Masivní vývoj Internetu vedl ke zvýšeným požadavkům na spolehlivou síťovou infrastrukturu. Efektivita komunikace v síti závisí na schopnosti směrovačů určit nejlepší cestu pro odesílání a přeposílání paketů ke koncovému zařízení. Jelikož OSPF v současné době představuje jeden z nejpoužívanějších směrovacích protokolů, jakýkoli přínos, který by pomohl udržet krok s rychle se měnícím prostředí Internetu, je velmi vítán. Významným omezením OSPF protokolu je, mimo jiné, absence informovanosti algoritmu pro výpočet metriky o aktuálním vytížení linky. Tato vlastnost představuje tzv. slabé místo, což má negativní vliv na výkonnost sítě. Z tohoto důvodu byla navržena nová metoda založená na dynamické adaptaci měnících se síťových podmínek a alternativní strategii OSPF metrik. Navržená metoda řeší problém neinformovanosti OSPF metriky o síťovém provozu a nevhodně vytížených linek, které snižují výkonnost sítě. Práce rovněž přináší praktickou realizaci, kdy vlastnosti nové metody jsou testovány a ověřeny spuštěním testů algoritmu v reálných zařízeních.

Physical education (PE) for pupils with special educational needs (SEN) is an important contemporary issue for primary teachers and other practitioners. In particular, how they are to include pupils with SEN in their classroom activity is a processing concern. This study is concerned essentially with how policy influences the ability of teachers to deal with SEN' pupils in PE. It explores the relationships between education policy on SEN and its implementation within PE when SEN pupils are placed in mainstream school settings. The main aims of this thesis are to explore how 'equality' and 'inclusion' are expressed in legislation, for example the National Curriculum in England and the Grade 1- 9 Curriculum Guidelines in Taiwan, and how teachers, local education authority (LEA) Advisors, pupils with physical disability and their parents interpret policy and engage in practice for SEN. The findings of the study are intended to provide guidance on education policy needed to promote 'inclusion' and connect SEN policy and its implementation within PE. This thesis develops and utilizes a theoretical model to illustrate the 'flow' of policy from government to schools. This framework has followed Bernstein's (1990) assertion that knowledge is produced and reproduced at different sites of practice and that 'discourses' are recontextualized in each. Qualitative research methods were used to explore these relationships. The research fields were located in the Midlands in England and in the North of Taiwan and investigate LEAs and primary schools. The research employed interviews, documentary analysis and observation to explore policy and its implementation for SEN pupils from not only a 'macro' but also a 'micro' perspective. Accordingly, this thesis has explored the relationships between teachers, the learning support assistants (LSA), pupils with physical disability and their activities in PE classrooms in order to throw light on processes of inclusion within PE and the difficulties associated with policy implementation for pupils with physical disability. The findings suggest that the implementation of SEN policy within PE was driven by ideals of inclusion and attempted to achieve equality. However, SEN policy and its implementation was rendered difficult by the production and reproduction of particular understandings of inclusion, and inadequate provision (training and resource) for teachers to deal with SEN pupils in PE. Compared with teachers in England, PE teachers in Taiwan seemed to be more 'able' to include SEN pupils in PE as they were less regulated by National Curriculum texts.

Déterminant d’un vieillissement actif et en santé, la mobilité permet aux aînés de maintenir et de développer des liens sociaux significatifs, et de demeurer intégrés dans leur communauté. Malgré ces bienfaits, les interventions offertes aux aînés visant à favoriser leurs déplacements restent rares et discontinues. Un accompagnement-citoyen personnalisé d’intégration communautaire (APIC) pourrait favoriser les déplacements et améliorer la perception des lieux des aînés en perte d’autonomie. Cette étude visait à : 1) vérifier les effets de l’APIC sur les déplacements et l’espace perçu des aînés en perte d’autonomie et 2) identifier les facilitateurs et les obstacles à l’utilisation de l’espace dans l’APIC. Un devis mixte incluant un dispositif pré-expérimental a été utilisé auprès de 16 participants (11 femmes) âgés entre 66 et 91 ans. Les déplacements ont été mesurés à l’aide du Life Space Assessment. Un entretien individuel semi-structuré d’environ 30 minutes a été réalisé 2 à 4 semaines après la fin de l’intervention. À la suite de l’APIC, les déplacements des participants se sont améliorés (p < 0,01). Selon les participants âgés, l’APIC constitue un facilitateur important qui a permis de découvrir des lieux de participation et d’améliorer leur capacité à se déplacer seul. L’APIC est une intervention prometteuse qui permet d’améliorer les déplacements et l’utilisation de l’espace d’aînés en perte d’autonomie.

The use of ERP in organisations is very popular and many companies have embraced this paradigm without really questioning why. Problems therefore often arise and cause high costs which is a result of poor planning. The paradigm also has its origin in the traditional architectural design that creates a system that has difficulties to adapt to organizations that are constantly evolving. The purpose of this study is to provide a different view of how IT-systems can operate within an organization and show how standard systems can be structured. We emanated from a case study at Linköping University Library, where we studied the implementation and integration of a standard system called Symphony. This lead to a prototype model of a system architecture called LSA (Loose coupled Architecture Service). The results of this study show the benefits of a detailed project plan for an implementation process. It also shows there are new system architectures available instead of the old traditional ones. The criticism towards the innovative object-oriented architecture models evolved in early 2000, have been proved wrong as we demonstrate in this study.

This thesis is focused on conceptual design of electric powered training aircraft, using certification guidelines CS-LSA. Designing process of geometrical and aerodynamic characteristics is primary based on statistics of certificated aircrafts in this particular category. The following calculation of performance stabilities and flight performances is based on knowledge of aerodynamic polar. The calculation of the polar is also part of this thesis. The last part of the thesis consists of construction design of the front part of fuselage and engine static structural analysis of engine mounts.

The research investigated whether a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)-based approach to image retrieval can map pixel intensity into a smaller concept space with good accuracy and reasonable computational cost. From a large set of computed tomography (CT) images, a retrieval query found all images for a particular patient based on semantic similarity. The effectiveness of the LSA retrieval was evaluated based on precision, recall, and F-score. This work extended the application of LSA to high-resolution CT radiology images. The images were chosen for their unique characteristics and their importance in medicine. Because CT images are intensity-only, they carry less information than color images. They typically have greater noise, higher intensity, greater contrast, and fewer colors than a raw RGB image. The study targeted level of intensity for image features extraction. The focus of this work was a formal evaluation of the LSA method in the context of large number of high-resolution radiology images. The study reported on preprocessing and retrieval time and discussed how reduction of the feature set size affected the results. LSA is an information retrieval technique that is based on the vector-space model. It works by reducing the dimensionality of the vector space, bringing similar terms and documents closer together. Matlab software was used to report on retrieval and preprocessing time. In determining the minimum size of concept space, it was found that the best combination of precision, recall, and F-score was achieved with 250 concepts (k = 250). This research reported precision of 100% on 100% of the queries and recall close to 90% on 100% of the queries with k=250. Selecting a higher number of concepts did not improve recall and resulted in significantly increased computational cost.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / William H. Hsu / In this work, we focus on the task of clustering businesses in the state of Kansas based on the content of their websites and their business listing information. Our goal is to cluster the businesses and overcome the challenges facing current approaches such as: data noise, low number of clustered businesses, and lack of evaluation approach. We propose an LSA-based approach to analyze the businesses’ data and cluster those businesses by using Bisecting K-Means algorithm. In this approach, we analyze the businesses’ data by using LSA and produce businesses’ representations in a reduced space. We then use the businesses’ representations to cluster the businesses by applying the Bisecting K-Means algorithm. We also apply an existing LDA-based approach to cluster the businesses and compare the results with our proposed LSA-based approach at the end. In this work, we evaluate the results by using a human-expert-based evaluation procedure. At the end, we visualize the clusters produced in this work by using Google Earth and Tableau. According to our evaluation procedure, the LDA-based approach performed slightly bet- ter then the LSA-based approach. However, with the LDA-based approach, there were some limitations which are: low number of clustered businesses, and not being able to produce a hierarchical tree for the clusters. With the LSA-based approach, we were able to cluster all the businesses and produce a hierarchical tree for the clusters.

