This thesis aims to increase knowledge about the usage and relevance of Project Management (PM) methods and tools within start-up companies, with regard to the previous work experience of the entrepreneur. The underdeveloped connection of PM and entrepreneurship will be further explored by following the research question proposed below that guides the study. What PM methods and tools do entrepreneurs apply in the process of launching the business versus the operation of the start-up, especially considering their previous work experience and contact with PM? In order to answer the proposed research question and pursue the set objectives, the thesis is structured as follows. First, the methodology within this study is represented in theoretical and practical form in chapter 2 and 4. Furthermore, the theoretical context in the field is summarized in chapter 3. The topics of traditional PM and agile PM (APM) with their characteristics and tools are portrayed; especially the latter is extensively presented in chapter 3.2 due to the need of flexibility and adaptability in the highly dynamic business environment nowadays, as well as the strong connection between APM and the IT development sector. Existing theories about the topics of entrepreneurship and start-ups are described in the subsequent chapter, whereby a focus is set on the entrepreneur itself and his or her previous work experience. To summarize the existing theory in the fields of PM and entrepreneurship a conceptual framework was created by the researchers of this study in chapter 3.4, which also serves to represent the findings of the study in the concluding chapter. The empirical findings, which are presented in chapter 5, were organized in chronological order of the conducted semi-structured, qualitative interviews with software development start-ups in Sweden. Valuable results for the research areas of entrepreneurship and PM, as well as for the practical usage in those fields could be generated. The summarized results of this qualitative study are summarized and presented in chapter 6, titled empirical analysis. The authors found out that the majority of the contacted start-ups did not plan a lot in the launching phase of the business, in fact, they did not apply specific PM tools. While the business was growing, so did its complexity, which is why the need for applying PM tools became more present. Even though no clear connection between the previous work experience of the entrepreneur and the applied PM tools could be established, it was noticeable that prior exposure to PM made the entrepreneurs more aware of the methods and tools. They specifically looked for some and used them more knowingly. Further drivers for choosing a PM method and tools were recommendations and personal research. Next to the stage and scale of the business, especially the team size, the location of the team members and their familiarity with each other appeared to influence the decision on using specific tools tremendously. In general, it could be detected in this study, that the APM framework was commonly recognized as highly valuable for start-ups and many of the respondents already follow it or want to do so in the future. Moreover, primarily only one or very few tools were applied within the start-ups to not lose track of the business development and keep everything concise.

The rate at which articles gets published grows exponentially and the possibility to access texts in machine-readable formats is also increasing. The need of an automated system to gather relevant information from text, text mining, is thus growing. The goal of this thesis is to find a biologically relevant gene network for atherosclerosis, themain cause of cardiovascular disease, by inspecting gene cooccurrences in abstracts from PubMed. In addition to this gene nets for yeast was generated to evaluate the validity of using text mining as a method. The nets found were validated in many ways, they were for example found to have the well known power law link distribution. They were also compared to other gene nets generated by other, often microbiological, methods from different sources. In addition to classic measurements of similarity like overlap, precision, recall and f-score a new way to measure similarity between nets are proposed and used. The method uses an urn approximation and measures the distance from comparing two unrelated nets in standard deviations. The validity of this approximation is supported both analytically and with simulations for both Erd¨os-R´enyi nets and nets having a power law link distribution. The new method explains that very poor overlap, precision, recall and f-score can still be very far from random and also how much overlap one could expect at random. The cutoff was also investigated. Results are typically in the order of only 1% overlap but with the remarkable distance of 100 standard deviations from what one could have expected at random. Of particular interest is that one can only expect an overlap of 2 edges with a variance of 2 when comparing two trees with the same set of nodes. The use of a cutoff at one for cooccurrence graphs is discussed and motivated by for example the observation that this eliminates about 60-70% of the false positives but only 20-30% of the overlapping edges. This thesis shows that text mining of PubMed can be used to generate a biologically relevant gene subnet of the human gene net. A reasonable extension of this work is to combine the nets with gene expression data to find a more reliable gene net.

A Tomografia por Impedância Elétrica tem como objetivo estimar a distribuição de impedância elétrica dentro de uma região a partir de medidas de potencial elétrico coletadas apenas em seu contorno externo quando corrente elétrica é imposta neste mesmo contorno. Uma das aplicações para esta tecnologia é o monitoramento das condições pulmonares de pacientes em Unidades de Tratamento Intensivo. Dentre vários algoritmos, destacam-se os filtros de Kalman que abordam o problema de estimação sob o ponto de vista probabilístico, procurando encontrar a distribuição de probabilidade do estado condicionada à realização das medidas. Para que estes filtros possam ser utilizados, um modelo de evolução temporal do sistema sendo observado deve ser adotado. Esta tese propõe o uso de um modelo de evolução para a variação de volume de ar nos pulmões durante a respiração de um paciente sob ventilação artificial. Este modelo é utilizado no unscented Kalman filter, uma extensão não linear do filtro de Kalman. Tal modelo é ajustado em paralelo à estimação do estado, utilizando um esquema dual de estimação. Um algoritmo de segmentação de imagem é proposto para identificar as regiões pulmonares nas imagens estimadas e assim utilizar o modelo de evolução. Com o intuito de melhorar as estimativas, o método do erro de aproximação é utilizado no modelo de observação para mitigar os erros de modelagem e informação a priori é adicionada na solução do problema inverso mal-posto. O método é avaliado através de simulações numéricas e ensaio experimental coletado em um voluntário. Os resultados mostram que o método proposto melhora as estimativas feitas pelo filtro de Kalman, propiciando a visualização de imagens absolutas, dinâmicas e com bom nível de contraste entre os tecidos e órgãos internos. / Electrical impedance tomography estimates the electrical impedance distribution within a region given a set of electrical potential measurements acquired along its boundary at the same time that electrical currents are imposed on the same boundary. One of the applications of this technology is lung monitoring of patients in Intensive Care Units. One class of algorithms employed for the estimation are the Kalman filters which deal with the estimation problem in a probabilistic framework, looking for the probability density function of the state conditioned to the acquired measurements. In order to use such filters, an evolution models of the system must be employed. This thesis proposes an evolution model of the variation of air in the lungs of patients under artificial ventilation. This model is used on the Unscented Kalman Filter, a nonlinear extension of the Kalman filter. This model is adjusted in parallel to the state estimation, in a dual estimation scheme. An image segmentation algorithm is proposed for identifying the lungs in the images. In order to improve the estimate, the approximation error method is employed for mitigating the observation model errors and prior information is added for the solution of the ill-posed inverse problem. The method is evaluated with numerical simulations and with experimental data of a volunteer. The results show that the proposed method increases the quality of the estimates, allowing the visualization of absolute and dynamic images, with good level of contrast between the tissues and internal organs.

