The purpose of our thesis is to investigate through a survey how specialization affects the perceived scope for discretion of the social worker. The study will also examine how the social worker can customize outpatient care targeted at children and young people. The study's empirics were collected through a web survey that was sent out via email to social workers who worked with children and young people in IFO's outpatient care.  The study examines how social workers' discretion is affected by the organization of social services such as the division of clients within the organization and the way in which they interact. The results indicate that guidelines, norms, and laws affect the social worker's discretion in a way that reduces client-customization. In addition, the study examines how the social worker can client-customize their efforts and which factors influence the degree of client-tailoring. The study shows that previous experience and education affect the scope for discretion in a way that increases client-customization. The empirical study is analysed using Lipsky's theory of street level bureaucrats.

After numerous renewals and reignitions since the initiation of the "War on Cancer" more than five decades ago, the recent reignition of "Moonshot to Cure Cancer" points to the systemic persistence of cancer as a major cause of loss of life and livelihood. Literature points to the diminishing returns of cancer research through time, as well as heterogeneities in cancer research centers' innovation strategies. This dissertation focuses on the strategic decision by cancer research centers to invest their resources in conducting early phases of clinical trials on new candidate drugs/treatments (resembling exploration) or late phases of clinical trials that push established candidates towards acquiring FDA approvals (resembling exploitation). The extensive clinical trials data suggests that cancer research centers are not only different in their emphasis on exploratory trials, but also in how their emphasis is changing over time. This research studies the dynamics of this heterogeneity in cancer research centers' innovation strategies, how experiential learning and capability development interact to cause dynamics of divergence among learning agents, and how the heterogeneity among cancer research centers' innovation strategies is affected by the dynamics of learning from experience and capability development. The findings of this dissertation shows that endogenous heterogeneities can arise from the process of learning from experience and accumulation of capabilities. It is also shown that depending on the sensitivity of the outcome of decisions to the accumulated capabilities, such endogenous heterogeneities can be value-creating and thus, justified. Empirical analysis of cancer clinical trials data shows that cancer research centers learn from success and failure of their previous trials to adopt more/less explorative tendencies. It also demonstrates that cancer research centers with a history of preferring exploratory or FDA trials have the tendency to increase their preference and become more specialized in one specific type (endogenous specialization). These behavioral aspects of the cancer research centers' innovation strategies provide some of the tools necessary to model the behavior of the cancer research efforts from a holistic viewpoint. / Doctor of Philosophy / The "Moonshot to Cure Cancer" was renewed most recently in September 2022. However, renewal and reignition of this national collective effort is nothing new; this effort started as "War on Cancer" in 1971 and has been reignited numerous times. After more than 50 years of our collective battle to cure cancer, it claims almost 600,000 lives annually and remains as the second leading cause of death in the US. There are a wide variety of cancer research centers from all around the world contributing to this collective effort and they make considerably different decisions regarding their investment in research. There is evidence suggesting that some of the research centers' investment decisions are not optimal and can be improved. It has been shown that systems such as patent regulations can be revised to encourage such improved decisions among cancer research centers. This dissertation focuses on the process of clinical trials for new drugs/treatments for cancer. New drugs/treatments have to pass different phases of trials to ensure that they are safe and effective before they can acquire FDA approvals. Cancer research centers decide whether to invest in early phases of clinical trials for new drug/treatment candidates or invest in late phases of trials for candidates that have already passed the early phases. The clinical trials data show that there has been a sharp rise in number of early phases of trials on new drugs/treatments; however, the same rise cannot be seen in the late phases of trials resulting in approvals. It can also be seen that different research centers put different levels of emphasis on initiating early phases of trials for new drugs/treatments (exploration). In this dissertation, the hypothesis is that this ongoing dilemma that cancer research centers face to invest on how much emphasis to put on exploration in their clinical trials is affected by learning from experience. To test this hypothesis, a mathematical model is used to show differences in decisions can be causes solely by learning from experience, when the decision maker is learning "what to do" from success/failure of previous efforts and learning "how to do it" from practicing and accumulating the required skills. Then, the hypothesis is formally tested using the clinical trials data. The results show that cancer research centers learn from the success and failure of their previous exploratory trials when deciding on their emphasis on exploration. Also, they accumulate skills, resources, and capabilities relevant to the type of research the conduct more often and specialize in either of late- or early-phases of trials. The findings of this dissertation show that learning from experience can cause in differences in decisions. It also finds evidence that cancer research centers learn to place different levels of emphasis on exploration in their clinical trials. These findings can later be used in models of the cancer research ecosystem to study how funding structures and policies can be changed to improve the outcomes of our collective effort to cure cancer.

