Дисертації з теми "Closed parts"

Le développement des interfaces cerveau-machine (ICM) apporte une nouvelle perspective aux patients en perte d'autonomie motrice. En combinant des enregistrements en ligne de l'activité cérébrale avec un algorithme de décodage, les patients peuvent apprendre à contrôler un bras robotique afin d'effectuer des actions simples. Cependant, contrairement à la grande quantité d'informations somatosensorielles fournie par les membres physiologiques vers le cerveau, les ICM actuelles sont dépourvues de capteurs de toucher et de force. Les patients doivent donc se fier uniquement à la vision et à l'audition, qui sont inadaptées au contrôle d'une prothèse. Cela contraste avec le fait que dans le cas d’un membre sain, les entrées somatosensorielles seules peuvent guider efficacement la manipulation d'un objet fragile, ou assurer une trajectoire précise. Une caractéristique intéressante des entrées somatosensorielles est leur organisation topologique à la surface corticale. Cette carte corticale semble jouer un rôle déterminant dans la perception sensorielle. Par conséquent, l'intégration d'une rétroaction somatosensorielle artificielle alignée sur cette carte corticale pourrait aider grandement l’intégration avoir un impact déterminant dans le transporter un grand nombre d'informations. Pour vérifier cette hypothèse, nous avons développé un ICM chez la souris qui inclut une riche rétroaction corticale artificielle de type somatosensoriel. Notre installation comprend des enregistrements en ligne de l'activité de plusieurs neurones dans le cortex moteur primaire du whisker (wM1), et fournit une rétroaction simultanée via une photostimulation du cortex somatosensoriel primaire du whisker (wS1), à faible latence, haute fréquence et structure spatiale, basée sur une cartographie obtenue par imagerie intrinsèque. Nous démontrons le fonctionnement de la boucle et montrons que les souris peuvent détecter l’activité des neurons dans wS1 déclenchée par les photostimulations. Surtout, nous montrons qu'en utilisant l'ICM en boucle fermée, les souris peuvent avoir une meilleure performance dans une tâche comportementale lorsque la structure du feedback artificiel est respecté somatotopie connue de wS1
The development of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) brings a new perspective to patients with a loss of motor autonomy. By combining online recordings of brain activity with a decoding algorithm, patients can learn to control a robotic arm in order to perform simple actions. However, in contrast to the vast amounts of somatosensory information channeled by limbs to the brain, current BMIs are devoid of touch and force sensors. Patients must therefore rely solely on vision and audition, which are maladapted to the control of a prosthesis. In contrast, in a healthy limb, somatosensory inputs alone can efficiently guide the handling of a brittle object, or ensure a smooth trajectory. One interesting feature of somatosensory inputs is its topological organization at the cortical surface. This cortical map plays a role in sensory perception. Therefore, integrating artificial somatosensory feedback aligned and consistent with this cortical map could potentially help the subject to decode the information conveyed by the feedback. To test this hypothesis, we have developed a BMI in the mouse model that includes a rich artificial somatosensory-like cortical feedback. Our setup includes online recordings of the activity of multiple neurons in the whisker primary motor cortex (wM1), and delivers feedback simultaneously via a low-latency, high-refresh rate photo-stimulation of the whisker primary somatosensory cortex (wS1) that is spatially structured at the mesoscopic scale, based on a mapping obtained by intrinsic imaging. We demonstrate the operation of the loop and show that mice can detect the wS1 neuronal spiking triggered by the photostimulations. Remarkably, we show that in the closed loop BMI, mice can have a significantly better performance in a behavioral task when the structure of the artificial feedback abides to the known wS1 somatotopy

La fabrication d'additive par arcs électriques (WAAM) est en train de devenir la principale technologie de Fabrication Additive (FA) utilisée pour produire des pièces à parois minces de taille moyenne à grande (Ordre de grandeur : 1 m) à un coût moindre. Pour fabriquer une pièce avec cette technologie, la stratégie de planification du trajet utilisée est la 2.5D. Cette stratégie consiste à découper un modèle 3D en différentes couches planes et parallèles les unes aux autres. L'utilisation de cette stratégie limite la complexité des topologies réalisables en WAAM, notamment celles présentant de grandes variations de courbure, et implique plusieurs départs/arrêt de l'arc lors de son passage d'une couche à l'autre. Ceci induit des phénomènes transitoires dans lesquels le contrôle de l'approvisionnement en énergie et en matière est complexe. Dans cette thèse, une nouvelle stratégie de fabrication visant à réduire au minimum les phases de démarrage et d'arrêt de l'arc est présentée. L'objectif de cette stratégie, appelée "Génération de Trajectoire Continue Tridimensionnelle" (GTCT), est de générer une trajectoire continue en forme de spirale pour des pièces minces en boucle fermée. Une vitesse de fil constante couplée à une vitesse de déplacement adaptative permet une modulation de la géométrie de dépôt qui assure un approvisionnement continu en énergie et en matière tout au long du processus de fabrication. L'utilisation de la stratégie 5 axes couplées à la GTCT permet la fabrication de pièces fermées avec une procédure pour déterminer la zone de fermeture optimale, et des pièces sur des substrats non-plans utiles pour ajouter des fonctionnalités à une structure existante. La fabrication de ces pièces avec la GTCT et plusieurs évaluations numériques ont montré la fiabilité de cette stratégie et sa capacité à produire de nouvelles formes complexes avec une bonne restitution géométrique, difficile ou impossible à atteindre aujourd'hui en 2.5D avec la technologie WAAM
Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) is becoming the primary Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology used to produce medium to large (order of magnitude: 1 m) thin-walled parts at lower cost. To manufacture a part with this technology, the path planning strategy used is 2.5D. This strategy consists in cutting a 3D model into different plane layers parallel to each other. The use of this strategy limits the complexity of the topologies achievable in WAAM, especially those with large variations in curvature. It also implies several start/stop of the arc during its passage from one layer to another, which induces transient phenomena in which the control of energy and material supply is complex. In this thesis, a new manufacturing strategy to reduce the arc start/stop phases to a single cycle is presented. The objective of this strategy, called "Continuous Three-dimensional Path Planning" (CTPP), is to generate a continuous spiral-shaped trajectory for thin parts in a closed loop. An adaptive wire speed coupled with a constant travel speed allows a modulation of the deposition geometry that ensures a continuous supply of energy and material throughout the manufacturing process. The use of the 5-axis strategy coupled with CTPP allows the manufacturing of closed parts with a procedure to determine the optimal closure zone and parts on non-planar substrates useful for adding functionality to an existing structure. Two geometries based on continuous manufacturing with WAAM technology are presented to validate this approach. The manufacturing of these parts with CTPP and several numerical evaluations have shown the reliability of this strategy and its ability to produce new complex shapes with good geometrical restitution, difficult or impossible to achieve today in 2.5D with WAAM technology

Motivés par l'évolution des réglementations en matière d'écologie mais aussi par des contraintes purement économiques, plusieurs secteurs industriels se sont retrouvés dans l'obligation de développer de nouvelles méthodes et modèles pour la gestion des produits en fin de vie. Dans ce contexte, la remanufacturation vise à gérer la récupération de la valeur d’un produit avant sa fin de vie. Elle permet de prolonger le cycle de vie du produit et d’économiser une partie des besoins industriels en matière première. Ces produits remanufacturés seront remis dans le marché et destinés à une autre catégorie de clients, différente de celle des produits neufs. Dans d'autres cas, les produits remanufacturés sont réutilisés sous la forme de pièces de rechange dans les actions de maintenance, mais cette réutilisation peut varier selon la stratégie de maintenance adoptée. Dans ce contexte, cette thèse s'intéresse à l’intégration d'un flux d’approvisionnement hybride en pièces de rechange dans un modèle de maintenance basé sur la dégradation stochastique d’un système de production. Deux types de flux d’approvisionnement en pièces de rechange sont étudiés : un flux direct et un flux inverse. Le flux direct est représenté par l'utilisation de pièces de rechange neuves et le flux inverse est représenté par la réutilisation des pièces récupérées lors des remplacements ultérieurs, avec la possibilité de réaliser une action de remanufacturation pour améliorer l'état de dégradation de ces pièces de rechange. Plusieurs problématiques ont été traitées pour permettre de comprendre l'impact et l'influence d'une politique de remanufacturation sur les performances d'un système de production. En effet, dans un premier temps, nous nous sommes intéressés à des systèmes de production composés d'une seule machine. Dans ce cadre, nous avons proposé des études séquentielles puis intégrées pour optimiser la politique de maintenance et celle de l'approvisionnement hybrides en pièces de rechange destinées aux actions de remplacements. Nous avons étudié également la gestion de production soumise à une contrainte de qualité basée sur l'évolution de la dégradation de la machine. Ensuite, et dans un second temps, nous avons présenté des généralisations des modèles étudiés dans le cadre de systèmes de production composés de plusieurs machines. Enfin, nous avons développé un outil d'aide à la décision pour conception de systèmes de production dans le cadre d'une politique de remanufacturation. Cette problématique - du niveau stratégique - vise à sélectionner le meilleur ensemble de machines pour construire un nouveau système de production capable de satisfaire les contraintes de production définies par décideur
Motivated by the change of regulations in the matter of sustainability, but also by pure economic constraints, several industries have found themselves obligated to develop new methods and models for the management of products that are at the end of their life cycle. In this context, the remanufacturing aims at managing the recovery of the product’s value before its end of life. This type of action will extend the product life cycle and save the use of the raw material. These remanufactured products will be re-injected in a market that serves another class of customers, different from the one using new products. In other cases, the remanufactured products are reused as spare parts for the maintenance, but this reuse may vary according to the maintenance strategy adopted. This thesis focuses on the integration of a hybrid flow supply of spare parts in a service model based on stochastic degradation of a production system. Two types of spare parts supply flows are studied: a direct flow and reverse flow. The direct flow is represented by the use of new spare parts and the reverse flow is represented by the reuse of the recovered parts during the replacements, with the ability to perform remanufacturing action to improve the degradation level of these spare parts. Several issues were treated to better understand the impact of remanufacturing policies over the performance of a production system. At the beginning we started our study with production systems composed of a single machine. In this context, we proposed sequential studies then integrated one to optimize the maintenance policy as well as the Hybrid provisioning in regard to spare parts destined to replacement actions. Similarly, we’ve studied the production management subjected to quality constraint based on the machine’s degradation process. Furthermore, we’ve presented generalizations of studied models within the context of a production system composed of several machines. Finally, we’ve developed an aid-to-decision-design tool for production systems within the remanufacturing process. This problematic aims at –from a strategic point- selecting the best group of machines to build a new system of production that is able to satisfy the constraints of a production defined by the decision maker

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-105).
by Mark S. Grodzinsky.
M.Eng.

