Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / Global epidemic surveillance is an essential task for national biosecurity management and bioterrorism prevention. The main goal is to protect the public from major health threads. To perform this task effectively one requires reliable, timely and accurate medical information from a wide range of sources. Towards this goal, we present a framework for epidemiological analytics that can be used to extract and visualize infectious disease outbreaks from the variety of unstructured web sources automatically. More precisely, in this thesis, we consider several research tasks including document relevance classification, entity extraction and animal disease-related event recognition in the veterinary epidemiology domain. First, we crawl web sources and classify collected documents by topical relevance using supervised learning algorithms. Next, we propose a novel approach for automated ontology construction in the veterinary medicine domain. Our approach is based on semantic relationship discovery using syntactic patterns. We then apply our automatically-constructed ontology for the domain-specific entity extraction task. Moreover, we compare our ontology-based entity extraction results with an alternative sequence labeling approach. We introduce a sequence labeling method for the entity tagging that relies on syntactic feature extraction using a sliding window. Finally, we present our novel sentence-based event recognition approach that includes three main steps: entity extraction of animal diseases, species, locations, dates and the confirmation status n-grams; event-related sentence classification into two categories - suspected or confirmed; automated event tuple generation and aggregation. We show that our document relevance classification results as well as entity extraction and disease-related event recognition results are significantly better compared to the results reported by other animal disease surveillance systems.

When can a contract constitute the relation of influence or control and their potential consequences? The aim of my thesis is the description of the regulation of group entities (with the exception of concern law) with emphasis on the possibility to establish such relationship by a contract. I am trying to prove that establishment of the relationship of influence and control is possible. I am further trying to prove that such situations are not common in practice. Controlling relationship established by a contract is even quite unique. Another aim of my thesis is to describe the legal consequences of group entities under the Act on Corporations, especially the compensation for damages. However I would also like to take into consideration other consequences of group entities within the Act on corporations.

Striving towards service excellence, a public entity can embark on various service and product delivery strategies as well as functional management strategies or management tools. The primary objective of this study is to indicate to what extent a public entity such as Gerotek can meet the different approaches to economically viable service delivery to the government and commercial environments respectively, where different rules, regulations, means and ways of contracting apply. In order to realise this objective, the characteristics of public entities and those of private entities competing in the same market were explored and comparisons made between the different entities to indicate the level of success each one is able to achieve. Public-Private Partnerships, Project- Partnering and Management, as well as Black Economic Empowerment involvement, as different forms of partnership agreements or other forms of business models, were investigated to distinguish best practice in service and product delivery strategies. The effectiveness of various management tools was discussed, such as the South African Excellence Model, Total Quality Management, and the Balanced Scorecard, which can be applied to assist management in improving service delivery. Interviews were conducted according to an interviewer-administered questionnaire to obtain information pertaining to the literature study of the above, in order to determine the effectiveness of service delivery within a public entity competing in government and commercial environments. The respondents agreed that a public entity could meet best practice to deliver economically viable services and products to both environments, with the reservation that continuous improvements should be made. / Thesis (M. Development and Management)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

Striving towards service excellence, a public entity can embark on various service and product delivery strategies as well as functional management strategies or management tools. The primary objective of this study is to indicate to what extent a public entity such as Gerotek can meet the different approaches to economically viable service delivery to the government and commercial environments respectively, where different rules, regulations, means and ways of contracting apply. In order to realise this objective, the characteristics of public entities and those of private entities competing in the same market were explored and comparisons made between the different entities to indicate the level of success each one is able to achieve. Public-Private Partnerships, Project- Partnering and Management, as well as Black Economic Empowerment involvement, as different forms of partnership agreements or other forms of business models, were investigated to distinguish best practice in service and product delivery strategies. The effectiveness of various management tools was discussed, such as the South African Excellence Model, Total Quality Management, and the Balanced Scorecard, which can be applied to assist management in improving service delivery. Interviews were conducted according to an interviewer-administered questionnaire to obtain information pertaining to the literature study of the above, in order to determine the effectiveness of service delivery within a public entity competing in government and commercial environments. The respondents agreed that a public entity could meet best practice to deliver economically viable services and products to both environments, with the reservation that continuous improvements should be made. / Thesis (M. Development and Management)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued Interpretation No. 46 (FIN 46), Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities – An Interpretation of ARB No. 51, in January 2003 and revised it in December 2003, with the objective to improve the transparency of financial information. Under FIN 46, companies are required to consolidate variable interest entities (VIEs) on financial statements if they are the primary beneficiaries of the VIEs. This dissertation empirically examines whether the implementation of this new financial reporting guidance affects firms’ accruals quality and investment efficiency. A manually collected sample comprised of firms affected by FIN 46 and firms disclosing no material impact from FIN 46 is used in the empirical analyses.The first part of the dissertation investigates the effects of FIN 46 on accruals quality. By using different accrual quality measures in prior studies, this study found that firms affected by FIN 46 experienced a decrease in accrual quality compared to firms reporting no material impact from FIN 46. Among the firms affected by FIN 46, firms consolidating VIEs were compared with firms terminating or restructuring VIEs. The accruals quality of firms consolidating VIEs was found to be lower than that of firms terminating or restructuring VIEs. These results are consistent in tests using alternative control samples.The second part of this dissertation examines the effects of FIN 46 on investment efficiency. Mixed results were found from using two different proxies used in prior literature. Using the investment-cash flow sensitivity to proxy for investment efficiency, firms affected by FIN 46 experienced a decrease in investment efficiency compared to firms reporting no material impact. It was also found that higher investment-cash flow sensitivity for firms consolidating VIEs during post-FIN 46 periods compared to both the no-impact firms and the matched pair control sample. Contrasting results were found when the deviation from expected investment is used as another proxy for investment efficiency. Empirical analyses show that FIN 46 firms experienced improved investment efficiency measured by the deviation from expected investment after their adoption of FIN 46. This study also provides explanations for the opposite results from the two different proxies.

