem domain. The measures were evaluated theoretically and empirically as part of a well defined methodology. On the one hand, we have followed a formal framework based on the theory of measurement, in order to carry out the theoretical validation of the proposed measures. On the other hand, the suitability of the measures, to be used as indicators of quality attributes, was evaluated empirically with a robust statistical technique for exploratory research. The data sets analysed were gathered after running several experiments and replications with a distributed enterprise information system. The results of the empirical evaluation show that most of the proposed measures are correlated to the quality attributes of interest, and that most of these measures may be used, individually or in combination, for the estimation of these quality attributes-namely efficiency, reliability and maintainability. The design of a distributed information system is modelled as a combination of its structure, which reflects static characteristics, and its behaviour, which captures complementary dynamic aspects. The behavioural measures showed slightly better individual and combined results than the structural measures in the experimentation. This was in line with our expectations, since the measures were evaluated as indicators of non-functional quality attributes of the operational system. On the other hand, the structural measures provide useful feedback that is available earlier in the software engineering process. Finally, we developed a prototype application to collect the proposed measures automatically and examined typical real-world scenarios where the measures may be used to make design decisions as part of the software engineering process.

Due to the rapid development of 3D display market, the protection and authentication of the intellectual property rights of 3D multimedia has become an essential concern. As a consequence, the digital watermarking for 3D image and video is attracting considerable attention. The depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) technique has been playing a critical role in 3D contents representation because of its numerous advantages. A good digital watermarking algorithm should be robust to various possible attacks, including geometric distortions and compressions. And di erent from ordinary 2D digital watermarking, there are more speci c requirements for 3D watermarking, especially for DIBR 3D image watermarking. Not only the center view, but also the virtual left and right views can be illegally distributed. Therefore, the embedded watermark information should be accurately extracted from these three views individually for content authentication, even under attacks. In this thesis, we focus on the research of digital watermarking and watermarking based quality evaluation for DIBR 3D images. We first present a 2D image and video watermarking method based on contourlet transform, which is then extended to a robust contourlet-based watermarking algorithm for DIBR 3D images. The watermark is embedded into the center view by quantizing certain contourlet coe cients. The virtual left and right views are synthesized from the watermarked center view and the corresponding depth map. One advantage of our algorithm is its simplicity and practicality. However, the performance on watermark extraction needs to be further improved. As an improvement, a blind watermarking algorithm for DIBR 3D images based on feature regions and ridgelet transform is proposed. The watermarked view has good perceptual quality under both the objective and subjective image quality measures. Compared with other related and state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm shows superiority in terms of watermark extraction and robustness to various attacks. Furthermore, as one of the most promising techniques for quality evaluation, a watermarking based quality evaluation scheme is developed for DIBR 3D images. The qualities of the watermarked center view and the synthesized left and right views under distortions can be estimated by examining the degradation of corresponding extracted watermarks. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme has good performance of quality evaluation for DIBR 3D images under the attacks.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第21072号 / 工博第4436号 / 新制||工||1689(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院工学研究科材料化学専攻 / (主査)教授 大塚 浩二, 教授 松原 誠二郎, 教授 秋吉 一成 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

Påbyggnation är en typ av hållbar stadsutveckling som blir allt vanligare i Sverige. Ett av de gemensamma målen vid påbyggnation, likt andra byggprojekt, är att uppnå en viss förbestämd kvalitet. Designkvalitet kan ses som en del av kvalitetsmålet. Problemet är att designkvalitet är svårdefinierat, ändå finns det ett behov av att mäta och hantera den här typen av värde, dels för kunden och samhället, dels för representanter i design- och byggprocessen. För att tillgodose behovet kan en utvärdering av designkvalitet vara en möjlig lösning. Ett av de senaste verktygen för detta är design quality evaluation (DQE) wheel, utvecklat av Eilouti (2020). Verktyget kan användas för att dra lärdom av projekt vilket blir särskilt viktigt i mindre utforskade områden, till exempel påbyggnation. Frågan är: hur uppnås designkvalitet? Forskning indikerar att arkitekten spelar en central roll. Arkitekten är den