<p>As the core of a previous thesis, a Web-based tool, called LDBN(Learn DataBase Normalization), was developed. The purpose of this tool is to provide an interactive learning environment for the normalization of relational database schemata whose constraints are defined by functional dependencies (FDs). During the fall terms of 2008 and 2009, LDBN was used in conjunction with the course Principles of Database Systems at the Umeå University Department of Computing Science, and some important observations were made.As a part of this thesis, some crucial extensions to LDBN, based upon these observations, are developed. The most signifcant extension is a tool for the visualization of FDs, based upon templates found in popular textbooks. Often, such visual representations are much easier for humans to grasp than purely text-based representations. However, this extension does not compromise the existing capabilities of LDBN. In addition, we present some other shortcomings of the previous version of LDBN and our approach to deal with those, in particular issues surrounding user privileges.</p>

<p>Car sales companies have in the last couple of years discovered that there is a big market in storing their customer's summer and winter tires for a small fee. For the customers it is very convenient to get rid of the all known storage problem with season tires. Burlin Motor Umeå is one of these companies and they are offering seasonal storage and change of tires in autumn and spring as well as washing of tires.The main problem for this kind of storage is how to make the storage easy to overview and how to keep track of all tires. This paper is a report on a distributed storage solution in Java for summer and winter tires based on criteria from Burlin Motor Umeå.</p>

<p>iPhone is one of the latest smartphones and it has grown in popularity ever since it was first released in 2007. The iPhone has more advanced features than a regular cell phone and is more suitable for internet related tasks because of its WiFi and 3G support. This report describes the development of a server API and a photo sharing application aimed to run on the iPhone platform. The project was issued by Piclair, the image uploading service located at http://piclair.com. Piclair already possesses efficient image uploading software for Windows and Mac OS X. The idea was to broaden the user base by entering one of the fastest growing smartphone platforms. The objective of the project was to develop a powerful but simple photo uploader dedicated to Piclair.com running on the iPhone and to create a lightweight API to handle the uploads server side. This report spans from the idea stage to a finished product. The result was a fully functional API and a non cumbersome Piclair characteristic photo uploader, suitable not only for WiFi connected devices but also 3G and EDGE.</p>

<p>In June of 2007 Apple Inc. released the smartphone Iphone. It was a groundbreaking success that set a new standard for what a smartphone should be able to do. Apple has improved the Iphone every year since then and the 3Gs is the newest Iphone model. As the phones have improved, both when looking at hardware and software, the applications have improved as well. The Iphone 3Gs provides the possibility to use the camera as an application background and with that the possibility to analyze the surroundings, making it possible to track objects that the phone is pointed towards.This thesis examines how object tracking can be implemented in applications for Iphone 3Gs as well as providing a survey of four different areas of use that have been implemented in Xcode: an augmented reality car game, a letter tracking application, a face recognition application and an object recognition application.</p>

<p>Breast cancer is diagnosed in more than 6300 Swedish women every year. Mammograms, which are X-ray images of breasts, are taken as part of a nationwide screening process and are analyzed for anomalies by radiologists. This analysis process could be made more efficient by using computer-aided image analysis to assist quality control of the mammograms. However, the development of such image analysis methods requires what is called a “ground truth”. The ground truth is used as a key in algorithm development and represents the true information in the depicted object. Mammograms are 2D projections of deformed 3D objects, and in these cases the ground truth is almost impossible to procure. Instead a surrogate ground truth is constructed. ALGSII, a novel method for ranking shapes within a given set, was recently developed for measuring the level of agreement among ensembles of markings produced by experts of glandular tissue in mammograms. It was hypothesized in this thesis that the ALGSII measure could be used to construct a surrogate truth based on the markings from domain experts.Markings from segmentations of glandular tissue, performed by 5 different field experts on 162 mammograms, comprised the working data for this thesis project. An algorithm was developed that, given a fixed set of markings, takes an initial shape and modifies it iteratively until it becomes the “optimal shape” - the shape with the highest level of agreement in the group of markings according to the ALGSII measure. The algorithm was optimized with egard to rate of accepted shape changes and computational complexity.The developed algorithm was successful in producing an optimal shape according to the definition of maximizing the ALGSII measure in 100% of the cases tested. The algorithm showed stability for the given data set, and its performance was significantly increased by the implemented optimizations.</p>

