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Uppsala Vatten, which is the water supply provider in Uppsala Municipality, has a leakage of 14 percent in their water distribution network. This amounts to a yearly loss of 2.4 million cubic meters of processed drinking water and 1.8 GWh of wasted energy. Uppsala Vatten has a set goal of lowering the leakage from 14 to 10 percent by 2022.  The company has around 40 wireless flow meters and is interested in using data analysis on flow data collected by these to find leaks more rapidly and thus decrease water loss. In this paper five algorithms for change detection were implemented and evaluated for the application of identifying leaks in water flow data. Implementation and testing of these algorithms on both real flow data and artificially created data was conducted to determine their suitability for the application and for relative comparison. Successful identification of leaks in real data was achieved for all five algorithms although the performance varied among them.

<p> Scientists widely accept that modern agriculture is unsustainable, but the best methods for addressing unsustainability are still contested (Constance, Konefal, and Hatanaka 2018). Grassroots sustainable agriculture communities have long participated in the exploration of solutions for agriculture unsustainability, and their momentum continues to grow in the technical age. Practitioners of grassroots sustainable agriculture use many information systems that were not originally built to support the design of agricultural systems. Based on ethnographic research with two grassroots sustainable agriculture communities, I show that participants&rsquo; personal and community values frequently clashed with those embedded in information systems, including ones used to look for and manage plant information. Furthermore, I demonstrate a range of information challenges that participants faced in the absence of tools designed to support their specific work. I argue that practitioners of grassroots sustainable agriculture need information systems tailored to their goals and values in order to productively address barriers to designing and building agroecosystems for their communities. </p><p> This dissertation provides an example of how to involve communities in the development of information technology artifacts and strengthen efforts to support sustainability via technological interventions. First, I engaged in two grassroots sustainable agriculture communities as a participant, experiencing their practices, values, and information challenges first hand. Then, I worked with the communities to create a plant database web application (SAGE Plant Database) that supports agroecosystem design in local contexts. Members of the communities participated in the design, development, and data population stages so that the SAGE Plant Database supports their design context and upholds their technological and holistic sustainability values. At the foundation of the database is a plant ontology grounded in the participants&rsquo; practice of designing agroecosystems. My comparative analysis of the design of the SAGE Plant Database to other databases demonstrates its relevance due to its emphasis on agroecological relationships among plants and between plants and the environment, the inclusion of ethnobotanical data, and the embedded community values. By engaging in this research, I seek to make progress towards transforming the technology-supported food system into one that furthers food security, food sovereignty, and holistic sustainability.</p><p>

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2000. / Also available online at the MIT Theses Online homepage <http://thesis.mit.edu>. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-86). / The evolution of the Internet has deep influence on the way businesses are managed. It not only has great impact on the way businesses approach their customers but also on the interface with their trading partners, employees, as well as their internal businesses processes. Today, developing an electronic business implies the total redesign of the enterprise; in other words it involves the total transformation of the way we do business. This thesis will address the following main question: How do different companies within the telecommunications industry gain competitive advantage from business to business e-commerce? The main focus of the study will be to compare and contrast business to business e-commerce practices for two companies within the following matrix: Maturity, Incumbent, Attacker: Company, AT&T, MCI Worldcom. In order to answer the main question I will be focusing on the following issues (for the above mentioned cases): ** What have been their approaches to b2b e-commerce? ** What has been the economic impact, due to the b2b e-commerce practice? ** What are the implications on the corporate strategy level? Have any of these companies redefined their culture and/or business model? ** What is the impact of such b2b e-commerce initiative on the value proposition? ** What appears to be the critical success factors in leveraging B2B e-commerce? ** What have been the constraints and or limitations? / by Fabio A. Naranjo O. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. / Designing a flexible system with real options is a method for managing uncertainty. This research introduces the concept of "complex" real options, which are composed of interconnected echnological, organizational and process components. "Complex" real options differ from the "standard" real options described in the literature in the option life-cycle activities of design, evaluation and management. To address the challenges posed by "complex" real options, the Life-Cycle Flexibility (LCF) Framework was created. The framework addresses issues along the entire life-cycle of an option, in both technical and social system dimensions. Two case studies were considered in this research to better understand "complex" real options and test the LCF Framework: 1) a large blended wing body aircraft in a commercial aircraft manufacturing enterprise and, 2) Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) capabilities in an urban region with multiple public and private stakeholders. For the case studies, both a quantitative and qualitative analysis was completed. System dynamics and traffic demand models were used to quantitatively evaluate flexibility for each case study. Forty interviews with practitioners were conducted to better understand the practical challenges associated with flexible systems. / (cont.) This research found that there are significant differences between "standard" and "complex" real options. In the design phase, enterprise architecture