One of the most important issues in the study of Urban-Service Distribution is the choice of the unit of analysis. Because of the ready availability of various data at the level of residence units, census tracts have been the spatial units most commonly selected. In some cases, municipally defined service districts have also been selected, and they are, in fact, only the aggregates of several neighboring census tracts. The problem encountered in the current study is the fact that Census-based Neighborhoods such as census tracts and the aggregations of census tracts frequently do not correspond with commonly recognized neighborhoods experienced informally in daily life, and they do not match local residents' perceptions of their neighborhoods as social areas. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Resident-perceived Neighborhood Boundaries (as the alternative unit of analysis to conventionally-used Census-based Neighborhood Units) on the accessibility to public parks based on equity consideration and its relationship to park utilization. The study also addressed whether the neighborhood boundaries perceived by the actual residents may exhibit more actual neighborhood construct than Census-based Neighborhood Units when the relationship between park accessibility and utilization is considered. First, the results indicate that when Resident-perceived Neighborhood Boundaries are adopted, there is no significant change, either in accessibility measures or in the equity of public park distribution among neighborhoods of different social strata. Second, there was no significant relationship between parks accessibility and utilization, which means that even though a park may be closest to a household, it is not always true that the household will choose to use that park. Third, it was confirmed that the relationship between park accessibility and utilization was significantly affected by some utilization factors. That is, travel distances to the parks were significantly affected by different types of utilization factors and, according to the classification of park type, the affecting utilization factors were different. Lastly, as the spatial unit of analysis, Resident-perceived Neighborhood Boundaries do not significantly enhance the strength of the relationship between public services accessibility and utilization compared to using Census-based Neighborhood Units.

Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) using the existing WLAN have won growing interest in the last years, it can be a perfect supplement to provide location information of users in indoor environments where other positioning techniques such as GPS, are not much effective. The thesis manuscript proposes a new approach to define a WLAN-based indoor positioning system (WLAN-IPS) as a combinatorial optimization problem to guarantee the requested communication quality while optimizing the positioning error. This approach is characterised by several difficult issues we tackled in three steps.At first, we designed a WLAN-IPS and implemented it as a test framework. Using this framework, we looked at the system performance under various experimental constraints. Through these experiments, we went as far as possible in analysing the relationships between the positioning error and the external environmental factors. These relationships were considered as evaluation indicators of the positioning error. Secondly, we proposed a model that defines all major parameters met in the WLAN-IPS from the literature. As the original purpose of the WLAN infrastructures is to provide radio communication access, we introduced an additional purpose which is to minimize the location error within IPS context. Two main indicators were defined in order to evaluate the network Quality of Service (QoS) and the positioning error for Location-Based Service (LBS). Thirdly, after defining the mathematical formulation of the optimisation problem and the key performance indicators, we proposed a mono-objective algorithm and a multi-objective algorithm which are based on Tabu Search metaheuristic to provide good solutions within a reasonable amount of time. The simulations demonstrate that these two algorithms are highly efficient for the indoor positioning optimization problem.

2000年Denhardt夫婦提出了新公共服務理論，且於2003年及2007年出書，詳細論述此理論的7項核心理念：服務公民而非服務顧客、公共利益的追尋、重視公民精神更勝於企業精神、策略思維與民主行動、理解「課責」並非單純簡易的事、服務而非導航、重視人性價值而非生產力。而隨著民主的蓬勃發展，自我意識亦隨之高漲，對於公共議題的關注及公共利益的追求，伴隨著公民社會的形成，全球民主國家亦極力於促成公民社會的實踐。基於新公共服務及公民社會在時代的發展歷程中重要角色，國家之中央及地方各級政府組織應致力於運用與實踐，以落實地方治理，進而達成全球化下國家之競爭力。 村、里是政府地方自治制度中最基層的組織，地方制度法所明定之鄉、鎮、市、區內部編組。而村（里）長，受鄉村（鎮、市、區）長之指揮監督，辦理村（里）公務及交辦事項。本研究以基隆市里辦公處為個案，運用文獻分析法及深度訪談法，建立新公共服務與里辦公處的組織與功能兩者的關係，探討基隆市里辦公處如何本著為民服務之精神，運用新公共服務理念，繼續發揮其時代功能，進而順利達成最基層在地化的為民服務工作，並期能提供相關實務建議。 / In 2000, Robert B. Denhardt & Janet V. Denhardt put forward the theory of new public service and published books in 2003 and 2007 to discuss 7 core ideas in detail: serve the public but not the customers, pursue public interest, place more emphasis on civic spirit than enterprise spirit, strategic thought and democratic action, understand that accountability is not just a simple issue, serve but not navigate, value humanity but not productivity. With the prosperous development of democracy, self-awareness is also enhanced. As to the concerns on public issues and pursuit of public interest, together with the formation of a civil society, global democratic nations also try every effort to promote the implementation of a public society. Based on the important role played by public service and civil society on era development programs, the central and local governments and organizations should commit to application and put local governance into practice so as to achieve national competitiveness in the context of globalization. Villages and neighborhoods are the most fundamental organizations in the local autonomous system. The Local Government System Act specifies the sub-groups consisting of the villages, towns, cities and districts. Besides, the village (neighborhood) head is directed and supervised by heads of the towns, cities and districts to deal with the affairs of the village (neighborhood). This study, taking the neighborhood affairs office in Keelung City as the study case, applies literature review and in-depth interview methods to explore and establish the relationship between organizations as well as the functions of new public service and the neighborhood affairs office. It also aims to determine how the Keelung neighborhood affairs office employs the concept of new public service to continue its functions in the spirit of service, so as to successfully achieve the goal that the most fundamental organization serves the local people. This study is expected to provide related practical suggestions.

