Within any ecosystem, information needs are shared to be fulfilled and to support the ecosystem in a way or another. They are vital for designing appropriate information systems that will provide those needs. In this thesis, the gravel road ecosystem is studied, where efficient information sharing is not enabled due to the lack of appropriate information systems. Thus,when focusing on the gravel roads ecosystem, information plays a crucial role regarding the maintenance acts upon these roads. Moreover, not enough literature investigates theinformation needs of gravel roads stakeholders with the aim to improve the maintenance ofthese roads.

Therefore, this thesis intends to elicit information needs of gravel road stakeholders by performing an exploratory case study. The case study forms a part of an ongoing project with the goal to build a cloud-based information system for a sustainable gravel road maintenance. Data were collected through telephone- and online-based interviews with several key stakeholders in Sweden and were thereafter structured through template analysis. The major findings were a set of information needs and several needed sensors within the pre-mentioned information system. This thesis concluded that the future cloud-based information system in the ongoing project is a useful system for sharing vital information among future gravel roads stakeholders, considering the variety of needed information that affects the maintenance of the gravel roads.

Modern software systems are increasingly more connected, pervasive, and dynamic, as such, they are subject to more runtime variations than legacy systems. Runtime variations affect system properties, such as performance and availability. The variations are difficult to anticipate and thus mitigate in the system design.

Self-adaptive software systems were proposed as a solution to monitor and adapt systems in response to runtime variations. Research has established a vast body of knowledge on engineering self-adaptive systems. However, there is a lack of systematic process support that leverages such engineering knowledge and provides for systematic reuse for self-adaptive systems development. 

This thesis proposes the Autonomic Software Product Lines (ASPL), which is a strategy for developing self-adaptive software systems with systematic reuse. The strategy exploits the separation of a managed and a managing subsystem and describes three steps that transform and integrate a domain-independent managing system platform into a domain-specific software product line for self-adaptive software systems.

Applying the ASPL strategy is however not straightforward as it involves challenges related to variability and uncertainty. We analyzed variability and uncertainty to understand their causes and effects. Based on the results, we developed the Autonomic Software Product Lines engineering (ASPLe) methodology, which provides process support for the ASPL strategy. The ASPLe has three processes, 1) ASPL Domain Engineering, 2) Specialization and 3) Integration. Each process maps to one of the steps in the ASPL strategy and defines roles, work-products, activities, and workflows for requirements, design, implementation, and testing. The focus of this thesis is on requirements and design.

We validate the ASPLe through demonstration and evaluation. We developed three demonstrator product lines using the ASPLe. We also conducted an extensive case study to evaluate key design activities in the ASPLe with experiments, questionnaires, and interviews. The results show a statistically significant increase in quality and reuse levels for self-adaptive software systems designed using the ASPLe compared to current engineering practices.

Example programs are well known as an important tool to learn computer programming. Realizing the signicance of example programs, this study has been conducted with a goalto measure and evaluate the quality of examples used in academia. We make a distinctionbetween good and bad examples, as badly designed examples may prove harmful for novice learners. In general, students differ from expert programmers in their approach to read and comprehend a program. How do students understand example programs is explored in the light of classical theories and models of program comprehension. Key factors that impact program quality and comprehension are identified. To evaluate as well as improve the quality of examples, a set of quality attributes is proposed. Relationship between program complexity and quality is examined. We rate readability as a prime quality attribute and hypothesize that example programs with low readability are difficult to understand. Software Reading Ease Score (SRES), a program readability metric proposed by Börstler et al. is implemented to provide a readability measurement tool. SRES is based on lexical tokens and is easy to compute using static code analysis techniques. To validate SRES metric, results are statistically analyzed in correlation to earlier existing well acknowledged software metrics.

We envision an Autonomic Software Product Line (ASPL). The ASPL is a dynamic software product line that supports self adaptable products. We plan to use reflective architecture to model and develop ASPL. To evaluate the approach, we have implemented three autonomic product lines which show promising results. The ASPL approach is at initial stages, and require additional work. We plan to exploit online learning to realize more dynamic software product lines to cope with the problem of product line evolution. We propose on-line knowledge sharing among products in a product line to achieve continuous improvement of quality in product line products.

Software quality is critical in today's software systems. A challenge is the trade-off situation architects face in the design process. Designers often have two or more alternatives, which must be compared and put into context before a decision is made. The challenge becomes even more complex for dynamic software product lines, where domain designers have to take runtime variations into consideration as well. To address the problem we propose extensions to an architectural reasoning framework with constructs/artifacts to define and model a domain's scope and dynamic variability. The extended reasoning framework encapsulates knowledge to understand and reason about domain quality behavior and self-adaptation as a primary variability mechanism. The framework is demonstrated for a self-configuration property, self-upgradability on an educational product-line.

Software architecture serves as a foundation for the design and development of software systems. Designing an architecture requires extensive analysis and reasoning. The study presented herein focuses on the architectural analysis and reasoning in support of engineering self-adaptive software systems with systematic reuse. Designing self-adaptive software systems with systematic reuse introduces variability along three dimensions; adding more complexity to the architectural analysis and reasoning process. To this end, the study presents an extended Architectural Reasoning Framework with dedicated reasoning support for self-adaptive systems and reuse. To evaluate the proposed framework, we conducted an initial feasibility case study, which concludes that the proposed framework assists the domain architects to increase reusability, reduce fault density, and eliminate differences in skills and experiences among architects, which were our research goals and are decisive factors for a system's overall quality.

