This thesis presents the theory behind prototyping and user interviews as parts of requirements analysis. It further discusses how these were used in the development of a budget planning application. The implemented Web-based solution uses a new component-based design rooted in a Model-View-Controller architecture. The application is used today with complete success at the Department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University.

This thesis describes the function and construction of a modular event detector system. Event detectors are used for solder joint reliability testing using electronic monitoring for short duration resistance changes during accelerated ageing and temperature cycling. Collected data is mainly used to study solder joints long-term properties. The system has three different monitoring functions: transient resistance detection, statistics process monitoring and periodic monitoring. In its present performance a total number of 384 channels can be monitored continuously. However the system can be expanded in steps of 96 channels, limited only by the capacity of the computers PCI-bus. The system is built around a PC equipped with the LabVIEW 6.1 programming environment and data acquisition cards from National Instruments. The circuit boards to be monitored are connected via adapter electronics. In the case of the superior electronic-kits project, four groups of 24 circuit boards are connected to the adapter electronics. To minimise the influence of environmental noise shielded and, where possible, twined cables are used.

På WM-data har man utvecklat ett ramverk som heter Java Development Platform med avsikt att modellera större delar av ett system och därmed minska mängden kod som måste skrivas för hand. Ramverket baseras helt på existerande öppna lösningar och används vid utveckling av webbaserade system och skapar en skiktat lösning med en webbapplikation som presentationslager. Problemet är att webbapplikationen har kommit att bli väldigt svår att modellera i enhet med resten av systemet framför allt på grund av den hårda kopplingen till Struts-ramverket. Samtidigt har man börjat få upp ögonen för AJAX och vad det skulle kunna tillföra ramverket. Examensarbetet fokuserar på att utreda de problem som existerar i ramverket samt undersöka integrationen av AJAX ur en synvinkel som gynnar dagens lösning. Detta görs genom litteraturstudier, laborationer och genom att undersöka existerande ramverk och plattformar som löser liknande problem. Fokus ligger även på hur AJAX kan användas för att lösa problemen i modelleringen. Resultatet av arbetet mynnar ut i en analys som behandlar de aspekter som krävs för att AJAX ska kunna bli en del av JDP-ramverket. Analysen innefattar också synen på hur AJAX skulle kunna användas för att underlätta modelleringen av webbapplikationen utan att införa något nytt modelleringsverktyg, det vill säga att UML fortfarande kan användas. / At the WM-data company a framework called Java Development Platform has been developed with the intention of developing a system by first modelling and generating a major part of it instead of handwriting everything from scratch. The framework is based solely on existing open source solutions and is used for developing layered web based systems with the web application as the presentation layer. The problem is that the web application has become very difficult to model in the same way as the rest of the system especially due to the tight coupling between the model and the Struts framework. At the same time, AJAX has been getting more and more attention for its application areas as well as how it can be used to solve the problems with modelling the web application. The thesis intends to focus on researching the existing problems in the framework as well as investigate the integration of AJAX from a standpoint that the framework can benifit from. This is done through literature studies, laborations and by looking at existing frameworks and platforms that aim to solve problems like the ones in JDP. The focus also lies on how AJAX can be used to solve the problems with modelling the web application. As a result, the thesis ends in an analysis which considers the aspects needed for implementing AJAX into the JDP framework. The analysis also discusses how AJAX can be used to facilitate the modelling of the web application without having to model it in another way other than through UML diagrams.

This thesis investigates how disparity estimation may be used to visualize an object on a 3D-screen. The first part looks into different methods of disparity estimation, and the second part examines different ways to visualize an object from one or several stereo pairs and a disparity map. Input to the system is one or several stereo pairs, and output is a sequence of images of the input scene but from more angles. This sequence of images can be shown on Setred AB's 3D-screen. The system has high real time demands and the goal is to do the disparity estimation and visualization in real time. In the first part of the thesis, three different ways to calculate disparity maps are implemented and compared. The three methods are correlation-based, local structure-based and phase-based techniques. The correlation-based methods cannot satisfy the real-time demands due to the large number of 2D-convolutions required per pixel. The local structure-based methods have too much noise and cannot satisfy the quality requirements. Therefore, the best method by far is the phase-based method. This method has been implemented in Matlab and C and comparisons between the different implementations are presented. The quality of the disparity maps is satisfying, but the real-time demands cannot yet be fulfilled. The future work is therefore to optimize the C code and move some functions to a GPU, because a GPU can perform calculations in parallel with the CPU. Another reason is that many of the calculations are related to resizing and warping, which are well-suited to implementation on a GPU.

The PhonePages of Sweden is a company that develops software for mobile units, especially cell phones. This thesis treats the development of, and contingencies for, a mobile phone directory, using the limited resources found in a mobile unit. The project was implemented and executed at The PhonePages with the intention of creating a product to sell to a third party. By studying different solutions, their benefits and drawbacks, an abstract picture of the product was constructed. Problems covered include compatibility problems caused by todays platform diversity as well as problems with saving, organizing and presenting data. The main goal was to create a phone directory which does not make external information retrievals. The service should contain both company and personal information, with name and phonenumber. Complete address information should also be available. The application should also manage different priorities and logotypes for the company information. The application, that emerged as a result of our work at The PhonePages, works independently, without making connections to the Internet and is completely implemented in J2ME, all according to the requirement specification. In other words, the analysis of the different solutions led to a working application.

