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Cílem této diplomové práce bylo nastudovat problematiku klasifikačních systémů v nemocnicích, které sledují především hospodářské požadavky hospitalizace. Následně bylo navrženo a naprogramováno webové rozhraní v prostředí Caché Server Pages (CSP), které poskytuje přístup k databázi CLINICOM. Pomocí webového rozhraní, je možno provádět klasifikaci pacientů do tříd MDC (Major Diagnostic Category), archivaci dat, výpočet DRG a další vybrané úkony. Webovou aplikaci by mohli využívat technicko-hospodářští pracovníci nemocnic a klinik jako jednoduchou pomůcku při své práci, respektive jako učební pomůcka biomedicínských oborů pří výuce zdravotnických informačních a klasifikačních systémů.

In this dissertation, I focus on source coding techniques as well as channel coding techniques. I addressed the challenges in WSN by developing (1) a new source coding strategy for erasure channels that has better distortion performance compared to MDC; (2) a new cooperative channel coding strategy for multiple access channels that has better channel outage performances compared to MIMO; (3) a new source-channel cooperation strategy to accomplish source-to-fusion center communication that reduces system distortion and improves outage performance. First, I draw a parallel between the 2x2 MDC scheme and the Alamouti's space time block coding (STBC) scheme and observe the commonality in their mathematical models. This commonality allows us to observe the duality between the two diversity techniques. Making use of this duality, I develop an MDC scheme with pairwise complex correlating transform. Theoretically, I show that MDC scheme results in: 1) complete elimination of the estimation error when only one descriptor is received; 2) greater efficiency in recovering the stronger descriptor (with larger variance) from the weaker descriptor; and 3) improved performance in terms of minimized distortion as the quantization error gets reduced. Experiments are also performed on real images to demonstrate these benefits. Second, I present a two-phase cooperative communication strategy and an optimal power allocation strategy to transmit sensor observations to a fusion center in a large-scale sensor network. Outage probability is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. Simulation results demonstrate that: 1) when signal-to-noise ratio is low, the performance of the proposed system is better than that of the MIMO system over uncorrelated slow fading Rayleigh channels; 2) given the transmission rate and the total transmission SNR, there exists an optimal power allocation that minimizes the outage probability; 3) on correlated slow fading Rayleigh channels, channel correlation will degrade the system performance in linear proportion to the correlation level. Third, I combine the statistical ranking of sensor observations with cooperative communication strategy in a cluster-based wireless sensor network. This strategy involves two steps: 1) ranking the sensor observations based on their test statistics; 2) building a two-phase cooperative communication model with an optimal power allocation strategy. The result is an optimal system performance that considers both sources and channels. I optimize the proposed model through analyses of the system distortion, and show that the cooperating nodes achieve maximum channel capacity. I also simulate the system distortion and outage to show the benefits of the proposed strategies.

Thesis advisor: Ana Maria Martinez Aleman / Higher education has experienced an unprecedented growth in the number of Latino/Hispanic students. Unfortunately as the literature has revealed, many institutions have not had success in serving this population. By all accounts Hispanics are the youngest and fastest growing population in the United States enrolling in college. However, they have the lowest educational attainment levels in the nation. New population growth is beginning to sprawl into geographic areas unfamiliar with serving this minority population. In just a few short years demographic changes are forecast to forever impact the landscape of colleges across the country: Hispanic-serving institutions will be at the forefront of American higher education. At present, colleges are not sufficiently prepared to meet the needs of its future students. The purpose of this case study was to provide a detailed analysis of a single case, Miami Dade College West Campus. Through an information-rich case study, this researcher set out to examine how Miami Dade College West Campus could serve as a new model for effective Hispanic-serving institutions. Sources of evidence used for the analysis included interviews with members of the dominant coalition involved in planning the campus and document analysis with a particular focus on the strategic planning process. The findings of the case study identified certain themes as central to Miami Dade College West Campus’s effectiveness in serving Hispanic students. First, findings indicated a predominant student-centered institutional culture. Second, the campus developed a strong campus-community interdependence that mutually supported growth and success. Findings also suggested a comprehensive approach to racial and ethnic diversity across campus. Finally, as is supported in the literature, institutional leadership was an integral component of the institution’s ability to effectively educate Latino students. The implications of this research can provide guidance and support to institutions as national demographic shifts will demand the need for quality, focused information on Hispanic-serving institutions. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Administration and Higher Education.

