In order to develop a better understanding of the process of development and deployment of automated systems, this thesis examines aspects of project execution and knowledge transfer in the context of a large automation project. <br /><br /> Background issues of project execution are examined, including the challenges of knowledge sharing in project development, as well as a brief discussion of measures of project success. The lifecycle of a large automation project is presented, including aspects of development and the development team, as well as design challenges inherent in the development process of a successful automation project which consisted of approximately 11,000 hours of combined effort by vendor and customer development teams. <br /><br /> Human factors aspects of large automation projects are explored, including an investigation of the workings of a large project team, by examining the cognitive aspects of the project team, as well as ecological aspects of the automation development process. <br /><br /> Using an interview methodology that can be termed the "echo method", project team members were interviewed in order to elicit helpful and unhelpful behaviours exhibited by other team members throughout the project. The results of these interviews are categorized and examined in the context of both knowledge management and social networks. Common themes in interview comments are identified, and related to both the areas of knowledge management and social networks. <br /><br /> Results indicated that team member experience and availability affect overall team performance. However, overlapping capabilities within a team were found to allow the team to adapt to changing circumstances, as well as to overcome weaknesses in team member availability. Better understanding of team interactions and capabilities supports improvements in project performance, ultimately delivering higher quality automation and streamlining the development process.

The objective of this project is to improve the performance of the Gnutella peer-to-peer protocol (version 0.4) by introducing a semantic-social routing model and several categories of interest. The Gnutella protocol requires peers to broadcast messages to their neighbours when they search files. The message passing generates a lot of traffic in the network, which degrades the quality of service. We propose using social networks to optimize the speed of search and to improve the quality of service in a Gnutella based peer-to-peer environment. Each peer creates and updates a friends list from its past experience, for each category of interest. Once peers generate their friends lists, they use these lists to semantically route queries in the network. Search messages in a given category are mainly sent to friends who have been useful in the past in finding files in the same category. This helps to reduce the search time and to decrease the network traffic by minimizing the number of messages circulating in the system as compared to standard Gnutella. This project will demonstrate by simulating a peer-to-peer type of environment with the JADE multi-agent system platform that by learning other peers interests, building and exploiting their social networks (friends lists) to route queries semantically, peers can get more relevant resources faster and with less traffic generated, i.e. that the performance of the Gnutella system can be improved.

Sammanfattning Titel: Ge ditt varumärke ett lyft! – en studie om hur företag bygger och stärker sina varumärken i sociala medier. Författare: Emilia Sjögren och Sofie Tellram. Handledare: Navid Ghannad. Nivå: Kandidatuppsats, marknadsföring (15hp), VT 2012. Nyckelord: Sociala medier, Varumärke, Kommunikation, Sociala nätverk, Bloggar. Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att beskriva hur företag kommunicerar i sociala medier samt vad som är syftet med att kommunicera. Genom detta vill vi få ökad kunskap och förståelse för hur företag kan bygga upp och stärka sina varumärken genom sociala medier. Metod: Uppsatsen har en kvalitativ metod med en deduktiv ansats i vilken tre fallföretag intervjuats. Företagen är kunniga inom sociala medier och arbetar aktivt med dessa. Teoretiskreferensram: Detta avsnitt inleds med traditionella kommunikationsteorier följt av kommunikation i sociala medier. Teoriavsnittet avslutas med övergripande teori om varumärken. Empirisk studie: I denna del presenteras de intervjuer som genomförts med tre fallföretag. Slutsats: Uppsatsens slutsats är att företag bygger och stärker sina varumärken i sociala medier genom olika aktiviteter och utifrån vad som är företagets syfte med kommunikationen väljer de socialt media. / Abstract Title: Give your brand a lift! – a study of how companies build and strengthen their brands in social media. Authors: Emilia Sjögren and Sofie Tellram. Adviser: Navid Ghannad. Level: Bachelor thesis in marketing (15 Swedish credits), Spring 2012. Keywords: Social media, Brands, Communication, Social networks, Blogs. Purpose: Our purpose is to describe how companies communicate in social media to build and strengthen their brands and to describe the purpose of the communication in social media. Our purpose is also to increase our knowledge and understanding of how companies build and strengthen their brands through social media. Method: This thesis has a qualitative method with a deductive approach in which three case studies are studied. The companies have high knowledge in the given topic and work active with social media. Theoreticalframework: This part of the thesis begins with traditional communicationtheories followed by communication in social media. The part ends with a comprehensive theory about brands with leads to a model which summarizes our theoretical framework. Empiricalframework: In this part the results of the interviews with the three Case studies are presented. Conclusion: The study shows that companies build and strengthen their brands in social media through different activities. Depending on the companies purpose it chooses a social media to communicate in.