Данная работа посвящена изучению и анализу уровня физической подготовленности студентов 1 курса УрФУ, занимающихся разными спортивными специализациями. В работе представлены результаты исследования уровня развития физических качеств, ориентированные на нормативы комплекса ГТО. А также рассматриваются вопросы эффективного развития физических качеств с использованием современных направлений фитнеса. / This work is devoted to the study and analysis of the level of physical fitness of first-year students of UrFU, engaged in various sports specializations. The paper presents the results of a study of the level of development of physical qualities, focused on the standards of the TRP complex. It also addresses the issues of effective development of physical qualities using modern fitness areas.

The change in the country's specialization has become a determining factor in changing the position of China in the world raw materials markets. Over the past 40 years China had been providing the catching up strategy, which led to spectacular economic transformation. The transformations included the rapid economic growth and increase of the welfare of the people, which were achieved by structural changes in the economy. The purpose of the research is to study the changes in China's specialization in the international division of labor as one of the effects of the catching up strategy. The most effective way of structural transformation of the economy is the catching up strategy with attracting foreign direct investment. The history of China's catching up strategy contains several stages with the structural transformations. The reforms in foreign trade, investment, industry have influenced on changes in the structure of the economy. At the present time China has become a major exporter of FDI. The extraction of raw materials is the main direction of its investment. During an econometric assessment of the factors, which contribute to the welfare of the people of China, it was found that industrial exports had increasingly influenced. With the increase of industrial exports by 1%, per capita GDP in China is growing at $ 2.13 million. However, the results are preliminary due to the lack of observations and can be further refined. Measures to support Chinese industrial exports are aimed not only at increasing foreign trade, but also at developing domestic trade through the import of foreign technology and attracting foreign investment. / Определяющим в изменении позиции Китая на мировых рынках сырья стало изменение специализации страны. За последние 40 лет Китай подвергся впечатляющим экономическим преобразованиям, осуществляя стратегию догоняющего развития. Преобразования нашли свое отражение в быстром экономическом росте и повышению благосостояния народа, которые были достигнуты структурными сдвигами в экономике. Наиболее эффективный способ структурной трансформации экономики — догоняющее развитие с привлечением ПИИ. История догоняющего развития Китая содержит несколько этапов по мере которых происходили соответствующие структурные преобразования. В наибольшей степени на изменение структуры экономики оказали влияние реформы в сфере внешней торговли и инвестиций, а также промышленности. На современном этапе Китай превратился в крупного экспортера ПИИ. Добыча сырья является главным направлением их вложения. В ходе эконометрической оценки факторов, способствующий росту благосостояния народа Китая было выявлено, что в наибольшей степени влияет промышленный экспорт. При увеличении экспорта промышленности на 1%, ВВП на душу населения Китая увеличивается на 2,13 млн. долларов. Однако, результаты носят предварительный характер из-за недостатка наблюдений и в дальнейшем могут быть доработаны. Меры поддержки китайского экспорта промышленности направлены не только на увеличение внешней торговли, но и на развитие внутренней за счёт импорта иностранных технологий и привлечения иностранных инвестиций.

Die Frage, wie Musiktheorien unterschiedlicher Provenienz und Charakteristik auf eine Weise miteinander verknüpft werden können, die ebenso aus fachwissenschaftlicher wie aus wissenschaftstheoretischer Perspektive akzeptabel erscheint, gewinnt für die zunehmend ausdifferenzierte Musiktheorie der Gegenwart mehr und mehr an Bedeutung. Der Beitrag geht dieser Frage nach, indem er erstens diverse Strategien des Umgangs mit theoretischer Diversität in der Analyse referiert und kritisiert, zweitens auf das Inkommensurabilitätsproblem verweist, das sich im Rahmen von Theorierezeption stellt, drittens fünf Thesen zur modifizierenden Theorierezeption diskutiert und viertens Metatheorie als Instrument eines unabschließbaren Prozesses der Selbstreflexion von Theorie konzeptualisiert. / The question of how theories of different origin and characteristics can be combined in a way that seems acceptable for music theorists as well as for philosophers of science is gaining more and more importance for the increasingly differentiated music theory of the present day. The article examines this question first by describing and criticizing various strategies of dealing with theoretical diversity in analysis; second, by referring to the incommensurability problem arising in the context of theory reception; third, by discussing five theses on modified theory reception; and finally, by conceptualizing metatheory as an interminable process of selfreflection of theory.