After a diagnosis of cancer, timely access to oncology care is a priority. For patients living in a rural community, there are many challenges such as proximity to cancer care, reduced access to state-of-the art therapies, lack of coordinated care, and limited access to clinical trials. A multidisciplinary consultation (MDC) via telehealth can improve access to care for rural oncology patients. The purpose of this project was to determine the effects of telehealth MDC on the time in days from diagnosis to the first treatment with the goal of persuading the project site to implement a telehealth MDC. The data involved a comparison of 2 rural locations, 1 with telehealth MDC and 1 without. Data from 36 oncology patients were compared using time in days from the initial diagnosis to the first oncology treatment. The patients who received the initial consultation with telehealth MDC had an average timeframe of 19 days from diagnoses to first treatment, whereas those without telehealth MDC had an average of 51 days, meaning there was a statistically significant difference (z = -5.811, p < .0001). The data will be presented to leadership at the project site to provide the rationale to implement telehealth MDC. This project can lead to a positive social change for rural oncology patients by encouraging telehealth MDC, which may address the several identified barriers that affect access for oncology patients by improving access to clinical trials, coordination of care, and nursing education to rural community patients at the project site.

The Internet has rapidly evolved from being a scientific experiment to a commercial network connecting millions of hosts that carries traffic generated by a large amount of applications with diverse requirements. Its architecture was however designed to enable efficient point-to-point delivery of bulk data, and can not provide statistical guarantees on the timely delivery of delay sensitive data such as streaming and real-time multimedia. Thus, applications that require low loss probabilities in today's Internet have to use some end-to-end error recovery mechanism. For delay sensitive applications the introduced latency by the applied schemes has to be low as well. Traffic control functions such as delay limited shaping and forward error correction (FEC), and multiple description coding (MDC) have been proposed for variable bitrate video. Their major drawback is, however, that it is difficult to predict their efficiency, as it depends on many factors like the characteristics of the stream itself, the characteristics of the traffic in the network and the network parameters. Consequently, it is difficult to decide which control mechanisms to employ, how to combine them and to choose the right parameters (e.g. block length, code rate) for optimal performance. In this thesis we present results on the efficiency of traffic control functions and MDC for video transmission based on mathematical models and simulations. We investigate the efficiency of delay limited traffic shaping and the trade-offs in the joint use of traffic shaping and forward error correction. We identify the packet size distribution of the traffic in the network as an additional factor that may influence the efficiency of FEC, and present a thorough analysis of its possible effects. We present an analytical comparison of MDC versus media-dependent FEC and media-independent FEC, and based on the results we conclude that MDC is a promising error control solution for multimedia communications with very strict delay bounds in an environment with bursty losses. We combine the analytical results with traces from measurements performed on the Internet to evaluate how efficient these error control schemes are under real loss patterns. We compare the efficiency of MDC and media-dependent FEC in the presence of channel estimation errors; we propose a new rate allocation method, which is robust to mis-estimations of the channel state and which improves error resilience on non-stationary channels. Finally we present an analytical model of the performance of an end-point-based multimedia streaming architecture based on multiple distribution trees and forward error correction, and analyze the behavior of the architecture for a large number of nodes. / QC 20101115

