Le document présente une synthèse de travaux sur le déploiement, l'utilisation et les techniques de mise en oeuvre d'applications développées selon un modèle de programmation à passage de messages sur des grilles de calcul. La première partie décrit les performances observées sur la période 2002-2006 sur une plateforme à l'échelle de la France, ainsi que les gains obtenus par équilibrage de charge. La deuxième partie décrit un intergiciel nouveau baptisé P2P-MPI qui synthétise un ensemble de propositions pour améliorer la prise en charge de tels programmes à passage de messages.

L'intégration récente des systèmes de communication numériques embarqués à bord des trains pour la gestion du trafic introduit de nouveaux problèmes de compatibilité électromagnétique dans le milieu ferroviaire, notamment, pour le système GSM-R « Global System for Mobile Communications - Railway» sur lequel se focalisent les travaux de la thèse. Ce système est un système numérique élaboré employant des protocoles de communication qui lui permettent de résister à certaines perturbations électromagnétiques. Ainsi, son immunité électromagnétique ne peut pas être étudiée selon les méthodes traditionnelles standardisées, puisqu'elles sont adaptées principalement à des systèmes analogiques. La thèse consiste à caractériser l'environnement EM ferroviaire d'une manière adaptée au contexte du système GSM-R. En effet, il faut préalablement connaitre les perturbations EM qu'il peut rencontrer à bord d'un train. Ainsi, nous avons exploité les méthodes fréquentielle et temporelle pour caractériser les perturbations EM que peut subir son signal utile sous des conditions normales d'opération. Les résultats obtenus ont montré que les perturbations EM transitoires qui apparaissent lors d'un mauvais contact entre la caténaire et le pantographe sont la source principale de perturbations EM pour le système GSM-R. Ainsi, nous avons étudié minutieusement leurs caractéristiques temporelles et d'amplitude à travers une étude statistique de chaque paramètre. Suite aux résultats obtenus, nous avons pu générer des signaux de test représentatifs de ce que peut voir le système GSM-R à bord d'un train avant d'exploiter ces signaux pour l'étude de l'immunité EM de ce système en laboratoire. Thèse encadrée à l'INRETS par DENIAU,V

<p>This research is investigated a relationship between life values and attitude towards advertising, which included life value appeals. A survey is used a self administrated questionnaire of a quantitative research method, which is asked about people’s life values based on Kahle scale of eight items and their attitudes about advertising posters are created ourselves. Sample was chosen from students and workers in Umea. University, offices and shopping mall techniques used to collect the data.</p><p> </p><p>Theoretical review has shown that the link between advertising appeals and consumer behavior factors’ life value and lifestyle being addressed before scholars, such as Belch, Polay, and Kahle so on. The review also included influencer factors and types of advertising appeals, and life values and lifestyle activities.</p><p> </p><p>This research’s empirical findings have established the correlation between ranking of eight life values and ranking of eight advertising posters with the values. In addition, the posters are compared by gender and lifestyles activities.  Our findings confirmed two out of three hypotheses. Confirmed first hypothesis is that consumer life value is reflected their choice of advertising posters with the value. Next, choice of the value and the poster is not different by gender. Unconfirmed hypothesis is lifestyle activities relative the choice of the posters.</p><p> </p><p>The research’s results have highlighted practical implications for advertisers and marketers, so that they can understand consumer behavior towards advertising. Especially in today’s world of booming advertisement industry, as such they are able to make more efficient their advertising, not to overdo nor underestimate its effects on customers.</p>

This paper presents a concurrent interpreter for a general-purpose concurrent logic programming language, Guarded Horn Clauses (GHC). Unlike typical implementations of GHC in logic programming languages, the interpreter is implemented in the Actor language Acore. The primary motivation for this work was to probe the strengths and weaknesses of Acore as a platform for developing sophisticated programs. The GHC interpreter provided a rich testbed for exploring Actor programming methodology. The interpreter is a pedagogical investigation of the mapping of GHC constructs onto the Actor model. Since we opted for simplicity over optimization, the interpreter is somewhat inefficient.

