No description available.

A novel noise control system is developed using adaptable tuned vibration absorbers (ATVA) to interact with a vibrating host structure in such a way as to reduce radiated acoustic energy. ATVA's are single-degree-of-freedom resonant devices that can change their resonant frequency and damping over a range. This ATVA noise control system is targeted at applications with tonal disturbances such as propeller aircraft. The motivation for this work is to better understand and experimentally demonstrate the noise control performance of globally detuned vibration absorbers (i.e. tuned away from the disturbance) compared to that of perfectly tuned devices on complex structures. A two-tier hierarchical control approach is used where a global control algorithm attempts to minimize a global parameter such as radiated acoustic energy by directing the adaptation of subordinate ATVA's. The global control algorithm uses an adaptive simplex search algorithm that requires no initial knowledge of the structure or the ATVA's. The ATVA's also require no model of the structure, each utilizing only the local vibration of its own mass and control gains set by the global controller. Noise control using a single ATVA is first studied on a small simply supported plate. Then, a multiple ATVA system is tested on a large plate structure at several test frequencies where many structural modes participate. Noise reductions up to 22 dB are achieved at locations in the radiated field. Further, it is found in some cases, classic tuning of the ATVA results in increased structural noise radiation. ATVA's are realized by outfitting typical inertial (proof-mass) actuators with a classical feedback loop. The device's resonant frequency and damping can be controlled independently, yet simultaneously via two control gains. The ATVA's are designed, built, and characterized for their adaptable domain and power requirements. A cohesive analytical model of the ATVA is also developed and used to compliment the experimental results. / Ph. D.

The objective of the study was to generate a ‘theory’/ ‘hypothesis’  on the important factors to focus on in implementing agile project methods in globally distributed teams. Using the grounded theory method, five key categories emerged from the so-called theoretical sampling, which entails the joint collection of data, coding and analysis. The study involved 33 individuals in four different companies, three in the Philippines and one in Sweden. The data collected for this thesis consisted of individual interviews in the Philippines and Sweden (Sept-Dec 2014), focus group sessions, observations of formal agile practices and experiences in the substantive area, conducted in the Philippines during the period Sept-Nov 2014.  The following five key categories emerged as the main concerns of the individuals involved in implementing agile project methods in globally distributed teams in software development projects:  (i) Working Communication, (ii)  Self-organizing Teams, (iii) People-centric organization, (iv) Continuous Learning and (v) Sustaining Infrastructure.  The respondents meant that these concerns should be addressed and resolved in such a way that the implementation of Agile project methods would resemble the case of a collocated Agile project team. The key categories, their fundamental characteristics and the subconcepts behind them were presented and analyzed in relation to the empirical data.The analysis included reported incidents and direct citations from the respondents, focus groups and from observations during the field study, in order to shed light on the process used to arrive to the categories, as well as explain the characteristics of the concepts in the emerging ‘grounded hypothesis’.

Probability-one homotopy algorithms have strong convergence characteristics under mild assumptions. Such algorithms for mixed complementarity problems (MCPs) have potentially wide impact because MCPs are pervasive in science and engineering. A probability-one homotopy algorithm for MCPs was developed earlier by Billups and Watson based on the default homotopy mapping. This algorithm had guaranteed global convergence under some mild conditions, and was able to solve most of the MCPs from the MCPLIB test library. This thesis extends that work by presenting some other homotopy mappings, enabling the solution of all the remaining problems from MCPLIB. The homotopy maps employed are the Newton homotopy and homotopy parameter embeddings. / Master of Science

<p>The traditional view of project management is beingchallenged by the globalization of markets, mergers ofinternational companies, and the integration of managerial andbusi-ness processes in global corporations. The development ofInformation Technology and the rapid growth of the Internet hascreated an opportunity to utilize global resources, resultingin new and unique problems within project management researchthat need to be addressed.</p><p>This thesis focuses on problems in project managementexperienced by global system suppliers trying to adapt theirbusinesses to the rapid changes of customers needs. Itespe-cially focuses on geographically dispersed organizationsconsisting of several organizations in different countries,with disparate history and corporate culture, developing anddeliver-ing complex systems under the company's name.</p><p>In order to identify potential problems faced by globalmulti-organizational companies, especially system supplierswith large research and development (R&D) budgets, aframe-work is suggested. This framework divides the problemsinto three categories: geographi-cal, organizational andcultural. The problems identified in the case studies are thenclassi-fied to these categories. Finally, a description of howthe identified problems can be man-aged is provided when themost important success factors identified in the studies arepresented.</p><p> </p> / QC 20100512

Today, globally distributed software development is an unstoppable trend in Information Technology (IT) all over the world due to the benefits it provides such as cost benefits, time saving, accessing the large labor pool and available resources. However, globally distributed software companies face some issues in this regard. Cultural differences are introduced and discussed as one of the fundamental issues in globally distributed IT companies. Further, it is evident from the literature that business analysis process is the fundamental phase of software development process that affects the entire process of software development, and requires effective communication and collaboration among teams and between team members. Globally distributed software development makes the business analysis process and its related sub-phases even much more complicated than it is. Therefore, in this study, the influence of cultural differences on globally distributed business analysis process is analyzed. In order to do that, I conduct a qualitative study in which employees of the Turkey and Poland branches of the GTECH IT Company are interviewed. Hence, in this study remote project team member are asked about varying cultural differences that I extract from several existing cultural models and unify them into an integrated model. There are many studies exist about cultural differences in literature and these studies has similarity and differences which are creating complexity for readers and researchers. Hence, in this research Hofstede’s, Hall’s and Trompenaars’ cultural frameworks are unified and then I develop a new cultural model. By applying this new framework or model I investigated the influence of varying cultural differences on business analysis process that is conducted in a globally distributed IT company.

