>Magister Scientiae - MSc / IP multicast is an efficient mechanism for simultaneously transmitting bulk data to multiple receivers. Many applications can benefit from multicast, such as audio and videoconferencing, multi-player games, multimedia broadcasting, distance education, and data replication. For either technical or policy reasons, IP multicast still has not yet been deployed in today’s Internet. Congestion is one of the most important issues impeding the development and deployment of IP multicast and multicast applications.

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A vertical-style data structure and operations on data in that structure are explored and tested in the domain of sliding window average algorithms for geographical information systems (GIS) data. The approach allows working with data of arbitrary precision, which is centrally important for very large GIS data sets. The novel data structure can be constructed from existing multi-channel image data, and data in the structure can be converted back to image data. While in the new structure, operations such as addition, division, and bit-level shifting can be performed in a parallelized manner. It is shown that the computation of averages for sliding windows on this data structure can be performed faster than using traditional computation techniques, and the approach scales to larger sliding window sizes.

The overall goal of the thesis was to study available geographic information systems (GIS) and to explore the functionality they provide. The implementation was focused on module for vector data creation and data analysis. As examples were used existing systems like GRASS and ArcGIS. The result of this master thesis was a plug-in integrated into the GIS of DELINFO, spol. s r.o. company. The plug-in can open, modify and save vector data in shapefile format. The plug-in is also able to do some basic analysis of the vector data, such as a region intersection, a union, hit tests and a distance measurement. This thesis could be used as a pattern for vector data operations in GIS.

PhD / Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics

PhD (Advanced Nursing Science) / Department of Advanced Nursing Science / Cervical cancer may be preventable when screening services which detect cancerous cells at an early stage are utilized. Utilization of cervical cancer screening services, taking of Pap smear in particular, is effective if done systematically, that is, yearly or every ten years depending on whether the individual is at risk or not. Failure to utilize cervical cancer screening services predisposes women to cervical cancer because if one is affected, the disease will progress without one being aware. Studies have been carried out in this area, but not much has been done on strategies to promote the utilization of cervical cancer screening services. Purpose The purpose of this study was to develop an intervention strategy to promote utilization of cervical cancer screening services in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa. Objective The specific objectives were to explore and describe the provision of cervical cancer screening services by Primary Health Care Nurses (PHCNs); assess the awareness of women on the utilization of cervical cancer screening services; develop an intervention strategy to promote utilization of cervical cancer screening services and to validate an intervention strategy to promote utilization of cervical cancer screening services at Vhembe District in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Methodology The research was conducted in three phases. In Phase I, qualitative and quantitative approaches were used. The qualitative approach was used to explore experiences of nurses concerning the provision of cervical cancer screening services and the quantitative approach applied for assessment of the awareness of women on the utilization of cervical screening services. The population in the qualitative approach were PHCNs providing cervical cancer services and, in the quantitative approach, were women aged 20-59. Nonprobability purposive sampling was used to sample 15 PHCNs and 500 women. Ethical considerations, that is, the rights of all the stakeholders were honoured. Data was collected from PHCNs through semi-structured interviews using an interview guide and from women through questionnaires. Reliability and validity of the research was ensured. Qualitative data was analyzed through open-coding and quantitative data through descriptive statistics (frequencies and percentages). ABSTRACT vi Results In Phase II, an intervention strategy to promote utilization of cervical cancer screening services in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa was developed. The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis was used to analyze the validity. Political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, environmental factors and laws within the opportunities and threats landscape of cervical cancer screening services in Vhembe District were analyzed. The Build, Overcome, Explore and Minimize (BOEM) paradigm was used to developed the intervention strategy. In Phase III, the qualitative and quantitative approach was used to validate the developed intervention strategies. A purposive sampling was used to sample fifteen PHCNs and 4 four managers. Conclusions Intervention strategies with action plans were developed. Recommendations Recommendations related to implementation of strategies to promote utilization of cervical cancer screening services were compiled.