Submitted by Franciele Moreira (francielemoreyra@gmail.com) on 2017-08-24T16:56:13Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Arlan Alves lourenço - 2017.pdf: 960702 bytes, checksum: df23c9ed1913031a62b34b635157d9b9 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-09-15T12:40:44Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Arlan Alves lourenço - 2017.pdf: 960702 bytes, checksum: df23c9ed1913031a62b34b635157d9b9 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-15T12:40:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Arlan Alves lourenço - 2017.pdf: 960702 bytes, checksum: df23c9ed1913031a62b34b635157d9b9 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-07-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / It had aimed to study the relationship of interference of weeds about the morphogenesis, productivity and greenhouse gases production of Urochloa ruziziensis. The research was installed at Mato Grosso Federal University, Barra do Garças County. The experimental design was randomized block, four replication and seven levels of coexistence period that are 0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90 days. Analyses were done to morphological parameters: tiller number, leaves number, green leaf biomass, green stein biomass, dry leaf blade biomass and dry stein biomass. After to have the biomass, it were calculated the green dry matter and dead dry matter availability corresponding to each period and it percentage participation in the total grass availability. Also, it was done analyses in vitro of greenhouse gases methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Variance analyses were done in the results to 5% and mean tests by Scott-Knott to 5%. The biomass production, CH4 and CO2 of U. ruziziensis were modify with only 15 days of coexistence with weeds having bigger effect after 45 days. It concludes that weeds interfere in the all morphological parameters, productivity and greenhouse gases production of U. ruziziensis. / Objetivou-se estudar a relação de interferência de plantas daninhas sobre a morfogênese, produção de gases de efeito estufa e produtividade da Urochloa ruziziensis. O experimento foi instalado na Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Campus Universitário do Araguaia, no município de Barra do Garças - MT.O delineamento experimental foi em blocos ao acaso, com os tratamentos constando de períodos de convivência 0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90 dias com quatro repetições. Foram realizadas análises dos parâmetros morfogênicos: número de perfilho, número de folhas, biomassa de lâmina foliar fotossinteticamente ativa, biomassa de caule verde, biomassa da lâmina foliar seca e biomassa de caule seco. Após a obtenção das biomassas, foram calculadas as disponibilidades de matéria seca verde e matéria seca morta correspondente a cada período e suas participações percentuais na disponibilidade total de forragem. Também foram realizadas análises in vitro de produção dos gases metano (CH4) e dióxido de carbono (CO2). Os resultados foram submetidos à análise de variância pelo teste F e para os testes de média utilizou-se Scott-Knott a 5%. A produção de biomassa, CH4 e CO2 da U. ruziziensis foi alterada logo aos 15 dias de convivência com as plantas daninhas havendo efeito ainda maior a partir de 45 dias. Conclui-se que as plantas daninhas interferem em todos os parâmetros morfológicos, na produtividade e na produção de gases de efeito estufa da Urochloa ruziziensis.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:35:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ricardo Andrade Saadi.pdf: 8601638 bytes, checksum: bdfdf748e1a4e616d79057edd8556315 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-19 / Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa / The present study comprises two issues related to the Brazilian scenario: the absence of educational activities in prisons and the new strategy of Brazilian authorities in fighting against organized crime, which in based on the impoverishment of criminal activity, creating a buildup situation in police and judicial deposits of goods constricted in criminal proceedings. The main goal of this work is demonstrating that educational activities in prisons can be financed by the amounts obtained by selling the above mentioned assets. / O presente trabalho aborda duas questões atuais do cenário brasileiro, quais sejam:a falta de atividades educacionais nos presídios e a nova postura das autoridades brasileiras no combate ao crime organizado, a qual baseia-se na descapitalização da atividade criminosa, o que gera um acúmulo nos depósitos policiais e judiciais de bens constritos em procedimentos penais. O objetivo do trabalho é demonstrar que as atividades educacionais nos presídios podem ser financiadas pelo valor obtido com a alienação antecipada dos bens supramencionados.

