<p>This Master's thesis studies how the technologies of today could be developed to better support education. An analysis is conducted of digital learning tools on the educational technology market. Based on this analysis a conclusion is made that while many other digital tools for education are well suited for their use, only a few computers are designed purely for students. While students in higher education do draw bene ts of using standard laptops and computers in their study work, the students in primary and secondary education should be provided with special learning computers. Therefore a conceptual design is presented for a mobile student computer that helps the students focus on school work.</p>

<p>There is pressure on mobile phone application developers. With the success of the iPhone in 2007 advanced mobile phones are getting more and more common, and with them a market for applications, programs for mobile phones has exploded. The thesis discusses the possibility of helping developers to lift the focus from the code and instead graphically visualize the system architecture, the design of graphics and the functionality of the application. First a "proof of concept" program was implemented that allows a user to create the graphics for a mobile phone application using only drag and drop. Then a design proposal was created with the goal to allow developers with basic programming experience to create mobile phone applications using drag and drop. The proposal was heuristically evaluated with the help of a checklist consisting of eleven Gestalt laws and ten heuristics that were applied on sketches of the design proposal constructed in Adobe Photoshop CS4. The results from the two parts were merged. To create applications fast and with low programming experience, using drag and drop is a strong candidate to solve the problem.</p>

<p>In recent years, agile software development methods have become increasingly popular throughout the world. Today there are a number of different agile methods and they all rest on the Agile Manifesto that was formulated in 2001 as a reaction to the traditional software processes.The aim of this thesis is to make a survey of some of the agile methods used today and to see how they are being used in practice. It consists of two parts: a literature study and an interview study with people working in the software business. First, a definition of agile methods is proposed and a number of different agile methods are described. Second, the interviews are being analysed with special focus on communication, collaboration, expectations and results. Third, the theory and practice are compared and the results are being analysed.Only three of the agile methods were used by the companies, and Scrum was the most common one. The respondents had all adopted the agile methods to their needs and they all seemed very pleased with this way of working. Their expectations on the agile methods were mainly satisfied. They stressed that documentation is still needed but is now done differently. Communication, both within the team and with the customer is also very important.</p>

<p>The aim of the thesis is object finding in occluded and cluttered environment using computer vision techniques and robot motion. Difficulties of the object finding are 1. finding objects at hidden area and 2. finding unrecognized objects. For solving the difficulties, two methods were developed, one is for finding objects in occluded cluttered environments using model based object finding and the other to increase the robustness in object finding by identifying known objects that are unidentified. The goal was to search occluded areas with the bumblebee2 stereo camera to be able to identify all known objects in the environment by removing all visible known objects To identify known objects SURF [9] was used and to be able to remove the identified objects their location first needed to be localized. To localize the object‘s x and y coordinate the information from SURF [9] was used, and the distance coordinate z is calculated using the depth image from the stereo camera. The method to identify objects the SURF [9] algorithm had missed to identify uses a method to find unknown segments in the environment. By using a push motion on the segments to change their angle it can remove possible light reflections and the object can be identified. The results of this research show that the method can find objects in occluded cluttered areas and it can also identified missed known objects.</p>

<p>The current browser landscape has no real support for server initiated push. Existing technologies such as Comet and AJAX emulate server push using "long-polling" and rely on maintaining two connections between client and browser for streaming. The latest HTML standard, HTML5, is introducing elements which will integrate web front-ends much tighter with server back-ends. Most importantly, web sockets are now being introduced and thereby allowing browser applications to receive asynchronous updates from the server side, so called server push. Web sockets de ne a full-duplex communication channel that operates over a single socket using HTML5 compliant browsers. Web sockets allow for true low latency applications and put less strain on the server.This paper is an attempt to create a web socket server according to the HTML5 web socket standard. The server will integrate with TickCapture[18] which is an existing system for back-testing and trading of algorithms written in various languages. TickCapture also allows for low latency presentation of real time market data and this data will be pushed through the web socket server to the clients using regular HTML5 compliant browsers.The nished system must provide good scalability so an in-depth study of scalability and load balancing techniques will be carried out to identify dierent solutions for my implementation.</p>

<p>It has been established that long term stress can lead to chronic illness of cardiac disease and vascular disorder. In the way people live their lives today they are surrounded by stress and they contribute to the stressful society when they constantly chase the time. The Mobile Life Centre explores how the system Aective Health can get people to reect up on their stress levels and connect that to their everyday activities by using bio sensors and a mobile phone. The bio sensor data visualization in the interface of the system is today tied to time. Since time is perceived dierently from person to person that is something that has caused problems for the design team of Aective Health. This thesis examines how dierent representations of time in user interfaces can be used to mediate the design qualities of subjective time, aliveness and uency in the Aective Health system. As a result from investigating the time aspect and how time can be visualized in a subjective way a suggestion for a design solution was developed.</p>

