This dissertation presents contributions to the fields of mobility modeling, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with mobile sinks, and opportunistic communication in theme parks. The two main directions of our contributions are human mobility models and strategies for the mobile sink positioning and communication in wireless networks. The first direction of the dissertation is related to human mobility modeling. Modeling the movement of human subjects is important to improve the performance of wireless networks with human participants and the validation of such networks through simulations. The movements in areas such as theme parks follow specific patterns that are not taken into consideration by the general purpose mobility models. We develop two types of mobility models of theme park visitors. The first model represents the typical movement of visitors as they are visiting various attractions and landmarks of the park. The second model represents the movement of the visitors as they aim to evacuate the park after a natural or man-made disaster. The second direction focuses on the movement patterns of mobile sinks and their communication in responding to various events and incidents within the theme park. When an event occurs, the system needs to determine which mobile sink will respond to the event and its trajectory. The overall objective is to optimize the event coverage by minimizing the time needed for the chosen mobile sink to reach the incident area. We extend this work by considering the positioning problem of mobile sinks and preservation of the connected topology. We propose a new variant of p-center problem for optimal placement and communication of the mobile sinks. We provide a solution to this problem through collaborative event coverage of the WSNs with mobile sinks. Finally, we develop a network model with opportunistic communication for tracking the evacuation of theme park visitors during disasters. This model involves people with smartphones that store and carry messages. The mobile sinks are responsible for communicating with the smartphones and reaching out to the regions of the emergent events.

For the purpose of internationalization of higher education, the European Union has established a scheme to facilitate student mobility under the Erasmus project. Erasmus programs are intended to provide participating students with the opportunity to experience education and cultural exchange in different countries. Erasmus programs are not only for European students; it is also available for non-EU students. However, while European students under the Erasmus scheme can experience free movement within EU borders during their studies, it is unclear to what extent the visa programs of Member States allow the same mobility for non-EU students. Through thematic policy analysis, this research addresses the policies implemented to facilitate non-EU students' mobility during their study within the EMJMD program, a multiple mobility master’s degree programs under the Erasmus+. The analysis covers the policies of the European Union as the benefactor of the program and the national migration agencies of the countries where students reside and study to see how national migration regulations comply with the European policies on student mobility.

Over the last two decades, mobile computing has gone from being a mere vision to becoming a reality, ubiquitously present in our everyday lives. There are different types of mobility, from user and terminal mobility, to mobility of services and sessions. This thesis is mainly about application mobility { the ability for an application to migrate between different host devices during its execution. The aim of this thesis work is to explore and advance the area of application mobility. The thesis approaches this goal through focusing on three research issues: Architectural considerations for application mobility; Context-awareness support and application adaptability; and Concept exploration.The contributions of this thesis include the identification of requirements for application mobility and a proposal for a decentralized, global scale architecture for application mobility, building on the peer-to-peer paradigm. Several prototypes of systems allowing application mobility are deployed, manifesting concepts such as decentralized system layout, context-awareness, context quality and global scope. Evaluations are both quantitative and qualitative. Other contributions of this thesis are the design and evaluation of a framework building on cloud and peer-to-peer technology to enable mobile sessions and an exploration of the concept of application mobility. / Sense Smart City, MOSA - mobil och öppen tjänste-access, NIMO - Nordic Interaction and Mobility Research Platform

Inledning: Stretching ökar rörelseförmågan över leden och har visats vara skadeförebyggande och en viktig del i rehabilitering. Rörligheten tros öka genom förlängning av kontraktil vävnad, ökad stretch-tolerans och anpassningar kopplade till aktivering av motoriska områden i hjärnan. Överföringseffekten innebär att den otränade (kontralaterala) extremiteten drar nytta av färdigheter som den tränade (unilaterala) extremiteten utvecklar något som kan ha stor nytta vid långvarig unilateral immobilisering. Syftet: Syftet med studien var att undersöka överföringseffekten från dynamisk- respektive statisk unilateral rörlighetsträning av hamstringsmusklatur till kontralateral sida efter två veckors intervention, samt jämföra effekterna däremellan. Metod: Fyra deltagare inkluderades och fördelades slumpmässigt mellan de två interventionerna. En grupp, deltagare 2 och 3, utförde unilateraldynamisk rörlighetsträning och den andra gruppen, deltagare 1 och 4, utförde unilateralstatisk rörlighetsträning. Rörligheten i hamstringsmuskulatur mättes med passive straight legraise (PSLR) och aktiv knäextension (AKE) innan och efter två veckors intervention. Resultat: Deltagare 1 och 2 visade en överföringseffekt på 6,4-11,3% vid mätning av AKE. Deltagare 2 visade en överföringseffekt på 6,3% vid mätning av PSLR. Deltagare 3 visade en minskning med 8% på kontralaterala benet vid mätning av PSLR. För övriga utfall visade deltagarna en förändring av rörligheten på ±3 grader. Diskussion: Överföringseffekt observerades vid hälften av utfallen och till största del vid mätning av AKE, utan skillnad mellan statisk och dynamisk rörlighetsträning. Tänkbar mekanism är en kombination av ökad stretch-tolerans och neurala adaptioner mellan hjärnbark, muskel och muskelspole. Konklusion: En viss överföringseffekt efter rörlighetsträning kan ej uteslutas men studier med fler deltagare behövs för att bekräfta resultatet av denna pilotstudie.

