The number of project-based organizations is increasing every year; this increase indicates the need to understand the complexities and ascertain the best ways of managing them. In these organizations, where the multi-project complex environment is dominant, one of the main challenges is dealing with project interdependencies. Interdependency relationships among the projects can be better understood and managed if appropriate tools and techniques are used efficiently. Thus, the ultimate goal of this study is to investigate and evaluate the best methods practiced by project-based organizations to effectively manage the interdependencies among the projects and suggest a new approach to view and understand those relationships better. A number of past researches have emphasized that effective project interdependency management results in an increase of the project and portfolio success. This research examines and explainsthe impacts of knowledge creation and knowledge transfer on interdependency management and vice-versa, by reviewing the existing literature and collecting data through multi-method qualitative study. In addition, the role of visual interdependency management and visual knowledge management tools are analyzed and compared, with the purpose of filling the gaps in the currently available literature, and investigating their moderating effects on interdependency management. Previous studies have found supporting evidence for the impacts of project interdependency management, knowledge creation and knowledge transfer on project success and organizational performance. However, there is no research targeted on how project interdependencies interact with knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. In order to investigate these interactions four project-based organizations from IT, multinational event management and consulting areas are involved in the semi-structured interviews. Additionally, as a part of qualitative study, questionnaires were undertaken to get access to valuable insights into the project and portfolio managers’ experience in dealing with interdependencies among the projects in the selected cases. The study is explanatory, cross- sectional in nature and takes a mixed approach to theory. The findings showed the presence of mutual impacts between knowledge creation, knowledge transfer processes and project interdependencies. The results revealed that the visual knowledge management tools, which are employed for the knowledge management, are beneficial in terms of project interdependency management as well. The visual interdependency management tools that are separately discussed in the existing literature, were found to be suitable for the knowledge management practices. Thus, it was found reasonable to integrate the visual interdependency management tools into the knowledge management area. As a result, these tools altogether serve to the efficient project interdependency management and lead to more successful project outcomes, which affect the organization’s performance as well.

Code comprehension is crucial for software development, as it ensures that code is easy to read andunderstand.Identifiers, such as variable-, function-, and methodnames playa significant role in code comprehension, and it isimportantthat they are written using meaningful names so thateveryone understands their usage. However, sometimes theycontainabbreviations that can have significantly differentexplanationsdepending on the context they are written in, which couldnegatively impact comprehension if the context is notfully known.Large code bases can be hard to navigate but with thehelp ofCode Visualization Tool (CVT) they can provide anoverviewthat helpfully displays the program’s flow and call graphs.Tohelp with abbreviations in large code bases this studywasconducted to investigate the use of Abbreviation Resolver(AR)techniques integrated into a CVT called Doxygen to seethe effecton identifier comprehension. A survey was performed ontwoopen-source projects with questions about thecomprehensionof different methods using their identifiers with bothresolvedidentifiers and abbreviated identifiers. The survey utilizedAR toanalyze participant ́s understanding of abbreviations todetermine it ́s usefulness. The findings suggest that the use ofa CVTwith an integrated AR helps in understanding uncommonanddomain-knowledge abbreviations which contribute toimprovedcode comprehension.