Over the years, many defense techniques have been proposed by the security community. Even so, few have been adopted by the general public and deployed in production. This limited defense deployment and weak security has serious consequences, as large scale cyber-attacks are now a common occurrence in society. One major obstacle that stands in the way is practicality, the quality of being designed for actual use or having usefulness or convenience. For example, an exploit mitigation design may be considered not practical to deploy if it imposes high performance overhead, despite offering excellent and robust security guarantees. This is because achieving hallmarks of practical design, such as minimizing adverse side-effects like performance degradation or memory monopolization, is difficult in practice, especially when trying to provide a high level of security for users. Secure and practical exploit mitigation design must successfully navigate several challenges. To illustrate, modern-day attacks, especially code re-use attacks, understand that rudimentary defenses such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) will be deployed moving forward. These attacks have therefore evolved and diversified their angles of attack to become capable of leveraging a multitude of different code components. Accordingly, the security community has uncovered these threats and maintained progress in providing possible resolutions with new exploit mitigation designs. More specifically though, defenses have had to correspondingly extend their capabilities to protect more aspects of code, leading to defense techniques becoming increasingly complex. Trouble then arises as supporting such fine-grained defenses brings inherent disadvantages such as significant hardware resource utilization that could be otherwise used for useful work. This complexity has made performance, security, and scalability all competing ideals in practical system design. At the same time, other recent efforts have implemented mechanisms with negligible performance impact, but do so at the risk of weaker security guarantees. This dissertation first formalizes the challenges in modern exploit mitigation design. To illustrate these challenges, this dissertation presents a survey from the perspective of both attacker and defender to provide an overview of this current security landscape. This includes defining an informal taxonomy of exploit mitigation strategies, explaining prominent attack vectors that are faced by security experts today, and identifying and defining code components that are generally abused by code re-use. This dissertation then presents two practical design solutions. Both defense system designs uphold goals of achieving realistic performance, providing strong security guarantees, being robust for modern application code-bases, and being able to scale across the system at large. The first practical exploit mitigation design this dissertation presents is MARDU. MARDU is a novel re-randomization approach that utilizes on-demand randomization and the concept of code trampolines to support sharing of code transparently system-wide. To the best of my knowledge, MARDU is the first presented re-randomization technique capable of runtime code sharing for re-randomized code system-wide. Moreover, MARDU is one of the very few re-randomization mechanisms capable of performing seamless live thread migration to newly randomized code without pausing application execution. This dissertation describes the full design, implementation, and evaluation of MARDU to demonstrate its merits and show that careful design can uphold all practical design goals. For instance, scalability is a major challenge for randomization strategies, especially because traditional OS design expects code to be placed in known locations so that it can be reached by multiple processes, while randomization is purposefully trying to achieve the opposite, being completely unpredictable. This clash in expectations between system and defense design breaks a few very important assumptions for an application's runtime environment. This forces most randomization mechanisms to abandon the hope of upholding memory deduplication. MARDU resolves this challenge by applying trampolines to securely reach functions protected under secure memory. Even with this new calling convention in place, MARDU shows re-randomization degradation can be significantly reduced without sacrificing randomization entropy. Moreover, MARDU shows it is capable of defeating prominent code re-use variants with this practical design. This dissertation then presents its second practical exploit mitigation solution, BASTION. BASTION is a fine-grained system call filtering mechanism aimed at significantly strengthening the security surrounding system calls. Like MARDU, BASTION upholds the principles of this dissertation and was implemented with practicality in mind. BASTION's design