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The Role of NGOs in Promoting Women Entrepreneurship in India
No full textEntrepreneurship is emerging as an important avenue in gaining economic independence for women. In last two decades (in post-liberalisation era), the economic reforms coupled with loosening of social restrictions has further provided an impetus to women to become entrepreneurs. According to the current trends most of the emerging women entrepreneurs are in small and micro enterprises. A cursory look at their situation highlights a number of major challenges faced by them. These challenges can be broadly classified as: lack of awareness, lack of information, difficulty in accessibility of finance, lack of easy access of entrepreneurial training and post training support, lack of market and network support, lack of self-confidence and managerial skills etc.
In recent times, the government has realised the importance of entrepreneurship as a prominent alternative to traditional wage employment in the new economy, and its role in increasing the pace of economic growth. Therefore, Indian government has come up with various special policy measures to help women entrepreneurs. However, there are major limitations among women entrepreneurs in accessing those facilities. These limitations arise due to various factors, such as: bureaucratic hassles, far reaching location of the government training centres, lack of transportation mainly in remote areas, restriction of government officials in terms of timing when women also have to perform household activities etc.
At this point, the NGOs emerge as a viable and important medium to support and promote women entrepreneurs. A number of NGOs in India are trying to help women entrepreneurs at various levels. To name a few, the AWAKE, the ICECD and the FIWE, three prominent NGOs in this field providing services to women entrepreneurs for more than 15 years. An attempt has been made in the present study to explore the approach and activities of the NGOs (considering the AWAKE, the ICECD and the FIWE as case study for the present research) in order to meet the above mentioned challenges. This also provides the answer to the central research questions of the present research.
It is important to highlight that a very limited number of substantial literatures are available on the NGOs and its contribution to the promotion of women entrepreneurship in India. The present study contributes significantly to the knowledge about the appropriate and effective approach of the NGOs to support women entrepreneurship in India. The study also highlights the various limitations of the NGOs while performing these activities. It is hoped that the finding will be helpful to the planners and policy makers in the field of women entrepreneurship. The study would also be great use to the researchers, professionals, corporate consultants and other NGOs interested in the field of entrepreneurship development in general and women entrepreneurship in particular
Distributional semantic phrases vs. semantic distributional nonsense: Adjective Modification in Compositional Distributional Semantics
No full textIn this thesis, I study the ability of compositional distributional semantics to model adjective modification. I present three studies that explore the degree to which semantic intuitions are grounded in the distributional representations of adjective-noun phrases, as well as provide insight into various linguistic phenomena by extracting unsupervised cues from these distributional representations. First, I investigate degrees of adjective modification. I contrast three types of adjectival modifiers – intersectively used color terms, subsectively used color terms, and intensional adjectives – and test the ability of different composition strategies to model their behavior. Next, I propose an approach to characterize semantic deviance of composite expressions using distributional semantic methods. I present a set of simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and show that they are more significant in determining the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases than measures classically employed in studies of compound processing. Finally, I use compositional distributional semantic methods to investigate restrictions in adjective ordering. Specifically, I focus on properties distinguishing adjective-adjective-noun phrases in which there is flexibility in the adjective ordering from those bound to a rigid order. I explore a number of measures extracted from the distributional representation of such phrases which may indicate a word order restriction. Overall, this work provides strong support for compositional distributional semantics, as it is able to generalize and capture the complex semantic intuition of natural language speakers for adjective-noun phrases, even without being able to rely on co-occurrence relations between the constituents
Il discorso straviato: Stefano D'Arrigo e il romanzo del Novecento
No full textLa tesi nasce come indagine intorno allo scrittore siciliano Stefano D'Arrigo e alla sua opera principale, il romanzo "Horcynus Orca" (1975). Situandosi nel punto di intersezione tra diverse linee chiave del Novecento – dalla riflessione sulle possibilità comunicative della lingua fino al problema della rielaborazione del trauma bellico – l'opera darrighiana connette strettamente il contesto italiano a quello sovranazionale: nonostante "Horcynus Orca" sia stato più volte associato alle grandi narrazioni novecentesche e ai nomi di autori come Joyce o Proust, tuttavia, raramente è stato analizzato nei suoi effettivi legami con il panorama letterario internazionale. La ricerca riconsidera dunque le caratteristiche dell'opera seguendo un percorso che, in linea con le esperienze biografico-letterarie dell'autore, inizia con Hölderlin (il «poeta ingrato», oggetto della tesi di laurea di D'Arrigo nel 1942), passa per i modernisti americani (Melville e Faulkner soprattutto, autori di riferimento per i romanzieri del dopoguerra italiano) e giunge fino a Gogol' (da cui D'Arrigo trae il suo primo romanzo, "Il venditore di anime morte", rimasto inedito).
