The fast growing online encyclopedia concept presents original and innovative features by taking advantage of information technologies. The links connecting the articles is one of the most important instances of these features. In this thesis, we present our work on discovering missing links in Wikipedia articles. This task is important for both readers and authors of Wikipedia. Readers will bene&amp / #64257 / t from the increased article quality with better navigation support. On the other hand, the system can be employed to support authors during editing. This study combines the strengths of different approaches previously applied for the task, and proposes its own techniques to reach satisfactory results. Because of the subjectivity in the nature of the task / automatic evaluation is hard to apply. Comparing approaches seems to be the best method to evaluate new techniques, and we offer a semi-automatized method for evaluation of the results. The recall is calculated automatically using existing links in Wikipedia. The precision is calculated according to manual evaluations of human assessors. Comparative results for different techniques are presented, showing the success of our improvements. Our system employs Turkish Wikipedia (Vikipedi) and, according to our knowledge, it is the &amp / #64257 / rst study on it. We aim to exploit the Turkish Wikipedia as a semantic resource to examine whether it is scalable enough for such purposes.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), whose basic aim is the contribution of scientific developments and providing services have been showing an increasing interest in evaluation of productivity and quality. In fact, productivity and quality evaluation is essential for all type of organizations since the evaluation helps organization to set short and long term goals by defining the current situations, future expectations and the roadmap to fulfill these expectations. The studies on evaluation of academic productivity and quality have led to development of new academic fields such as Bibliometrics, Scientometrics and Informetrics. Consequently, new academic journals specialized on these disciplines have emerged. Moreover, during the last twenty years, as an outcome of these new emerging academic fields, several university ranking systems have been developed both at national and global level. Although these university ranking systems have attracted attention / they have been criticized due to a number of issues such as inappropriateness of indicators chosen, scoring procedure adopted, etc. In this study, an academic performance evaluation and ranking system has been developed and implemented. The new system which processes about 2,000 world universities is based on data from non subjective, reliable and universally accepted online sources. The scoring procedure includes statistical analysis and data has been collected via a tool developed for this purpose to eliminate human errors.

Estimation and measurement of the size of software is crucial for project management activities. Functional size measurement is one of the most frequently used methods to measure size of software and COSMIC is one of the popular methods for functional size measurement. Although precise size measurement is critical, the results may differ because of the errors made in the measurement process. The erroneous measurement results cause lack of confidence for the methods as well as reliability problems for effort and cost estimations. This research proposes an error prevention model for COSMIC Functional Size Measurement method to increase the reliability of the measurements. The prevention model defines data movement patterns for different types of the functional processes and a cardinality table to prevent errors. We validated the prevention model with two different case studies and observed that it can decrease errors up to 90% in our case studies.

It is a commonly held belief that the integration of user research data into the design process can bring great benefits / and there have been many studies that not only examine these benefits, but have also suggested how these researches may be carried out. However, effective integration relies as much on the way information gathered from user researches is delivered to the designer as the quality of the information gathered. Examples of how user research findings are communicated can be found in literature / but what is lacking is a structured approach to developing deliverables with a framing of discussions about effectiveness, considering the practitioner&rsquo / s needs and expectations. This study aims to investigate how user research findings should be communicated to the designers in order to maintain effectiveness in integration of the findings to the design process. A model and strategies and guidelines to achieve effective communication are proposed as the result. In order to propose them the methodology involves three main stages, including a literature search, an in-depth interview with the practicing designers and a verification questionnaire to confirm the findings of the previous two stages. The results of the study reveal expected outcomes of the user research activity by designers as the dimensions of effective communication of user research findings. Moreover qualities of the delivery mediums and informational content of the deliverables are identified from practitioners&rsquo / perspectives. The outcome of the study is a set of strategies and guidelines that the researches should consider, while designing new deliverables and planning communication activities for delivering user research findings to the design process.

