The purpose of the present study is to determine whether adult supervisors of children's groups who accurately perceive the interpersonal structure of their groups are more able managers of their groups than are those adults who inaccurately judge the group's interpersonal structure.

Thesis (MBA (Business Management))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010.

This text describes the process of creating a mobile application for sport club management and its everyday operations. The main goal of the application is to digitize and unite most of common activities in the sport club. Another goal is to create the user interface which will be primarily intuitive and simple to use while providing straightforward ways of usage during most important user use cases. The thesis studies principles for designing user interfaces, analyzes sports team environment and defines the requirements for a software product to support sports club management. The design of the solution follows the analysis of requirements as well as the description of the implementation of the resulting product and its publishing to the real sports club environment. The thesis ends with description of user testing methods and results of the testing which validate accomplishment of defined goals.

Thesis (MBA (Business Management))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.

Nous avons proposé une approche de clusterisation distribuée en vue de son application au problème de la gestion de groupes dynamiques et pour la sécurisation des échanges. Pour parvenir à cet objectif, une combinaison de critères permettant de sélectionner les noeuds les plus appropriés pour assurer les fonctionnalités de clusterheads a été défini, cette dernière s'appuie sur une topologie virtuelle avec le moins de sauts possible, en évitant ainsi de gaspiller les ressources dans les retransmissions dûes aux collisions. Une fois l'étape de mise au point de l'approche de clusterisation effectuée, une application pour résoudre le problème de la gestion de groupes dynamiques et la sécurisation des échanges a été réalisée. Les performances de notre approche de clusterisation ont été évaluées en terme de messages échangés et d'énergie dépensée par les noeuds du réseau. Les résultats de cette évaluation montrent que notre approche est performante. / The proposed clustering approache divides the network into clusters based on affinity relationships between nodes and two types of keys which are generated by a clusterhead. The first one is shared by a clusterhead and its local members and the second one is shared by the clusterhead and its parent cluster. The proposed algorithm is adaptive according to the limitation of the mobile nodes battery power and to the dynamic network topology changes.The performance evaluation and communication overhead analysis of the proposed algorithm are presented using simulation.