Advances in computing technologies are pushing software systems and their operating environments to become more dynamic and complex. The growing complexity of software systems coupled with uncertainties induced by runtime variations leads to challenges in software analysis and design. Self-Adaptive Software Systems (SASS) have been proposed as a solution to address design time complexity and uncertainty by adapting software systems at runtime. A vast body of knowledge on engineering self-adaptive software systems has been established. However, to the best of our knowledge, no or little work has considered systematic reuse of this knowledge. To that end, this study contributes an Autonomic Software Product Lines engineering (ASPLe) methodology. The ASPLe is based on a multi-product lines strategy which leverages systematic reuse through separation of application and adaptation logic. It provides developers with repeatable process support to design and develop self-adaptive software systems with reuse across several application domains. The methodology is composed of three core processes, and each process is organized for requirements, design, implementation, and testing activities. To exemplify and demonstrate the use of the ASPLe methodology, three application domains are used as running examples throughout the report.

This work studies systematic reuse in the context of self-adaptive software systems. In our work, we realized that managing variability for such platforms is different compared to traditional platforms, primarily due to the run-time variability and system uncertainties. Motivated by the fact that recent trends show that self-adaptation will be used more often in future system generation and that software reuse state-of-practice or research do not provide sufficient support, we have investigated the problems and possibly resolutions in this context. We have analyzed variability for these systems, using a systematic reuse prism, and identified a research gap in variability management. The analysis divides variability handling into four activities: (1) identify variability, (2) constrain variability, (3) implement variability, and (4) manage variability. Based on the findings we envision a reuse framework for the specific domain and present an example framework that addresses some of the identified challenges. We argue that it provides basic support for engineering self-adaptive software systems with systematic reuse. We discuss some important avenues of research for achieving the vision.

Designing a software architecture requires architectural reasoning, i.e., activities that translate requirements to an architecture solution. Architectural reasoning is particularly challenging in the design of product-lines of self-adaptive systems, which involve variability both at development time and runtime. In previous work we developed an extended Architectural Reasoning Framework (eARF) to address this challenge. However, evaluation of the eARF showed that the framework lacked support for rigorous reasoning, ensuring that the design complies to the requirements. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework that enhances eARF with such support. The framework defines a set of artifacts and a series of activities. Artifacts include templates to specify domain quality attribute scenarios, concrete models, and properties. The activities support architects with transforming requirement scenarios to architecture models that comply to required properties. Our focus in this paper is on architectural reasoning support for a single product instance. We illustrate the benefits of the approach by applying it to an example client-server system, and outline challenges for future work. © 2016 IEEE.

We describe ongoing work on a variability mechanism for Autonomic Software Product Lines (ASPL). The autonomic software product lines have self-management characteristics that make product line instances more resilient to context changes and some aspects of product line evolution. Instances sense the context, selects and bind the best component variants to variation-points at run-time. The variability mechanism we describe is composed of a profile guided dispatch based on off-line and on-line training processes. Together they form a simple, yet powerful variability mechanism that continuously learns, which variants to bind given the current context and system goals.

This report describes a work in progress to develop Autonomic Software Product Lines (ASPL). The ASPL is a dynamic software product line approach with a novel variability handling mechanism that enables traditional software product lines to adapt themselves at runtime in response to changes in their context, requirements and business goals. The ASPL variability mechanism is composed of three key activities: 1) context-profiling, 2) context-aware composition, and 3) online learning. Context-profiling is an offline activity that prepares a knowledge base for context-aware composition. The context-aware composition uses the knowledge base to derive a new product or adapts an existing product based on a product line's context attributes and goals. The online learning optimizes the knowledge base to remove errors and suboptimal information and to incorporate new knowledge. The three activities together form a simple yet powerful variability handling mechanism that learns and adapts a system at runtime in response to changes in system context and goals. We evaluated the ASPL variability mechanism on three small-scale software product lines and got promising results. The ASPL approach is, however, is yet at an initial stage and require improved development support with more rigorous evaluation. 

More than two decades of research have demonstrated an increasing need for software systems to be self-adaptive. Self-adaptation is required to deal with runtime dynamics which are difficult to predict before deployment. A vast body of knowledge to develop Self-Adaptive Software Systems (SASS) has been established. We, however, discovered a lack of process support to develop self-adaptive systems with reuse. To that end, we propose a domain-engineering based methodology, Autonomic Software Product Lines engineering (ASPLe), which provides step-by-step guidelines for developing families of SASS with systematic reuse. The evaluation results from a case study show positive effects on quality and reuse for self-adaptive systems designed using the ASPLe compared to state-of-the-art engineering practices.

We describe ongoing work in knowledge evolution management for autonomic software product lines. We explore how an autonomic product line may benefit from new knowledge originating from different source activities and artifacts at run time. The motivation for sharing run-time knowledge is that products may self-optimize at run time and thus improve quality faster compared to traditional software product line evolution. We propose two mechanisms that support knowledge evolution in product lines: online learning and knowledge sharing. We describe two basic scenarios for runtime knowledge evolution that involves these mechanisms. We evaluate online learning and knowledge sharing in a small product line setting that shows promising results.

The concept of variability is fundamental in software product lines and a successful implementation of a product line largely depends on how well domain requirements and their variability are specified, managed, and realized. While developing an educational software product line, we identified a lack of support to specify variability in quality concerns. To address this problem we propose an approach to model variability in quality concerns, which is an extension of quality attribute scenarios. In particular, we propose domain quality attribute scenarios, which extend standard quality attribute scenarios with additional information to support specification of variability and deriving product specific scenarios. We demonstrate the approach with scenarios for robustness and upgradability requirements in the educational software product line.