L'analisi mantiene una stretta correlazione tra il piano delle scelte stilistiche e quello dello sviluppo narrativo delle opere, ponendo al centro la domanda intorno alle possibilità di significazione della parola letteraria e alla sua legittimità. D'Arrigo rientra nel novero degli scrittori contemporanei che avvertono, per la prima volta, il senso dell'inadeguatezza del loro strumento, la lingua, e praticano la letteratura in un contesto di sfiducia ignoto ai loro predecessori: la figura di Hölderlin mostra come questa riflessione derivi dall'attraversamento della tradizione europea più che dall'influenza del coevo romanzo sperimentale, rispetto al quale D'Arrigo aveva sempre dichiarato la propria estraneità. Se il romanzo “straviato” – aggettivo che D'Arrigo mutua dai racconti di Raffaello Brignetti – nasce dall'esperienza di una crisi, non è con la provocatorietà delle avanguardie né con il silenzio attonito della “letteratura dell'incomunicabilità” che D'Arrigo intende reagirvi. L'influenza del romanzo epico-popolare, segnalata dalla presenza di Gogol', mostra di avere un peso significativo nell'indirizzare la poetica darrighiana verso una visione della letteratura che abbandona il desiderio di risalire alla parola intatta del passato e si serve degli effetti babelici della lingua come di una risorsa narrativa. L'opera di D'Arrigo può dunque essere considerata un esempio di questa diversa risposta alla crisi della parola letteraria, una risposta più tarda, che matura nel romanzo del pieno Novecento e contrariamente alla sua fama di “mostruosità” trae linfa dal sostegno della tradizione
Event Based Media Indexing
No full textMultimedia data, being multidimensional by its nature, requires appropriate approaches for its organizing and sorting. The growing number of sensors for capturing the environmental conditions in the moment of media creation enriches data with context-awareness. This unveils enormous potential for eventcentred multimedia processing paradigm. The essence of this paradigm lies in using events as the primary means for multimedia integration, indexing and management.
Events have the ability to semantically encode relationships of different informational modalities. These modalities can include, but are not limited to: time, space, involved agents and objects. As a consequence, media processing based on events facilitates information perception by humans. This, in turn, decreases the individual’s effort for annotation and organization processes. Moreover events can be used for reconstruction of missing data and for information enrichment.
The spatio-temporal component of events is a key to contextual analysis. A variety of techniques have recently been presented to leverage contextual information for event-based analysis in multimedia. The content-based approach has demonstrated its weakness in the field of event analysis, especially for the event detection task. However content-based media analysis is important for object detection and recognition and can therefore play a role which is complementary to that of event-driven context recognition.
The main contribution of the thesis lies in the investigation of a new eventbased paradigm for multimedia integration, indexing and management. In this dissertation we propose i) a novel model for event based multimedia representation, ii) a robust approach for mining events from multimedia and iii) exploitation of detected events for data reconstruction and knowledge enrichment
Studies of the Higgs sector in H->ZZ->2l2q and bbH->4b semileptonic channels at CMS.
