During the last decades “Climate Change” has become a vital topic on national and international political agendas. There it is presented as an irrevocable fact of global impact and thus of universal relevance. What has often been neglected are local discourses of marginalized groups and their specific contextualization of “Climate Change” phenomena. The aim of this project, to develop another perspective along these dominant narratives, has resulted in the research question How is social reality reconstructed on the phenomenon of “Climate Change” among the “Emerging Black Farmers” in the Swartland region in Western Cape, South Africa? Taken as an example, “Climate Change Knowledge” is reconstructed through a case study on the information exchange between the NGO Goedgedacht Trust and local small-scale farmers in the post-Apartheid context of on-going political, social, economic and educational transition in South Africa. Applying a constructivist approach, “Climate Change Knowledge” is not understood as an objectively given, but a socially constructed “reality” that is based on the interdependency of socio-economic conditions and individual assets, including language skills and language practice, sets of social norms and values, as well as strategies of knowledge transfer. The data set consists of qualitative data sources, such as application forms and interview material, which are triangulated. The rationale of a multi-layered data analysis includes a discursive perspective as well as linguistic and ethical “side perspectives”. Epistemologically, the thesis is guided by assumptions of complexity theory, framing knowledge around “Climate Change” as a fluid, constantly changing system that is shaped by constant intra- and inter-systemic exchange processes, and characterized by non-linearity, self-organization and representation of its constituents. From this point of departure, a theoretical terminology has been developed, which differentiates between symbols, interrelations, contents and content clusters. These elements are located in a system of spatio-temporal orientation and embedded into a broader (socio-economic) context of “historicity”. Content clusters are remodelled with the help of concept maps. Starting from that, a local perspective on “Climate Change” is developed, adding an experiential notion to the global narratives. The thesis concludes that there is no single reality about “Climate Change” and that the farmers’ “Climate Change Knowledge” highly depends on experiential relativity and spatio-temporal immediacy. Furthermore, analysis has shown that the system’s historicity and social manifestations can be traced in the scope and emphasis of the content clusters discussed. Finally the thesis demonstrates that characteristics of symbols, interconnections and contents range between dichotomies of direct and indirect, predictable versus unpredictable, awareness and negligence or threat and danger, all coexisting and creating a continuum of knowledge production.

The blood oxygen level dependent functional MRI (BOLD-fMRI) signal is an indirect measure of the neuronal activity that most BOLD studies are interested in. This thesis uses generative embedding algorithms to investigate some of the challenges and opportunities that this presents for BOLD imaging. It is standard practice to analyse BOLD signals using general linear models (GLMs) that assume fixed neurovascular coupling. However, this assumption may cause false positive or negative neural activations to be detected if the biological manifestations of brain diseases, disorders and pharmaceutical drugs (termed "neuromodulations") alter this coupling. Generative embedding can help overcome this problem by identifying when a neuromodulation confounds the standard GLM. When applied to anaesthetic neuromodulations found in preclinical imaging data, Fentanyl has the smallest confounding effect and Pentobarbital has the largest, causing extremely significant neural activations to go undetected. Half of the anaesthetics tested caused overestimation of the neuronal activity but the other half caused underestimation. The variability in biological action between anaesthetic modulations in identical brain regions of genetically similar animals highlights the complexity required to comprehensively account for factors confounding neurovascular coupling in GLMs generally. Generative embedding has the potential to augment established algorithms used to compensate for these variations in GLMs without complicating the standard (ANOVA) way of reporting BOLD results. Neuromodulation of neurovascular coupling can also present opportunities, such as improved diagnosis, monitoring and understanding of brain diseases accompanied by neurovascular uncoupling. Information theory is used to show that the discriminabilities of neurodegenerative-diseased and healthy generative posterior parameter spaces make generative embedding a viable tool for these commercial applications, boasting sensitivity to neurovascular coupling nonlinearities and biological interpretability. The value of hybrid neuroimaging systems over separate neuroimaging technologies is found to be greatest for early-stage neurodegenerative disease.