<p>The Internet has rapidly evolved from being a scientific experiment to a commercial network connecting millions of hosts that carries traffic generated by a large amount of applications with diverse requirements. Its architecture was however designed to enable efficient point-to-point delivery of bulk data, and can not provide statistical guarantees on the timely delivery of delay sensitive data such as streaming and real-time multimedia. Thus, applications that require low loss probabilities in today's Internet have to use some end-to-end error recovery mechanism. For delay sensitive applications the introduced latency by the applied schemes has to be low as well. Traffic control functions such as delay limited shaping and forward error correction (FEC), and multiple description coding (MDC) have been proposed for variable bitrate video. Their major drawback is, however, that it is difficult to predict their efficiency, as it depends on many factors like the characteristics of the stream itself, the characteristics of the traffic in the network and the network parameters. Consequently, it is difficult to decide which control mechanisms to employ, how to combine them and to choose the right parameters (e.g. block length, code rate) for optimal performance.</p><p>In this thesis we present results on the efficiency of traffic control functions and MDC for video transmission based on mathematical models and simulations. We investigate the efficiency of delay limited traffic shaping and the trade-offs in the joint use of traffic shaping and forward error correction. We identify the packet size distribution of the traffic in the network as an additional factor that may influence the efficiency of FEC, and present a thorough analysis of its possible effects. We present an analytical comparison of MDC versus media-dependent FEC and media-independent FEC, and based on the results we conclude that MDC is a promising error control solution for multimedia communications with very strict delay bounds in an environment with bursty losses. We combine the analytical results with traces from measurements performed on the Internet to evaluate how efficient these error control schemes are under real loss patterns. We compare the efficiency of MDC and media-dependent FEC in the presence of channel estimation errors; we propose a new rate allocation method, which is robust to mis-estimations of the channel state and which improves error resilience on non-stationary channels. Finally we present an analytical model of the performance of an end-point-based multimedia streaming architecture based on multiple distribution trees and forward error correction, and analyze the behavior of the architecture for a large number of nodes.</p>

Submitted by Emanuel Varela Cardoso (emanuel.varela@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-11-09T17:51:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 ALECIO SOARES SILVA – DISSERTAÇÃO (PPGMat) 2014.pdf: 873139 bytes, checksum: 9a35db2563d66eb36f4dabfe6e5cd45e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-09T17:51:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ALECIO SOARES SILVA – DISSERTAÇÃO (PPGMat) 2014.pdf: 873139 bytes, checksum: 9a35db2563d66eb36f4dabfe6e5cd45e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08 / Capes / Neste trabalho consideramos o uso de algoritmo de Euclides com o intuito de aplicá-lo de uma forma interdisciplinar. Para atingir este objetivo construimos o conjunto dos números naturais, com base nos quatro axiomas de Peano e o conjunto dos inteiros por uma relação de equivalência específica. Além disto, fizemos um estudo de algumas propriedades aritméticas dos números inteiros, bem como do magnífico algoritmo de Euclides. Em seguida utilizamos este algoritmo como uma ferramenta para calcular o maximo divisor comum (MDC) de números inteiros e a partir do MDC estudamos a resolução de equações lineares diofantinas, as quais foram empregadas para fazer o balanceamento de Reações Quimicas. / In this work we consider the use of the Euclid’s algorithm in order to apply it in an interdisciplinary way. To achieve this we constructed the set of the natural numbers based on the four Peano axioms and the set of integers by a specific equivalence relation. Moreover, we have studied some arithmetic properties of integers, as well as the magnificent Euclidean algorithm. We then use this algorithm as a tool to calculate the Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) of integers and from this study the resolution of Diophantine linear equations, which were employed to do the balance of Chemical Reactions.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / This study examines the challenges of coordination in Zimbabwe’s power sharing government (2009 to 2013) between ZANU PF and the two MDC formations in the implementation of policies that cross ministerial jurisdictions under ministers from different political parties. The analysis was done through the theoretical lens of Shepsle and Laver (1996) that a cabinet minister as the political head of a major government department have the formal discretion of any policy issues under his jurisdiction and uses his or her own power to influence the substance of any specific proposals that matters within his or her own jurisdiction. I empirically examined the restructuring of the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company and the Green Fuel Project where the outcome of the projects required joint working between ministries controlled by different political parties. Green Fuel is a large scale ethanol producing factory constructed at a cost of US$600 million as a partnership between the Ministry of Agriculture and a private investor, but for the blended fuel to be consumed as an end product needed collaboration from the Ministry of Power and Energy Development to put out legislation enforcing mandatory blending. The Minister of Energy and Power Development ruled out mandatory blending of petrol and ethanol that left the US$600 million Green Fuels ethanol projector ground its operations and imperilled 5000 direct jobs the company had created arguing that the government does not make public policy for individuals and that the project was started without the consultation of the MDC. He also argued that the bio ethanol project affected communities in various ways including dispossession of their land, the slashing of their crops, killing of their cattle and the dispossession from their land. The restructuring of ZISCO entailed the partial sale of the government owned entity spearheaded by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. It went through a bidding process and 54% of shares were transferred from the state to EAHL and it was renamed New Zim Steel at a ceremony presided over by the head of state. Critical to ZISCO resuming operations was the transfer of mineral rights and the Minister of Mines Obert Mpofu refused to do so arguing that he did not know about the ZISCO deal, was excluded from the negotiation process of the agreement deal despite that the agreement was concluded by cabinet. In both instances, policies that emanated from a ministry controlled by a minister of another political party did not achieve their horizontal objectives.

