The traffic safety and efficiency applications made possible by vehicular communications have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people who, every day, use automobiles as their primary means of transportation. To be well connected and fully functional, these networks of cars require a minimum number of active nodes, which often may not happen due to a lack of radio-equipped vehicles on the road. These same networks can also be overwhelmed with traffic and signaling in the presence of too many cars, requiring careful coordination between all nodes to ensure proper operation. One way to overcome both these problems is to supplement vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications with vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems by deploying Roadside Units (RSUs) along the road to support the network of moving cars. RSUs are infrastructure nodes that can supplement sparse networks in low-density scenarios, and help coordinate and move data in denser networks. RSUs have an associated cost, however, and so their numbers need to be minimized while still maintaining a significant improvement to the vehicular network. he work presented in this thesis quantities the benefits of Roadside Unit deployments and proposes innovative approaches that can reduce and even eliminate the need for RSUs altogether.he first part of the thesis focuses on highway networks: first, an analytical model is developed to analyze communication delay in scenarios with sparse bi-directional traffic, considering both disconnected and connected RSUs.hen, a study on connectivity and message dissemination in these networks reveals how significant benefits of RSUs are only achieved when the deployed RSUs are interconnected. Extensive simulation work paired with sets of experimental measurements validate both model and study. Supplementing the work on sparse highway networks, an infrastructure-less approach is then proposed, consisting of two methods to improve communication delays in these scenarios: decelerate disconnected vehicles as they receive safety messages, and boost the same vehicles’ radio transmit power, to shorten the time to restore connectivity. Both techniques are modeled analytically, and data from a simulation study validate the models and show significant improvements in the connectivity of sparse highway networks with this infrastructure-less approach. he second part of the thesis sets its sights on urban vehicular networks. High costs associated with RSUs prevent their deployment at scale, and therefore finding alternative solutions to this longstanding problem is very important. A novel, low-cost self-organizing network approach to leveraging parked cars as RSUs in urban areas is proposed here, enabling parked cars to create coverage maps based on received signal strength and to decide whether to become RSUs from that knowledge. Initial simulation work reveals significant benefits to emergency message broadcasting delay in sparse scenarios and shows the ability of the self-organizing approach in providing robust and widespread coverage to dense urban areas, using only a small fraction of the cars parked in a city. he parking behaviors of individual drivers are then studied, by analyzing and gathering statistics on travel survey data from various metropolitan areas. Daily and hourly analytical models of parking events are provided, along with important derivations.he statistical data show that parking events can be classified into two major groups based on the time a car spends parked, and that these patterns vary substantially throughout the day while being markedly similar across different cities. he last part of the thesis focuses on self-organization for parked car RSUs. Novel mechanisms for self-organization are introduced that are innovative in their ability to keep the network of parked cars under continuous optimization, in their multicriteria decision process, and in their control of each car’s battery usage, rotating roadside unit roles between vehicles as required.he first comprehensive study of the performance of such approaches is presented, via realistic modeling of mobility, parking, and communication, thorough simulations, and an experimental verification of concepts that are key to self-organization. his analysis leads to strong evidence that parked cars can serve as an alternative to fixed roadside units, and organize to form networks to support smarter transportation and mobility.

Traffic congestion and over saturation is a common worldwide problem. This problem is more severe in urban areas due to rapid increase in number of vehicles. City traffic often results in traffic blockage at peak office hours. The same situation can also be observed on freeways, especially at entrance/exit areas of a city. In most cases the drivers are totally unaware about road traffic situations in advance. Intelligent transportation systems offer various applications to improve road traffic.  In this manner the timely and reliable traffic information can be greatly beneficial for travelers. Real time travel time information can be adopted by vehicles as an excellent tool which can result to reduce the impact of continuous traffic increase on urban roads. Real time travel time estimation is a complex task as it involves various factors. This travel time estimation is even more difficult for urban road networks. In our dissertation, we have investigated an estimated time of arrival approach in order to inform the drivers in advance about travel time. We have introduced Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) in a clever and intelligent fashion by developing a Case-Based Reasoning engine. We believe that by adopting this simple and intelligent approach, it can greatly help improving traffic congestion overall. We also believe that this strategy will also help in reducing the emission of environment unfriendly gases, thus helping mankind.

Ericsson has always strived for the technology leadership in its offering by designing products based on the latest technology. Going ahead with a similar thought it started exploring an idea of running a mobile core application using a Simplified Infrastructure (SI) to eventually enable the Cloud based solutions. But in order to run these type of applications in the Cloud, the in-service performance provided by such a SI should be the same as the native infrastructure in order to maintain the mobile core application’s QoS. "High availability" of the infrastructure is one of the measure of the ISP and from the ISP point of view, such a migration would be considered feasible only if the SI is able to maintain the same level of availability as provided by the native infrastructure solution without bringing in any major architecture changes within the SI. Hence this master thesis project investigates the feasibility of achieving the same availability as before if the mobile core application is to be migrated from the native infrastructure to the SI. Such a feasibility exploration was the very first attempt with respect to the SI within Ericsson, which was executed through this master thesis project. In order to achieve the goal of this thesis project a detailed system study was carried out, which focused on the native infrastructure architecture, how it was maintaining the "high availability" and how it differed from the SI. In the end, it was possible to confirm that the level of availability of infrastructure services as provided through the SI will be higher than the native infrastructure after the migration if the proposed suggestions of this master thesis project are implemented successfully. These implementations also do not change the architecture of the SI in any major way. The end results of this thesis project were also highly appreciated by Ericsson and are now part of thedevelopment plan for next mobile core infrastructure solution at Ericsson.