Submitted by Maicon Juliano Schmidt (maicons) on 2015-07-13T17:24:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Marisa De Camargo Silveira.pdf: 2880498 bytes, checksum: 34a9f1b7aa050daf9ebeb7b14ea0ac9f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-13T17:24:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marisa De Camargo Silveira.pdf: 2880498 bytes, checksum: 34a9f1b7aa050daf9ebeb7b14ea0ac9f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-01-31 / Nenhuma / A presente dissertação abordou aspectos estratégicos de serviços através do uso da tecnologia da informação na construção de estratégias e do entendimento da relevância da correta estruturação de processos mediante o planejamento de cenários e da gestão do conhecimento, bem como da observância da tecnologia orientada para a gestão do conhecimento, alicerçadas pelo design estratégico através de ferramentas de visualização. A estratégia da dissertação, de delineamento qualitativo, utilizou a pesquisa-ação por permitir adequações dos protótipos no decorrer do percurso do estudo, o que é aderente às constantes e necessárias atualizações. Como coleta dos dados, contou com técnicas de observação e entrevista com especialista. O presente estudo teve a seguinte premissa: avaliar, inserir ferramentas de visualização aplicadas a serviços em empresa de TI, e propor a partir dos dois ciclos estudados, uma abordagem de serviços com um portfólio de ferramentas mais participativo, envolvendo o cliente desde o início de cada projeto. Essa nova formatação objetivou a criação da inovação em serviços inerentes ao atendimento de soluções fiscais, dessa forma possibilitando uma atuação diferenciada com o intuito de refletir na geração de valores para os clientes e, consequentemente, obter o reconhecimento da instituição através de seus serviços inovadores. / The current paper has approached strategic aspects of services through the use of information technology in the building of strategies, the understanding of the relevance of the right structuring of processes via the planning of scenarios and knowledge management, as well as the observance of technology oriented to knowledge management, grounded on service strategic design through visualization tools. The paper’s strategy, which had a qualitative profile, made use of an action research method, as it allowed the adaptation of the prototypes in the course of the study, which, in turn, was adherent to the constant and necessary updates. Regarding data collection, observation techniques and interviews with experts were performed. The current study had the following premise: to evaluate and insert visualization tools applied to services in an IT company and, considering the two cycles studied, propose a service approach with a more participatory tool portfolio by involving the costumer since the beginning of each project. This new format pursued the creation of innovation for services inherent to tax solutions. Thus, a distinguished operation, which aimed to reflect on the generation of value to the customers and, consequently, the institution’s recognition for their innovative services have been made possible.

Network packet traces, despite having a lot of noise, contain priceless information, especially for investigating security incidents or troubleshooting performance problems. However, given the gigabytes of flow crossing a typical medium sized enterprise network every day, spotting malicious activity and analyzing trends in network behavior becomes a tedious task. Further, computational mechanisms for analyzing such data usually take substantial time to reach interesting patterns and often mislead the analyst into reaching false positives, benign traffic being identified as malicious, or false negatives, where malicious activity goes undetected. Therefore, the appropriate representation of network traffic data to the human user has been an issue of concern recently. Much of the focus, however, has been on visualizing TCP traffic alone while adapting visualization techniques for the data fields that are relevant to this protocol's traffic, rather than on the multivariate nature of network security data in general, and the fact that forensic analysis, in order to be fast and effective, has to take into consideration different parameters for each protocol. In this thesis, we bring together two powerful tools from different areas of application: SiLK (System for Internet-Level Knowledge), for command-based network trace analysis; and ComVis, a generic information visualization tool. We integrate the power of both tools by aiding simplified interaction between them, using a simple GUI, for the purpose of visualizing network traces, characterizing interesting patterns, and fingerprinting related activity. To obtain realistic results, we applied the visualizations on anonymized packet traces from Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, captured on selected hours across three months. We used a sliding window approach in visually examining traces for two transport-layer protocols: ICMP and UDP. The main contribution of this research is a protocol-specific framework of visualization for ICMP and UDP data. We explored relevant header fields and the visualizations that worked best for each of the two protocols separately. The resulting views led us to a number of guidelines that can be vital in the creation of "smart books" describing best practices in using visualization and interaction techniques to maintain network security; while creating visual fingerprints which were found unique for individual types of scanning activity. Our visualizations use a multiple-views approach that incorporates the power of two-dimensional scatter plots, histograms, parallel coordinates, and dynamic queries. / Master of Science

