The Phylogenetic reconstruction has seen great development in the last 30 years. Computers have become more powerful and more generally accessible, and computer algorithms more sophisticated. It comes the effort of scientists to reconstruct the entire tree of life from a large amount of phylogenetic data. Just for this purpose are formed phylogenetic supertrees that allow the combination of all information gathered so far. The aim of this work is to find a method to construct supertree that will give correct results.

This master's thesis concerns the use of the methodology of the decision tree in the investment decision making. The proposed decision model provides the best solution from the available options for the EXPECT-IT ltd. company. This thesis contains also a range of own proposals followed by their evaluation.

There are an analysis of main business processes, inner and outer spheres of business where IS/ICT could be a merit in the thesis. Suitable information and communication technologies are chosen to support running a company which deals with cultural events organizing and restaurant activities.

This term project describes the concept of information system based on the virtual file system and the reasons which led to the creation of this concept. It discusses the basic approaches to solve common parts of the functionality of information system (such as access rights management, structure of data and managing configuration of system) and tries to find the concept that solves this functionality consistently and easily. The main objective of the proposed concept is to create a system that brings simplicity and intuitiveness of user interface, unification of common functionality and maximum flexibility and extensibility. The whole concept is based on the representation of the system as a tree of virtual files on which user performs actions.

This term project addresses the construction of kD tree acceleration structures and parallelization of this construction using GPU. At the beginning, there is an introduction of the reader into CUDA platform for parallel programming. There is a decription of generic principles as well as specific features that will be used in this thesis. Following that the reader is put into the issue of acceleration structures for Ray tracing. These structures are described and the kD tree acceleration structure and its variants are portrayed in detail. After that the analysis of chosen kD tree variant is broken down and the problems and issuse of its parallel implementation are adressed. As a part of implementation discription, there is a short descripton of CPU variant and detailed specifications of the CUDA kernels. The testing section brings the results of implementation in form of CPU vs GPU comparison, as well as evaluation of how much the metric set in design was fulfilled. In the end there is a summary of achieved goals and results followed by possible future improvements for the implementation.

Durch die europaweite Liberalisierung der Strommärkte entsteht ein zunehmend liquider Binnenmarkt für Strom. Auf einem liberalisierten Markt ist ein enger Zusammenhang zwischen Preisen und Grenzkosten zu erwarten, diese werden in der Stromerzeugung im wesentlichen durch den Einsatz von Primärenergieträgern verursacht. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wird das German Electricity Market Model (GEMM) vorgestellt, das den deutschen Strommarkt in seiner Interaktion mit den Strommärkten anderer europäischer Staaten modelliert. In GEMM werden Stromangebot und -nachfrage verschiedener europäischer Regionen genauso wie die Transportkapazitäten zwischen diesen Regionen über mehrere Zeitschritte abgebildet und in ein lineares Optimierungsproblem übersetzt. Mit Hilfe einer Optimierungsrechnung können anschließend die Auswirkungen von Veränderungen der Preise der Energieträger Steinkohle, Erdgas und Heizöl auf den Strompreis sowie den Stromaustausch der abgebildeten Regionen simuliert und interpretiert werden.

In our bachelor thesis, we described an implicit data structure that, given a way to maintain an implicit representation of polylogarithmic buckets, could implement all the dynamic ordered dictionary operations in logarithmic time. We now fulfill our obligation and provide a corresponding construction of implicit buckets. 1

One fundamental condition for a democracy to work is the possibility for voters to hold their legislators to account. Because voter turnout in European Parliament (EP) elections is so low, however, the task of holding MEPs accountable is passed on to the national parties. These become ‘transmission belts’ between voters and legislators: they instruct the MEPs how to vote and present them threats and rewards to ensure they vote as promised. To study how well this works, this thesis aims at exploring what influences how an MEP votes in situations where the national party and the European Party Group (EPG) hold conflicting policy positions. A new analytical framework is built to generate and preliminarily test hypotheses concerning what influences how an MEP votes. The analytical framework is largely inspired by Strøm (1990), who assumes that legislators are driven by their wishes of getting policy through, reaching high office and being re-elected. Normally, these goals can be reached with the help of the legislator’s party, which is why legislators have an incentive to keep their party happy and vote according to its policy position. In the EP, however, things are complicated by the fact that certain goals can only be reached with the help of legislators’ EPGs. Hypotheses concerning what may drive MEPs to vote either with her national party or with her EPG are tested in the thesis with the help of unique interview data, collected from five Swedish MEPs from parties in government. The thesis’ results show that policy-related incentives are most important to MEPs, and that these incentives are mainly controlled by EPGs. Office- and re-election-related incentives are only ascribed limited importance. There are contextual factors that affect these results: if an issue is perceived as important to Sweden or to the national party or if it receives high media attention, MEPs ascribe less importance to EPG-controlled incentives, although this does not mean that national party-controlled incentives increase in importance. In conclusion, MEPs do not seem to feel pressured by their national parties when deciding how to vote. This leads me to the conclusion that the role of national parties as ‘transmission belts’ between voters and MEPs is defective

In this thesis we study the Aronszajn and special Aronszajn trees, their existence and nonexistence. We introduce the most common definition of special Aronszajn tree and some of its generalizations and we examine the relations between them. Next we study the notions of the tree property and the weak tree property at a given regular cardinal κ. The tree property means that there are no Aronszajn trees at κ and the weak tree property means that there are no special Aronszajn trees at κ. We define and compare two forcings, the Mitchell forcing and the Grigorieff forcing, and we use them to obtain a model in which the (weak) tree property holds at a given cardinal. At the end, we show how to use the Mitchell forcing to construct a model in which the (weak) tree property holds at more than one cardinal. 1

Goal of this work is to write an optimized program for visualization of 3D scenes using ray tracing method. First, the theory of ray tracing together with particular techniques are presented. Next part focuses on different approaches to accelerate the algorithm. These are space partitioning structures, fast ray-triangle intersection technique and possibilities to parallelize the whole ray tracing method. A standalone chapter addresses the design and implementation of the ray tracing program.