This thesis is an investigation into the role of architecture as a tool for connections. It explores this idea in four scales: the urban scale, the immediate context, the scale of the building and the interpersonal scale. Architecturally, it addresses the complexities of an intervention in an urban fabric and embraces the contextual it is an attempt to reanimate the core of Downtown Roanoke, through the adaptive reuse of an inert built mass by opening it up to put it in conversation with its surroundings. Programmatically, it responds to a collaborative transient workspace catering to individual entrepreneurs or small groups of independent start-up enthusiasts or simply mobile workers. The thesis focuses on connections as the language through which these stories find their expression. / Master of Architecture

An experimental investigation was conducted to study the behavior of extended end-plate moment connections subjected to cyclic loading. Eleven specimens were tested, representing typical connection configurations used in the metal building manufacturing industry. Four of the beams were shallow (30 in. or less), and seven were deep (60 in. or more). Two of the beams had compact webs, two had non-compact webs, and seven had slender webs. All specimens were designed according to the "thick plate" procedure contained in AISC Design Guide 16, Flush and Extended Multiple-Row Moment End-Plate Connections. A displacement-controlled history was used to load the specimens. Experimental maximum moments were compared to analytical predictions of beam and connection strength. Also, each moment versus rotation relationship was analyzed for compliance with the requirements of Ordinary, Intermediate, and Special Moment Frames, as defined by AISC in the Seismic Provisions for Structural Steel Buildings. The experimental results demonstrated that the thick plate procedure in Design Guide 16 is an accurate model for predicting the strength of the connection elements, and the procedure is recommended for designing connections subject to cyclic (seismic) loads. The connection design moment should be based on the expected plastic strength of the beam, regardless of the equations governing nominal beam strength. / Master of Science

Information Retrieval (IR) plays a key role in serving large communities of users who are in need of relevant answers for their search queries. IR encompasses various search models to address different requirements and has introduced a variety of supporting tools to improve effectiveness and efficiency. "Search" is the key focus of IR. The classic search methodology takes an input query, processes it, and returns the result as a ranked list of documents. However, this approach is not the most effective method to support the task of finding document associations (relationships between concepts or queries) both for direct or indirect relationships. The Stepping Stones and Pathways (SSP) retrieval methodology supports retrieval of ranked chains of documents that support valid relationships between any two given concepts. SSP has many potential practical and research applications, which are in need of a tool to find connections between two concepts. The early SSP "proof-of-concept" implementation could handle only 6000 documents. However, commercial search applications will have to deal with millions of documents. Hence, addressing the scalability limitation becomes extremely important in the current SSP implementation in order to overcome the limitations on handling large datasets. Research on various commercial search applications and their scalability indicates that the Lucene search tool kit is widely used due to its support for scalability, performance, and extensibility features. Many web-based and desktop applications have used this search tool kit to great success, including Wikipedia search, job search sites, digital libraries, e-commerce sites, and the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The goal of this research is to re-implement SSP in a scalable way, so that it can work for larger datasets and also can be deployed commercially. This work explains the approach adopted for re-implementation focusing on scalable indexing, searching components, new ways to process citations (references), a new approach for query expansion, document clustering, and document similarity calculation. The experiments performed to test the factors such as runtime and storage proved that the system can be scaled up to handle up to millions of documents. / Master of Science

With the advancement of semiconductor technology, the System on Chip (SoC) is becoming more and more complex, so the on-chip communication has become a bottleneck of SoC Design. Since the traditional bus system is inefficient and not scalable, the Network-On-Chip (NoC) has emerged as the promising communication mechanism for complex SoCs. As some systems have specific performance requirements, such as a minimum throughput (for real-time streaming data) or bounded latency (for interrupts, process synchronization, etc), communication with Guaranteed Service (GS) support becomes crucial for predictable SoC architectures. Circuit Switching (CS) is a popular approach to support GS, which firstly has to allocate an exclusively connection (circuit) between the source and destination nodes, and then the data packets are delivered over this connection. However, it is inefficient and inflexible because the resource is occupied by single connection during its whole lifetime, which can block other communications. Hence, two extensions of CS have been proposed to share resources: i) Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM), in which the available link capacity is split into multiple time slots to be shared by different flows in TDM scheme; and ii) Space-Division-Multiplexing (SDM), in which only a subset (sub-channel) of the link wires is exclusively allocated to a specific connection, while the remaining wires of the link can be used by other flows. The connection allocation is critical for CS, since the data delivery can start only after the associated connection is allocated. In this thesis, we propose a dedicated hardware connection allocator to solve the dynamic connection allocation problem for CS NoCs, which has to i) allocate a contention-free path between source-destination pairs and ii) allocate appropriate portions of link bandwidth (appropriate number of time slots and subsets) along the path. The dedicated connection allocator, called NoCManager, solves the connection allocation problem by employing a trellis-search based shortest path algorithm. The trellis search can explore all possible paths between source node and destination. Moreover, it shall find the requested path in a fixed low latency and can guarantee the path optimality in terms of path length if the path is available. In this thesis, two different trellis graphs, Forward-Backtrack trellis and Register-Exchange trellis are proposed. The Forward-Backtrack trellis completes the path search in two steps: forward search and backtracking. Firstly, the forward search begins at source node that traverses the network to find the free path. When destination node is reached, the backtrack starts from destination to select the survivor path and collect the associated path parameters. However, Register-Exchange trellis saves the entire survivor path sequences during forward search. Consequently, the backtracking step can be omitted, and thus the allocation time is halved compared to forward-backtrack approaches. Moreover, each trellis graph consists of three categories, unfolded structure, folded structure and bidirectional structure. The unfolded structure can provide high allocation speed while folded structure is more efficient from a hardware point of view. The bidirectional structure starts the search at two sides, source node and destination node simultaneously, so the allocation speed is 2 times faster than previous unidirectional search. Furthermore, in order to address the scalability issue of previous centralized systems, the partitioned architecture (i.e. spatial partitioning technique) is proposed to divide the large system into multiple smaller differentiated logical partitions served by local NoCManagers. This partitioning technique keeps the request load of the manager and manager-node communication overhead moderate. Inside each partition, the path search problem is solved by a local manager with trellis-search algorithm. To establish a path that crosses partitions, the managers communicate with each other in distributed manner to converge the global path. In order to further enhance the path diversity and resource utilization, we adopt the combined TDM and SDM technique. In combined TDM-SDM approach, each SDM sub-channel is split into multiple time slots so that can be shared by multiple flows. Hence, the number of sub-channels can be kept moderate to reduce router complexity, while still providing higher path diversity than TDM scheme. In order to investigate and optimize TDM-SDM partitioning strategy, we studied the influence of different TDM-SDM link partitioning strategies on success rate and path length that allowed us to find the optimal solution. The dedicated connection allocator using the trellis-search algorithm is employed for TDM, SDM and TDM-SDM CS. In the end, we present the router architecture that combines the circuit-switching network (for GS communication) and packet-switching network (for best-effort communication).