The purpose of this thesis is the valuation of AGF Logistics, Ltd. The diploma thesis consists of financial analysis for the years 2011 to 2015, from the strategic analysis, financial plan drawn up for the years 2016 to 2020 and valuation of the company. Company valuation is done based on the DCF entity method using other supporting methods.

The master thesis aims to compare the DCF Entity method and the DCF APV method. In the practical part of the thesis, both of these methods are applied to evaluate the company KOVOVÝROBA HOFFMANN, s.r.o. When applied correctly and using the same input data, DCF Entity as well as DCF APV results are supposed to equal. However, both methods dispose of its pros and cons. Despite its imperfections, the DCF Entity method is commonly used in practise, whereas the DCF APV method lacks of interest. This thesis, however, points out that the DCF APV could be not merely an equal alternative to the DCF Entity method, but could also avoid some of its imperfections or give extra information compared to the DCF Entity method. As a consequence, we can expect increasing importance of the DCF APV method.

This diploma thesis deals with the valuation of the brewery Primátor as at the 1st January 2010. This company was sold to the company LIF, a.s. by the former owner, city of Náchod in the spring 2009 as a company with low rentability and with financial problems caused by inefficient projects of the city, which were realized by the brewery and which weren't connected with the core business of the company, with the brewing. The main purpose of this work is to find the value of brewery after one year production connected wholly with the brewing under the new owner without the financial burden of the city. The value will be compared with the price realized during the transaction of sale. The reason of the comparison is to evaluate the adequacy of this price payed for the brewery.

The amount of knowledge increases rapidly due to the increasing number of available data sources. However, the autonomy of data sources and the resulting heterogeneity prevent comprehensive data analysis and applications. Data integration aims to overcome heterogeneity by unifying different data sources and enriching unstructured data. The enrichment of data consists of different subtasks, amongst other the annotation process. The annotation process links document phrases to terms of a standardized vocabulary. Annotated documents enable effective retrieval methods, comparability of different documents, and comprehensive data analysis, such as finding adversarial drug effects based on patient data. A vocabulary allows the comparability using standardized terms. An ontology can also represent a vocabulary, whereas concepts, relationships, and logical constraints additionally define an ontology. The annotation process is applicable in different domains. Nevertheless, there is a difference between generic and specialized domains according to the annotation process. This thesis emphasizes the differences between the domains and addresses the identified challenges. The majority of annotation approaches focuses on the evaluation of general domains, such as Wikipedia. This thesis evaluates the developed annotation approaches with case report forms that are medical documents for examining clinical trials. The natural language provides different challenges, such as similar meanings using different phrases. The proposed annotation method, AnnoMap, considers the fuzziness of natural language. A further challenge is the reuse of verified annotations. Existing annotations represent knowledge that can be reused for further annotation processes. AnnoMap consists of a reuse strategy that utilizes verified annotations to link new documents to appropriate concepts. Due to the broad spectrum of areas in the biomedical domain, different tools exist. The tools perform differently regarding a particular domain. This thesis proposes a combination approach to unify results from different tools. The method utilizes existing tool results to build a classification model that can classify new annotations as correct or incorrect. The results show that the reuse and the machine learning-based combination improve the annotation quality compared to existing approaches focussing on the biomedical domain. A further part of data integration is entity resolution to build unified knowledge bases from different data sources. A data source consists of a set of records characterized by attributes. The goal of entity resolution is to identify records representing the same real-world entity. Many methods focus on linking data sources consisting of records being characterized by attributes. Nevertheless, only a few methods can handle graph-structured knowledge bases or consider temporal aspects. The temporal aspects are essential to identify the same entities over different time intervals since these aspects underlie certain conditions. Moreover, records can be related to other records so that a small graph structure exists for each record. These small graphs can be linked to each other if they represent the same. This thesis proposes an entity resolution approach for census data consisting of person records for different time intervals. The approach also considers the graph structure of persons given by family relationships. For achieving qualitative results, current methods apply machine-learning techniques to classify record pairs as the same entity. The classification task used a model that is generated by training data. In this case, the training data is a set of record pairs that are labeled as a duplicate or not. Nevertheless, the generation of training data is a time-consuming task so that active learning techniques are relevant for reducing the number of training examples. The entity resolution method for temporal graph-structured data shows an improvement compared to previous collective entity resolution approaches. The developed active learning approach achieves comparable results to supervised learning methods and outperforms other limited budget active learning methods. Besides the entity resolution approach, the thesis introduces the concept of evolution operators for communities. These operators can express the dynamics of communities and individuals. For instance, we can formulate that two communities merged or split over time. Moreover, the operators allow observing the history of individuals. Overall, the presented annotation approaches generate qualitative annotations for medical forms. The annotations enable comprehensive analysis across different data sources as well as accurate queries. The proposed entity resolution approaches improve existing ones so that they contribute to the generation of qualitative knowledge graphs and data analysis tasks.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第22580号 / 情博第717号 / 新制||情||123(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 吉川 正俊, 教授 黒橋 禎夫, 教授 田島 敬史, 教授 田中 克己(京都大学 名誉教授) / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM