It is not always that easy to accurately interpret a parking signs The driver is expected to keep track of what every road sign, direction, prohibition, and amendment means, both by themselves and in combination with each others In addition, the driver must also keep track of the time, date, if there is a holiday, week number, etcs This can make the driver unsure of the rules, or interpret the rules incorrectly, which can lead to hefty fnes or even a towed vehicles By developing a mobile application that can analyze a photograph of a parking sign and quickly give the driver the verdict, the interpretation process can be made easys The purpose of this study has been to examine available technology within image and text analysis and then develop a prototype of an Android application that can interpret a photograph of a parking sign and quickly give the correct verdict, with the help of said technologys The constructed prototype will be evaluated partly by user tests to evaluate the application’s usability, and partly by functionality tests to evaluate the accuracy of the analysis processs Based on the results from the tests, a conclusion was drawn that the application gave a very informative and clear verdict, which was correct most of the time, but ran into problems with certain signs and under more demanding environmental circumstancess The tests also showed that the interface was perceived as easy to understand and use, though less interaction needed from the user was desireds There is a great potential for future development of ParCam, where the focus will be on increasing the automation of the processs / Att tolka en parkeringsskylt korrekt är inte alltid så  enkelt. Föraren förväntas ha koll på vad alla vägmärken, anvisningar, förbud, och tillägg betyder, både för sig själva och i kombination med varandra. Dessutom måste föraren även ha koll på  tid, datum, ev. helgdag, veckonummer m.m. Detta kan leda till att föraren blir osäker på vad som gäller eller tolkar reglerna felaktigt, vilket kan leda till dryga böter och även bortbogserat fordon. Genom att utveckla en mobilapplikation som kan analysera ett fotografi av en parkeringsskylt och snabbt ge svar kan denna tolkningsprocess underlättas för föraren. Syftet med denna studie har varit att utforska befintliga teknologier inom bild- och textanalys och därefter konstruera en prototyp av en Android-app som med hjälp av denna teknologi samt användarens mobilkamera kunna tolka fotografier av en parkeringsskylt och snabbt ge en korrekt utvärdering. Den konstruerade prototypen kommer att utvärderas dels genom användartester för att testa applikationens användbarhet och dels genom analys av utdata för att mäta analysens träffsäkerhet. Från testerna drogs slutsatsen att applikationen gav ett väldigt tydligt och informativt svar där analysen var korrekt de allra flesta gångerna, men stötte på problem med vissa skyltar och under svårare miljöförhållanden. Testerna visade också att gränssnittet upplevdes lätt att använda, men skulle helst kräva mindre inblandning från användaren. Det finns stor utvecklingspotential för ParCam, där fokus kommer att läggas på utökad automatisering av processen.

Research questions: What role do culture and legislation have when it comes to the message content of betting companies? Do the culture and legislation influence the companies to use either emotional or rational marketing? Do culture and legislation influence the companies to use either hard or soft-sell in marketing? Purpose: The intention of writing this paper is to give the reader a full concept on the market of betting/gambling and get an explanation of how the changes in communication can differ in the Swedish, British and American markets depending on legislation barriers and cultural diversity. We strive to build a more comprehensive explanation of how these factors influence Svenska Spel, Bet365, and MGM to use either an emotional or rational marketing strategy and a hard- or softselling approach when they construct a favorable message content. Method: This is a qualitative research study with an abductive approach. The information used in the study is thoroughly researched, and the laws and cultural norms that are investigated are relevant within the study’s framework. The literature study was carried out by collecting theory from credible scientific articles, public regulations, and a carefully worked out Hofstede model. Conclusion: The results of this study show that the culture heavily influences the actual message content of each company on the market as well as the laws and legislations. Evidence to support this claim is that the traits of emotional and rational marketing combined with either soft-sell or hard-sell reflect the cultural traits of both the consumers and the market as a whole.

