<p>The aim of this study was to observe the housing support team (boendestödssteamet) in Västerås City in its visiting work and how they empowered clients. Tenants are visited by social workers, in its visiting works, when the habitants have rental charge debts. Participating observations is common in case studies, but also in fieldwork which was the foundation in our study. Our method of collecting data consisted of a triangulation; unstructured interviews with social workers, participating observations and a following up with a questionnaire. We took part in participating observations of social workers whilst visiting tenants with rental charge debts. The social services in Västerås City are getting 120-125 reports concerning rental debts from the landlords every month. We visited 46 tenants and it resulted in 23 of them paying their rental debts. All of the tenants have not paid their rental debts. We have seen how em-powering social workers activity is. Empowerment has been seen in individuals while regain-ing their own power, but also in the community when taking control over their problems with too large rental debts. Empowerment becomes a social work tool, in their visiting work, in helping tenants.</p>

The cooperative design approach, which research and practice have proven to be successful in several ways, is based on understanding users and their contexts through a variety of methods. This approach of working closely together with the users, however, is not the same thing as letting the users decide themselves what to design. Rather it means that designers in an interdisciplinary research team, working in close collaboration with the users, will use their design skills and collected knowledge about the users to produce good designs. Though cooperative design has proven successful, there are ways in which it could be improved. Cooperative design derived as a result of criticism about the lack of focus on users in the design process. In this sense, cooperative design has been the critical view, whereas socio-cultural perspectives such as gender, values and power relations have been either suppressed, deliberately or not, or not taken into consideration to the full extent that they could be. In contrast, three important elements of cultural studies research are meaning, identity and power. Research in this field examines the relationship between people and context, and between cultural and social practices, as well as on forces that change or preserve power structures. One aim of this thesis is to emphasise the importance of these issues within cooperative design. The focus of my thesis is to, through a phenomenological approach and a critical view of the different cooperative design projects I have participated in, discuss issues that have either been part of the projects’ structure, or have been imposed on the projects by circumstances that perhaps could not be foreseen. Three main issues that need further investigation to understand how they affect the design process are discussed: language and meaning, the individual in the group-oriented activities of cooperative design, and finally power relations and structures. I use myself as the subject through which the socio-cultural and critical viewpoints are shown. My aim is to show that there are aspects of the individual researcher in the cooperative design process that impact the design space and design. Through a critical discussion of the projects and related issues, this thesis argues that the cooperative design process can involve data and methods that we do not always know how to handle. As a result, we can miss important aspects of the research or end up in difficult dilemmas. Therefore, we need to better understand on what grounds we make design decisions in the cooperative design process, investigate what effect the individual has in group-oriented design processes, and examine how culture, language and power structures guide us and how we use methods such as triangulation. I believe that researchers need to evaluate our cooperative design process from the outside, with the goal of improving these processes. / QC 20100519

Background: The development of the Swedish demography is one of the most important social and economic changes ever in Swedish history. Society as well as business is facing an age chock since almost every other company owner is over 50 years old. The complexity of managing a successful succession is pointed out as a major threat to the Swedish economy by the organization Svenskt Näringsliv. Purpose: The purpose with this master thesis is to identify and analyze critical success factors for a successful succession from a going concern perspective. Research method: By using the strong aspects from the quantitative as well as the qualitative method, high level of order and systematic could be reached, without loosing too much details and depth in this particular research. The empirical data was gathered by a digital survey sent to 3000 companies. The quantitative research was complemented by 6 qualitative interviews to increase depth and reliability. Results: The study shows that there is a great incongruence between the expected problems associated to the succession and the actual outcome. Furthermore, there are great differences between the problems prioritized by the companies compared to the ones that their advisers and consultants recommend should be prioritized. The analyses and results lead to a new model for successful succession, The 4-Ps of Successful Succession.

L'organisation structurée (graphe avec hiérarchies et propriétés sémantiques) d'objets du plan implique plusieurs opérations complexes qui doivent être effectuées en toute sécurité de cohérence topologique. La précision inhérente d'une machine étant nécessairement limitée, il faut souvent recourir à une arithmétique exacte couteuse. Cette thèse présente, à partir de travaux liés à la réalisation du module de facettisation d'un simulateur de vol industriel, une solution permettant l'utilisation d'une arithmétique mixte, de précision arbitraire et de coût très inférieur statistiquement a la solution exacte. On y trouve aussi l'unification des méthodes de construction d'un diagramme de Voronoi, d'une triangulation de Delaunay pour un nuage de points dans le plan et de la triangulation contrainte de Delaunay de la représentation par segments d'un graphe planaire, autour d'une technique incrémentale optimale, fondamentalement plus simple que la méthode diviser-pour-résoudre classique. La technique incrémentale permet, par ailleurs, de donner un algorithme linéaire et très simple de construction du diagramme de Voronoi et de la triangulation de Delaunay d'un nuage de points situes sur la frontière d'un polygone monotone ou convexe.