La diversification des résultats de recherche (DRR) vise à sélectionner divers documents à partir des résultats de recherche afin de couvrir autant d’intentions que possible. Dans les approches existantes, on suppose que les résultats initiaux sont suffisamment diversifiés et couvrent bien les aspects de la requête. Or, on observe souvent que les résultats initiaux n’arrivent pas à couvrir certains aspects. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une nouvelle approche de DRR qui consiste à diversifier l’expansion de requête (DER) afin d’avoir une meilleure couverture des aspects. Les termes d’expansion sont sélectionnés à partir d’une ou de plusieurs ressource(s) suivant le principe de pertinence marginale maximale. Dans notre première contribution, nous proposons une méthode pour DER au niveau des termes où la similarité entre les termes est mesurée superficiellement à l’aide des ressources. Quand plusieurs ressources sont utilisées pour DER, elles ont été uniformément combinées dans la littérature, ce qui permet d’ignorer la contribution individuelle de chaque ressource par rapport à la requête. Dans la seconde contribution de cette thèse, nous proposons une nouvelle méthode de pondération de ressources selon la requête. Notre méthode utilise un ensemble de caractéristiques qui sont intégrées à un modèle de régression linéaire, et génère à partir de chaque ressource un nombre de termes d’expansion proportionnellement au poids de cette ressource. Les méthodes proposées pour DER se concentrent sur l’élimination de la redondance entre les termes d’expansion sans se soucier si les termes sélectionnés couvrent effectivement les différents aspects de la requête. Pour pallier à cet inconvénient, nous introduisons dans la troisième contribution de cette thèse une nouvelle méthode pour DER au niveau des aspects. Notre méthode est entraînée de façon supervisée selon le principe que les termes reliés doivent correspondre au même aspect. Cette méthode permet de sélectionner des termes d’expansion à un niveau sémantique latent afin de couvrir autant que possible différents aspects de la requête. De plus, cette méthode autorise l’intégration de plusieurs ressources afin de suggérer des termes d’expansion, et supporte l’intégration de plusieurs contraintes telles que la contrainte de dispersion. Nous évaluons nos méthodes à l’aide des données de ClueWeb09B et de trois collections de requêtes de TRECWeb track et montrons l’utilité de nos approches par rapport aux méthodes existantes. / Search Result Diversification (SRD) aims to select diverse documents from the search results in order to cover as many search intents as possible. For the existing approaches, a prerequisite is that the initial retrieval results contain diverse documents and ensure a good coverage of the query aspects. In this thesis, we investigate a new approach to SRD by diversifying the query, namely diversified query expansion (DQE). Expansion terms are selected either from a single resource or from multiple resources following the Maximal Marginal Relevance principle. In the first contribution, we propose a new term-level DQE method in which word similarity is determined at the surface (term) level based on the resources. When different resources are used for the purpose of DQE, they are combined in a uniform way, thus totally ignoring the contribution differences among resources. In practice the usefulness of a resource greatly changes depending on the query. In the second contribution, we propose a new method of query level resource weighting for DQE. Our method is based on a set of features which are integrated into a linear regression model and generates for a resource a number of expansion candidates that is proportional to the weight of that resource. Existing DQE methods focus on removing the redundancy among selected expansion terms and no attention has been paid on how well the selected expansion terms can indeed cover the query aspects. Consequently, it is not clear how we can cope with the semantic relations between terms. To overcome this drawback, our third contribution in this thesis aims to introduce a novel method for aspect-level DQE which relies on an explicit modeling of query aspects based on embedding. Our method (called latent semantic aspect embedding) is trained in a supervised manner according to the principle that related terms should correspond to the same aspects. This method allows us to select expansion terms at a latent semantic level in order to cover as much as possible the aspects of a given query. In addition, this method also incorporates several different external resources to suggest potential expansion terms, and supports several constraints, such as the sparsity constraint. We evaluate our methods using ClueWeb09B dataset and three query sets from TRECWeb tracks, and show the usefulness of our proposed approaches compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