Judicious modeling of an energy system can help provide insights as to how elements of the energy system might be configured in the longer term. The current and future electricity and water desalination systems of each GCC country were represented using a full-cost based optimization tool called MESSAGE and the following scenarios were examined: 1. The business as usual scenario (BAU): current energy system is extended into the future without any changes. The energy system structure and characteristics are kept the same. The fuel prices are also kept at the current subsidized levels. 2 - The netback-pricing scenario: all fuel costs are increased to the international market price. The freed amount of fuel is assumed to be available for export to the international market. Moreover, this scenario examines different carbon tax options of 0, 20,30 ,40 and 50 dollars per kilo tons of CO2 emissions. 3 - The Nuclear hub scenario: examines the idea of a “nuclear hub” state for the GCC region that can have all the “know-how” and logistics to provide sufficient nuclear energy for the GCC through the Interconnection Grid “GCCIG”. Results shows that fossil fuels will continue to play an important role in a least cost future for the region. This is due, in no small part, to the cheap natural gas resources in the GCC. Despite the high renewable energy technologies potential, their penetration – given the study assumptions - proved to be important, but limited in the GCC. On the other hand, nuclear energy shows clear economic potential.

Barrelfish operating system is an experimental instance of multikernel structure which exhibits good features such as hardware heterogeneity, scalability, dynamicity, etc. Barrelfish is in progress and lacks applications. Therefore, there is a need to investigate the efficiency of applications running in Barrelfish and one of candidates is a shared-memory application. To conduct an empirical study, Cilk is chosen inasmuch as its runtime library is designed for shared-memory architectures and it has been known to expose good performance. This thesis focuses on making Cilk run on top of Barrelfish in order to reach two goals: portability which is described to be supported by Barrelfish, and good speed afterwards. The porting involves compiling Cilk runtime source code by replacing its pthread subroutines with set of APIs in Barrelfish and then changing the way Cilk scheduler spawns worker thread on multiple cores. However, the main point of the porting is to make different cores access to the same virtual address space. Luckily, Barrelfish provides a notion of domain which specifies the number of cores in an application so that these cores can share the same memory space. This thesis also has carried out benchmarks on some Cilk programs and found that Cilk does not perform as well as it is expected. In addition measurements on parallel workers shows that Cilk on Barrelfish takes more cycles to perform computation. Although Cilk still maintains work-first principle, it cannot achieve the time bound. The spanning domain cost is proportional to the number of cores, but it will matter if applications take small time to complete.

Short Message Service (SMS) is a permanently available service on mobile phone networks. In addition to text messages, it supports binary messages to provide various services to mobile phones. SMS security has a strong relationship to the security of mobile phones. Due to the open functionality of mobile phone networks, SMS can be exposed to dierent kind of attacks. To cope with the increasing demand for secure SMS, it is crucial to perform a vulnerability analysis of SMS-implementations to nd out potential security vulnerabilities that smartphones may be exposed to. Conducting vulnerability analyses of SMS is dicult, as one would need to send a large amount of SMS through the mobile phone network in order to conduct such analyses. However, if the need for a mobile phone network is removed from the vulnerability analysis, the diculties of performing it can be considerably reduced. Collin Mulliner and Challie Miller (2009) presented a testing platform (without the engagement of a mobile phone network) for this purpose in three popular mobile phone operating systems: the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. They claimed that their testing platform could be ported to other smartphone operating systems (OS). Since the Symbian operating system is one of the most popular smartphone platforms, this thesis focuses on how to port this testing platform to the Symbian OS for vulnerability analysis of SMS-implementations. The research methodology behind this study was an experimental research method, conducted by presenting a hypothesis and developing an artifact to test it. This research produced a key finding: that it is not feasible to implement this vulnerability analysis for SMS-implementations on the Symbian OS, when considering the prerequisites that Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller dened in their work. They claimed that, if there is an application level access to the serial line for the modem or the ability to add or remove the arbitrary driver, then it is feasible to port their testing framework to other operating systems. This research discovers that neither of these conditions exists in the Symbian OS.