Submitted by Fabiano Vassallo (fabianovassallo2127@gmail.com) on 2017-05-23T16:08:26Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Tese original para UFF - PDF.pdf: 4954001 bytes, checksum: d1ab6d7fa73274b195794a76cd6879c1 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-05-25T19:26:27Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Tese original para UFF - PDF.pdf: 4954001 bytes, checksum: d1ab6d7fa73274b195794a76cd6879c1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-25T19:26:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Tese original para UFF - PDF.pdf: 4954001 bytes, checksum: d1ab6d7fa73274b195794a76cd6879c1 (MD5) / Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio de Janeiro, Campus Arraial do Cabo, RJ / Partindo dos pressupostos teóricos da Abordagem Global, preconizados pelo grupo de autores franceses que se dedicam ao estudo dos problemas de ordem textual e à operacionalização dos constructos teóricos para o ensino de língua, sob a ótica da Linguística Aplicada em Língua Materna, este trabalho possui como objetivo migrar do “restritivamente linguístico” para o “globalmente comunicativo”, buscando trazer novas sugestões de atividades práticas para o ensino de Leitura em nossas escolas, através de oficinas, realizadas com alunos do 1º. e 3º. anos na faixa etária entre 15 e 17 anos, em regimes de internato e semi-internato do Ensino Médio integrado ao Técnico de uma escola pública federal – Instituto Federal Sul de Minas- Câmpus Muzambinho/MG. Essas atividades estão baseadas nas cinco capacidades da Competência Comunicativa- conceito preconizado pelos autores acima mencionados- e nas dez estratégias de leitor maduro ou de sucesso da autora inglesa Hosenfeld. Como pano de fundo pedagógico, utilizamo-nos das orientações da Pedagogia Simbólica de Byington, cuja teoria nos orienta para a valorização dos sentidos, da mente e do corpo na construção do saber, aqui, especificamente, no estudo de Leitura em nossas salas de aula. Assim, o trabalho busca conjugar mente/mãos; cognitivo/afetivo; subjetivo/objetivo; abstrato/concreto. Uma forma por nós encontrada para a viabilização desse processo de conjugação foi a utilização dos conhecimentos prévios dos alunos e a proposta preliminar de construção de objetos concretos que servirão como uma espécie de detonadores anamnésicos capazes de funcionar como ganchos retentivos das experiências vividas / Starting from the theoretical assumptions of the Global Approach, advocated by the group of French writers who are dedicated to the study of the problems of textual order and the operationalization of theoretical models for the theaching of language from the viewpoint of Applied Linguistics in Native Language constructs and considering that this study has the goal of migrating from a “strictly linguistic” view to an “overall communicative” vision, seeking to bring new suggestions for practical activities for teaching reading in our schools through workshops conducted with students from 1 st. and 3 rd. years of high school, between the ages of 15 and 17 in boarding and semi-boarding high schools integrated to a Federal technical school – Instituto Federal do Sul de Minas – Câmpus Muzambinho/MG. These activities are based on the five capabilities of Communicative Competence concept advocated by the authors mentioned above and the ten strategies for developing mature or successful readers displayed by the English author Hosenfeld. As a pedagogical background, we use us the guidelines of Symbolic Pedagogy by Byington, whose theory guides us to the enhancement of the senses, the mind and body in the construction of knowledge, here, specifically in the study of reading in our classrooms. The study seeks to combine mind / hands; cognitive / affective; subjective/ objective; abstract / concrete. Finding a way for us to achieve this conjugation process with the use of prior knowledge of the students and preliminary proposed construction of concrete objects that serve as kind of anamnestic detonators capable of functioning as retentive hooks of experiences

No description available.