is based on empirical observation of what a legitimate system call invocation consists of. BASTION introduces System Call Integrity to enforce the correct and intended use of system calls within a program. In order to enforce this novel security policy, BASTION proposes three new specialized contexts for the effective enforcement of legitimate system call usage. Namely, these contexts enforce that: system calls are only invoked with the correct calling convention, system calls are reached through legitimate control-flow paths, and all system call arguments are free from attacker corruption. By enforcing System Call Integrity with the previously mentioned contexts, this dissertation adds further evidence that context-sensitive defense strategies are superior to context-insensitive ones. BASTION is able to prevent over 32 real-world and synthesized exploits in its security evaluation and incurs negligible performance overhead (0.60%-2.01%). BASTION demonstrates that narrow and specialized exploit mitigation designs can be effective in more than one front, to the point that BASTION not only revents code re-use, but is capable of defending against any attack class that requires the utilization of system calls. / Doctor of Philosophy / Limited security defense deployment and weak security has serious consequences, as large scale cyber-attacks are now a common occurrence. This may be surprising since many defense techniques have been proposed; yet in reality, few have become dopted by the general public. To elaborate, designing an ideal defense that is strong security-wise but does not use any computer resources is challenging. In practice, there is no free lunch, and therefore a design must consider how to best balance security with performance in an effort to be practical for users to deploy their defense. Common tradeoffs include adverse side-effects such as slowing down user applications or imposing significant memory usage. Therefore, practical and strong defense design is important to promote integration into the next generation of computer hardware and software. By sustaining practical design, the needed jump between a proof-of-concept and implementing it on commodity computer chips is substantially smaller. A practical defense should foremost guarantee strong levels of security and should not slow down a user's applications. Ideally, a practical defense is implemented to the point it seems invisible to the user and they don't even notice it. However, balancing practicality with strong security is hard to achieve in practice. This dissertation first reviews the current security landscape - specifically two important attack strategies are examined. First, code re-use attacks, are exactly what they sound like; code re-use essentially reuse various bits and pieces of program code to create an attack. Second, system call abuse. System calls are essential functions that ordinarily allow a user program to talk with a computer's operating system; they enable operations such as a program asking for more memory or reading and writing files. When system calls are maliciously abused, they can cause a computer to use up all its free memory or even launch an attacker-written program. This dissertation goes over how these attacks work and correspondingly explains popular defense strategies that have been proposed by the security community so far. This dissertation then presents two defense system solutions that demonstrate how a practical defense system could be made. To that end, the full design, implementation, and evaluation of each defense system, named MARDU and BASTION, is presented. This dissertation leverages attack insights as well as compiler techniques to achieve its goal. A compiler is an essential developer tool that converts human written code into a computer program. Moreover, compilers can be used to apply additional optimizations and security hardening techniques to make a program more secure. This dissertation's first defense solution, MARDU, is a runtime randomization defense. MARDU protects programs by randomizing the location of code chunks throughout execution so that attackers cannot find the code pieces they need to create an attack. Notably, MARDU is the first randomization defense that is able to be seamlessly deployed system-wide and is backwards compatible with programs not outfitted with MARDU. This dissertation's second defense solution, BASTION, is a defense system that strictly focuses on protection of system calls in a program. As mentioned earlier, system calls are security critical functions that allow a program to talk a computer operating system. BASTION protects the entire computer by ensuring that every time a system call is called by a user program, it was rightfully requested by the program and not maliciously by an attacker. BASTION verifies this request is legitimate by confirming that the current program state meets a certain set of criteria.

