Bakgrund: Tidigare forskning visar att konsumenter i allmänhet har blivit mer medvetna om de miljöproblem som kan uppstå, i och med en ökad konsumtion. Allt fler företag har börjat ändra inriktning på sina marknadsföringstrategier för att skapa en grönare identitet. Detta är ett svar på konsumenters ökade efterfrågan på miljövänligare alternativ. Företagen investerar stora resurser på att implementera dessa strategier. Ett problem som därför behöver undersökas är om det verkligen gör någon nytta för företaget i slutändan att använda sig av gröna marknadsföringsstrategier. I studien undersöks, om konsumenter har grönare attityder gentemot ett företag (Max), som har en grönare marknadsföringsstrategi än huvudkonkurrenterna (Burger King och McDonalds). Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att ta reda på om konsumenter i generation Y:s attityder skiljer sig åt, mellan företag med olika grad av gröna marknadsföringsstrategier. Metod: Studien utgår ifrån en deduktiv ansats med ett kvantitativt tillvägagångssätt. Datainsamlingen har skett i form av en enkätundersökning med 152 respondenter i åldrarna 21 till 39 år. Slutsats: Studien visar att ett företag med väletablerad grön marknadsföringsstrategi (Max) uppfattas som grönare hos konsumenterna, än huvudkonkurrenterna (Burger King och McDonalds). / Background: Previous research shows that consumers in general have become more aware of the environmental problems that may occur, with an increased consumption. More and more companies have begun to refocus their marketing strategies to create a greener identity. This is a response to consumers demands for greener alternatives. The companies are investing substantial resources to implement these strategies. A problem that therefore needs to be examined is whether it really do any good for the companies in the end, to use green marketing strategies. The study examines if consumers have greener attitudes toward a company (Max), which has a marketing strategy that is greener than it’s main competitors’ (Burger King and McDonalds). Purpose: The purpose of this study is to find out whether consumers of Generation Y's attitudes differ between companies with different degrees of green marketing strategies. Method: The study is based on a deductive approach with a quantitative method. Data has been collected in the form of a questionnaire survey with 152 respondents aged 21-39 years. Conclusion: The study shows that a company with a well-established green marketing strategy (Max) is perceived as greener by the consumers, than it’s main competitors (Burger King and McDonalds).

In his paper introducing fuzzy sets, L.A. Zadeh describes the difficulty of assigning some real-world objects to a particular class when the notion of class membership is ambiguous. If exact classification is not obvious, most people approximate using intuition and may reach agreement by placing an object in more than one class. Numbers or ‘degrees of membership’ within these classes are used to provide an approximation that supports this intuitive process. This results in a ‘fuzzy set’. This fuzzy set consists any number of ordered pairs to represent both the class and the class’s degree of membership to provide a formal representation that can be used to model this process. Although the fuzzy approach to reasoning and classification makes sense, it does not comply with two of the basic principles of classical logic. These principles are the laws of contradiction and excluded middle. While they play a significant role in logic, it is the violation of these principles that gives fuzzy logic its useful characteristics. The problem of this representation within a database system, however, is that the class and its degree of membership are represented by two separate, but indivisible attributes. Further, this representation may contain any number of such pairs of attributes. While the data for class and membership are maintained in individual attributes, neither of these attributes may exist without the other without sacrificing meaning. And, to maintain a variable number of such pairs within the representation is problematic. C. J. Date suggested a relation valued attribute (RVA) which can not only encapsulate the attributes associated with the fuzzy set and impose constraints on their use, but also provide a relation which may contain any number of such pairs. The goal of this dissertation is to establish a context in which the relational database model can be extended through the implementation of an RVA to support of fuzzy data on an actual system. This goal represents an opportunity to study through application and observation, the use of fuzzy sets to support imprecise and uncertain data using database queries which appropriately adhere to the relational model. The intent is to create a pathway that may extend the support of database applications that need fuzzy logic and/or fuzzy data.

