The thesis compounds three views on the Key Account Management (KAM). Firstly, KAM is defined from a theoretical perspective. Secondly, a practical example of KAM is described within the international organization AIESEC; including feedback from a client. Finally, there are suggestions in order to improve KAM in terms of soft skills of Account Managers.

La tecnología está en constante innovación y definitivamente en esta era cada vez se ha vuelto una parte esencial de nuestra vida. Todas las industrias se han visto involucrada por los diversos avances tecnológicos; y uno de ellos es la industria del cine. Una industria creada a partir de los pequeños avances tecnológicos en su época, como el cinematógrafo hasta los últimos avances de nuestros días como lo son las imágenes generadas por computadora. Dentro de la industria del cine tenemos a una muy importante, Hollywood, que hoy en día es muy exitosa y nos ofrece una gran variedad de películas de gran éxito, entre las cuales destaca las de superhéroes. En específico, Marvel comics que con sus personajes ha logrado posicionarse en esta industria, teniendo más de 30 películas. Llevando el mundo de las páginas de historieta hacia la gran pantalla. Ello debido a sus fantásticos personajes con características humanas y también a la tecnología que ayuda a recrear estos mundos que Stan Lee y Jack Kirby crearon hace décadas. Dos industrias nacidas y desarrolladas en una época pasada vuelven a resurgir a través de estos avances tecnológicos para seguir entreteniendo y enseñando a los más jóvenes. En un sociedad plagada de acontecimientos peligrosos donde se necesita un héroe en quien confiar, una esperanza a la sociedad a su día a día. Vuelven los superhéroes del pasado con un nuevo rostro gracias a la nueva era tecnología que nos permite creer en que lo imposible es posible. / It is widely believed that nowadays technology has become a escencial part of our lives. One of the biggest impact of it's development had affected cinematography industry which has been increasing due to the new ways of technology. One of these industries is Hollywood, which as we all know offers a huge variety of successful movies and the most notorious is Marvel that has revolutionise all the comic worlds. Marvel has more than 30 movies most of them had used CGI and advance technology that helped to appreciate sophisticated graphics. The reason of this huge success is on the superheroes character's that has a lot of human characteristics and it seems to be more like us. In addition to this, the comics where this movies are based on are fantastic and creates to the spectator the feeling of been in somewhere else for a couple of hours. Finally, Marvel as an important industry has been dealing with all the technology development that is a big part of all their achievement. / Trabajo de investigación

MSc (Botany) / Department of Botany / The overall aim of this study was to determine the population biology of Sclerocarya birrea (A Rich) Hochst., subspecies caffra (Sond) at Nylsvley Nature Reserve, Limpopo, South Africa. Sclerocarya birrea is a keystone plant species which is rated as one of the most highly valued indigenous trees because of its multiple uses. It is identified as a key species to support the livelihood of rural communities and it is central to various commercial activities. Sclerocarya birrea is also widely used by game in protected areas and by humans in communal areas for its fruit, wood and medicinal properties. Understanding the population biology for this key stone species is important as there are many environmental factors that are affecting its population structure. The study found that the population of S. birrea at Nylsvley Nature Reserve is fairly healthy and is mainly comprised of seedling and adult trees. Evidence of predators feeding on the seeds of Sclerocarya birrea was also recorded in this study. Additionally, disturbance, such as fire and cutting do not have negative impact on S.barrea

MSCAGR (Agricultural Economics) / Department of Agricultural Economics / Agricultural cooperatives are important tools for enhancing the living standards of farmers in rural areas. It is therefore very clear that cooperatives are for the benefit of the farmers. However, the development of cooperatives in the study area is not at a desired level yet; hence, it is necessary to determine the farmers’ attitudes towards forming cooperatives. The research was carried out in Makhado Local Municipality, Vhembe District in Limpopo Province. Three irrigation schemes were selected for the study, which consist of a total of 215 smallholder farmers. However, only 152 smallholder irrigation farmers were used for the study. The mixed research design method was used for this study. The sampling technique used is purposive sampling. Data was collected through a structured questionnaire. Interviews were also made using key informants (Extension Office). The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse the data. Cross tabulations and the logistic regression were used to analyse the data. The study revealed that the socioeconomic characteristics smallholder irrigation farmers has an impact on their willingness to form cooperatives. The study also revealed that the attitudes of farmers have an impact on their willingness to form cooperatives. The study further revealed that the constraints such as trainings, hired service providers, costs of inputs, access to agricultural information, access to adequate land and access to markets have an impact on their willingness to form cooperatives. The study recommended that strategies can be implemented on how cooperatives can be formed and enhance their success. The study also shows that future research can be done in youth participation in agriculture and cooperatives, cooperatives partnering with agricultural companies and other organisations. / NRF

No description available.

The growing number of mobile devices used today and the increasing dependency on them in the workplace makes understanding how users interact with these devices critical. This study looks to find how different generational groups commit errors on different types of devices. Participants completed tasks consisting of word and character input on two different devices, a physical keypad and touchscreen device. The number of errors and types of error, corrected and permanent were collected for each participant. It was found that participants committed more errors when using character input and physical keypad devices but also corrected more of their errors when using them. When looking at number of errors and the amount of corrected errors, the optimal input content and input method paired combination is using word input on the key device. The results of this study can help guide industries in choosing the right devices for their users.