The research conducted at the department of Electrical Engineering of the University of South Florida campus in Tampa only covers the electrical aspect of electric drives. However, the performance of electric machinery is significantly impacted by temperature variation. The literature review shows three main control techniques in use today in electric drives namely, Scalar control, Direct Torque control and Field Oriented control. This thesis presents a temperature rise of rotor bars, stator winding, stator core and stator frame in a running three phase field-oriented controlled induction machine. A literature search shows that none of research has been carried out to investigate a thermal response of a field-oriented controlled induction motor. With this motivation, we were able to implement a lumped parameters thermal model of a three-phase field-oriented IM in MATLAB Simulink, which allows us to determine that rotor bars have the highest temperatures rising to 84 degrees Celsius. This confirms that rotors bars are the hottest part of a running IM as stipulated in literature.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / One of the assumptions of conventional regression analysis is I that the parameters are constant over all observations. It has often been suggested that this may not be a valid assumption to make, particularly if the econometric model is to be used for economic forecasting0 Apart from this it is also found that econometric models, in particular, are used to investigate the underlying interrelationships of the system under consideration in order to understand and to explain relevant phenomena in structural analysis. The pre-requisite of such use of econometrics is that the regression parameters of the model is assumed to be constant over time or across different crosssectional units.

We present a novel method for learning Support Vector Machines (SVMs) in the online setting. Our method is generally applicable in that it handles the online learning of the binary, multiclass, and structural SVMs in a unified view. The SVM learning problem consists of optimizing a convex objective function that is composed of two parts: the hinge loss and quadratic regularization. To date, the predominant family of approaches for online SVM learning has been gradient-based methods, such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). Unfortunately, we note that there are two drawbacks in such approaches: first, gradient-based methods are based on a local linear approximation to the function being optimized, but since the hinge loss is piecewise-linear and nonsmooth, this approximation can be ill-behaved. Second, existing online SVM learning approaches share the same problem formulation with batch SVM learning methods, and they all need to tune a fixed global regularization parameter by cross validation. On the one hand, global regularization is ineffective in handling local irregularities encountered in the online setting; on the other hand, even though the learning problem for a particular global regularization parameter value may be efficiently solved, repeatedly solving for a wide range of values can be costly. We intend to tackle these two problems with our approach. To address the first problem, we propose to perform implicit online update steps to optimize the hinge loss, as opposed to explicit (or gradient-based) updates that utilize subgradients to perform local linearization. Regarding the second problem, we propose to enforce local regularization that is applied to individual classifier update steps, rather than having a fixed global regularization term. Our theoretical analysis suggests that our classifier update steps progressively optimize the structured hinge loss, with the rate controlled by a sequence of regularization parameters; setting these parameters is analogous to setting the stepsizes in gradient-based methods. In addition, we give sufficient conditions for the algorithm's convergence. Experimentally, our online algorithm can match optimal classification performances given by other state-of-the-art online SVM learning methods, as well as batch learning methods, after only one or two passes over the training data. More importantly, our algorithm can attain these results without doing cross validation, while all other methods must perform time-consuming cross validation to determine the optimal choice of the global regularization parameter.

Leishmania of the subgenus Viannia are protozoan parasites transmitted by phlebotomine sandflies (Diptera: Phlebotominae). They occur in tropical and subtropical areas in South America, where they cause cutaneous and mucocutaneous leishmaniasis. In this thesis, we studied developmental pattern of Viannia group and factors affecting its development within the sand fly gut. First, we investigated Leishmania braziliensis development within the Lutzomyia longipalpis digestive tract. Using GFP-labeled strain we demonstrated peripylar development: promastigotes escaped from the endoperitrophic space, colonized the hindgut and then migrated anteriorly. Four morphological forms were found within the Lu. longipalpis digestive tract: elongated nectomonads, short nectomonads, metacyclic promastigotes and paramastigotes. Furthermore, using the histological methods we demonstrated parasite attachment in pylorus region, while there were only free promastigotes in the midgut; neither form was found attached to the midgut epithelium. The next part was devoted to the effect of temperature on Viannia in Lu. longipalpis. We compared development of two closely related species L. peruviana and L. braziliensis at 20 řC and 26 řC. Leishmania braziliensis developed well in both temperatures tested, L. peruviana developed...