The efficacy of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) is contingent on it having a design appropriate for the species it is intended to protect. Hector�s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori), a coastal delphinid endemic to New Zealand, is endangered due to bycatch in gillnets. Analyses of survival rate and population viability suggest that the Banks Peninsula population is most likely still declining despite the presence of the Banks Peninsula Marine Mammal Sanctuary (BPMMS), where gillnetting is regulated. More data on distribution and movements of dolphins are therefore required to improve the design of the BPMMS. On aerial surveys of Hector�s dolphin distribution at Banks Peninsula over three years, sightings were made up to 19 n.mi. offshore. On average, 19% of dolphins were sighted outside the BPMMS�s 4 n.mi. offshore boundary in summer, compared to 56% in winter. On similar surveys of the South Island�s west coast, all dolphins were sighted within 6 n.mi. of the coast and there was no seasonal change in distribution. At each location, Mantel tests indicated that distance offshore had the strongest and most consistent effect on distribution. However, a logistic regression model using the combined datasets suggested that distribution was most strongly defined by water depth, with all sightings made inside the 90 m isobath. Boat surveys were carried out at Banks Peninsula (2002 to 2006) to continue the long-term photo-ID project. Using the 22 year dataset, alongshore home-range of the 20 most frequently sighted dolphins was estimated by univariate kernel methods. Mean alongshore range was 49.69 km (SE = 5.29), 60% larger than the previous estimate. Fifteen percent of these individuals had ranges extending beyond the northern boundary of the BPMMS. An acoustic data logger, the T-POD, was trialled for passive acoustic monitoring of Hector�s dolphins. Simultaneous T-POD/theodolite surveys revealed that T-PODs reliably detected dolphins within 200m. No detections were made beyond 500m. To monitor inshore habitat use, T-PODs were deployed in three locations at Banks Peninsula (n = 431 days). A GLM analysis of Detection Positive Minutes (DPM) per day indicated that season had the largest effect on detection rate, with over twice as many DPMs per day in summer (x̄ = 99.8) as winter (x̄ = 47.6). The new findings on Hector�s dolphin distribution and ranging can be used to improve the design of the BPMMS. It is recommended that the offshore boundary of the BPMMS is extended to 20 n.mi. (37 km), the northern boundary is moved 12 km north and recreational gillnetting is prohibited year round. In areas where distribution of Hector�s dolphin has not been studied, the offshore boundary of MPAs should enclose the 100 m isobath.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, June, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-87).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. / Committee Chair: Anton Kleywegt; Committee Member: Dong Jun Wu; Committee Member: Ellis Johnson; Committee Member: George L. Nemhauser; Committee Member: Pinar Keskinocak.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, June, 2004. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-87)

During multisensory integration, information from distinct sensory systems that refers to the same physical event is combined. For example, the sound and image that an individual generates as s/he interacts with the world, will provide the nervous system with multiple cues which can be integrated to estimate the individual’s position in the environment. However, the information that is perceived through different sensory pathways/systems can be qualitatively different. The information can be redundant and describe the same property of an event in a common reference frame (i.e., the image and sound referring to the individual’s location), or it can be complementary. Combining complementary information can be advantageous in that it extends the range and richness of the information available to the nervous system, but can also be superfluous and unnecessary to the task at hand – i.e. olfactory cues about the individuals perfume can increase the richness of the representation but not necessarily aid in localisation. Over the last century or so, a large body of research has focused on different aspects of multisensory interactions at both the behavioural and neural levels. It is currently unclear whether the mechanisms underlying multisensory interactions for both type of cue are similar or not. Moreover, the evidence for differences in behavioural outcome, dependent on the nature of the cue, is growing. Such cue property effects possibly reflect a processing heuristic for more efficient parsing of the vast amount of sensory information available to the nervous system at any one time. The present thesis assesses the effects of cue properties (i.e., redundant or complementary) on multisensory processing and reports a series of experiments demonstrating that the nature of the cue, defined by the task of the observer, influences whether the cues compete for representation as a result of interacting, or whether instead multisensory information produces an optimal increase in reliability of the event estimate. Moreover, a bridging series of experiments demonstrate the key role of redundancy in inferring that two signals have a common physical cause and should be integrated, despite conflict in the cues. The experiments provide insights into the different strategies adopted by the nervous system and some tentative evidence for possible, distinct underlying mechanisms.