Get PDFThe thesis is devoted to my Ph.D. research activities during last three years within the CMS collaboration. My primary field of interest was the investigation of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model and in connection with
Beyond-Standard-Model New Physics searches
Building skin as energy supply: Prototype development of a wooden prefabricated BiPV wall
Get PDFIn the perspective of “nearly zero energy buildings” as foreseen in the EPBD 2010/31/EU, herein a prototype of a wooden prefabricated BiPV wall is conceived, designed, built and tested.
The prototype key concepts, identified according to the recommendations of the IEA Task 41 research project, are: multi-functionality, prefabrication, sustainability and integration.
The prototype design is the result of a theoretical study which takes into account both architectural integration aspects and energy performance issues.
The latter in particular, is based on the evaluation and improvement of both PV and building-related aspects, through the investigation and implementation of low-cost passive strategies to improve the overall BiPV performance.
A modular specimen of the prototype was built thanks to an industrial collaboration and tested through an experimental approach, based on the combination of several phases performed in two test facilities (i.e. INTENT lab and SoLaRE-PV lab) by means of original experimental set-up.
The effectiveness of the proposed BiPV prototype configuration is proven by comparing the results of the experiments with monitored data of two BiPV systems (a roof and a façade system) located in South Tyrol (North of Italy).
The experimental results are then generalized, providing significant data and experimental expressions for a deeper understanding of BiPV systems energy performance
Development and study of a dense array Concentration PhotoVoltaic (CPV) system
No full textIn the past several years there has been a growing commercial interest in Concentration PhotoVoltaics (CPV) thanks to its promise of low cost electrical power generation. While the technology of CPV using point-focus Fresnel-like optical elements is reaching maturity, the systems based on dense array receivers still need further scientific progress. This thesis explores the field of CPV applied to a parabolic concentrator prototype and to a dense array receiver made of multijunction solar cells.
The solar concentrator, completely designed and built at the University of Trento, is characterized, in order to get the illumination distribution on the PV receiver. The non-uniformity in incident flux results in a current mismatch among cells and strongly impacts the system performance. In order to solve this issue, we have proposed a new type of electrical connection by fitting each cell of the array with an individual DC-DC converter. This method is shown to increase the power transfer efficiency with respect to classical series connection, at least for the tested illumination levels and unbalances. The other main problem with dense array systems is the reliability of the PV receiver, with special attention to the high thermal flux to be dissipated. Several types of water-cooled receivers have been built, with different material configurations that were previously studied with 3D thermal modeling. In particular the building of a multi-cell receiver has required the design of the insulation/interconnection between the cells, the tuning of the cell soldering and the realization of front contact connections
Supporting Concept Extraction and Identifier Quality Improvement through Programmers' Lexicon Analysis
No full textIdentifiers play an important role in communicating the intentions associated with the program entities they represent. The information captured in identifiers support programmers to (re-)build the âmental modelâ of the software and facilitates understanding. (Re-)building the âmental modelâ and understanding large software, however, is difficult and expensive. Besides, the effort involved in the process heavily depends on the quality of the programmersâ lexicon used to construct the identifiers.
This thesis addresses the problem of program understanding focusing on (i) concept extraction, and (ii) quality of the lexicon used in identifiers. To address the first problem (concept extraction), two ontology extraction approaches exploiting the natural language information captured in identifiers and structural information of the source code are proposed and evaluated. We have also proposed a method to automatically train a natural language analyzer for identifiers. The trained analyzer is used for concept extraction. The evaluation was conducted on a program understanding task, concept location. Results show that the extracted concepts increase the effectiveness of concept location queries. Besides extracting concepts from the source code, we have investigated information retrieval (IR) based techniques to filter domain concepts from implementation concepts.