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are becoming a part of our daily lives in various forms of application. Their success depends highly on the accuracy of the digital data they use. In networks where characteristics change by time, time-based network analysis algorithms provide results that are more accurate. However, these analyses require time-based travel speed data to provide accurate results. Conventionally, traffic data are usually obtained using the data provided from loop-detectors. These detectors usually exist on main arteries, freeways and highways / they rarely exist on back roads, secondary roads and streets due to their deployment costs. Today, telematics systems offer fleet operators to track their fleet remotely from a central system. Those systems provide data about the behaviors of vehicles with time information. Therefore, a tracking system can be used as an alternative to detector-based systems on estimating travel speeds on networks. This study aims to provide methods to estimate network characteristics using the data collected directly from fleets consisting of global positioning system (GPS) receiver equipped vehicles. GIS technology is used to process the collected GPS data spatially to match digital road maps. After matching, time-dependent characteristics of roads on which tracked vehicles traveled are estimated. This estimation provides data to perform a time-dependent network analysis. The methods proposed in this study are tested on traffic network of Middle East Technical University campus. The results showed that the proposed methods are capable of measuring time-dependent link-travel times on the network. Peak hours through the network are clearly detected.

As applications like IPTV and VoD (Video on demand) are gaining popularity, it is becoming more important to study the behavior of video signals in the Internet access infrastructures such as ADSL and cable networks. Average delay, average jitter and packet loss in these networks affect the quality of service, hence transmission and access speeds need to be determined such that these parameters are minimized. In this study the behavior of the above mentioned IP networks under variable bit rate (VBR) video traffic is investigated. ns-2 simulator is used for this purpose and actual as well as artificially generated signals are applied to the networks under test. Variable bit rate (VBR) traffic is generated synthetically using ON/OFF sources with ON/OFF times taken from exponential or Pareto distributions. As VBR video shows long range dependence with a Hurst parameter between 0.5 and 1, this parameter was used as a metric to measure the accuracy of the synthetic sources. Two different topologies were simulated in this study: one similar to ADSL access networks and the other behaving like cable distribution network. The performance of the networks (delay, jitter and packet loss) under VBR video traffic and different access speeds were measured. According to the obtained results, minimum access speeds in order achieve acceptable quality video delivery to the customers were suggested.

In this thesis, we study improvement of product quality in manufacturing industry by identifying and optimizing influential process variables that cause defects on the items produced. Real data provided by a manufacturing company from the metal casting industry were studied. Two well-known approaches, logistic regression and decision trees, were used to model the relationship between process variables and defect types. The approaches used were compared.

Since wireless network technology has advanced swiftly and dropped in price, it became a widely used networking option among numerous organizations and even single home users. In spite of their widespread usage by private sector, wireless networks are still undesired alternative for the governments due to security concerns. Although wireless networks possessed lots of proven and documented security flaws at first, with the latest researches and developments this condition ameliorated by the time and wireless networks became much more robust to various security attacks. In this thesis, a secure wireless network architecture that will allow exchange of unclassified information, using 802.11 (Wi-fi) and 802.16 (WIMAX), will be proposed that could be established by governments in case of emergency situations, namely natural disasters or wars, where cable infrastructure becomes unavailable.

Software testing is an important phase the of software development cycle which reveals faults and ensures correctness of the developed software. Distributed real-time systems are mostly safety critical systems for which the correctness and quality of the software is much more significant. However, majority of the current testing techniques have been developed for sequential (non real-time) software and there is a limited amount of research on testing distributed real-time systems. In this thesis, a proposed approach in the academic literature testing distributed real-time systems using a distributed test architecture is implemented and compared to existing software testing practices in a software development company on a case study. Evaluation of the results show the benefits of using the considered distributed test approach on distributed real-time systems in terms of software correctness.

This study investigates the connection between design patterns, object oriented (OO) quality metrics and software maintainability. The literature on OO metrics, design patterns and software maintainability are reviewed, the relation between OO metrics and software maintainability is investigated, and then, in terms of obtained maintainability indicator metrics, the maintainability change of an application due to usage of design patterns is observed.