This dissertation is devoted to the finite element (FE) approximation of equations describing the motion of a class of non-Newtonian fluids. The main focus is on incompressible fluids whose viscosity nonlinearly depends on the shear rate and pressure. The equations of motion are discretized with equal-order d-linear finite elements, which fail to satisfy the inf-sup stability condition. In this thesis a stabilization technique for the pressure-gradient is proposed that is based on the well-known local projection stabilization (LPS) method. If the viscosity solely depends on the shear rate, the well-posedness of the stabilized discrete systems is shown and a priori error estimates quantifying the convergence of the method are proven. In the shear thinning case, the derived error estimates provide optimal rates of convergence with respect to the regularity of the solution. As is well-known, the Galerkin FE method may suffer from instabilities resulting not only from lacking inf-sup stability but also from dominating convection. The proposed LPS approach is then extended in order to cope with both instability phenomena. Finally, shear-rate- and pressure-dependent viscosities are considered. The Galerkin discretization of the governing equations is analyzed and the convergence of discrete solutions is...

Modern applications of mobile robots require them to have the ability to safely and effectively navigate in human environments. New challenges arise when these robots must plan their motion in a human-aware fashion. Current methods addressing this problem have focused mainly on the activity forecasting aspect, aiming at improving predictions without considering the active nature of the interaction, i.e. the robot’s effect on the environment and consequent issues such as reciprocity. Furthermore, many methods rely on computationally expensive offline training of predictive models that may not be well suited to rapidly evolving dynamic environments. This thesis presents a novel approach for enabling autonomous robots to navigate socially in environments with humans. Following formulations of the inverse planning problem, agents reason about the intentions of other agents and make predictions about their future interactive motion. A technique is proposed to implement counterfactual reasoning over a parametrised set of light-weight reciprocal motion models, thus making it more tractable to maintain beliefs over the future trajectories of other agents towards plausible goals. The speed of inference and the effectiveness of the algorithms is demonstrated via physical robot experiments, where computationally constrained robots navigate amongst humans in a distributed multi-sensor setup, able to infer other agents’ intentions as fast as 100ms after the first observation. While intention inference is a key aspect of successful human-robot interaction, executing any task requires planning that takes into account the predicted goals and trajectories of other agents, e.g., pedestrians. It is well known that robots demonstrate unwanted behaviours, such as freezing or becoming sluggishly responsive, when placed in dynamic and cluttered environments, due to the way in which safety margins according to simple heuristics end up covering the entire feasible space of motion. The presented approach makes more refined predictions about future movement, which enables robots to find collision-free paths quickly and efficiently. This thesis describes a novel technique for generating "interactive costmaps", a representation of the planner’s costs and rewards across time and space, providing an autonomous robot with the information required to navigate socially given the estimate of other agents’ intentions. This multi-layered costmap deters the robot from obstructing while encouraging social navigation respectful of other agents’ activity. Results show that this approach minimises collisions and near-collisions, minimises travel times for agents, and importantly offers the same computational cost as the most common costmap alternatives for navigation. A key part of the practical deployment of such technologies is their ease of implementation and configuration. Since every use case and environment is different and distinct, the presented methods use online adaptation to learn parameters of the navigating agents during runtime. Furthermore, this thesis includes a novel technique for allocating tasks in distributed robotics systems, where a tool is provided to maximise the performance on any distributed setup by automatic parameter tuning. All of these methods are implemented in ROS and distributed as open-source. The ultimate aim is to provide an accessible and efficient framework that may be seamlessly deployed on modern robots, enabling widespread use of intention prediction for interactive navigation in distributed robotic systems.

