Islandora Archipelago: Update on the Project & Community

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

APIs and Datasets everywhere

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

Tuotekehitysprosessin suorituskyvyn parantaminen pienikokoisessa tuotekehitysorganisaatiossa

Tutkimuksen tavoite on selvittää tuotekehitysprosessin vaiheet ja niihin vaikuttavia tekijöi-tä sekä löytää keinoja, joilla parantaa pienikokoisen tuotekehitysorganisaation tuotekehi-tysprosessia ja tuotekehitystoimintaa. Tutkimuksessa selvitettiin, miten hyvin kohdeor-ganisaation tuotekehitysprosessi vastaa teoriamääritelmiä dokumenttitarkasteluna. Lisäksi kartoitettiin kohdeorganisaation tuotekehitystoiminnan nykytilaa ja haastattelemalla henkilökuntaa. Tutkimusote on toiminta-analyyttinen. Kohdeorganisaatiolla on dokumentoitu tuotekehitysprosessi, josta käy ilmi vaiheet, kriteerit ja vastuut. Prosessi vastaa teoriamääritelmiä sitä paremmin, mitä lähemmäksi prosessin loppua siirrytään. Haastatteluista tuli ilmi, että kohdeorganisaation vahvuudet ovat työntekijöiden osaamisessa ja asenteessa sekä työilmapiirissä. Suurimpia kehityskohtia ovat resurssitilanne ja tuotemäärittelyjen taso. Kohdeorganisaatiossa on liian vähän teki-jöitä tehtävämäärään nähden ja tuotemäärittelyt muuttuvat usein prosessin aikana. Seu-rauksena on mm. aikataulujen venyminen ja suunnittelun laadun heikkeneminen. Tuote-kehitystoiminta nähtiin pääasiassa tuotteiden tuotteistamisessa, ei tuoteideoiden kehittä-misessä. Tuotekehitysprosessin tuntemus vaihtelee ja asiakastarpeet eivät ole tuotekehi-tykselle selvät. Lisäksi henkilökunta ei tunne täysin suorituskyvyn mittareita ja menossa olevia kehityshankkeita. Prosessin kriteerien päivitys ja painotus etupään tehtäviin parantaisi prosessia etenkin prosessin loppupään toiminnoissa. Toiminnan parantamiseksi resursointitilannetta pitää parantaa ja tuotemäärittelyjen analysointiin tulee panostaa enemmän. Lisäksi koulutus prosessista, asiakastarpeista, mittaamisesta ja kehityshankkeista parantaisi kokonaisku-van ymmärtämistä ja näin ollen toiminnan taso parantuisi. Innovaatiotoiminnan ja ideoin-nin lisäämiseksi tulisi tutkia, mitä mahdollisuuksia toiminnan lisäämiseksi on.

Tuotekehitysprosessin alkupään järjestäminen pelialan yrityksessä

Tämän diplomityön tarkoitus on rakentaa mobiilipeliyritykselle tuotekehitysprosessin alkupään prosessi tuotekehityksen tehostamiseksi. Toimialan dynaamisuudesta ja hyperkilpailullisuudesta johtuen sekä projektien abstraktin luonteen takia tulee mobiilipelikehitysyritysten erityisesti panostaa tuotekehityksen alkuvaiheisiin. Työ tutkii yleisiä tuotekehityksen periaatteita sekä yleisiä olemassaolevia tuotekehitysprosesseja. Tarkastelun kohteena ovat erityisesti innovatiivinen organisaatio ja benchmarking tuotekehityksen apuna. Yleisesti tuotekehitysprosesseista tutustutaan yleisimpiin malleihin, jotka ovat olleet valtavirran käytössä jo pitkään. Prosessien tarkastelun lisäksi niitä tutkitaan kriittisesti ja löydetään osa-alueita, joihin tulee keskittyä erityisesti tuotekehitysprosessin alkupään järjestämisessä. Lisäksi työssä paneudutaan alan menestyneiden yritysten toimintatapoihin, joista haetaan oppia rakennettavaan malliin. Työssä käsitellään myös toimialan ominaispiirteitä, joista johtuen perinteiset tuotekehitysprosessit eivät ole optimaalisia alalle. Työn tuloksena saadaan virtaviivainen prosessimalli, joka maksimoi luovuuden, mutta säästää resursseja ja luo selkeät linjat prosessin läpivientiin. Rakennettuun malliin pohditaan myös kehitysehdotuksia, ja sille on laadittu kevyt jatkokehityssuunnitelma. Malli menee suoraan yrityksen käyttöön, joten lopullinen malli tulee myös hioutumaan tuotekehitysprojektien edetessä. Työssä on erityistä se, että työn tekijä on toiminut alalla työtehtävissä, ja malli on hioutunut pitkän ajan kuluessa. Täten suuri osa työstä on tekijän hiljaisen tiedon avaamista ja pohtimista.

