<p>What role do state party organizations play in twenty-first century American politics? What is the nature of the relationship between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections? These questions frame the three studies presented in this dissertation. More specifically, I examine the organizational development of the state party organizations and the strategic interactions and connections between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections. </p><p>In the first empirical chapter, I argue that the Internet Age represents a significant transitional period for state party organizations. Using data collected from surveys of state party leaders, this chapter reevaluates and updates existing theories of party organizational strength and demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party organizational development in the early twenty-first century. In the second chapter, I ask whether the national parties utilize different strategies in deciding how to allocate resources to state parties through fund transfers and through the 50-state-strategy party-building programs that both the Democratic and Republican National Committees advertised during the 2010 elections. Analyzing data collected from my 2011 state party survey and party-fund-transfer data collected from the Federal Election Commission, I find that the national parties considered a combination of state and national electoral concerns in directing assistance to the state parties through their 50-state strategies, as opposed to the strict battleground-state strategy that explains party fund transfers. In my last chapter, I examine the relationships between platforms issued by Democratic and Republican state and national parties and the strategic considerations that explain why state platforms vary in their degree of similarity to the national platform. I analyze an extensive platform dataset, using cluster analysis and document similarity measures to compare platform content across the 1952 to 2014 period. The analysis shows that, as a group, Democratic and Republican state platforms exhibit greater intra-party homogeneity and inter-party heterogeneity starting in the early 1990s, and state-national platform similarity is higher in states that are key players in presidential elections, among other factors. Together, these three studies demonstrate the significance of the state party organizations and the state-national party partnership in contemporary politics.</p> / Dissertation

I contribute to research pertaining to young voters by comparing the 2016 agenda of young people (based on existing polling) with Republican and Democratic Party platforms. By analyzing party platforms in the context of Millennial voters, this thesis attempts to determine the effectiveness to which the Democratic and Republican platforms reflect young people’s interests on three key topics: education, terrorism and homeland security, and racism. I argue that the Democratic Party’s progressive platform offers more substantial solutions to Millennial concerns than the GOP. By catering to young voter’s progressive, pro-big government, anti-racist agenda, the Democratic Party may one day bolster a formidable coalition of support for future elections.

Den tekniska utvecklingen går framåt och påverkar samhället i allt högre grad. Det finns samtidigt en oklarhet i hur verksamheter påverkas av den. Det framgår i studier att det behöver forskas mer kring hur den tekniska utvecklingen påverkar samhället. För att bidra till en ökad förståelse och kunskap inom området fokuserar den här studien på att granska ett område inom den tekniska utvecklingen och dess påverkan på värdenätverk inom en specifik bransch. Ett fenomen inom den tekniska utvecklingen som är på framfart är plattformsutvecklingen. Det är ett fenomen som förenklar och effektiviserar hur mjukvara hanteras och levereras samt beskrivs få konsekvenser för värdenätverk i branscherna som anammar det. Vilka konsekvenserna är, är dock oklart. Det beskrivs att en bransch som ser ut att anamma plattformsutvecklingen är affärssystembranschen. Dock är det även där oklart vad fenomenet kommer att innebära för branschen och dess värdenätverk. För att nå den ökade förståelsen och kunskapen som eftersträvades inleddes arbetet med att ta fram en litteraturstudie. Därefter gjordes en kvalitativ undersökning där empiriskt material samlades in genom att intervjua respondenter från konsultbolag och affärssystemleverantörer. Dessa två aktörer är de som traditionellt sett varit de som skapat värdena för slutkunderna i affärssystembranschen. Med hjälp av litteraturen och det empiriska materialet kunde studien sedan undersöka hur plattformsutvecklingen kan komma att påverka det traditionella värdenätverket i affärssystembranschen. Studiens resultat visar att plattformsutvecklingen påverkar affärssystembranschens värdenätverk och gör så på flera sätt. Om fenomenet anammas kan värdenätverket få fler roller, nya relationer mellan rollerna och förändrade och nya värden som utbyts mellan dem. Grunden till att plattformsutvecklingen påverkar värdenätverket på det här sättet är dess sätt att möjliggöra och främja nya sätt att samarbeta och skapa värden för slutkunderna.

