Market changes are held to occur at an ever-faster rate due to forces such as technologicaladvancements, shifting consumer preferences and habits and increased competition. This hascaused a rise in interest for developing more agile working methodologies in marketing.Marketing agility is a capability that allows firms to quickly sense and respond to marketchanges. The assessment of when and how much marketing agility is needed is based on theknowledge of when the business environment is uncertain. Uncertainty is not always presentor constantly at the same level, indicating marketing agility is not as necessary in all contexts.The need for agility is also influenced by characteristics of the firm and their businessenvironment. Utilising a research design based on interviews with marketing managers inSweden, the purpose of this research is to determine how characteristics of the firm and theirbusiness environment influence the need for marketing agility. The results indicate that bothmarket uncertainty levels and different characteristics of the firm related to size, structure,resources, brand and product, influence the need for marketing agility. We emphasise how theneed for marketing agility can be constant or occur only in specific situations. The paperconcludes with implications for research and practice in relation to when marketing agility isneeded.Keywords: Marketing Agility, Iteration, Sensemaking, Speed, Marketing Decision, Uncertainty,Dynamic Market Changes

A large class of practical planning problems that require reasoning about uncertain outcomes, as well as tradeoffs among competing goals, can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs). This model has been studied for over 60 years, and has many applications that range from stochastic inventory control and supply-chain planning, to probabilistic model checking and robotic control. Standard dynamic programming algorithms solve these problems for the entire state space. A more efficient heuristic search approach focuses computation on solving these problems for the relevant part of the state space only, given a start state, and using heuristics to identify irrelevant parts of the state space that can be safely ignored. This dissertation considers the heuristic search approach to this class of problems, and makes three contributions that advance this approach. The first contribution is a novel algorithm for solving MDPs that integrates the standard value iteration algorithm with branch-and-bound search. Called branch-and-bound value iteration, the new algorithm has several advantages over existing algorithms. The second contribution is the integration of recently-developed suboptimality bounds in heuristic search algorithm for MDPs, making it possible for iterative algorithms for solving these planning problems to detect convergence to a bounded-suboptimal solution. The third contribution is the evaluation and analysis of some techniques that are widely-used by state-of-the-art planning algorithms, the identification of some weaknesses of these techniques, and the development of a more efficient implementation of one of these techniques -- a solved-labeling procedure that speeds converge by leveraging a decomposition of the state-space graph of a planning problem into strongly-connected components. The new algorithms and techniques introduced in this dissertation are experimentally evaluated on a range of widely-used planning benchmarks.

A stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem is an undiscounted Markov decision process with an absorbing and zero-cost target state, where the objective is to reach the target state with minimum expected cost. This problem provides a foundation for algorithms for decision-theoretic planning and probabilistic model checking, among other applications. This thesis describes an implementation and evaluation of recently developed error bounds for SSP problems. The bounds can be used in a test for convergence of iterative dynamic programming algorithms for solving SSP problems, as well as in action elimination procedures that can accelerate convergence by excluding provably suboptimal actions that do not need to be re-evaluated each iteration. The techniques are shown to be effective for both decision-theoretic planning and probabilistic model checking.

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This creative thesis explores the process of visual development and how one can apply it to their own body of work. Visual Development encompasses the entire concept design process, from the idea to the final design. Vis Dev artists document their journey to depict how an idea becomes a fully refined and polished concept. They illustrate a wide variety of elements, such as characters, costuming, props, and environments. The development of all of these factors then allows the artist to cultivate an imaginative and creative world that could be used for multiple forms of entertainment, such as animated films, video games, and comics. This project follows the visual development process to create a lineup of 4 space-themed circus characters, their pose and expression sheets, and 2 key illustrations.