Agile software development approaches have emerged as a response to perceived frustrations of more heavyweight plan-driven methods, and have now become well established within the information systems field. More recently, there has been a tremendous growth in applying agile methods in globally distributed settings. In light of this, there is a pressing need to understand how agile practices are adapted which were originally conceived for collocated settings, and now actually being used in globally distributed settings, taking into account the challenges posed by such contexts. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to this research gap, with a quest to better understand and unpack the "black-box" of how collaborative practices evolve within global agile settings. The value of this research lies in improving and advancing our understanding of the challenges the team members go through in adapting agile practices in global contexts. The research also explores how collaborative practices can support agility in globally distributed settings. In order to contribute to knowledge and increase conceptual clarity, there is a need to carry out in-depth and in-situ research within an organisational context. By taking a socio-technical perspective this study intends to extend our existing knowledge on how collaborative practices are evolving in real-time practice within globally distributed agile settings. The empirical evidence is drawn from a globally distributed team, operating in a global financial bank with offices based in London and Delhi. Interpretive research methods including semi-structured interviews and observations are used to understand team members' experiences of developing collaborative practices in a globally distributed context. Although existing literature on agile software development acknowledges the intrinsic significance of collaboration for effective functioning of agile methods, current studies fail to demonstrate a situated practice perspective on how collaborative practices are adapted in globally distributed settings. This study enlists the analytical concepts of boundary objects and Pickering's "mangle of practice" to better understand the process of how collaborative practices evolve in globally distributed agile teams. The resulting analysis provides us with a much more nuanced understanding of how interactions take place in developing collaborative practices in globally distributed contexts. The findings reveal that collaborative practices within such settings tend not to follow from pre-set expectations of how agile practices should work, but are temporally emergent. Team members have to revise collaborative practices through an ongoing process of mutual "tuning" within their situated contexts, in order to achieve a gradual state of interactive stability or a steadiness of practices. The results demonstrate how actors address the challenges in developing shared understandings to drive forward the joint software development process across global locations and move towards supporting agility within the projects. The thesis presents a pluralistic conceptual framework called the Collaborative Tuning Approach, which aids in gaining critical insights of issues related to adapting agile practices and also demonstrates how collaborative practices can act as enabler to achieving agility in such settings. The framework explains the challenges the team members face and how these are overcome when attempting to modify practices and indeed how these evolve through an ongoing state of flux and uncertainty leading to hybrid agile practices.

This work presents new models and algorithms for creating, modifying, and controlling access to complex text. The digitization of texts opens new opportunities for preservation, access, and analysis, but at the same time raises questions regarding how to represent and collaboratively edit such texts. Two issues of particular interest are modelling the relationships of markup (annotations) in complex texts, and controlling the creation and modification of those texts. This work addresses and connects these issues, with emphasis on data modelling, algorithms, and computational complexity; and contributes new results in these areas of research. Although hierarchical models of text and markup are common, complex texts often exhibit layers of overlapping structure that are best described by multihierarchical markup. We develop a new model of multihierarchical markup, the globally ordered GODDAG, that combines features of both graph- and range-based models of markup, allowing documents to be unambiguously serialized. We describe extensions to the XPath query language to support globally ordered GODDAGs, provide semantics for a set of update operations on this structure, and provide algorithms for converting between two different representations of the globally ordered GODDAG. Managing the collaborative editing of documents can require restricting the types of changes different editors may make, while not altogether restricting their access to the document. Fine-grained access control allows precisely these kinds of restrictions on the operations that a user is or is not permitted to perform on a document. We describe a rule-based model of fine-grained access control for updates of hierarchical documents, and in this context analyze the document generation problem: determining whether a document could have been created without violating a particular access control policy. We show that this problem is undecidable in the general case and provide computational complexity bounds for a number of restricted variants of the problem. Finally, we extend our fine-grained access control model from hierarchical to multihierarchical documents. We provide semantics for fine-grained access control policies that control splice-in, splice-out, and rename operations on globally ordered GODDAGs, and show that the multihierarchical version of the document generation problem remains undecidable.

We construct bosonic and fermionic locally covariant quantum fields theories on curved backgrounds for large classes of fields. We investigate the quantum field and n-point functions induced by suitable states.

The United Nations has, during many years, developed a model for a globally harmonized system for classification and labeling of chemicals, with the aim of it becoming a global standard. This system is implemented in the European Union through the CLP-regulation and is now working parallel to the existing directives until 1st of June 2015, when all the new classifications of substances and mixtures must be completed. The aim of this project was to adjust the laboratory to the new legislation, through inventory of stored chemicals, update the list of chemicals and perform self-classifications of mixtures. The work included handling of about 650 different chemicals with varying hazard classifications and search for information in corporate websites and chemical databases. This resulted in a new and complete list of chemicals stored and used in the laboratory and, in addition, an example of how to make a self classification of a mixture. Through this work using web based search for chemical classification according to the CLP-regulation, many difficulties were encountered and one of the conclusions is that due to the many noticed uncertainties and inconsistencies in self classification of mixtures the aim of keeping the globally harmonized system harmonized will be nearly impossible to fulfill.