Les patients infectés chroniquement par le VHB ont un risque élevé de développer des maladies graves du foie telles que le carcinome hépatocellulaire. Dans les cellules infectées, le virus persiste sous la forme d’un ADN circulaire covalemment clos (ADNccc) qui reste stable même chez les patients qui suivent un traitement. La protéine virale HBc, en plus de son rôle dans la formation des capsides, est retrouvée dans le noyau et est recrutée sur l’ADNccc et modifie sa structure. Cependant son rôle dans ce contexte n’est pas encore compris. Afin de mieux comprendre le rôle nucléaire d’HBc notamment sur la biologie de l’ADNccc et l’expression des ARN viraux, nous avons construit plusieurs mutants déficients pour l’expression d’HBc. Nous avons tout d’abord construit un mutant qui possède deux codons stop après le codon 27 d’HBc suivi d’une substitution d’une partie du gène HBc par une séquence codant différents épitopes. Lors de l’infection, ce virus possède un fort défaut d’expression des ARN viraux, qui ne peut être restauré par la ré-expression d’HBc. La quantification des ARN naissants montre que le défaut semble être post-transcriptionnel mais est présent rapidement après la transcription (<2h). Ces résultats suggèrent que le défaut observé est indépendant d’HBc et que la séquence délétée de HBV HBc-Flag27* pourrait être impliquée dans un mécanisme de régulation post-transcriptionnelle. Grâce à ce virus, nous avons pu mettre en évidence que la protéine HBc apportée avec la capside lors de l’infection est capable de se réassocier sur l’ADNccc dans le noyau. Nous avons ensuite étudié des mutants ayant une séquence plus proche de la souche sauvage, sans cette substitution. Lorsqu’ils sont exprimés à partir d’un plasmide exprimant à la fois le génome et la protéine HBc sous le contrôle d’un promoteur SV40, nous observons un défaut d’expression de l’ARNpg pour des mutants possédant les codons stop après le 27e ou le 38e codon du gène HBc, mais pas lorsqu’il est placé après le 67e codon. Ces résultats suggèrent que le déplacement du codon stop d’HBc induit la diminution de l’expression de l’ARNpg et que le codon stop naturel d’HBc pourrait être protégé des voies de surveillance des ARN viraux comme la nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) qui reconnait les ARN ayant un codon stop prématuré. Lors des infections par ces virus, et donc en absence d’HBc, nous observons un défaut accru pour les virus ayant des codons stop aux codons 27 et 38 et un défaut apparait pour le virus ayant le codon stop après la position 67. Dans ce contexte, en absence d’HBc, nous avons pu voir que les ARN codants pour les protéines de surface sont également impactés et que l’expression des ARN peut être partiellement restaurée par l’expression d’HBc. Par des techniques de chromosome conformation capture nous avons pu mettre en évidence que le virus HBV HBc-27* n’est plus exclu des régions réprimées contactant des lamines, indiquant que la protéine HBc pourrait être impliquée dans la l’adressage de l’ADNccc vers des régions favorables pour la transcription. Afin de comprendre les mécanismes impliqués dans la régulation par HBc, nous avons isolé les partenaires nucléaires de la protéine et mis en évidence de nombreux facteurs impliqués dans la régulation de l’ADN et de la transcription ainsi que dans la réparation des dommages à l’ADN.Dans l’ensemble, nos résultats permettent de mieux comprendre les mécanismes de régulation de la biologie des ARN du VHB
Chronic HBV carriers (CHB) are at high risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma. Because covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) persists in infected cells through RNA expression, deciphering the mechanisms involved in RNA transcription and stability is a crucial step to identify new antiviral targets. In addition to its role in capsid formation, HBV core protein (HBc) has been shown to be associated with the cccDNA and to modulate its structure, yet the impact of this modification on HBV transcription is not fully understood. To better understand the role of HBc in this context we constructed several mutants deficient for HBc expression. The first mutant has two stop codons after codon 27 in HBc followed by a substitution of the HBc sequence by a sequence encoding different epitopes. During infection, this virus shows a strong decrease in expression of viral RNA, which cannot be rescued by re-expression of HBc. The quantification of nascent RNAs shows that the defect appears to be post-transcriptional and is present as early as 2h after transcription. These results suggest that the observed defect is independent of HBc and that the deleted sequence in the HBV genome of this mutant could be involved in a post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism. With this mutant, we have been able to demonstrate that the HBc protein provided by the capsid during infection is able to re-associate onto the cccDNA in the nucleus. We then studied HBc mutants generated in the context of the the wild-type virus sequence, without the substitution. When expressed from a plasmid expressing both the genome and the HBc protein under the control of SV40 promoter, we observe a decrease of the pgRNA expression for mutants having the stop codons after the 27th or 38th codon of HBc, but not when the stop codon is located after the 67th codon. These results suggest that displacement of the HBc stop codon induces a decrease in pgRNA expression, independently of HBc protein, and that the natural stop codon of HBc could be protected from viral RNA surveillance pathways such as nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) that recognizes RNAs with a premature stop codon. During infections with these viruses, and therefore in the absence of HBc, we observed an increased in the defect for viruses having stop codons at position 27 and 38 and a defect appears for a virus having the stop codon at position 67. In this context, in the absence of HBc, we have seen that RNAs encoding surface proteins are also impacted and that RNA expression can be partially restored by HBc expression. By chromosome conformation capture techniques we were able to observe that the HBc-27* HBV virus is no longer excluded from repressed regions associated with lamins, indicating that the HBc protein could be involved in the localization of the cccDNA at active chromatin regions favorable for transcription.In order to understand the mechanisms involved in HBc regulation, we have isolated the nuclear partners of HBc and highlighted many factors involved in the RNA and DNA regulation, in the DNA damage repair and RNA processing.Overall, our results shed light on the regulatory mechanisms of HBV RNA biology

Le clade C de Escherichia coli ST131, pathogène extra-intestinal (ExPEC) multirésistant aux antibiotiques, a émergé dans le monde entier au début des années 2000. La compréhension de son essor fait partie des enjeux majeurs de santé publique. Pour participer à cette compréhension, nous avons pris en considération l’histoire phylogénique de ST131 et axé nos recherches sur la comparaison du clade C avec son progéniteur, le clade B, qui est lui composé de souches globalement sensibles aux antibiotiques. L’histoire phylogénétique du clone ST131 décrit la diversification du clade B ancestral en différents sous-clades B (de B1 à B5), B5 donnant naissance au clade C, qui lui-même s’est diversifié en deux sous-clades, C1 et C2. Nous avons souhaité connaitre l’évolution de ces différents sous-clades en termes de fréquence relative au sein de tous les ExPEC. Pour cela, nous avons analysé les génomes de ST131 identifiés au sein de E. coli bactériémiques systématiquement collectés en Angleterre entre 2001 et 2012. Cette analyse a montré que, durant la période étudiée, (i) ST131 faisait partie des quelques clones dominants, avec en son sein une dominance des souches de clade C, en particulier celles de sous-clade C2 et (ii) les souches de clade B persistaient de manière stable, en particulier celles de sous-clades B4 et B5, malgré une fréquence relative globale plus faible que celle du clade C. Par ailleurs, nous avons constitué une collection de 39 souches ST131 qui se sont avérées représentatives de la diversité des clades et sous-clades B et C, à l’exception d’une souche B4 (nommée Hybride), porteuse de l’allèle fimH30, normalement spécifique du clade C. Grâce à cette collection, nous avons exploré la croissance et la formation de biofilm précoce (après 2, 3 et 5 h d’incubation) des souches de clade B et C. Toutes les souches possédaient des capacités de croissance égales, alors qu’elles différaient quant à la formation de biofilm : biofilm plus fréquemment observé en 2 h chez le clade B que chez le clade C. Puis, deux souches représentatives du clade B et du clade C, nommées Ancêtre et Émergente, respectivement, ainsi que Hybride ont été soumises à des compétitions deux à deux in vitro et in vivo (dans divers modèles murins). En dépit de l’absence de différences de fitness in vitro entre ces trois souches, Émergente s’est montrée chez la souris moins bonne colonisatrice des tractus intestinaux et/ou urinaires et moins virulente dans le modèle de septicémie que Ancêtre et Hybride. Faisant référence au gène fimB non fonctionnel chez toutes les souches de clade C, gène codant un des régulateurs de la synthèse des fimbriae de type 1 qui participent à la formation du biofilm et à l’adhésion bactérienne, nous l’avons délété chez Ancêtre et Hybride. Bien que la délétion du gène fimB abolissait in vitro la formation du biofilm précoce observée chez les souches parentales, aucun effet n’a été observé lors de la mise en compétition des mutants avec leurs souches parentales, in vitro comme in vivo ; mutant et souche parentale se comportaient de manière équivalente au regard de la colonisation intestinale et de la virulence chez la souris.Au total, ces travaux suggèrent qu’une perte de virulence globale, processus connu pour améliorer le niveau de transmission bactérien, est survenue chez le clade C de ST131 en plus de son acquisition d’une multirésistance aux antibiotiques, deux évolutions susceptibles de lui assurer un meilleur fitness, notamment dans les environnements sous pression antibiotique
The clade C of Escherichia coli ST131, an extra-intestinal pathogen (ExPEC) multidrug-resistant, emerged worldwide in the early 2000s. Understanding its expansion is one of the major public health challenges. To contribute to this understanding, we took into consideration the phylogenesis of ST131 and focused our research on comparing the clade C with its progenitor, the clade B, which is composed of strains globally sensitive to antibiotics.The phylogenesis of the clone ST131 describes the diversification of the ancestral clade B into different B subclades (from B1 to B5), B5 giving rise to clade C, which itself has diversified into two subclades, C1 and C2. We wanted to learn about the evolution of these different subclades in terms of relative frequency within all ExPECs. For this purpose, we analyzed the ST131 genomes identified within bacteriemic E. coli systematically collected in England between 2001 and 2012. This analysis showed that, during the studied period, (i) ST131 was one of the few dominant clones, with a dominance of clade C strains, particularly those of subclade C2 and (ii) clade B strains persisted in a stable manner, particularly those of subclades B4 and B5, despite an overall relative frequency lower than that of clade C. Besides, we have compiled a collection of 39 ST131 strains that have been found to be representative of the diversity of B and C clades and subclades, with the exception of one B4 strain (called Hybrid), which carries the fimH30 allele, normally specific to the clade C. Through this collection, we have explored the growth and formation of early biofilm (after 2, 3 and 5 hours of incubation) of clade B and C strains. All strains had equal growth capacities, while they differed in biofilm formation: biofilm was more frequently observed in 2 h in clade B strains than in clade C strains. Then, two representative strains of clades B and C, called Ancestor and Emergent, respectively, as well as Hybrid, were subjected to competitions two by two in vitro and in vivo (in various mouse models). Despite the absence of in vitro fitness differences between these three strains, Emergent was found to be less effective in colonizing the intestinal and/or urinary tract in mice and less virulent in the sepsis model than Ancestor and Hybrid. Referring to the non-functional fimB gene in all strains of clade C, a gene encoding one of the regulators of type 1 fimbriae synthesis involved in biofilm formation and bacterial adhesion, we have deleted it in Ancestor and Hybrid. Although the deletion of the fimB gene abolished in vitro the formation of early biofilm observed in parental strains, no effect was observed when mutants were put in competition with their parental strains, in vitro and in vivo; mutant and parental strain also behaved equally with regard to intestinal colonization and virulence in mice. In total, this work suggests that a global loss of virulence, a process known to improve the level of bacterial transmission, has occurred in ST131 clade C in addition to its acquisition of a multidrug resistance, two evolutions likely to ensure better fitness, especially in environments under antibiotic pressure

Le choc hémorragique est à l’origine de 50 % des décès après un traumatisme grave. Dans ce contexte d’urgence, les objectifs hémodynamiques reposent uniquement sur le maintien d’une cible de pression artérielle basse. Les recommandations européennes sur la prise en charge des traumatisés graves hémorragiques conseillent un niveau de 80 à 90 mmHg de pression artérielle systolique jusqu’au contrôle complet du saignement et 80 mmHg de pression artérielle moyenne en cas de traumatisme crânien grave associé. Cependant, il manque actuellement des données sur la relation entre le niveau de pression artérielle, la microcirculation et l’oxygénation tissulaire. Dans un modèle d’étude de la microcirculation villositaire intestinale chez la souris, nous avons observé une relation linéaire entre la pression artérielle moyenne, la pO2 intestinale et la microcirculation intestinale. Un niveau de pression artérielle moyenne <60 mmHg était associé à une altération microcirculatoire et à la survenue d’une hypoxie intestinale. La réanimation initiale du choc hémorragique consiste prioritairement en l’administration de remplissage vasculaire. De la noradrénaline est fréquemment associée précocement de manière à limiter la dilution. Le maintien d’objectifs hémodynamiques stricts dans ce contexte d’urgence où de nombreuses tâches doivent être réalisées en même temps est complexe. L’administration de noradrénaline nécessite une certaine expertise pour cibler des objectifs de pression artérielle étroits. Dans la suite de notre travail, nous avons développé et testé un système de réanimation automatisée en boucle fermée guidée sur la pression artérielle dans des modèles de choc hémorragique. Le système de réanimation automatisée contrôlait le remplissage vasculaire ou l’association remplissage vasculaire et noradrénaline. Dans ces études, la performance de la réanimation automatisée était excellente, au minimum similaire à celle d’un médecin spécialisé
Hemorrhagic shock is responsible for 50 % of the deaths after severe trauma. In this emergency context, hemodynamic goals are based solely on maintaining a low blood pressure. European guidelines on the management of major bleeding after trauma recommend targeting a systolic arterial pressure goal of 80-90 mmHg while hemorrhage is not stopped yet and of 80 mmHg of mean arterial pressure in case of severe head injury. However, data on the relationship between blood pressure level, microcirculation and tissue oxygenation are currently missing. In a study model of intestinal villous microcirculation in mice, we observed a linear relationship between mean arterial pressure, intestinal pO2 and intestinal microcirculation. A mean arterial blood pressure level <60 mmHg was associated with microcirculatory impairment and to occurrence of intestinal hypoxia.Fluid guided resuscitation is the cornerstone of early hemorrhagic shock treatment. Norepinephrine is frequently associated with fluid resuscitation to limit dilution. Maintenance of strict hemodynamic objectives in such emergency context where many tasks must be performed at the same time is complex. Norepinephrine administration requires some expertise to target narrow blood pressure goals. In the rest of our work we have developed and tested a closed-loop resuscitation system guided on arterial blood pressure in hemorrhagic shock models. The closed-loop resuscitation system controlled fluid administration alone or a combination of fluid and norepinephrine. In these studies, the performance of closed-loop resuscitation was excellent, at least similar to that of a specialist physician