This thesis has examined how expatriate managers in Russia create and use social networks with other individuals, in order to be successful in their assignment on an international unit. The study has also focused on how corporations can benefit from these networking activities conducted by the expatriates. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with expatriate managers on location in Russia in order to answer the research question. The interviews have later been analyzed by using a theoretical framework mainly based on the social capital theory and the main findings are as follows. Expatriate managers in Russia create networks with other individuals in order to both receive new business opportunities but also for adjusting to life in Russia. Corporations themselves do also benefit from these social networks, since they can create foundations for new business opportunities and increase corporations general image. The limitations of this study are that only Swedish expatriates have been included in the presented empirical material.

In this paper, there are three policy scenarios that are explored and discussed. The first scenario comes from a dataset where little information is known about individual nodes and connection weights are placed based on the economic theory of increasing or constant returns. The second dataset was derived by taking a group of academic researchers (without any knowledge beyond co authorship alliances) working on a joint venture and exploring what combined research ventures would be most beneficial for future research outputs. More information concerning individual nodes and connections is given in this dataset, but the weights on connections are still developed according to rules of economic theory. The final set of data is developed by viewing the same co-authorship alliances as in the second scenario, but instead the data is examined more thoroughly and more accurate maps of authors connection weights are generated.

Online social networks have quickly become the most popular destination on the World Wide Web. These networks are still a fairly new form of online human interaction and have gained wide popularity only recently within the past three to four years. Few models or descriptions of the dynamics of these systems exist. This is largely due to the difficulty in gaining access to the data from these networks which is often viewed as very valuable. In these networks, members maintain list of friends with which they share content with by first uploading it to the social network service provider. The content is then distributed to members by the service provider who generates a feed for each member containing the content shared by all of the member's friends aggregated together. Direct access to dynamic linkage data for these large networks is especially difficult without a special relationship with the service provider. This makes it difficult for researchers to explore and better understand how humans interface with these systems. This dissertation examines an event driven sampling approach to acquire both dynamics link event data and blog content from the site known as LiveJournal. LiveJournal is one of the oldest online social networking sites whose features are very similar to sites such as Facebook and Myspace yet smaller in scale as to be practical for a research setting. The event driven sampling methodology and analysis of the resulting network model provide insights for other researchers interested in acquiring social network dynamics from LiveJournal or insight into what might be expected if an event driven sampling approach was applied to other online social networks. A detailed analysis of both the static structure and network dynamics of the resulting network model was performed. The analysis helped motivated work on a model of link prediction using both topological and content-based metrics. The relationship between topological and content-based metrics was explored. Factored into the link prediction analysis is the open nature of the social network data where new members are constantly joining and current members are leaving. The data used for the analysis spanned approximately two years.

Abstract Like the other developing countries, there was an obvious dual structural economy in the process of economic transition in PRC. There were a lot of rural surplus labor forces in the agricultural sector, and massive underemployments in the industrial sector resulted from imbalanced development policies of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central-planning economic system. Moreover, the formation of dual structure in PRC was partly in response to differences of natural environment. The most important is that it was caused deeply political and social institutions of Chinese characteristics. With economic reform all the more, large urban-rural gap brought about rural labor mobility from rural to rural, or mobility from underdeveloped interior region to developed coastal region. In the process of mobility, social networks play key role, which provided non-native labors some employment opportunities, information and some places to stay. But the kinds of networks were strengthened by discriminations of local residents¡¦ collective exclusiveness, which resulted in rural-urban dual structure divided into two sub-structures further. People of two sub-structures exclude each other for self-benefits on the one hand, and there would be mutual actions and competitions mutually on the other hand. Labor allocation was the most easily influenced by polity, society and economy of a nation. Therefore, in the meanwhile labor mobility emerged in the geographical space or economic structure, and there would be implications of economic transitions. When we explore the differences of economic development through expression of labor mobility that was helpful to probe into institutional changes of China and to explain differences of economic development and structure between regions. Consequently, this paper makes labor mobility to be a kind of indicators to examine economic development, which would be useful for us to find diversities of innate characters of economic development between provinces of China.

Abstracts The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between the entrepreneurial planning and social networks to realize their positive effects. In this thesis the entrepreneurial planning is defined as the opportunity, business model, resource, and entrepreneurial team. Social networks are connections to people which concentrate on friend, family and colleague. This thesis takes advantage of the qualitative research by in-depth interviews combined with literature review to come to the following research findings: (1)Friends have the very strong positive effects to the resource and entrepreneurial team. (2)The personality of the entrepreneurs is the critical element to do the integration in entrepreneurial planning and social networks. (3)Experienced entrepreneurs have the better ability to integrate or exercise social networks to the entrepreneurial planning on hand than non-experienced ones. (4) As the entrepreneur one has to build up one¡¦s own social networks in daily time. There is some future research recommendations presented as follows. (1)Participant of the interview should focus on the experienced entrepreneurs. (2)Taking advantage of the regression method to make priority of the social networks. Key words: entrepreneurial planning, social network, entrepreneur, positive effects.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2009. / Title from title screen (site viewed October 15, 2009). PDF text: xi, 168 p. : col. ill. ; 1 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3369393. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.