O transplante cardíaco é a última opção terapêutica para pacientes portadores de insuficiência cardíaca grave. Apesar dos avanços na terapia imunossupressora, a rejeição continua sendo o principal obstáculo para o sucesso do transplante. No presente estudo, propõe-se avaliar o perfil de expressão gênica no tecido cardíaco. Com isso, espera-se contribuir para o melhor entendimento do processo de rejeição a nível molecular. Foram analisadas as amostras sequenciais (1, 3 e 6 meses, 1 e 2 anos pós-transplante) de biópsias endomiocárdicas em parafina de 63 indivíduos transplantados cardíacos. O diagnóstico de rejeição humoral foi realizado pela detecção de C3d e C4d do complemento na reação de imuno-histoquímica, e as expressões dos genes protetores (ADIPOR1, ADIPOR2, HMOXO-1, BCL2L1 e VEGF) e genes associados à inflamação (IL-6, TNF?, IFN?, TGF-?, AIF-1, NOS2, ICAM, VCAM e MCP-1); foram avaliadas pela reação em cadeia da polimerase quantitativa em tempo real (qPCR). As frequências de indivíduos positivos para C4d (28,6%) e vasculite (20,0%) foram significantemente maiores em relação ao teste de reatividade de anticorpos realizado nos receptores antes do transplante (6,3%). Houve mudança no perfil de expressão gênica no tecido cardíaco após o transplante, com aumento da expressão dos genes inflamatórios (AIF-1, TNF?, IL-6, NOS2 e VCAM) e diminuição da expressão dos genes protetores (ADIPOR1, ADIPOR2, BCL2L1 e VEGF). Além disso, as expressões dos genes ADIPOR1 e ADIPOR2 foram significantemente menores nos indivíduos positivos para C4d (p<0,001) e gene VEGF (p<0,001) no grupo com vasculite. Houve também uma correlação positiva entre a expressão do gene VEGF e ADIPOR1 (r=0,5688) e ADIPOR2 (r=0,5191). Por outro lado, a expressão aumentada do gene VCAM (p<0,001) foi detectada em todos os tipos de rejeição. Conclui-se que, depois do transplante, o sistema imune do receptor passou a reconhecer os antígenos do órgão transplantado. Com isso, ocorreu uma mudança no perfil de expressão gênica no enxerto cardíaco, caracterizada pela expressão aumentada dos genes inflamatórios e diminuição dos genes protetores. A expressão aumentada do gene VCAM associada à baixa expressão dos genes protetores: ADIPOR1, ADIPOR2, BCL2L1 e VEGF resultaram em maior gravidade da rejeição celular, humoral e vasculopatia do aloenxerto cardíaco. / Heart transplantation is the ultimate treatment for patients with severe heart failure. Despite advances in immunosuppressive therapy, rejection still remains the main obstacle to successful transplant. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the gene expression profile in cardiac tissue. With this we hope to contribute to a better understanding of the rejection process at the molecular level. Sequential samples (1, 3, and 6 months, 1 to 2 years post-transplant) endomyocardial biopsies paraffin of 63 heart transplant subjects were analyzed. The diagnosis of humoral rejection was performed by detection of C3d and C4d complement in immunohistochemistry and the expression of protective genes (ADIPOR1, ADIPOR2, HMOXO-1, and VEGF BCL2L1) and genes associated with inflammation (IL-6,TNF?, IFN?, TGF-?, AIF-1, NOS2, ICAM, VCAM and MCP-1); were evaluated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). The frequency of individuals positive for C4d (28.6%) and vasculitis (20.0%) were significantly higher compared to antibodies reactivity test conducted in the recipients before transplantation (6.3%). There was a change in the gene expression profile in cardiac tissue after transplantation, with increased expression of inflammatory genes (AIF-1,TNF?, IL-6, NOS2, and VCAM) and a decreased expression of protective genes (ADIPOR1, ADIPOR2, BCL2L1, and VEGF). Furthermore, the expressions of ADIPOR1 and ADIPOR2 genes were significantly lower in C4d positive individuals (p<0,001), and VEGF (p<0,001) in the group with vasculitis. There was also a positive correlation between VEGF expression and ADIPOR1 (r=0.5688) and DIPOR2 (r=0.5191). Moreover, increased expression of VCAM (p<0,001) was detected in all types of rejection. We conclude that, after transplantation, the recipient\'s immune system began to recognize the antigens of the transplanted organ. Thus, a change in gene expression profile in cardiac graft is characterized by increased inflammatory genes and decreased expression of protective genes. Increased VCAM gene associated with lower expression of protective genes expression: ADIPOR1, ADIPOR2, BCL2L1 and VEGF resulted in increased severity of cellular and humoral rejection and cardiac allograft vasculopathy.