Actuellement les communications véhiculaires sont devenues une réalité guidée par diverses applications. Notamment, la diffusion de vidéo de qualité élevée avec des contraintes de faible latence requises par les applications temps réel. Grâce au niveau de compression jamais atteint auparavant, l’encodeur H.265/HEVC est très prometteur pour la diffusion de vidéos en temps réel dans les réseaux ad hoc véhiculaire (VANET). Néanmoins, la qualité de la vidéo reçue est pénalisée par les mauvaises caractéristiques du canal de transmission (disponibilité, non stationnarité, rapport signal à bruit, etc.). Afin d’améliorer et d’assurer une qualité vidéo minimale à la réception nous proposons dans ce travail une optimisation conjointe source-canal-protocole de la transmission en tenant compte à la fois des paramètres de transmission et d’encodage vidéo. Dans un premier temps, nous montrons l’intérêt et le gain apporté par les solutions dites inter-couches « cross-layer ». Par la suite, nous développons deux approches l’une exploitant un « cross-layer » entre la couche application et la couche MAC et une seconde exploitant les protocoles de transports dans l’adaptation du flux vidéo. En ce qui concerne la première approche nous proposons une solution utilisant une gestion hiérarchique des trames au niveau des files d’attentes de la couche MAC, basée sur l’importance des images du flux vidéo. Dans une seconde solution, nous retenons le codage par descriptions multiples comme solution de protection à la source. Les résultats de simulations obtenus pour plusieurs types de scénarios véhiculaires réalistes montrent que les différents schémas de transmission véhiculaire proposés offrent des améliorations significatives en termes de qualité vidéo à la réception et de retard de bout en bout par rapport aux schémas classiques. / At present, vehicular communications have become a reality guided by various applications. In particular, high-quality video delivery with low latency constraints is required for real-time applications. The new state-of-the-art high-effciency video coding (HEVC) standard is very promising for real-time video streaming in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). Nevertheless, these networks have variable channel quality and a limited bandwidth that penalizes the overall performances of end-to-end video transmission. In order to meet these constraints, we proposed in this work to consider both transmission and video encoding parameters through a joint source-channel-protocol coding approach to provide an improvement in video transmission. First, we have shown the interest and the gain brought by the "cross-layer" solutions. Then, we developed two approaches. The first one exploits a "crosslayer" solution between the application layer and the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer while the second exploits the transport layer protocols in the adaptation of the video stream. Regarding the first approach, we have proposed solutions to allocate the frames to the most appropriate Access Category (AC) queue on the MAC layer based on the image importance in the video stream. In another solution, we chose multiple descriptions source coding as an error resilient solution. Thus, the simluation results obtained for different realistic vehicular scenarios demonstrate that the proposed transmission schemes offer significant video quality improvements and end-to-end delay reduction compared to conventional transmission schemes.