Managing Customer Co-creation: Empirical Evidence from Finnish High-tech SMEs

The purpose of this thesis is to find out how customer co-creation activities are managed in Finnish high-tech SMEs by understanding managers’ views on relevant issues. According to theory, issues such as firm size, customer knowledge implementation, lead customers, the fuzzy front-end of product/service development as well as the reluctance to engage in customer co-creation are some of the field’s focal issues. The views of 145 Finnish SME managers on these issues were gathered as empirical evidence through an online questionnaire and analyzed with SPSS statistics software. The results show, firstly, that Finnish SME managers are aware of the issues associated with customer co-creation and are able to actively manage them. Additionally, managers performed well in regards to collaborating with lead customers and implemented customer knowledge evenly in various stages of their new product and service development processes. Intellectual property rights emerged as an obstacle deterring managers from engaging in co-creation. The results suggest that in practice managers would do well by looking for more opportunities to implement customer knowledge in the early and late stages of new product and service development, as well as by actively searching for lead customers.

Nichesourcing The Uralic Languages For The Benefit Of Linguistic Research And Lingual Societies

The emerging technologies have recently challenged the libraries to reconsider their role as a mere mediator between the collections, researchers, and wider audiences (Sula, 2013), and libraries, especially the nationwide institutions like national libraries, haven’t always managed to face the challenge (Nygren et al., 2014). In the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages, the National Library of Finland has become a node that connects the partners to interplay and work for shared goals and objectives. In this paper, I will be drawing a picture of the crowdsourcing methods that have been established during the project to support both linguistic research and lingual diversity. The National Library of Finland has been executing the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages since 2012. The project seeks to digitize and publish approximately 1,200 monograph titles and more than 100 newspapers titles in various, and in some cases endangered Uralic languages. Once the digitization has been completed in 2015, the Fenno-Ugrica online collection will consist of 110,000 monograph pages and around 90,000 newspaper pages to which all users will have open access regardless of their place of residence. The majority of the digitized literature was originally published in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union, and it was the genesis and consolidation period of literary languages. This was the era when many Uralic languages were converted into media of popular education, enlightenment, and dissemination of information pertinent to the developing political agenda of the Soviet state. The ‘deluge’ of popular literature in the 1920s to 1930s suddenly challenged the lexical orthographic norms of the limited ecclesiastical publications from the 1880s onward. Newspapers were now written in orthographies and in word forms that the locals would understand. Textbooks were written to address the separate needs of both adults and children. New concepts were introduced in the language. This was the beginning of a renaissance and period of enlightenment (Rueter, 2013). The linguistically oriented population can also find writings to their delight, especially lexical items specific to a given publication, and orthographically documented specifics of phonetics. The project is financially supported by the Kone Foundation in Helsinki and is part of the Foundation’s Language Programme. One of the key objectives of the Kone Foundation Language Programme is to support a culture of openness and interaction in linguistic research, but also to promote citizen science as a tool for the participation of the language community in research. In addition to sharing this aspiration, our objective within the Language Programme is to make sure that old and new corpora in Uralic languages are made available for the open and interactive use of the academic community as well as the language societies. Wordlists are available in 17 languages, but without tokenization, lemmatization, and so on. This approach was verified with the scholars, and we consider the wordlists as raw data for linguists. Our data is used for creating the morphological analyzers and online dictionaries at the Helsinki and Tromsø Universities, for instance. In order to reach the targets, we will produce not only the digitized materials but also their development tools for supporting linguistic research and citizen science. The Digitization Project of Kindred Languages is thus linked with the research of language technology. The mission is to improve the usage and usability of digitized content. During the project, we have advanced methods that will refine the raw data for further use, especially in the linguistic research. How does the library meet the objectives, which appears to be beyond its traditional playground? The written materials from this period are a gold mine, so how could we retrieve these hidden treasures of languages out of the stack that contains more than 200,000 pages of literature in various Uralic languages? The problem is that the machined-encoded text (OCR) contains often too many mistakes to be used as such in research. The mistakes in OCRed texts must be corrected. For enhancing the OCRed texts, the National Library of Finland developed an open-source code OCR editor that enabled the editing of machine-encoded text for the benefit of linguistic research. This tool was necessary to implement, since these rare and peripheral prints did often include already perished characters, which are sadly neglected by the modern OCR software developers, but belong to the historical context of kindred languages and thus are an essential part of the linguistic heritage (van Hemel, 2014). Our crowdsourcing tool application is essentially an editor of Alto XML format. It consists of a back-end for managing users, permissions, and files, communicating through a REST API with a front-end interface—that is, the actual editor for correcting the OCRed text. The enhanced XML files can be retrieved from the Fenno-Ugrica collection for further purposes. Could the crowd do this work to support the academic research? The challenge in crowdsourcing lies in its nature. The targets in the traditional crowdsourcing have often been split into several microtasks that do not require any special skills from the anonymous people, a faceless crowd. This way of crowdsourcing may produce quantitative results, but from the research’s point of view, there is a danger that the needs of linguists are not necessarily met. Also, the remarkable downside is the lack of shared goal or the social affinity. There is no reward in the traditional methods of crowdsourcing (de Boer et al., 2012). Also, there has been criticism that digital humanities makes the humanities too data-driven and oriented towards quantitative methods, losing the values of critical qualitative methods (Fish, 2012). And on top of that, the downsides of the traditional crowdsourcing become more imminent when you leave the Anglophone world. Our potential crowd is geographically scattered in Russia. This crowd is linguistically heterogeneous, speaking 17 different languages. In many cases languages are close to extinction or longing for language revitalization, and the native speakers do not always have Internet access, so an open call for crowdsourcing would not have produced appeasing results for linguists. Thus, one has to identify carefully the potential niches to complete the needed tasks. When using the help of a crowd in a project that is aiming to support both linguistic research and survival of endangered languages, the approach has to be a different one. In nichesourcing, the tasks are distributed amongst a small crowd of citizen scientists (communities). Although communities provide smaller pools to draw resources, their specific richness in skill is suited for complex tasks with high-quality product expectations found in nichesourcing. Communities have a purpose and identity, and their regular interaction engenders social trust and reputation. These communities can correspond to research more precisely (de Boer et al., 2012). Instead of repetitive and rather trivial tasks, we are trying to utilize the knowledge and skills of citizen scientists to provide qualitative results. In nichesourcing, we hand in such assignments that would precisely fill the gaps in linguistic research. A typical task would be editing and collecting the words in such fields of vocabularies where the researchers do require more information. For instance, there is lack of Hill Mari words and terminology in anatomy. We have digitized the books in medicine, and we could try to track the words related to human organs by assigning the citizen scientists to edit and collect words with the OCR editor. From the nichesourcing’s perspective, it is essential that altruism play a central role when the language communities are involved. In nichesourcing, our goal is to reach a certain level of interplay, where the language communities would benefit from the results. For instance, the corrected words in Ingrian will be added to an online dictionary, which is made freely available for the public, so the society can benefit, too. This objective of interplay can be understood as an aspiration to support the endangered languages and the maintenance of lingual diversity, but also as a servant of ‘two masters’: research and society.