Value iteration is not typically considered a viable algorithm for solving large-scale MDPs because it converges too slowly. However, its performance can be dramatically improved by eliminating redundant or useless backups, and by backing up states in the right order. We present several methods designed to help structure value dependency, and present a systematic study of companion prioritization techniques which focus computation in useful regions of the state space. In order to scale to solve ever larger problems, we evaluate all enhancements and methods in the context of parallelizability. Using the enhancements, we discover that in many instances the limiting factor of the algorithms is no longer time, but space. We thus evaluate all metrics and decisions with respect to cache performance. We generate a family of algorithms by combining several of the methods discussed, and present empirical evidence demonstrating that performance can improve by several orders of magnitude for real-world problems, while preserving accuracy and convergence guarantees.

Min undersökning syftar till att undersöka hur genus skapas i den nyaste Disneyfilmen med kvinnlig karaktär – ”Turning red” (2022). Uppsatsen undersöker även hur tidigare Disneyprinsessor gestaltats i film, och hur protagonisten i ”Turning red” – Mei Mei gestaltas. Jag valde att undersöka detta eftersom det finns mycket forskning kring Disneyprinsessor och dess stereotypiska uttryck i film och sagor, och jag ville därför ta reda på hur den nyaste filmens kvinnliga karaktär gestaltats. Jag ville undersöka om det fanns samma stereotypiska uttryck, eller om nya tillkommit. Jag ville med detta ta reda på om stereotypiska uttryck och könsroller var gömda i filmen, och hur dessa formades. Detta är viktigt att ta reda på eftersom genusskapande i filmer påverkar hur vi i samhället skapar genus, och vice versa. Något som särskilt är viktigt att uppmärksamma i Disneyfilmer eftersom de är otroligt populära och dessutom de som visar barn en fantasivärld – som de tolkar som verklighet. Jag har använt mig av en kvalitativ innehållsanalys för att undersöka detta, och har utfört en tematisk analys med en abduktiv ansats och en hermeneutisk kunskapssyn. Resultatet visade att ”Turning red” innehöll könsterotypiska budskap, även om det också fanns en del nyanserade egenskaper hos Mei Mei. Resultatet visade också att genusskapande i samhället hänger ihop med hur genuskapande visas i film. / My research aims to examine how gender is created in the newest Disney film that contains a female character - "Turning red" (2022). The essay examines how previous Disney princesses have been portrayed in film, and how the protagonist in "Turning red" - Mei Mei - is shaped. I chose to investigate this because there is a lot of research about Disney princesses and their stereotypical expression in movies and fairy tales, and I wanted to find out how the female character of the newest movie had been portrayed. I wanted to investigate if the same stereotypical expressions existed, or if new ones were added. I also wanted to investigate whether stereotypical expressions and gender roles were hidden in the movie, and how these were shaped. This is important to investigate because gender-shaping in movies affects how we in society creates gender, and vice versa. Something that is especially important to pay attention to is Disney movies because they are incredibly popular. They are also those that shows children a fantasy world – which they perceive as reality. I have used a qualitative content analysis to investigate this and have carried out a thematic analysis with an abductive approach and a hermeneutic view of knowledge. The result showed that "Turning red" contained gender stereotypic messages, although there were also some nuanced characteristics of Mei Mei. The result also showed that gender creation in society relates to how gender creation is shown in movie.

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Yes / The design of reinforced concrete buildings must satisfy the serviceability stiffness criteria in terms of maximum lateral deflections and inter story drift in order to prevent both structural and non-structural damages. Consideration of plastic hinge formation is also important to obtain accurate failure mechanism and ultimate strength of reinforced concrete frames. In the present study, an iterative procedure has been developed for the analysis of reinforced concrete frames with cracked elements and consideration of plastic hinge formation. The ACI and probability-based effective stiffness models are used for the effective moment of inertia of cracked members. Shear deformation effect is also considered, and the variation of shear stiffness due to cracking is evaluated by reduced shear stiffness models available in the literature. The analytical procedure has been demonstrated through the application to three reinforced concrete frame examples available in the literature. It has been shown that the iterative analytical procedure can provide accurate and efficient predictions of deflections and ultimate strength of the frames studied under lateral and vertical loads. The proposed procedure is also efficient from the viewpoint of computational time and convergence rate. The developed technique was able to accurately predict the locations and sequential development of plastic hinges in frames. The results also show that shear deformation can contribute significantly to frame deflections.