Master of Science / Department of Geology / Abdelmoneam Raef / This research presents a workflow integrating several post-stack seismic attributes to assist in understanding the development history of Weirman Field, Ness County, KS. This study contributes to shaping future drilling plans by establishing a workflow combining analysis of seismic attributes and well cuttings to locate a channel fill zone of better reservoir quality, and to highlight reservoir boundaries due to compartmentalization. In this study, I have successfully outlined a fluvial channel, which is expected to be significantly different in terms of petrophysical properties. The Pennsylvanian aged Cherokee sandstones that potentially comprise channel fill lithofacies, in this study, have been linked to oil production throughout the state of Kansas. It is important to understand channel sandstones when evaluating drilling prospects, because of their potential as an oil reservoir and unpredictable shapes and locations. Since their introduction in the 1970s, seismic attributes have become an essential part of lithological and petrophysical characterization of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Seismic attributes can correlate to and help reveal certain subsurface characteristics and specific geobodies that cannot be distinguished otherwise. Extracting and analyzing acoustic impedance, root-mean-square amplitude and amplitude attenuation, guided by a time window focused on the top of the Mississippian formation, resulted in an understanding of the key seismic channel-facies framework and helped to explain some of the disappointing drilling results at Weirman Field. To form a better understanding of these seismic attributes, this study combined certain attributes and overlayed them in partially transparent states in order to summarize and better visualize the resulting data. A preliminary study of spectral decomposition, which was introduced in the late 1990s, was preformed, and a more in-depth study of this multi-resolution attribute is recommended for future study of this particular field. This study also recommends integrating the revealed compartmentalization boundary and the seismic channel-facies framework in future drilling plans of Weirman Field.

Attributive absolute constructions in contemporary French The aim of this master thesis is a detailed analysis of French attributive absolute constructions (att. AC) with emphasis on their semantic characteristics. Att. AC is an example of what is called "secondary predication", i.e. a non-finite predicative structure modifying the primary predication, see a typical example "les yeux fermés", 'the eyes closed', in the sentence "Marie est assise, les yeux fermés.", 'Mary sits with her eyes closed.'. The main function of the att. AC is the modification of the head noun through the relation of inalienable possession (IP), or a part - whole relation, between this noun, which is mostly a human being, and an entity conceptualized in the att. AC. The thesis finds its main source in a monograph about AC written by Suzanne Hanon (1989), which is here completed by a qualitative analysis of syntactic and semantic factors that come into play in the formation of att. AC. Att. AC are approached form the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar as conceptualizations of the IP (or part - whole) paradigm and it is proposed their description as a prototype-based category with some instances more typical (see the example above) than others (e.g. att. AC with an adverbial function or modifying an...