Nowadays, people have many business activities and entertainments on a variety of online platforms. Despite their various functionalities, online platforms have a fundamental administrative problem: How do platform designers or administrators create proper online environments, including mechanisms and policies, to better manage user behaviors, in order to reach the goals of the platforms? Starting with a taxonomy of online platforms, I introduce three critical dimensions that help to characterize such platforms, including revenue model, heterogeneity in the role of users and level of user interaction. Then, I choose three online platforms as research contexts and conduct empirical studies, trying to identify and understand the impact of the incentive program, quality information disclosure, and social influence, on users' decision-making in online platforms. The first essay investigates the effectiveness of incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher status in the community after achieving increasingly more challenging goals, in motivating user contribution in the same platform. The findings have important implications for crowd-based online applications, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing. The second essay focuses on online consumer review sites, and studies whether and how consumer-generated word-of-mouth of restaurants-both volume and valence-is influenced by the disclosure of quality information from health inspectors, by conducting analytical modeling and econometric analyses using data from a leading consumer review site. The third essay examines how social interactions matter in a large-scale online social game that adopts an increasingly popular freemium revenue model. The study leverages an econometric model to quantify the effect of peer consumption on players' repeated decisions for the consumption of both free services and premium services. Finally, I conclude the dissertation by highlighting the three fundamental issues of design and management of online platforms.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate sensing, computing, communication and actuation capabilities to monitor and control operations in the physical environment. A key requirement of such systems is the need to provide predictable real-time performance: the timing correctness of the system should be analyzable at design time with a quantitative metric and guaranteed at runtime with high assurance. This requirement of predictability is particularly important for safety-critical domains such as automobiles, aerospace, defense, manufacturing and medical devices. The work in this dissertation focuses on the challenges arising from the use of modern multi-core platforms in CPS. Even as of today, multi-core platforms are rarely used in safety-critical applications primarily due to the temporal interference caused by contention on various resources shared among processor cores, such as caches, memory buses, and I/O devices. Such interference is hard to predict and can significantly increase task execution time, e.g., up to 12 commodity quad-core platforms. To address the problem of ensuring timing predictability on multi-core platforms, we develop novel analytical and systems techniques in this dissertation. Our proposed techniques theoretically bound temporal interference that tasks may suffer from when accessing shared resources. Our techniques also involve software primitives and algorithms for real-time operating systems and hypervisors, which significantly reduce the degree of the temporal interference. Specifically, we tackle the issues of cache and memory contention, locking and synchronization, interrupt handling, and access control for computational accelerators such as general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), all of which are crucial to achieving predictable real-time performance on a modern multi-core platform. Our solutions are readily applicable to commodity multi-core platforms, and can be used not only for developing new systems but also migrating existing applications from single-core to multi-core platforms.

Research question: How can Crowdfunding be used as a marketing tool?Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the anomalies and trends in crowdfunding in order to explain how crowdfunding can be used as a marketing tool.Method: This research is exploratory with an inductive research approach. Primary data was collected with qualitative techniques. Semi-structured interviews was used when interviewing the participants in order to withdraw data.Findings: The empirical data showed that crowdfunding can be used for marketing and creating a buzz or awareness. These findings lead us to create a proposed model for how crowdfunding most effectively can be used as marketing.