M.Sc. / We live in a modern world in which visual perception has become an absolute necessity. Navigating and walking around in a city without getting lost is a difficult enough task when using all senses, but if you are visually disabled, this becomes a near impossible task. All around us are signs, billboards, motorcars, buildings, computers, and other similar signs of modern times, which are most effectively observed visually. The next logical step in assisting the visually disabled to experience the world around them more freely, is to make more effective use of the technology that has created the shift to the visual world in the first place. It now appears possible to design a framework to incorporate not only current, but also future hardware and software into a solution to the above-mentioned problems. Such a framework has to be flexible to allow it to keep up not only with hardware, but software advances as well. Furthermore, it needs to take into account the needs of a typical blind user. One way of implementing this framework is to make use of a form of sensereplacement. Where the visual sense is impaired, technology can be used to analyze and interpret the visual world, obtain meaningful information from the scene, and then re-route this information to another sense. This dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section will provide an overview of the rest of the dissertation. It will also investigate similar research that is currently being undertaken, and provide a model for a possible solution to the above-mentioned problems. The second section will provide the background study needed to make informed decisions when implementing a prototype system. The third section will investigate the implementation of a prototype model, as well as the construction of a pilot project.

M.Sc. / The manufacturing sector has produced a wide variety of techniques in its attempts to find the ultimate solution for the manufacturing process, with these techniques ranging from material requirements planning, just-in-time production, total-quality management, flexible manufacturing systems and computer integrated manufacturing to advanced planning and scheduling. Given the fact that the technique entitled "advanced planning and scheduling" in the manufacturing environment is primarily aimed at resource planning and scheduling during the production process, however, a clamant need was created for manufacturing companies to broaden their focus in order to include all the processes involved in the production environment, as well as the external processes impacting on productivity. A large area that came into focus owing to the latter paradigm shift is known as "supply chain management". Supply chain management is concerned with the integration of and communication between the various elements in the entire supply chain, including elements such as demand planning and forecasting, scheduling, customer sales, supplier purchases, production planning and forecasting, resource planning and warehouse management. This research study will be devoted to an investigation into the issues surrounding supply chain management and all its manifestations, including its basic components and their integration and interaction. This investigation will also cover research into scheduling systems up to current reactive constraintbased scheduling systems, since scheduling is deemed to be the core of the supply chain in terms of the influence it exerts on most other components, be it directly or indirectly. The investigation will also take us into the realm of an exciting new technology whose exponents are known as "intelligent software agents", which agents are aimed at providing autonomy to the objects within a system and which agents are characterised by their behaviour and decision processes. The said agents can be used to perform highly specialised tasks during the manufacturing process, such as scheduling and forecasting. A prototype system will be developed in the course of the research in a bid to illustrate the integration, evaluation and monitoring of the supply chain elements through the use of intelligent agents. By endowing the system with intelligence, the researchers hope to identify many future uses for intelligent agents in the various segments of the supply chain.

Dr Math is a math tutoring service implemented on the chat application Mxit. The service allows school learners to use their mobile phones to discuss mathematicsrelated topics with human tutors. Using the broad user-base provided by Mxit, the Dr Math service has grown to consist of tens of thousands of registered school learners. The tutors on the service are all volunteers and the learners far outnumber the available tutors at any given time. School learners on the service use a shorthand language-form called microtext, to phrase their queries. Microtext is an informal form of language which consists of a variety of misspellings and symbolic representations, which emerge spontaneously as a result of the idiosyncrasies of a learner. The specific form of microtext found on the Dr Math service contains mathematical questions and example equations, pertaining to the tutoring process. Deciphering the queries, to discover their embedded mathematical content, slows down the tutoring process. This wastes time that could have been spent addressing more learner queries. The microtext language thus creates an unnecessary burden on the tutors. This study describes the development of an automated process for the translation of Dr Math microtext queries into mathematical equations. Using the design science research paradigm as a guide, three artefacts are developed. These artefacts take the form of a construct, a model and an instantiation. The construct represents the creation of new knowledge as it provides greater insight into the contents and structure of the language found on a mobile mathematics tutoring service. The construct serves as the basis for the creation of a model for the translation of microtext queries into mathematical equations, formatted for display in an electronic medium. No such technique currently exists and therefore, the model contributes new knowledge. To validate the model, an instantiation was created to serve as a proof-of-concept. The instantiation applies various concepts and techniques, such as those related to natural language processing, to the learner queries on the Dr Math service. These techniques are employed in order to translate an input microtext statement into a mathematical equation, structured by using mark-up language. The creation of the instantiation thus constitutes a knowledge contribution, as most of these techniques have never been applied to the problem of translating microtext into mathematical equations. For the automated process to have utility, it should perform on a level comparable to that of a human performing a similar translation task. To determine how closely related the results from the automated process are to those of a human, three human participants were asked to perform coding and translation tasks. The results of the human participants were compared to the results of the automated process, across a variety of metrics, including agreement, correlation, precision, recall and others. The results from the human participants served as the baseline values for comparison. The baseline results from the human participants were compared with those of the automated process. Krippendorff’s α was used to determine the level of agreement and Pearson’s correlation coefficient to determine the level of correlation between the results. The agreement between the human participants and the automated process was calculated at a level deemed satisfactory for exploratory research and the level of correlation was calculated as moderate. These values correspond with the calculations made as the human baseline. Furthermore, the automated process was able to meet or improve on all of the human baseline metrics. These results serve to validate that the automated process is able to perform the translation at a level comparable to that of a human. The automated process is available for integration into any requesting application, by means of a publicly accessible web service.