Fantasy sport participation is an online activity consuming the time, energy, and devotion of many sport followers. This activity provides participants a unique way to experience sport aside from simply viewing, listening, or following a sporting contest. Fantasy sport users present marketers and advertisers with a distinct type of sport fan, segmentation strategy, and target market. These users experience sport beyond wins, losses, and championships. They view statistics as fantasy points, individual players as products, and injury reports as team-altering news. These users see sport through a different lens. The purpose of this research is to gain familiarity with the fantasy sport user by developing an understanding of the motivations behind fantasy sport participation and examining factors associated with participation in fantasy sport; specifically involving media use, message board use, sport participation, overall satisfaction, and future intentions. Data was collected through the use of mixed methods consisting of qualitative online focus groups and quantitative questionnaires. The findings of the focus groups revealed four major themes associated with the participation and experience of fantasy sport. The themes were Competition, Socializing, Surveillance, and Ownership. These findings assisted in (1) validating past and current research, (2) developing and altering scale items for the quantitative questionnaire, and (3) providing deeper understanding of the fantasy sport experience. The major results of the quantitative questionnaire indicated top fantasy sport motivating factors as Fanship, Competition, and Social Sport with the lowest factors as Fan Expression, Ownership, and Escape. The factors with the highest significant relationship with overall satisfaction in the activity were Competition, Achievement, and Surveillance. The factors with the highest significant relationship with future intentions were Competition and Camaraderie. Other findings revealed no significant difference in motivations between different levels of sport participation and message board use. Message board use did, however, produce significant differences favoring higher overall satisfaction and future intentions for those using message boards. Other results examine (1) media use and fantasy sport participation and (2) Mavenism and Schwabism and its relationship to fantasy sport motivations, overall satisfaction, and future intentions.

The objective of this thesis is the development of cooperative localization and tracking algorithms using nonparametric message passing techniques. In contrast to the most well-known techniques, the goal is to estimate the posterior probability density function (PDF) of the position of each sensor. This problem can be solved using Bayesian approach, but it is intractable in general case. Nevertheless, the particle-based approximation (via nonparametric representation), and an appropriate factorization of the joint PDFs (using message passing methods), make Bayesian approach acceptable for inference in sensor networks. The well-known method for this problem, nonparametric belief propagation (NBP), can lead to inaccurate beliefs and possible non-convergence in loopy networks. Therefore, we propose four novel algorithms which alleviate these problems: nonparametric generalized belief propagation (NGBP) based on junction tree (NGBP-JT), NGBP based on pseudo-junction tree (NGBP-PJT), NBP based on spanning trees (NBP-ST), and uniformly-reweighted NBP (URW-NBP). We also extend NBP for cooperative localization in mobile networks. In contrast to the previous methods, we use an optional smoothing, provide a novel communication protocol, and increase the efficiency of the sampling techniques. Moreover, we propose novel algorithms for distributed tracking, in which the goal is to track the passive object which cannot locate itself. In particular, we develop distributed particle filtering (DPF) based on three asynchronous belief consensus (BC) algorithms: standard belief consensus (SBC), broadcast gossip (BG), and belief propagation (BP). Finally, the last part of this thesis includes the experimental analysis of some of the proposed algorithms, in which we found that the results based on real measurements are very similar with the results based on theoretical models.