Forests are essential for life, providing various ecological, social, and economic benefits worldwide. However, one of the main challenges faced by the world is the forest damage caused by biotic and abiotic factors. In any case, the forest damages threaten the environment, biodiversity, and ecosystem. Climate change and anthropogenic activities, such as illegal logging and industrial waste, are among the principal elements contributing to forest damage. To achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to forests and climate change, detecting and analyzing forest damages, and taking appropriate measures to prevent or reduce the damages are essential. To that end, we envision establishing a Smart Forest Observatories (SFOs) network, as shown below, which can be either a local area or a wide area network involving remote forests. The basic idea is to use Monitor, Analyze, Plan, Execute, and Knowledge (MAPE-K) architecture from autonomic computing and self-adaptive software systems domain to design and develop the SFOs network. The SFOs are planned to collect, analyze, and share the collected data and analysis results using state-of-the-art methods. The principal objective of the SFOs network is to provide accurate and real-time data to policymakers and forest managers, enabling them to develop effective policies and management strategies for global forest conservation that help to achieve SDGs related to forests and climate change.

Facial recognition technology has become a ubiquitous tool in security and personal identification. However, the rise of this technology has been accompanied by concerns over inherent biases, particularly regarding ethnic and gender. This thesis examines the extent of these biases by focusing on the influence of dataset imbalances in facial recognition algorithms. We employ a structured methodological approach that integrates AI-generated images to enhance dataset diversity, with the intent to balance representation across ethnics and genders. Using the ResNet and Vgg model, we conducted a series of controlled experiments that compare the performance impacts of balanced versus imbalanced datasets. Our analysis includes the use of confusion matrices and accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score metrics to critically assess the model’s performance. The results demonstrate how tailored augmentation of training datasets can mitigate bias, leading to more equitable outcomes in facial recognition technology. We present our findings with the aim of contributing to the ongoing dialogue regarding AI fairness and propose a framework for future research in the field.

Structural damage detection has been an interdisciplinary area of interest for various engineering fields. While the available damage detection methods have been in the process of adapting machine learning concepts, most machine learning based methods extract “hand-crafted” features which are fixed and manually selected in advance. Their performance varies significantly among various patterns of data depending on the particular structure under analysis. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), on the other hand, can fuse and simultaneously optimize two major sets of an assessment task (feature extraction and classification) into a single learning block during the training phase. This ability not only provides an improved classification performance but also yields a superior computational efficiency. 1D CNNs have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in vibration-based structural damage detection; however, it has been reported that the training of the CNNs requires significant amount of measurements especially in large structures. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper presents an enhanced CNN-based approach that requires only two measurement sets regardless of the size of the structure. This approach is verified using the experimental data of the Phase II benchmark problem of structural health monitoring which had been introduced by IASC-ASCE Structural Health Monitoring Task Group. As a result, it is shown that the enhanced CNN-based approach successfully estimated the actual amount of damage for the nine damage scenarios of the benchmark study.

Food waste is becoming an increasing threat to the environment and the economy. Estimates indicate that annually, a third of the food produced around the world ends up being wasted. Only one-fourth of that food is enough to take nearly a billion people out of starvation. Food waste is especially higher in more developed countries, including most of the states in the European Union and the USA. Sector-wise, food is being lost from field to fork, with households topping the charts. Overbuying, not knowing what already is in the fridge, unaware of the food until it eventually expires, are among the most common reasons that contribute to the food waste. The potential prevention of such massive waste could significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions around the world and help the economy of the households including all the parties involved in food production, distributing and retailing.

On the other hand, technology has progressed in very rapid steps. The advancement of AI, ML, IoT, and voice-enabled devices has revolutionized many industries and has made us more efficient as human beings. Unfortunately, these advancements haven't yet had any significant impact in assisting families with their food choices and in preventing them from overbuying and throwing food away. Most of the proposed solutions addressing this issue, do not get integrated into everyday life. That is because they require a lot of manual input, rely entirely on mobile phones, do not show immediate results to keep users motivated, and on top of all, for the sole fact that modern lives are quite complex, and although an important issue, food waste is not an everyday cause of concern of an average person.

This thesis takes into account all of the shortcomings of the previous works and aims to create a more sustainable solution by exploring new ways of food inventory management in the households by automating the process so that users don't have to manually enter the data themselves. The proposed solution consists of a device that should be easily mounted into any fridge and acts as an interface between users and their food inventory. The device contains a bar-code scanner for the item input and a back-end that is capable of recognizing the item and can in return show user-friendly and valuable information such as the approximate price of the item, the approximate due date etc. and notifies users when an item is about to expire so that they can take appropriate actions.

7 out of 9 participants in the final conceptual design study said they would use this solution in their homes. The rest of the results from the designed test cases indicate a clear excitement and interest in participants and a willingness to see the prototype in the finished state, all the comments and insights together with the future work and how the feedback will be used into the next iteration are part of the final discussion of this thesis.

Software is the heartbeat of modern technology. To keep up with the new demands and expansion of requirements, changes are constantly introduced to the software, i.e., changes can also be made to fix an existing fault/defect. However, these changes might also cause further faults/defects in the software. This study aims to investigate the possible correlation between change-proneness and fault-proneness in object- oriented systems. Forty releases of five different open-source systems are analysed to quantify change- and fault-proneness; Beam, Camel, Ignite, Jenkins, and JMe- ter, then statistic evidence is presented as to answer the following: (1) Is there is a relationship between change-proneness and fault-proneness for classes in object- oriented systems? (2) Is there a relationship between size and fault-proneness for classes in object-oriented systems? and (3) Is there a relationship between size and change-proneness for classes in object-oriented systems? Using the Wilcoxon rank- sum test, the results show that: (1) there is a correlation between change- and fault- proneness at a statistically significant level and (2) a correlation also exists betweenclass size and its change- and fault-proneness at a statistically significant level.