C³TO (Chatter Call Centre/Tutoring Online) is a scalable architecture to support mobile online tutoring using chat protocols over cell phones. It is the scalability of this architecture which is the primary focus of this dissertation. Much has been written lamenting the state of mathematics education in South Africa. It is not a pretty story. In order to help solve this mathematical crisis, the “Dr Math” research project was started in January, 2007. “Dr Math” strove to assist school pupils with their mathematics homework by providing access to tutors from a nearby university to help them. The school pupils used MXit on their cell phones and the tutors used normal computer workstations. The original “Dr Math” research project expected no more than twenty to thirty school pupils to participate. Unexpectedly thousands of school pupils started asking “Dr Math” to assist them with their mathematics homework. The original software could not scale. The original software could not cater for the thousands of pupils needing help. The scalability problems which existed in the original “Dr Math” project included: hardware scalability issues, software scalability problems, lack of physical office space for tutors, and tutor time being wasted by trivial questions. C³TO tackled these scalability concerns using an innovative three level approach by implementing a technological feature level, a tactical feature level, and a strategic feature level in the C³TO architecture. The technological level included specific components, utilities, and platforms which promoted scalability. The technological level provided the basic building blocks with which to construct a scalable architecture. The tactical level arranged the basic building blocks of the technological level into a scalable architecture. The tactical level provided short term solutions to scalability concerns by providing easy configurability and decision making. The strategic level attempted to answer the pupils questions before they actually arrived at the tutor thereby reducing the load on the human tutors. C³TO was extensively tested and evaluated. C³TO supported thousands of school pupils with their mathematics homework over a period of ten months. C³TO was used to support a small conference. C³TO was used to encourage people to volunteer their time in participation of Mandela Day. C³TO was used to support “Winter School” during the winter school holiday. In all these cases, C³TO proved itself to be scalable.

<div>We describe a new task called The Amazing Race: Robot Edition. In this task, the robot is placed in a real, unknown environment, without a map, and asked to find a designated location. It will need to explore its surroundings, find and approach people, engage them in a dialogue to obtain directions to the goal, and follow those directions to the hallway with the goal. We describe and implement a variety of robotic behaviors that performs each of these functions. We test these in the real world in test environments that were distinct from the training environments where we developed our methods and trained our models. Additionally, these test environments were completely unmodified and reflect the state of the real world.</div><div>First, we describe how our robotic system solves this problem where the environment is constrained to a single floor or a single building. We demonstrate that we are able to find a goal location in never-before-seen environments. Next, we describe a machine-learned approach to the dialogue and components of our system to make it more robust to the diversity and noisiness of navigational instructions someone may provide.</div>

The growth of the internet towards the Internet of Things (IoT) has impacted the way we live. Intelligent (smart) devices which can act autonomously has resulted in new applications for example industrial automation, smart healthcare systems, autonomous transportation to name just a few. These applications have dramatically improved the way we live as citizens. While the internet is continuing to grow at an unprecedented rate, this has also been coupled with the growing demands for new services e.g. machine-to machine (M2M) communications, smart metering etc. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) architecture was developed decades ago and was not prepared nor designed to meet these exponential demands. This has led to the complexity of the internet coupled with its inflexible and a rigid state. The challenges of reliability, scalability, interoperability, inflexibility and vendor lock-in amongst the many challenges still remain a concern over the existing (traditional) networks. In this study, an evolutionary approach into implementing a "Scalable IoT Data Transmission Network" (S-IoT-N) is proposed while leveraging on existing transport networks. Most Importantly, the proposed evolutionary approach attempts to address the above challenges by using open (existing) standards and by leveraging on the (traditional/existing) transport networks. The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) of the proposed S-IoT-N is attempted on a physical network testbed and is demonstrated along with basic network connectivity services over it. Finally, the results are validated by an experimental performance evaluation of the PoC physical network testbed along with the recommendations for improvement and future work.

This book introduces the intelligent design theory, which preserves the core of creation science while doing away with much of the biblical literalism and explicit references to God. It discusses the theory, where it came from, and how it is presented to the public. It argues that the theory represents a serious threat to the educational, scientific, and philosophical values of the Enlightenment that have shaped modern science and modern democratic institutions.