This thesis explores the feasibility of clustering mixed data and unevenly spaced time series for customer segmentation. The proposed method implements the Gower dissimilarity as the local distance function in dynamic time warping to calculate dissimilarities between mixed data time series. The time series are then clustered with k−medoids and the clusters are evaluated with the silhouette score and t−SNE. The study further investigates the use of a time warping regularisation parameter. It is derived that implementing time as a feature has the same effect as penalising time warping, andtherefore time is implemented as a feature where the feature weight is equivalent to a regularisation parameter. The results show that the proposed method successfully identifies clusters in customer transaction data provided by Nordea. Furthermore, the results show a decrease in the silhouette score with an increase in the regularisation parameter, suggesting that the time at which a transaction occurred might not be of relevance to the given dataset. However, due to the method’s high computational complexity, it is limited to relatively small datasets and therefore a need exists for a more scalable and efficient clustering technique. / Denna uppsats utforskar klustring av ojämnt fördelade tidsserier med numeriska och kategoriska variabler för kundsegmentering. Den föreslagna metoden implementerar Gower dissimilaritet som avståndsfunktionen i dynamic time warping för att beräkna dissimilaritet mellan tidsserierna. Tidsserierna klustras sedan med k-medoids och klustren utvärderas med silhouette score och t-SNE. Studien undersökte vidare användningen av en regulariserings parameter. Det härledes att implementering av tid som en egenskap hade samma effekt som att bestraffa dynamic time warping, och därför implementerades tid som en egenskap där dess vikt är ekvivalent med en regulariseringsparameter.  Resultaten visade att den föreslagna metoden lyckades identifiera kluster i transaktionsdata från Nordea. Vidare visades det att silhouette score minskade då regulariseringsparametern ökade, vilket antyder att tiden transaktion då en transaktion sker inte är relevant för det givna datan. Det visade sig ytterligare att metoden är begränsad till reltaivt små dataset på grund av dess höga beräkningskomplexitet, och därför finns det behov av att utforksa en mer skalbar och effektiv klusteringsteknik.

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This thesis investigates the problem of robot navigation using only landmark bearings. The proposed system allows a robot to move to a ground target location specified by the sensor values observed at this ground target posi- tion. The control actions are computed based on the difference between the current landmark bearings and the target landmark bearings. No Cartesian coordinates with respect to the ground are computed by the control system. The robot navigates using solely information from the bearing sensor space. Most existing robot navigation systems require a ground frame (2D Cartesian coordinate system) in order to navigate from a ground point A to a ground point B. The commonly used sensors such as laser range scanner, sonar, infrared, and vision do not directly provide the 2D ground coordi- nates of the robot. The existing systems use the sensor measurements to localise the robot with respect to a map, a set of 2D coordinates of the objects of interest. It is more natural to navigate between the points in the sensor space corresponding to A and B without requiring the Cartesian map and the localisation process. Research on animals has revealed how insects are able to exploit very limited computational and memory resources to successfully navigate to a desired destination without computing Cartesian positions. For example, a honeybee balances the left and right optical flows to navigate in a nar- row corridor. Unlike many other ants, Cataglyphis bicolor does not secrete pheromone trails in order to find its way home but instead uses the sun as a compass to keep track of its home direction vector. The home vector can be inaccurate, so the ant also uses landmark recognition. More precisely, it takes snapshots and compass headings of some landmarks. To return home, the ant tries to line up the landmarks exactly as they were before it started wandering. This thesis introduces a navigation method based on reflex actions in sensor space. The sensor vector is made of the bearings of some landmarks, and the reflex action is a gradient descent with respect to the distance in sensor space between the current sensor vector and the target sensor vec- tor. Our theoretical analysis shows that except for some fully characterized pathological cases, any point is reachable from any other point by reflex action in the bearing sensor space provided the environment contains three landmarks and is free of obstacles. The trajectories of a robot using reflex navigation, like other image- based visual control strategies, do not correspond necessarily to the shortest paths on the ground, because the sensor error is minimized, not the moving distance on the ground. However, we show that the use of a sequence of waypoints in sensor space can address this problem. In order to identify relevant waypoints, we train a Self Organising Map (SOM) from a set of observations uniformly distributed with respect to the ground. This SOM provides a sense of location to the robot, and allows a form of path planning in sensor space. The navigation proposed system is analysed theoretically, and evaluated both in simulation and with experiments on a real robot.

The master thesis is focused on the principle of ultrasonographs and their modes, and ways of denoising data obtained by ultrasonographs. This project will also concentrate on removing the speckle noise, because the speckle noise has the largest share of the noise in the measured data in ultrasonographs. The other main objective was to describe advanced methods of filtration, especially the modifications of the median filter, such as the modified hybrid median filter and modification of the anisotropic diffusion, namely generalizing Perona-Malik anisotropic diffusion using restricted dissimilarity functions. These two filters were tested on images with artificial noise and on data captured using the ultrasound system GE VingMed System FiVe. Also, the program for filtering and display filtered ultrasound data captured by GE VingMed System FiVe is described.

This study investigates the impact of second language age of onset on the development of syntactic competence in bilinguals. Forty-five bilingual children were tested using a picture- matching task with relative clauses. In this paradigm, children are aurally presented with relative clauses of various kinds and are asked to match what they hear with the appropriate picture (out of four choices) on the screen. More specifically, our experiment compared the comprehension of subject- vs. object-extracted center-embedded relative clauses and contained sentences with noun phrases (NPs) that did or did not match in number (both NPs singular or plural = match, one NP singular, one NP plural = mismatch). We compared the performance of a group of Simultaneous bilinguals (two languages since birth), Early sequential bilinguals (first exposure to L2 - English between the ages of 1 to 4) and Late sequential bilinguals (first exposure to L2 -English after the age of 4 but latest at the age of 6 - primary school). The mean age of the participants at the time of testing was approx. 10 years of age. The results show that there is a varied pattern in the comprehension strategies used among the three bilingual groups. The group of Simultaneous bilinguals showed more reliance on the syntactic information contained in...