An important problem in bioinformatics is the reconstruction of gene regulatory networks from expression data. The analysis of genomic data stemming from high- throughput technologies such as microarray experiments or RNA-sequencing faces several difficulties. The first major issue is the high variable to sample ratio which is due to a number of factors: a single experiment captures all genes while the number of experiments is restricted by the experiment’s cost, time and patient cohort size. The second problem is that these data sets typically exhibit high amounts of noise.<p><p>Another important problem in bioinformatics is the question of how the inferred networks’ quality can be evaluated. The current best practice is a two step procedure. In the first step, the highest scoring interactions are compared to known interactions stored in biological databases. The inferred networks passes this quality assessment if there is a large overlap with the known interactions. In this case, a second step is carried out in which unknown but high scoring and thus promising new interactions are validated ’by hand’ via laboratory experiments. Unfortunately when integrating prior knowledge in the inference procedure, this validation procedure would be biased by using the same information in both the inference and the validation. Therefore, it would no longer allow an independent validation of the resulting network.<p><p>The main contribution of this thesis is a complete computational framework that uses experimental knock down data in a cross-validation scheme to both infer and validate directed networks. Its components are i) a method that integrates genomic data and prior knowledge to infer directed networks, ii) its implementation in an R/Bioconductor package and iii) a web application to retrieve prior knowledge from PubMed abstracts and biological databases. To infer directed networks from genomic data and prior knowledge, we propose a two step procedure: First, we adapt the pairwise feature selection strategy mRMR to integrate prior knowledge in order to obtain the network’s skeleton. Then for the subsequent orientation phase of the algorithm, we extend a criterion based on interaction information to include prior knowledge. The implementation of this method is available both as part of the prior retrieval tool Predictive Networks and as a stand-alone R/Bioconductor package named predictionet.<p><p>Furthermore, we propose a fully data-driven quantitative validation of such directed networks using experimental knock-down data: We start by identifying the set of genes that was truly affected by the perturbation experiment. The rationale of our validation procedure is that these truly affected genes should also be part of the perturbed gene’s childhood in the inferred network. Consequently, we can compute a performance score / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Statistics / James Higgins / Many studies are performed on units that cannot be replicated due to cost or other restrictions. There often is an abundance of subsampling to estimate the within unit component of variance, but what is needed for statistical tests is an estimate of the between unit component of variance. There is evidence to suggest that the ratio of the between component of variance to the total variance will remain relatively constant over a range of studies of similar types. Moreover, in many cases this intraclass correlation, which is the ratio of the between unit variance to the total variance, will be relatively small, often 0.1 or less. Such situations exist in education, agriculture, and medicine to name a few. The present study discusses how to use such prior information on the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) to obtain inferences about differences among treatments in the face of no replication. Several strategies that use the ICC are recommended for different situations and various designs. Their properties are investigated. Work is extended to under-replicated experiments. The work has a Bayesian flavor but avoids the full Bayesian analysis, which has computational complexities and the potential for lack of acceptance among many applied researchers. This study compares the prior information ICC methods with traditional methods. Situations are suggested in which prior information ICC methods are preferable to traditional methods and those in which the traditional methods are preferable.

Magister Legum - LLM / There is a growing interplay of competing realities facing the international community in the general areas of innovation, technological advancement and overall economic development. The highly industrialised wealthy nations, largely located on the Northern hemisphere are on the one hand undoubtedly at the forefront in global research, technology and infrastructure development. The developing and least developed countries on the other hand are mostly situated on the Southern hemisphere. They are not as wealthy or technologically advanced as their Northern counterparts, but are naturally endowed with unique variations of plant, animal and micro-organism species occurring in natural ecosystems, as well as the traditional knowledge on how to use these unique species. This knowledge has been adjudged to be responsible for the sustainable maintenance of the earth biodiversity. Increasing exploitation of biodiversity spurred on by the competing realities identified above, has left the earth in a present state of alarm with respect to the uncontrolled loss of biodiversity. The traditional knowledge of local peoples has significantly offered leads to research institutes from the North in developing major advancements in drugs, cosmetics and agriculture. Little or no compensation has however been seen to go back to the indigenous communities and countries that provide resources, and indicate various possibilities through their traditional knowledge to the use of such resources. Efforts by some biodiversity rich countries to ddress this trend through legislation developed in accordance with the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity have been frustrated due to the inability to enforce their domestic laws outside their borders. Theft of genetic resources and its associated traditional knowledge from such countries has therefore remained a major challenge. Against this backdrop, and on the insistence of biodiversity-rich developing countries, an international regime on access and benefit sharing was negotiated and its final text adopted in 2010. This international regime is as contained in the Nagoya Protocol. This research sets out to examine whether the Nagoya Protocol offers a final solution to the protection of traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity in biodiverse countries. It further examines the importance of domestic legislation in achieving the objectives of the Protocol. The research has been tailored to African biodiverse countries, and seeks these answers within the context of Africa. / South Africa