Historical remains in Swedish forests are at risk of being damaged by heavy machineryduring regular soil preparation, scarification, and regeneration activities. Thereason for this is that the exact locations of these remains are often unknown or theirrecords are inaccurate. Some of the most vulnerable historical remains are the tracesleft after years of charcoal production. In this thesis, we design and implement acomputer vision artificial intelligent model capable of identifying these traces usingtwo accessible visualizations of Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data. Themodel we used was the ResNet34 Convolutional Neural Network pre-trained on theImageNet dataset. The model took advantage of the image segmentation approachand required only a small number of annotations distributed on original images fortraining. During the process of data preparation, the original images were heavilyaugmented, which bolstered the training dataset. Results showed that the model candetect charcoal burners sites and mark them on both types of LIDAR visualizations.Being implemented on modern frameworks and featured with state-of-art machinelearning techniques, the model may reduce the costs of surveys of this type of historicalremains and thereby help save cultural heritage.

Component-based Software development is a promising way to improve quality, time to market and handle the increasing complexity of software management. However, The component-based development is still a process with many problems, it is not well de_ned either from theoretical or practical point of view. This thesis gives a brief overview of Component-Based Software development and starts with brief historical evolution followed by a general explanation of the method. A detailed discussion of the underlying principles like components, component framework and compent system architecture are then presented. Some real world component stadards such as .net framework, CORBA CCM and EJB are given in detail. Finally, simple fille-sharing-program based on Apache's Avalon framework and another one based on .net framework are developed as a case study.

Abstract

Information and communication technology is used in healthcare in Sweden to improve health quality. Electronic Health Records are one of the technologies in healthcare which can increase a patient’s involvement in his/her healthcare and decision-making related to it. The patient can discuss the treatments, analyses and medical information stored in Electronic Health Records. The aim in this study is to investigate how the Electronics Health Records can be improved to motivate refugees in Sweden who cannot speak Swedish. This research is a qualitative interpretive case study. The methods used in this study are observation and interviews. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. The findings show that refugees don’t receive information or instructions about how to use electronic health records properly. The language is the biggest hurdle to use electronic health records for refugee patients without knowing Swedish language. The findings further show that the electronic health records can be improved by adding sound or translated medical information in the diagnosis part of the electronic health record. This research might contribute to the healthcare process of any country in the world which has refugees and they use electronic health records.

Smart Grid is one of the increasingly used critical infrastruc- ture that is essential for the functioning of a country. This coupled with Internet of Things (IoT) has huge potentials in several areas such as re- mote monitoring and managing of electricity distribution, traffic signs, traffic congestion, parking spaces, road warnings and even early detection of power influxes as a result of natural disasters, safety failures, equip- ment failures or carelessness. Despite the advantages of Smart Grids, there are security threats, privacy concerns and still open challenges re- lated to these issues in Smart Grids. This chapter seeks to provide a review of the security and privacy perspectives inherent in IoT enabled Smart Grids. Firstly the chapter explores the functionalities of Smart Grids as opposed to a traditional grid. Next the chapter provides an overview of Smart Grid architectures followed by positioning IoT con- cept into Smart Grid with a focus on architectures. Then, the proposed approach for identifying threats and attacks in IoT enabled Smart Grid, namely the security pyramid is presented. Lastly, we work on identifying the possible threats and attacks in the digital substation use case.

Digital video är ett område som expanderat kraftigt senaste åren. På grund av avancerade videokompressionsmetoder kan numera en hel långfilm rymmas på mobiltelefonen eller den handhållna videospelaren. Men hur fungerar videokompression och hur hårt kan man komprimera en viss filmsekvens med bibehållen användarnytta? I denna uppsats görs en genomgång för grunderna inom videokompression. Dess förhållande till användarnyttan undersöks genom ett experiment. I detta experiment testas tre videosekvenser komprimerade med tre olika kodekar i tre olika datahastigheter för tre olika experimentgrupper. Slutsatsen av

denna studie är att det är svårt att hitta en exakt brytpunkt där användaren finner videokvaliteten oacceptabel. Dock kan det konstateras att den högsta datahastigheten(256 kbit/s) genererar hög användarnytta medan den lägsta datahastigheten genererar låg användarnytta. Mellanhastigheten 128 kbit/s får knappt godkänt av testpersonerna.

Denna uppsats behandlar nätverksoptimering, med fokus på att få fram den bästa möjliga tillgängligheten till lägsta möjliga kostnad, i form av länkar. I studien tas en teoretiskt grundad hypotes om en metod fram för att lösa detta problemet. Samt genomförs ett test där metoden appliceras på ett studieobjekt för att bekräfta huruvida metoden verkar fungerar eller inte.

Resultatet blir slutligen en metod som genom att analysera tillgängligheten, länk redundansen samt beräkna antal oberoende vägar mellan noder i ett nätverk. Kan genom att jämföra resultat från före en förändring med resultat från efter en förändring lyfta fram de förändringar som medför förbättringar. Varpå ett nätverk kan optimeras till bästa möjliga tillgänglighet till lägsta möjliga kostnad, i form av länkar.

Microscope cameras possess high zoom capabilities and are frequently used for quality control in various industries. Visus Technology is a company that manufactures and sells these cameras, along with control software. The problem is that these cameras can only be set to one focus depth at a time. Therefore, we were tasked with implementing a fast focus stacking algorithm that combines multiple input images with different focus depths, resulting in a composite image with consistent focus throughout. This will later be integrated into the control software.

We initially approached the problem by choosing pixels with the highest Laplacian intensity. This resulted in very noisy output images since the blurry images could sometimes produce high-intensity pixels where they were not supposed to be. To address this, we implemented a grid-based focus stacking algorithm. The algorithm divides the input images into tiles, filtering out the blurriest tiles to exclude them from the stacking process. The result is a composite image with significantly reduced blur.