Objetivando implementar um sistema embarcado baseado principalmente em software, duas abordagens ortogonais estão sendo propostas: Desenvolvimento Baseado em Plataformas, que maximiza o reuso; Desenvolvimento Baseado em Modelos, que aumenta o nível de abstração utilizando conceitos de orientação a objetos e UML para modelar uma aplicação. Porém, com o aumento do nível de abstração, engenheiros de software não possuem a idéia exata do impacto de suas decisões de modelagem em questões importantes, como desempenho, e consumo de energia e de memória para uma plataforma embarcada específica. Neste trabalho, propõe-se estimar a memória de dados e de programa, o desempenho e o consumo de energia, diretamente de especificações em UML, como intuito de realizar a exploração do espaço de projeto já nos estágios iniciais do processo de desenvolvimento. Resultados experimentais apresentam erros reduzidos, quando componentes da plataforma são reutilizados e seus custos já são conhecidos para uma plataforma alvo. Aplicações reais foram modeladas de diferentes formas e demonstram a eficiência da abordagem de estimativa para o estagio inicial de exploração do espaço de projeto, permitindo ao desenvolvedor avaliar e comparar diferentes soluções de modelagem. Os valores estimados utilizados na exploração do espaço de projeto podem alcançar taxas de erros inferiores a 5%. / In order to quickly implement an embedded system that is mainly based on software, two orthogonal approaches have been proposed: Platform-based Design, which maximizes the reuse of components; and Model Driven Development, which rises the abstraction level by using object-oriented concepts and UML for modeling an application. However, with this increasing of the abstraction level, software engineers do not have an exact idea of the impact of their modeling decisions on important issues such as performance, energy, and memory footprint for a given embedded platform. This work proposes to estimate data and program memory, performance, and energy directly from UML model specifications to explore the design space in the early steps of development process. Experimental results show a very small estimation error when platform components are reused and their costs on the target platform are already known. Real-life applications are modeled in different ways and demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimates in an early design space exploration, allowing the designer to evaluate and compare different modeling solutions. The estimated values used in the design space exploration can achieve errors as low as 5%.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-08-19T13:52:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 1.pdf: 1168426 bytes, checksum: a22061c806f5a4d1b7ff70ad14ba1834 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Instituto de Tecnologia em Fármacos/Farmanguinhos. Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil. / O câncer é um distúrbio celular marcado por alterações no processo de duplicaçãodo DNA, resultando em proliferação celular alterada, de forma desordenada.Qualquer que seja a causa do câncer este é basicamente uma doença celular caracterizada por um desvio dos mecanismos de controle das células. O câncer é um importante problema de saúde pública em países em desenvolvimento e desenvolvidos, sendo responsável por mais de seis milhões de mortes a cada ano, o que respresenta cerca de 12% de todas as causas de morte em todo o mundo.Embora as maiores taxas de incidência de câncer sejam encontradas em países desenvolvidos, dos dez milhões de casos novos anuais de câncer, cinco milhões e meio são diagnosticados nos países em desenvolvimento. No Brasil as estimativas apontam que em 2011 ocorreram 489.270 novos casos de câncer. Os tipos mais incidentes, à exceção do câncer de pele não melanoma, foram os cânceres de próstata e de pulmão no sexo masculino e os cânceres de mama e do colo do útero no sexo feminino. Neste cenário, este trabalho tem como objetivo fazer um levantamento geral dos gastos públicos com medicamentos antineoplásicos, a fim de se avaliar a necessidade de fabricação nacional por um laboratório oficial dos medicamentos em questão, visando a redução dos gastos públicos, ampliação da assistência farmacêutica, elucidação dos medicamentos estratégicos, evitando assim o desabastecimento e identificação dos principais fármacos/medicamentos para serem incorporados a produção pública. Após levantamento mercadológico e avaliação das necessidades do SUS, foram selecionados quatorze medicamentos antineoplásicos para produção nacional por um laboratório oficial, são eles: hidroxiuréia, capecitabina, citrato de tamoxifeno, acetato de megestrol, clorambucila, ciclofosfamida, tioguanina, mesilato de imatinibe, mercaptopurina, anastrozol, cloridrato de erlotinibe, bicalutamida, melfalana e metotrexato. Através de levantamento mercadológico e das necessidades do SUS no fornecimento de medicamentos antineoplásicos, sugere-se que a fabricação nacional por um laboratório oficial de tais medicamentos, poderia