Um dos grandes desafios em mineração de dados é a integração de dados temporais ao seu processo. Existe um grande número de aplicações emergentes que envolvem dados temporais, incluindo a identificação de transações fraudulentas em cartões de crédito e ligações telefônicas, a detecção de intrusão em sistemas computacionais, a predição de estruturas secundárias de proteínas, a análise de dados provenientes de sensores, entre muitas outras. Neste trabalho, tem-se interesse na classificação de séries temporais que representam sinais de áudio. Como aplicação principal, tem-se interesse em classificar sinais de insetos coletados por um sensor óptico, que deve ser capaz de contar e classificar os insetos de maneira automática. Apesar de serem coletados opticamente, os sinais capturados se assemelham a sinais de áudio. O objetivo desta pesquisa é comparar métodos de classificação por similaridade e por extração de atributos que possam ser utilizados no contexto da classificação de insetos. Para isso, foram empregados os principais métodos de classificação de sinais de áudio, que têm sido propostos para problemas como reconhecimento de instrumentos musicais, fala e espécies animais. Neste trabalho, é mostrado que, de modo geral, a abordagem por extração de atributos é mais eficaz do que a classificação por similaridade. Mais especificamente, os melhores resultados são obtidos com a utilização de coeficientes mel-cepstrais. Este trabalho apresenta contribuições significativas em outras aplicações, também relacionadas à análise de séries temporais e sinais de áudio, por similaridade e por extração de atributos / One of the major challenges in data mining is the integration of temporal data to its process. There are a number of emerging applications that involve temporal data, including fraud detection in credit card transactions and phone calls, intrusion detection in computer systems, the prediction of secondary structures of proteins, the analysis of data from sensors, and many others. In this work, our main interest is the classification of time series that represent audio signals. Our main interest is an application for classifying signals of insects collected from an optical sensor, which should count and classify insects automatically. Although these signals are optically collected, they resemble audio signals. The objective of this research is to compare classification methods based on similarity and feature extraction in the context of insects classification. For this purpose, we used the main classification methods for audio signals, which have been proposed for problems such as musical instrument, speech and animal species recognition. This work shows that, in general, the approach based on feature extraction is more accurate than the classification by similarity. More specifically, the best results are obtained with mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients. This work also presents significant contributions in other applications, also related to the analysis of time series and audio signals by similarity and feature extraction

Quando há interesse em monitorar a variância de uma característica da qualidade de interesse através de gráfico de controle por variáveis, o gráfico S2 é a alternativa mais usual. Entretanto, há situações onde mensurar a característica da qualidade é caro, consome mais tempo por unidade de inspeção, requer maior esforço dos operadores quanto à obtenção dos dados ou envolve ensaios destrutivos. Nestes casos, a classificação da variável contínua em categorias através de um dispositivo torna-se uma alternativa interessante. A avaliação pode ser mais rápida, a análise e o equipamento utilizado podem ser mais simples, de modo que o custo final da inspeção seja menor. O objetivo do trabalho é propor um gráfico de controle por atributos para monitoramento da variabilidade. Para tanto a estatística GS2 é calculada e gráfico sinaliza se GS2 > LC, LC limite de controle determinado de modo que minimize o ARL1, fixado um valor de ARL0. Como resultado a performance do gráfico GS2 é comparada ao gráfico S2 em termos de ARL1. / In cases aiming at monitoring the variance of a products quality characteristics using a variable control chart, chart S2 is the most used alternative. However, in some situations, this solution can be expensive, demand more time per individual inspected unit, demand greater efforts from operators to acquire data or involve destructive tests. In such cases, the use of a gauge measurement tool to classify the continuous variable into categories, becomes an interesting alternative. The assessment can be faster, the analysis and the tool used can be simple, resulting in less costly final inspections. This work proposes the use of an attribute control chart to monitor variability. Statistics GS2 is calculated and control chart signalize if GS2 > CL, whereas CL is the determined control limit, minimizing ARL1 for a fixed value of ARL0. GS2 control chart performance is compared to S2 chart based on ARL1.

Quando há interesse em monitorar a variância de uma característica da qualidade de interesse através de gráfico de controle por variáveis, o gráfico S2 é a alternativa mais usual. Entretanto, há situações onde mensurar a característica da qualidade é caro, consome mais tempo por unidade de inspeção, requer maior esforço dos operadores quanto à obtenção dos dados ou envolve ensaios destrutivos. Nestes casos, a classificação da variável contínua em categorias através de um dispositivo torna-se uma alternativa interessante. A avaliação pode ser mais rápida, a análise e o equipamento utilizado podem ser mais simples, de modo que o custo final da inspeção seja menor. O objetivo do trabalho é propor um gráfico de controle por atributos para monitoramento da variabilidade. Para tanto a estatística GS2 é calculada e gráfico sinaliza se GS2 > LC, LC limite de controle determinado de modo que minimize o ARL1, fixado um valor de ARL0. Como resultado a performance do gráfico GS2 é comparada ao gráfico S2 em termos de ARL1. / In cases aiming at monitoring the variance of a products quality characteristics using a variable control chart, chart S2 is the most used alternative. However, in some situations, this solution can be expensive, demand more time per individual inspected unit, demand greater efforts from operators to acquire data or involve destructive tests. In such cases, the use of a gauge measurement tool to classify the continuous variable into categories, becomes an interesting alternative. The assessment can be faster, the analysis and the tool used can be simple, resulting in less costly final inspections. This work proposes the use of an attribute control chart to monitor variability. Statistics GS2 is calculated and control chart signalize if GS2 > CL, whereas CL is the determined control limit, minimizing ARL1 for a fixed value of ARL0. GS2 control chart performance is compared to S2 chart based on ARL1.

Com o crescimento do volume e dos tipos de dados, a necessidade de analisar e entender o que estes representam e como estão relacionados tem se tornado crucial. Técnicas de visualização baseadas em projeções multidimensionais ganharam espaço e interesse como uma das possíveis ferramentas de auxílio para esse problema, proporcionando um forma simples e rápida de identificar padrões, reconhecer tendências e extrair características antes não óbvias no conjunto original. No entanto, a projeção do conjunto de dados em um espaço de menor dimensão pode não ser suficiente, em alguns casos, para responder ou esclarecer certas perguntas feitas pelo usuário, tornando a análise posterior à projeção crucial para a correta interpretação da visualização observada. Logo, a interatividade, aplicada à necessidade do usuário, é uma fator essencial para análise. Neste contexto, este projeto de mestrado tem como principal objetivo criar metáforas visuais baseadas em atributos, através de medidas estatísticas e artefatos para detecção de ruídos e grupos similares, para auxiliar na exploração e análise dos dados projetados. Além disso, propõe-se disponibilizar, em navegadores Web, as técnicas de visualização de dados multidimensionais desenvolvidas pelo Grupo de Processamento Visual e Geométrico do ICMC-USP. O desenvolvimento do projeto como plataforma Web inspira-se na dificuldade de instalação e execução que certos projetos de visualização possuem, como problemas causados por diferentes versões de IDEs, compiladores e sistemas operacionais. Além disso, o fato do projeto estar disponível online para execução tem como propósito facilitar o acesso e a divulgação das técnicas propostas para o público geral. / With the growing number and types of data, the need to analyze and understand what they represent and how they are related has become crucial. Visualization techniques based on multidimensional projections have gained space and interest as one of the possible tools to aid this problem, providing a simple and quick way to identify patterns, recognize trends and extract features previously not obvious in the original set. However, the data set projection in a smaller space may not be sufficient in some cases to answer or clarify certain questions asked by the user, making the posterior projection analysis crucial for the exploration and understanding of the data. Thus, interactivity in the visualization, applied to the users needs, is an essential factor for analysis. In this context, this master projects main objective consists to create visual metaphors based on attributes, through statistical measures and artifacts for detecting noise and similar groups, to assist the exploration and analysis of projected data. In addition, it is proposed to make available, in Web browsers, the multidimensional data visualization techniques developed by the Group of Visual and Geometric Processing at ICMC-USP. The development of the project as a Web platform was inspired by the difficulty of installation and running that certain visualization projects have, mainly due different versions of IDEs, compilers and operating systems. In addition, the fact that the project is available online for execution aims to facilitate the access and dissemination of technical proposals for the general public.

