Blekinge Institute of Technology
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Law and Spatial Planning. Socio-Legal Perspectives on the Development of Wind Power and 3G Mobile Infrastructures in Sweden
No full textThis PhD thesis in Spatial Planning argues for the importance of understanding
the approaches to knowledge and rationalities embedded in spatially relevant
decision-making. It emphasises the significance of seeing law as an empirical
object of study for planning and environmental management. The Swedish
development of wind power and 3G mobile infrastructures are used as cases to
study these issues of principal interest. It is a compilation thesis consisting
of a comprehensive introductory framework and five articles or chapters that
have also been published elsewhere. The study is based on three main
perspectives: Level of decision-making, legitimacy of different forms of
knowledge involved in the process, and the sociolegal tension between formal
law and its practical consequences.
The thesis deals with problems stemming from the multi-level tensions in the
planning and implementation that exist between the national, the regional and
the local authorities. The legal context is analysed from the sociolegal
perspective, in particular how the juridification of siting and permit
conflicts determines what type of knowledge that can legitimately affect the
decision-making and thereby set conditions for public participation. Finally,
the thesis elaborates on the largely counterproductive results of the strong
emphasis on efficiency in the revision of planning and permit processes for
wind power and 3G-infrastructure, and what can be learnt from the experiences
of the attempts at increasing efficiency.
A combination of methods has been employed in the studies, and the data comes
from a range of sources such as a large set of mast building permits, a sample
of wind permit cases, as well as appealed permit cases. In addition, interviews
have been conducted with judges from relevant courts, including regional
handling officers who assess wind turbine applications. Legal documents such as
preparatory work and licence conditions have also been analysed. The results
show that there is a legal-rhetorical adaptation to the expert-based
decision-making in court when permits are appealed. Further, the administrative
levels interact poorly in the overall implementation. The national decisions,
irrespective of the normative viewpoint of who should control the landscape
planning, could be better informed of the preconditions at a local level that
factually define the outcome of the implementation.
The author, Stefan Larsson, holds a PhD in Sociology of Law, an LLM and is a
sociolegal researcher who generally studies issues in the intersection of
conceptual, sociolegal and technological change. The thesis has been supervised
by Professor Lars Emmelin, The Swedish School of Planning, BTH, and
co-supervised by Professor Karsten Åström, the Department of Sociology of Law,
Lund University. The thesis is the result of research within the programme
Tools for environmental assessment in strategic decision-making, MiSt, funded
by The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the Centre for Work,
Technology and Social Change at Lund University
Aetiology of Tick-Borne Infections in an Adult Swedish Population - Are Co-Infections with Multiple Agents Common?
No full textIn Scandinavia, tick-borne infections affecting humans include Lyme borreliosis
(LB), tick-borne
encephalitis (TBE) and human granulocytic anaplasmosis (HGA). Each of these
infections can present
with unspecific symptoms. In this prospective clinical study, we recruited
patients based on
two independent inclusion criteria; 1) patients with unspecific symptoms, i.e.
fever (≥38.0˚C) or a
history of feverishness and/or any combination of headache, myalgia or
arthralgia and 2) patients
with erythema migrans (EM), following an observed tick bite or tick exposure
within one month
prior to onset of symptoms. A total of 206 patients fulfilled the study. Among
these, we could identify
186 cases of LB (174 with EM), 18 confirmed and two probable cases of HGA and
two cases of
TBE. Thirteen of the HGA cases presented without fever. Furthermore, 22 of the
EM patients had a sub-clinical co-infection with Anaplasma phagocytophilum,
based on serology. Both TBE cases had co-infections, one with Borrelia
burgdorferi and one with Anaplasma phagocytophilum. We conclude
that it is important to consider several causative agents and possible
co-infections in the
clinical management of infectious diseases where ticks may be suspected as
vectors
A method for evaluation of learning components
No full textToday, it is common to include machine learning components in software
products. These components offer specific functionalities such as image
recognition, time series analysis, and forecasting but may not satisfy the
non-functional constraints of the software products. It is difficult to
identify suitable learning algorithms for a particular task and software
product because the non-functional requirements of the product affect algorithm
suitability. A particular suitability evaluation may thus require the
assessment of multiple criteria to analyse trade-offs between functional and
non-functional requirements. For this purpose, we present a method for
APPlication-Oriented Validation and Evaluation (APPrOVE). This method comprises
four sequential steps that address the stated evaluation problem. The method
provides a common ground for different stakeholders and enables a multi-expert
and multi-criteria evaluation of machine learning algorithms prior to inclusion
in software products. Essentially, the problem addressed in this article
concerns how to choose the appropriate machine learning component for a
particular software product
Subjective quality assessment of an adaptive video streaming model
No full textWith the recent increased popularity and high usage of HTTP Adaptive Streaming
(HAS) techniques, various studies have been carried out in this area which
generally focused on the technical enhancement of HAS technology and
applications. However, a lack of common HAS standard led to multiple
proprietary approaches which have been developed by major Internet companies.
In the emerging MPEG-DASH standard the packagings of the video content and HTTP
syntax have been standardized; but all the details of the adaptation behavior
are left to the client implementation. Nevertheless, to design an adaptation
algorithm which optimizes the viewing experience of the enduser, the multimedia
service providers need to know about the Quality of Experience (QoE) of
different adaptation schemes. Taking this into account, the objective of this
experiment was to study the QoE of a HAS-based video broadcast model. The
experiment has been carried out through a subjective study of the end user
response to various possible clients' behavior for changing the video quality
taking different QoE-influence factors into account. The experimental
conclusions have made a good insight into the QoE of different adaptation
schemes which can be exploited by HAS clients for designing the adaptation
algorithms
Fuzzy Set Theory Applied to Make Medical Prognoses for Cancer Patients
No full textAs we all know the classical set theory has a deep-rooted influence in the
traditional mathematics. According to the two-valued logic, an element can
belong to a set or cannot. In the former case, the element’s membership degree
will be assigned to one, whereas in the latter case it takes the zero value.