suprir as necessidades do SUS, evitando assim o desabastecimento do mercado público nacional de medicamentos antineoplásicos, garantindo o acesso de tais medicamentos à população, além da consolidação dessas classes terapêuticas nos laboratórios oficiais. / Cancer is a disorder characterized by cellular changes in the process of DNA replication, resulting in altered cell proliferation, in a disorderly way. Whatever the cause of this cancer cell is primarily a disease characterized by a deviation of the control mechanisms of cells. Cancer is a major public health problem in developed and developing countries, accounting for more than six million deaths each year, which respresents about 12% of all causes of death worldwide. Although the highest incidence rates of cancer were found in developed countries, the ten million new cases of cancer annually, five and a half million a re diagnosed in developing countries. In Brazil, estimates that in 2011occured 489,270 new cases of cancer. The most incidents, with the exception of nonmelanoma skin cancer, was prostate cancers and lung cancer in males and breast and cervical cancer in females. In this scenario, this paper aims to make a general survey of public spending with anticancer drugs, in order to evaluate the need for national manufacturing by an official laboratory of the drugs in question, in order to reduce public spending, expansion of pharmaceutical care, elucidation of strategic drugs, avoiding the shortage and identification of drugs for incorporation in public production. After marketing survey and needs assessment of SUS, fourteen anticancer drugs were selected for national production by an official laboratory, they are: hydroxyurea, capecitabine, tamoxifen citrate, megestrol acetate, chlorambucil, cyclophosphamide, thioguanine, imatinib mesylate, mercaptopurine, anastrozole, erlotinib hydrochloride, bicalutamide, melphalan and methotrexate. Through marketing survey, as well as a needs assessment of SUS in delivering anticancer drugs, suggests that the national manufacturing by an official laboratory of such drugs could supply the needs of SUS, avoiding the shortage of public market of anticancer drugs, ensuring access to such medicines to the population, and the consolidation of these therapeutic classes in official laboratories.

Propriedades do primeiro autovalor e da primeira autofunção do operador laplaciano em variedades riemannianas são estudadas. Para variedades em que se pode estimar o laplaciano de funções distância, estimativas explícitas para o primeiro autovalor do laplaciano em domínios duplamente conexos são obtidas. Então observamos que hipóteses sobre as curvaturas da variedade e do bordo do domínio permitem estimar o laplaciano da distância. Além disso, autofunções em domínios não compactos do espaço hiperbólico EI" são estudadas. Mostramos que donn'nios contidos em horobolas não admitem autofunções limitadas associadas ao autovalor A(HIn), mas se o fecho assintótico do domínio contém um aberto de (9ooIHIn, então ele admite uma autofunção positiva que se anula em dfí U dooQ. A existência e o perfil de autofunções de autovalor A(IHI") em EI", em IHIn\Sr(o), em horobolas, em hiperbolas e no complementar de horobolas são analisados. Para alguns desses domínios apresentamos uma expressão explícita para a autofunção que depende apenas da distância à fronteira. Finalmente, técnicas de simetrização de Schwarz são adaptadas para variedades permitindo-nos obter estimativas para normas de autofunções. Primeiro um argumento de comparação demonstra que variedades mais simétricas maximizam certas normas. Obtenios também uma estimativa diretamente da função isoperimétrica da variedade. / Some properties of the first eigenvalue A and the first eigenfunction of the Laplace operator in a Riemannian manifold are studied. Assuming a bound for the Laplacian of the distance function, exphcit estimates for the first eigenvalue of a doubly counected domain are presented. Then some assumptions on the curvatures of the manifold and its boundary are made in order to have an estimate for the Laplacian of the distance function. Furthermore eigenfunctions of non compact domains in the hyperbohc space EIn are studied. We prove that a domain contained in a horoball does not admit a bounded eigenfunction of eigenvalue A(lHIn), but if the closure of the domain contains an open set of then it admits a positive eigenfunction that vanishes on dQ U daoíl. The existence and the profile of eigenfunctions of eigenvalue A(E[n ) in H71, in H [ r i \ 5 r ( o ) , in horoballs, hiperballs and in the complement of a horoball are analysed. For some of these domains we present an explicit expression for the eigenfunction that depends only on the distance to the boundary. Finally Schwarz symmetrization techniques are adapted for manifolds implying in estimates for the norm of the eigenfunctions. First a comparison argument proves that highly symmetric manifolds maximize some norm and then an estimated obtained directly from the isoperimetric function of the manifold is presented.