This report compares the characteristics of push/pull load balancing techniques usedin the context of a logging system. The logging system is expected to handle a largevolume of events. The load balancing techniques are evaluated with focus onthroughput during high load. The testing scenarios includes the use of a traditionalload balancer (push-based) and the use of messaging queues (pull-based and indirectlycontext aware) in its place. The ultimate goal of the report is to determine the feasibilityof using a messaging queue rather than a traditional load balancer in a distributedlogging system. Tests were conducted measuring the throughput of multiple setupswith different load balancers. The conclusion of this report is that both messagingqueues and load balancing are equally feasible in a logging context. / Rapporten jämför egenskaper hos lastbalanseringstekniker för användning i ettdistribuerat logghanteringssystem. Systemet förväntas hantera stora volymermeddelanden vid hög belastning. Testscenarion som utförs sker med traditionelllastbalansering där event trycks ut, samt med meddelandeköer som är hämtbaserade.Målet med rapporten är att avgöra om kontextbaserad lastbalansering kan ökastabiliteten i ett system avsett för hantering av loggdata. Testerna som utfördesuppmätte mängden data som gick igenom systemet vid en given tidpunkt, testernakördes med flera typer av lastbalanserare. Slutsatsen som dras är att bådemeddelandeköer och lastbalansering är passande för användning i ett loggsystem.

The world is now digitized with an increased use of different social media platforms and infinite new ways for marketers to engage consumers. With the increased use of online marketing and the tough competition in an online environment, a challenge for companies is to differentiate their brand and stand out. What type of message strategy and content that companies use in their marketing will affect the behavior of the consumers and can help them reach their target audience. The purpose of this study was to investigate how companies use different message strategies in their designing of content for social media to drive the most engagement from consumers. The research was made with a qualitative methodology with a deductive approach by gathering theories and conducting three semi-structured interviews which were then analyzed to help answer the research questions. The qualitative interviews showed the importance of using different strategies and adapting the content for social media to fit the target audience. The research indicates that it can be difficult to pin down one specific message strategy for companies to consistently follow over time, but instead need to focus on building customer relationships and the importance of interacting with customers since this can make them feel more engaged. / Världen är nu digitaliserad med en ökad användning av olika sociala medieplattformar och nya sätt för marknadsförare att engagera konsumenter. Den ökade användningen av marknadsföring online och den hårda konkurrensen medför en utmaning för företag att differentiera sitt varumärke och sticka ut. Vilka typer av strategier som företag använder i sin marknadsföring påverkar konsumentbeteende och kan hjälpa företagen att nå sin målgrupp. Syftet med den här studien var att undersöka hur företag använder olika strategier i sin utformning av innehåll för sociala medier för att driva konsumentengagemang. Forskningen genomfördes med en kvalitativ forskningsdesign med en deduktiv ansats genom att samla in teorier och genomföra tre semistrukturerade intervjuer. Datan analyserades sedan för att besvara forskningsfrågorna. De kvalitativa intervjuerna visade vikten av att använda olika strategier och anpassa innehållet för sociala medier för att passa målgruppen. Forskningen antyder att det kan vara svårt för företag att hålla fast vid en specifik strategi att konsekvent följa över tid, utan istället måste fokusera på att bygga kundrelationer och interagera med kunder eftersom detta kan främja engagemanget.