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Human capital theory, the dominant approach to labor migration, assumes that workers who migrate improve their economic well-being. / Ph. D.

The transportation sector is a key carbon emitter, and e-mobility is becoming increasingly recognised around the globe to address climate change, biodiversity loss and societal challenges. In Sri Lanka, e-mobility is identified as a major alternative option that emerged while combating the economic crisis. This paper explores potential pathways to integrate e-mobility into the Colombo Metropolitan Area (CMA) through understanding 'What hinders this e-mobility transition?' and 'How to accelerate it?'. The study applied a combination of transition studies, including MLP, Path dependency and, lock-ins and transition management theories, followed by the mixed-methods approach to analysing the complexities created along the co-evolution of socio-technical systems and to suggest potential pathways. The findings show that historical influences and diverse configuration elements hinder the capabilities of emerging e-mobility novelties by locking society in a private vehicle-dominating regime. A holistic and integrated approach is necessary to overcome the identified challenges and to achieve a sustainable e-mobility transition.

This dissertation comprises three autonomous essays on topics in labor economics. The first chapter investigates the impact of socio-cultural, technological, and other transformative factors on employees' labor market decisions over recent decades, focusing specifically on the mobility of young workers in terms of job and occupation transitions. Data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97) indicate a marked increase in job mobility among young participants across different cohorts. Analysis of these datasets demonstrates that the influence of age on the likelihood of changing jobs has become more negative for the second cohort. This shift is primarily driven by changes in the impact of age for specific socio-demographic groups of respondents. Additionally, there is a notable between-cohort rise in the relationship between both upward and downward job transitions and occupational mobility. The second essay explores the consequences of the rise in industrial robot installations on shifts in population size and employment within local labor markets, which may be substantially affected by the rapid advancement of robotics technology in recent decades. The cross-sectional study reveals discernible gender disparities in the impacts of robot adoption. The effect of robotization on the labor force participation rate is negative for men and unmarried women yet positive for married women. As industrial robots are predominantly programmed to perform routine tasks in manufacturing industries traditionally associated with heavy manual male-dominated labor, the anticipated impact of robot exposure on employment in the manufacturing sector is predictably negative for male workers. For women, this effect is conversely positive. It was also found that robot penetration leads to an increase in the share of family income attributed to females within married-couple households. The extended cross-sectional analysis in the third chapter indicates that the impact of robotization on local labor markets is more negative for younger people. Fixed-effects models using panel data analysis reveal that robot adoption unexpectedly reduces migration but enhances labor force participation, opposing recent scholarly findings. Employing an alternative robot adoption variable that is based on technology adoption within individual industries and, therefore, can only be utilized to analyze employment-related dependent variables yields more robust and statistically significant results, indicating a negative impact of robot exposure on employment. Nevertheless, panel data analysis does not support the previous chapter's findings regarding gender differences in the impact of robot penetration. These discrepancies may be attributed to differences in the structure, methodology, and nature of cross-sectional versus panel data and the methodological differences in measuring robotization. / Doctor of Philosophy / This work consists of three separate essays on labor economics. The first chapter looks at how cultural, technological, and other big changes have affected people's job choices over the past few decades. Data from two surveys of young people show that young workers are changing jobs more often now. Age is found to have a bigger negative effect on job changes for the younger cohort. This change mainly affects specific socio-demographic groups. There is also a stronger link between moving up or down in jobs and changing occupations. The second essay examines how the increase in the use of industrial robots affects the population and employment in local labor markets. The study finds that robots affect men and unmarried women negatively but have a positive impact on married women. Since robots usually do routine tasks in manufacturing, which is a male-dominated field, this hurts male workers' job prospects but helps women. Robots also lead to a higher share of family income coming from women in married households. The third chapter shows that robots impact younger people in local job markets more negatively. Using different data, it is found that robots surprisingly reduce migration but increase labor force participation. This finding is different from those of other studies. A new way of measuring robot use within specific industries shows that robots negatively affect employment. However, this new analysis does not support the earlier findings about gender differences. These differences may come from how data is collected and analyzed and the methods used to measure robot use.