This thesis deals with the technology platforms that bring together different types of actors in the same sector by supporting the Operational Programme Enterprise and Innovation. The aim was to use three case studies to assess the functioning of technology platforms and their benefits to its members. The thesis is mainly qualitative in nature. Research questions focus on the membership structure and activities of technology platforms, the importance of various types of proximity in cooperation with its members and the impact on their competitiveness. Thanks to the paper I found out the benefits of technology platforms to deepen relationships and mutual trust, which proved important for the mutual cooperation. Social and cognitive proximity are the two most important types of proximity in cooperation with actors. The thesis also revealed deficiencies in meeting the objectives of technology platforms consisting in the definition and implementation of the vision of the field. Negative finding is the absence of government among members of the technology platforms. Technology platforms are with their activities shaping the emergence and spread of knowledge and innovation for mutual cooperation among actors from different backgrounds. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / John M. Hatcliff / Medical devices have traditionally been designed, built, and certified for use as monolithic units. A new vision of "Medical Application Platforms" (MAPs) is emerging that would enable compositional medical systems to be instantiated at the point of care from a collection of trusted components. This work details efforts to create a development environment for applications that run on these MAPs. The first contribution of this effort is a language and code generator that can be used to model and implement MAP applications. The language is a subset of the Architecture, Analysis and Design Language (AADL) that has been tailored to the platform-based environment of MAPs. Accompanying the language is software tooling that provides automated code generation targeting an existing MAP implementation. The second contribution is a new hazard analysis process called the Systematic Analysis of Faults and Errors (SAFE). SAFE is a modified version of the previously-existing System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), that has been made more rigorous, partially compositional, and easier. SAFE is not a replacement for STPA, however, rather it more effectively analyzes the hardware- and software-based elements of a full safety-critical system. SAFE has both manual and tool-assisted formats; the latter consists of AADL annotations that are designed to be used with the language subset from the first contribution. An automated report generator has also been implemented to accelerate the hazard analysis process. Third, this work examines how, independent of its place in the system hierarchy or the precise configuration of its environment, a component may contribute to the safety (or lack thereof) of an entire system. Based on this, we propose a reference model which generalizes notions of harm and the role of components in their environment so that they can be applied to components either in isolation or as part of a complete system. Connections between these formalisms and existing approaches for system composition and fault propagation are also established. This dissertation presents these contributions along with a review of relevant literature, evaluation of the SAFE process, and concludes with discussion of potential future work.

The increased demand for broadband communications has led to the rapid development of the conventional terrestrial and satellite wireless communications systems. One of the main challenges to next generation wireless systems is to deliver high-capacity and cost-efficient solutions to cope with an increasing usage of broadband services and applications. In the recent years, an emerging competitive system has attracted the attention for providing wireless broadband communications and other services based on quasi-stationary aerial platforms operating in the stratosphere known by high altitude platforms (HAPs), and located 17-22 km above the earth surface. This solution has been described by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as "a new and long anticipated technology that can revolutionize the telecommunication industry''. The HAP systems provide important advantages such as low cost, high elevation angles, low propagation delay, easy and incremental deployment, flexibility in operation, broad coverage, broadcast and broadband capability, ability to move around in emergency situations, etc. Therefore, they have been proposed by ITU for the provision of fixed, mobile services and applications, e.g. the third generation (3G) services licensed by ITU and backbone link for terrestrial networks in remote areas. This thesis explores and investigates the wireless communication and techno-economic performance of terrestrial systems and HAPs. An overview of research and development on aerial platforms worldwide is given. Coexistence performance and techniques of heterogeneous systems to provide broadband wireless communications based on Worldwide Interoperability Microwave Access (WiMAX) are investigated. A heterogeneous scenario is developed to examine the coexistence performance of heterogeneous systems. The capacity and deployment aspects of HAPs are analyzed, and further compared with terrestrial Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) through techno-economic studies including a proposed partnership based business model for HAPs. Performance of wireless sensor network applications via HAPs is also investigated, and shows the high potential of HAPs for large-area and long-endurance surveillance and emergency applications. The thesis shows that communications from the aerial platforms provide the best features of both terrestrial and satellite systems. HAPs can effectively coexist in a heterogeneous radio environment, and are competitive solutions in urban and suburban scenarios in terms of capacity, coverage and business perspective. This makes HAP a viable competitor and complement to conventional terrestrial infrastructures and satellite systems.

Simulation models are used to analyse company processes. The purpose is to create a model in simulation software that will represent the behaviour of the company. Options to improve the current situation are investigated by observation of the studied system and subsequent experimenting with the model. This work deals with the situation in the company, which focuses on lease and service of working platforms. New headquarters is being built to provide better services and changes in offer of leased working platforms are being considered. Model of the company is created in software SIMUL8. Next step is to perform simulation experiment and summarize the results. Input values are adjusted according to these results, which leads to a more favorable solution. The aim of this work is to optimize the working capacity and improve the structure of offer of leased working platforms.