E-Government Collaboration in the Swedish Public Sector : Multiple Studies on Collaboration Facilitators and Collaboration Modes

Collaboration in the public sector is imperative to achieve e-government objectives such as improved efficiency and effectiveness of public administration and improved quality of public services. Collaboration across organizational and institutional boundaries requires public organizations to share e-government systems and services through for instance, interoperable information technology and processes. Demands on public organizations to become more open also require that public organizations adopt new collaborative approaches for inviting and engaging citizens in governmental activities. E-government related collaboration in the public sector is challenging, however, and collaboration initiatives often fail. Public organizations need to learn how to collaborate since forms of e-government collaboration and expected outcomes are mostly unknown. How public organizations can collaborate and the expected outcomes are thus investigated in this thesis by studying multiple collaboration cases on the acquisition and implementation of a particular e-government investment (digital archive). This thesis also investigates how e-government collaboration can be facilitated through artifacts. It is done through a case study, where objects that cross boundaries between collaborating communities in the public sector are studied, and by designing a configurable process model integrating several processes for social services. By using design science, this thesis also investigates how an m-government solution that facilitates collaboration between citizens and public organizations can be designed. The thesis contributes to literature through describing five different modes of interorganizational collaboration in the public sector and the expected benefits from each mode. It also contributes with an instantiation of a configurable process model supporting three open social e-services and with evidence of how it can facilitate collaboration. This thesis further describes how boundary objects facilitate collaboration between different communities in an open government design initiative. It contributes with a designed mobile government solution, thereby providing proof of concept and initial design implications for enabling collaboration with citizens through citizen sourcing (outsourcing a governmental activity to citizens through an open call). This thesis also identifies research streams within e-government collaboration research through a literature review and the thesis contributions are related to the identified research streams. This thesis gives directions for future research by suggesting that future research should focus further on understanding e-government collaboration and how information and communication technology can facilitate collaboration in the public sector. It is suggested that further research should investigate m-government solutions to form design theories. Future research should also examine how value can be co-created in e-government collaboration.

Sunray etched Visors for the Jamaican Olympic Team in three colours: yellow, green and black

Design for visors for the delegation from Jamaica to the London Olympic Games 2012. This design was commissioned by PUMA 2012 based on McLean's designs featured in the website House of Flora, which functions as a space of display, archive, folio, point of sale and dissemination. The McLean standard design for visors is a component of the avant garde, pret a porter millinery, accessory design collections, and stylistically customised for the Jamaican team. McLean's oeuvre is original in its integration of the experimental traditions of art school workshop culture with the professional demands of fashion manufacture and trade culture. Combining the innovation of the postmodern urban artisan with the exacting demands of industrial production, dissemination and distribution McLean's design work spans the disparate worlds of national art collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (A Hat Anthology Exhibition, and catalogue 2009), London Design Museum ( Fifty Hats that Changed the World 2009). Integrating design considerations of multiple and mass production with the stylistic considerations of the studio workshop McLean brings the wit of the avant garde urban artisan to the structures and systems of fashion industry. The designs reach to a global audience as product users, as well as to the international connoisseurship of crafts and design specialists. The rigour of McLean's research and innovation is evident in the specificity of the stylistic references made through her selection of materials, processes, form, colour and symbolism. A range of cultural references cite the rich fusion of early twentieth century modernist culture in which the disparate worlds of popular, proletarian, culture fertilised the stylistic austerity of high modern formalism. McLean here considers the relationship between millinery and coiffure, following from the millinery piece featured in (Marcel bobbed hairpiece hat), and now brings the considerations of ethnic difference to bear on her design. Afro hair brings user group specificity to the milliner, and the visor design is a resolution of function and style for both protection and display. Connoting the sartorial conventions of workwear headgear, rather than the nineteenth century colonial 'cricketer's' cap, or the twentieth century US 'baseball' peaked cap, McLean's 'Jamaican Olympic Visor' brings distinctively postcolonial meaning to the cultural profile of the heterotopic media space. Designing for the popular culture of Olympic sports, televised and broadcast to global audiences, brings new forms of agency to the fashion designer, and McLan's design deploys a style that is widely recognisable from other popular culture's film and TV depictions of workwear to mark the distinctive tradition of supremacy that black athletes bring to the European traditions of cultural heritage. Supplanting the Arcadian 'laurels' with which winners are, traditionally, crowned, McLean's visor design innovation, suggests that it is not impossible to challenge and transform apparently timeless hierarchies of power and supremacy, so that ex-slaves may also become victors. McLean's fashion designs all work within this reach of fashion towards the carnivalesque inversion of social orderliness through play, display and sartorial activism.