Computer and Information Science
Ph.D.
Cloud computing has brought availability of services at unprecedented scales but data accessibility considerations become more complex due to involvement of multiple parties in providing the infrastructure. In this thesis, we discuss the problem of enabling cooperative data access in a multi-cloud environment where the data is owned and managed by multiple enterprises. We consider a multi-party collaboration scheme whereby a set of parties collectively decide accessibility to data from individual parties using different data models such as relational databases, and graph databases. In order to implement desired business services, parties need to share a selected portion of information with one another. We consider a model with a set of authorization rules over the joins of basic relations, and such rules are defined by these cooperating parties. The accessible information is constrained by these rules. Specifically, the following critical issues were examined: Combine rule enforcement and query planning and devise an algorithm which simultaneously checks for the enforceability of each rule and generation of minimum cost plan of its execution using a cost metric whenever the enforcement is possible; We also consider other forms of limiting the access to the shared data using safety properties and selection conditions. We proposed algorithms for both forms to remove any conflicts or violations between the limited accesses and model queries; Used graph databases with our authorization rules and query planning model to conduct similarity search between tuples, where we represent the relational database tuples as a graph with weighted edges, which enables queries involving "similarity" across the tuples. We proposed an algorithm to exploit the correlations between attributes to create virtual attributes that can be used to catch much of the data variance, and enhance the speed at which similarity search occurs; Proposed a framework for defining test functionalities their composition, and their access control. We discussed an algorithm to determine the realization of the given test via valid compositions of individual functionalities in a way to minimize the number of parties involved. The research significance resides in solving real-world issues that arise in using cloud services for enterprises After extensive evaluations, results revealed: collaborative data access model improves the security during cooperative data processes; systematic and efficient solving access rules conflict issues minimizes the possible data leakage; and, a systematic approach tackling control failure diagnosis helps reducing troubleshooting times and all that improve availability and resiliency. The study contributes to the knowledge, literature, and practice. This research opens up the space for further studies in various aspects of secure data cooperation in large-scale cyber and cyber-physical infrastructures.
Temple University--Theses

Business intelligence (BI) has emerged as a key technology to be hosted on Cloud computing. BI offers a method to analyse data thereby enabling informed decision making to improve business performance and profitability. However, within the shared domains of Cloud computing, BI is exposed to increased security and privacy threats because an unauthorised user may be able to gain access to highly sensitive, consolidated business information. The business process contains collaborating services and users from multiple Cloud systems in different security realms which need to be engaged dynamically at runtime. If the heterogamous Cloud systems located in different security realms do not have direct authentication relationships then it is technically difficult to enable a secure collaboration. In order to address these security challenges, a new authentication framework is required to establish certain trust relationships among these BI service instances and users by distributing a common session secret to all participants of a session. The author addresses this challenge by designing and implementing a multiparty authentication framework for dynamic secure interactions when members of different security realms want to access services. The framework takes advantage of the trust relationship between session members in different security realms to enable a user to obtain security credentials to access Cloud resources in a remote realm. This mechanism can help Cloud session users authenticate their session membership to improve the authentication processes within multi-party sessions. The correctness of the proposed framework has been verified by using BAN Logics. The performance and the overhead have been evaluated via simulation in a dynamic environment. A prototype authentication system has been designed, implemented and tested based on the proposed framework. The research concludes that the proposed framework and its supporting protocols are an effective functional basis for practical implementation testing, as it achieves good scalability and imposes only minimal performance overhead which is comparable with other state-of-art methods.

Abstract Climate change causes range expansions, but neither the population parameters nor the ecological mechanisms behind range expansions are well known. I studied population dynamics and demography of the great tit (Parus major) in northern Finland, close to the northern range margin of the species’ distribution. I further examined winter conditions, such as temperature, as limiting factors on winter site fidelity and survival of human-fed great tits. Temporal variation in the population growth rate was large, but indicated an overall increasing population size, which fits the current large scale increase in the north. Importantly, the study population was a sink (or pseudo-sink) in almost all years because of low adult survival and low local recruitment. Immigration formed 39–43% of the annual population growth rate indicating that the population is demographically dependent on immigration. The demography differs most from other great tit populations in terms of adult survival which is lower than estimates from more southern Europe. This difference may reflect the impact of more difficult winters. Results from the wintering population support this line of reasoning. Within-winter movement was lower during mid-winter (January to February) and decreased during cold periods. This pattern is probably linked to energy saving and predator escaping strategies during these demanding periods when energy expenditure is high and birds have limited daylight hours to forage. Site fidelity was lower for juveniles than adults within a winter, but not between winters. In addition, survival showed strong links to winter weather. There was temporal variation within winters, particularly when the winter was colder than usual. Survival of juveniles showed a stronger response to cold temperatures. When mean daily minimum temperatures declined below –15 C° degrees, survival started to decline. Low winter temperatures thus provide one explanation for the lower annual adult survival and the sink nature of the population. The results suggest that great tits suffer from the cold conditions of the north: higher mortality increases turnover allowing for strong immigration. Great tits should benefit from warming winters caused by climate change
Tiivistelmä Väitöskirjassani tutkin talitiaisen (Parus major) populaatiodynamiikkaa, talviaikaista paikkauskollisuutta ja säilyvyyttä levinneisyysalueen pohjoisreunan läheisessä populaatiossa Oulussa. Aikuissäilyvyys oli vuosittain hieman alhaisempi kuin lajin ydinalueella Länsi-Euroopassa. Tutkimusalueella syntyneistä poikasista vain pieni osa jäi pesimään tutkimusalueelle, mikä heijastaa voimistunutta lähtömuuttoa huonolaatuiselta alueelta. Ajallinen vaihtelu populaation kasvukertoimessa oli suurta, mutta keskiarvo osoittaa nykyisen populaation kasvavan. Havaitsemani populaation kasvu ei selity kasvulla aikuissäilyvyydessä tai paikallisessa rekrytoinnissa. Oletan, että populaatio on ollut tulomuuton ylläpitämä nielu (tai valenielu) lähes kaikkina tutkimusvuosina. Niinpä populaatio on demografisesti ja geneettisesti riippuvainen ydinalueesta, josta tuleva geenivirta aiheuttaa ongelmia paikallisiin olosuhteisiin sopeutumisessa. Tutkin sekä talvensisäistä että talvien välistä paikkauskollisuutta suhteessa ikään, sukupuoleen, vuodenaikaan, lämpötilaan ja päivän pituuteen. Talvensisäinen liikkuvuus oli vähäisintä keskitalvella erityisesti kylmien jaksojen aikana. Tämä ilmiö on luultavasti yhteydessä energiansäästöön ja saalistajien välttelyyn näiden vaativien jaksojen aikana, jolloin energiankulutus on suurta ja valoisa ruokailuaika on lyhyt. Nuorten talvensisäinen paikkauskollisuus oli huonompi kuin aikuisten, mutta sukupuolten välillä tässä ei ollut eroa. Sen sijaan talvien välisessä paikkauskollisuudessa ei ollut ryhmien välisiä eroja, mikä viittaa paikkauskollisuudesta olevan yhtäläiset hyödyt kaikille. Nuoret luultavasti keräävät tietoa resursseista ensimmäisenä talvenaan ja täten hankkivat samat edut kuin aikuiset palatessaan alueelle seuraavana talvena. Tutkin, onko talvella lintujen ruokintapaikkoja hyödyntävien talitiaisten säilyvyydessä ympäristötekijöistä, kuten lämpötilasta, johtuvaa vaihtelua. Talvisäilyvyys vaihteli paljon etenkin tavallista kylmempänä talvena. Nuoret kärsivät eniten kylmistä lämpötiloista. Kun keskilämpötila laski –15 C°:seen tai sen alapuolelle, säilyvyys alkoi heikentyä. Verrattuna kylmään talveen säilyvyys oli 1,5 kertaa todennäköisempää lauhan talven aikana. Talitiaiset näyttävät kärsivän pohjoisen kylmistä olosuhteista: korkea kuolleisuus lisää vaihtuvuutta ja geenivirtaa, kun alueelle kohdistuu voimakasta tulomuuttoa

The phylogeny and diversity within the Lasiosphaeriaceae family of Ascomycete fungi is poorly known in many aspects. In this study a phylogenetic hypothesis for a subclade within Lasiosphaeriaceae was developed using nucleotide sequence data from the ribosomal LSU and ITS, and the nuclear protein coding βT, RPB2, MCM7, and TSR1 genes. The phylogenetic analyses based on maximum likelihood revealed non-monophyly in seven out of eight studied genera, among them Podospora with the model species P. anserina. Data on spore number and collection substrate type were optimized on the concatenated nucleotide maximum likelihood tree using an equal rate maximum likelihood model. Three independent switches from 8 to 4 spores and five unambiguous independent substrate switches from soil to dung were inferred.