One of the major demand related risks for companies that produce consumer electronics goods is change in consumer preferences over time as reflected in the weights they attach to the attributes of products. This contributes to the difficulty of predicting whether consumers will purchase a new product or not and the accuracy of such forecasts can have significant ramifications for companies’ strategies, profitability and even their chances of survival. Knowledge of attribute-weights and accurate forecasts of new products can give companies better insights during the product development stages, inform go-no-go decisions on whether to launch a developed product and also support decisions on whether a recently launched product should be withdrawn or not due to poor early stage sales. Despite the important implications of change in attribute-weights, no research has investigated the extent to which such changes occur and impact on the accuracy of forecasts of the future market share of these products. Prior to the current research, it was assumed that the weights are constant over time – even when the nature of the attributes was assumed to change. To investigate these concerns choice based conjoint (CBC) was applied to data gathered in a longitudinal survey of consumer choices relating a range of consumer electronic products, where innovation has different rates and the product life cycles are various. This allowed an assessment of the extent to which the weights of attributes of choice-based conjoint models change over a six months period for consumer durable products and the degree to which this variability is dependent on the nature of the product. It demonstrates that the change in weights is greater for products that have high technological complexity and shorter lifecycles and also links the changeability of weights to the characteristics of potential consumers. The results of thesis demonstrate that the assumption of constant weights can potentially lead to inaccurate market share forecast for high-tech, short life-cycle products that are launched several months after the choice-based modelling has been conducted.

"Storing data on untrusted storage makes secure data sharing a challenge issue. On one hand, data access policies should be enforced on these storage servers; on the other hand, confidentiality of sensitive data should be well protected against them. Cryptographic methods are usually applied to address this issue -- only encrypted data are stored on storage servers while retaining secret key(s) to the data owner herself; user access is granted by issuing the corresponding data decryption keys. The main challenges for cryptographic methods include simultaneously achieving system scalability and fine-grained data access control, efficient key/user management, user accountability and etc. To address these challenge issues, this dissertation studies and enhances a novel public-key cryptography -- attribute-based encryption (ABE), and applies it for fine-grained data access control on untrusted storage. The first part of this dissertation discusses the necessity of applying ABE to secure data sharing on untrusted storage and addresses several security issues for ABE. More specifically, we propose three enhancement schemes for ABE: In the first enhancement scheme, we focus on how to revoke users in ABE with the help of untrusted servers. In this work, we enable the data owner to delegate most computation-intensive tasks pertained to user revocation to untrusted servers without disclosing data content to them. In the second enhancement scheme, we address key abuse attacks in ABE, in which authorized but malicious users abuse their access privileges by sharing their decryption keys with unauthorized users. Our proposed scheme makes it possible for the data owner to efficiently disclose the original key owner's identity merely by checking the input and output of a suspicious user's decryption device. Our third enhancement schemes study the issue of privacy preservation in ABE. Specifically, our proposed schemes hide the data owner's access policy not only to the untrusted servers but also to all the users. The second part presents our ABE-based secure data sharing solutions for two specific applications -- Cloud Computing and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In Cloud Computing cloud servers are usually operated by third-party providers, which are almost certain to be outside the trust domain of cloud users. To secure data storage and sharing for cloud users, our proposed scheme lets the data owner (also a cloud user) generate her own ABE keys for data encryption and take the full control on key distribution/revocation. The main challenge in this work is to make the computation load affordable to the data owner and data consumers (both are cloud users). We address this challenge by uniquely combining various computation delegation techniques with ABE and allow both the data owner and data consumers to securely mitigate most computation-intensive tasks to cloud servers which are envisaged to have unlimited resources. In WSNs, wireless sensor nodes are often unattendedly deployed in the field and vulnerable to strong attacks such as memory breach. For securing storage and sharing of data on distributed storage sensor nodes while retaining data confidentiality, sensor nodes encrypt their collected data using ABE public keys and store encrypted data on storage nodes. Authorized users are given corresponding decryption keys to read data. The main challenge in this case is that sensor nodes are extremely resource-constrained and can just afford limited computation/communication load. Taking this into account we divide the lifetime of sensor nodes into phases and distribute the computation tasks into each phase. We also revised the original ABE scheme to make the overhead pertained to user revocation minimal for sensor nodes. Feasibility of the scheme is demonstrated by experiments on real sensor platforms. "