A Case Study of Agile Software Engineering Methods and Practices in the MeeGo Harmattan Open Source and Product Context

The aim of this master’s thesis is to study how Agile method (Scrum) and open source software are utilized to produce software for a flagship product in a complex production environment. The empirical case and the used artefacts are taken from the Nokia MeeGo N9 product program, and from the related software program, called as the Harmattan. The single research case is analysed by using a qualitative method. The Grounded Theory principles are utilized, first, to find out all the related concepts from artefacts. Second, these concepts are analysed, and finally categorized to a core category and six supported categories. The result is formulated as the operation of software practices conceivable in circumstances, where the accountable software development teams and related context accepts a open source software nature as a part of business vision and the whole organization supports the Agile methods.

Success factors of commercial open source software projects

Open source and open source software development have been interesting phenomena during the past decade. Traditional business models do not apply with open source, where the actual product is free. However, it is possible to make business with open source, even successfully, but the question is: how? The aim of this study is to find the key factors of successfully making business out of commercial open source software development. The task is achieved by finding the factors that influence open source projects, finding the relation between those factors, and find out why some factors explain the success more than others. The literature review concentrates first on background of open innovation, open source and open source software. Then business models, critical success factors and success measures are examined. Based on existing literature a framework was created. The framework contains categorized success factors that influence software projects in general as well as open source software projects. The main categories of success factors in software business are divided into community management, technology management, project management and market management. In order to find out which of the factors based on the existing literature are the most critical, empirical research was done by conducting unstructured personal interviews. The main finding based on the interviews is that the critical success factors in open source software business do not differ from those in traditional software business or in fact from those in any other business. Some factors in the framework came out in the interviews that can be considered as key factors: establishing and communicating hierarchy (community management), localization (technology management), good license know-how and IPR management (project management), and effective market management (market management). The critical success factors according to the interviewees are not listed in the framework: low price, good product and good business model development.

Protocol for collection and separation of bone marrow mononuclear cells in Chlorocebus aethiops

Abstract: Chlorocebus aethiops is a species of non-human primate frequently used in biomedical research. Some research involves this species as an experimental model for various diseases and possible treatment with stem cells. The bone marrow is one of the main sources of these cells and provides easy access. The aim of this study was to standardize the protocol of collection and separation of bone marrow in C. aethiops. Ten animals were submitted to puncture of bone marrow with access to the iliac crest and cell separation by density gradient. The bone marrow of C. aethiops had an average of 97% viability. From the results achieved, we can conclude that C. aethiops is an excellent model to obtain and isolate mononuclear cells from bone marrow, fostering several studies in the field of cell therapy.

Heat Source Estimation with the Conjugate Gradient Method in Inverse Linear Diffusive Problems

In this work, we present the solution of a class of linear inverse heat conduction problems for the estimation of unknown heat source terms, with no prior information of the functional forms of timewise and spatial dependence of the source strength, using the conjugate gradient method with an adjoint problem. After describing the mathematical formulation of a general direct problem and the procedure for the solution of the inverse problem, we show applications to three transient heat transfer problems: a one-dimensional cylindrical problem; a two-dimensional cylindrical problem; and a one-dimensional problem with two plates.

Identification of research trends in the field of separation processes. Application of epidemiological model, citation analysis, text mining, and technical analysis of the financial markets

Choice of industrial development options and the relevant allocation of the research funds become more and more difficult because of the increasing R&D costs and pressure for shorter development period. Forecast of the research progress is based on the analysis of the publications activity in the field of interest as well as on the dynamics of its change. Moreover, allocation of funds is hindered by exponential growth in the number of publications and patents. Thematic clusters become more and more difficult to identify, and their evolution hard to follow. The existing approaches of research field structuring and identification of its development are very limited. They do not identify the thematic clusters with adequate precision while the identified trends are often ambiguous. Therefore, there is a clear need to develop methods and tools, which are able to identify developing fields of research. The main objective of this Thesis is to develop tools and methods helping in the identification of the promising research topics in the field of separation processes. Two structuring methods as well as three approaches for identification of the development trends have been proposed. The proposed methods have been applied to the analysis of the research on distillation and filtration. The results show that the developed methods are universal and could be used to study of the various fields of research. The identified thematic clusters and the forecasted trends of their development have been confirmed in almost all tested cases. It proves the universality of the proposed methods. The results allow for identification of the fast-growing scientific fields as well as the topics characterized by stagnant or diminishing research activity.

