The early detection of damage of in-service structural or mechanical systems is of vital importance. With early detection, the damage may be repaired before the integrity of the system is jeopardized, avoiding possible monetary losses, environmental impacts, injury and death. With this goal in mind, many structural health monitoring techniques have been developed which use a combination of sensors and algorithms to collect, process and interpret data to detect damage in a structure. This thesis presents work completed in support of the experimental validation of a novel structural health monitoring technique developed with the aim of providing improved qualitative results compared to those methods currently available.

The isotropy of a glass can be broken by the application of a mechanical stress giving rise to a phenomenon of birefringence. Some lead-containing glass compositions are known to prevent this phenomenon and they are called zero-stress optic glass. Mueller’s theory of photoelasticity attempts to explain the structural origin of the photoelastic response in glass and crystal. Zwanziger’s empirical model is able to predict the photoelastic response of a glass based on its composition and the crystal structure of its constituents. Lead-, tin-, antimony-, zinc-, and cadmium-containing glasses were investigated in the binary silicate, borate, and phosphate systems. The stress optic coe?cient of these binary glasses was measured experimentally using the S´enarmont method or found in the literature. Solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy and M¨ossbauer spectroscopy were mainly used to investigate the local environment of the cations. The photoelastic response of a glass and its structure were correlated, and the results were compared with the expectations arising from Mueller’s theory and Zwanziger’s empirical model. The theory and the model were both tested and their reliability was discussed. Zero-stress optic glasses are of technological interest, but new environmental regulations forbids the use of lead in materials, including glass. From experimental results and literature, a global strategy to design new zero-stress optic glasses was established. New lead-free zero-stress optic glasses were discovered with properties similar to the lead-containing zero-stress optic glass (high index of refraction, transparency, no coloration). The study of the structural dependence of the photoelastic response of oxide glass contributed to identify new parameters in?uencing the photoelasticity, such as covalency, polarizability and natural deformation of the additive.

Many real world problems are naturally distributed, whether they are spatially, cognitively, or otherwise. Distributed problems naturally lend themselves to solutions using multi-agent paradigms. Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DisCSPs) are a class of such distributed problems. In DisCSPs, variables and constraints are distributed between agents. Most distributed algorithms, although exponential in the worst-case, can have a good performance in the average case. The main purpose of this research is to statistically assess difference between the empirical performances of major state of the art DisCSP algorithms including Multi-Sectioned Constraint Network (MSCN) based algorithms, that have never been empirically compared against other DisCSP algorithms. In this thesis, we select a set of state of the art DisCSP algorithms and compare them on randomly generated instances of binary DisCSPs with a wide range of characteristics. Distributed algorithms ADOPT, DSA, DPOP, and MSCN based algorithms were selected based on a set of high level criteria. We explore how these algorithms relatively compare with each other on a range of DisCSPs with different parameters. Their performances are evaluated according to computation time (in the form of non-concurrent computational steps or NCCCs) and communication load (in the form of number of messages as well as volume of messages). Statistical parametric tests are used to aid interpretation of the performance results. In addition, this thesis discusses privacy issues associated with these DisCSP algorithms.

Software security failures are common and the problem is growing. A vulnerability is a weakness in the software that, when exploited, causes a security failure. It is difficult to detect vulnerabilities until they manifest themselves as security failures in the operational stage of the software, because security concerns are often not addressed or known sufficiently early during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Complexity, coupling, and cohesion (CCC) related software metrics can be measured during the early phases of software development such as design or coding. Although these metrics have been successfully employed to indicate software faults in general, the relationships between CCC metrics and vulnerabilities have not been extensively investigated yet. If empirical relationships can be discovered between CCC metrics and vulnerabilities, these metrics could aid software developers to take proactive actions against potential vulnerabilities in software. In this thesis, we investigate whether CCC metrics can be utilized as early indicators of software vulnerabilities. We conduct an extensive case study on several releases of Mozilla Firefox to provide empirical evidence on how vulnerabilities are related to complexity, coupling, and cohesion. We mine the vulnerability databases, bug databases, and version archives of Mozilla Firefox to map vulnerabilities to software entities. It is found that some of the CCC metrics are correlated to vulnerabilities at a statistically significant level. Since different metrics are available at different development phases, we further examine the correlations to determine which level (design or code) of CCC metrics are better indicators of vulnerabilities. We also observe that the correlation patterns are stable across multiple releases. These observations imply that the metrics can be dependably used as early indicators of vulnerabilities in software. We then present a framework to automatically predict vulnerabilities based on CCC metrics. To build vulnerability predictors, we consider four alternative data mining and statistical techniques – C4.5 Decision Tree, Random Forests, Logistic Regression, and Naïve-Bayes – and compare their prediction performances. We are able to predict majority of the vulnerability-prone files in Mozilla Firefox, with tolerable false positive rates. Moreover, the predictors built from the past releases can reliably predict the likelihood of having vulnerabilities in future releases. The experimental results indicate that structural information from the non-security realm such as complexity, coupling, and cohesion are useful in vulnerability prediction. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-24 17:31:36.581

