The goal of this master degree project was to find out whether or not a highly integrated system for universal tagging of content improves the usability of a desktop environment. A prototype of such a system was implemented and integrated into the GNOME desktop environment. A usability study was then performed which showed that the tagging system did improve the usability of the desktop environment.

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The cloud computing paradigm is realized through large scale distributed resource management and computation platforms such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Dryad, and Pregel. These platforms enable quick and efficient development of a large range of applications that can be sustained at scale in a fault-tolerant fashion. Two key technologies, namely resource virtualization and feature-rich enterprise storage, are further driving the wide-spread adoption of virtualized cloud environments. Many challenges arise when designing resource management techniques for both native and virtualized data centers. First, parameter tuning of MapReduce jobs for efficient resource utilization is a daunting and time consuming task. Second, while the MapReduce model is designed for and leverages information from native clusters to operate efficiently, the emergence of virtual cluster topology results in overlaying or hiding the actual network information. This leads to two resource selection and placement anomalies: (i) loss of data locality, and (ii) loss of job locality. Consequently, jobs may be placed physically far from their associated data or related jobs, which adversely affect the overall performance. Finally, the extant resource provisioning approach leads to significant wastage as enterprise cloud providers have to consider and provision for peak loads instead of average load (that is many times lower). In this dissertation, we design and develop a resource management framework to address the above challenges. We first design an innovative resource scheduler, CAM, aimed at MapReduce applications running in virtualized cloud environments. CAM reconciles both data and VM resource allocation with a variety of competing constraints, such as storage utilization, changing CPU load and network link capacities based on a flow-network algorithm. Additionally, our platform exposes the typically hidden lower-level topology information to the MapReduce job scheduler, which enables it to make optimal task assignments. Second, we design an online performance tuning system, mrOnline, which monitors the MapReduce job execution, tunes the parameters based on collected statistics and provides fine-grained control over parameter configuration changes to the user. To this end, we employ a gray-box based smart hill-climbing algorithm that leverages MapReduce runtime statistics and effectively converge to a desirable configuration within a single iteration. Finally, we target enterprise applications in virtualized environment where typically a network attached centralized storage system is deployed. We design a new protocol to share primary data de-duplication information available at the storage server with the client. This enables better client-side cache utilization and reduces server-client network traffic, which leads to overall high performance. Based on the protocol, a workload aware VM management strategy is further introduced to decrease the load to the storage server and enhance the I/O efficiency for clients. / Ph. D.

This thesis deals with technologies of SELinux security policy writing. Furthermore the thesis analyzes userspace of GNU/Linux operating system with special focus on KDE desktop environment. On the basis of this analysis a bottom-up methodics to create a security policy is devised. Acquired knowledge is then used in practice when realizing the main goal of the thesis, which is to create example security policies for chosen KDE applications. When describing technologies of security policy writing the thesis draws information from available sources of information. Input for userspace analysis are available electronic sources of information and author's own experience with analyzed applications. This is used with common philosophic principles to devise bottom-up methodics of policy writting. Following act of policy building draws from defined security goals, acquired knowledge, created methodics and defined usecases. Theoretical contribution of the thesis is devised methodics of userspace policy building. Main practical contribution are then created example SELinux policies for chosen KDE applications. The structure of the thesis follows its goals. For them three parts are created: background research of available resources, author's own theoretical contemplations and practical output of the thesis. Those parts are then devided into sections according to needs of each topic.

This master's thesis gives introduction to FreeIPA project and GNOME Keyring project. It discusses benefits of possible integration of GNOME Keyring into FreeIPA using FreeIPA's component called Password Vault. Designs of possible implementations are provided. Prototype of one of these designs is implemented.

Gaze tracking is a field within computer vision that has a large number of possible areas of application. However, much of the software available for gaze tracking is locked to licenses and/or certain equipment that can be expensive, hard to get a hold of, intrusive for the user, or simply impractical. The research within gaze tracking typically focuses on the theoretical models used to perform the tracking, rather than the software implementation of it. The purpose of this report is to make real-time gaze tracking systems more easily available to the common user and developer. Hence, this thesis explores a possible implementation of gaze tracking using C# in Visual Studio, with the help of a number of different libraries, only using a simple web camera as hardware. Further, the system is analyzed and evaluated by the precision of the subject’s eye movements which is projected on the screen. The resulting system is heavily inaccurate and imprecise but changing and adding a few key software components such as estimating the user’s head pose could vastly improve the accuracy and precision of the system. / Blickspårning är ett fält inom datorseende som har ett stort antal möjliga tilläpmningsområden. Däremot så är mycket av den tillgängliga mjukvaran låst till licenser och/eller viss utrustning som kan vara dyr, svår att få tag på, påträngande, eller helt enkelt opraktisk. Forskningen inom blickspårning fokuserar typiskt sett på den teoretiska modellen som beskriver hur spårningen går till, snarare än hur det implementeras i mjukvara. Syftet med den här rapporten är att skapa ett blickspårningsprogram som körs i realtid för att underlätta och göra det mer tillgängligt för andra användare och utvecklare. Därför utforskar den här uppsatsen ett sätt att implementera blickspårning med C# i Visual Studio, med hjälp av ett antal olika kodbibliotek, och endast en enkel webbkamera som hårdvara. Systemet kommer även att bli analyserat och evaluerat med hänseende till träffsäkerheten i testpersoners ögonrörelse som projiceras på skärmen. Det resulterande systemet har en oerhört låg träffsäkerhet och exakthet, men genom att ändra några nyckelkomponenter i mjukvaran, så som att uppskatta hur användarens huvud är riktat, så kan systemets träffsäkerhet och precision ökas dramatiskt.