Health care providers face large costs in terms of operating rooms not being utilized due to patients (1) not canceling enough in advance to allow a different patient to be scheduled or (2) not being in a good enough condition to be operated on due to failure to follow preoperative instructions properly. This degree project aims to see if SMS text reminders can be used to lower the number of surgeries canceled in this manner. Patients of the surgical-, urological- and orthodontic clinics at a hospital in Stockholm were placed into one of three groups; (1) a group that did not receive a text message reminder, (2) a group that received a "short" reminder, (3) and a group that received a "long" reminder. A survey was also conducted to determine what the patients thought of the reminders and whether they believed it influenced them or not. The study suggests that reminders do not work as a method to decrease the short notice cancellation rate as it may not be a poor memory that causes the patient to cancel. Instead, anxiety might have a greater impact than expected. Further studies should be conducted in order to confirm this hypothesis. / Sjukvårdsgivare möts av stora kostnader då operationssalar inte används på grund av att patienter (1) inte avbokar i tid för att tillåta att en annan patient tar deras platser eller (2) inte är i tillräckligt bra tillstånd för att bli opererad på grund av ett misslyckande att följa de preoperativa instruktionerna ordentligt. Detta examensarbete har som mål att undersöka om SMS-påminnelser kan användas för att minska antalet operationer som avbokas på detta vis. Patienter från de kirurgiska-, urologiska och ortopediska klinikerna på ett sjukhus i Stockholm placerades i en av tre grupper; (1) en grupp som inte mottog SMS-påminnelser, (2) en grupp som mottog en ”kort påminnelse”, (3) och en grupp som mottog en ”lång” påminnelse. En enkätstudie utfördes för att kunna avgöra om patienter ansåg att påminnelserna påverkade dem eller inte. Studien antyder att påminnelser inte fungerar som ett sätt att minska antalet avbokningar med kort varsel eftersom det avbokningar eventuellt inte beror på minnet. Istället är det möjligt att ångest har en större påverkan än förväntat. Fler studier borde utföras för att kunna bekräfta denna hypotes.

This thesis investigates the possible future pathways for the road transportation sector of Cyprus, in a time horizon from the year 2013 to 2040. The road transportation sector of Cyprus is the most energy consuming sector in the country, completely dependent on the use of diesel and gasoline. In order to comply with the renewable energy target for the transportation sector set by the European Union, Cyprus needs to transform its road transportation sector. The software MESSAGE (Model for Energy Supply Strategy Alternatives and their General Environmental Impact) is used to model the road transport sector, consisting of passenger and freight transportation. The results of the modelling provides insights into the most cost-effective pathways for Cyprus in the future. In addition to the reference scenario, four different scenarios are examined. These scenarios are focusing on different relevant aspects for Cyprus which are renewable energy, natural gas, public transport and hydrogen. The results of the study indicate that the total numbers of petroleum fueled vehicles will increase in the future, and the freight transport will be particularly difficult to transform. For the passenger transport, there will be a fuel switch from gasoline to diesel, since diesel is less expensive than gasoline. There are possibilities for increasing the numbers of alternative low-carbon emitting vehicle technologies in Cyprus. For the passenger transport, the most cost-effective low-carbon vehicle technologies are hybrid diesel electric cars, plug-in hybrid diesel electric cars and hybrid electric diesel buses. For the freight transport, the most cost-effective low-carbon vehicle technologies are natural gas heavy trycks and electric light trucks. Lastly, the results of the study indicate that it will not be possible for Cyprus to reach the renewable energy target for the transportation sector. The country has to investigate in taxation schemes for increasing the numbers of alternative vehicles as well as increasing the blends of biofuels into gasoline and diesel.