Chromatographic recovery of chemicals from acidic biomass hydrolysates

Lignocellulosic biomasses (e.g., wood and straws) are a potential renewable source for the production of a wide variety of chemicals that could be used to replace those currently produced by petrochemical industry. This would lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions and waste amounts, and to economical savings. There are many possible pathways available for the manufacturing of chemicals from lignocellulosic biomasses. One option is to hydrolyze the cellulose and hemicelluloses of these biomasses into monosaccharides using concentrated sulfuric acid as catalyst. This process is an efficient method for producing monosaccharides which are valuable platforn chemicals. Also other valuable products are formed in the hydrolysis. Unfortunately, the concentrated acid hydrolysis has been deemed unfeasible mainly due to high chemical consumption resulting from the need to remove sulfuric acid from the obtained hydrolysates prior to the downstream processing of the monosaccharides. Traditionally, this has been done by neutralization with lime. This, however, results in high chemical consumption. In addition, the by-products formed in the hydrolysis are not removed and may, thus, hinder the monosaccharide processing. In order to improve the feasibility of the concentrated acid hydrolysis, the chemical consumption should be decreased by recycling of sulfuric acid without neutralization. Furthermore, the monosaccharides and the other products formed in the hydrolysis should be recovered selectively for efficient downstream processing. The selective recovery of the hydrolysis by-products would have additional economical benefits on the process due to their high value. In this work, the use of chromatographic fractionation for the recycling of sulfuric acid and the selective recovery of the main components from the hydrolysates formed in the concentrated acid hydrolysis was investigated. Chromatographic fractionation based on the electrolyte exclusion with gel type strong acid cation exchange resins in acid (H+) form as a stationary phase was studied. A systematic experimental and model-based study regarding the separation task at hand was conducted. The phenomena affecting the separation were determined and their effects elucidated. Mathematical models that take accurately into account these phenomena were derived and used in the simulation of the fractionation process. The main components of the concentrated acid hydrolysates (sulfuric acid, monosaccharides, and acetic acid) were included into this model. Performance of the fractionation process was investigated experimentally and by simulations. Use of different process options was also studied. Sulfuric acid was found to have a significant co-operative effect on the sorption of the other components. This brings about interesting and beneficial effects in the column operations. It is especially beneficial for the separation of sulfuric acid and the monosaccharides. Two different approaches for the modelling of the sorption equilibria were investigated in this work: a simple empirical approach and a thermodynamically consistent approach (the Adsorbed Solution theory). Accurate modelling of the phenomena observed in this work was found to be possible using the simple empirical models. The use of the Adsorbed Solution theory is complicated by the nature of the theory and the complexity of the studied system. In addition to the sorption models, a dynamic column model that takes into account the volume changes of the gel type resins as changing resin bed porosity was also derived. Using the chromatography, all the main components of the hydrolysates can be recovered selectively, and the sulfuric acid consumption of the hydrolysis process can be lowered considerably. Investigation of the performance of the chromatographic fractionation showed that the highest separation efficiency in this separation task is obtained with a gel type resin with a high crosslinking degree (8 wt. %); especially when the hydrolysates contain high amounts of acetic acid. In addition, the concentrated acid hydrolysis should be done with as low sulfuric acid concentration as possible to obtain good separation performance. The column loading and flow rate also have large effects on the performance. In this work, it was demonstrated that when recycling of the fractions obtained in the chromatographic fractionation are recycled to preceding unit operations these unit operations should included in the performance evaluation of the fractionation. When this was done, the separation performance and the feasibility of the concentrated acid hydrolysis process were found to improve considerably. Use of multi-column chromatographic fractionation processes, the Japan Organo process and the Multi-Column Recycling Chromatography process, was also investigated. In the studied case, neither of these processes could compete with the single-column batch process in the productivity. However, due to internal recycling steps, the Multi-Column Recycling Chromatography was found to be superior to the batch process when the product yield and the eluent consumption were taken into account.