[ES] La teoría y las políticas de innovación son más beneficiosas cuando reflejan cambios en las prioridades sociales. Centradas tradicionalmente e inicialmente en el cambio tecnológico, vemos que las políticas de innovación actualmente enfrentan la tarea cada vez más necesaria de abordar las externalidades negativas, especialmente en el contexto de la sostenibilidad social y ambiental. Esto se materializa mejor en el caso de ejemplo de la política de innovación de especialización inteligente en Europa. Como contribución al debate actual en el campo sobre la intersección de la innovación y la sostenibilidad, esta tesis aborda tres preguntas de investigación diferentes centradas en cómo se pueden aprovechar las políticas de innovación para lograr la igualdad, la sostenibilidad y la inclusión. Cada capítulo plantea una pregunta única, se embarca en una revisión de la literatura específica y emplea una metodología personalizada para responder la pregunta en cuestión y, en consecuencia, contribuir a nuestra comprensión del amplio tema de la innovación para la sostenibilidad. La tesis finaliza con la literatura y las contribuciones metodológicas de las preguntas de investigación, además de las recomendaciones de políticas a nivel de empresa, nivel regional y nivel de diseño e implementación de políticas. / [CA] La teoria i la política de la innovació són més beneficioses quan reflecteixen canvis en les prioritats de la societat. Tradicionalment i inicialment centrada en el canvi tecnològic, veiem que la política d'innovació s'enfronta actualment a la tasca cada vegada més necessària d'abordar les externalitats negatives, especialment en el context de la sostenibilitat social i ambiental. Això s'incorpora millor en l'exemple de cas de la política d'innovació d'especialització intel·ligent a Europa. En contribució al debat actual sobre la intersecció de la innovació i la sostenibilitat, aquesta tesi s'adreça a tres qüestions de recerca diferents centrades en com es pot aprofitar la política d'innovació per aconseguir la igualtat, la sostenibilitat i la inclusió. Cada capítol fa una pregunta única, s'embarca en una revisió bibliogràfica específica i utilitza una metodologia personalitzada per respondre a la pregunta en qüestió i, per tant, contribuir a la nostra comprensió de l'ampli tema de la innovació per a la sostenibilitat. La tesi acaba amb la literatura i les contribucions metodològiques de les qüestions de recerca, a més de les recomanacions polítiques a nivell de firma, regional i de disseny i implementació de polítiques. / [EN] Innovation theory and policy are most beneficial when they reflect shifts in societal priorities. Traditionally and initially focused on technological change, we see innovation policy currently grappling with the increasingly necessary task of addressing negative externalities, especially in the context of social and environmental sustainability. This is best embodied in the case-example of the Smart Specialization innovation policy in Europe. In contribution to the current debate in the field on the intersection of innovation and sustainability, this thesis targets three different research questions focused on how innovation policy can be leveraged to achieve equality, sustainability, and inclusivity. Each chapter asks a unique question, embarks on a specific literature review, and employs a tailored methodology to answer the question at hand and accordingly contribute to our understanding of the broad theme of innovation for sustainability. The thesis ends with the literature and methodological contributions of the research questions in addition to the policy recommendations at the firm level, regional level and policy design and implementation level. / Moujaes, G. (2024). Focusing on the Bright Sides of Innovation: Three essays on the role of National Knowledge Dynamics, Inclusive Innovation Teams and Policy Monitoring [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/203886

Bakgrund: Barnsjuksköterskor har en högre pediatrisk kompetensnivå än allmänsjuksköterskor. Teoretisk kunskap i kombination med erfarenhet skapar kompetens och utöver kompetensutveckling bidrar specialistutbildning till förbättring av vården, personlig tillfredställelse, löneutveckling och möjligheter till befordran. Trots detta ökar integreringen av allmänsjuksköterskor inom hälso- och sjukvården för barn och ungdomar till följd av den rådande bristen på barnsjuksköterskor. Syfte: Syftet med studien är att belysa barnsjuksköterskans professionella erfarenheter av att arbeta med barn och ungdomar i hälso- och sjukvården efter genomförd specialistsjuksköterskeutbildning. Metod: Studien var av kvalitativ design där data samlades in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med åtta barnsjuksköterskor som tagit specialistsjuksköterskeexamen mellan år 2020-2024. Data analyserades med kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultat: Analysen resulterade i fyra kategorier: Specialistkompetens ger ökad trygghet, Specialistkompetens ger ökad respekt, Specialistkompetens medger nya arbetsmarknadsmöjligheter och Specialistkompetens fördjupas med erfarenhet. Konklusion: Specialistutbildning innebär en kompetensutveckling för barnsjuksköterskor och en förbättrad kvalitet av arbetet med barn och ungdomar. För att motivera fler allmänsjuksköterskor att specialisera sig krävs en tydlig skillnad i arbetet före och efter specialisering. Det är även avgörande att utbildningen betalas av arbetsgivaren för att specialisering ska vara gynnsam för allmänsjuksköterskor. / Background: Pediatric nurses have a higher level of pediatric competence than general nurses. Theoretical knowledge combined with experience creates competence, and in addition to competence development, specialist training contributes to the improvement of care, personal satisfaction, salary progression, and promotion opportunities. Nevertheless, the integration of general nurses in pediatrics is increasing due to the current shortage of pediatric nurses. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to shed light on the pediatric nurse's professional experiences of working with children and adolescents in health and medical care after completed specialist nurse training. Method: The study was of a qualitative design where data was collected through semi-structured interviews with eight pediatric nurses who graduated specialist nursing degrees between the years of 2020-2024. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results: The analysis resulted in four categories: Specialist competence gives increased security, Specialist competence gives increased respect, Specialist competence allows new labor market opportunities and Specialist competence deepens with experience. Conclusion: Specialist training means competence development for pediatric nurses and an improved quality of work with children and adolescents. In order to motivate more general nurses to specialize, a clear difference in the work before and after specialization is required. It is also crucial that the training is paid for by the employer in order for specialization to be beneficial for general nurses.

