Business Process Modeling in Software Requirements Engineering for Small and Medium Software Projects

Vaatimusmäärittelyn tavoitteena on luoda halutun järjestelmän kokonaisen, yhtenäisen vaatimusluettelon vaatimusten määrittämiseksi käsitteellisellä tasolla. Liiketoimintaprosessien mallintaminen on varsin hyödyllinen vaatimusmäärittelyn varhaisissa vaiheissa. Tämä työ tutkii liiketoimintaprosessien mallintamista tietojärjestelmien kehittämistä varten. Nykyään on olemassa erilaisia liiketoimintaprosessien mallintamiseen tarkoitettuja tekniikoita. Tämä työ tarkastaa liiketoimintaprosessien mallintamisen periaatteet ja näkökohdat sekä eri mallinnustekniikoita. Uusi menetelmä, joka on suunniteltu erityisesti pienille ja keskisuurille ohjelmistoprojekteille, on kehitetty prosessinäkökohtien ja UML-kaavioiden perusteella.

Spectral Color Appearance Modeling

Kuvien laatu on tutkituimpia ja käytetyimpiä aiheita. Tässä työssä tarkastellaan värin laatu ja spektrikuvia. Työssä annetaan yleiskuva olemassa olevista pakattujen ja erillisten kuvien laadunarviointimenetelmistä painottaen näiden menetelmien soveltaminen spektrikuviin. Tässä työssä esitellään spektriväriulkomuotomalli värikuvien laadunarvioinnille. Malli sovelletaan spektrikuvista jäljennettyihin värikuviin. Malli pohjautuu sekä tilastolliseen spektrikuvamalliin, joka muodostaa yhteyden spektrikuvien ja valokuvien parametrien välille, että kuvan yleiseen ulkomuotoon. Värikuvien tilastollisten spektriparametrien ja fyysisten parametrien välinen yhteys on varmennettu tietokone-pohjaisella kuvamallinnuksella. Mallin ominaisuuksien pohjalta on kehitetty koekäyttöön tarkoitettu menetelmä värikuvien laadunarvioinnille. On kehitetty asiantuntija-pohjainen kyselymenetelmä ja sumea päättelyjärjestelmä värikuvien laadunarvioinnille. Tutkimus osoittaa, että spektri-väri –yhteys ja sumea päättelyjärjestelmä soveltuvat tehokkaasti värikuvien laadunarviointiin.

Spontaneous Speech and Emotional Response modeling based on One-class classifier oriented to Alzheimer Disease diagnosis

The purpose of our project is to contribute to earlier diagnosis of AD and better estimates of its severity by using automatic analysis performed through new biomarkers extracted from non-invasive intelligent methods. The methods selected in this case are speech biomarkers oriented to Sponta-neous Speech and Emotional Response Analysis. Thus the main goal of the present work is feature search in Spontaneous Speech oriented to pre-clinical evaluation for the definition of test for AD diagnosis by One-class classifier. One-class classifi-cation problem differs from multi-class classifier in one essen-tial aspect. In one-class classification it is assumed that only information of one of the classes, the target class, is available. In this work we explore the problem of imbalanced datasets that is particularly crucial in applications where the goal is to maximize recognition of the minority class as in medical diag-nosis. The use of information about outlier and Fractal Dimen-sion features improves the system performance.

Financial Modeling to Support Organizational Control

Tutkimus tarkastelee taloudellisia mallintamismahdollisuuksia metsäteollisuuden liiketoimintayksikössä. Tavoitteena on suunnitella ja luoda taloudellinen malli liiketoimintayksikölle, jonka avulla sen tuloksen analysoiminen ja ennustaminen on mahdollista. Tutkimusta tarkastellaan konstruktiivisen tutkimusmenetelmän avulla. Teoreettinen viitekehys tarkastelee olemassa olevan informaation muotoilemista keskittyen tiedon jalostamisen tarpeisiin, päätöksenteon asettamiin vaatimuksiin sekä mallintamiseen. Toiseksi, teoria esittää informaatiolle asetettavia vaatimuksia organisatorisen ohjauksen näkökulmasta.Empiirinen tieto kerätään osallistuvan havainnoinnin avulla hyödyntäen epävirallisia keskusteluja, tietojärjestelmiä ja laskentatoimen dokumentteja. Tulokset osoittavat, että liikevoiton ennustaminen mallin avulla on vaikeaa, koska taustalla vaikuttavien muuttujien määrä on suuri. Tästä johtuen malli täytyykin rakentaa niin, että se tarkastelee liikevoittoa niin yksityiskohtaisella tasolla kuin mahdollista. Testauksessa mallin tarkkuus osoittautui sitä paremmaksi, mitä tarkemmalla tasolla ennustaminen tapahtui. Lisäksi testaus osoitti, että malli on käyttökelpoinen liiketoiminnan ohjauksessa lyhyellä aikavälillä. Näin se luo myös pohjan pitkän aikavälin ennustamiselle.

Task-Driven Activity Reduces the Cortical Activity Space of the Brain: Experiment and Whole-Brain Modeling.