The increasing demand for efficient and secure public transportation systems necessi-tates innovative solutions. This research investigates facial recognition technology in pub-lic bus transportation as an advanced alternative to traditional RFID and QR code methods.The study addresses the limitations of existing identification and fare collection methods,such as the potential for lost, stolen, or shared RFID cards and fare evasion with QR codes.We designed and implemented a facial recognition-based system using a Raspberry Pi withan HQ-Camera, OpenCV for real-time image processing, and FaceNet for facial recogni-tion. The system was tested in a simulated bus boarding environment, focusing on accu-racy, processing time, and robustness under varying conditions. Results demonstrated thatthe proposed system significantly enhances passenger verification speed and security, of-fering a more efficient and secure solution. Specifically, our system achieved an accuracyrate of 0.75 after analyzing 15 images of 13 participants, with a notable improvement inprocessing speed and robustness. Additionally, user feedback indicated general acceptanceof the technology despite privacy concerns. This research contributes to developing moreefficient and secure public transportation systems, paving the way for broader applicationsof biometric technology in daily commutes. With this system, we can look forward to afuture of faster, more secure public transportation.

Numerous studies have shown that mobile devices like smartphones play a significant role in education these days, and it's clear that the influence and benefits of these devices regarding the potential for pedagogical perspectives are obvious. Mobile learning allows for flexibility by eliminating the need for learning to happen at a particular time and place. Moreover, mobile devices that can support Augmented Reality (AR) are becoming more powerful, less expensive and quite useful in the education process. In this paper, we conduct a study where mobile AR application alongside project-based learning is utilized in a classroom setting, where interviews are administered to understand the K-12 students' attitude towards the educational model based on mobile AR for enhancing the twenty-first century skills in chemistry education. The interviews are conducted with thirty students and their teacher who teaches them chemistry course. Four skills are investigated and discussed, i.e., innovation and creativity, critical skills and problem solving, communication and collaboration, and information culture. Based on the research findings, some recommendations are provided. Furthermore, in the scope of Agenda 2030 for Palestine, we believe these findings could serve as a basis for developing practical policy interventions attributed to enhancing the educational system with emerging technologies.

Java applications consume energy, which has become a controversial topic since it limits the number of machines and increases the cost of data centers. This paper investigates the potential relationship between energy consumption and some quality attributes for Java Collections and Sorting algorithms in order to raise awareness about using energy-efficient programs. In addition, introduce to the developers the most and least efficient Java Collection and Sorting algorithm in terms of energy consumption, memory, and CPU usage. This was achieved by conducting a controlled experiment to measure these terms. The data obtained for the results was used to acquire Statistical and Efficiency Analysis to answer the research questions.

Scientific and technological innovations have become increasingly important as we face the benefits and challenges of both globalization and a knowledge-based economy. Still, enrolment rates in STEM degrees are low in many European countries and consequently there is a lack of adequately educated workforce in industries. We believe that this can be mainly attributed to pedagogical issues, such as the lack of engaging hands-on activities utilized for science and math education in middle and high schools. In this paper, we report our work in the SciChallenge European project, which aims at increasing the interest of pre-university students in STEM disciplines, through its distinguishing feature, the systematic use of social media for providing and evaluation of the student-generated content. A social media-aware contest and platform were thus developed and tested in a pan-European contest that attracted >700 participants. The statistical analysis and results revealed that the platform and contest positively influenced participants STEM learning and motivation, while only the gender factor for the younger study group appeared to affect the outcomes (confidence level – p<.05).

Purpose: This study explores both library users’ and librarians’ experiences, benefits, and challenges depending on the implementation of digital technologies in academic libraries. The research has been taken place in two Greek academic libraries; In the Panteion University Library and in the Central Library of T.E.I. of Athens.Approach: Two research questions were developed for this research to be conducted and a sample size of 55 respondents (39 library users and 16 librarians) of the Panteion University Library and Central Library of T.E.I. of Athens, was evaluated.Findings: From the findings of the study, it was concluded that the general perception of both library users and librarians towards digital material and E-resources and services of the Panteion University Library and Central Library of T.E.I. of Athens, is satisfactory. Library users were satisfied with the convenience of digital material, the availability of E-resources provided by both academic libraries such as World Wide Web, WIFI, and online databases. They were not satisfied with library technology (i.e., computers) and library staff. Besides, results showed that services such as e-mail and Open Public Access Catalogue were used more often. Librarians were less satisfied with the digital library system, the limited personnel, and the financial funds for academic libraries in general.Implication: The results of this research have implications in the stakeholders of an academic library including the institutional management, the library administration, the librarians, the library users, the researchers, the community at large, and others.Value: This paper identifies critical issues related to the utilization of digital technologies and digital material; their benefits and challenges faced by librarians and library users as well as their effective operation from academic libraries in this information age.

Cloud computing popularity has continued to be on the increase side, and it has been significant contributory factor to the of 24/7 365 days business culture of the digital 21st century where data and data centers are accessed via the internet through any connected device, anytime and from anywhere. Higher Education Institutions (HEI) or Tertiary Education Institution (TEI) are also among organisations, medium and large, that are tapping into this trend by gradually adopting this technology to reduce their high budgets in the prevailing face of financial shortage. This has particularly made the technology attractive to TEI in developing countries, and more of them are adopting the services being offered by cloud computing. The adoption of this technology however, affects the way and manner by which IT services are being delivered traditionally by the TEI IT or ICT departments. The objective of this study therefore, is to explore the adoption of this phenomenal technology and its impact on the role of traditional IT department in one of the tertiary education institution in the South Western part of Nigeria. The TOE framework adoption model was used to explore the adoption factors, and interviews conducted within the ICT department of the institution as part of the empirical findings process. In contrary to popular belief, no member of the IT staff has lost his or her job yet based on the adoption despite the impact on the skills and culture in service delivery of the department. IT staffs were encouraged to adapt to the change as quickly as possible with trainings given, and the ICT, thus the HEI have value added as most of the services are now available on a 24-hour basis to users, even while off campus and far remote, a dream very difficult and near impossible in the days of full traditional IT services delivery.