Cette thèse concerne l'investigation détaillée du problème du temps de zapping dans les réseaux d'opérateurs offrant un service IPTY basé sur la technologie multicast. Cette investigation a conduit à plusieurs contributions qui permettent de substantiellement améliorer le temps de zapping dans ce type de réseau. Notre première contribution concerne la partie purement réseau. Nous avons proposé d'optimiser le processus de changement de chaîne et ceci pour chaque version du protocole IGMP. Cette optimisation réduit la latence due au réseau sans pour autant augmenter la consommation de bande passante d'une manière significative. Nous avons modélisé le service IPTV Multicast pour estimer les pics de consommation de la bande passante pour permettre à l'opérateur de dimensionner son réseau. La deuxième contribution concerne la partie traitement du flux IPTV par le récepteur. Dans cette partie, nous avons proposé d'associer au flux principal un flux secondaire, version retardée du principal. La construction du flux secondaire se fait en donnant une priorité élevée aux paquets transportant des éléments d'une I-Frame par rapport à d'autres types d'éléments (P­ Frame, B-Frame, Voix et Data). Cette nouvelle règle de construction permet de réduire le délai d'attente de la première I­Frame nécessaire pour commencer la phase de décodage tout en réduisant le temps de remplissage du buffer. Dans un environnement réel, nous avons évalué cette contribution et constaté une réduction remarquable du temps de zapping. / This thesis involves a detailed investigation of the problem of IPTV zapping time in networks of operators providing IPTV service based on multicast technology. This investigation led to some contributions that can substantially improve the channel change time in this type of network.Our first contribution concerns the pure network. We proposed an optimization of the channels changing process for each version of the IGMP protocol. This optimization reduces network latency without significantly increasing the bandwidth consumption. We proposed also a model of multicast IPTV service that we used to estimate the maximum bandwidth demand. This model enables the operator to size the bandwidth availability in its network.The second contribution relates to the processing part of stream IPTV on the receiver. In this section, we proposed to combine the main flow to a secondary flow, delayed version of the main stream. The construction of the secondary stream is clone by giving high priority to packets carrying elements of an I-frame compared to other types of elements (P-Frame, B­-Frame, Voice and Data). This rule of construction can reduce the First I-Frame Delay required to start the decoding phase and at the same time reduce the Buffering Delay. In a real environment, we evaluated this contribution and measured a remarkable decline of the zapping time with our proposal.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:54:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MarlosAMSO.pdf: 1784342 bytes, checksum: 36e985b587c52304548da7b98cad94f7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-01-15 / Internet applications such as media streaming, collaborative computing and massive multiplayer are on the rise,. This leads to the need for multicast communication, but unfortunately group communications support based on IP multicast has not been widely adopted due to a combination of technical and non-technical problems. Therefore, a number of different application-layer multicast schemes have been proposed in recent literature to overcome the drawbacks. In addition, these applications often behave as both providers and clients of services, being called peer-topeer applications, and where participants come and go very dynamically. Thus, servercentric architectures for membership management have well-known problems related to scalability and fault-tolerance, and even peer-to-peer traditional solutions need to have some mechanism that takes into account member's volatility. The idea of location awareness distributes the participants in the overlay network according to their proximity in the underlying network allowing a better performance. Given this context, this thesis proposes an application layer multicast protocol, called LAALM, which takes into account the actual network topology in the assembly process of the overlay network. The membership algorithm uses a new metric, IPXY, to provide location awareness through the processing of local information, and it was implemented using a distributed shared and bi-directional tree. The algorithm also has a sub-optimal heuristic to minimize the cost of membership process. The protocol has been evaluated in two ways. First, through an own simulator developed in this work, where we evaluated the quality of distribution tree by metrics such as outdegree and path length. Second, reallife scenarios were built in the ns-3 network simulator where we evaluated the network protocol performance by metrics such as stress, stretch, time to first packet and reconfiguration group time / Atualmente aplica??es em grupo na Internet est?o em ascens?o, como por exemplo transmiss?o de ?udio e v?deo, computa??o colaborativa e jogos com m?ltiplos participantes. Isso leva ? necessidade de comunica??o multicast, mas infelizmente o suporte a este tipo de servi?o n?o est? amplamente dispon?vel pela camada de rede. Por isso, no atual est?gio tecnol?gico surgiram solu??es de protocolos multicast implementados na camada de aplica??o para suprir tal defici?ncia. Al?m disso, estas aplica??es muitas vezes se apresentam simultaneamente como provedores e clientes dos servi?os utilizados, caracterizando-as como aplica??es denominadas peer-to-peer, possuindo caracter?sticas din?micas, onde os participantes podem entrar e sair de um grupo com uma freq??ncia muito alta. Assim, algoritmos centralizados de ger?ncia de grupo n?o apresentam bom desempenho para essa classe de aplica??es, e mesmo as solu??es peer-to-peer tradicionais necessitam ter algum mecanismo que leve em considera??o essa volatilidade. A id?ia de consci?ncia de localiza??o permite distribuir os participantes na rede virtual de acordo com a sua proximidade na rede f?sica, permitindo um bom desempenho nas opera??es de gerenciamento do grupo. Diante deste contexto, nesta tese ? proposto um protocolo de comunica??o multicast na camada de aplica??o, chamado LAALM, que leva em considera??o a topologia da rede real no processo de montagem da rede virtual, utilizando uma nova m?trica denominada IPXY para prover a consci?ncia de localiza??o, atrav?s do processamento de informa??es locais. O LAALM foi implementado utilizando uma ?rvore distribu?da compartilhada e bi-direcional, possuindo uma heur?stica sub-?tima para o processo de inclus?o de novos participantes que visa minimizar o custo de constru??o da ?rvore de distribui??o de dados. A avalia??o do protocolo foi realizada de duas formas distintas: i) atrav?s de um simulador pr?prio onde se procurou avaliar a qualidade de constru??o da ?rvore de distribui??o gerada, avaliando-se m?tricas como o n?mero de filhos por cada n? e a dist?ncia final entre os n?s; ii) atrav?s de cen?rios real?sticos constru?dos no simulador de redes ns-3, onde foi avaliado o desempenho do protocolo atrav?s de m?tricas como stress, stretch e tempos de associa??o e reconfigura??o dos grupos