Development of a Wireless MEMS Multifunction Sensor System and Field Demonstration of Embedded Sensors for Monitoring Concrete Pavements, TR-637, 2016

Pavements tend to deteriorate with time under repeated traffic and/or environmental loading. By detecting pavement distresses and damage early enough, it is possible for transportation agencies to develop more effective pavement maintenance and rehabilitation programs and thereby achieve significant cost and time savings. The structural health monitoring (SHM) concept can be considered as a systematic method for assessing the structural state of pavement infrastructure systems and documenting their condition. Over the past several years, this process has traditionally been accomplished through the use of wired sensors embedded in bridge and highway pavement. However, the use of wired sensors has limitations for long-term SHM and presents other associated cost and safety concerns. Recently, micro-electromechanical sensors and systems (MEMS) and nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS) have emerged as advanced/smart-sensing technologies with potential for cost-effective and long-term SHM. This two-pronged study evaluated the performance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) MEMS sensors embedded in concrete pavement (Final Report Volume I) and developed a wireless MEMS multifunctional sensor system for health monitoring of concrete pavement (Final Report Volume II).

Early stage memory loss interventions: utilization, impact, and the experience of living alone.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

HERMES - High Efficiency Roads with Rerouteing Methods and Traffic Signal Control.

HERMES is one of the projects in the European ATT Programme. The ATT Programme (or DRIVE II as it is frequently referred to) is an application oriented Community Research and Technological Development Programme that has been conceived and implemented with the objective of contributing to the competitiveness of Europe and to its social and economic cohesion. An important means toward this end is the direct collaboration between different European sector actors: road authorities, fleet operators, road user representatives, industry, and research institutions. DRIVE I has already achieved an important step into this direction. DRIVE II aims at providing a framework that encourages even closer cooperation through large scale international pilot projects that will require common functional and technical specifications for the systems to be implemented at least between the partners directly involved in any project. HERMES is one of the so-called "supporting R&D projects" that provides strategies, algorithms and systems for the pilot applications

Categories, Allegories, and Circuit Design

Languages based upon binary relations offer an appealing setting for constructing programs from specifications. For example, working with relations rather than functions allows specifications to be more abstract (for example, many programs have a natural specification using the converse operator on relations), and affords a natural treatment of non-determinism in specifications. In this paper we present a novel pictorial interpretation of relational terms as simple pictures of circuits, and a soundness/completeness result that allows relational equations to be proved by pictorial reasoning.

Oculo-auriculo-vertebral spectrum: a review of the literature and genetic update

Oculo-auriculo-vertebral spectrum (OAVS, OMIM 164 210) is a developmental disorder primarily involving structures derived from the first and second pharyngeal arches during embryogenesis. The phenotype is clinically heterogeneous and is typically characterised by abnormal development of the ear, mandible anomalies and defects of the vertebral column. OAVS may occur as a multiple congenital abnormality, and associated findings include anomalies of the eye, brain, heart, kidneys and other organs and systems. Both genetic and environmental factors are thought to contribute to this craniofacial condition, however, the mechanisms are still poorly understood. Here, we present a review of the literature on OAVS, discussing what is known about the aetiology, candidate loci, possible mechanisms and the range of clinical features that characterise this condition. We also comment on some important aspects of recurrence risk counselling to aid clinical management.

CYR61 and TAZ Upregulation and Focal Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition May Be Early Predictors of Barrett’s Esophagus Malignant Progression

Barrett's esophagus is the major risk factor for esophageal adenocarcinoma. It has a low but non-neglectable risk, high surveillance costs and no reliable risk stratification markers. We sought to identify early biomarkers, predictive of Barrett's malignant progression, using a meta-analysis approach on gene expression data. This in silico strategy was followed by experimental validation in a cohort of patients with extended follow up from the Instituto Português de Oncologia de Lisboa de Francisco Gentil EPE (Portugal). Bioinformatics and systems biology approaches singled out two candidate predictive markers for Barrett's progression, CYR61 and TAZ. Although previously implicated in other malignancies and in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition phenotypes, our experimental validation shows for the first time that CYR61 and TAZ have the potential to be predictive biomarkers for cancer progression. Experimental validation by reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR and immunohistochemistry confirmed the up-regulation of both genes in Barrett's samples associated with high-grade dysplasia/adenocarcinoma. In our cohort CYR61 and TAZ up-regulation ranged from one to ten years prior to progression to adenocarcinoma in Barrett's esophagus index samples. Finally, we found that CYR61 and TAZ over-expression is correlated with early focal signs of epithelial to mesenchymal transition. Our results highlight both CYR61 and TAZ genes as potential predictive biomarkers for stratification of the risk for development of adenocarcinoma and suggest a potential mechanistic route for Barrett's esophagus neoplastic progression.

Generating a state t-design by diagonal quantum circuits

We investigate protocols for generating a state t-design by using a fixed separable initial state and a diagonal-unitary t-design in the computational basis, which is a t-design of an ensemble of diagonal unitary matrices with random phases as their eigenvalues. We first show that a diagonal-unitary t-design generates a O (1/2(N))-approximate state t-design, where N is the number of qubits. We then discuss a way of improving the degree of approximation by exploiting non-diagonal gates after applying a diagonal-unitary t-design. We also show that it is necessary and sufficient to use O (log(2)(t)) -qubit gates with random phases to generate a diagonal-unitary t-design by diagonal quantum circuits, and that each multi-qubit diagonal gate can be replaced by a sequence of multi-qubit controlled-phase-type gates with discrete-valued random phases. Finally, we analyze the number of gates for implementing a diagonal-unitary t-design by non-diagonal two- and one-qubit gates. Our results provide a concrete application of diagonal quantum circuits in quantum informational tasks.