Public key cryptosystems offer important advantages over symmetric methods, but the most important such systems rely on the difficulty of integer factorization (or the related discrete logarithm problem). Advances in quantum computing threaten to render such systems useless. In addition, public-key systems tend to be slower than symmetric systems because of their use of number-theoretic algorithms. I propose a new public key system which may be secure against both classical and quantum attacks, while remaining simple and very fast. The system's action is best described in terms of linear algebra, while its security is more naturally explained in the context of graph theory.

This research investigated key management in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) environment. At the time this research began key management schemes provided limited functionality and low service availability in a highly partitioned ad hoc environment. The purpose of this research was to develop a framework that provides redundancy and robustness for Security Association (SA) establishment between pairs of nodes. The key contribution of this research is the Key Management System (KMS) framework and, more specifically, the unique way the various components are integrated to provide the various functionalities. The KMS overcomes the limitations of previous systems by (1) minimizing pre-configuration, (2) increasing service availability, (3) and increasing flexibility for new nodes joining the network. A behavior grading scheme provides the network with a system-wide view of the trustworthiness of nodes and enables the KMS to dynamically adjust its configuration according to its environment. The introduction of behavior grading allows nodes to be less dependent on strict identity verification. This KMS was simulated with Monte Carlo and NS2 simulations and was shown to interoperate with IP Security (IPsec) to enable the establishment of IPsec SAs. The simulations have proven the effectiveness of the system in providing service to the nodes in a highly partitioned environment. / Ph. D.

As a low fidelity work simulation, Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) are an affordable and practical way of empirically linking training and on-the-job performance, thereby providing a viable means of evaluating training effectiveness. An issue, when utilizing SJTs, is deciding the appropriate manner in which the SJT should be scored. Traditional SJT scoring methodologies, while successfully utilized for selection and prediction, pose specific challenges when applied to a SJT designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a training program. This study discusses the shortcomings of traditional SJT scoring methodologies when used in the evaluation context. To overcome these challenges, an innovative scoring methodology, the Hybrid methodology, is presented. This study provides the detailed description of the Hybrid scoring key creation, and compares the Hybrid scoring key with two traditional scoring keys (Subject Matter Expert (SME) and Respondent-based scoring keys). Responses from a military training program are utilized to illustrate the distinctive effects of using the three different scoring approaches. The superiority of the hybrid scoring key, due to increased confidence in the key's accuracy, and findings regarding training evaluation are discussed. Future research directions and practical applications of the research are also discussed. / Master of Science

Modern SSDs are getting faster and smarter with near-data computing capabilities. Due to their design choices, traditional key-value stores do not fully leverage these new storage devices. These key-value stores become CPU-bound even before fully utilizing the IO bandwidth. LSM or B+ tree-based key-value stores involve complex garbage collection and store sorted keys and complicated synchronization mechanisms. In this work, we propose a cross-layered key-value store named Retina that decouples the design to delegate control path manipulations to host CPU and data path manipulations to computational SSD to maximize performance and reduce compute bottlenecks. We employ many design choices not explored in other persistent key-value stores to achieve this goal. In addition to the cross-layered design paradigm, Retina introduces a new caching mechanism called Mirror cache, support for variable key-value pairs, and a novel version-based crash consistency model. By enabling all the design features, we equip Retina to reduce compute hotspots on the host CPU, take advantage of the on-storage accelerators to leverage the data locality on the computational storage, improve overall bandwidth and reduce the bandwidth net- work latencies. Thus when evaluated using YCSB, we observe the CPU utilization reduced by 4x and throughput performance improvement of 20.5% against the state-of-the-art for read-intensive workloads. / Master of Science / Modern secondary storage systems are providing an exponential increase in memory access speeds. In addition, new generation storage systems attach compute resources near data to offload computation to storage. Traditional datastore systems are lacking in performance when used with the new generation SSDs (Solid State Drive). The key reason is the SSDs are underutilized due to CPU bottlenecks. Due to design choices, conventional datastores incur expensive CPU tasks that cause the CPU to bottleneck even before the storage speeds are fully utilized. Thus, when attached to a modern SSD, conventional datastores will underutilize the storage resources. In this work, we propose a cross-layered key-value store named Retina that decouples the design to delegate control path manipulations to host CPU and data path manipulations to computational SSD to maximize performance and reduce compute bottlenecks. In addition to the cross-layered design paradigm, Retina introduces a new caching mechanism called Mirror cache and a novel version-based crash consistency model. By enabling all the design features, we equip Retina to reduce compute hotspots on the host CPU, take advantage of the on-storage accelerators to leverage the data locality on the computational storage and improve overall access speed. To evaluate Retina, we use throughput and CPU utilization as the comparison metric. We test our implementation with Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark, a popular datastore benchmark. We evaluate against RocksDB(the most widely adopted datastore) to enable fair performance comparison. In conclusion, we show that Retina key-value store improves the throughput performance by offloading logic to computational storage to reduce the CPU bottlenecks.