How a stimulus or a task alters the spontaneous dynamics of the brain remains a fundamental open question in neuroscience. One of the most robust hallmarks of task/stimulus-driven brain dynamics is the decrease of variability with respect to the spontaneous level, an effect seen across multiple experimental conditions and in brain signals observed at different spatiotemporal scales. Recently, it was observed that the trial-to-trial variability and temporal variance of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals decrease in the task-driven activity. Here we examined the dynamics of a large-scale model of the human cortex to provide a mechanistic understanding of these observations. The model allows computing the statistics of synaptic activity in the spontaneous condition and in putative tasks determined by external inputs to a given subset of brain regions. We demonstrated that external inputs decrease the variance, increase the covariances, and decrease the autocovariance of synaptic activity as a consequence of single node and large-scale network dynamics. Altogether, these changes in network statistics imply a reduction of entropy, meaning that the spontaneous synaptic activity outlines a larger multidimensional activity space than does the task-driven activity. We tested this model's prediction on fMRI signals from healthy humans acquired during rest and task conditions and found a significant decrease of entropy in the stimulus-driven activity. Altogether, our study proposes a mechanism for increasing the information capacity of brain networks by enlarging the volume of possible activity configurations at rest and reliably settling into a confined stimulus-driven state to allow better transmission of stimulus-related information.

A comparison of indices of glucose metabolism in five black populations: data from modeling the epidemiologic transition study (METS).

BACKGROUND: Globally, Africans and African Americans experience a disproportionate burden of type 2 diabetes, compared to other race and ethnic groups. The aim of the study was to examine the association of plasma glucose with indices of glucose metabolism in young adults of African origin from 5 different countries. METHODS: We identified participants from the Modeling the Epidemiologic Transition Study, an international study of weight change and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in five populations of African origin: USA (US), Jamaica, Ghana, South Africa, and Seychelles. For the current study, we included 667 participants (34.8 ± 6.3 years), with measures of plasma glucose, insulin, leptin, and adiponectin, as well as moderate and vigorous physical activity (MVPA, minutes/day [min/day]), daily sedentary time (min/day), anthropometrics, and body composition. RESULTS: Among the 282 men, body mass index (BMI) ranged from 22.1 to 29.6 kg/m(2) in men and from 25.8 to 34.8 kg/m(2) in 385 women. MVPA ranged from 26.2 to 47.1 min/day in men, and from 14.3 to 27.3 min/day in women and correlated with adiposity (BMI, waist size, and % body fat) only among US males after controlling for age. Plasma glucose ranged from 4.6 ± 0.8 mmol/L in the South African men to 5.8 mmol/L US men, while the overall prevalence for diabetes was very low, except in the US men and women (6.7 and 12 %, respectively). Using multivariate linear regression, glucose was associated with BMI, age, sex, smoking hypertension, daily sedentary time but not daily MVPA. CONCLUSION: Obesity, metabolic risk, and other potential determinants vary significantly between populations at differing stages of the epidemiologic transition, requiring tailored public health policies to address local population characteristics.

Theoretical modeling of photon and electron-stimulated Na and K desorption from SiO2

The mechanism of generation of atomic Na and K from SiO2 samples has been studied using explicitly correlated wave function and density functional theory cluster calculations. Possible pathways for the photon and electron stimulated desorption of Na and K atoms from silicates are proposed, thus providing new insight on the generation of the tenuous Na and K atmosphere of the Moon.

A System-Level Simulation Model for a Protocol Processor

As the development of integrated circuit technology continues to follow Moore’s law the complexity of circuits increases exponentially. Traditional hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog are no longer powerful enough to cope with this level of complexity and do not provide facilities for hardware/software codesign. Languages such as SystemC are intended to solve these problems by combining the powerful expression of high level programming languages and hardware oriented facilities of hardware description languages. To fully replace older languages in the desing flow of digital systems SystemC should also be synthesizable. The devices required by modern high speed networks often share the same tight constraints for e.g. size, power consumption and price with embedded systems but have also very demanding real time and quality of service requirements that are difficult to satisfy with general purpose processors. Dedicated hardware blocks of an application specific instruction set processor are one way to combine fast processing speed, energy efficiency, flexibility and relatively low time-to-market. Common features can be identified in the network processing domain making it possible to develop specialized but configurable processor architectures. One such architecture is the TACO which is based on transport triggered architecture. The architecture offers a high degree of parallelism and modularity and greatly simplified instruction decoding. For this M.Sc.(Tech) thesis, a simulation environment for the TACO architecture was developed with SystemC 2.2 using an old version written with SystemC 1.0 as a starting point. The environment enables rapid design space exploration by providing facilities for hw/sw codesign and simulation and an extendable library of automatically configured reusable hardware blocks. Other topics that are covered are the differences between SystemC 1.0 and 2.2 from the viewpoint of hardware modeling, and compilation of a SystemC model into synthesizable VHDL with Celoxica Agility SystemC Compiler. A simulation model for a processor for TCP/IP packet validation was designed and tested as a test case for the environment.

Modeling and manufacturability assessment of bistable quantum-dot cells

We have investigated the behavior of bistable cells made up of four quantum dots and occupied by two electrons, in the presence of realistic confinement potentials produced by depletion gates on top of a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure. Such a cell represents the basic building block for logic architectures based on the concept of quantum cellular automata (QCA) and of ground state computation, which have been proposed as an alternative to traditional transistor-based logic circuits. We have focused on the robustness of the operation of such cells with respect to asymmetries derived from fabrication tolerances. We have developed a two-dimensional model for the calculation of the electron density in a driven cell in response to the polarization state of a driver cell. Our method is based on the one-shot configuration-interaction technique, adapted from molecular chemistry. From the results of our simulations, we conclude that an implementation of QCA logic based on simple ¿hole arrays¿ is not feasible, because of the extreme sensitivity to fabrication tolerances. As an alternative, we propose cells defined by multiple gates, where geometrical asymmetries can be compensated for by adjusting the bias voltages. Even though not immediately applicable to the implementation of logic gates and not suitable for large scale integration, the proposed cell layout should allow an experimental demonstration of a chain of QCA cells.