Manure and sorbent fertilisers increase on-going nutrient availability relative to conventional fertilisers

The key to better nutrient efficiency is to simultaneously improve uptake and decrease losses. This study sought to achieve this balance using sorbent additions and manure nutrients (spent poultry litter; SL) compared with results obtained using conventional sources (Conv; urea nitrogen, N; and phosphate–phosphorus; P). Two experiments were conducted. Firstly, a phosphorus pot trial involving two soils (sandy and clay) based on a factorial design (Digitaria eriantha/Pennisetum clandestinum). Subsequently, a factorial N and P field trial was conducted on the clay soil (D. eriantha/Lolium rigidum). In the pot trial, sorbent additions (26.2 g of hydrotalcite [HT] g P− 1) to the Conv treatment deferred P availability (both soils) as did SL in the sandy soil. In this soil, P delivery by the Conv treatments declined rapidly, and began to fall behind the HT and SL treatments. Addition of HT increased post-trial Colwell P. In the field trial low HT-rates (3.75 and 7.5 g of HT g P− 1) plus bentonite, allowed dry matter production and nutrient uptake to match that of Conv treatments, and increased residual mineral-N. The SL treatments performed similarly to (or better than) Conv treatments regarding nutrient uptake. With successive application, HT forms may provide better supply profiles than Conv treatments. Our findings, combined with previous studies, suggest it is possible to use manures and ion-exchangers to match conventional N and P source productivity with lower risk of nutrient losses.

Low-power high-performance SAR ADC design with digital calibration techniques

This dissertation presents the design of three high-performance successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) using distinct digital background calibration techniques under the framework of a generalized code-domain linear equalizer. These digital calibration techniques effectively and efficiently remove the static mismatch errors in the analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion. They enable aggressive scaling of the capacitive digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which also serves as sampling capacitor, to the kT/C limit. As a result, outstanding conversion linearity, high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), high conversion speed, robustness, superb energy efficiency, and minimal chip-area are accomplished simultaneously. The first design is a 12-bit 22.5/45-MS/s SAR ADC in 0.13-μm CMOS process. It employs a perturbation-based calibration based on the superposition property of linear systems to digitally correct the capacitor mismatch error in the weighted DAC. With 3.0-mW power dissipation at a 1.2-V power supply and a 22.5-MS/s sample rate, it achieves a 71.1-dB signal-to-noise-plus-distortion ratio (SNDR), and a 94.6-dB spurious free dynamic range (SFDR). At Nyquist frequency, the conversion figure of merit (FoM) is 50.8 fJ/conversion step, the best FoM up to date (2010) for 12-bit ADCs. The SAR ADC core occupies 0.06 mm2, while the estimated area the calibration circuits is 0.03 mm2. The second proposed digital calibration technique is a bit-wise-correlation-based digital calibration. It utilizes the statistical independence of an injected pseudo-random signal and the input signal to correct the DAC mismatch in SAR ADCs. This idea is experimentally verified in a 12-bit 37-MS/s SAR ADC fabricated in 65-nm CMOS implemented by Pingli Huang. This prototype chip achieves a 70.23-dB peak SNDR and an 81.02-dB peak SFDR, while occupying 0.12-mm2 silicon area and dissipating 9.14 mW from a 1.2-V supply with the synthesized digital calibration circuits included. The third work is an 8-bit, 600-MS/s, 10-way time-interleaved SAR ADC array fabricated in 0.13-μm CMOS process. This work employs an adaptive digital equalization approach to calibrate both intra-channel nonlinearities and inter-channel mismatch errors. The prototype chip achieves 47.4-dB SNDR, 63.6-dB SFDR, less than 0.30-LSB differential nonlinearity (DNL), and less than 0.23-LSB integral nonlinearity (INL). The ADC array occupies an active area of 1.35 mm2 and dissipates 30.3 mW, including synthesized digital calibration circuits and an on-chip dual-loop delay-locked loop (DLL) for clock generation and synchronization.

Optimisation of digitally coded test vectors for mixed-signal components

International audience

Optimization of aeroponic technology for future integration in quality potato seed production systems in tropical environments

Virus and soil borne pathogens negatively impact on the production of potatoes in tropical highland and sub-tropical environments, limiting supply of an increasingly popular and important vegetable in these regions. It is common for latent disease infected seed tubers or field grown cuttings to be used as potato planting material. We utilised an International Potato Centre technique, using aeroponic technology, to produce low cost mini-tubers in tropical areas. The system has been optimised for increased effectiveness in tropical areas. High numbers of seed tubers of cultivar Sebago (630) and Nicola per m2 (>900) were obtained in the first generation, and the system is capable of producing five crops of standard cultivars in every two years. Initial results indicate that quality seed could be produced by nurseries and farmers, therefore contributing to the minimisation of soil borne diseases in an integrated management plan. This technology reduces seed production costs, benefiting seed and potato growers. © ISHS.