abstract: The Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) is an integrated assessment tool for exploring consequences and responses to global change. However, the current iteration of GCAM relies on NetCDF file outputs which need to be exported for visualization and analysis purposes. Such a requirement limits the uptake of this modeling platform for analysts that may wish to explore future scenarios. This work has focused on a web-based geovisual analytics interface for GCAM. Challenges of this work include enabling both domain expert and model experts to be able to functionally explore the model. Furthermore, scenario analysis has been widely applied in climate science to understand the impact of climate change on the future human environment. The inter-comparison of scenario analysis remains a big challenge in both the climate science and visualization communities. In a close collaboration with the Global Change Assessment Model team, I developed the first visual analytics interface for GCAM with a series of interactive functions to help users understand the simulated impact of climate change on sectors of the global economy, and at the same time allow them to explore inter comparison of scenario analysis with GCAM models. This tool implements a hierarchical clustering approach to allow inter-comparison and similarity analysis among multiple scenarios over space, time, and multiple attributes through a set of coordinated multiple views. After working with this tool, the scientists from the GCAM team agree that the geovisual analytics tool can facilitate scenario exploration and enable scientific insight gaining process into scenario comparison. To demonstrate my work, I present two case studies, one of them explores the potential impact that the China south-north water transportation project in the Yangtze River basin will have on projected water demands. The other case study using GCAM models demonstrates how the impact of spatial variations and scales on similarity analysis of climate scenarios varies at world, continental, and country scales. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2015

Media consumption has shown a tremendous increase in recent years, and with this increase, new audience expectations are put on the features offered by media-streaming services. One of these expectations is the ability to skip redundant content, which most probably is not of interest to the user. In this work, intro sequences which have sufficient length and a high degree of image similarity across all episodes of a show is targeted for detection. A statistical prediction model for classifying video intros based on these features was proposed. The model tries to identify frame similarities across videos from the same show and then filter out incorrect matches. The performance evaluation of the prediction model shows that the proposed solution for unguided predictions had an accuracy of 90.1%, and precision and recall rate of 93.8% and 95.8% respectively.The mean margin of error for a predicted start and end was 1.4 and 2.0 seconds. The performance was even better if the model had prior knowledge of one or more intro sequences from the same TV series confirmed by a human. However, due to dataset limitations the result is inconclusive. The prediction model was integrated into an automated system for processing internet videos available on SVT Play, and included administrative capabilities for correcting invalid predictions. / Under de senaste åren så har konsumtionen av TV-serier ökat markant och med det tillkommer nya förväntningar på den funktionalitet som erbjuds av webb-TVtjänster. En av dessa förväntningar är förmågan att kunna hoppa över redundant innehåll, vilket troligen inte är av intresse för användaren. I detta arbete så ligger fokus på att detektera video intron som bedöms som tillräckligt långa och har en hög grad av bildlighet över flera episoder från samma TV-program. En statistisk modell för att klassificera intron baserat på dessa egenskaper föreslogs. Modellen jämför bilder från samma TV-program för att försöka identifiera matchande sekvenser och filtrera bort inkorrekta matchningar. Den framtagna modellen hade en träffsäkerhet på 90.1%, precision på 93.8% och en återkallelseförmåga på 95.8%. Medelfelmarginalen uppgick till 1.4 sekunder för start och 2.0 sekunder för slut av ett intro. Modellen presterade bättre om den hade tillgång till en eller fler liknande introsekvenser från relaterade videor från sammaTV-program bekräftat av en människa. Eftersom datasetet som användes för testning hade vissa brister så ska resultatet endast ses som vägledande. Modellen integrerades i ett system som automatiskt processar internet videos frånSVT-Play. Ett tillhörande administrativt verktyg skapades även för att kunna rätta felaktiga gissningar.

Spelling normalization is the task to normalize non-standard words into standard words in texts, resulting in a decrease in out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in texts for natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, and opinion mining, improving the performance of various NLP applications on normalized texts. In this thesis, we explore different methods for spelling normalization of English student writings including traditional Levenshtein edit distance comparison, phonetic similarity comparison, character-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and character-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) methods. An important improvement of our implementation is that we develop an approach combining Levenshtein edit distance and phonetic similarity methods with added components of frequency count and compound splitting and it is evaluated as a best approach with 0.329% accuracy improvement and 63.63% error reduction on the original unnormalized test set.