An Open Source, DDI-based Curation System for Social Science Data

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Multi-source ingestion of publisher articles - The SCOAP3 repository experience

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Sustaining your Open Source project through training: a Hydra case study

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Kramerius - Fedora based open source system for a digital library

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Assimilate partitioning in leaves of the raffinose-storing herb Lamium album L.: the effects of altering source-sink balance

In Lamium album, sucrose and raffinose-family oligosaccharides are the major products of photosynthesis that are stored in leaves. Using gas analysis and 14CO2 feeding, we compared photosynthesis and the partitioning of recently-fixed carbon in plants where sink activity was lowered by excision of flowers and chilling of roots with those where sink activity was not modified. Reduction in sink activity led to a reduction in the maximum rate of photosynthesis, to retention of fixed carbon in source leaves and to the progressive accumulation of raffinose-family oligosaccharides. This ultimately affected the extractable activities of invertase and sucrose phosphate synthase. At the end of the light period, invertase activity was significantly higher in treated plants. By contrast sucrose phosphate synthase activity was significantly lower in treated plants. We propose that reducing sink activity in L. album is associated with a shift in metabolism away from starch and sucrose synthesis and towards sucrose catabolism, galactinol utilisation and the synthesis of raffinose-family oligosaccharides.

Usability comparison of open source content management systems

The purpose of this thesis is to study, investigate and compare usability of open source cms. The thesis examines and compares usability aspect of some open source cms. The research is divided into two complementary parts –theoretical part and analytical part. The theoretical part mainly describes open source web content management systems, usability and the evaluation methods. The analytical part is to compare and analyze the results found from the empirical research. Heuristic evaluation method was used to measure usability problems in the interfaces. The study is fairly limited in scope; six tasks were designed and implemented in each interface for discovering defects in the interfaces. Usability problems were rated according to their level of severity. Time it took by each task, level of problem’s severity and type of heuristics violated will be recorded, analyzed and compared. The results of this study indicate that the comparing systems provide usable interfaces, and WordPress is recognized as the most usable system.

Suodattimen simulointi Aspen Plus simulointiohjelmistolla

Tässä työssä tutkittiin Aspen Plus-ohjelmiston soveltuvuutta suodattimen simulointiin. Tämän työn kirjallisuusosassa on esitelty eri suodatusmekanismit sekä joitain prosessisimulointiin soveltuvia ohjelmistoja lähdekirjallisuuden perusteella. Kokeellisessa osassa on tutkittu Aspen Plus-ohjelmiston soveltuvuutta suodattimen simuloimiseen. Simulointi suoritettiin käyttäen Aspenin suodatinmoduulin suunnittelumallia. Lähtökohtana käytettiin buchnersuppilolla ZnS-suspensiolle tehtyä koesuodatusta, jonka perusteella saatiin lähtöparametrien, kuten kakun- ja kankaan vastusten arvot. Simuloinnissa mitoitettiin samalle kapasiteetille rumpusuodatin, jonka suodatuspinta-alaa ja kiintoainekakun tilavuutta verrattiin koesuodatuksen vastaaviin arvoihin. Lisäksi vastaava simulointi suoritettiin filtration-and-separation.com sivuston omaa vakiopaineisen vakuumisuodattimen simulointiin tarkoitettua laskentapohjaa käyttäen, jonka tuloksia verrattiin myös Aspenilla saatuihin simulointituloksiin.

Identification of the main generator source of longitudinal muscle contraction in the earthworm ventral nerve cord

The main generator source of a longitudinal muscle contraction was identified as an M (mechanical-stimulus-sensitive) circuit composed of a presynaptic M-1 neuron and a postsynaptic M-2 neuron in the ventral nerve cord of the earthworm, Amynthas hawayanus, by simultaneous intracellular response recording and Lucifer Yellow-CH injection with two microelectrodes. Five-peaked responses were evoked in both neurons by a mechanical, but not by an electrical, stimulus to the mechanoreceptor in the shaft of a seta at the opposite side of an epidermis-muscle-nerve-cord preparation. This response was correlated to 84% of the amplitude, 73% of the rising rate and 81% of the duration of a longitudinal muscle contraction recorded by a mechano-electrical transducer after eliminating the other possible generator sources by partitioning the epidermis-muscle piece of this preparation. The pre- and postsynaptic relationship between these two neurons was determined by alternately stimulating and recording with two microelectrodes. Images of the Lucifer Yellow-CH-filled M-1 and M-2 neurons showed that both of them are composed of bundles of longitudinal processes situated on the side of the nerve cord opposite to stimulation. The M-1 neuron has an afferent process (A1) in the first nerve at the stimulated side of this preparation and the M-2 neuron has two efferent processes (E1 and E3) in the first and third nerves at the recording side where their effector muscle cell was identified by a third microelectrode.