A laser triangulating camera system projects a laser line onto an object to create height curveson the object surface. By moving the object, height curves from different parts of the objectcan be observed and combined to produce a three dimensional representation of the object.The calibration of such a camera system involves transforming received data to get real worldmeasurements instead of pixel based measurements. The calibration method presented in this thesis focuses specifically on small fields ofview. The goal is to provide an easy to use and robust calibration method that can complementalready existing calibration methods. The tool should get as good measurementsin metric units as possible, while still keeping complexity and production costs of the calibrationobject low. The implementation uses only data from the laser plane itself making itusable also in environments where no external light exist. The proposed implementation utilises a complete scan of a three dimensional calibrationobject and returns a calibration for three dimensions. The results of the calibration havebeen evaluated against synthetic and real data.

This thesis presents a 3D reconstruction approach to the detection of static obstacles from a single rear view parking camera. Corner features are tracked to estimate the vehicle’s motion and to perform multiview triangulation in order to reconstruct the scene. We model the camera motion as planar motion and use the knowledge of the camera pose to efficiently solve motion parameters. Based on the observed motion, we selected snapshots from which the scene is reconstructed. These snapshots guarantee a sufficient baseline between the images and result in more robust scene modeling. Multiview triangulation of a feature is performed only if the feature obeys the epipolar constraint. Triangulated features are semantically labelled according to their 3D location. Obstacle features are spatially clustered to reduce false detections. Finally, the distance to the nearest obstacle cluster is reported to the driver.

Ad-Hoc Wireless routing has become an important area of research in the last few years due to the massive increase in wireless devices. Computational Geometry is relevant in attempts to build stable, low power routing schemes. It is only recently, however, that models have been expanded to consider devices with a non-uniform broadcast range, and few properties are known. In particular, we find, via both theoretical and experimental methods, extremal properties for the Localized Delaunay Triangulation over the Mutual Inclusion Graph. We also provide a distributed, sub-quadratic algorithm for the generation of the structure.

Surface reconstruction of anatomical structures is an integral part of medical modeling. Contour information is extracted from serial cross-sections of tissue data and is stored as "slice" files. Although there are several reasonably efficient triangulation algorithms that reconstruct surfaces from slice data, the models generated from them have a jagged or faceted appearance due to the large inter-slice distance created by the sectioning process. Moreover, inconsistencies in user input aggravate the problem. So, we created a method that reduces inter-slice distance, as well as ignores the inconsistencies in the user input. Our method called the piecewise weighted implicit functions, is based on the approach of weighting smaller implicit functions. It takes only a few slices at a time to construct the implicit function. This method is based on a technique called variational interpolation. <p> Other approaches based on variational interpolation have the disadvantage of becoming unstable when the model is quite large with more than a few thousand constraint points. Furthermore, tracing the intermediate contours becomes expensive for large models. Even though some fast fitting methods handle such instability problems, there is no apparent improvement in contour tracing time, because, the value of each data point on the contour boundary is evaluated using a single large implicit function that essentially uses all constraint points. Our method handles both these problems using a sliding window approach. As our method uses only a local domain to construct each implicit function, it achieves a considerable run-time saving over the other methods. The resulting software produces interpolated models from large data sets in a few minutes on an ordinary desktop computer.

In this master thesis a visual odometry system is implemented and explained. Visual odometry is a technique, which could be used on autonomous vehicles to determine its current position and is preferably used indoors when GPS is notworking. The only input to the system are the images from a stereo camera and the output is the current location given in relative position. In the C++ implementation, image features are found and matched between the stereo images and the previous stereo pair, which gives a range of 150-250 verified feature matchings. The image coordinates are triangulated into a 3D-point cloud. The distance between two subsequent point clouds is minimized with respect to rigid transformations, which gives the motion described with six parameters, three for the translation and three for the rotation. Noise in the image coordinates gives reconstruction errors which makes the motion estimation very sensitive. The results from six experiments show that the weakness of the system is the ability to distinguish rotations from translations. However, if the system has additional knowledge of how it is moving, the minimization can be done with only three parameters and the system can estimate its position with less than 5 % error.

The aim of this thesis was to develop an objective and automatic method for identifying capillaries in microscope images of the skin. Furthermore, statistical data about the identified capillaries and the capillary distribution should be computed and stored in a database. The method was implemented using the platform independent programming language Java. An analysis of microscope improvement using various polarization filter setups and wavelength filtershas also been performed, as well as a pilot study of the effect of applying a local anaesthetic cream on the skin. The method is developed and aimed at research on various pathological skin conditions affecting the capillary distribution. Hypertension, diabetes, inflammation, ischemia, connective tissue disease, and erythromelalgia are all examples of diseases or pathological conditions which are supposed to affect the distribution of the skin capillaries.