<p><p><p>VARN A network multiplayer 2D action game written in Java. All games that support any form of play across networks is in one way or another affected by the delay, or "ping", that occurs from the time it takes for information to travel over the wires. Not only does it take time, it varies depending on how far away the connected partner is and the current status of the network you are on. Through the years a lot of different methods have been developed to combat these delays. I have reviewed some of these methods and implemented a synchronization system in Java meant to be used in online action multiplayer games.</p></p></p>

<p>When Apple first introduced the iPhone it was thought by many to be groundbraking. The main visible difference was that the phone had no keypad, just a touch screen. Another interesting feature in this phone was the addition of accelerometers. With this the device knows the forces applied to it and therefore knows how it is tilted. In april 2010 Steve Jobs announced 85 million iPhone OS devices sold. This makes it a very interesting OS from a developers point of view.This project aims to explore those two new key features and the iPhone OS by implementing a simplified version of the game Mad Skills Motocross by Turborilla. This is a fast paced sideways scrolling motocross game with demanding physics simulation. The physics is modeled via high frequency (1000 Hz) Verlet integration. Important aspects of the project are therefore also if the iPhone can handle the game and if it still will be a fun game considering the changes going from desktop to iPhone.The results were a game playable on one track with accurate physics, running with a visible frame rate of 30 frames per second and some interesting insights in what you need to think about when developing for iPhone OS.</p>

<p>The company Microshop is interested in implementing new features in their product-website, and would like to examine the possibility and usefulness of introducing such functionality. When designing interaction for commercial websites, it is important to make the menus easy to use, and refrain from using deep hierarchies in order to avoid causing unnecessary burden for the users. There is an interest among users for adaptive functionality, but this requires great amounts of trust in the website from the user. Something which can be created by refraining from using implicit information, and provide detailed explanations throughout the website. A usability test was conducted in order to complement the data gathered from the theoretical study, the interviews and the expert evaluations. This test evaluated the interface design and the necessity of the proposed functionality. The test was carried out under controlled conditions, and was conducted as a series of user observations of the trial participants. Results showed that there is a need for adaptive functionality, but that the existing interface requires an update before additional functionality is introduced. Proposals on how this could be solved are presented as a number of design proposals which would address the problems, and propose a design for the new features. The usability test proved extremely capable of identifying errors that occurred when the participants corrected their previous actions. In addition, the users trust in the interface, and their previous computer experience contributed to interesting results.</p>

<p>An important task in any graphical simulation is the collision detection between the objects in the simulation. It is desirable to have a good general method for collision detection with high performance. This thesis describes an implementation of a collision detection method that uses distance fields to detect collisions. This method is quite robust and able to detect collisions between most possible shapes. It is also capable of computing contact data for collisions. A problem with distance fields is that the performance cost for making a distance field is quite extensive. It is therefore customary to have some way of accelerating the computation of the distance field (usually by only computing select parts of the field). The application implemented in this thesis solves this performance problem by using the parallel framework OpenCL for accelerating the construction of the field.OpenCL enables programmers to execute code on the GPU. The GPU is highly data parallel and a huge increase in performance can be obtained by letting the GPU handle the computations associated with the initiation of the field.</p>

<p>This thesis focuses on learning natural language interfaces using synchronous</p><p>grammars, l-calculus and statistical modeling of parse probabilities. A major</p><p>focus of the thesis has been to replicate Mooney and Wong’s l-WASP [17] algorithm</p><p>and implement it inside the C-PHRASE [12] Natural Language Interface</p><p>(NLI) system. By doing this we can use C-PHRASE’s more expressive and transportable</p><p><em>meaning representation language </em>(MRL), rather than the PROLOG-based</p><p>MRL Mooney and Wong used.</p><p>Our system, the C-PHRASE LEARNER, relaxes some constraints in l-WASP</p><p>to allow use of more flexible MRL grammars. We also reformulate the algorithm</p><p>in terms of operations on trees to clarify and simplify the approach. We test the</p><p>C-PHRASE LEARNER over the US geography corpus GEOQUERY and produce</p><p>precision and recall results slightly below those achieved by l-WASP. This was</p><p>expected as we have fewer domain restrictions due to our more expressive and</p><p>portable MRL grammar.</p><p>Our work on the C-PHRASE LEARNER system has also revealed some promising</p><p>avenues of future research including, among others, alternative statistical alignment</p><p>strategies, integrating linguistic theories into our learning algorithm and</p><p>ways to improve named entity recognition. C-PHRASE LEARNER is presented</p><p>as open source to the community to allow anyone to expand upon this work.</p>