The rapid advancement of cutting-edge techniques has propelled state-of-the-art (SOTA) language models to new heights. Despite their impressive capabilities across a variety of downstream tasks, large language models still face many challenges such as hallucination and bias. The thesis focuses on two key objectives: first, it measures the robustness of T0_3B and investigates feasible methodologies to enhance the model’s robustness. Second, it targets on the explainability of large language models, aiming to make the intrinsic working mechanism more transparent and, consequently enhance model’s steerability. Motivated by the importance of mitigating non-robust behavior in language models, the thesis initially measures model’s robustness on handling minor perturbation. After that, I proposed and verified an approach to enhance robustness by making input more contextualized, a method that does not require the step of fine-tuning. Moreover, to understand the complex working mechanism of large language models, I designed and introduced two novel visualization tools: ’Logit Lens’ and ’Hidden States Plot in Spherical Coordinate System’. These tools, combined with additional experimental analysis, revealed a noticeable differentiation of the predicted processes between the first predicted token and subsequent tokens. The contributions of the thesis are mainly in the two following aspects: it provides feasible methodologies to enhance the robustness of language models without the need of fine-tuning, and it contributes to the field of explainable AI through the development of two visualization tools that shed light on the understanding of the working mechanism. / Den snabba utvecklingen av banbrytande tekniker har drivit språkmodeller till nya höjder. Trots deras imponerande prestanda över diverse språkrelaterade uppgifter, trots detta har dessa modeller fortfarande problem som hallucinationer och bias. Avhandlingen är centrerad kring två huvudmål: för det första undersöker den robustheten hos T0_3B och undersöker framtida strategier för att förbättra dess robusthet. För det andra utforskar den språkmodellernas ”förklaringsbarhet” (dvs hur väl vi förstår deras beteende), i syfte att göra dem mer transparenta och följaktligen förbättra modellens styrbarhet. Det första vi gör är att visa experiment som vi har satt upp för att mäta modellens robusthet mot mindre störningar. Som svar föreslår och underbygger vi ett tillvägagångssätt för att öka robustheten genom att ge modellen mer kontext när en fråga ställs, en metod som inte kräver vidare träning av modellen. Dessutom, för att förstå den komplexiteten hos språkmodeller, introducerar jag två nya visualiseringsverktyg: Logit Lens och Hidden States Plot i sfäriskt koordinatsystem. Dessa verktyg, i kombination med ytterligare experimentell analys, avslöjar ett diskting mönstr för den första förutspådda ordet jämfört med efterföljande ord. Bidragen från avhandlingen är huvudsakligen i de två följande aspekterna: den ger praktiska åtgärder för att förbättra robustheten hos språkmodeller utan behov av vidare träning, och den bidrar till området för förklarabar AI genom utvecklingen av två visualiseringsverktyg som ökar våran förståelse för hur dessa modeller fungerar.

Ensuring food security in a world with an increasing population and demand on natural resources is becoming ever more pertinent. Plant breeders are using an increasingly diverse range of data types such as phenotypic and genotypic data to identify plant lines with desirable characteristics suitable to be taken forward in plant breeding programmes. These characteristics include a number of key morphological and physiological traits, such as disease resistance and yield that need to be maintained and improved upon if a commercial plant variety is to be successful. The ability to predict and understand the inheritance of alleles that facilitate resistance to pathogens or any other commercially important characteristic is crucially important to experimental plant genetics and commercial plant breeding programmes. However, derivation of the inheritance of such traits by traditional molecular techniques is expensive and time consuming, even with recent developments in high-throughput technologies. This is especially true in industrial settings where, due to time constraints relating to growing seasons, many thousands of plant lines may need to be screened quickly, efficiently and economically every year. Thus, computational tools that provide the ability to integrate and visualize diverse data types with an associated plant pedigree structure will enable breeders to make more informed and subsequently better decisions on the plant lines that are used in crossings. This will help meet both the demands for increased yield and production and adaptation to climate change. Traditional family tree style layouts are commonly used and simple to understand but are unsuitable for the data densities that are now commonplace in large breeding programmes. The size and complexity of plant pedigrees means that there is a cognitive limitation in conceptualising large plant pedigree structures, therefore novel techniques and tools are required by geneticists and plant breeders to improve pedigree comprehension. Taking a user-centred, iterative approach to design, a pedigree visualization system was developed for exploring a large and unique set of experimental barley (H. vulgare) data. This work progressed from the development of a static pedigree visualization to interactive prototypes and finally the Helium pedigree visualization software. At each stage of the development process, user feedback in the form of informal and more structured user evaluation from domain experts guided the development lifecycle with users' concerns addressed and additional functionality added. Plant pedigrees are very different to those from humans and farmed animals and consequently the development of the pedigree visualizations described in this work focussed on implementing currently accepted techniques used in pedigree visualization and adapting them to meet the specific demands of plant pedigrees. Helium includes techniques to aid problems with user understanding identified through user testing; examples of these include difficulties where crosses between varieties are situated in different regions of the pedigree layout. There are good biological reasons why this happens but it has been shown, through testing, that it leads to problems with users' comprehension of the relatedness of individuals in the pedigree. The inclusion of visual cues and the use of localised layouts have allowed complications like these to be reduced. Other examples include the use of sizing of nodes to show the frequency of usage of specific plant lines which have been shown to act as positional reference points to users, and subsequently bringing a secondary level of structure to the pedigree layout. The use of these novel techniques has allowed the classification of three main types of plant line, which have been coined: principal, flanking and terminal plant lines. This technique has also shown visually the most frequently used plant lines, which while previously known in text records, were never quantified. Helium's main contributions are two-fold. Firstly it has applied visualization techniques used in traditional pedigrees and applied them to the domain of plant pedigrees; this has addressed problems with handling large experimental plant pedigrees. The scale, complexity and diversity of data and the number of plant lines that Helium can handle exceed other currently available plant pedigree visualization tools. These techniques (including layout, phenotypic and genotypic encoding) have been improved to deal with the differences that exist between human/mammalian pedigrees which take account of problems such as the complexity of crosses and routine inbreeding. Secondly, the verification of the effectiveness of the visualizations has been demonstrated by performing user testing on a group of 28 domain experts. The improvements have advanced both user understanding of pedigrees and allowed a much greater density and scale of data to be visualized. User testing has shown that the implementation and extensions to visualization techniques has improved user comprehension of plant pedigrees when asked to perform real-life tasks with barley datasets. Results have shown an increase in correct responses between the prototype interface and Helium. A SUS analysis has sown a high acceptance rate for Helium.