Cloud computing provides access to on-demand computing resources and storage space, whereby applications and data are hosted with data centers managed by third parties, on a pay-per-use price model. This allows organizations to focus on core business goals instead of managing in-house IT infrastructure.                    

However, as more business critical applications and data are moved to the cloud, service availability is becoming a growing concern. A number of recent cloud service disruptions have questioned the reliability of cloud environments to host business critical applications and data. The impact of these disruptions varies, but, in most cases, there are financial losses and damaged reputation among consumers.        

This thesis aims to investigate the threats to service availability in cloud computing and to provide some best practices to mitigate some of these threats. As a result, we identified eight categories of threats. They include, in no particular order: power outage, hardware failure, cyber-attack, configuration error, software bug, human error, administrative or legal dispute and network dependency. A number of systematic mitigation techniques to ensure constant availability of service by cloud providers were identified. In addition, practices that can be applied by cloud customers and users of cloud services, to improve service availability were presented.

Aims/Objectives: The objectives of this thesis were to examine and discuss the existing information and communication technology (ICT) tools used in the healthcare sector for older adults with dementia, the benefits and challenges of using these ICT tools from the perspective of older adults with dementia and their health care providers. Research methods: Data was collected using semi-structured interviews with older adults with dementia and health care providers and managers at a nursing home in Nigeria. All interviews were audio recorded with the consent of the research participants and then transcribed verbatim. All interview transcripts were analyzed using qualitative content analysis using the deductive approach. The coding scheme used for data analysis was derived from an existing framework called the Human-Organization-Technology fit (HOT) Framework. In addition, existing literature were reviewed on the use of ICT tools by older adults with dementia, their caregivers and their health care providers. Empirical findings: A total of six participants were interviewed for this study: two older adults with dementia, two nurses and two managers (one senior manager and one manager from the medical team). One older adult was 72 years old and was diagnosed with dementia one year ago. The other older adult was 70 years old and was diagnosed with dementia two years ago. The nurses that I interviewed have been working at this nursing home for 3 and 4 years respectively. The mangers that I interviewed have also been working at this nursing home for 3 and 4 years respectively. Two ICT tools are currently being used at this nursing home: 1) a GPS tracker and 2) a device that assists older adults with their daily activities. Eight themes emerged from the interviews: system quality, service quality, user satisfaction (perceived usefulness), system use, user expectation, organization structure, organization environment and net benefits. Conclusion and Future research: This study demonstrated that older adults with dementia and their caregivers (i.e. nurses) perceived the GPS tracker and the ADL assistant as userfriendly and helpful for supporting the daily activities. Most of the existing research on ICT tools used for dementia care have been conducted in North America and Europe. Therefore, there is a need for more research in Africa.

In educational institutions, the use of technology has been used to compliment face to face learning or used alone to deliver the educational needs and learning process for distance education. Where used alone, it is said to be online learning and where it has complimented traditional learning it can be said to be hybrid or blended learning. Before the pandemic, the question of choice or the voluntary use of these technology was there, and the student determined what was best suited for their educational and learning needs. This study looks at the how the students related with technology during the pandemic. It looks at constructs like performance expectancy, fit for use, effort expectancy, fit for task and ends with investigating the student’s perception on intention for future use. Using a mixed approach, the perception of students was sampled. First by using a quantitative method, hinged on the novelty of the disruption to reveal areas that could be of potential interest and then a qualitative method followed. The purpose of using a mixed method approach was for completeness and complimentary reasons. The results of the qualitative data and quantitative data were bridged to form meta-inferences, and these were used to answer the research questions and discuss the findings.

The study revealed that technology was easy to use without little or no technical issues, it was fit for the task at hand, it aided the students to achieve their academic goals and needs, but intention to retain the use of technology for future academic activities was not welcomed. This was due to social factors like lack of motivation, feeling of isolation, lack of social interaction been missing but available in traditional classes. these are critical factors that affect the retention of technology for future use. In the presence of choice, they would rather go back to the traditional mode. They integration of technology with traditional mode of learning, i.e., blended mode of learning was highly welcomed.

Trots de svenska medborgarnas ökande krav på digital självservice via e-tjänster, går införande trögt hos kommunerna. En anledning är den relativt låga kunskap som finns i området. Främst vad gäller avancerade e-tjänster som förutom att öka medborgarnas tillgänglighet, insyn och delaktighet i sina offentliga ärenden, även ska minska den administrativa hanteringen för att istället låta mer av resurserna gå till kärnverksamheten. I den här kvalitativa fallstudien studerades hur en kommunal verksamhetsprocess utvecklas vid införandet av en e-tjänst. Hur slöseri kan identifieras i processen informationshantering och informationsflöde och hur dessa förändrats efter att e-tjänsten införts. Resultatet baserades på material från intervjuer och analyserades utifrån Leans kategorier av slöseri och teorin om Microsystem. Resultatet visade att slöseri som uppstår i informationshantering och informationsflöde mellan enheter eller microsystem kunde identifieras om alla microsystem kartlägger processen tillsammans. Mycket slöseri hade tagits bort i utvecklingsarbetet och lett till en smidigare och troligtvis mer effektiv process. Ett antagande men som även bekräftades av personalens upplevelser från testförsöken. Processutvecklingen tillsammans med e-tjänsten har säkerställt delar av processflödet där antalet informationsöverföringar blivit färre och på så sätt troligtvis även minskat risken för att missförstånd och felhantering ska uppstå av informationshanteringen.