Perdas embrionárias e alterações gestacionais são frequentemente observadas em prenhezes de embriões bovinos manipulados in vitro. Sabe-se que tais anormalidades são resultantes de alterações epigenéticas ocasionadas pela manipulação dos gametas e/ou do embrião durante as técnicas de reprodução assistida (ARTs), com destaque para as técnicas de fecundação in vitro (FIV) e da clonagem por transferência nuclear de células somáticas (SCNT). Tais alterações resultam em distúrbios no desenvolvimento do concepto em algum momento crítico entre a fertilização e o parto, fornecendo bons modelos de estudos sobre a fisiopatologia de perdas embrionárias e dos distúrbios de desenvolvimento. Caracterizam-se como momentos críticos após a transferência do embrião (TE) o desenvolvimento embrionário no útero, o reconhecimento materno da gestação, a placentação e o desenvolvimento da placenta e do feto, os quais tem de ser transpassados sem nenhuma falha, permitindo um desenvolvimento normal do concepto até o termo. Sendo assim, o presente trabalho abordou três fases distintas do amplo período gestacional em prenhezes por ARTs. O Estudo 1 foi realizado durante o período peri-reconhecimento materno da gestação e objetivou descrever a abundância de expressão de genes estimulados pelo interferon tau (ISGs) de células mononucleares do sangue periférico (PBMCs) maternas em gestações oriundas de ARTs no primeiro mês de gestação; o Estudo 2 compreendeu os primeiros 35 dias de gestação e objetivou descrever as mudanças morfológicas e vasculares do complexo útero-concepto-ovário e o estímulo à expressão de ISGs em PBMCs em gestações de conceptos clonados por SCNT com diferentes fenótipos de desenvolvimento, sendo esses denominados gestação anembrionada e CL persistente; e o Estudo 3 foi conduzido durante o período pré-parto e objetivou descrever as alterações na produção de esteroides sexuais e corticosteroides em gestações produzidas por ARTs. Três hipóteses foram testadas: (1) Gestações de conceptos clonados por SCNT apresentam uma baixa e mais tardia estimulação de ISGs em PBMCs maternas quando comparadas com gestações de conceptos produzidos por FIV e IA; (2) O concepto clonado por SCNT apresenta um menor estímulo sobre mudanças morfológicas e vasculares do complexo útero-ovário e ISGs em PBMCs maternas durante os primeiros 35 dias de gestação, quando comparado com conceptos oriundos de IA; e (3) Gestações de embriões oriundos de ARTs apresentam alterações na dinâmica esteroidogênica no pré-parto quando comparados com gestações de IA. No estudo 1 foram coletadas amostras de sangue de gestações produzidas por inseminação artificial (IA), FIV e clonagem por SCNT, nos dias 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 e 31 pós-ovulação e foi realizada mensuração da abundância de transcritos de ISGs (OAS1 e ISG15) em PBMCs maternas. No estudo 2, gestações produzidas por IA e clonagem por SCNT, foram submetidas a escaneamentos ultrassonográficos dos ovários, útero e concepto a cada 3 dias do dia 14 ao 35 (dia 0 = ovulação) e amostras de sangue foram coletadas nos dias 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 e 31 para mensuração da abundância de transcritos de ISGs (OAS1 e ISG15) em PBMCs maternas. No estudo 3, foram coletadas amostras de sangue no último mês em gestações naturais, oriundas de FIV e de clonagem por SCNT para análise hormonal de 10 esteroides utilizando o método de espectrometria de massas multi-hormonal de alta resolução LC-MS/MS. O primeiro estudo mostrou semelhanças na expressão de genes estimulados pelo IFNT em gestações oriundas de ARTs e produzidas por IA. Entretanto, a estimulação nas gestações oriundas de ARTs aparentou ser quatro dias mais prolongada, sugerindo uma maior funcionalidade do trofectoderma em conceptos oriundos de ARTs. O segundo estudo demonstrou um aumento na expressão de ISGs em PBMCs maternas tanto em gestações de conceptos normais quanto em anormais, justificando a manutenção da função luteal mesmo na ausência de detecção do concepto por ultrasonografia. No terceiro estudo, demonstrou-se alterações na esteroidogênese nas gestações de embriões FIV e clonados no último mês de gestação, sendo essas compatíveis com a hiperativação da enzima aromatase durante todo o último mês de gestações oriundas de FIV e hiperativação das enzimas P450C11 e P450C21 trinta dias antes do parto em gestações oriundas de clonagem por SCNT. O presente estudo concluiu que conceptos oriundos de FIV e clonagem por SCNT apresentam um prolongamento no estímulo de ISGs pelo IFNT, conceptos clonados anormalos apresentam estímulo de ISGs, o que justifica a manutenção da função luteal, e, por fim, a cascata esteroidonênica que culmina com o parto apresenta-se alterada em gestações oriundas de FIV e clonagem por SCNT.
Pregnancy losses and gestational abnormalities are frequently observed in pregnancies from in vitro produced embryos in bovines. It is known that these abnormalities are due to epigenetic changes from the manipulation of gametes and/or embryo during the use of assisted reproduction techniques (ARTs), especially for the in vitro fertilization (IFV) and cloning by somatic cells nuclear transfer (SCNT). These changes results in disturbances of conceptus development in any critical stage between the fertilization and parturition, which provides good models for the study of physiopathology of embryo losses and disturbances of development. Critical stages after the embryo transfer (ET) to the uterus are characterized as the maternal recognition of pregnancy, placentation, and fetal-placental development, which needs to be surpassed without failures, in order to develop a normal conceptus until term. Therefore, the present work approached three distinct phases of the wide gestational period in pregnancies from ARTs. The Study 1 was conducted during the maternal peri-recongnition of pregnancy period and aimed to describe the expression of interferon stimulated genes (ISGs) in maternal peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in pregnancies derived of ARTs; the Study 2 comprise the first 35 days of pregnancy and aimed to describe morphological and vascular changes of the complex uterus-ovaries-conceptus, as well as the expression of ISGs in maternal PBMCs in pregnancies of conceptus cloned by SCNT with different phenotypes of development, denominated as anembryonic gestation and persistent CL; the Study 3 was conducted during the pre-partum period and aimed to describe changes in the production of sexual steroids and corticosteroids during the last month of pregnancies derived of ARTs. Three hypothesis were tested: (1) Pregnancies of conceptus cloned by SCNT presented a decrease and delay in the stimulation of ISGs in maternal PBMCs when compared with conceptuses produced by IFV and AI; (2) Stimulus from the conceptus for changes in the morphology and vasculature of the the uterus-ovarian complex, detected by ultrasonography in B and Doppler modes, and the stimulation of ISGs in maternal PBMCs during the first 35 days of pregnancy of conceptus cloned by SCNT are less intense when compared with conceptus derived from AI; and (3) Pregnancies derived of ARTs present changes in the steroidogenic dynamics in the pre-partum, when compared with pregnancies derived from AI. In Study 1 blood samples were collected from pregnancies produced by AI, IVF, and cloning by SCNT, at days 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, and 31 post-ovulation for the measurement of abundance of transcripts of ISGs (OAS1 and ISG15) in maternal PBMCs. In Study 2, pregnancies derived of AI and cloning by SCNT, were submitted to ultrasonographic scans for the evaluation and description of morphological and vascular changes in ovaries, uterus, and conceptus every 3 days from day 14 to 35 (day 0 = ovulation) and blood samples were collected on days 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 e 31 for the measurement of the abundance of transcripts of ISGs (OAS1 and ISG15) in maternal PBMCs. In Study 3, blood samples were collected during the last month of pregnancies naturally conceived, derived of IVF, and cloned by SCNT for the analysis of 10 steroids using the method of mass spectrometry high resolution LC-MS/MS. The first study showed similarities in the ISGs expression stimulation in pregnancies derived of ARTs and AI. However, the stimulation in the ART derived pregnancies was apparently 4 days longer, suggesting a greater placental function in conceptus derived of ARTs. The second study showed an increase in ISG expression in both normal and abnormal conceptus development, which justifies the maintenance of CL in the absence of a conceptus structure detected by ultrasonography. In the third study, was detected changes in the steroidogenesis of pregnancies derived of IFV and cloning by SCNT during the last month of pregnancy, which are compatible with the hyperactivation of the aromatase enzyme during the last month of IFV derived pregnancies, and hyperactivation of the enzymes P450C11 and P450C21 thirty days before parturition in pregnancies derived of cloning by SCNT. The present study concludes that conceptus derived of IFV and cloning by SCNT present a prolonged stimulus of ISGs, cloned conceptus with anomalous development presents a stimulus of ISGs, which justifies the CL function maintenance, and, ultimately, the steroidogenic cascade that culminates with the term is altered in pregnancies derived from IFV and cloning by SCNT.

Data analytics queries often involve aggregating over massive amounts of data, in order to detect trends in the data, make predictions about future data, and make business decisions as a result. As such, it is important that a database management system (DBMS) handling data analytics queries perform well when those queries involve massive amounts of data. A data warehouse is a DBMS which is designed specifically to handle data analytics queries. This thesis describes the data warehouse Amazon Redshift, and how it was used to design a data analysis system for Laserfiche. Laserfiche is a software company that provides each of their clients a system to store and process business process data. Through the 2015-16 Harvey Mudd College Clinic project, the Clinic team built a data analysis system that provides Laserfiche clients with near real-time reports containing analyses of their business process data. This thesis discusses the advantages of Redshift’s data model and physical storage layout, as well as Redshift’s features directly benefit of the data analysis system.

Globalmodelle sind aufgrund ihres groben Gitters (60 x 60 km) nur unzureichend in der Lage kleinskalige Prozesse (orographische Niederschlagsverstärkung) in der Atmosphäre aufzulösen. Mit Mesoskalenmodellen z.B. dem GESIMA (5 x 5 km) können deshalb die physikalische Grundlagen der Atmosphäre (Wolken- und Niederschlagsbildung) besser studiert und eine Kopplung mit hydrologischen Abflussmodellen erprobt werden. Zukünftig sieht dieses Projekt genau das vor, wobei der erste Teil, die Arbeit mit dem meteorologische Modell hier vorgestellt werden soll. Starkniederschlagserreignisse sind vielerorts auf der Welt mit charakteristischen Wetterlagen verbunden, die quasi über Tage unverändert ergiebigen Regen produzieren. Initialisiert mit den lokalen Vertikalprofilen aus Radiosondendaten, produzieren das prognostische Mesoskalenmodell GESIMA und das diagnostische Niederschlagsberechungsverfahren (MAXRR) maximale Regenmengen vergleichbarer Größenordnung
Global models are insufficient to solve small scale atmospheric processes (e.g. orographic precipitation) due to their gross resolution (60 x 60 km). With mesoscale models e.g. the GESIMA (5 x 5 km), the physical fundamentals of the atmosphere (formation of precipitation and clouds) can better be studied and a coupling with hydrological models be tested through. This project plans exactly, as a first step, the work with the cited meteorological model. Heavy rainfall events are connected with characteristic weather conditions in many places in the world which produce invariably rain quasi over days. Initialized with the local vertical profiles from radiosonde data, the prediction model GESIMA and the diagnostic model MAXRR produced rain quantities of comparable order of magnitude

Denna uppsats inriktar sig på rekvisitet verksam i betydande omfattning (verksamhetsrekvisitet) i relation till ”vanliga anställda” i personalägda fåmansföretag. Det framgår i förarbetena att verksamhetsrekvisitet anses vara uppfyllt när delägarens arbetsinsatser har stor betydelse för vinstgenereringen. Den avgörande faktorn här är om delägaren genom arbetsinsatser genererat intäkter till företaget. Arbetsinsatser av ”vanliga anställda”, dvs. anställda utan någon ledarbefattning eller utan kvalifikationer för företagets kärnverksamhet, anses i vanliga fall inte generera vinster till företaget. Det avgjordes dock några rättsfall där domstolen ansåg att ”vanliga anställda” var verksamma i betydande omfattning. Det är därför relevant att utreda om domstolens bedömningar i de här rättsfallen avviker från syftet bakom verksamhetsrekvisitet. Uppsatsens syfte är att utreda om domstolens bedömningar i rättspraxis som berör rekvisitet ”verksam i betydande omfattning” i relation till ”vanliga anställda” i personalägda företag avviker från lagstiftarens syfte bakom rekvisitet. Lagtexten ger ingen förklaring till hur verksamhetsrekvisitet ska tolkas. I uppsatsen läggs därför vikt vid analysen av förarbeten för att fastställa motivet till lagstiftningen. För att uppnå uppsatsens syfte görs därefter en jämförande analys av praxis med förarbetena. Författaren finner att domstolens bedömningar avviker från syftet bakom verksamhetsrekvisitet beträffande ”vanliga anställda” i personalägda företag. Uppsatsen visar att domstolen stegvis har slutat ta ställning till om arbetsinsatser av sådana anställda har någon betydelse för vinstgenereringen. Domstolen betraktar ”vanliga anställda” som aktivt verksamma utan att ge övertygande skäl till sitt avgörande. Det visas även att domstolens avgöranden påverkar framtida bedömningar i likartade mål.
This thesis focuses on the criterion significantly active in relation to ordinary employees in employee-owned private companies. Shareholders in close companies are considered to be significantly active when their undertakings are essential for the company’s profit. The decisive factor here is whether the shareholders contribute profits to the company. Ordinary employees usually are not concidered to generate profits to the company. Nevertheless, there have been several legal cases in which the Court stated that ordinary employees were significantly active. The question that arises is if the Court’s judgement in these cases deviates from what the legislator meant with the criterion “significantly active” concerning ordinary employees. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the Courts’s judgement in the case law that concerns the criterion “significantly active” in relation to ordinary employees in employee-owned private companies deviates from what the legislator meant with this criterion. The law does not provide any guidance to how the criterion shoud be interpreted. The thesis is based therefore on the comparative analysis of the preparatory work with the relevant case law in order to answer the purpose of this thesis. The conclusion made in this thesis is that the Court’s judgement does deviate from what the legislator meant with the criterion “significantly active” concerning ordinary employees in employee-owned private companies. The analysis shows that the Court does not take into consideration whether such employees’ contribution is profitable to the company. The Court states that ordinary employees are significantly active without giving any convincing justification for its decision. Furthermore, the Court’s decisions affect future judgements in similar cases.

Globalmodelle sind aufgrund ihres groben Gitters (60 x 60 km) nur unzureichend in der Lage kleinskalige Prozesse (orographische Niederschlagsverstärkung) in der Atmosphäre aufzulösen. Mit Mesoskalenmodellen z.B. dem GESIMA (5 x 5 km) können deshalb die physikalische Grundlagen der Atmosphäre (Wolken- und Niederschlagsbildung) besser studiert und eine Kopplung mit hydrologischen Abflussmodellen erprobt werden. Zukünftig sieht dieses Projekt genau das vor, wobei der erste Teil, die Arbeit mit dem meteorologische Modell hier vorgestellt werden soll. Starkniederschlagserreignisse sind vielerorts auf der Welt mit charakteristischen Wetterlagen verbunden, die quasi über Tage unverändert ergiebigen Regen produzieren. Initialisiert mit den lokalen Vertikalprofilen aus Radiosondendaten, produzieren das prognostische Mesoskalenmodell GESIMA und das diagnostische Niederschlagsberechungsverfahren (MAXRR) maximale Regenmengen vergleichbarer Größenordnung.
Global models are insufficient to solve small scale atmospheric processes (e.g. orographic precipitation) due to their gross resolution (60 x 60 km). With mesoscale models e.g. the GESIMA (5 x 5 km), the physical fundamentals of the atmosphere (formation of precipitation and clouds) can better be studied and a coupling with hydrological models be tested through. This project plans exactly, as a first step, the work with the cited meteorological model. Heavy rainfall events are connected with characteristic weather conditions in many places in the world which produce invariably rain quasi over days. Initialized with the local vertical profiles from radiosonde data, the prediction model GESIMA and the diagnostic model MAXRR produced rain quantities of comparable order of magnitude.