El presente trabajo de investigación que se muestra a continuación comprende el análisis y ejecución de la problemática encontrada en la empresa Grupo Deltron, el cual ha reportado un descenso de ventas en unidades de su línea de notebooks. Para el desarrollo del trabajo se ha implementado la metodología de la ciencia de datos, el cual permitió desarrollar el objetivo general , pues se logró identificar los conglomerados de clientes que mostraron un comportamiento importante producto de las ventas de la línea de notebooks en el 2020, estos datos obtenidos fueron brindados por un integrante del equipo, quien maneja información directa de la base de datos interna de la misma empresa de Grupo Deltron, facilitando la recopilación para el desarrollo del trabajo de investigación, con ello se identificaron 18 variables con 184 646 registros que fueron fundamentales para establecer el modelo de enfoque de análisis que se aplicara en el trabajo de manera descriptiva y prescriptiva. Asimismo, se aplicaron herramientas de visualización que permitieron obtener mayor claridad de los datos y definir las variables de indagación, obteniendo resultados consistentes y determinantes para la solución de la problemática inicial. / The present research work that is shown below comprises the analysis and execution of the problems found in the company Grupo Deltron, which has reported a decrease in sales in units of its line of notebooks. For the development of the work, the data science methodology has been implemented, which managed to develop the general objective, since it was possible to identify the clusters of clients that showed an important behavior due to the sales of the notebook line in 2020, These data were provided by a team member, who manages direct information from the internal database of the same Deltron Group company, facilitating the compilation for the development of the research work, with this, 18 variables were identified with 184646 records that were fundamental to establish the analysis approach model that will be applied in the work in a descriptive and prescriptive way. Likewise, visualization tools were applied that allowed obtaining greater clarity of the data and defining the inquiry variables, obtaining consistent and decisive results for the solution of the initial problem. / Trabajo de investigación

The purpose of this diploma thesis is to provide a complex overview for the network status visualization topic. The diploma thesis is structured into four parts. The first one is dedicated to the definition of the most important terms, together with the description of several visualization methods, network metrics and last but not least to the discussion of visualization risks and benefits. In the second part, an own visualization process is at first proposed and then the particular steps of this process are discussed. Easy to understand examples are applied through this part. In the third part, several method of data collection protocols and visualization tools are briefly described. The analyzed tools are graphic libraries, as well as standalone applications and Network Management Systems. The last part is dedicated to the analysis of the current visualization tools used on the VŠE network. A short analysis of the university's network is also made. According to this analysis, an own solution is proposed for a particular part of network.