Les immigrants allophones qui s’établissent dans la région métropolitaine de recensement (RMR) de Montréal sont vraisemblablement confrontés à la concurrence qui y existe entre le français et l’anglais. À l’aide de données agrégées du recensement canadien de 2006, nous explorons le rôle que pourrait jouer l’environnement linguistique résidentiel dans l’adoption de deux comportements linguistiques; le transfert linguistique vers le français ou l’anglais et la connaissance des langues officielles chez ceux n’ayant pas effectué de transfert, tout en tenant compte de leurs caractéristiques individuelles. Des liens initiaux existent entre la composition linguistique des 56 quartiers de la RMR et les comportements linguistiques des immigrants allophones. De plus, des caractéristiques individuelles similaires mènent à des orientations linguistiques similaires. Sans séparer ces deux effets, des régressions linéaires nous permettent de croire que la connaissance de l’anglais et/ou du français n’est pas déterminée par la composition linguistique du quartier, alors que cette dernière ne peut être écartée lorsque nous analysons la langue d’usage à la maison (transferts). / Immigrants with a mother tongue other than French or English are likely to face the existing concurrence between these two languages when settling down in the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area (CMA). Using agregated data from the 2006 Canadian Census, the potential role of residential linguistic environment on two measures of immigrants` language behavior is explored : language shift at home (from a third language to the use of French or English) and French or English proficiency (of those who did not shift), along with the consideration of their individual caracteristics. Initial links are observed between language composition of the 56 neighborhoods of the CMA and language behavior of the immigrants. Moreover, similar individual caracteristics seem to lead to similar language behaviors. Linear regressions cannot distinguish both effects, but tend to show that language proficiency in French and/or English is not determined by neighborhood caracteristics. However, evidence suggests that the potential significant role of the language composition of the neighborhood on the language shift at home cannot be overlooked.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Data are valuable assets to any organizations or individuals. Data are sources of useful information which is a big part of decision making. All sectors have potential to benefit from having information. Commerce, health, and research are some of the fields that have benefited from data. On the other hand, the availability of the data makes it easy for anyone to exploit the data, which in many cases are private confidential data. It is necessary to preserve the confidentiality of the data. We study two categories of privacy: Data Value Hiding and Data Pattern Hiding. Privacy is a huge concern but equally important is the concern of data utility. Data should avoid privacy breach yet be usable. Although these two objectives are contradictory and achieving both at the same time is challenging, having knowledge of the purpose and the manner in which it will be utilized helps. In this research, we focus on some particular situations for clustering and classification problems and strive to balance the utility and privacy of the data. In the first part of this dissertation, we propose Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) based techniques that accommodate constraints defined explicitly into the update rules. These constraints determine how the factorization takes place leading to the favorable results. These methods are designed to make alterations on the matrices such that user-specified cluster properties are introduced. These methods can be used to preserve data value as well as data pattern. As NMF and K-means are proven to be equivalent, NMF is an ideal choice for pattern hiding for clustering problems. In addition to the NMF based methods, we propose methods that take into account the data structures and the attribute properties for the classification problems. We separate the work into two different parts: linear classifiers and nonlinear classifiers. We propose two different solutions based on the classifiers. We study the effect of distortion on the utility of data. We propose three distortion measurement metrics which demonstrate better characteristics than the traditional metrics. The effectiveness of the measures is examined on different benchmark datasets. The result shows that the methods have the desirable properties such as invariance to translation, rotation, and scaling.