Skaalautuvan grafiikka- ja käyttöliittymäkirjaston valinta ja hyödyntäminen reaaliaikaisessa web-sovelluksessa

Skaalautuvien web-sivujen merkitys kasvaa nykypäivänä, koska web-sivuja katsotaan hyvin erikokoisilla ja -resoluutiosilla laitteilla. Sivujen skaalautuessa eri laitteille ei tarvitse erikseen tehdä mobiilisivuja tai perinteistä natiivia ohjelmistoa joka laitteelle, vaan yksi sivu toimii kaikilla laitteilla. Ongelmana on saada web-sovellukset toimimaan eri laitteilla, koska laitteiden selaimissa saattaa olla pieni eroja, joiden vuoksi on työlästä saada skaalautuva käyttöliittymä toimimaan kaikilla eri laitteilla. Skaalautuvien sivujen kehittämisen avuksi on luotu erilaisia käyttöliittymä- ja grafiikkakirjastoja, jotka auttavat sivun skaalautuvuuden toteuttamisessa. Kirjastoja käyttämällä säästetään kehitystyöhön käytettävää aikaa ja ulkoistetaan kirjaston ylläpito kolmannelle osapuolelle. Tällöin jää enemmän aikaa varsinaisten sovelluksen kehitystyölle. Tässä työssä tutkitaan eri käyttöliittymä- ja grafiikkakirjastovaihtoehtoja käyttöliittymän toteuttamiseksi. Työssä toteutetaan yksinkertainen verkkoseurantajärjestelmän prototyyppi ja valitaan sille skaalautuva käyttöliittymä- ja grafiikkakirjasto. Järjestelmä koostuu kolmesta osasta: käyttöliittymästä, palvelusta ja tietolähteistä, joista palvelu kerää tietoa käyttöliittymälle näytettäväksi.