Secure multi-party computation (secure MPC) has been established as the de facto paradigm for protecting privacy in distributed computation. One of the earliest secure MPC primitives is the Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) scheme. SSS has many advantages over other popular secure MPC primitives like garbled circuits (GC) -- it provides information-theoretic security guarantee, requires no complex long-integer operations, and often leads to more efficient protocols. Nonetheless, SSS receives less attention in the signal processing community because SSS requires a larger number of honest participants, making it prone to collusion attacks. In this dissertation, I propose an agent-based computing framework using SSS to protect privacy in distributed signal processing. There are three main contributions to this dissertation. First, the proposed computing framework is shown to be significantly more efficient than GC. Second, a novel game-theoretical framework is proposed to analyze different types of collusion attacks. Third, using the proposed game-theoretical framework, specific mechanism designs are developed to deter collusion attacks in a fully distributed manner. Specifically, for a collusion attack with known detectors, I analyze it as games between secret owners and show that the attack can be effectively deterred by an explicit retaliation mechanism. For a general attack without detectors, I expand the scope of the game to include the computing agents and provide deterrence through deceptive collusion requests. The correctness and privacy of the protocols are proved under a covert adversarial model. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of SSS-based protocols and the validity of our mechanism design.

Le chiffrement homomorphe est une branche de la cryptologie, dans laquelle les schémas de chiffrement offrent la possibilité de faire des calculs sur les messages chiffrés, sans besoin de les déchiffrer. L’intérêt pratique de ces schémas est dû à l’énorme quantité d'applications pour lesquels ils peuvent être utilisés. En sont un exemple le vote électronique, les calculs sur des données sensibles, comme des données médicales ou financières, le cloud computing, etc..Le premier schéma de chiffrement (complètement) homomorphe n'a été proposé qu'en 2009 par Gentry. Il a introduit une technique appelée bootstrapping, utilisée pour réduire le bruit des chiffrés : en effet, dans tous les schémas de chiffrement homomorphe proposés, les chiffrés contiennent une petite quantité de bruit, nécessaire pour des raisons de sécurité. Quand on fait des calculs sur les chiffrés bruités, le bruit augmente et, après avoir évalué un certain nombre d’opérations, ce bruit devient trop grand et, s'il n'est pas contrôlé, risque de compromettre le résultat des calculs.Le bootstrapping est du coup fondamental pour la construction des schémas de chiffrement homomorphes, mais est une technique très coûteuse, qu'il s'agisse de la mémoire nécessaire ou du temps de calcul. Les travaux qui on suivi la publication de Gentry ont eu comme objectif celui de proposer de nouveaux schémas et d’améliorer le bootstrapping pour rendre le chiffrement homomorphe faisable en pratique. L’une des constructions les plus célèbres est GSW, proposé par Gentry, Sahai et Waters en 2013. La sécurité du schéma GSW se fonde sur le problème LWE (learning with errors), considéré comme difficile en pratique. Le bootstrapping le plus rapide, exécuté sur un schéma de type GSW, a été proposé en 2015 par Ducas et Micciancio. Dans cette thèse on propose une nouvelle variante du schéma de chiffrement homomorphe de Ducas et Micciancio, appelée TFHE.Le schéma TFHE améliore les résultats précédents, en proposant un bootstrapping plus rapide (de l'ordre de quelques millisecondes) et des clés de bootstrapping plus petites, pour un même niveau de sécurité. TFHE utilise des chiffrés de type TLWE et TGSW (scalaire et ring) : l’accélération du bootstrapping est principalement due à l’utilisation d’un produit externe entre TLWE et TGSW, contrairement au produit externe GSW utilisé dans la majorité des constructions précédentes.Deux types de bootstrapping sont présentés. Le premier, appelé gate bootstrapping, est exécuté après l’évaluation homomorphique d’une porte logique (binaire ou Mux) ; le deuxième, appelé circuit bootstrapping, peut être exécuté après l’évaluation d’un nombre d'opérations homomorphiques plus grand, pour rafraîchir le résultat ou pour le rendre compatible avec la suite des calculs.Dans cette thèse on propose aussi de nouvelles techniques pour accélérer l’évaluation des calculs homomorphiques, sans bootstrapping, et des techniques de packing des données. En particulier, on présente un packing, appelé vertical packing, qui peut être utilisé pour évaluer efficacement des look-up table, on propose une évaluation via automates déterministes pondérés, et on présente un compteur homomorphe appelé TBSR qui peut être utilisé pour évaluer des fonctions arithmétiques.Pendant les travaux de thèse, le schéma TFHE a été implémenté et il est disponible en open source.La thèse contient aussi des travaux annexes. Le premier travail concerne l’étude d’un premier modèle théorique de vote électronique post-quantique basé sur le chiffrement homomorphe, le deuxième analyse la sécurité des familles de chiffrement homomorphe dans le cas d'une utilisation pratique sur le cloud, et le troisième ouvre sur une solution différente pour le calcul sécurisé, le calcul multi-partite
Fully homomorphic encryption is a new branch of cryptology, allowing to perform computations on encrypted data, without having to decrypt them. The main interest of homomorphic encryption schemes is the large number of practical applications for which they can be used. Examples are given by electronic voting, computations on sensitive data, such as medical or financial data, cloud computing, etc..The first fully homomorphic encryption scheme has been proposed in 2009 by Gentry. He introduced a new technique, called bootstrapping, used to reduce the noise in ciphertexts: in fact, in all the proposed homomorphic encryption schemes, the ciphertexts contain a small amount of noise, which is necessary for security reasons. If we perform computations on noisy ciphertexts, the noise increases and, after a certain number of operations, the noise becomes to large and it could compromise the correctness of the final result, if not controlled.Bootstrapping is then fundamental to construct fully homomorphic encryption schemes, but it is very costly in terms of both memory and time consuming.After Gentry’s breakthrough, the presented schemes had the goal to propose new constructions and to improve bootstrapping, in order to make homomorphic encryption practical. One of the most known schemes is GSW, proposed by Gentry, Sahai et Waters in 2013. The security of GSW is based on the LWE (learning with errors) problem, which is considered hard in practice. The most rapid bootstrapping on a GSW-based scheme has been presented by Ducas and Micciancio in 2015. In this thesis, we propose a new variant of the scheme proposed by Ducas and Micciancio, that we call TFHE.The TFHE scheme improves previous results, by performing a faster bootstrapping (in the range of a few milliseconds) and by using smaller bootstrapping keys, for the same security level. TFHE uses TLWE and TGSW ciphertexts (both scalar and ring): the acceleration of bootstrapping is mainly due to the replacement of the internal GSW product, used in the majority of previous constructions, with an external product between TLWE and TGSW.Two kinds of bootstrapping are presented. The first one, called gate bootstrapping, is performed after the evaluation of a homomorphic gate (binary or Mux); the second one, called circuit bootstrapping, can be executed after the evaluation of a larger number of homomorphic operations, in order to refresh the result or to make it compatible with the following computations.In this thesis, we also propose new techniques to improve homomorphic computations without bootstrapping and new packing techniques. In particular, we present a vertical packing, that can be used to efficiently evaluate look-up tables, we propose an evaluation via weighted deterministic automata, and we present a homomorphic counter, called TBSR, that can be used to evaluate arithmetic functions.During the thesis, the TFHE scheme has been implemented and it is available in open source.The thesis contains also ancillary works. The first one concerns the study of the first model of post-quantum electronic voting based on fully homomorphic encryption, the second one analyzes the security of homomorphic encryption in a practical cloud implementation scenario, and the third one opens up about a different solution for secure computing, multi-party computation

This thesis examines an automated method to detect surface deformations on automotive panels for the purpose of quality control along a manufacturing assembly line. Automation in the automotive manufacturing industry is becoming more prominent, but quality control is still largely performed by human workers. Quality control is important in the context of automotive body panels as deformations can occur along the assembly line such as inadequate handling of parts or tools around a vehicle during assembly, rack storage, and shipping from subcontractors. These defects are currently identified and marked, before panels are either rectified or discarded. This work attempts to develop an automated system to detect deformations to alleviate the dependence on human workers in quality control and improve performance by increasing speed and accuracy. Some techniques make use of an ideal CAD model behaving as a master work, and panels scanned on the assembly line are compared to this model to determine the location of deformations. This thesis presents a solution for detecting deformations of various scales without a master work. It also focuses on automated analysis requiring minimal intuitive operator-set parameters and provides the ability to classify the deformations as dings, which are deformations that protrude from the surface, or dents, which are depressions into the surface. A complete automated deformation detection system is proposed, comprised of a feature extraction module, segmentation module, and classification module, which outputs the locations of deformations when provided with the 3D mesh of an automotive panel. Two feature extraction techniques are proposed. The first is a general feature extraction technique for 3D meshes using octrees for multi-resolution analysis and evaluates the amount of surface variation to locate deformations. The second is specifically designed for the purpose of deformation detection, and analyzes multi-resolution cross-sections of a 3D mesh to locate deformations based on their estimated size. The performance of the proposed automated deformation detection system, and all of its sub-modules, is tested on a set of meshes which represent differing characteristics of deformations in surface panels, including deformations of different scales. Noisy, low resolution meshes are captured from a 3D acquisition, while artificial meshes are generated to simulate ideal acquisition conditions. The proposed system shows accurate results in both ideal situations as well as non-ideal situations under the condition of noise and complex surface curvature by extracting only the deformations of interest and accurately classifying them as dings or dents.

This thesis proposes a collaboration framework for the Web of Things based on the concepts of Service-oriented Architecture and integrated with semantic web technologies to offer new possibilities in terms of efficient asset management during operations requiring multi-actor collaboration. The motivation for the project comes from the rise in disasters where effective cross-organisation collaboration can increase the efficiency of critical information dissemination. Organisational boundaries of participants as well as their IT capability and trust issues hinders the deployment of a multi-party collaboration framework, thereby preventing timely dissemination of critical data. In order to tackle some of these issues, this thesis proposes a new collaboration framework consisting of a resource-based data model, resource-oriented access control mechanism and semantic technologies utilising the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology that can be used simultaneously by multiple actors without impacting each other’s networks and thus increase the efficiency of disaster management and relief operations. The generic design of the framework enables future extensions, thus enabling its exploitation across many application domains. The performance of the framework is evaluated in two areas: the capability of the access control mechanism to scale with increasing number of devices, and the capability of the semantic annotation process to increase in efficiency as more information is provided. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is fit for purpose.