This thesis aimed to study the everyday use of ICT-enabled memory aids in order to understand and to describe the technological mediations that are brought by them (i.e. how they shape/mediate experiences and actions of their users). To do this, a post-phenomenological approach was appropriated. Postphenomenology is a modified, hybrid phenomenology that tries to overcome the limitations of phenomenology. As for theoretical framework, ‘Technological Mediation’ was adopted to conduct the study. Technological Mediation as a theory provides concepts suitable for explorations of the phenomenon of human-technology relation.

It was believed that this specific choice of approach and theoretical framework would provide a new way of exploring the use of concrete technologies in everyday life of human beings and the implications that this use might have on humans’ lives. The study was conducted in the city of Växjö, Sweden. Data was collected by conducting twelve face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Collected data was, then, analyzed by applying the concepts within the theoretical framework – Technological Mediation - to them.

The results of this study provided a list of ICT-enabled devices and services that participants were using in their everyday life in order to support their memory such as: calendars, alarms, notes, bookmarks, etc. Furthermore, this study resulted in a detailed description of how these devices and services shaped/mediated the experiences and the actions of their users. 

Att vid 18 års ålder tvingas ansvara för sina handlingar är för många ett stort steg, inte minst då en del av ansvaret är ekonomi. Ungdomarna vänder sig ofta till föräldrarna med frågor, men var ska de vända sig när föräldrarna inte har svaret? Bankerna har börjat söka sig lägre ner i åldrarna med sin marknadsföring för att fånga kunden innan denne blir myndig, men fortfarande är det många frågetecken kring informationen ungdomarna behöver.

Uppdraget var att undersöka vad ungdomar behöver för information i en webbplats riktad mot ungdomar från banken. En undersökning genomfördes med en enkätundersökning med 100respondenter och tre olika fokusgrupper som genererade att ungdomarna känner att banker är alldeles för avlägsna. En minskad distans skulle medföra att ungdomarna lättare vänder sig till banken vid frågor kring sin ekonomi vilket i sin tur medför att deras intresse kring privatekonomiska frågor ökar.

Designförslaget som presenteras fokuserar mycket på en funktion med textbaserad personlig service med co-browsingfunktioner som tillåter en bankman guida den unga kunden genom webbplatsen. Strävan är att ungdomarna ska känna en samhörighet till banken och lättare kan få alla typer av frågor besvarade då de var osäkra på vilken information de behöver. Om man inför en sådan tjänst bör användbarhetstest och utvärderingar på designförslaget genomföras för att kontrollera om distansen mellan bank och ungdom minskar.

Stream ciphers are counted as an important part of symmetric encryption method. Their basic idea comes from One-Time-Pad cipher using XOR operator on the plain text and the key to generate the cipher. The present work brings a new idea in symmetric encryption method, which inherits stream key generation idea from synchronous stream cipher and uses division instead of xoring. The Usage of division to combine the plain text with stream key gives numerous abilities to this method that the most important one is using random factors to produce the ciphers.

Education is a sector that has the potential to become a critical area of action for the full exploitation of ICT. Educational systems of developed and developing countries have an ever-increasing tendency to apply ICT to education, in an attempt to prepare their students for the future's society. This thesis attempted to explore what kind of ICT is used in the Greek Primary Schools and develop an understanding on the relationship between the ICT and the teachers. The philosophical background is post-phenomenology and the methods chosen for collecting data for this research are policy document analysis and interviews. The empirical findings show that various ICT are being used in the classrooms of the Greek Primary Schools,  others widely and others occasionally. The research compares the legal framework revolving around ICT in Primary Schools in Greece, with the teachers' own experiences and shows that the guidelines suggested by the Greek Ministry of Education cannot be followed easily, due to economical and pedagogical reasons. It also investigates the ICT's effects on the teachers and the students through the teachers' own words and perceptions. The effects are mostly positive, there are mentioned however, some negative ones to take into consideration. Finally, the research presents a number of sectors where the participant teachers suggested there is room for improvement. By comparing the legal framework with the situation in the Primary Schools, this research adds a new perspective to the previous literature. The findings show that the current situation can be improved and the teachers' statements may trigger further research.

A North American university is engaged in a large transformation project involving the wholeorganisation. Students, Lecturers, departments and additional questions from the shared leadership team are engaging in defining the services offered, in particular from the university library and its associated sub-services. It is an exciting time for the University as it seeks to not only define its services but also how these can be created and consumed.There are many aspects to this re-organisation and many items to be addressed. In this report,we look at the current situation at the University, as well as taking into account the aspirations of the stakeholders. We start by drawing out a Rich Picture, part of Soft System Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1981) which we use in order to spot opportunities that are available for further exploration. Much of the information that we use comes from material supplied by the University itself as well as interviews with the Head of Library services and Head of Library IT. We look indepth at how SSM assists in this process of evaluation through its focus on participation and how it may assist us to understand the many different perspectives collected in our research. SSM consequently assists in defining problems with solutions to any areas that have drawn our attention. Following the evaluation of collected data, discussions and our own observations, we identify that a digital wall that is being proposed for the redesigned library presents an opportunity to explore possibilities for exploitation of this technology. Further research on other digital walls such as Brisbane’s Cube (Abdi et al, 2014), and Auraria Library’s Discovery Wall(Burch, 2016) shows some of the uses that these walls have been put to and how the Institutions use them. We then use a number of models to evaluate the data that we collected on digital walls and from the North American University and analyse it in order to inform our thinking. These models can be used independently or collectively to evaluate data from different perspectives. As such we were able to look at problems and solutions from the perspective of many of the actors involved in shaping the future library services. These models and results are discussed in the report. Finally, we take our results and make a number of proposals for the North American University digital wall along with the relevant justifications at the end of this report.