This research is investigated a relationship between life values and attitude towards advertising, which included life value appeals. A survey is used a self administrated questionnaire of a quantitative research method, which is asked about people’s life values based on Kahle scale of eight items and their attitudes about advertising posters are created ourselves. Sample was chosen from students and workers in Umea. University, offices and shopping mall techniques used to collect the data.   Theoretical review has shown that the link between advertising appeals and consumer behavior factors’ life value and lifestyle being addressed before scholars, such as Belch, Polay, and Kahle so on. The review also included influencer factors and types of advertising appeals, and life values and lifestyle activities.   This research’s empirical findings have established the correlation between ranking of eight life values and ranking of eight advertising posters with the values. In addition, the posters are compared by gender and lifestyles activities.  Our findings confirmed two out of three hypotheses. Confirmed first hypothesis is that consumer life value is reflected their choice of advertising posters with the value. Next, choice of the value and the poster is not different by gender. Unconfirmed hypothesis is lifestyle activities relative the choice of the posters.   The research’s results have highlighted practical implications for advertisers and marketers, so that they can understand consumer behavior towards advertising. Especially in today’s world of booming advertisement industry, as such they are able to make more efficient their advertising, not to overdo nor underestimate its effects on customers.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of vehicle activated signs. Vehicle activated signs are being reportedly used in recent years to display dynamic information to road users on an individual basis in order to give a warning or inform about a specific event. Vehicle activated signs are triggered individually by vehicles when a certain criteria is met. An example of such criteria is to trigger a speed limit sign when the driver exceeds a pre-set threshold speed. The preset threshold is usually set to a constant value which is often equal, or relative, to the speed limit on a particular road segment. This review examines in detail the basis for the configuration of the existing sign types in previous studies and explores the relation between the configuration of the sign and their impact on driver behavior and sign efficiency. Most of previous studies showed that these signs have significant impact on driver behavior, traffic safety and traffic efficiency. In most cases the signs deployed have yielded reductions in mean speeds, in speed variation and in longer headways. However most experiments reported within the area were performed with the signs set to a certain static configuration within applicable conditions. Since some of the aforementioned factors are dynamic in nature, it is felt that the configurations of these signs were thus not carefully considered by previous researchers and there is no clear statement in the previous studies describing the relationship between the trigger value and its consequences under different conditions. Bearing in mind that different designs of vehicle activated signs can give a different impact under certain conditions of road, traffic and weather conditions the current work suggests that variable speed thresholds should be considered instead.

The decision to become an organ donor involves considering both self-relevant risks and the needs of others. This study applied prospect theory to examine how message frames that focus on the possible survival or death of a potential organ transplant recipient affect participants' willingness to become organ donors. Perceived personal risk and ambivalence were examined as moderating variables. Results indicate that risk, rather than ambivalence, played an instrumental role in participants' decisions to donate. Although no main effects or interactions related to message frame emerged in initial analyses, a supplemental analysis revealed a modest persuasive advantage for the loss-framed message among low-risk participants. Additional analyses revealed that for low-risk participants, perceived benefits of organ donation were higher for the loss frame than the gain frame, whereas the opposite pattern was found for high-risk participants. Findings suggest that decisions about organ donation may be associated with unique responses to message frames.

Ces dernières années, la virtualisation a connu un important regain d'intérêt dans les centres de traitement de données. Elle séduit par la grande flexibilité qu'elle apporte, par ses propriétés d'isolation et de tolérance aux pannes ainsi que par sa capacité à tirer partie des processeurs multicoeurs. Toutes ces caractéristiques en font une solution intéressante pour répondre aux problèmes liés aux évolutions matérielles des grappes de calcul. Cependant, la virtualisation est encore peu mise en oeuvre dans ce cadre, notamment car son impact sur les performances des applications parallèles est considéré comme prohibitif. Pour pallier ce problème, nous avons conçu un périphérique virtuel de communication permettant l'exécution efficace d'applications parallèles dans une grappe de machines virtuelles. Nous proposons en outre un ensemble de techniques permettant de faciliter le déploiement d'applications virtualisées. Ces fonctionnalités ont été regroupées au sein d'un support exécutif permettant de bénéficier des avantages de la virtualisation de la manière la plus transparente possible pour l'utilisateur, et ce en minimisant l'impact sur les performances.