Image segmentation is important with applications to several problems in biology and medicine. While extensively researched, generally, current segmentation methods perform adequately in the applications for which they were designed, but often require extensive modifications or calibrations before used in a different application. We describe a system that, with few modifications, can be used in a variety of image segmentation problems. The system is based on a supervised learning strategy that utilizes intensity neighborhoods to assign each pixel in a test image its correct class based on training data. In summary, we have several innovations: (1) A general framework for such a system is proposed, where rotations and variations of intensity neighborhoods in scales are modeled, and a multi-scale classification framework is utilized to segment unknown images; (2) A fast algorithm for training data selection and pixel classification is presented, where a majority voting based criterion is proposed for selecting a small subset from raw training set. When combined with 1-nearest neighbor (1-NN) classifier, such an algorithm is able to provide descent classification accuracy within reasonable computational complexity. (3) A general deformable model for optimization of segmented regions is proposed, which takes the decision values from previous pixel classification process as input, and optimize the segmented regions in a partial differential equation (PDE) framework. We show that the performance of this system in several different biomedical applications, such as tissue segmentation tasks in magnetic resonance and histopathology microscopy images, as well as nuclei segmentation from fluorescence microscopy images, is similar or better than several algorithms specifically designed for each of these applications. In addition, we describe another general segmentation system for biomedical applications where a strong prior on shape is available (e.g. cells, nuclei). The idea is based on template matching and supervised learning, and we show the examples of segmenting cells and nuclei from microscopy images. The method uses examples selected by a user for building a statistical model which captures the texture and shape variations of the nuclear structures from a given data set to be segmented. Segmentation of subsequent, unlabeled, images is then performed by finding the model instance that best matches (in the normalized cross correlation sense) local neighborhood in the input image. We demonstrate the application of our method to segmenting cells and nuclei from a variety of imaging modalities, and quantitatively compare our results to several other methods. Quantitative results using both simulated and real image data show that, while certain methods may work well for certain imaging modalities, our software is able to obtain high accuracy across several imaging modalities studied. Results also demonstrate that, relative to several existing methods, the template based method we propose presents increased robustness in the sense of better handling variations in illumination, variations in texture from different imaging modalities, providing more smooth and accurate segmentation borders, as well as handling better cluttered cells and nuclei.

This creative project outlines the process used in developing an action oriented and citizen based neighborhood plan for the Bloomingdale Neighborhood, located in Fort Wayne, Indiana. As a member of the City of Fort Wayne Planning Department, I was the lead staff person in the development of this plan. The plan was designed to identify and resolve neighborhood issues with manageable goals and specific action steps. Though the planning department initiated the process and took a leadership role in the plan's development, the neighborhood association ultimately determined the plan's focus and direction. This allowed the association to take ownership of the process and ultimately the plan. The techniques and methods used in the process for developing the Bloomingdale Plan will be incorporated in future neighborhood planning efforts in Fort Wayne. / Department of Urban Planning

Die Forschungsarbeit widmet sich der Rekonstruktion und dem Vergleich der Stadt- und Quartiersentwicklung der Partnerstädte Chemnitz und Akron. Nach rasantem Wachstum als Produktionsstandorte während der Industrialisierung befinden sich heute die lokalen Wirtschaften im Zuge der Deindustrialisierung in einer strukturellen Krise. Dennoch halten beide Städte am Selbstverständnis als Standort des produzierenden Gewerbes und am industriellen Erbe fest, was vor dem Hintergrund eines internationalen Standortwettbewerbs um postfordistische Wissensökonomien gefasst wird. Einhergehend mit der wirtschaftsstrukturellen Transformation verlor Akron bereits seit den 1960er Jahren, Chemnitz seit der politischen Wende 1989 zehntausende Einwohner, was sich in der Funktion und Gestalt der Quartiere und dem Lebensvollzug in ihnen manifestiert. Dabei stehen die Akteure raumbezogener Politik und Planung einem scheinbaren Dilemma gegenüber: einerseits müssen sie Strategien der Adaption an Schrumpfung finden, andererseits sollen sie Anreize für Regeneration und erneutes Wachstum schaffen. Diese Stadt- und Quartiersentwicklung unter Schrumpfungsbedingungen kann weder allein von staatlichen noch ausschließlich von zivilgesellschaftlichen oder privat-wirtschaftlichen Akteuren organisiert werden. Die vorgefundenen Formen der Raumproduktion in Chemnitz und Akron orientieren sich folglich an Governance-Mechanismen. Dabei dominieren wachstumsorientierte Strategien der Kernstadtentwicklung, die in Chemnitz und Akron durch verschiede Diskurse legitimiert werden. Anhand von Fallbeispielen geht die Arbeit des Weiteren der Frage nach, welche Akteurskonstellationen in je zwei innerstädtischen Problemquartieren der Partnerstädte vorherrschen und welchen Einfluss zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure bei den partizipativen Planungsansätzen spielen.