Dans les systèmes informatiques, la consommation énergétique est devenue le facteur le plus limitant de la croissance de performance observée pendant les décennies précédentes. Conséquemment, les paradigmes d'architectures d'ordinateur et de développement logiciel doivent changer si nous voulons éviter une stagnation de la performance durant les décennies à venir.Dans ce nouveau scénario, des nouveaux designs architecturaux et micro-architecturaux peuvent offrir des possibilités d'améliorer l'efficacité énergétique des ordinateurs, grâce à la spécialisation matérielle, comme par exemple les configurations de cœurs hétérogènes, des nouvelles unités de calcul et des accélérateurs. D'autre part, avec cette nouvelle tendance, le développement logiciel devra faire face au manque de portabilité de la performance entre les matériels toujours en évolution et à l'écart croissant entre la performance exploitée par les programmeurs et la performance maximale exploitable du matériel. Pour traiter ce problème, la contribution de cette thèse est une méthodologie et la preuve de concept d'un cadriciel d'auto-tuning à la volée pour les systèmes embarqués. Le cadriciel proposé peut à la fois adapter du code à une micro-architecture inconnue avant la compilation et explorer des possibilités d'auto-tuning qui dépendent des données d'entrée d'un programme.Dans le but d'étudier la capacité de l'approche proposée à adapter du code à des différentes configurations micro-architecturales, j'ai développé un cadriciel de simulation de processeurs hétérogènes ARM avec exécution dans l'ordre ou dans le désordre, basé sur les simulateurs gem5 et McPAT. Les expérimentations de validation ont démontré en moyenne des erreurs absolues temporels autour de 7 % comparé aux ARM Cortex-A8 et A9, et une estimation relative d'énergie et de performance à 6 % près pour le benchmark Dhrystone 2.1 comparée à des CPUs Cortex-A7 et A15 (big.LITTLE). Les résultats de validation temporelle montrent que gem5 est beaucoup plus précis que les simulateurs similaires existants, dont les erreurs moyennes sont supérieures à 15 %.Un composant important du cadriciel d'auto-tuning à la volée proposé est un outil de génération dynamique de code, appelé deGoal. Il définit un langage dédié dynamique et bas-niveau pour les noyaux de calcul. Pendant cette thèse, j'ai porté deGoal au jeu d'instructions ARM Thumb-2 et créé des nouvelles fonctionnalités pour l'auto-tuning à la volée. Une validation préliminaire dans des processeurs ARM ont montré que deGoal peut en moyenne générer du code machine avec une qualité équivalente ou supérieure comparé aux programmes de référence écrits en C, et même par rapport à du code vectorisé à la main.La méthodologie et la preuve de concept de l'auto-tuning à la volée dans des processeurs embarqués ont été développées autour de deux applications basées sur noyau de calcul, extraits de la suite de benchmark PARSEC 3.0 et de sa version vectorisée à la main PARVEC.Dans l'application favorable, des accélérations de 1.26 et de 1.38 ont été observées sur des cœurs réels et simulés, respectivement, jusqu'à 1.79 et 2.53 (toutes les surcharges dynamiques incluses).J'ai aussi montré par la simulation que l'auto-tuning à la volée d'instructions SIMD aux cœurs d'exécution dans l'ordre peut surpasser le code de référence vectorisé exécuté par des cœurs d'exécution dans le désordre similaires, avec une accélération moyenne de 1.03 et une amélioration de l'efficacité énergétique de 39 %.L'application défavorable a été choisie pour montrer que l'approche proposée a une surcharge négligeable lorsque des versions de noyau plus performantes ne peuvent pas être trouvées.En faisant tourner les deux applications sur les processeurs réels, la performance de l'auto-tuning à la volée est en moyenne seulement 6 % en dessous de la performance obtenue par la meilleure implémentation de noyau trouvée statiquement. / In computing systems, energy consumption is limiting the performance growth experienced in the last decades. Consequently, computer architecture and software development paradigms will have to change if we want to avoid a performance stagnation in the next decades.In this new scenario, new architectural and micro-architectural designs can offer the possibility to increase the energy efficiency of hardware, thanks to hardware specialization, such as heterogeneous configurations of cores, new computing units and accelerators. On the other hand, with this new trend, software development should cope with the lack of performance portability to ever changing hardware and with the increasing gap between the performance