issues must be considered either as a precursor or simultaneously with the design of the option. In the evaluation stage, option valuation techniques more sophisticated than those found in the real options literature were needed to value the "complex" real options. In the management stage, political considerations were of great importance as political opposition could prevent option exercise from occurring. Without the LCF framework, existing processes for evaluating real options are not adequate for taking into account the interacting technical, organizational and process components of 'complex" real options. In summary, this research provides new insights into the design, evaluation and management of "complex" real options. / by Joshua Bryan McConnell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-76). / Access to straightforward yet robust tools to quantify the impact of renewable energy resources on air emissions from fossil fuel power plants is important to governments aiming to improve air quality and reduce greenhouse gases at least cost. It is also important to renewable energy developers seeking to gather support and facilitate permitting of their projects. Due to the inherent complexities of the electric power system, it is difficult to determine the effects of renewable energy generators on emissions from fossil fuel power plants. Additionally, because there are a variety of methods for calculating "avoided emissions," which differ in complexity and transparency, and which provide dissimilar results, there remains uncertainty in estimating avoided emissions. Guidance from government authorities on which method to use is too flexible to provide a robust framework to enable decision makers to evaluate environmental solutions. This thesis informs decision making first by highlighting important issues to consider when analyzing the impact of renewable energy resources on emissions, then by reviewing current guidance on the matter, and finally by comparing existing methods of calculating avoided emissions. Several methods are further evaluated by applying them to potential offshore wind energy resources in New England, including the proposed Cape Wind project. / (cont.) This analysis suggests that the potential avoided emissions of the Cape Wind project are significant, though lower than previously stated by the project developers and supporters. The usefulness of the available literature on calculating avoided emissions suggests that governments and electric industry analysts should continue to share information on different methods and work together to revise the current guidance. To further increase analytical capacity, government agencies should collect, organize, and disseminate more data on the electricity system including power plant operations and emissions. The ability to accurately quantify avoided emissions will help policymakers design programs with the right incentives to reduce emissions from power plants and will enable them to describe the environmental benefits of doing so. To facilitate development of clean energy resources, it is proposed that more weight is given to environmental benefits such as avoided emissions in environmental impact assessments. To assist in reducing emissions, it is recommended that renewable energy and energy efficiency resources are allowed to participate more directly in emissions markets. / by Michael Peter Berlinski. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-86). / In this thesis, the control of hypertension provides the backdrop for my effort to investigate how clinical trial design has evolved for antihypertensive drug submissions reviewed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 1988 and 2001. To do this, I have constructed and undertaken a preliminary analysis of a number of quantitative surrogate measures of complexity and scale, such as trial design, numbers of patients, treatment lengths, active drug comparators, number of indications pursued, number of indications approved, and approval times. In addition, I review how practice guidelines for the treatment of hypertension have changed with advancing clinical and biological knowledge. I attempt to investigate whether a link exists between the changing characteristics of clinical trials for antihypertensive therapies and the evolving guidelines for treating hypertension, promulgated by the Joint National Committee Report on the Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure, (JNC), a committee assembled by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. / (cont.) Although the number of New Drug Applications (NDAs) examined in the antihypertensive class is too small to permit rigorous statistical analyses, I am nonetheless able to observe a number of apparent trends within the set of NDA submissions for antihypertensives approved by the FDA. Specific trends I observe in support of increasing trial complexity include: 1) trial sizes increase over time as measured by patient enrollments per trial (p-value = 0.003); 2) clinical trial designs over time have included greater numbers of arms per trial (p-value = 0.022); and 3) the number of drug-drug interaction studies in antihypertensive NDAs has increased with time (p-value = 0.027). These trends offer preliminary support for the hypothesis that clinical trials associated with NDA applications for antihypertensives have become more complex over the last two decades. The mechanisms responsible for the observed increase in complexity are less clear. Based on available information, I cannot determine if FDA guidance documents or informal correspondence were responsible for making antihypertensive clinical trials more complicated, or whether pharmaceutical companies introduced greater complexity into the trial design for commercial reasons. / (cont.) Furthermore, while I observe that FDA guidelines did not precisely track changes in JNC guidelines for treating hypertension, it is not clear whether the discrepancies are meaningful. Future research might attempt to identify more precisely the causes of increasing clinical trial complexity, and attempt to relate trial complexity to the cost of drug development more generally. / by John Simon Howe MacNeil. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / In the second half of the twentieth century, American wildlife biologists incorporated Cold War-era surveillance technologies into their practices in order to render wild animals and their habitats legible and manageable. One of the most important of these was wildlife radio-tracking, in which collars and tags containing miniature transmitters were used to locate individual animals in the field. In addition to producing new ecological insights, radio-tracking served as a site where relationships among scientists, animals, hunters, animal rights activists, environmentalists, and others involved in wildlife conservation could be embodied and contested. While scholars have tended to interpret surveillance technologies in terms of the extension of human control over nature and society, I show how technological, biological, and ecological factors made such control fragmentary and open to reappropriation. Wildlife radio-tracking created vulnerabilities as well as capabilities; it provided opportunities for connection as well as for control. I begin by showing how biologists in Minnesota and Illinois in the early 1960s used radio-tracking to establish intimate, technologically-mediated, situated relationships with game animals such as ruffed grouse, which they hoped would bolster their authority vis-a-vis recreational hunters. I then show how the technique was contested by environmentalists when biologists applied it to iconic "wilderness wildlife" such as grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park in the 1960s and 1970s. One way for biologists to render radio-tracking acceptable in the face of such opposition was to emphasize its continuity with traditional practices, as they did in a radio-tagging study of tigers in Nepal in the 1970s. / (cont.) Another way was to shift to less invasive techniques of remote sensing, such as the bioacoustic surveys of bowhead whales off Alaska's Arctic coast that were conducted in the 1980s after a proposal to radio-tag whales was rejected by marine mammalogists and Ifiupiat whalers. Finally, wildlife biologists could reframe radio-tracking as a means for popular connection rather than expert control, as they did by broadcasting the locations of satellite-tagged albatrosses to schoolchildren, gamblers, and the general public via the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. / by Etienne Samuel Benson. / Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS

Thesis: Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-206). / Through the mode of conceptual history, this dissertation examines some of the forms dissent could take within academic social science in the United States from roughly 1945-1970. The concept in question is "conflict." There are many stories one could tell about this concept and its transformations in postwar American social science, but in this dissertation I focus on one in particular: how certain social scientists sought to frame conflict as a problem of knowledge, by stretching the concept to fit the global proportions of the bipolar world that seemed to have emerged from World War II, and then using that conceptualization to oppose the Cold War. The dissertation first considers a specific moment of conceptual change, when some social scientists sought to redefine "conflict" in the immediate aftermath of World War II, so that it would be capacious enough to describe conflict at all levels of analysis, from the intrapersonal to the international. From there, it follows a cadre of social scientists who used that novel conceptualization to build an intellectual movement around a new journal and research center starting in the mid- 1950s. The scholars who participated in that movement, known as "peace research" or ''conflict resolution," endeavored to construct a "general theory of conflict," which they would then employ to challenge the notion that the Cold War was inevitable. The language of mid-century social science was the idiom in which they expressed their dissent. Although this was to become an international movement, this dissertation focuses on its American incarnation, which came to fruition at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor beginning around 1957. The dissertation then looks closely at how two of the leading theorists of that movement modeled conflict in the early 1960s, and considers the ethical and political impulses that animated their work, demonstrating that it was possible for some intellectuals to inhabit the dual role of academic social scientist and social critic in the early 1960s. It concludes with a brief set of reflections on the United States Institute of Peace, an independent federal institute established in 1984 to embody the dream of "conflict resolution." / by Marie Elizabeth Burks. / Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, June 2004. / "May 2004." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-253). / This dissertation recounts the development of graphic models of human bodies and virtual reality simulators for teaching anatomy and surgery to medical students, residents, and physicians. It considers how researchers from disciplinary cultures in medicine, engineering, and computer programming come together to build these technologies, bringing with them values and assumptions about bodies from each of their disciplines, values and assumptions that must be negotiated and that often are made material and embedded in these new technologies. It discusses how the technological objects being created privilege the body as a dynamic and interactive system, in contrast to the description and taxonomic body of traditional anatomy and medicine. It describes the ways that these technologies create new sensory means of knowing bodies. And it discusses the larger cultural values that these technologies reify or challenge. The methodology of this dissertation is ethnography. I consider in-depth one laboratory at a major medical school, as well as other laboratories and researchers in the field of virtual medicine. I study actors in the emerging field of virtual medicine as they work in laboratories, at conferences, and in collaborations with one another. I consider the social formations that are developing with this new discipline. Methods include participant observation of laboratory activities, teaching, surgery, and conferences and extensive, in-depth interviewing of actors in the field. I draw on the literatures in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, the sociology of science, technology, and medicine, and the history of science and technology to argue that "bodies of information" are part of a bio-engineering revolution. / (Cont.) that is making human bodies more easily viewed and manipulated. Science studies theorists have revealed the constructed, situated, and contingent nature of technoscientific communities and the objects they work with. They also have discussed how technoscientific objects help create their subjects and vice versa. This dissertation considers these phenomena within the arena of virtual medicine to intervene in debates about the body, about simulation, and about scientific cultures. / by Rachel Prentice. / Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS