L'engouement du grand public pour les objets communicants et l'évolution des technologies a entraîné le besoin de transférer des quantités grandissantes d'informations en un minimum de temps. L'arrivée de l'UWB à la fin des années 90 a apporté aux communications sans fil une solution à cette problématique. L'UWB permet en effet d'atteindre de très hauts débits de transmission sur de courtes distances dans des environnements intra-bâtiment. Parmi les solutions envisagées pour cette nouvelle couche physique très haut débit, le système MB-OFDM répond bien aux contraintes environnementales. L'objectif des travaux réalisés dans le cadre de cette thèse est d'étudier et de proposer une amélioration du système MB-OFDM.<br /><br />Après la présentation du système MB-OFDM et de ses performances, nous proposons une nouvelle forme d'onde pour l'UWB nommée LP-OFDM. Elle est obtenue en ajoutant au système MB-OFDM une fonction de précodage linéaire combinant avantageusement l'OFDM et la technique d'étalement de spectre. L'utilisation du précodage linéaire permet une meilleure exploitation de la diversité fréquentielle du canal. Il offre également une plus grande granularité dans le choix des débits, augmentant ainsi la flexibilité du système. Il est important de souligner que l'ajout de la fonction de précodage linéaire s'accompagne d'une augmentation minime de la complexité du système.<br /><br />Des techniques d'optimisation du système sont proposées. Afin de minimiser l'interférence entre les codes d'étalement, une technique reposant sur l'allocation des séquences d'étalement est décrite et un critère de sélection proposé. Nous avons également mis en évidence la nécessité de trouver un compromis entre le rendement de codage et la longueur des séquences d'étalement afin de tirer au mieux partie de la diversité du canal tout en limitant l'interférence entre les codes. Une amélioration notable des performances du système LP-OFDM est ainsi obtenue par rapport au système MB-OFDM. Le système LP-OFDM étendu au cas du MIMO utilisant un codage temps-espace d'Alamouti est également étudié. Les résultats obtenus montrent là encore une amélioration significative des performances permettant d'envisager une augmentation de la portée ou des débits de transmission.<br /><br />Enfin, l'impact d'un interférent à bande étroite de type WiMAX sur les performances du système LP-OFDM est étudié comparativement au système MB-OFDM. Il en ressort que le système LP-OFDM est plus robuste que le système MB-OFDM face à un brouilleur. L'utilisation du précodage linéaire permet en effet d'étaler la puissance du signal interférent en réception lors du déprécodage linéaire.

It is a major clinical problem that survival rates after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest have not markedly improved during the last decades, despite extensive research and the introduction of new interventions. However, recent studies have demonstrated promising treatments such as targeted temperature management (TTM) and methylene blue (MB). In our first study, we investigated the effect of MB administered during experi-mental cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the setting of postponed hypother-mia in piglets. We set out to study if MB could compensate for a delay to establish targeted TTM. The study demonstrated that MB more than compensated for 30 min delay in induction of TTM. The effect of MB added to that of TTM. The second study examined the effects of TTM and S-PBN on the endothelin system and nitric oxide synthases (NOS) after prolonged CA in a porcine CPR mod-el. The study was designed to understand the cardioprotective mechanism of S-PBN and TTM by their influence on the endothelin system and NOS regulation. We veri-fied for the first time, that these two cardioprotective postresuscitative interventions activate endothelin-1 and its receptors concomitantly with eNOS and nNOS in the myocardium. We concluded that nitric oxide and endothelin pathways are implicated in the postresuscitative cardioprotective effects of TTM. The third study compared survival and hemodynamic effects of low-dose amio-darone and vasopressin to vasopressin in a porcine hypovolemic CA model. The study was designed to evaluate whether resuscitation with amiodarone and vasopressin compared to vasopressin alone would have an impact on resuscitation success, survival, and hemodynamic parameters after hemorrhagic CA. We found that combined resuscitation with amiodarone and vasopressin after hemorrhagic circulatory arrest resulted in greater 3-hour survival, better preserved hemodynamic parameters and smaller myocardial injury compared to resuscitation with vasopressin only. In our fourth study we planned to compare hemodynamic parameters between the treatment group (milrinone, esmolol and vasopressin; MEV) and control group (vasopressin only) during resuscitation from prolonged cardiac arrest in piglets. The study was designed to demonstrate if MEV treatment improved hemodynamics or cardiac damage compared to controls. We demonstrated that MEV treatment reduced cardiac injury compared with vasopressin alone.

This paper examines different foreign policies of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) with regards to a peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula. The paper uses the theoretical framework of Social Constructivism to analyze what impact the different foreign policies of South Korea towards North Korea have had on their relations, thus providing an understanding of what impact those foreign policies have had on the peaceful reunification process of the Korean Peninsula. The paper will also look at the First Korean Nuclear Crisis, the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis, the ROKS Cheonan sinking and the shelling of Yeonpyeong, and with the help from the theoretical framework of Social Constructivism, analyze what impact those incidents have had on South Korea’s foreign policy and relations with North Korea, thus providing an understanding what impact those incidents have had on the peaceful reunification process of the Korean Peninsula.

Diese Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit der Evaluation von Sprachpolitiken mit Hilfe von Sprachdynamik Modellen. Da sprachliche Diversität ein zentrales Merkmal moderner Gesellschaften darstellt, müssen Staaten und Administrationen Sprachpolitiken sorgfältig gestalten und evaluieren. Mögliche Effekte, Nutzen und Kosten von Politiken müssen bewertet und gegeneinander abgewogen werden. Eine wichtige Eigenschaft von Sprachpolitiken ist dabei, dass sich die Anzahl derer, die von ihnen profitieren, sowie deren Kosten über die Zeit stark verändern können. Um dies zu berücksichtigen, präsentiert die Dissertation eine Kombination aus klassischen Politikanalyse Werkzeugen und neuen Sprachdynamik Modellen. Im Gegensatz zu bereits existierenden Modellen, können in den neu entwickelten Modellen Parameter aus empirischen Daten geschätzt werden. Dies ist eine Voraussetzung, um langfristige Effekte von Politiken realistisch abbilden zu können. Die Dissertation besteht aus vier eigenständigen Aufsätzen. Im ersten Aufsatz wird mit einem abstrakten Modell gezeigt, dass es für einen Staat optimal sein kann die Minderheitensprache in Form von Bilingualität am Leben zu erhalten. In den folgenden beiden Aufsätzen werden realistischere Modelle entwickelt und damit zwei empirische Fälle analysiert. Im letzten Aufsatz werden Erweiterungen der vorherigen Modelle auf den Fall multipler Minderheitensprachen vorgestellt. / This thesis deals with language policy evaluation from a language dynamics modeling perspective. As linguistic diversity is an essential feature of most modern societies, states and administrations have to thoroughly design and analyze language policies. Potential effects, benefits and costs have to be assessed and weighted against one another. A pivotal characteristic of language policies is that the numbers of their beneficiaries and costs can change dramatically over time. To account for these changes, the thesis proposes a combination of traditional policy evaluation techniques with well designed language dynamics models. In contrast to previous models in the literature, the thesis proposes and analyzes models based on parameters obtainable from empirical data. It is argued that this is a prerequisite to analyze the long term effects of policies in a realistic fashion. This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. In the first essay we show with the help of an abstract model that it can be optimal for the state to keep a minority language alive in the form of bilingualism. In the next two essays more realistic models are developed and applied to the empirical cases. In the last essay extensions of the previous models to the case of several minority languages are presented.

<p>With 2.1 million new cases, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), which is 15-20% of these breast cancer cases is clinically negative for expression of estrogen and progesterone receptors (ER/PR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) receptors<a>.</a> It is characterized by its unique molecular profile, aggressive behavior, distinct patterns of metastasis, and lack of targeted therapies. TNBCs utilize glycolysis for growth, proliferation, invasiveness, chemotherapeutic resistance and hence has poor therapeutic response. There is an urgent need for novel/alternate therapeutic strategies beyond current standard of treatment for this subset of high-risk patients. Electrical pulse-based chemotherapy, known as electrochemotherapy (ECT) could be a viable option for TNBC therapy. ECT involves the local application of precisely controlled electrical pulses to reversibly permeabilize the cell membrane for enhanced uptake. ECT can increase the cytotoxicity of the chemotherapeutics up-to 1000 times, facilitating a potent local cytotoxic effect. </p> <p>The high cost and severe side-effects of conventional chemotherapeutics motivate the application of effective natural compounds. Combining electrical pulses with natural compounds will enhance the treatment efficacy. This dissertation focuses on curcumin, the yellow pigment of natural herb turmeric, that has been used for over 5000 years for its excellent anticancer properties. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of curcumin for treating multiple cancers, including TNBC, with limited side effects. The potency of curcumin can be enhanced further by combining it with ECT to provide an attractive and cost-effective alternative for TNBC treatment. </p> <p>Towards this we studied the effect of ECT with curcumin on MDA-MB-231 cell line, a human adenocarcinoma epithelial TNBC cell line. We performed various assays, including cell viability, colony forming, cell cycle, apoptosis, H₂O₂ reactive oxygen species (ROS), immunoblotting, real time quantitative PCR (qPCR), and cellular metabolites detection to study the impact of ECT with curcumin on MDA-MB-231 cells. In addition, to better understand the underlying mechanisms, we used high throughput, label-free quantitative proteomics. While several studies have attempted to define the mechanism of action of curcumin on cancer cells, little is known on the action mechanism of the curcumin delivered with electrical pulses. This work unravels the molecular mechanism behind the enhanced effects observed under the ECT-based curcumin therapy in TNBC cells, employing a high-throughput, quantitative, label-free mass spectroscopy-based proteomics approach. The proteomics approach provides information on the thousands of cellular proteins involved in the cellular process, allowing a comprehensive understanding of the electro-curcumin-therapy mechanism. Similar studies were also performed for ECT with cisplatin to compare the efficacy of the electro-curcumin-therapy to the standard stand-alone cisplatin-based therapy.</p> <p>Our results revealed a switch in the metabolism from glycolysis to mitochondrial metabolic pathways. This metabolic switch caused an excessive production of H₂O₂ ROS to inflict apoptotic cell death in MDA-MB-231 cells, demonstrating the potency of this ECT based curcumin therapy. These results encourage further studies to extend the application of ECT for clinical practice.</p>

Substitutional dopants in III-V semi-conductors, such as Si atoms in GaAs, are of great interest for the applications in transistors, Schottky diodes, and doping super-lattices which have been widely employed to control the electrical properties of semi-conductors. Although Si doped GaAs systems have been intensively investigated theoretically and experimentally in the last several decades, some properties are still debated. In order to give a further explanation of Si doped GaAs systems, we systematically studied DX center in bulk GaAs and in GaAs(110), as well as the relative stabilities of different charged systems for Si atom replacing Ga atom at the substitutional site near GaAs(110) surface from first principles ground state method. We show that DX centre is a metastable state in bulk GaAs and completely unstable in the top few layers of GaAs(110). When Si atom replaces Ga atom at the surface, Charge states have an important influence on the stability of the system, and the additional charge is mainly concentrated on the Si atom for charged system. In addition, we studied the STM images of clean GaAs(110) and charged Si:GaAs(110) by employing Tersoff-Hamann approximation. The calculated STM images are in good agreement with experimental results. We show that at the positive bias voltage the positively charged Si atom presents a bright feature while the negatively charged Si atom shows a dark feature. In a semi-conductor, all bands are either completely full or completely empty. It is well known that DFT underestimates the band gaps of semi-conductors, a simple rigid shift can be used to correct the band energies of semi-conductors. Unlike semi-conductor, the fermi energies of metals lie in some bands. Furthermore, it turned out that some noble metals such as Cu and Ag depend on the considered band and k point , therefore, the so-called scissors operator can not be used for the metallic systems. The most successful approach within theoretical method for these metals is the many body perturbation theory. On the other hand, an interesting study for metals is quasi-particle excitations, which play an important role in a rich variety of physical and chemical phenomena such as energy transfer in photochemical reaction, desorption and oxidation of molecules at surfaces, spin transport within bulk metals, across interfaces, and at surfaces. One of the crucial properties of quasi-particle excitation is their lifetimes which determine the duration of these excitations. We carried out the calculations of quasi-particle band-structures and lifetimes for noble metals Cu and Ag within the GW approximation. For Cu, both the calculated positions of the d bands and the width of the d bands is within 0.1 eV compared to the experimental results. For Ag, partial core correction should be included in the pseudo-potential to get reliable positions of the d bands. The calculated lifetime agree with the experiment in the energy region away from the Fermi level, but deviates from the experimental results near the Fermi level where short range interactions which GW approach fails to describe play an important role. For a better description of the lifetime near the Fermi level, higher terms beyond the GW approximation in the many body perturbation theory need to be considered. In addition, the image potential state lifetimes in Cu(100) have been calculated using GW approximation based on the localized Gaussian basis set, and the calculated n=1, 2 imagepotential state lifetimes are in good agreement with experimental results.

I present and discuss the results of calculations ofelectronic structures of perfect and defective CaF2 and BaF2 crystals. These are based on the ab initio Hartree-Fock method with electron correlation corrections and ondensity-functional theory calculations with different exchange-correlation functionals, including hybrid exchange techniques.The defective systems include F centers, M centers, O-V dipoles, Hydrogen impurities and H centers.

