Design, development and first evaluation of a client/server system for managing and querying linguistic corpora

This thesis is concerned with the role played by software tools in the analysis and dissemination of linguistic corpora and their contribution to a more widespread adoption of corpora in different fields. Chapter 1 contains an overview of some of the most relevant corpus analysis tools available today, presenting their most interesting features and some of their drawbacks. Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of the reasons why none of the available tools appear to satisfy the requirements of the user community and then continues with technical overview of the current status of the new system developed as part of this work. This presentation is followed by highlights of features that make the system appealing to users and corpus builders (i.e. scholars willing to make their corpora available to the public). The chapter concludes with an indication of future directions for the projects and information on the current availability of the software. Chapter 3 describes the design of an experiment devised to evaluate the usability of the new system in comparison to another corpus tool. Usage of the tool was tested in the context of a documentation task performed on a real assignment during a translation class in a master's degree course. In chapter 4 the findings of the experiment are presented on two levels of analysis: firstly a discussion on how participants interacted with and evaluated the two corpus tools in terms of interface and interaction design, usability and perceived ease of use. Then an analysis follows of how users interacted with corpora to complete the task and what kind of queries they submitted. Finally, some general conclusions are drawn and areas for future work are outlined.

Optical Design for Automatic Identification and Portable Systems

This thesis proposes design methods and test tools, for optical systems, which may be used in an industrial environment, where not only precision and reliability but also ease of use is important. The approach to the problem has been conceived to be as general as possible, although in the present work, the design of a portable device for automatic identification applications has been studied, because this doctorate has been funded by Datalogic Scanning Group s.r.l., a world-class producer of barcode readers. The main functional components of the complete device are: electro-optical imaging, illumination and pattern generator systems. For what concerns the electro-optical imaging system, a characterization tool and an analysis one has been developed to check if the desired performance of the system has been achieved. Moreover, two design tools for optimizing the imaging system have been implemented. The first optimizes just the core of the system, the optical part, improving its performance ignoring all other contributions and generating a good starting point for the optimization of the whole complex system. The second tool optimizes the system taking into account its behavior with a model as near as possible to reality including optics, electronics and detection. For what concerns the illumination and the pattern generator systems, two tools have been implemented. The first allows the design of free-form lenses described by an arbitrary analytical function exited by an incoherent source and is able to provide custom illumination conditions for all kind of applications. The second tool consists of a new method to design Diffractive Optical Elements excited by a coherent source for large pattern angles using the Iterative Fourier Transform Algorithm. Validation of the design tools has been obtained, whenever possible, comparing the performance of the designed systems with those of fabricated prototypes. In other cases simulations have been used.

Producers' Perceptions and Consumers' Behaviour Toward Certified Beans from Integrated Production (IP) in the Brazilian Central Region

Integrated production (IP) is part of the Brazilian government program to promote sustainable agricultural production. IP ensure minimum food quality standards for domestic market, and export. Furthermore, IP is considered a good option to reduce negative environmental impacts of intensive crops in tropical Savannas, including common beans, as a Brazilian staple food. Although its advantages, and the government’s effort to promote IP, few growers are adopting IP. Maybe, the perception about IP usefulness and/or its ease of use is not too clear. Moreover, the production sector is driven by market signs, and there is few information on the consumer's preferences toward IP certified products in Brazil. In this study, we sought to identify some critical factors that can influence the IP adoption in beans' production. Moreover, we sought to verify the consumers’ perceptions and intention of purchasing IP certified beans (hypothetical product). This report comprises four chapters: (1) an introduction illustrating the context in which the research was based; (2) the results on the study of IP adoption based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM); (3) the choice experiment results applied to identify consumers preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for IP label; (4) the results on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) applied to identify consumers’ perception toward IP certified beans. This research contributes with rich information for the beans’ supply chain, providing several insights to growers, retail and other agents, including policy makers. Beans’ production sector seems to be positively intentioned to adopt IP, but further studies should be conducted to test other adoption indicators using TAM model. Surveyed consumers are willing to pay a premium price for IP labelled beans. They showed a positive attitude toward purchasing IP labelled beans. It is an important information to motivate production sector to offer certified beans to the market.

Use of shared memory in the context of embedded multi-core processors: exploration of the technology and its limits

Modern embedded systems embrace many-core shared-memory designs. Due to constrained power and area budgets, most of them feature software-managed scratchpad memories instead of data caches to increase the data locality. It is therefore programmers’ responsibility to explicitly manage the memory transfers, and this make programming these platform cumbersome. Moreover, complex modern applications must be adequately parallelized before they can the parallel potential of the platform into actual performance. To support this, programming languages were proposed, which work at a high level of abstraction, and rely on a runtime whose cost hinders performance, especially in embedded systems, where resources and power budget are constrained. This dissertation explores the applicability of the shared-memory paradigm on modern many-core systems, focusing on the ease-of-programming. It focuses on OpenMP, the de-facto standard for shared memory programming. In a first part, the cost of algorithms for synchronization and data partitioning are analyzed, and they are adapted to modern embedded many-cores. Then, the original design of an OpenMP runtime library is presented, which supports complex forms of parallelism such as multi-level and irregular parallelism. In the second part of the thesis, the focus is on heterogeneous systems, where hardware accelerators are coupled to (many-)cores to implement key functional kernels with orders-of-magnitude of speedup and energy efficiency compared to the “pure software” version. However, three main issues rise, namely i) platform design complexity, ii) architectural scalability and iii) programmability. To tackle them, a template for a generic hardware processing unit (HWPU) is proposed, which share the memory banks with cores, and the template for a scalable architecture is shown, which integrates them through the shared-memory system. Then, a full software stack and toolchain are developed to support platform design and to let programmers exploiting the accelerators of the platform. The OpenMP frontend is extended to interact with it.