aktör som genom sina designintentioner ska se till att kundens mål och behov uppfylls. Däremot finns det få empiriska stöd för kopplingen mellan designintention och designkvalitet. Därför är det relevant att undersöka hur begreppen förhåller sig till varandra. Undersökningen kan ge insikt i hur designkvalitet uppnås, främst genom ökad förståelse för hur arkitektens designintentioner påverkar det slutliga resultatet. För att säkerställa att designintentioner leder till uppnådd designkvalitet pekar forskning på att intentionerna måste kopplas till mätbara resultat. DQE kan vara en lösning som erbjuder dessa mätbara resultat. Examensarbetets syfte är att bidra med ökad förståelse för hur designkvalitet uppnås genom att undersöka relationen mellan designkvalitet och designintention. Undersökningen möjliggörs genom en tillämpning av DQE. Verktyget kan erbjuda den struktur som behövs för att erhålla arkitektens utvärdering av designkvalitet och ta reda på bakomliggande designintentioner. För att uppnå syftet används två primära metoder: först en litteraturundersökning, sedan en fallstudie. I den första delen jämförs och kontrasteras olika teoretiska synsätt på designkvalitet och designintention. Därefter föreslås en definition av begreppen som blir gällande i arbetets kontext. Arbetets andra del innebär en djupdykning i sju olika påbyggnadsprojekt där uppdragsansvarig eller handläggande arkitekt intervjuas. Intervjuerna genomförs för att erhålla arkitektens utvärdering av designkvalitet och ta reda på bakomliggande designintentioner. Resultatet analyseras i tre steg för att kunna dra slutsatser om relationen mellan designkvalitet och designintention. Litteraturundersökningen resulterar i två föreslagna definitioner. (Se avsnitt 3.1.4 respektive 3.3.4 för fullständiga definitioner.) Designkvalitet används i regel för att beskriva en byggnads goda egenskaper med avseende på design. Begreppet är svårdefinierat på grund av dess subjektiva karaktär och därmed omöjliga separation från personliga, samhällsenliga och kulturella förutsättningar. Designintention är en designers beskrivning av mål, syften eller orsaker bakom designrelaterade beslut. Designintentioner skapas utifrån en designers tolkning av kundens prioriterade mål. Resultatet blir därför en kombination av designerns och kundens värderingar. Fallstudien visar att estetik, stads- & miljömässig lämplighet samt identitet & karaktär är de parametrar som prioriteras högst av arkitekterna. Samma parametrar leder även till högst designkvalitet i arkitekternas utvärderingar. Resultatet talar för att arkitekternas prioriterade designintentioner tenderar att resultera i uppnådd designkvalitet. Det betyder att relationen mellan designkvalitet och designintention existerar och att arkitekten är nyckelpersonen i sammanhanget. Analysen indikerar att relationen utgörs av en problemlösande process där arkitekten ansvarar för att säkerställa att designintentionerna leder till uppnådd designkvalitet. Processen är känslig eftersom den påverkas av kundens vilja och arkitektens förmåga att tillämpa sina designintentioner i praktiken. Examensarbetet belyser vikten av arkitektens arbete från intention till slutlig produkt eftersom det kan främja designkvalitet i den färdiga byggnaden. Avgränsningen till påbyggnadsprojekt bidrar till att vidga tillämpningsområdet för designkvalitet och designintention. Tillämpningen av DQE var en förutsättning för examensarbetets genomförande. Däremot kan det argumenteras för att verktyget gör större nytta som diskussionsunderlag än för att kvantifiera designkvalitet. / Vertical extensions of buildings are a type of sustainable urban development with increasing occurrence in Sweden. One of the commonly held goals when vertically extending a building, as in other construction projects, is to achieve a certain pre-determined quality. Design quality can be seen as a part of the quality goal. The problem is that design quality is difficult to define, still there is a need for measuring and managing this type of value, not only for the client and society, but also for actors within the design and building process. To satisfy the need an evaluation of design quality might be a possible solution. One of the most recent tools for this is the design quality evaluation (DQE) wheel, developed by Eilouti (2020). The tool can be used to learn lessons from a project which is especially important in less researched areas, e.g. vertical extensions of buildings. The question is: how is design quality achieved? Research indicates that the architect plays a crucial role. The architect is the actor who through their design intentions should ensure that the clients’ goals and needs are fulfilled. However, there are few empirical studies supporting the connection between design intentions and design quality. That is why it is relevant to examine how these concepts relate to one another. The examination can provide insight into how design quality is achieved, mainly by increased understanding of how the architects’ design intentions are affecting the result. To ensure that the design intentions lead to achieved design quality research imply that the intentions must be connected to testable outcomes. DQE might be a solution providing these testable outcomes.  