that programmers can extract and the maximum achievable performance of the hardware. To address this issue, this thesis contributes by proposing a methodology and proof of concept of a run-time auto-tuning framework for embedded systems. The proposed framework can both adapt code to a micro-architecture unknown prior compilation and explore auto-tuning possibilities that are input-dependent.In order to study the capability of the proposed approach to adapt code to different micro-architectural configurations, I developed a simulation framework of heterogeneous in-order and out-of-order ARM cores. Validation experiments demonstrated average absolute timing errors around 7 % when compared to real ARM Cortex-A8 and A9, and relative energy/performance estimations within 6 % for the Dhrystone 2.1 benchmark when compared to Cortex-A7 and A15 (big.LITTLE) CPUs.An important component of the run-time auto-tuning framework is a run-time code generation tool, called deGoal. It defines a low-level dynamic DSL for computing kernels. During this thesis, I ported deGoal to the ARM Thumb-2 ISA and added new features for run-time auto-tuning. A preliminary validation in ARM processors showed that deGoal can in average generate equivalent or higher quality machine code compared to programs written in C, including manually vectorized codes.The methodology and proof of concept of run-time auto-tuning in embedded processors were developed around two kernel-based applications, extracted from the PARSEC 3.0 suite and its hand vectorized version PARVEC. In the favorable application, average speedups of 1.26 and 1.38 were obtained in real and simulated cores, respectively, going up to 1.79 and 2.53 (all run-time overheads included). I also demonstrated through simulations that run-time auto-tuning of SIMD instructions to in-order cores can outperform the reference vectorized code run in similar out-of-order cores, with an average speedup of 1.03 and energy efficiency improvement of 39 %. The unfavorable application was chosen to show that the proposed approach has negligible overheads when better kernel versions can not be found. When both applications run in real hardware, the run-time auto-tuning performance is in average only 6 % way from the performance obtained by the best statically found kernel implementations.

This study explored the link between teachers’ inputs and process and students’ academic achievement in Junior Secondary Certificate (JSC) Mathematics for the period 2006 to 2010.The outcome (teacher effectiveness) was obtained by means of value added measures (students’ aggregate JSC Mathematics scores for 2006 to 2010 by school). One hundred and fifty JSC schools out of a total of 573 constituted the units of analysis for the study. The data regarding teachers were obtained by means of self-administered questionnaires, and JSC Mathematics results from 2006 to 2010 were obtained from the Directorate of National Examinations and Assessment (DNEA). Multi-correlation and regression techniques at alpha =0.001; 0.05 and 0.10 were used to analyse the link between teachers’ inputs and processes, and students’ academic achievement in JSC Mathematics. The null hypotheses formulated for the study were tested at the 0.05 (5%) level of significance. In summary, it appears that the various aspects of teachers’ inputs (teachers’ educational qualifications, teaching experience, subject specialisation etc.), processes (standards-based professional development, standards-based classroom activities, and classroom management beliefs) are related to students’ academic achievement in JSC Mathematics. In particular, a linear combination of the following variables had a significant and positive association with students’ academic achievement in JSC Mathematics: teachers’ major in Mathematics (teachers’ inputs); teachers’ usage of whole class discussion (standards-based classroom activities); perceived knowledge of algebra; teachers’ professional development in interdisciplinary instruction; teachers’ review of students’ homework/assignments; and students talking to other students about how to solve mathematics problems. Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in general, and some classroom practices were not significantly related to students’ academic achievements. This study, therefore, recommends that teachers’ professional development should focus on the subject matter that the teachers will be teaching, as well as alignment of teachers’ learning opportunities with real work experience using actual curriculum materials and assessment. / Educational Studies / D. Ed. (Didactics)