Le récit enchâssé émerge comme concept au début du XXe siècle, à la faveur des travaux formalistes sur le recueil de nouvelles. Il ne se développe véritablement que dans les années soixante, sous la plume de Todorov et de Genette. Mais alors, il est moins étudié qu’effleuré. Aucune définition consensuelle ne se dégage chez les narratologues. On prête au dispositif une origine millénaire, sans bien expliquer la persistance intacte d'un procédé d'écriture depuis l'Inde ancienne. Le récit enchâssé a été davantage un mythe critique qu'un objet d'étude. Cette thèse se propose de reprendre la conceptualisation là où elle s'est arrêtée : à l'intuition que certains textes contiennent des récits en surplus. Par des décrochages typographiques, par un changement d'énonciateur, par une variation temporelle, par une série de marquages spécifiques, un récit peut être mis en relief dans l'espace textuel. L'enchâssement, alors, ne serait que le fait de cette mise en relief, qu'elle s'effectue ou non dans un texte littéraire, qu'elle porte ou non sur un texte narratif. Y a-t-il légitimité, dès lors, à parler d'un « récit enchâssé » ? A-t-il existé dans l'histoire une technique homogène de mise en relief d'un récit ? En posant cette question sur les récits courts du XIXe siècle (1800-1890), cette thèse s'efforce également d'expliquer l'apparition de la notion. Car c'est au XIXe siècle que, pour la première fois, le recueil de nouvelles est comparé à une fiction indépendante, en l'occurrence, une nouvelle. Analyser ce rapprochement permet de découvrir comment a été préparée la possibilité de penser le « récit enchâssé ». / At the beginning of the twentieth century, embedded narrative emerged as a concept, thanks to the research that Russian formalists had carried out on a collection of short stories. But the category came into bloom only in the 1960s, under Todorov and Genette's pens. At that time though, the subject was broached rather than dealt with in depth. No definition based on consensus ever arose from narratology; and the seamless persistence of this narrative technique, dating back to Ancient India, has never been well accounted for. Embedded narrative has always been a critical myth rather than a subject to be studied. The aim of this dissertation is to start where the first tentative conceptualization stopped: the feeling that some texts do contain extra narratives. Inserted stories can be enhanced through typography layouts, changes of narratee, time-related alterations, or by sets of specific markings. Embedding might then mean emphasizing rather than inserting. Is it then legitimate to comment on 'embedded narratives' as such? Was there ever a consistent technique to emphasize narratives? By raising these issues, this dissertation aims at getting to the root of the notion, and addresses the topic by drawing on a large number of short stories published between 1800 and 1890. For during the nineteenth century short stories collections came for the first time closer to independent fiction, precisely to short story. Analyzing this rapprochement will enable us to discover how the very notion of 'embedded narrative’ could come up.