The presented thesis includes investigations to fully characterize the electronic structure and magnetic properties ofselected manganese containing high-spin molecules by means of various X-ray spectroscopic, magnetic and theoretical methods. The investigations on the Mn4 star-shaped molecule havelead to a number of interesting results. Magneto-chemical studies exhibit very weak exchange coupling constantsbetween the four Mn(II) ions, leading to complicated low lying states in which the ground state is not well separated, resulting from a dominant weak ferromagnetic coupling and a giant moment of up to 20 µB/f.u. XMCD measurements revealed that almost the completemagnetic moment is located around the Mn(II) ions.This is in agreement with only a few charge transfer states foundwithin the detailed X-ray absorption spectroscopic study. The electronic structure and detailed magnetic properties of the star-shaped heteronuclear CrIIIMnII3 complex have been precisely investigated.With XPS the homovalency of Mn and Cr have been verified. The XA-spectra of the manganese and chromium L edges were measured and compared to earlier investigated Mn4 spectra.The combination high-magnetic field magnetic measurements and element selective XMCD of Mn and Cr L edges and quantum model calculations lead to a complete analysis of the magnetic structure of the CrMn3 magnetic core. The III valence state of the manganese ions in MnIII6O2Salox has been verified. From X-ray diffraction, typical Jahn-Teller distorted oxygen octahedra have been found for Mn(III) ions. Comparisons of XPS and XAS spectra of the complex to corresponding spectraof maganite and tetranuclear manganese(II) cluster it was definitely possible to identify MnIII6O2Salox as a pure Mn(III) compound.

The multiple constant multiplication (MCM) operation is a fundamental operation in digital signal processing (DSP) and digital image processing (DIP). Examples of the MCM are in finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, matrix multiplication, and transforms. The aim of this work is minimizing the complexity of the MCM operation using common subexpression elimination (CSE) technique and redundant number representations. The CSE technique searches and eliminates common digit patterns (subexpressions) among MCM coefficients. More common subexpressions can be found by representing the MCM coefficients using redundant number representations. A CSE algorithm is proposed that works on a type of redundant numbers called the zero-dominant set (ZDS). The ZDS is an extension over the representations of minimum number of non-zero digits called minimum Hamming weight (MHW). Using the ZDS improves CSE algorithms' performance as compared with using the MHW representations. The disadvantage of using the ZDS is it increases the possibility of overlapping patterns (digit collisions). In this case, one or more digits are shared between a number of patterns. Eliminating a pattern results in losing other patterns because of eliminating the common digits. A pattern preservation algorithm (PPA) is developed to resolve the overlapping patterns in the representations. A tree and graph encoders are proposed to generate a larger space of number representations. The algorithms generate redundant representations of a value for a given digit set, radix, and wordlength. The tree encoder is modified to search for common subexpressions simultaneously with generating of the representation tree. A complexity measure is proposed to compare between the subexpressions at each node. The algorithm terminates generating the rest of the representation tree when it finds subexpressions with maximum sharing. This reduces the search space while minimizes the hardware complexity. A combinatoric model of the MCM problem is proposed in this work. The model is obtained by enumerating all the possible solutions of the MCM that resemble a graph called the demand graph. Arc routing on this graph gives the solutions of the MCM problem. A similar arc routing is found in the capacitated arc routing such as the winter salting problem. Ant colony optimization (ACO) meta-heuristics is proposed to traverse the demand graph. The ACO is simulated on a PC using Python programming language. This is to verify the model correctness and the work of the ACO. A parallel simulation of the ACO is carried out on a multi-core super computer using C++ boost graph library.

Nowadays, small autonomous underwater robots are strongly preferred for remote exploration of unknown and unstructured environments. Such robots allow the exploration and monitoring of underwater environments where a long term underwater presence is required to cover a large area. Furthermore, reducing the robot size, embedding electrical board inside and reducing cost are some of the challenges designers of autonomous underwater robots are facing. As a key device for reliable operation-decision process of autonomous underwater robots, a relatively fast and cost effective controller based on Fuzzy logic and proportional-integral-derivative method is proposed in this thesis. It efficiently models nonlinear system behaviors largely present in robot operation and for which mathematical models are difficult to obtain. To evaluate its response, the fault finding test approach was applied and the response of each task of the robot depicted under different operating conditions. The robot performance while combining all control programs and including sensors was also investigated while the number of program codes and inputs were increased.