Single-board computers as hardware for container orchestration have been a growing subject. Previous studies have investigated their potential of running production-grade technologies in various environments where low-resource, cheap, and flexible clusters may be of use. This report investigates the appliance of methods and processes prevalent in cluster, container orchestration, and cloud-native environments. The motivation being that if single-board computers are able to run clusters to a satisfactory degree, they should also be able to fulfill the methods and processes which permeate the same cloud-native technologies. Investigation of the subject will be conducted through the creation of different criteria for each method and process. They will then act as an evaluation basis for an experiment in which a single-board computer cluster will be built, provisioned, configured, and monitored. As a summary, the investigation has been successful, instilling more confidence in single-board computer clusters and their ability to implement cluster related methodologies and processes.

Utbildning i samband med systemimplementering är enligt tidigare forskning ett viktigt men åsidosatt ämne som behöver studeras mer i detalj. Den här uppsatsen undersöker vilka faktorer som är väsentliga vid en utbildningssituation i samband med införandet av ett nytt system i en kommunal organisation. Studien belyser faktorer som uppkommit i insamlingen av empiri samt de faktorer som framkommit från tidigare forskning och teoretisk bakgrund. Idag finns det ingen standardiserad modell för hur en användarutbildning bör se ut. Således presenteras de viktigaste faktorerna som ger en indikation på hur en utbildning påverkar implementeringsresultat och hur en bra användarutbildning bör se ut.

Den här rapporten undersöker om gränsen mellan Terminal Services och Citrix XenApp har börjat suddas ut eller om man ännu kan dra en tydlig linje mellan dessa. Detta för att avgöra om organisationer som idag kör Windows Server 2003 med Citrix XenApp enbart klarar sig med de nya funktionerna i Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services och ändå uppfylla de krav och behov en organisation har. Arbetet genomfördes rent teoretiskt. För att avgöra likheter och skillnader mellan applikationerna, så användes till största delen ett ramverk. För att kunna få en bild av hur applikationerna tillämpas rent praktiskt, användes tidigare testar samt analyser. Resultatet visar att Terminal Services tagit ett större steg inom marknaden för applikationsvirtualisering. Slutsatsen antyder att Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services är lämplig för organisationer utan komplexa behov.

Vizz3D is a 3D graphics code analysis tool, developed at Växjö University that optionally can use Java3D or OpenGL. However, initially Java3D was the only programming interface used. No other version was considered. Therefore the applications structure was built with the Java3D way of thought in mind. But code visualization with 3D graphics can be a demanding task for the computers processor and its graphics hardware and Java3D is known to be somewhat inefficient. So an OpenGL version was introduced.

This thesis reflects on the work restructuring the application’s code to fit both versions within Vizz3D in a structured and object-oriented way. The thesis shows the efforts to be taken to make an existing ever evolving tool easily extendible to other API’s. Additional aspects of OpenGL specific implementations are discussed throughout the thesis.

The main reason for this work is to find an appropriate way to include multi-word units in a latent semantic vector model. This would be of great use since these models normally are defined in terms of words, which makes it impossible to search for many types of multi-word units when the model is used in information retrieval tasks. The paper presents a Swedish evaluation set based on synonym tests and an evaluation of vector models trained with different corpora and parameter settings, including a rather naive way to add bi- and trigrams to the models. The best results in the evaluation is actually obtained with both bi- and trigrams added. Our hope is that the results in a forthcoming evaluation in the document retrieval context, which is an important application for these models, still will be at least as good with the bi- and trigrams are added, as without.

Syftet med den här studien är att undersöka om det finns ett intresse för sociala interaktioner i video-slots och hur det i sådana fall kan utformas för att ge användarna en bra användarupplevelse. Onlinekasinon är den spelform som har ökat mest i popularitet i Sverige senaste åren och video-slots är den speltyp som växer mest. Tidigare studier visar på att det finns en drivkraft att göra saker tillsammans och som stärker och berikar upplevelser. Studier på sociala interaktioner i online-spel visar tydligt på att njutningen är ett viktigt element för att spela. Syftet är även att undersöka om sociala interaktioner i video-slots kan leda till en sundare spelstil för de med spelmissbruk.

Video-slots är ett hedoniskt motivationssystem (HMS) och används för att ge användaren nöje och glädje i ett system. Teorin som studien baserats på är HMSAM, som är en HMS specifik modell som använts för att skapa en förståelse för uppfattad användarvänlighet, uppfattad användarnytta, glädje, kontroll och nyfikenhet, som kan påverka inre motivation. Inre motivation behövs för att användare ska kunna fördjupa sig och fortsätta vilja använda ett HMS-system. 

Studien har en kvalitativ ansats och kvalitativa semi-strukturerade intervjuer har använts vid insamlandet av empiri. Fokus har legat på användarnas upplevelser, deras motivationer, drivkrafter, kontroll och önskemål kring sociala interaktioner vid spelande av video-slots. Intervjufrågorna grundas utifrån HMSAM men även utifrån spelifierings-ramverket Octalysis. Resultaten från datainsamlingen analyseras utifrån uppkomna kategorier och mönster. Analysen visade en stor motivation till att spela video-slots online tillsammans och att det skulle förhöja deras spelupplevelse. Även att det hade förenklat deras spelsessioner och skapat större gemenskap, då majoriteten av informanterna redan spelade video-slots tillsammans idag, med egna konstruerade metoder. Analysen visade också att informanterna spelar främst för nöjet och spänningens skull. Utifrån datan från intervjuerna togs designförslag fram, med stöd av spelifierings-ramverket. Designförslagen mynnade ut i sex grafiska gränssnittsskisser med funktioner som förhoppningsvis kan bidra till en förhöjd användarupplevelse.