With other words, a feeling of imprecision or fuzziness in the two-valued logic
does not exist. With the rapid development of science and technology, more and
more scientists have gradually come to realize the vital importance of the
multi-valued logic. Thus, in 1965, Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh from Berkeley
University put forward the concept of a fuzzy set. In less than 60 years,
people became more and more familiar with fuzzy set theory. The theory of fuzzy
sets has been turned to be a favor applied to many fields.
The study aims to apply some classical and extensional methods of fuzzy set
theory in life expectancy and treatment prognoses for cancer patients. The
research is based on real-life problems encountered in clinical works by
physicians. From the introductory items of the fuzzy set theory to the medical
applications, a collection of detailed analysis of fuzzy set theory and its
extensions are presented in the thesis. Concretely speaking, the Mamdani fuzzy
control systems and the Sugeno controller have been applied to predict the
survival length of gastric cancer patients. In order to keep the gastric cancer
patients, already examined, away from the unnecessary suffering from surgical
operation, the fuzzy c-means clustering analysis has been adopted to
investigate the possibilities for operation contra to nonoperation.
Furthermore, the approach of point set approximation has been adopted to
estimate the operation possibilities against to nonoperation for an arbitrary
gastric cancer patient. In addition, in the domain of multi-expert
decision-making, the probabilistic model, the model of 2-tuple linguistic
representations and the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) have been
utilized to select the most consensual treatment scheme(s) for two separate
prostate cancer patients.
The obtained results have supplied the physicians with reliable and helpful
information. Therefore, the research work can be seen as the mathematical
complements to the physicians’ queries
No-reference image and video quality assessment: a classification and review of recent approaches
No full textThe field of perceptual quality assessment has gone through a wide range of
developments and it is still growing. In particular, the area of no-reference
(NR) image and video quality assessment has progressed rapidly during the last
decade. In this article, we present a classification and review of latest
published research work in the area of NR image and video quality assessment.
The NR methods of visual quality assessment considered for review are
structured into categories and subcategories based on the types of
methodologies used for the underlying processing employed for quality
estimation. Overall, the classification has been done into three categories,
namely, pixel-based methods, bitstream-based methods, and hybrid methods of the
aforementioned two categories. We believe that the review presented in this
article will be helpful for practitioners as well as for researchers to keep
abreast of the recent developments in the area of NR image and video quality
assessment. This article can be used for various purposes such as gaining a
structured overview of the field and to carry out performance comparisons for
the state-of-the-art methods
Greening of IP-Based Video Distribution Networks: Developments and Challenges
No full textThe creation and the distribution of video content is a multistage process that
refers to the aquisition of video source, content production and packaging, and
distribution to customers. The major components are the access networks,
metro/edge networks, core networks, data centers and storage networks.
Today, the access networks, of type wireless and wired,
dominate the power consumption of the chain. However, it is expected that, with
increasing access speeds, the core network routing will dominate the power
consumption of the chain as well. Furthermore, it is also expected that the
power consumption of Data Centers (DCs) and Content Distribution Networks
(CDNs) will be dominated by the power consumption of data storage for content
that is infrequently downloaded as well as by the transport of data for content
that is frequently downloaded.
The paper provides an overview of the problems related to the greening of
IP-based video distribution, with particular focus on recent developments and
the associated challenges. These are research topics planned to be solved by
the last call Celtic-Plus project proposal CONVINcE (Consumption OptimizatioN
in Video Networks). This research project has received the
EUREKA Celtic-Plus label for funding approval in five European countries:
France, Sweden, Finland, Romania and Turkey. It is considered to be a very high
quality research and the topic is considered to be very relevant to our future
from ecological and economical view
Early identification of bottlenecks in very large scale system of systems software development
No full textSystem of systems are of high complexity, and for each system, many different
requirements are implemented in parallel. Systems are developed with some
degree of managerial independence but later on have to work together. In this
situation, many requirements are written, implemented, and tested in parallel
for different systems that are to be integrated. This makes identifying
bottlenecks challenging, and visualizations often used on project level (such
as Kanban boards or burndown charts) have to be extended/complemented to cope
with the increased complexity. In response to these challenges, the
contributions of this study are to propose the following: (i) a visualization
for early identification and proactive removal of bottlenecks; (ii) a
visualization to check on the success of bottleneck resolution; and (iii) to
provide an industry evaluation of the visualizations in a case study of a
system of systems developed at Ericsson AB in Sweden. The feedback by the
practitioners showed that the visualizations were perceived as useful in
improving throughput and lead time. The quantitative analysis showed that the
visualizations were able in identifying bottlenecks and showing improvements or
the lack thereof. On the basis of the qualitative and quantitative data
collected, we conclude that the visualizations are useful in bottleneck
identification and resolution
How can libraries and other academic stakeholders engage in making data open?
No full textIn this paper we will address the questions of what and where the value of open
access to research data might be and
how libraries and related stakeholders can contribute to achieve the benefits
of freely sharing data. In particular, the emphasis is
on how libraries need to acquire the competence for collaboration to train and
encourage researchers and library staff to work with open data. The paper is
based on the early results of the RECODE project, an EU FP7 project that
addresses the drivers and barriers in developing open access to research data
in Europe (http://www.recodeproject.eu)