El presente trabajo tiene como finalidad explicar cómo se pueden resolver problemas relacionados a la indisponibilidad de servicios de TI del puesto de trabajo digital tradicional. Asi como también, cómo alinear a los empleados, la tecnología y procesos para mejorar la eficiencia operativa en una empresa del sector minero que se encuentra en una iniciativa de transformación digital para seguir la tendencia de la minería 4.0. Para lo cual se propone el uso de una plataforma Cloud computing que ofrezca los beneficios del concepto digital modern workplace. El cual consiste en modernizar el puesto de trabajo a través de tecnología que proporcione a los usuarios movilidad, alta disponibilidad de los servicios, herramientas de colaboracion innovadoras y seguridad de la información de los datos corporativos. Para demostrar ello, el presente trabajo se divide en cinco capítulos. En el primer capítulo se desarrollan aspectos introductorios acerca de la organización objetivo que tiene una situación problemática. También se menciona el objetivo general y los objetivos específicos. Luego se realiza una revisión del estado del arte para conocer antecedentes, tendencias y casos de éxito referidos al tema. En él segundo capítulo se establecen los conceptos necesarios para el entendimiento de las definiciones. En el tercer capítulo se presenta el análisis del problema, sus causas, impacto y la toma de requerimientos que debe cumplir la solución propuesta. En el cuarto capítulo se realiza el diseño de cada objetivo específico. Finalmente, en el capítulo cinco se valida el diseño propuesto.
The purpose of this work is to explain how problems related to the unavailability of IT services of the traditional digital workplace can be solved. As well as, how to align employees, technology and processes to improve operational efficiency in a company in the mining sector that is in a digital transformation initiative to follow the trend of mining 4.0. For which the use of a Cloud computing platform is proposed that offers the benefits of the modern workplace digital concept. Which consists of modernizing the workplace through technology that provides users with mobility, high availability of services, innovative collaboration tools and information security of corporate data. To demonstrate this, this work is divided into five chapters. The first chapter develops introductory aspects about the target organization that has a problem situation. The general objective and the specific objectives are also mentioned. Then a review of the state of the art is carried out to find out background, trends and success stories related to the subject. The second chapter establishes the concepts necessary for understanding the definitions. The third chapter presents the analysis of the problem, its causes, impact and the requirements that the proposed solution must meet. In the fourth chapter, the design of each specific objective is carried out. Finally, in chapter five the proposed design is validated.
Tesis

Nachhaltige Architektur erfordert neue Bauformen, innovative Konstruktionen und die Verwendung neuartiger Baumaterialien. Zur Abschätzung des Risikos von feuchtebedingten Schäden finden Programme der hygrothermischen Bauteilsimulation Anwendung. Bei der Entwicklung solcher Simulationsprogramme spielt die korrekte Modellierung der Klimarandbedingungen eine entscheidende Rolle. Beim Übergang von der kurzwelligen horizontalen Strahlungsstromdichte auf die kurzwellige Strahlungsstromdichte eines beliebigen Bauteils müssen Himmelsrichtung der Flächennormalen und die Neigung des Bauteils zum Ausschluss von Eigenverschattung berücksichtigt werden. Das dargestellte integrale Modell erlaubt die Berechnung und Programmierung in einem hygrothermischen Simulationsprogramm. Für den Fall, dass nur Messwerte der globalen Strahlungsstromdichte zur Verfügung stehen, können die direkten und diffusen Anteile mithilfe geeigneter Modelle mit einer sehr guten Genauigkeit berechnet werden. Zur Berechnung der langwelligen Strahlungsbilanz eines Bauteils stehen nur selten jene Klimaparameter zur Verfügung, mit denen die atmosphärische langwellige Strahlungsflussdichte analytisch bestimmt werden kann, weshalb semi-empirische Modelle Anwendung finden müssen. Die langwellige Ausstrahlung der Atmosphäre kann mithilfe von bodennaher Lufttemperatur und Luftfeuchte sowie zweier Bedeckungsgrad-Indizes berechnet werden, welche die langwelligen Strahlungseigenschaften der Atmosphäre auf der Basis der vorhandenen kurzwelligen Strahlungsstromdichten beschreiben. Damit wird erstmals ein umfassendes Modell für die langwellige Strahlungsbilanz vorgelegt, welches alle Möglichkeiten der Datenverfügbarkeit berücksichtigt. Die Berechnung der Schlagregenstromdichte auf ein Bauteil kann mit den meisten vorliegenden semi-empirischen Modellen nur sehr ungenau erfolgen. Andere Verfahren, wie z.B. CFD-Simulationen, kommen wegen des beträchtlichen Aufwands meist nicht in Frage. Das bislang einzige vorliegende umfassende validierte semi-empirische Modell von Blocken kann durch die Berücksichtigung der mesoklimatischen Verhältnisse in seiner Genauigkeit verbessert werden
Sustainable architecture requires new building design, innovative constructions and the use of newly developed building materials. In order to determine the risk of moisture-related damages, computer programs for hygrothermal building part simulation are being used. If one develops such a simulation program, correct modelling of climatic boundary conditions plays an important role. When calculating the shortwave solar radiation flux density at an arbitrary building part on the basis of the shortwave solar radiation flux density on the horizontal surface, one must take into consideration the orientation and the inclination of the building part in order to preclude self-shading. The presented integral model allows the calculation and the programming in a hygrothermal simulation program. If only measured values of global radiation flux density are available, direct and diffuse parts can be determined very precisely by means of validated models. When calculating the longwave radiation balance on a building part, the needed values for the correct determination of atmospheric longwave radiation are hardly available. That’s why semi-empirical models will be applied. The longwave radiation flux density of the atmosphere can be determined on the basis of near-ground temperature and relative humidity and two cloud cover indices, which describe the longwave irradiative properties of the atmosphere by means of available shortwave radiation flux densities. Therewith, firstly an integral model is being presented in order to determine longwave radiation balance, which considers all possibilities of data availability. Most models for determination of driving rain load work with very bad accuracy. Other methods such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are not possible for hygrothermal building part simulations because of the huge effort. The only fully validated semi-empirical model by Blocken can be improved, if meso-climatic boundary conditions are taken into consideration

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A presente Tese realiza uma análise acerca do tipo penal em suas diversas vertentes, com as contribuições teóricas fornecidas pela perspectiva sistemista de Niklas Luhmann. O objetivo é demonstrar que é possível observar as comunicações referentes à formação jurídico-dogmática da tipicidade penal desde a idéia de tipo penal fechado até a construção do tipo penal autopoiético. Com isso, permite-se abstrair a efetividade da norma penal incriminadora, além das limitações impostas pela dogmática jurídica. Para tanto, desenvolve-se uma descrição do estado da arte das principais teorias penalistas ligadas à configuração do tipo penal, iniciando pela doutrina causal/finalista, passando pelas novas questões jusfilosóficas ligadas ao funcionalismo (imputação objetiva), ponderando suas linhas constituintes e delimitando a pertinência de seus opositores. A dinâmica materializada pelo enfrentamento dessas distintas posturas provoca o desenvolvimento de uma nova semântica da concretização do tipo penal, apresentando-se
This argument holds an analysis about the criminal type in its various aspects, with the theoretical contribution provided by the systemic perspective of Niklas Luhmann. The goal is to demonstrate that it is possible to observe the communications concerning the legal-dogmatic formation of a penal typicality since the idea of a closed criminal type until the construction of the autopoietic criminal type. This allows a disregard of the effectiveness of the incriminating penal norm, beyond the limitations imposed by legal dogmatic. Therefore, a description of the artistic state of the primary penal theories connected to the configuration of the penal type must be created, starting from the causal/finalist doctrine, moving thru the new juridical/philosophical questioning linked to the functionalism (objective imputation), analyzing its constituting aspects and marking down the pertinence of it’s opposition. The dynamic materialized by the confronting of these two different postures, instigates the creation of a

This Thesis is focused on the arranging of the melody, which is accompanied by jazz chords. It deals with creating a more harmonious voices using Block Voicing method. Distribution to target notes and passing notes is made using techniques of constraint programming (CSP). Passing notes are reharmonized by dominant seventh chord or by parallel chord. Using CSP a bass part is also created. To solve CSP is used Gecode library. The harmonious voices are arranged by Four Part Close Voicing. The application result is a tool for the music arranger.

Au sortir de la Révolution, les collections du Garde-Meuble présentaient un aspect singulier : on avait dispersé bon nombre de chefs-d’œuvre du mobilier royal, et dans le même temps, saisi chez les émigrés et condamnés beaucoup de meubles et objets de grande valeur. Napoléon Ier dut compter sur cette dotation pour meubler les palais dont il prenait possession avec le faste adéquat. La valeur de ces remplois de mobilier évolua au fil des régimes: à une valeur purement utilitaire succédèrent bientôt d’autres qualités attribuées à cet héritage, sur les plans historique, artistique, et symbolique. Sous la Restauration, on ne prêta guère attention à ce patrimoine, pourtant quasi familial, et les ventes de rebuts organisées dans les années 1820 contribuèrent à disperser encore des meubles royaux du XVIIIe siècle. C’est sous la Monarchie de Juillet que se fit jour un intérêt historique pour ces collections, largement mises à profit pour les ameublements des palais. Dans le même temps, le Garde-Meuble initia une véritable politique d’acquisition de mobilier ancien, à l’effet de se procurer des modèles authentiques et de compléter les collections. Ce dernier aspect fut d’autant plus important sous le Second Empire. À l’initiative de l’impératrice Eugénie, qui érigea le style Louis XVI en quasi-style officiel, on racheta des pièces importantes du mobilier royal, dont la plupart servit à l’exposition consacrée à Marie-Antoinette au Petit Trianon en 1867. Finalement, l’étude de ces remplois aura conduit à définir un processus de patrimonialisation du mobilier au XIXe siècle, qui mena à la reconnaissance de la valeur historique de ces objets et à leur présentation au musée
After the French Revolution, the collections of the Garde-Meuble were divided into two parts : on one hand, all pieces of royal furniture that were not sold at auction, and on the other hand, many objects confiscated from convicts and émigrés. By ascending the throne, Napoléon Ist used this endowment to furnish the palaces with all necessary ceremonial. This is considered as simply utility reuses of ancient furniture ; the same situation is to notice for the Restauration, although Louis XVIII and Charles X could have seen those collections as a familial heritage. When Louis-Philippe Ier came to power, the value of ancient furniture reuses evolved, due to a new interest in historic heritage. By creating historicist interiors in the palaces and by refurnishing historic appartements, the Garde-Meuble developed an acquisition policy on the art market to enrich its collections. This phenomenon was enhanced during the Second Empire, on the initiative of Empress Eugénie, a period that saw the first retrospective exhibitions, for instance the one hold at the Petit Trianon and dedicated to the Queen Marie-Antoinette in 1867. Last but not least, this study underlines the process of ̏ patrimonialization ̋ that characterized the fate of French royal furniture during the 19th-century, and led to its permanent exhibition in museums

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O objetivo desta dissertação consiste em investigar o processo de construção da identidade profissional de médicos que se dedicam à assistência a pacientes que apresentam doenças progressivas e ameaçadoras da continuidade existencial e que têm contribuído para o desenvolvimento dos Cuidados Paliativos no Brasil. Buscamos conhecer a trajetória profissional destes médicos desde a escolha da medicina como profissão até o encontro com a filosofia e a prática dos Cuidados Paliativos. Com este intuito, realizamos entrevistas semiestruturadas,colhidas segundo a metodologia de História Oral de Vida. Foram entrevistados seis médicos de diferentes especialidades que ocupam cargos diretivos em uma das associações profissionais voltadas para a disseminação e legitimação política e social dos Cuidados Paliativos no Brasil. Os depoentes se destacam no cenário nacional no que diz respeito às discussões sobre esta temática e mantêm contato com importantes instituições internacionais. Por esta razão, chamamos o conjunto de entrevistados de elite médica paliativista. Percebemos uma pobre interlocução entre os médicos paliativistas, o que se reflete na ausência de uma identidade integrada desse grupo profissional. Os entrevistados acentuaram as competências humanitárias necessárias ao bom exercício da Medicina Paliativa, mas, no entanto, não foram explicitadas as competências específicas a este campo profissional, que justificariam seu reconhecimento pelas entidades médicas competentes comouma nova área de atuação ou especialidade.

Telemetry system, Optimisation, Sensoric networks, Smart Grid, Internet of Things, Sensors, Information security, Cryptography, Cryptography algorithms, Cryptosystem, Confidentiality, Integrity, Authentication, Data freshness, Non-Repudiation.