Submitted by Maicon Juliano Schmidt (maicons) on 2015-06-11T19:24:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Débora de Oliveira Lemos Rocha de Souza.pdf: 11262812 bytes, checksum: 1afc26309c47e8dc71f1c5e88aae7409 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-06-11T19:24:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Débora de Oliveira Lemos Rocha de Souza.pdf: 11262812 bytes, checksum: 1afc26309c47e8dc71f1c5e88aae7409 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-27 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / FAPERGS - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul / Algumas ações do processo projetual se restringem aos pensamentos dos designers, gerando uma dificuldade para compreender o processo e torná-lo explícito. As pesquisas nessa área tentam transpor essas limitações, buscando perceber o modo como os designers resolvem os problemas para aprimorar a sua atuação. Esses problemas são caracterizados como mal-estruturados e podem ser vistos de diferentes perspectivas, gerando respostas distintas. O conceito de coevolução percebe a resolução de problemas de forma evolutiva: à medida que compreende-se um pouco mais o problema, as respostas tornam-se mais aprimoradas. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo geral compreender a coevolução do problema de design. Para isso, realizou-se uma pesquisa exploratória em um workshop em design, coletando as informações por meio de grupos focais e do registro, em vídeo, do processo realizado pelos participantes. A técnica utilizada para analisar as informações coletadas nos grupos focais e nos vídeos foi a análise de conteúdo, com algumas adaptações necessárias à pesquisa realizada. Na análise, percebeu-se que a coevolução é influenciada: 1) pela formulação inicial do problema que funciona como uma força motora, impulsionando o processo de resolução do problema; 2) pela forma como as equipes se articulam, levando-se em conta o modo como os integrantes desempenham diferentes papeis e estabelecem um ritmo de resolução do problema de acordo com experiências anteriores que trazem para o projeto; 3) pelos questionamentos em relação ao problema ou à solução, caracterizando-se como uma das estratégias utilizadas pelos designers para avançar no espaço-problema ou no espaço-solução. Concluiu-se, assim, que não só o espaço-problema e o espaço-solução se modificam no percurso do projeto de forma a provocar uma evolução mútua, mas os diversos fatores que envolvem o processo projetual também influenciam na coevolução do problema de design. / Some actions in the design process are restricted to the designers’ thoughts, what may cause some difficulties in understanding the process itself and making it explicit. Studies in this area attempt to overcome these limitations by looking into the way designers solve problems to improve their performance. These problems are usually characterized as ill-structured and can be seen from different perspectives, leading to distinct answers. The concept of co-evolution regards problem resolution in an evolutive manner: as the problem is better understood, the answers become more refined. The overall objective of this work is to understand the co-evolution of the design problem. In order to do this, an exploratory research was conducted within a design workshop, where data was collected by means of both focal groups and videos recording the participants’ process. The technique used to analyse all this data was Content Analysis, with some necessary adaptations to the context of the present research. In the analysis, it was possible to observe that co-evolution is influenced by: 1) the initial formulation of the problem that works as a driving force, boosting the problem resolution process; 2) the way the groups manage themselves, taking into consideration the manner in which different members play distinct roles and establish a problem resolution pace based on previous experiences they bring to the project; and 3) inquiries related to the problem or the solution, which can be regarded as one of the strategies used by designers to move forward into the problem space or the solution space. In conclusion, all these observations lead to the understanding that not only the problem space and the solution space modify themselves in the course of the project, triggering mutual evolution, but the diverse aspects involved in the design context also have some influence on the co-evolution of the design problem.

Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2017-03-15T15:41:16Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Paulo Henrique Santini_.pdf: 1635865 bytes, checksum: a18482dc0477e7b87a5e8b04620ff499 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-15T15:41:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Paulo Henrique Santini_.pdf: 1635865 bytes, checksum: a18482dc0477e7b87a5e8b04620ff499 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-08-30 / Santander Universidades / Na área da computação nas últimas décadas o principal fenômeno a ser destacado é a difusão dos dispositivos móveis e os avanços da computação ubíqua, que propõe um cenário onde os diferentes tipos de serviços computacionais encontram-se disponíveis aos usuários a qualquer momento e em qualquer lugar. Esses serviços, também devem interagir no cotidiano das pessoas de forma onipresente, invisível e proativa. Com base nisso, diversas aplicações têm surgido aplicadas em diferentes áreas, como educação, saúde, transporte, acessibilidade. Nestas áreas pode ser constatado que a formação e gerenciamento de grupos é um desafio comum e possui grande importância como pode ser notado pelos esforços recentes e pesquisas relevantes sobre o assunto. Nessas pesquisas tem-se apontado que é importante considerar aspectos de contexto das entidades, mas também o histórico de contexto de determinada entidade. Neste cenário, esta dissertação propõe o eGroup, um modelo para o gerenciamento de grupos dinâmicos de entidades, que visa auxiliar aplicações ubíquas que almejem agrupar e gerenciar entidades levando em consideração características de perfis das entidades, o contexto em que elas estão inseridas, bem como histórico destes. A estratégia adotada neste trabalho se diferencia dos trabalhos relacionados por não trabalhar com um domínio específico, considerar todos os aspectos de contexto e o histórico de contexto, gerando de forma dinâmica um perfil e trilha do grupo. Com os resultados obtidos através de uma validação por cenários, foi possível verificar a viabilidade do modelo, além de propor uma solução para o problema de pesquisa. / In recent decades in the area of computing the main phenomenon to be highlighted is the diffusion of mobile devices and advances in ubiquitous computing, which proposes a scenario where the different types of computer services are available to users anytime and anywhere. These services should also interact ubiquitously, invisible and proactive in daily life. Based on this, several applications have emerged applied in different areas such as education, health, transportation, accessibility. These can be seen that the formation and management groups is a common challenge and has great importance as can be seen by recent efforts and relevant research on the subject. In these studies we have pointed out that it is important to consider the context of aspects of the entities but also the determined entity context history. In this scenario, this dissertation proposes the eGroup, a model for managing dynamic groups of bodies which aims to assist ubiquitous applications that aim group and manage entities taking into account characteristics of the entities profiles, the context in which they operate, as well as historical thereof. The strategy adopted in this study differs from related work by not working with a particular domain, consider all aspects of the context and the context of history, generating dynamically a profile and group track. The results obtained through a validation scenarios, it was possible to verify the viability of the model, and to propose a solution to the problem of research.