Adopting the Vaadin Java framework to rebuild VTT’s Web Interfaces and Database Applications

With the growth in new technologies, using online tools have become an everyday lifestyle. It has a greater impact on researchers as the data obtained from various experiments needs to be analyzed and knowledge of programming has become mandatory even for pure biologists. Hence, VTT came up with a new tool, R Executables (REX) which is a web application designed to provide a graphical interface for biological data functions like Image analysis, Gene expression data analysis, plotting, disease and control studies etc., which employs R functions to provide results. REX provides a user interactive application for the biologists to directly enter the values and run the required analysis with a single click. The program processes the given data in the background and prints results rapidly. Due to growth of data and load on server, the interface has gained problems concerning time consumption, poor GUI, data storage issues, security, minimal user interactive experience and crashes with large amount of data. This thesis handles the methods by which these problems were resolved and made REX a better application for the future. The old REX was developed using Python Django and now, a new programming language, Vaadin has been implemented. Vaadin is a Java framework for developing web applications and the programming language is extremely similar to Java with new rich components. Vaadin provides better security, better speed, good and interactive interface. In this thesis, subset functionalities of REX was selected which includes IST bulk plotting and image segmentation and implemented those using Vaadin. A code of 662 lines was programmed by me which included Vaadin as the front-end handler while R language was used for back-end data retrieval, computing and plotting. The application is optimized to allow further functionalities to be migrated with ease from old REX. Future development is focused on including Hight throughput screening functions along with gene expression database handling

La régie d'entreprise : son évolution face aux bouleversements des marchés financiers

"Mémoire présenté à la faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de Maître en droit (LL.M.)"

Le design participatif au sein d’entreprises : une exploration des opportunités et limites perçues par des concepteurs de produits

La littérature contient une abondance d’information sur les approches de design impliquant les utilisateurs. Bien que les chercheurs soulèvent de nombreux avantages concernant ces approches, on en sait peu sur ce que les concepteurs des entreprises en pensent. Ce projet a pour but de connaître les perceptions des concepteurs de produits quant aux outils de design participatif puis, d’identifier les opportunités et limites qu’ils évoquent à ce sujet, et finalement, de faire des suggestions d’outils qui faciliteraient l’introduction du design participatif dans un processus de design existant. Après avoir fait un survol du domaine du design participatif et de ses outils, six cas sont étudiés au moyen d’entrevues semi-dirigées conduites auprès de concepteurs de produits. Les données sont analysées à l’aide de cartes cognitives. En ce qui concerne les outils de design participatif, les participants rencontrés perçoivent un accès direct aux besoins des utilisateurs et la possibilité de minimiser les erreurs en début de processus donc, d’éviter les modifications coûteuses qu’elles auraient entraînées. Les obstacles perçus par les concepteurs sont principalement liés à la résistance au changement, à la crainte de laisser créer ou décider les utilisateurs, ainsi qu’au manque de temps et de ressources de l’équipe. Finalement, sur la base des informations collectées, nous suggérons quatre outils de design participatif qui semblent plus intéressants : l’enquête contextuelle, les sondes, les tests de prototypes et l’approche « lead user ». Pour faire suite à ce travail, il serait intéressant d’élaborer un protocole de recherche plus exhaustif pour augmenter la portée des résultats, ou encore, d’appliquer le design participatif, dans une entreprise, afin d’explorer la satisfaction des gens quant aux produits conçus, les effets collatéraux sur les équipes impliquées, l’évolution des prototypes ou le déroulement des ateliers.

Fast imaging of laser-blow-off plume:Lateral confinement in ambient environment

The dynamics of plasma plume, formed by the laser-blow-off of multicomponent LiF-C thin film under various ambient pressures ranging from high vacuum to argon pressure of 3 Torr, has been studied using fast imaging technique. In vacuum, the plume has ellipsoidal shape. With the increase in the ambient pressure, sharp plume boundary is developed showing a focusing-like confinement in the lateral space behavior in the front end, which persists for long times. At higher ambient pressure (> 10−1 Torr ), structures are developed in the plasma plume due to hydrodynamic instability/turbulences.