碩士
國立中山大學
政治學研究所
103
Researchers of partisan voters have‭ ‬been assuming‭ ‬that‭ ‬there is a solid difference between‭ ‬“independent”voters and‭ ‬partisan voters‭ (‬including leaners‭). ‬This is hardly a case in the Taiwan context‭,‬‭ ‬a democracy of two-party presidential system‭, ‬where over 40‭ ‬percent of voters are partisans but claiming independent‭ ‬in most of telephone surveys‭.‬‭ ‬Pollsters‭, ‬researchers‭, ‬and journalists‭ ‬have been calculating the distribution of party supporters by either‭ ‬omitting‭ ‬these‭ ‬“independent”‭ ‬voters‭ ‬due to the unavailability of the data‭, ‬or simply apply counterintuitive formula to guess the distribution of the respondents with missing data‭. ‬This study takes‭ ‬avoid the definition of not-so-well-defined‭ ‬“independent”‭ ‬voters but aiming at‭ ‬these“invisible”‭ ‬or‭ ‬“closet”‭ ‬voters and at‭ ‬finding‭ ‬out their partisan orientation behind their ambivalent answers to telephone surveys‭. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ To do so I took‭ ‬a‭ ‬series of‭ ‬steps‭, ‬including qualitative and quantitative ones‭. ‬First I used a‭ ‬representative sample‭, ‬conducted in January 2014‭ (‬N=1,072‭) ‬in Taiwan via a RDD telephone survey‭. ‬This survey includes‭ ‬the‭ ‬conventional‭ ‬party identification question plus a serious‭ ‬of‭ ‬theory-based‭ ‬alternative questions‭ ‬that I evaluated to be triggering respondents’‭ ‬mobilized reasoning about the two major political parties‭,‬‭ ‬Kuomingtang‭ (‬KMT‭) ‬or Democratic Progressive Party‭ (‬DPP‭). ‬I‭ ‬then created an‭ ‬index for partisan respondents‭ ‬of the two political camps‭, ‬and applied the score patterns to‭ ‬the closet respondents‭. ‬In another follow up survey‭ (‬March 2014‭) ‬that‭ ‬targeted at‭ ‬the closet respondents‭ ‬I‭ ‬found that the correctness of prediction‭ ‬using the index‭ ‬is about 70%‭. ‬I then targeted and interviewed the most ambivalent closet voters and explored how their partisan mobilized reasoning was‭ (‬and failed to be‭) ‬triggered by the alternative survey questions‭. ‬I‭ ‬concluded with‭ ‬a‭ ‬few‭ ‬survey questions‭ ‬future‭ ‬electoral‭ ‬studies can use for probing‭ ‬closet voters‭. ‬The rich implications of the findings‭ ‬for improving the accuracy of predicting partisan votes‭, ‬the debates about the characteristics of independent voters‭, ‬and the development of partisan mobilized.

碩士
中原大學
工業與系統工程研究所
100
Abstract In order to fulfill the consumer perception to preserve the environment, enterprises must strengthen materials management of product. When companies fully focus on their core functions, materials management and reverse logistics will not become part of the company main activities. Thus materials management and reverse logistics are entrusted to an external company to get the economic profit. In this study, an overall closed-loop supply chain is entrusted by third-party logistics with forward logistics of product distribution and reverse logistics of product recovery. In order to solve the problems induced by bullwhip effect and extra costs, this study also uses consignment inventory strategy to tackle the complex closed-loop supply chain inventory system. Because suppliers must pay the cost of returned goods and commissioned third-party logistics, it will cause much cost for supplier by analysis results. This study uses consignment inventory system to shorten length of manufacturing cycle of suppliers in order to reduce inventory costs, and the retailer do not need to pay the set-up cost so that the consignment inventory system makes the overall closed-loop supply chain achieve a better efficiency.

Closed depressions, low elevation features in a landscape with no outlet point, play an important role in both surface and subsurface hydrology. These depressions, which are common in hummocky morainal landscapes, pool incoming surface flow, promoting infiltration and facilitating leaching of surface pollutants into vital groundwater resources. Due to the cost of ground based identification in large areas and difficulties with the identification of irregular depressions, remote identification using digital elevation models (DEMs) stands as a practical and effective tool for the mapping of these closed depressions. A modified stochastic depression identification algorithm was used in this study to characterize depressions in the Waterloo and Paris-Galt-Guelph moraines of Southwestern Ontario. The simulation output was a map of depressions in the study area. Depressions were corroborated using GRCA Wetlands data, Google Street View imagery, SWOOP 2006 orthophotos and field validation. Depression corroboration showed that the algorithm was able to accurately identify the location of closed depressions containing wetlands and closed depressions that are dry (largely due to wetland draining) in the hummocky topography of the study site. This research has implications for depression mapping in the field of digital terrain analysis as it enables the identification of real depressions in large study areas with a moderate resolution DEM. Providing a means of efficiently mapping closed depressions is important because of the role closed depressions play in the recharge of important groundwater stores.
Natural Resources Canada

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) showed promising results in learning from point cloud data. Applications of GCNs include point cloud classi cation, point cloud segmentation, point cloud upsampling, and more. Recently, the introduction of Deep Graph Convolutional Networks (DeepGCNs) allowed GCNs to go deeper, and thus resulted in better graph learning while avoiding the vanishing gradient problem in GCNs. By adapting impactful methods from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as residual connections, dense connections, and dilated convolutions, DeepGCNs allowed GCNs to learn better from non-Euclidean data. In addition, deep learning methods proved very e ective in the task of point cloud upsampling. Unlike traditional optimization-based methods, deep learning-based methods to point cloud upsampling does not rely on priors nor hand-crafted features to learn how to upsample point clouds. In this thesis, I discuss the impact and show the performance results of DeepGCNs in the task of point cloud part segmentation on PartNet dataset. I also illustrate the signi cance of using GCNs as upsampling modules in the task of point cloud upsampling by introducing two novel upsampling modules: Multi-branch GCN and Clone GCN. I show quantitatively and qualitatively the performance results of our novel and versatile upsampling modules when evaluated on a new proposed standardized dataset: PU600, which is the largest and most diverse point cloud upsampling dataset currently in the literature.

Though the Aerospace industry is moving towards small satellites and smaller sensor technologies, sensors used for close-proximity operations are generally cost (and often size and power) prohibitive for University-class satellites. Given the need for low-cost, low-mass solutions for close-proximity relative navigation sensors, this research analyzed the expected errors due to near-field effects using a coarse sun sensor as part of a 6-degree-of-freedom (6-dof) solution. To characterize these near-field effects, a test bed (Characterization Test Apparatus or CTA) was proposed, its design presented, and the design stage uncertainty analysis of the CTA performed. A candidate coarse sun sensor (NorthStarTM) was chosen for testing, and a mathematical model of the sensor’s functionality was derived. Using a Gaussian Least Squares Differential Correction (GLSDC) algorithm, the model parameters were estimated and a comparison between simulated NorthStarTM measurements and model estimates was performed. Results indicate the CTA is capable of resolving the near-field errors. Additionally, this research found no apparent show stoppers for using coarse sun sensors for 6-dof solutions.

Cloud Computing is the next step in the evolution of the Internet. It provides seemingly unlimited computation and storage resources by abstracting the networking, hardware, and software components underneath. However, individual cloud service providers do not have unlimited resources to offer. Some of the tasks demand computational resources that these individual cloud service providers can not fulfill themselves. In such cases, it would be optimal for these providers to borrow resources from each other. The process where different cloud service providers pool their resources is called Cloud Federation. There are many aspects to Cloud Federation such as access control and interoperability. Access control ensures that only the permitted users can access these federated resources. Interoperability enables the end-user to have a seamless experience when accessing resources on federated clouds. In this thesis, we detail our project named GENI-SAVI Federation, in which we federated the GENI and SAVI cloud systems. We focus on the access control portion of the project while also discussing the interoperability aspect of it.
Graduate
0984
panjwani.riz@gmail.com

Metal foams have many attractive properties such as light weight, low relative density, energy absorption capability etc. One of the main advantages of metal foam is that the foam inherits several properties of the parent metal, at the same time, at a fraction of the weight. Metal foams are basically of two types; closed pore and open pore. In the open pore configuration the highly porous structure with large surface to volume ratio is attractive in thermal applications such as heat exchangers, small scale refrigeration, diesel exhaust cooling and heat sink for electronics. Large surface area to volume ratio of the heat transfer area is an important parameter in design of heat exchangers. Application of open cell metal foam as a heat exchanger involves production of the metal foam, cutting/drilling the metal foam to required dimensions and attaching it to a substrate or duct. Foams are cut by various methods such as by using circular saw, band saw, abrasive sawing wire or electrical discharge machining. Cutting or drilling operations plastically deform the struts and affect the surface roughness of the struts and hence, the contact area between the foam and the substrate. The foam and the substrate are then joined to get the final product. Various techniques are adopted to join the foam and substrate that includes, press fit, welding, soldering, brazing and use of epoxy adhesives or thermal glue. These methods either deform the foam plastically or involve a bonding material which involves an additional step in manufacturing and is generally necessary to reduce the thermal resistance at the interface. Every secondary step involved in machining the foam and joining it to substrate/duct add to the energy, time and cost of the component. Significant amount of materials wastage occurs during the production and machining steps of the metal foam. Bonding material used for attaching foam to the substrate makes the recycling of the heat exchangers difficult. In the present research work the above issues were rectified by introducing a novel method of fabricating the heat exchanger in a single step. This can be done by producing open cell foam, bonded to the substrate in a single step to get the ready to use heat exchanger. The uniqueness of the method/ process is that it provides an advantage of manufacturing heat exchangers consisting of open cell aluminium foam both inside and outside the aluminium duct/substrate. Here open cell metal foam is metallurgic ally bonded to the aluminium duct without producing any distortion in the aluminium duct. The present method avoids the secondary cutting and joining operations, hence reducing material and energy wastage. This heat exchanger does not need a bonding material at the foam duct interface which makes the product completely recyclable without even having to separate the aluminium foam and, many-at-times, the copper substrate. Further, in the present process no hazardous material is involved in the fabrication process of the heat exchanger and all the materials used for the foam production can be recycled. Another unique advantage of this process is that the foam can also be cast inside and outside the tube in a single step. This helps increase the heat transfer area per unit volume inside the tube increasing the effectiveness significantly. First, an attempt was made to cast aluminium foam over a Cu substrate. Spheres made of Plaster of Paris (PoP) were used as space holders to create pores in the foam. First, a dough of PoP was prepared by mixing sufficient amount of water with the powder of PoP. Small pieces of PoP were taken from the dough and were rolled by hands to prepare spherical balls. Next, a casting setup was made where a die made of stainless steel was placed in a crucible whose bottom was filled with sand. A tube/duct made of copper was placed at the centre of the die and PoP balls were dropped around the duct. This setup was then placed in a furnace and was preheated to remove all the moisture from the PoP. Molten aluminium at around 700 °C was poured into the preheated die. After solidification, the die was opened and cast was allowed to cool in ambient air. PoP balls were removed by using a sharp needle and by dipping the casting in acetic acid. After removal of PoP from the cast, interconnected holes/cavities formed in the place of space holders/PoP balls, forming pores in the foam. There are some limitations of this method such as removal of PoP was tedious and needed chemicals that need to be discarded, PoP cannot be recycled and creates waste, small amount of moisture present in PoP balls can cause an explosion. The bonding between aluminium foam and Cu substrate obtained was not good, giving rise to thermal contact resistance. Due to the above limitations further implementation of this process using PoP was not explored further. There was a need of space holder material which can withstand the temperature of molten Al and also can be removed easily from the cast without any use of chemicals. Obtaining metallic bonding between foam and Cu substrate was difficult due to the corrosion layer formation at the interface of Al and Cu substrate due to preheating. If preheating was not carried out full penetration of the molten aluminium did not take place in the space available in between the spheres. Therefore, it was decided to cast Al foam over Al substrate. The main challenge and difficulty was to cast open cell Al foam inside and outside the tube/duct made of the same material (Al) without distorting the tube/duct as well as achieving consistent metallic bonding between the two. This has been successfully done by gravity casting method a single step manufactured and ready to use open cell Al foam heat exchanger were fabricated. A casting setup was prepared, which consisted of a commercially pure aluminium tube placed in the middle of a stainless steel split die. The gap between the tube and die was filled with the salt spheres. An uncommon and new approach was adopted to produce NaCl salt spheres. NaCl salt balls (spherical and ovoid) of different diameters were processed by casting route. The casting step of NaCl is necessary as the moisture present in NaCl can be completely removed during the melting of NaCl. NaCl was chosen as it had a melting point higher than aluminium. The casting setup was placed in a furnace and was preheated to various temperatures up to 550 °C. Commercially pure aluminium was melted separately in a crucible and was poured into the steel die at 700oC. The liquid metal flows through the die and fills the cavities between the salt balls. The die was opened immediately after solidification of molten Al and cast was allowed to cool in ambient air. The salt (NaCl), which was still solid, was dissolved in water to get the foam structure. With proper control of the preheat temperature and temperature of liquid aluminium no distortion of the aluminium duct was observed throughout the length of the heat exchanger. Consistent and complete fusion/ metallic bonding was observed at the interface of Al foam and Al substrate/duct. Several heat exchangers with different porosity and pore geometry with the aluminium foam cast outside the tube and both inside and outside of the tube were fabricated. The beauty of the designed method is that it is simple and cost effective and eliminates the major issue of thermal contact resistance since the foam and the duct are made of the same material and are bonded in the liquid state leaving no interface between the foam and the duct. Further, foam can also be cast inside the duct in the same step while casting the foam outside the tube, giving an integral heat exchanger which has higher heat transfer surface area to volume ratio inside and outside the duct. This is expected to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the heat exchanger An added advantage of this method is that the heat exchanger can be recycled easily in a single step re-melting route. Further, the heat exchanger does not use any hazardous material during manufacture that needs attention during recycling. After the production and fabrication of the heat exchangers, the thermal performance or effectiveness of the heat exchangers was assessed, to evaluate its usefulness and suitability for heat transfer application. An experimental test setup was fabricated in the laboratory to perform the heat transfer tests. The experimental test setup consists of the following major components;1) A test chamber whose function was to insulate the heat exchangers from the surroundings and to avoid any heat loss to the surroundings, 2) An air blower used to supply cold fluid (air) to the test chamber, 3) A constant temperature bath was used to supply the hot fluid, which was water in this case, in the duct of the heat exchanger, 4) A rotameter was used to measure the volumetric flow rate of the cold fluid and 5) A pressure gauge having the pressure measurement range between 1 mbar to 160 mbar to measure the pressure drop across the test chamber. K-type chromel – alumel thermocouples having temperature measurement range between -270 °C to 1,260 °C were used to measure the temperature of hot and cold fluids during the experiments. By aid of the data logger system and computer, temperature readings were recorded during the tests and were used further for the heat transfer calculations. For testing the aluminium foam heat exchangers was placed in the insulated test chamber. Hot water was supplied inside the duct of heat exchanger whereas air at room temperature was supplied around the foams at varying flow rates during the tests. During the tests, temperature readings were taken at steady state condition. NTU-Effectiveness method was used to evaluate the thermal performance of heat exchangers. Overall results obtained by this experimental study are as follows • As the inlet temperature difference between hot and the cold fluids increases the heat transfer rate and the effectiveness of the heat exchangers also increases. • At a constant flow rate of hot fluid, heat exchangers exhibits significantly better thermal performance at lower flow rate of cold fluid compared to higher flow rate. As the flow rate of cold fluid increases, the velocity of the fluid increases and consequently, reduces the optimum interaction time between hot and the cold fluids required for the efficient heat transfer. • At a constant and low flow rate of cold fluid the effectiveness of the heat exchanger increases as the porosity of the foam increases. But when the flow rate of cold fluid was increased further after a certain limit, the effectiveness value of the heat exchanger decreases. • Heat exchanger consisting of foam of higher porosity exhibits higher effective. • Heat exchanger having foam inside and outside of the duct/tube exhibits significantly higher effectiveness compared to Al duct, Cu duct and other heat exchanger tested. • At a higher flow rate of the cold fluid, the heat exchangers consisting of foams of higher porosity, experience more drop in effectiveness compared to the heat exchanger having foams of low porosity. • Pressure drop across the length of the foam/fin increases as the volumetric flow rate of the cold fluid (m3/s) increases. • Surface area per unit volume and effectiveness values for bare Al tube is very low compared to Al foam heat exchangers resulting in the bare Al tube exhibiting much lower effectiveness compared to heat exchanger made of Al foam. • For a certain flow rate of fluids, the effectiveness of the heat exchanger increases up to a certain thickness of the Al foam. • Regardless of the thickness of the foam, the effectiveness of the heat exchangers is low at higher flow rate of cold fluid compared to lower flow rate. • These foam based heat exchanger had a much higher effectiveness when compared to that of other heat exchangers, data of which were got from literature. The present experimental study concludes that fuse bonding open cell aluminium foam over an Al duct or Al substrate can improve the thermal performance of the heat exchanger significantly. The thesis includes five chapters. Chapter 1 gives a detailed introduction about the metal foam, heat exchangers, thermal contact resistance and its effect on the heat transfer rate has been explained. This chapter also includes the overall aim and motivation for the research work. Chapter 2 covers the literature available on production methods of metal foam and its limitations has been listed out. And conventional methods of manufacturing open cell metal foam heat exchangers and its disadvantages have been explained in detailed. Chapter 3 covers in detail the novel method of production and fabrication of open cell metal foam heat exchangers. Chapter 4 includes an experimental study, where thermal performance of heat exchangers has been assessed through heat transfer experiments. Chapter 5 is the conclusions and future works.