In light of globalisation and sustainability challenges, the potential of shared mobility, or Mobility as a Service (MaaS), has been acknowledged as a way to improve mobility and transport both for the individual user and society at large. A specific type of mobility is that of corporate mobility, or how companies enable their employees to transport themselves during the workday as well as to and from work. This is a an area where MaaS has previously not been applied, thus potentially creating an unexplored business opportunity for someone to offer shared mobility as a service towards companies in need of efficient corporate mobility. To investigate the new solution of corporate Mobility as a Service (cMaaS) and the potential to transform it into a service offered to external customers, this study has been carried out as a single case study applying a business model perspective to the pilot project Sustainable Mobility Services Södertälje, where MaaS is applied to an existing corporate mobility solution. Inquiries have revolved around what constitutes a cMaaS service and what value is created from it, as well as what value a potential customer and their potential users envision. Lastly, we investigate practical challenges associated with our specific case, as well as strategic challenges regarding the business model design for cMaaS. Our findings help to describe the novel concept of cMaaS and propose a definition of it, based on previous definitions of corporate mobility and MaaS. Furthermore, the study concludes that value from cMaaS is multi-dimensional and hard to account for in a single value proposition, both due to the interrelationship between customer and users, and the sustainability value created from it. This is especially critical since cMaaS is a user-centric service. Lastly, the study concludes that the development of a business model for cMaaS is subject to a number of challenges, however this is not a sign that cMaaS is not a promising business opportunity, but rather that it is in an early stage. An experimental approach to it is beneficial, however it is crucial to continue development in an informed way, building on acquired knowledge to improve the experiment and to ultimately decide if cMaaS is an attractive business opportunity and if so, what the most suitable business model is. / I takt med globalisering och ökande hållbarhetsutmaningar har potentialen i delad mobilitet, eller Mobility as a Service (MaaS), fått allt mer uppmärksamhet, som ett sätt att förbättra mobilitet och transporter både för den enskilda användaren och för samhället i stort. En särskild typ av mobilitet handlar om företags interna transporter (Corporate Mobility), det vill säga hur företag kan förbättra transport för sina anställda, både under arbetsdagen och till och från jobbet. MaaS har inte tidigare applicerats på den typen av mobilitet, och det skulle kunna vara en intressant affärsmöjlighet att erbjuda delad mobilitet som en service, till företag med behov av välfungerande interna transporter. Syftet med denna studie har varit att undersöka kombinationen av delad mobilitet (MaaS) och företags interna transporter (Corporate Mobility), kallat corporate Mobility as a Service (cMaaS), och möjligheten i att sälja den som en tjänst till externa kunder. För att uppnå det har studien genomförts som en enfallsstudie där ett affärsmodellsperspektiv applicerats på pilotprojektet Sustainable Mobility Services Södertälje, som introducerar MaaS i ett företags existerande interntransportsystem. Undersökningarna har handlat om vad en cMaaS-lösning innefattar och vilket värde det skapar, samt vilket värde en potentiell kund och dess potentiella användare vill ha från det. Dessutom har utmaningar kring att sälja och definiera en affärsmodell för cMaaS undersökts. Våra resultat bidrar till att beskriva konceptet cMaaS och vi föreslår en definition av det, baserad på definitioner av företags interna transporter och MaaS. Vidare indikerar resultaten att värde från cMaaS är multi-dimensionellt och därför svårt att beskriva i en enda value proposition, detta både på grund av den inbördes relationen mellan kunden och användarna, och hållbarhetsvärdena cMaaS skapar. Detta är särskilt kritiskt eftersom cMaaS är en användarfokuserad tjänst. Till sist visar resultaten att affärsutvecklingen av cMaaS står inför ett antal utmaningar, men att det inte nödvändigtvis innebär att cMaaS inte är en lovande affärsmöjlighet, utan snarare att utvecklingen är i ett tidigt skede. Att testa sig fram med en experimentell affärsutveckling kan vara bra, men det är också viktigt att göra det på ett strukturerat sätt, och bygga vidare på insamlad kunskap för att justera och förbättra testandet. På så vis kan man uppnå målet att avgöra om cMaaS är en attraktiv affärsmöjlighet, och i så fall hur en lyckad affärsmodell ser ut.