O processo de tomada de decisão, em diferentes ambientes gerenciais, enfrenta um momento de mudança no contexto organizacional. Nesse sentido, Business Analytics pode ser visto como uma área que permite alavancar o valor dos dados, contendo ferramentas importantes para o processo de tomada de decisão. No entanto, a presença de dados em diferentes formatos representa um desafio. Nesse contexto de variabilidade, os dados de texto têm atraído a atenção das organizações, já que milhares de pessoas se expressam diariamente neste formato, em muitas aplicações e ferramentas disponíveis. Embora diversas técnicas tenham sido desenvolvidas pela comunidade de ciência da computação, há amplo espaço para melhorar a utilização organizacional de tais dados de texto, especialmente quando se volta para o suporte à tomada de decisões. No entanto, apesar da importância e disponibilidade de dados em formato textual para apoiar decisões, seu uso não é comum devido à dificuldade de análise e interpretação que o volume e o formato de dados em texto apresentam. Assim, o objetivo desta tese é desenvolver e avaliar um framework voltado ao uso de dados de texto em processos decisórios, apoiando-se em diversas técnicas de processamento de linguagem natural (PNL). Os resultados apresentam a validade do framework, usando como instância de demonstração de sua aplicabilidade o setor de turismo através da plataforma TripAdvisor, bem como a validação interna de performance e a aceitação por parte dos gestores da área consultados. / The decision-making process, in different management environments, faces a moment of change in the organizational context. In this sense, Business Analytics can be seen as an area that leverages the value of data, containing important tools for the decision-making process. However, the presence of data in different formats poses a challenge. In this context of variability, text data has attracted the attention of organizations, as thousands of people express themselves daily in this format in many applications and tools available. Although several techniques have been developed by the computer science community, there is ample scope to improve the organizational use of such text data, especially when it comes to decision-making support. However, despite the importance and availability of textual data to support decisions, its use is not common because of the analysis and interpretation challenge that the volume and the unstructured format of text data presents. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to develop and evaluate a framework to contribute with the expansion and development of text analytics in decision-making processes, based on several natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The results presents the validity of the framework, using as a demonstration of its applicability the tourism sector through the TripAdvisor platform, as well as the internal validation of performance and the acceptance by managers.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre général de l'étude de la production et de la compréhension du discours. Afin de comprendre un texte, le lecteur doit identifier correctement les relations entre les phrases et entre les segments. L'auteur peut faciliter l'identification de ces relations par différents dispositifs linguistiques. Parmi ceux-ci, nous avons choisi d'étudier les marqueurs qui signalent une continuité ou une rupture thématique. Deux types de marqueurs ont retenu notre attention : les anaphores possessives et les marqueurs temporels. D'une manière générale, le groupe "déterminant possessif + syntagme nominal" représente deux entités : un possesseur (par le biais du déterminant) et un possédé (le syntagme nominal). Un des objectifs de cette thèse est d'étudier l'impact de cette propriété de l'anaphore possessive sur les processus cognitifs à l'œuvre lors de la production et de la compréhension du discours. Spécifiquement, nous avons testé l'impact de cette propriété sur l'accessibilité du possesseur et son éventuel effet structurateur du discours. Après une analyse théorique de ces concepts, des expériences de production libres ou sous contraintes, ainsi que des expériences où les participants devaient faire des choix d'anaphores ou de suites adéquates ont été menées. La deuxième partie est consacrée aux analyses de corpus. Nous étudions les dispositifs signalant la structure d'un texte, dont les anaphores possessives et les marqueurs temporels. Ces derniers jouent un rôle très important en production et en compréhension du discours. L'auteur les utilise pour mettre en évidence la structure de son texte. L'étude de ce type de marqueurs nous a permis de développer des outils pour l'analyse automatique de grands corpus de textes. Nous avons également étudié de manière simultanée plusieurs types de marques afin de comparer leur efficacité en tant que marqueurs de rupture thématique et d'analyser l'emploi cumulatif des adverbiaux temporels et de certaines expressions référentielles. Si les marqueurs temporels sont importants en langue maternelle, ils le sont encore plus lors de l'apprentissage et de la maîtrise d'une langue étrangère. C'est pourquoi nous avons réalisé une étude avec des apprenants du néerlandais qui fait l'objet de la troisième partie.

A comprehensive, transient three-dimensional model of a single-pass laser surface alloying process has been developed and used to examine the heat, momentum and species transport phenomena. A numerical study is performed in a co-ordinate system moving with the laser at a constant scanning speed. In this model a fixed grid enthalpy-porosity approach is used, which predicts the evolutionary pool development. In this model two extreme cases of alloying element and base metal combinations are considered based on their relative melting points. One extreme case is for an alloying element with its melting point much lower than that of the base metal. In this case the alloying element melts almost instantaneously. Hence it is assumed that the alloying element introduced on the melt pool surface is in the molten state. Thus, while solving the species conservation equation a species flux condition is used on the entire melt pool surface. This case is analysed for aluminium alloying element on iron base metal. The final species distribution in the melt pool as well as in the solidified alloy is predicted. The other extreme case is studied for an alloying element with its melting point relatively higher than that of the base metal. In this case all the alloying element particles on the melt pool surface will not melt. Only those particles which fall in the region on the melt pool surface where the local temperature is higher than the melting point of the alloying element will melt. The particles which fall away from this region are advected into the melt pool, due to a strong Marangoni convection on the melt pool surface. If a particle is advected into the inner region in the melt pool (where the temperature is higher than its melting point), it starts melting and thus the molten species mass gets distributed. Hence, the species flux condition at the entire surface of the melt pool is not valid. The particles are tracked in the melt pool by assuming the alloying particles to be spherical in shape and moving without any relative velocity with the surrounding fluid. Simultaneously, the temperature field inside the spherical particle is solved by assuming its surface temperature to be the local temperature in the melt pool. The amount of particle mass that fuses as it passes through a particular control volume is noted. The same procedure is repeated for a large number of particles initiated at various locations on the pool surface, and a statistical distribution of the species mass source in the entire pool is obtained. This species mass source distribution is then used to solve the species conservation equation. Nickel alloying element on aluminium base metal is used to illustrate this case. The numerical results obtained from the two cases are compared with the available experimental results. A qualitative matching is found between the numerical and experimental results.