Cette thèse porte sur l’exploitation d’une population nomade afin de colporter des informations dites ‘atomiques’ de rencontres entre entités fixes ou mobiles pour des applications diverses basées sur la localisation et la traçabilité. Répondre à ces besoins en milieux confinés s’avère un défi, que ce soit dans un contexte industriel, médical ou social. Parmi les solutions existantes, le système GPS (Global Positioning System) offre des résultats encourageants lorsqu’il s’agit de connaître une position en extérieur. Cette solution n’est plus utilisable en intérieur tel que dans une mine par exemple, en raison des caractéristiques du signal fortement perturbées dans ce type de milieu. Le fil directeur de ce travail consiste à proposer un modèle utilisant la technologie des réseaux de capteurs sans fil afin de modéliser et de trouver des solutions à des problématiques allant de la localisation en milieux confinés au suivi et à la reconstitution de trajectoires d’entités mobiles. Les solutions proposées dans cette thématique doivent être tolérantes aux délais. Après avoir présenté les constituants de notre modèle générique de colportage, une instanciation de ce modèle a permis de nous pencher sur un cas de localisation et de traçabilité dans un espace confiné. Les résultats de simulation et d’expérimentation ont montré l’impact de notre mécanisme de colportage sur la qualité de l’information recensée concernant les déplacements et les rencontres des entités mobiles. Outre la proposition d’un modèle générique, la contribution de cette thèse comporte des mécanismes de colportage (et de filtrage) de l’information par des entités mobiles contraintes en taille mémoire. / This thesis focuses on the exploitation of a nomadic population to pass around information called contact event which represents the recording of a meeting between fixed or mobile entities for localization and tracking applications. Addressing these needs in confined environments is a challenge, whether in an industrial, medical or social context. Among the existing solutions, the GPS (Global Positioning System) provides encouraging results for outdoor localization. However, this solution is not operational in confined environments such as mines, due to the signal characteristics highly disturbed in this type of environment. The guiding principle of this work is to propose a model using the technology of wireless sensor networks for modeling and finding solutions for localization and tracking mobile nodes in confined areas. The new approach proposed in this thesis is inspired by the principle of ‘store-carry-forward’ of Delay-Tolerant-Network (DTN). After presenting the components of our generic model, an instantiation of this model has allowed us to address a localization and tracking case in a confined area. The simulation and experimentation results show the impact of our filtering mechanism on the quality of the knowledge collected concerning the movements and meetings of the mobile nodes.

Depuis quelques années, l'évolution des terminaux nomades et des réseaux mobiles et/ou sans fil favorise le développement de nouveaux services et de nouvelles applications dédiées aux usagers mobiles. Parmi ces applications, nous définissons le concept d'applications de proximité. Celles-ci permettent à différents usagers physiquement proches les uns des autres de partager certaines de leurs informations et de localiser les données disponibles. Ces applications s'inscrivent dans un contexte fortement distribué et dynamique où l'ensemble de l'information disponible est répartie sur les terminaux des différents participants et subit de fréquentes variations dûes à la mobilité des participants. Dans cet environnement, les services de localisation actuels présentent d'importantes limites. Nous avons donc proposé ISLANDS (Information and Services LocalizAtioN and Discovery Service), un service de localisation adapté à l'environnement des applications de proximité, en particulier à la distribution de l'information. Ce service ISLANDS repose sur notre modèle d'évaluation des requêtes dépendantes de la localisation. Un exemple de requêtes dépendantes de la localisation est « quel est l'arrêt de bus le plus proche de moi ? ». Le modèle d'évaluation proposé permet de considérer la mobilité des utilisateurs et en particulier leur localisation géographique dans l'évaluation des requêtes. Ce modèle d'évaluation a été optimisé afin de pouvoir être pleinement exploité dans un environnement contraint en terme de ressources. Le processus d'évaluation d'une requête dépendante de la localisation s'articule autour de différentes étapes dont l'évaluation de la localisation géographique du client qui émet la requête. Aujourd'hui, les techniques de localisation ne sont pas toujours exploitables : par exemple, le GPS qui est la solution la plus répandue , ne fonctionne généralement pas à l'intérieur d'un bâtiment, nous proposons donc une solution de localisation reposant sur les métadonnées de l'environnement. Notre solution permet de localiser un utilisateur de façon approximative mais avec une précision suffisante pour évaluer des requêtes dépendantes de la localisation. Cette solution a été optimisée de façon à minimiser la consommation des ressources sur les terminaux nomades et à réduire le nombre de communications entre les participants. Un prototype d'ISLANDS a été implémenté et démontré aux 19èmes journées de bases de données avancées (BDA'03) dans le but de valider nos propositions.

No description available.

Lifelong Learning is the development of human potential through a continuously supportive process which stimulates individuals to acquire knowledge and skills throughout their lifetimes (Dewey, 1910; Leicester & Field, 2000). It is significant both for the individual and the society in the 21st century, especially for China. Inspired by the Lisbon Key Competences (Cziboly, 2010) and Capability Approach, the author defined five core capabilities for lifelong learning related to this educational research: language capability, learning capability, creative capability, aesthetic and cultural capabilities, and social and civic capabilities. Drama in educational settings is the focus on the educational function to define drama as a teaching and learning method (DfES, 2003). It incorporates elements of an actor's training to facilitate students' physical, social, emotional and cognitive development. Drama used as a pedagogy in education is seen as a valuable tool for learning in many aspects related to language learning and lifelong learning (Cziboly, 2010). However, influenced by culture and history, drama pedagogy is less well developed in China compared to the West, in terms of both theory and practice. In this research, the author conducted a case study using drama pedagogy to design a drama program through "College Chinese" teaching in the Communication University of China. The two main research questions were 1) to explore the relationship between drama pedagogy and lifelong learning and 2) to discover the positive and negative effects of using drama pedagogy in the Chinese context. For the second question, the author used the concept of "localisation", which is the process of adapting a product or content to a specific locale or market. Although it is a term that is more often used in business and economics, the author used it in this research because it is closely related to the idea of adapting a teaching strategy from one distinct cultural area (e.g. the West) to another (e.g. China). This research contributes to the theory of the relationship between drama pedagogy and lifelong learning. It also has implications for the localisation of liberal pedagogy in indigenous contexts and the future educational reform in China.

La thèse a porté sur la localisation de mobile pour les systèmes UMTS-FDD. Il s'agit d'un sujet qui intéresse de plus en plus les opérateurs, notamment dans le cas de système UMTS-FDD où il existe très peu de réseaux réels. Les différentes approches permettant de localiser un émetteur ont ainsi été envisagées, et plus particulièrement, celles basées sur les mesures de puissances, les temps d'arrivée (TOA) en liaison descendante ou encore celles basées sur les angles d'arrivée (AOA) et sur toute combinaison AOA-TOA. Pour ces différentes approches, nous nous sommes intéressés aux deux principales sources d'erreur pouvant dégrader les performances de la localisation : -l'absence de trajet direct qui est une des caractéristiques des systèmes radio-mobile. -le problème d'écoute, qui est inhérent au système UMTS-FDD. A ces deux problèmes, nous avons proposé des solutions pour les differentes approches de localisation, qui soient à la fois précises et facile à mettre en oeuvre au niveau de la norme.