Discrete event simulation is the most suitable type of simulation for analyzing a complex system where changes happen at discrete time instants. Discrete event simulation is a major experimental methodology in several scientific and engineering domains. Unfortunately, a conventional discrete event simulator cannot meet with increasing demands of computational or the structural complexities of modern systems such as peer-to-peer (P2P) systems; therefore parallel discrete event simulation has been a focus of researchers for several decades. Unfortunately, no simulator is regarded as a standard which can satisfy the demands of all kinds of applications. Thus while given a simulator yields good performance for a specific kind of applications, it may failed to be efficient for other kinds of applications. Furthermore, although technological advancements have been made in the multi-core computing hardware, none of the mainstream P2P discrete event simulators is designed to support parallel simulation that exploits multi-core architectures. The proposed HydraNetSim parallel discrete event simulator (PDES) is a step toward addressing these issues. Developing a simulator which can support very large numbers of nodes to realize a massive P2P system, and can also execute in parallel is a non-trivial task. The literature review in this thesis gives a broad overview of prevailing approaches to dealing with the tricky problems of simulating a massive, large, and rapidly changing system, and provides a foundation for adopting a suitable architecture for developing a PDES. HydraNetSim is a discrete event simulator which allows parallel simulation and exploits the capabilities of parallelization of modern computing hardware. It is based on a novel master/slave paradigm. It divides the simulation model into a number of specific slaves (a cluster of processes) considering the number of cores provided by the underlying computing hardware. Each slave can be assigned to a specific CPU on a different core. Synchronization of the slaves is achieved by proposing a variant of the classic Null-Message Algorithm (NMA) with a focus on keeping the synchronization overhead as low as possible. Furthermore, HydraNetSim provides log information for debugging purposes and introduces a new mechanism of gathering and writing simulation results to a database. The experimental results show that the sequential counterpart of HydraNetSim (SDES) takes 41.6% more time than HydraNetSim-2Slave and 23.6% than HydraNetSim-3Slave. HydraNetSim-2Slave is 1.42 times faster, consumes 1.18 times more memory, and supports 2.02 times more nodes than a sequential discrete event simulator (SDES). Whereas, HydraNetSim-3Slave executes 1.24 times faster, consumes 2.08 times more memory, and supports 3.04 times more nodes than SDES. The scaling factor of HydraNetSim is ⌈(β-1)*102.04%⌉ of the maximum numbered of nodes supported by SDES; where β is the number of slaves. / Diskret händelsesimulering är den mest passande typen av simulering för att analysera ett komplext system där förändringar sker i diskreta tidpunkter. Diskret händelsesimulering är en stor experimentell metod i flera vetenskapliga och tekniska områden. Tyvärr kan en konventionell diskret händelse simulator uppfyller inte med ökande krav på beräkningsprogram eller strukturella komplexiteten av moderna system som peer-to-peer (P2P) system, och därför parallellt diskret händelse simulering har varit ett fokus för forskare under flera årtionde. Tyvärr ingen simulator ansåg som en standard som kan uppfylla kraven på alla typer av applikationer. Så samtidigt få en simulator ger bra prestanda för en specifik typ av applikationer kan det inte vara effektivt för andra typer av applikationer. Även om tekniska framsteget har gjorts i multi-core datorhårdvara, är ingen av de vanliga P2P händelsestyrd simulatorer för att stödja parallella simulering som utnyttjar flera kärnor arkitekturer. Den föreslagna HydraNetSim parallella diskret händelse simulator (PDES) är ett steg mot att fokusera på dessa frågor. Utveckla en simulator som kan stödja ett mycket stort antal noder för att realisera en massiv P2P-system, och kan även utföra parallellt är en icke-trivial uppdrag. Litteraturstudien i denna tesen ger en bred översikt över aktuell metoder för att hantera de svåra problem som simulerar en massiv, stor och snabbt ändra system och ger en grund för att adoptera en passande struktur för att utveckla ett PDES. HydraNetSim är en diskret händelse simulator som gör det möjligt parallellt simulering och utnyttjar funktionerna i parallellisering av modern datorhårdvara. Det är baserat på en ny master / slav paradigm. Den delar simuleringsmodellen i ett antal specifika slavar (ett kluster av processer) med tanke på antalet kärnor som tillhandahålls av den underliggande datorhårdvara. Varje slav kan tilldelas en specifik CPU på en annan kärna. Synkronisering av slavarna uppnås genom att föreslå en variant av det klassiska Null-Message Algorithm (NMA) med fokus på att hålla simuleringen overhead så lågt som möjligt. Dessutom ger HydraNetSim log information för felsökning ändamål och inför en ny mekanism för att samla in och skriva simuleringar resultat till en databas. De experimentella resultaten visar att den sekventiella motsvarigheten till HydraNetSim (SDES) tar 41,6% mer tid än HydraNetSim-2Slave och 23,6% mindre än HydraNetSim-3Slave. HydraNetSim-2Slave är 1,42 gånger snabbare, förbrukar 1,18 gånger mer minne, och stöder 2.02 gånger fler noder än en sekventiell händelsestyrd simulator (SDES). I HydraNetSim-3Slave kör 1.24 gånger snabbare, förbrukar 2,08 gånger mer minne, och stöder 3,04 gånger fler noder än SDES. Skalfaktorn av HydraNetSim är ⌈(β-1)*102.04%⌉ av den maximala numrerade noder som stöds av SDES; där β är antalet slavar.