The purpose of this master thesis is to contribute with increased understanding of how design quality is achieved by examining the relation between design quality and design intention. The examination is enabled due to the application of DQE. The tool can offer a structure for acquiring the architect’s evaluation of design quality and finding out the underlying design intentions. To achieve the purpose two primary methods are being used: first a literature review, then a case study. The first part compares different theoretical viewpoints on design quality and design intention. Thereafter two definitions are proposed which are applicable within the context of this thesis. The second part takes a deeper dive into seven different vertical extension projects where each responsible architect is interviewed. The interviews are conducted to acquire the architect’s evaluation of design quality and to find out the underlying design intentions. The results are analysed in three stages in order to make conclusions about the relation between design quality and design intention.  The literature review results in two proposed definitions. (See section 3.1.4 and 3.3.4 for the complete Swedish definitions.) Design quality is often used to describe a building’s good properties regarding design. The concept is difficult to define because of its subjective nature and therefore impossible separation from personal, societal, and cultural conditions. Design intention is a designer’s description of goals, purposes or reasons behind design related decisions. Design intentions are based on a designer’s interpretation of the client’s prioritised goals. The result is therefore a combination of the designer’s and the client’s values. The case study shows that aesthetics, urban & environmental fit, and identity & character are the parameters which the architects prioritise the highest. The same parameters lead to the highest design quality according to the architects’ evaluations. The results show that the architects’ prioritised design intentions tend to lead to achieved design quality. This means that the relation between design quality and design intention exists and that the architect is the key person in this context. The analysis indicates that the relation consists of a problem-solving process where the architect is responsible of ensuring that the design intentions lead to achieved design quality. The process is sensitive because it is affected by the client’s will and the architect’s ability to apply their design intentions in practise.  This thesis highlights the importance of the architect’s work from intention to product because it can favour the design quality of the finished building. The demarcation to vertical extensions of buildings contribute to widen the areas of applicability for design quality and design intention. The application of DQE was a prerequisite for the realisation of this thesis. However, it can be argued that the tool is better used as a basis for discussion rather than to quantify design quality. / Timber on Top

<p>3D city models have been widely used in different applications such as urban planning, traffic control, disaster management etc. Effective visualisation of 3D city models in various scales is one of the pivotal techniques to implement these applications. In this thesis, a framework is proposed to visualise the 3D city models both online and offline using City Geography Makeup Language (CityGML) and Extensible 3D (X3D) to represent and present the models. Then, generalisation methods are studied and tailored to create 3D city scenes in multi-scale dynamically. Finally, the quality of generalised 3D city models is evaluated by measuring the visual similarity from the original models.</p><p> </p><p>In the proposed visualisation framework, 3D city models are stored in CityGML format which supports both geometric and semantic information. These CityGML files are parsed to create 3D scenes and be visualised with existing 3D standard. Because the input and output in the framework are all standardised, it is possible to integrate city models from different sources and visualise them through the different viewers.</p><p> </p><p>Considering the complexity of the city objects, generalisation methods are studied to simplify the city models and increase the visualisation efficiency. In this thesis, the aggregation and typification methods are improved to simplify the 3D city models.</p><p> </p><p>Multiple representation data structures are required to store the generalisation information for dynamic visualisation. One of these is the CityTree, a novel structure to represent building group, which is tested for building aggregation. Meanwhile, Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) is employed to detect the linear building group structures in the city models and they are typified with different strategies. According to the experiments results, by using the CityTree, the generalised 3D city model creation time is reduced by more than 50%.</p><p> </p><p>Different generalisation strategies lead to different outcomes. It is important to evaluate the quality of the generalised models. In this thesis a new evaluation method is proposed: visual features of the 3D city models are represented by Attributed Relation Graph (ARG) and their similarity distances are calculated with Nested Earth Mover’s Distance (NEMD) algorithm. The calculation results and user survey show that the ARG and NEMD methods can reflect the visual similarity between generalised city models and the original ones.</p> / QC 20100923 / ViSuCity Project