This thesis considers the domain of acoustic source localisation and tracking in an indoor environment. Acoustic tracking has applications in security, human-computer interaction, and the diarisation of meetings. Source localisation and tracking is typically a computationally expensive task, making it hard to process on-line, especially as the number of speakers to track increases. Much of the literature considers single-source localisation, however a practical system must be able to cope with multiple speakers, possibly active simultaneously, without knowing beforehand how many speakers are present. Techniques are explored for reducing the computational requirements of an acoustic localisation system. Techniques to localise and track multiple active sources are also explored, and developed to be more computationally efficient than the current state of the art algorithms, whilst being able to track more speakers. The first contribution is the modification of a recent single-speaker source localisation technique, which improves the localisation speed. This is achieved by formalising the implicit assumption by the modified algorithm that speaker height is uniformly distributed on the vertical axis. Estimating height information effectively reduces the search space where speakers have previously been detected, but who may have moved over the horizontal-plane, and are unlikely to have significantly changed height. This is developed to allow multiple non-simultaneously active sources to be located. This is applicable when the system is given information from a secondary source such as a set of cameras allowing the efficient identification of active speakers rather than just the locations of people in the environment. The next contribution of the thesis is the application of a particle swarm technique to significantly further decrease the computational cost of localising a single source in an indoor environment, compared the state of the art. Several variants of the particle swarm technique are explored, including novel variants designed specifically for localising acoustic sources. Each method is characterised in terms of its computational complexity as well as the average localisation error. The techniques’ responses to acoustic noise are also considered, and they are found to be robust. A further contribution is made by using multi-optima swarm techniques to localise multiple simultaneously active sources. This makes use of techniques which extend the single-source particle swarm techniques to finding multiple optima of the acoustic objective function. Several techniques are investigated and their performance in terms of localisation accuracy and computational complexity is characterised. Consideration is also given to how these metrics change when an increasing number of active speakers are to be localised. Finally, the application of the multi-optima localisation methods as an input to a multi-target tracking system is presented. Tracking multiple speakers is a more complex task than tracking single acoustic source, as observations of audio activity must be associated in some way with distinct speakers. The tracker used is known to be a relatively efficient technique, and the nature of the multi-optima output format is modified to allow the application of this technique to the task of speaker tracking.

The ability to precisely determine one's location in within the world (localisation) is a key requirement for any robot wishing to navigate through the world. For long-term operation, such a localisation system must be robust to changes in the environment, both short term (eg. traffic, weather) and long term (eg. seasons). This thesis presents two methods for performing such localisation using cameras - small, cheap, lightweight sensors that are universally available. Whilst many image-based localisation systems have been proposed in the past, they generally rely on either feature matching, which fails under many degradations such as motion blur, or on photometric consistency, which fails under changing illumination. The methods we propose here directly align images with a dense prior map. The first method uses maps synthesised from a combination of LIDAR scanners to generate geometry and cameras to generate appearance, whilst the second uses vision for both mapping and localisation. Both make use of an information-theoretic metric, Normalised Information Distance (NID), for image alignment, relaxing the appearance constancy assumption inherent in photometric methods. Our methods require significant computational resources, but through the use of commodity GPUs, we are able to run them at a rate of 8-10Hz. Our GPU implementations make use of low level OpenGL, enabling compatibility across almost any GPU hardware. We also present a method for calibrating multi-sensor systems, enabling the joint use of cameras and LIDAR for mapping. Through experiments on both synthetic data and real-world data from over 100km of driving outdoors, we demonstrate the robustness of our localisation system to large variations in appearance. Comparisons with state-of-the-art feature-based and direct methods show that ours is significantly more robust, whilst maintaining similar precision.

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The greatest task of many international marketing practitioners in host organisations, entails understanding the factors that influence the localisation or standardisation of marketing programmes. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the role of local context in the local strategies of global brands. This paper uses a qualitative case study design of two global brands.Findings – The findings show that the role that emerging macro-level factors of local context play in the local strategies of global brands is in determining the levels at which marketing programs will be standardised or localised.Micro-level factors of local context play the role of a) setting the preconditions for product development and b) determining the extant of productivity that can be achieved in the local contextThe strategic implications that must be considered at the local level when applying a global brand include brand identity standards as well as making specific choices about global or local consumer culture positioning.Practical implications- For practitioners, the practical implications encompass strategic considerations in the course of making decisions to standardise or localise marketing programs.Originality/value – This paper highlights new variations in contextual factors within-countries. It also provides an international perspective that is rooted in local context regarding global marketing intermediaries. Lastly, it explores the strategic implications considered when applying a global brand. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

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