Developing high quality software is of eminent importance to keep the existing customers satisfied and to remain competitive. One of the most important software quality characteristics is performance, which defines how fast and/or efficiently a software can perform its operation. While several studies have shown that field problems are often due to performance issues instead of feature bugs, prior research typically treats all bugs as similar when studying various aspects of software quality (e.g., predicting the time to fix a bug) or focused on other types of bug (e.g., security bugs). There is little work that studies performance bugs. In this thesis, we perform an empirical study to quantitatively and qualitatively examine performance bugs in the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browser projects in order to find out if performance bugs are really different from other bugs in practice and to understand the rationale behind those differences. In our quantitative study, we find that performance bugs of the Firefox project take longer time to fix, are fixed by more experienced developers, and require changes to more lines of code. We also study performance bugs relative to security bugs, since security bugs have been extensively studied separately in the past. We find that security bugs are re-opened and tossed more often, are fixed and triaged faster, are fixed by more experienced developers, and are assigned more number of developers in the Firefox project. Google Chrome project also shows different quantitative characteristics between performance and non-performance bugs and from the Firefox project. Based on our quantitative results, we look at that data from a qualitative point of view. As one of our most interesting observation, we find that end-users are often frustrated with performance problems and often threaten to switch to competing software products. To better understand, the rationale for some users being very frustrated (even threatening to switch product) even though most systems are well tested, we performed an additional study. In this final study, we explore a global perspective vs a user centric perspective of analyzing performance data. We find that a user-centric perspective might lead to a small number of users with considerably poor performance while the global perspective might show good or same performance across releases. The results of our studies show that performance bugs are different and should be studied separately in large scale software systems to improve the quality assurance processes related to software performance. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-30 01:28:22.623

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Magistro baigiamasis darbas "Lietuvos energetikos ūkio administravimas“ parašytas Annos Tatarnikovos, vadovaujant viešojo administravimo katedros profesoriui dr. Vladimirui Obrazcovui. Pasirinktos temos aktualumas tame, jog Lietuvos šilumos ūkis dar vystymosi stadijoje ir tinkamai įvertinus esamą energetikos ūkio administravimo patirtį galima pakeisti bei įtakoti šilumos sektoriaus ateitį. Darbo naujumą ir praktinį reikšmingumą sudaro tai, jog greta teorinės ir praktinės analizės, bus atliekamas ir Lietuvos šilumos ūkio administravimo efektyvumo tyrimas. Būtina akcentuoti, jog pokyčiai energetikos sektoriuje neišvengiami, pasitelkus kvalifikuotus šios srities specialistus, remiantis moksliniais tyrimais, atlikus atitinkančią realiai padėčiai SWOT analizę galima užtikrinti sklandžią šilumos ūkio veiklą bei skaidrų finansinių išteklių panaudojimą. Darbe analizuojant mokslinę literatūrą pateikiamos kapitalo pritraukimo alternatyvos šilumos ūkio modernizavimui. Pagrindinės alternatyvos yra: banko kreditai, įmonės koncesija-nuoma, dalinis įmonės privatizavimas. Siūlomos ir kitos alternatyvos: paslaugų sutartis ir administravimo sutartis, tačiau jų galiojimo terminas daug trumpesnis ir jos gali būti panaudotos tik kaip laikinos priemonės. Darbe naudojami istorinis ir lyginamasis tyrimo metodai naudojami ištirti šilumos ūkio administravimo raidą Lietuvoje, bei jai darančius įtaką veiksnius, restruktūrizavus šilumos ūkį. Apibendrinant rezultatus, teikiant rekomendacijas... [to full text] / Actuality of the chosen topic is in the fact that the Lithuanian heating network is going under development. Having estimated the existing administration experience correctly, one can change or influence upon the heating sectors future. The novelty and practical meaning of the work consists in the research of the effectiveness of the Lithuanian heating system administration to be performed, alongside with the theoretical and practical analysis. The accent is put upon the inevitability of changes in the energy sector. The changes are inevitable if being deeply investigated by researchers and scientific specialists doing profound SWOT analysis to reinforce the heating system activities using transparent financial sources. The scientific literature has been analyzed concerning (alternative) capital investments alternatives for heating systems modernization. The main alternatives are: bank credits, concession companies rentals and privatization of companies. The other alternatives are: service argument; administration agreement. However, the validity term of such services is by for shorter, so they com serve as temporary means alone. Summarizing the results the method of analytical criticism has been used. AB “Vilniaus energija” the Vilnius energy sector of the beginning of 2002 has been analysed. This company signed a rental concession agreement with a foreign society. To find out the advantages and disadvantages of the heating system rentals to the private sector, the... [to full text]

Empirical likelihood (EL) is a recently developed nonparametric method of statistical inference. Owen’s 2001 book contains many important results for EL with uncensored data. However, fewer results are available for EL with right-censored data. In this dissertation, we first investigate a right-censored-data extension of Qin and Lawless (1994). They studied EL with uncensored data when the number of estimating equations is larger than the number of parameters (over-determined case). We obtain results similar to theirs for the maximum EL estimator and the EL ratio test, for the over-determined case, with right-censored data. We employ hazard-type constraints which are better able to handle right-censored data. Then we investigate EL with right-censored data and a k-sample mixed hazard-type constraint. We show that the EL ratio test statistic has a limiting chi-square distribution when k = 2. We also study the relationship between the constrained Kaplan-Meier estimator and the corresponding Nelson-Aalen estimator. We try to prove that they are asymptotically equivalent under certain conditions. Finally we present simulation studies and examples showing how to apply our theory and methodology with real data.