Speaker identification using models for phonemes

Motivation for Speaker recognition work is presented in the first part of the thesis. An exhaustive survey of past work in this field is also presented. A low cost system not including complex computation has been chosen for implementation. Towards achieving this a PC based system is designed and developed. A front end analog to digital convertor (12 bit) is built and interfaced to a PC. Software to control the ADC and to perform various analytical functions including feature vector evaluation is developed. It is shown that a fixed set of phrases incorporating evenly balanced phonemes is aptly suited for the speaker recognition work at hand. A set of phrases are chosen for recognition. Two new methods are adopted for the feature evaluation. Some new measurements involving a symmetry check method for pitch period detection and ACE‘ are used as featured. Arguments are provided to show the need for a new model for speech production. Starting from heuristic, a knowledge based (KB) speech production model is presented. In this model, a KB provides impulses to a voice producing mechanism and constant correction is applied via a feedback path. It is this correction that differs from speaker to speaker. Methods of defining measurable parameters for use as features are described. Algorithms for speaker recognition are developed and implemented. Two methods are presented. The first is based on the model postulated. Here the entropy on the utterance of a phoneme is evaluated. The transitions of voiced regions are used as speaker dependent features. The second method presented uses features found in other works, but evaluated differently. A knock—out scheme is used to provide the weightage values for the selection of features. Results of implementation are presented which show on an average of 80% recognition. It is also shown that if there are long gaps between sessions, the performance deteriorates and is speaker dependent. Cross recognition percentages are also presented and this in the worst case rises to 30% while the best case is 0%. Suggestions for further work are given in the concluding chapter.

COMBINED FEATURE EXTRACTION TECHNIQUES AND NAIVE BAYES CLASSIFIER FOR SPEECH RECOGNITION

Speech processing and consequent recognition are important areas of Digital Signal Processing since speech allows people to communicate more natu-rally and efficiently. In this work, a speech recognition system is developed for re-cognizing digits in Malayalam. For recognizing speech, features are to be ex-tracted from speech and hence feature extraction method plays an important role in speech recognition. Here, front end processing for extracting the features is per-formed using two wavelet based methods namely Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) and Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD). Naive Bayes classifier is used for classification purpose. After classification using Naive Bayes classifier, DWT produced a recognition accuracy of 83.5% and WPD produced an accuracy of 80.7%. This paper is intended to devise a new feature extraction method which produces improvements in the recognition accuracy. So, a new method called Dis-crete Wavelet Packet Decomposition (DWPD) is introduced which utilizes the hy-brid features of both DWT and WPD. The performance of this new approach is evaluated and it produced an improved recognition accuracy of 86.2% along with Naive Bayes classifier.

A novel Sigma–Delta based parallel analogue-to-residue converter

Animportant step in the residue number system(RNS) based signal processing is the conversion of signal into residue domain. Many implementations of this conversion have been proposed for various goals, and one of the implementations is by a direct conversion from an analogue input. A novel approach for analogue-to-residue conversion is proposed in this research using the most popular Sigma–Delta analogue-to-digital converter (SD-ADC). In this approach, the front end is the same as in traditional SD-ADC that uses Sigma–Delta (SD) modulator with appropriate dynamic range, but the filtering is doneby a filter implemented usingRNSarithmetic. Hence, the natural output of the filter is an RNS representation of the input signal. The resolution, conversion speed, hardware complexity and cost of implementation of the proposed SD based analogue-to-residue converter are compared with the existing analogue-to-residue converters based on Nyquist rate ADCs

Integración de las técnicas de mercadeo y la relación estratégica comunitaria

Con el siguiente proyecto se pretende explicar cómo se realiza la integración de las técnicas de mercadeo y la relación estratégica comunitaria, debido a que las organizaciones utilizan conceptos comunitarios. Se analizan las principales estrategias de mercadeo como marketing mix, geomarketing, mercadeo de servicios, mercadeo relacional y mercadeo social. Se explican las técnicas de mercadeo como mercadeo directo, diferenciación de productos, segmentación de mercado, investigación de mercados, inteligencia de mercados, optimización de canales de distribución y comercio electrónico. Adicionalmente, se exponen las estrategias comunitarias como coaliciones comunitarias, organizaciones de base, liderazgo comunitario y empoderamiento. La metodología implementada para este proyecto es de tipo teórico-conceptual y reúne los aportes de varios documentos científicos de diversas áreas del conocimiento. Las fuentes de información, conceptos y teorías se seleccionan según el criterio del investigador en función de las posibilidades descriptivas de la integración propuesta. En esta investigación se concluye que las técnicas y las estrategias de mercadeo permiten la comunicación entre las organizaciones y las comunidades. Esto posibilita que exista participación entre ambas partes y es un factor clave para el surgimiento de la relación estratégica comunitaria. Se recomienda realizar investigaciones posteriores sobre la relación estratégica comunitaria, aplicadas a organizaciones y comunidades.