In the theory part of this thesis will examine the connection between politics and sport, including the politicization of major sport events and the particular role of non-democratic states as host nations. In the empirical part, three case studies (Summer Olympics Beijing 2008, Winter Olympics Sochi 2014, and FIFA World Cup Qatar 2018) will be analyzed in the light of how they have influenced (or have the potential to influence) reforms, the adoption of democratic structures, and the human rights situation.

Joint behaviour in fire is currently one of the most important topics of research in structural fire resistance. The collapse of World Trade Center buildings and the results of the Cardington full-scale eight storey steel framed building fire tests in the UK have demonstrated that steel joints are particularly vulnerable during the heating and cooling phases of fire. The main purpose of this research is to develop robust joints to CFT columns that are capable of providing very high rotational and tying resistances to make it possible for the connected beam to fully develop catenary action during the heating phase of fire attack and to retain integrity during the cooling phase of fire attack. This research employed the general finite element software ABAQUS to numerically model the behaviour of restrained structural subassemblies of steel beam to concrete filled tubular (CFT) columns and their joints in fire. For validation, this research compared the simulation and test results for 10 fire tests previously conducted at the University of Manchester. It was envisaged that catenary action in the connected beams at very large deflections would play an important role in ensuring robustness of steel framed structures in fire. Therefore, it was vital that the numerical simulations could accurately predict the structural behaviour at very large deflections. In particular, the transitional behaviour of the beam from compression to catenary action presented tremendous difficulties in numerical simulations due to the extremely high rate of deflection increase. This thesis will explain the methodology of a suitable simulation method, by introducing a pseudo damping factor. The comparison between the FE and the experimental results demonstrates that the 3-D finite element model is able to successfully simulate the fire tests. The validated ABAQUS model was then applied to conduct a thorough set of numerical studies to investigate methods of improving the survival temperatures under heating in fire of steel beams to concrete filled tubular (CFT) columns using reverse channel connection. This study investigated five different joint types of reverse channel connection: extended endplate, flush endplate, flexible endplate, hybrid flush/flexible endplate and hybrid extended/flexible endplate. The connection details investigated include reverse channel web thickness, bolt diameter and grade, using fire-resistant (FR) steel for different joint components (reverse channel, end plate and bolts) and joint temperature control. The effects of changing the applied beam and column loads were also considered. It is concluded that by adopting some of the joint details to improve the joint tensile strength and deformation capacity, it is possible for the beams to develop substantial catenary action to survive very high temperatures. This thesis also explains the implications on fire resistant design of the connected columns in order to resist the additional catenary force in the beam. The validated numerical model was also used to perform extensive parametric studies on steel framed structures using concrete filled tubular (CFT) columns with flexible reverse channel connection and fin plate connection to find means of reducing the risk of structural failure during cooling. The results lead to the suggestion that in order to avoid connection fracture during cooling, the most effective and simplest method would be to reduce the limiting temperature of the connected beam by less than 50°C from the limiting temperature calculated without considering any axial force in the beam.

This thesis focuses on forensic analysis of network connection in operating systems based on Linux kernel. The paper is divided into chapters that describe principles of digital forensics, packet processing inside Linux kernel and compare forensic software tools. This knowledge is then applied in design of application for network connection forensics in Linux. Designed application is implemented and used in practical process of digital forensic analysis. In conclusion possible extensions are proposed.

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