published_or_final_version / Civil and Structural Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Electrical Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Benchmarks set standards for innovation in computer architecture research and industry product development. Consequently, it is of paramount importance that the benchmarks used in computer architecture research and development are representative of real-world applications. However, composing such representative workloads poses practical challenges to application analysis teams and benchmark developers - (1) Benchmarks that are standardized are open-source whereas applications of interest are typically proprietary, (2) Benchmarks are rigid, measure single-point performance, and only represent a sample of the application behavior space (3) Benchmark suites take several years to develop, but applications evolve at a faster rate, and (4) Benchmarks geared towards temperature and power characterization are difficult to develop and standardize. The objective of this dissertation is to develop an adaptive benchmark generation strategy to construct synthetic benchmarks to address these benchmarking challenges. We propose an approach for automatically distilling key hardware-independent performance attributes of a proprietary workload and capture them into a miniature synthetic benchmark clone. The advantage of the benchmark clone is that it hides the functional meaning of the code, but exhibits similar performance and power characteristics as the target application across a wide range of microarchitecture configurations. Moreover, the dynamic instruction count of the synthetic benchmark clone is substantially shorter than the proprietary application, greatly reducing overall simulation time -- for the SPEC CPU 2000 suite, the simulation time reduction is over five orders of magnitude compared to the entire benchmark execution. We develop an adaptive benchmark generation strategy that trades off accuracy to provide the flexibility to easily alter program characteristics. The parameterization of workload metrics makes it possible to succinctly describe an application's behavior using a limited number of fundamental program characteristics. This provides the ability to alter workload characteristics and construct scalable benchmarks that allows researchers to explore a wider range of the application behavior space, conduct program behavior studies, and model emerging workloads. The parameterized workload model is the foundation for automatically constructing power and temperature oriented synthetic workloads. We show that machine learning algorithms can be effectively used to search the application behavior space to automatically construct benchmarks for evaluating the power and temperature characteristics of a computer architecture design. The need for a scientific approach to construct synthetic benchmarks, to complement application benchmarks, has long been recognized by the computer architecture research community, and this dissertation work is a significant step towards achieving that goal.

Includes bibliographical references. / This project was commissioned in order to provide engineers with the necessary knowledge of steel wire winder ropes so that they may make accurate decisions as to when a rope is near the end of its useful life. For this purpose, a knowledge base was compiled from the experience of experts in the field in order to create an expert system to aid the engineer in his task. The EXSYS expert system shell was used to construct a rule-based program which would be run on a personal computer. The program derived in this thesis is named ROPES, and provides information as to the forms of damage that may be present in a rope and the effect of any defects on rope strength and rope life. Advice is given as to the procedures that should be followed when damage is detected as well as the conditions which would necessitate rope discard and the urgency with which the replacement should take place. The expert system program will provide engineers with the necessary expertise and experience to assess, more accurately than at present, the condition of a winder rope. This should lead to longer rope life and improved safety with the associated cost savings. Rope assessment will also be more uniform with changes to policy being able to be implemented quickly and on an ongoing basis as technology and experience improves. The program ROPES, although compiled from expert knowledge, still requires the further input of personal opinions and inferences to some extent. For this reason, the program cannot be assumed infallible and must be used as an aid only.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1981.

published_or_final_version / Civil and Structural Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborg University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

The thesis analyses the customer behavior of Kiwi.com, a global online retail company for booking flights and proposes marketing interventions to increase the conversion rates in various customer segments. The effectiveness of new behavioral interventions is tested against current marketing efforts using experimental A/B methods. Additionally, areas for further improvements are explored and a design of future product features and marketing behavioral interventions is proposed.

The goal of this thesis is to research to role of data profiling in data quality management and the quality of existing data profiling SW tools. The role of data profiling was based up an analysis of the general methodology of approach to the management of data quality. I've compiled an own methodology for the analysis of data profiling tools. This methodology focuses on three main aspects: Technical requirements, User friendliness and Functionality. Based on the methodology the best SW solution for data profiling was chosen. General shortcomings of tested SW tools were also analysed.