Jet flames are commonly used as flame effects in pyrotechnical shows, and are also a possible risk in industries that uses pressurised flammable gas. For these users it is important to  make fire safety engineering calculations to minimise the risks. This project focus on jet flames that are used in pyrotechnic shows where, e.g. it is important to determine the safety distance to the audience. Up to now most studies made concerning jet flames regards jet flames in subsonic regiments, whilst there is a lack of studies concerning sonic jet flames and mathematical formulations for radiation from these cases are limited. This makes pre-determination of temperatures, safety distances, flame heights etc. a challenge. Based on information found, and assumptions when needed, calculations of the safety distance were made.

Data warehouse maintenance and maintenance cost has been well studied in the literature. Integrating data sources, in a data warehouse environment, may often need data cleaning, transformation, or any other function applied to the data in order to integrate it. The impact on view maintenance, when data is integrated with other comparison operators than defined in theta join, has, however, not been closely looked at in previous studies. In this study the impact of using a complex join in data warehouse environment is analyzed to measure how different maintenance strategies are affected when data needs to be integrated using other comparison operators than defined in a theta join. The analysis shows that maintenance cost is greatly increased when using complex joins since such joins often lack optimization techniques which are available when using a theta join. The study shows, among other things, that the join aware capability of sources is not of importance when performing complex joins, and incremental view maintenance is better approach than using recomputed view maintenance, when using complex joins. Strategies for maintaining data warehouses when data is integrated using a complex join are therefore different than when a theta join is used, and different maintenance strategies need to be applied.

Information in a data warehouse is stored in materialized views, which must be kept consistent with respect to changes made in the sources. This problem has been extensively studied in the relational model. The process is referred to as view maintenance. XML is emerging as the de facto standard for data representation and data exchange of semistructured data. Most discussions involving XML assume the XML data is stored in plain text files. However, there are a number of different approaches for storing XML data, which can be categorized according to the underlying system used. Views and materialized views can also be specified in XML. This dissertation investigates how view maintenance in an XML context is influenced by the utilized approach for storage. We survey existing storage strategies using a relational database as the underlying system for storage, and storage strategies using plain text files. Further, we survey approaches for maintenance in the context of XML. We investigate three selected storage strategies in detail. We conclude with some insights gained during the investigation.

This thesis focuses on returnee entrepreneurs in a large industrial cluster, Zhongguancun Science Park in Beijing, based on a combined quantitative and qualitative method. Using a hand-collected dataset of returnee entrepreneur-owned 353 SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and local entrepreneur-owned 358 SMEs from Zhongguancun Science Park, the author empirically investigates the role of returnee-firms in technology transfer and knowledge spillovers. The findings suggest returnee entrepreneurs play a significant role in technology transfer and act as a new channel for international knowledge spillovers. It also examines the relationship between the characteristics of returnees and their firms' performance in comparison with non-returnee firms. The results also show that returnee-firms have gained competitive advantage in high-tech industries and perform better than non-returnee firms. Based on eight case studies, the author also compares and contrasts differences and similarities in term of internationalisation process of these two types of firms. It is found that returnee entrepreneurs are the early adopters of internationalisation due to their international background and international networks.

Det mobila operativsystemet Android är idag ett ganska dominerande operativsystem på den mobila marknaden dels på grund av sin öppenhet men också på grund av att tillgängligheten är stor i och med både billiga och dyra telefoner finns att tillgå. Men idag har Android inget fördefinierat designmönster vilket leder till att varje utvecklare får bestämma själv vad som ska användas, vilket ibland kan leda till onödigt komplex kod i applikationerna som sen blir svårtestad och svårhanterlig. Detta arbete ämnar jämföra två designmönster, Passive Model View Controller (PMVC) och Model View View-Model (MVVM), för att se vilket designmönster som blir minst komplext med hjälp av att räkna fram mätvärden med hjälp av Cyclomatic Complexity Number (CCN). Studien är gjord utifrån arbetssättet Design & Creation och ämnar bidra med: kunskap om vilket mönster man bör välja, samt om CCN kan peka ut vilka delar i en applikation som kommer att ta mer eller mindre lång tid att testa. Under studiens gång tog vi även fram skillnader på om man anväder sig av den så kallade Single Responsibilyt Principle (SRP) eller inte. Detta för att se om separerade vyer gör någon skillnad i applikationernas komplexitet. I slutändan så visar studien på att komplexiteten i små applikationer är väldigt likvärdig, men att man även på små applikationer kan se skillnad på hur komplex koden är men också att kodkomplexitet på metodnivå kan ge riktlinjer för testfall. / Today the mobile operating system Android has a firm grip on the mobile market due to its open source code and the availability due to the variety of phones available, from very cheap models to the high-end exclusive ones. However, Android currently has no defined design pattern which causes a bit of a problem during the initial stages of development because the developer has to make that decision before the initial development starts. This sometimes causes excessive complexity in the finished application, which then becomes difficult to test and manage. In this report we compare the two design patterns Passive Model View Controller (PMVC) and Model View View-Model (MVVM) to decide which one is the least complex. For this we used so called metrics to show the complexity of the finished applications. The metrics were calculated using the existing library of functions called Cyclomatic Complexity Numbers (CCN). The study is based on the workflow Design & creation and aim to contribute with: knowledge that will make it easier to choose design pattern when developing an Android application, and if you can with CCN point out which areas in an application will take more or less time to conduct tests on. During the study we also analyzed how big of an impact the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) had on the complexity. This was part of the study so that we could see the difference of separated views versus non-separated views. The study shows us that the complexity in small applications is very similar, no matter which design pattern you're using. However, it also shows that there are certain parts of the applications that are diverse in their complexity and that code complexity on method-level can give directions to test cases.