To address the second problem (quality of the lexicon used in identifiers), we have defined a publicly available catalog of lexicon bad smells (LBS) and developed a suite of tools to automatically detect them. LBS indicate some potential lexicon construction problems that can be addressed through refactoring. The impact of LBS on concept location and the contribution they can give to fault prediction have been studied empirically. Results indicate that LBS refactoring has a significant positive impact on IR-based concept location task and contributes to improve fault prediction, when used in conjunction with structural metrics. In addition to detecting LBS in identifiers, we try also to fix them. We have proposed an approach which uses the concepts extracted from the source code to suggest names which can be used to complete or replace an identifier. The evaluation of the approach shows that it provides useful suggestions, which can effectively support programmers to write consistent names
Retrofit of Existing Bridges with Concept of Integral Abutment Bridge: Static and Dynamic Parametric Analysis
No full textThe integral abutment bridge (IAB) constituted by the superstructure and the substructure can achieve a composite action responding as a single structural unit by eliminating or reducing expansion joints and bearings. Accordingly, the construction and maintenance costs can be reduced. Therefore, the IAB concept has recently become a topic of remarkable interest among bridge engineers, not only for newly built bridges but also during refurbishment processes. The research topic concerns the retrofit of existing bridges with the IAB concept.
In order to investigate the retrofitting technique with the IAB concept, the literature survey on the practical applications of this approach in worldwide was carried out firstly, including retrofitting motivations, detailed processes and structural performance after retrofitting. Besides, another literature review on the critical issues of analysis on the IAB, such as soil-structure interactions, modelling approaches and plastic hinge simulations, was conducted in order to find out the most suitable method in modelling.
The case study of a simply supported prestressed concrete bridge (named Viadotto Serrone) with three spans constructed in 1972 was analyzed, which has some durability problems nowadays. The finite element model was built, involving soil-structure interactions, non-linear behaviors and retrofitting processes. The original and updated Italian design codes are compared through static analysis and seismic analysis. Another investigation was conducted to prove the necessity of considering soil-structure interactions in the IAB.
Based on the appropriate finite element model, a large number of static sensitive analyses were carried out, taking thermal actions; bridge types; soil conditions and substructure heights as parameters. Through analysing the responses of girders, piers, abutment stems and piles, some important factors and the corresponding influence were found, which could be adopted to guide the retrofitting technique with the IAB concept. Then, the verification was conducted in order to check if the existing sections could be reused without any changes and point out the most critical components, which need to be repaired or replaced. Moreover, the dynamic performance of bridge before and after retrofitting was investigated preliminarily through modal analysis and response spectrum analysis
Silicon nanocrystals downshifting for photovoltaic applications
No full textIn conventional silicon solar cell, the collection probability of light generated carries shows a drop in the high energy range 280-400nm. One of the methods to reduce this loss, is to implement nanometre sized semiconductors on top of a solar cell where high energy photons are absorbed and low energy photons are re-emitted. This effect,
called luminescence down-shifter (LDS), modifies the incident solar spectrum producing an enhancement of the energy conversion efficiency of a cell. We investigate this innovative effect using silicon nanoparticles dispersed in a silicon dioxide matrix as active material. In particular, I proposed to model these structures using a transfer matrix approach to simulate its optical properties in combination with a
2D device simulator to estimate the electrical performance. Based on the optimized layer sequences, high efficiency cells were produced within the european project LIMA characterized by silicon quantum dots as active
layer. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of this approach by showing an enhancement of the short circuit current density with up to 4%. In addition, a new configuration was proposed to improve the solar cell performances. Here the silicon nanoparticles are placed on a cover glass and not directly on the silicon cells. The aim of this study was to separate the silicon nanocrystals (Si-NCs) layer from the cell.
In this way, the solar device is not affected by the Si-NCs layer during the fabrication process, i.e. the surface passivation quality of the cell remains unaffected after the application of the LDS layer. Using this approach, the downshifting contribution can be quantified separately from the passivation effect, as compared with the previous method based on the Si-NCs deposition directly on the solar devices. By suitable
choice of the dielectric structures, an improvement in short circuit current of up 1% due to the LDS effect is demonstrated and simulated