MetaML is a statically typed functional programming language with special support for programgeneration. In addition to providing the standard features of contemporary programminglanguages such as Standard ML, MetaML provides three staging annotations. These staging annotationsallow the construction, combination, and execution of object-programs.Our thesis is that MetaML's three staging annotations provide a useful, theoretically soundbasis for building program generators. This dissertation reports on our study of MetaML's stagingconstructs, their use, their implementation, and their formal semantics. Our results include anextended example of where MetaML allows us to produce ecient programs, an explanation ofwhy implementing these constructs in traditional ways can be challenging, two formulations ofMetaML's semantics, a type system for MetaML, and a proposal for extending MetaML with atype construct for closedness.The dissertation consolidates a number of previous publications by the author, includingMetaML's type systems and big-step semantics. The presentation is new. The proposed solutionto an implementation problem and the reduction semantics for MetaML's three staging constructsare also new.

Many real-time systems have significant value in terms of legacy, since large efforts have been spent over many years to ensure their proper functionality. Examples can be found in, e.g., telecom and automation-industries. Maintenance consumes the major part of the budget for these systems. As each system is part of a dynamically changing larger whole, maintenance is required to modify the system to adapt to these changes. However, due to system complexity, engineers cannot be assumed to understand the system in every aspect, making the full range of effects of modifications on the system difficult to predict. Effect prediction would be useful, for instance in early discovery of unsuitable modifications. Accurate models would be useful for such prediction, but are generally non-existent. With the introduction of a method for automated modeling, this thesis applies an industrial perspective to the problem of obtaining models of legacy real-time systems. The method generates a model of the system as it behaved during the executions. The recordings cover system level events such as context switches and communication, and may optionally cover data manipulations on task level, which allows modeling of causal relations. As means of abstraction, the models can contain probabilistic selections and execution time requirements. The method also includes automatic validation of the generated model, in which the model is compared to the system behavior. Our method has been implemented and has been evaluated in both an industrial case-study and in a controlled experiment. For the controlled experiment, we have developed a framework for automatic evaluation of (automated) modeling methods. Using the models generated with our method, engineers can prototype designs of modifications, which allows for early rejection of unfeasible designs. The earlier such rejection is performed, the more time and resources are freed for other activities.

This thesis aims to improve the ontology engineering process, by providing better semiautomatic support for constructing ontologies and introducing knowledge reuse through ontology patterns. The thesis introduces a typology of patterns, a general framework of pattern-based semi-automatic ontology construction called OntoCase, and provides a set of methods to solve some specific tasks within this framework. Experimental results indicate some benefits and drawbacks of both ontology patterns, in general, and semi-automatic ontology engineering using patterns, the OntoCase framework, in particular. The general setting of this thesis is the field of information logistics, which focuses on how to provide the right information at the right moment in time to the right person or organisation, sent through the right medium. The thesis focuses on constructing enterprise ontologies to be used for structuring and retrieving information related to a certain enterprise. This means that the ontologies are quite 'light weight' in terms of logical complexity and expressiveness. Applying ontology content design patterns within semi-automatic ontology construction, i.e. ontology learning, is a novel approach. The main contributions of this thesis are a typology of patterns together with a pattern catalogue, an overall framework for semi-automatic patternbased ontology construction, specific methods for solving partial problems within this framework, and evaluation results showing the characteristics of ontologies constructed semiautomatically based on patterns. Results show that it is possible to improve the results of typical existing ontology learning methods by selecting and reusing patterns. OntoCase is able to introduce a general top-structure to the ontologies, and by exploiting background knowledge, the ontology is given a richer structure than when patterns are not applied.

Capacity is an essential quality factor in telecommunication systems. The ability to develop systems with the lowest cost per subscriber and transaction, that also meet the highest availability requirements and at the same time allow for scalability, is a true challenge for a telecommunication systems provider. This thesis describes a research collaboration between Linköping University and Ericsson AB aimed at improving the management, representation, and implementation of capacity requirements in large-scale software engineering. An industrial case study on non-functional requirements in general was conducted to provide the explorative research background, and a richer understanding of identified difficulties was gained by dedicating subsequent investigations to capacity. A best practice inventory within Ericsson regarding the management of capacity requirements and their refinement into design and implementation was carried out. It revealed that capacity requirements crosscut most of the development process and the system lifecycle, thus widening the research context considerably. The interview series resulted in the specification of 19 capacity sub-processes; these were represented as a method plug-in to the OpenUP software development process in order to construct a coherent package of knowledge as well as to communicate the results. They also provide the basis of an empirically grounded anatomy which has been validated in a focus group. The anatomy enables the assessment and stepwise improvement of an organization’s ability to develop for capacity, thus keeping the initial cost low. Moreover, the notion of capacity is discussed and a pragmatic approach for how to support model-based, function-oriented development with capacity information by its annotation in UML models is presented. The results combine into a method for how to improve the treatment of capacity requirements in large-scale software systems.