This thesis addresses the problem of registering one point set with respect to another. This problem arises in the context of the use of CMM/Scanners to inspect objects especially with freeform surfaces. The tolerance verification process now requires the comparison of measured points with the nominal geometry. This entails placement of the measured point set in the same reference frame as the nominal model. This problem is referred to as the registration or localization problem. In the most general form the tolerance verification task involves registering multiple point sets corresponding to multi-step scan of an object with respect to the nominal CAD model. This problem is addressed in three phases. This thesis presents a novel approach to automated inspection by matching point sets based on the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. The Modified ICP (MICP) algorithm presented in the thesis improves upon the existing methods through the use of a localized region based triangulation technique to obtain correspondences for all the inspection points and achieves dramatic reduction in computational effort. The use of point sets to represent the nominal surface and shapes enables handling different systems and formats. Next, the thesis addresses the important problem of establishing registration between point sets in different reference frames when the initial relative pose between them is significantly large. A novel initial pose invariant methodology has been developed. Finally, the above approach is extended to registration of multiview inspection data sets based on acquisition of transformation information of each inspection view using the virtual gauging concept. This thesis describes implementation to address each of these problems in the area of automated registration and verification leading towards automatic inspection.

Nachhaltige Architektur erfordert neue Bauformen, innovative Konstruktionen und die Verwendung neuartiger Baumaterialien. Zur Abschätzung des Risikos von feuchtebedingten Schäden finden Programme der hygrothermischen Bauteilsimulation Anwendung. Bei der Entwicklung solcher Simulationsprogramme spielt die korrekte Modellierung der Klimarandbedingungen eine entscheidende Rolle. Beim Übergang von der kurzwelligen horizontalen Strahlungsstromdichte auf die kurzwellige Strahlungsstromdichte eines beliebigen Bauteils müssen Himmelsrichtung der Flächennormalen und die Neigung des Bauteils zum Ausschluss von Eigenverschattung berücksichtigt werden. Das dargestellte integrale Modell erlaubt die Berechnung und Programmierung in einem hygrothermischen Simulationsprogramm. Für den Fall, dass nur Messwerte der globalen Strahlungsstromdichte zur Verfügung stehen, können die direkten und diffusen Anteile mithilfe geeigneter Modelle mit einer sehr guten Genauigkeit berechnet werden. Zur Berechnung der langwelligen Strahlungsbilanz eines Bauteils stehen nur selten jene Klimaparameter zur Verfügung, mit denen die atmosphärische langwellige Strahlungsflussdichte analytisch bestimmt werden kann, weshalb semi-empirische Modelle Anwendung finden müssen. Die langwellige Ausstrahlung der Atmosphäre kann mithilfe von bodennaher Lufttemperatur und Luftfeuchte sowie zweier Bedeckungsgrad-Indizes berechnet werden, welche die langwelligen Strahlungseigenschaften der Atmosphäre auf der Basis der vorhandenen kurzwelligen Strahlungsstromdichten beschreiben. Damit wird erstmals ein umfassendes Modell für die langwellige Strahlungsbilanz vorgelegt, welches alle Möglichkeiten der Datenverfügbarkeit berücksichtigt. Die Berechnung der Schlagregenstromdichte auf ein Bauteil kann mit den meisten vorliegenden semi-empirischen Modellen nur sehr ungenau erfolgen. Andere Verfahren, wie z.B. CFD-Simulationen, kommen wegen des beträchtlichen Aufwands meist nicht in Frage. Das bislang einzige vorliegende umfassende validierte semi-empirische Modell von Blocken kann durch die Berücksichtigung der mesoklimatischen Verhältnisse in seiner Genauigkeit verbessert werden.
Sustainable architecture requires new building design, innovative constructions and the use of newly developed building materials. In order to determine the risk of moisture-related damages, computer programs for hygrothermal building part simulation are being used. If one develops such a simulation program, correct modelling of climatic boundary conditions plays an important role. When calculating the shortwave solar radiation flux density at an arbitrary building part on the basis of the shortwave solar radiation flux density on the horizontal surface, one must take into consideration the orientation and the inclination of the building part in order to preclude self-shading. The presented integral model allows the calculation and the programming in a hygrothermal simulation program. If only measured values of global radiation flux density are available, direct and diffuse parts can be determined very precisely by means of validated models. When calculating the longwave radiation balance on a building part, the needed values for the correct determination of atmospheric longwave radiation are hardly available. That’s why semi-empirical models will be applied. The longwave radiation flux density of the atmosphere can be determined on the basis of near-ground temperature and relative humidity and two cloud cover indices, which describe the longwave irradiative properties of the atmosphere by means of available shortwave radiation flux densities. Therewith, firstly an integral model is being presented in order to determine longwave radiation balance, which considers all possibilities of data availability. Most models for determination of driving rain load work with very bad accuracy. Other methods such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are not possible for hygrothermal building part simulations because of the huge effort. The only fully validated semi-empirical model by Blocken can be improved, if meso-climatic boundary conditions are taken into consideration.

This research explores differences in environmental worldviews and connections to the land globally and more specifically in a case study of NGOs working in the Ecuadorian Cloud Forest. The aims of this project are to investigate different environmental worldviews expressed between western NGOs and non western local NGOs and to pose these questions 1) what environmental worldviews and ethics are at play in addressing conservation globally and specifically in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador? 2) How do these worldviews influence models for conservation? 3) How do locally-run projects differ from foreign NGOs in addressing the combined needs of the environment and the people in Ecuador? I work to establish a framework for comparing the environmental worldviews of foreign environmental NGOs that of local NGOs, by researching environmental worldviews around the world as influenced by culture, society, history and religion. By using research on case studies done by Jim Igoe, Carolyn Merchant, John Schelhas and Max Pfeffer, I explore the dominant Western worldview of conservation and how its introduction of the National Park model has impacted local communities globally. By comparing this Western worldview of conservation via preservation in National Parks to the nonwestern worldview of integrative models for conservation, I hope to establish a framework for how looking at conservation from the perspective of local communities may prove more beneficial to the future of conservation projects globally. This case study centers around four main community-based conservation projects in the Ecuadorian Cloud Forest and asks how their grassroots operations differ from the Ecuadorian National Park system in their efforts to educate and support local communities. This project proposes to dissect these projects designed by local and foreign NGOs to see how they are shaped by their environmental worldviews and whether that worldview includes just the needs of the environment or takes into account the needs of the people as well. This is done through a combination of participant observation and semi-structured open-ended interviews. All data in this ethnography is qualitative and draws on three bodies of literature that serve as frames or approaches to this topic: environmental worldviews, political ecology, and environmental justice. By using these three approaches I show that the environment and ultimately efforts for conservation do not exist within a vacuum but rather lay within a broader context of beliefs, society, and history.
Graduation date: 2012

Celem pracy jest kompleksowa analiza i ocena przepisów Protokołu haskiego o prawie właściwym dla zobowiązań alimentacyjnych z 23 listopada 2007 r. pod kątem jego celów oraz przesłanek jego ratyfikacji przez Unię Europejską. Poprzez ratyfikację protokołu prawodawca unijny pragnął zapewnić jednolite stosowanie regulacji dotyczących statutu alimentacyjnego na jak największym obszarze. Celami protokołu są natomiast zwiększenie pewności prawnej oraz przewidywalności, a tym samym umożliwienie wierzycielom alimentacyjnym działania z pełną wiedzą o ich sytuacji i unikania problemów wynikających z różnorodności krajowych systemów prawnych, oraz sprawiedliwe wyważenie interesów wierzyciela i dłużnika alimentacyjnego poprzez przyjęcie nowej regulacji kolizyjnej. Praca opiera się na tezie, że konstrukcja postanowień protokołu haskiego nie zapewnia pełnej realizacji jego celów.
The goal of the dissertation is to scrutinise the Hague Protocol of 23 November 2007 on the Law Applicable to Maintenance Obligations with regard to its aims and the reasons for its ratification by the European Union. The EU has adopted this new international instrument to ensure consistent application of regulations on the law applicable to maintenance cases in as many states as possible. The objectives of the Hague Protocol are: (i) to improve legal certainty and predictability by creating common provisions on the law applicable to maintenance obligations and, therefore, to enable creditors to act in full knowledge of their situation, without being subject to diverse national systems, and (ii) to create fair balance between the interests of the maintenance creditors and debtors by introducing new conflict rules. The thesis is that the construction of the provisions of the Hague Protocol does not let it achieve its objectives completely.