INTRODUÇÃO: A punção aspirativa por agulha fina guiada por ecoendoscopia (PAAF-EE) é método consagrado para o diagnóstico de lesões sólidas de pâncreas. A aplicação de pressão negativa (PN) durante a PAAF-EE tem objetivo de manter o tecido junto à ponta cortante da agulha durante sua passagem através da lesão, resultando no desprendimento e retenção de células. A capilaridade (CP) é outra técnica que utiliza a retirada gradual do estilete durante a PAAF-EE e parece ser igualmente eficaz, além de evitar aspiração indesejada de hemácias e coágulos. OBJETIVO: Analisar o rendimento da ecopunção de lesões sólidas pancreáticas utilizando PN versus (vs) CP e os aspectos citológicos qualitativos e semiquantitativos da celularidade e contaminação por sangue dos grupos estudados. MÉTODO: No estudo, foram randomizados 50 pacientes com lesões sólidas de pâncreas para realização de PAAF-EE. Cada paciente foi submetido a quatro punções, intercalando as duas técnicas. A ordem das punções foi randomizada por computador. O grupo A (PN, CP, PN, CP) e o grupo B (CP, PN, CP, PN). RESULTADOS: As sensibilidade, especificidade e acurácia da PN vs CP foram 95,2% vs 92,3%; 100% vs 100%; 95,7% vs 93%, respectivamente. Quando foi considerada a associação das duas técnicas (PN+CP), os resultados da sensibilidade, especificidade e acurácia foram 95,6%, 100% e 96%. O valor preditivo positivo (VPP) foi alto para todas técnicas (100%) e os valores preditivos negativos (VPN) para PN, CP e associação dos métodos foram de 66,7% vs 57,1% vs 66,7%, respectivamente. Não houve diferença estatística no rendimento diagnóstico entre a PN e CP: 88% vs 80% (p=0,344), entretanto as técnicas somadas (PN+CP) foi superior à CP isolada: 94% vs 80% (p=0,016). A avaliação citológica qualitativa e semi-quantitativa de celularidade e contaminação por sangue no esfregaço e emblocado pelas técnicas de PN e CP não apresentou diferença estatística (p>0,05). CONCLUSÃO: O rendimento diagnóstico da PAAF-EE pela técnica de PN versus CP de massas sólidas de pâncreas não apresenta diferença estatística, entretanto a utilização das técnicas combinadas é superior, particularmente em relação à CP isolada. A celularidade e contaminação por sangue é semelhante independente da técnica utilizada (PN ou CP) ou do tipo de preparação citológica (esfregaço ou emblocado) / BACKGROUND: Endoscopic ultrasound fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA) is an established diagnostic method for solid pancreatic masses. Application of negative pressure (NP) during EUS-FNA has the purpose of holding tissue against the cutting edge of the needle as it is moved through the lesion leading to cell detachment and drawing them up. Capillary (CP) sampling is another technique that removes the needle stylet gradually and continuously during the EUS-FNA and seems to have comparable results with less blood and clot aspiration. AIM: Analyze diagnostic yield of EUS-FNA of pancreatic solid mass using NP versus CP and evaluate cytological qualitative and semi-quantitative features of cellularity and blood contamination of each group. METHOD: A total of 50 patients were randomized for NP or CP EUSFNA with a standard 22G needle. Each patient had four passes using NP and CP in an alternate fashion. Computer randomization generated two groups. Group A (NP, CP, NP, CP) and group B (CP, NP, CP, NP). RESULTS: Diagnostic yield of NP versus CP had no statistical difference (p=0.344). Both techniques (NP+CP) was superior to CP alone (p=0.016), but not to NP alone (p=0.25). Sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of NP vs CP were 95.2% vs 92.3%; 100% vs 100%; 95.7% vs 93%, respectively. Results for sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of both NP+CP were 95.6%, 100% and 96%. Positive predictive value was high for all techniques (100%) and Negative predictive value for NP, CP and both techniques were 66.7%, 57.1% and 66.7%, respectively. NP and CP smears and cell blocks had no statistical differences in qualitative and semi-quantitative citological evaluation for cellularity and bloodiness (p > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: NP versus CP in EUS-FNA of solid pancreatic mass yielded similar overall outcomes in terms of diagnostic performance, however the combination of both techniques is superior, particularly compared to CP alone. Cellularity and bloodiness are equivalent no matter which technique (NP or CP) or type of cytological preparation (smear or cell block) is used

A family of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of- speech (PoS) tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Multiword Expression (MWE) identification all involve assigning labels to sequences of words in text (sequence labeling). Most modern machine learning approaches to sequence labeling utilize word embeddings, learned representations of text, in which words with similar meanings have similar representations. Quite recently, contextualized word embeddings have garnered much attention because, unlike pretrained context- insensitive embeddings such as word2vec, they are able to capture word meaning in context. In this thesis, I evaluate the performance of different embedding setups (context-sensitive, context-insensitive word, as well as task-specific word, character, lemma, and PoS) on the three abovementioned sequence labeling tasks using a deep learning model (BiLSTM) and Portuguese datasets. v

Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a form of utility computing which has emerged with the recent innovations in the service computing and data communication technologies. Regardless of the fact that IaaS is attractive for application service providers, satisfying user requests while ensuring cloud operational objectives is a complicated task that raises several resource management challenges. Among these challenges, limited controllability over network services delivered to cloud consumers is prominent in single datacenter cloud environments. In addition, the lack of seamless service migration and optimization, poor infrastructure utilization, and unavailability of efficient fault tolerant techniques are noteworthy challenges in geographically distributed datacenter clouds. Initially in this thesis, a datacenter resource management framework is presented to address the challenge of limited controllability over cloud network traffic. The proposed framework integrates network virtualization functionalities offered by software defined networking (SDN) into cloud ecosystem. To provide rich traffic control features to IaaS consumers, control plane virtualization capabilities offered by SDN have been employed. Secondly, a quality of service (QoS) aware seamless service migration and optimization framework has been proposed in the context of geo-distributed datacenters. Focus has been given to a mobile end-user scenario where frequent cloud service migrations are required to mitigate QoS violations. Finally, an SDN-based dynamic fault restoration scheme and a shared backup-based fault protection scheme have been proposed. The fault restoration has been achieved by introducing QoS-aware reactive and shared risk link group-aware proactive path computation algorithms. Shared backup protection has been achieved by optimizing virtual and backup link embedding through a novel integer linear programming approach. The proposed solutions significantly improve bandwidth utilization in inter-datacenter networks while recovering from substrate link failures.

We investigate various relationships between categories of functors. The major examples are given by extending some duality to a larger structure, such as an adjunction or a recollement of abelian categories. We prove a theorem which provides a method of constructing recollements which uses 0-th derived functors. We will show that the hypotheses of this theorem are very commonly satisfied by giving many examples. In our most important example we show that the well-known Auslander-Gruson-Jensen equivalence extends to a recollement. We show that two recollements, both arising from different characterisations of purity, are strongly related to each other via a commutative diagram. This provides a structural explanation for the equivalence between two functorial characterisations of purity for modules. We show that the Auslander-Reiten formulas are a consequence of this commutative diagram. We define and characterise the contravariant functors which arise from a pp-pair. When working over an artin algebra, this provides a contravariant analogue of the well-known relationship between pp-pairs and covariant functors. We show that some of these results can be generalised to studying contravariant functors on locally finitely presented categories whose category of finitely presented objects is a dualising variety.

Durant cette thèse, nous avons introduit les problèmes de Bin Covering avec Contrainte de Distance (BCCD) et de Bin Packing avec Contrainte de Distance (BPCD), qui trouvent leur application dans les réseaux de grande échelle, tel Internet. L'étude de ces problèmes que nous effectuons dans des espaces métriques quelconques montre qu'il est impossible de travailler dans un tel cadre sans avoir recours à de l'augmentation de ressources, un procédé qui permet d'élaborer des algorithmes construisant des solutions moins contraintes que la solution optimale à laquelle elles sont comparées. En plus de résultats d'approximation intéressants, nous prouvons la difficulté de ces problèmes si ce procédé n'est pas utilisé. Par ailleurs, de nombreux outils ont pour objectif de plonger les grands réseaux qui nous intéressent dans des espaces métriques bien décrits. Nous avons alors étudié nos problèmes dans plusieurs espaces métriques spécifiques, et, en particulier, ceux générés par certains de ces outils, comme Vivaldi et Sequoia. / During this Ph.D we introduced Bin Covering under Distance Constraint (BCCD in French) and Bin Packing under Distance Constraint (BPCD in French). Those two problems find their applications in the context of large scale networks, like Internet. We studied those problems in general metric spaces, and proved that using resource augmentation is mandatory. Resource augmentation allows to build algorithms working on solutions with less constraints than the optimal solution to which it is compared to. We found interesting approximations algorithms using this relaxation, and proved the necessity of this resource augmentation. However many tools are used to embed large networks we are interested in in specific metric spaces. Thus we studied those problems in different specific metric spaces, in particular those generated by the use of Vivaldi and Sequoia, two of those tools.