Sustainability of community forestry enterprises: indigenous wild honey gathering in the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve Palawan, Philippines

Commercialization of non-timber forest products has been one of the strategies worldwide for integrated rural poverty alleviation and forest conservation. Through a social-ecological systems approach, this dissertation aims to assess the contribution of a community forestry enterprise to sustainable rural development in an indigenous forest community in an ecological frontier. Specifically, this research work seeks to define the current relationship of indigenous Tagbanuas on Palawan island in the Philippines with giant honey bees (Apis dorsata Fab.) and analyze the impacts of a wild honey enterprise on rural livelihood, forest preservation, and traditional culture. By employing the multi-step knowledge development process of transdisciplinary research, this dissertation establishes system knowledge and target knowledge, which are both important in shaping transformative knowledge. This has the potential to influence local, regional, and global decision making processes on indigenous livelihood, forest and honey bee conservation. In chapter two, a global review was conducted on the role of wild bees in social-ecological systems. The review shows that wild bees occupy a central role in social contexts and mostly provide services and benefits related to food, medicine, and pollination. Chapter three shows that on a local level, indigenous Tagbanuas mostly use honey for food, medicine, and material. The majority (94%) of 251 non-honey hunter Tagbanuas surveyed consume honey; however, most of them (86%) only use less than a liter of honey annually. Nowadays, honey hunters rarely perform hunting rituals and also sell beeswax, which had long been considered important in Tagbanua rituals. Despite wild honey hunting being a major livelihood activity, only 24% of those surveyed could correctly identify the giant honey bee. Inferential statistics show that lower level of education correlates with a higher probability to correctly identify the giant honey bee. Chapter four details how giant honey bee nesting areas were voluntarily mapped by honey hunters who trained in using global positioning system equipment. In chapter five, spatial analysis was conducted on nesting tree areas. Results show that vegetation cover dropped from 0.61 in the year 1988 to 0.41 in 2015. Pollen analysis showed the presence of at least 11 plant families in honey samples. This includes the mangrove family Rhizophoraceae, which hints that the giant honey bees forage in both terrestrial and coastal areas. A minority of community members responded that they use chemical fertilizers (4%) and pesticides (20%), which are known to be harmful to bees. However, the laboratory-analyzed honey samples contain no pesticide residues, showing the potential of Tagbanuas honey to be classified as organic. In chapter six, results of a gross margin and integrated value chain analysis show that downstream actors capture most of the economic value of wild honey. Commercial wild honey hunting may help avoid poverty aggravation, but it seems insufficient in alleviating poverty or guaranteeing conservation. In chapter seven, we discuss how integrated conservation and development projects have much potential in promoting sustainable development in indigenous forest communities but challenges need to be overcome to fulfill this potential. Institutions must not only focus on provisioning ecosystem services of giant honey bees, but also consider cultural and regulating services. In pursuing sustainability and systems thinking, this dissertation compels readers to pay attention to two marginalized entities: indigenous groups and honey bees other than the well-known European honey bee (A. mellifera L.). In doing so, this research hopes to influence conservation and development efforts to become more inclusive and sensitive to entities left behind.Nachhaltigkeit gemeinschaftlicher Forstbetriebe: Sammeln wilden Honigs durch Einheimische im UNESCO Mensch- und Biosphärenreservat Palawan, Philippinen Die Kommerzialisierung von Nicht-Holz-Waldprodukten ist eine der Strategien der integrierten ländlichen Armutsbekämpfung und des Naturschutzes. Unter Nutzung eines sozial-ökologischen Systemansatzes zielt diese Arbeit darauf ab, den Beitrag gemeinschaftlicher Waldnutzung indigener Bevölkerungsgruppen zur nachhaltigen ländlichen Entwicklung zu beurteilen. Als Fallbeispiel dienen dabei die aktuellen Wechselwirkungen der indigenen Gruppe der Tagbanuas auf Palawan Insel in den Philippinen mit Riesen-Honigbienen (Apis dorsata Fab.) Dabei werden die Auswirkungen der kommerziellen Honigvermarktung auf die ländlichen Lebenswelten, den Schutz des Waldökosystems und die traditionelle Kultur zu analysieren. Durch den Einsatz eines mehrstufigen Wissensentwicklungsprozesses aus der transdisziplinären Forschung werden in dieser Arbeit Systemkenntnisse und Zielwissen geschaffen, die für die Gestaltung von transformativem Wissen wichtig sind. Sie können lokale, regionale und globale Entscheidungsprozesse auf die indigenen Lebenswelten, den Waldschutz und die Erhaltung von wilden Honigbienenpopulationen beeinflussen. Eine globale Überprüfung der Rolle der Wildbienen in sozial-ökologischen Systemen zeigt, dass wilde Bienen eine zentrale Rolle in ruralen sozialen Kontexten einnehmen und Produkte und Dienstleistungen etwa in Form von Nahrung, Medizin und Bestäubung bieten. Indigene Tagbanuas nutzen Honig als Nahrung, Medizin und Material. Die große Mehrheit (94%) der nicht-Honig-sammelnden Tagbanuas verwenden Honig, allerdings die meisten von ihnen (86%) nur weniger als einen Liter Honig jährlich. Heutzutage führen Honigsammler selten Jagdrituale durch, und verkaufen stattdessen das Bienenwachs, das traditionell wichtig für Tagbanua-Rituale ist. Trotz des Sammelns wilden Honigs, was ein wichtiger Lebensunterhalt in Tagbanua-Gemeinden ist, konnten nur 24% von 251 nicht-Honig-sammelnden Tagbanuas die Riesen-Honigbiene richtig identifizieren. Inferentielle Statistiken zeigen, dass ein niedrigeres Bildungsniveau und eine höhere Vegetation die korrekte Identifizierung der Riesen-Honigbiene erheblich beeinflussen. Die Nistplätze der Riesen-Honigbienen wurden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit von den Honigsammlern mit Hilfe von globalen Positionierungssystemen (GPS) dargestellt. Die räumliche Analyse zeigte, dass die Vegetationsabdeckung in Nestbaumgebieten von 0,61 im Jahr 1988 auf 0,41 im Jahr 2015 sank. Die Pollenanalyse zeigte die Anwesenheit von mindestens 11 Pflanzenfamilien in Honigproben. Dazu gehört auch die Mangrovenfamilie Rhizophoraceae, die darauf hinweist, dass die Riesen-Honigbienen auch in küstennahen Gebieten Palawans Nahrung finden. Nur eine Minderheit von Tagbanua Kleinbauern nutzen chemische Düngemittel (7%) und Pestizide (14%), die für Bienen schädlich sind. Die Honigproben enthalten keine Pestizidrückstände und zeigen ein Potential, das als organisch eingestuft werden kann. Eine grobe Marge und eine integrierte Wertschöpfungskettenanalyse mit sozio-kulturellen Analysen zeigen, dass nachgeschaltete Akteure den größten Teil des ökonomischen Wertes von Wildhonig abschöpfen und die kommerzielle Sammlung von Wildhonig negative Auswirkungen auf die traditionelle Kultur von Tagbanuas hat. Kommerzielle Wildhonigsammlung kann dazu beitragen, ein weiteres Armutswachstum zu vermeiden, aber weniger dazu, Armut zu mindern. Integrierte Waldschutz- und Entwicklungsprojekte haben ein hohes Potenzial für die Förderung der nachhaltigen Entwicklung indigener Waldgemeinschaften. Allerdings gibt es Herausforderungen, die überwunden werden müssen, wenn dieses Potenzial umgesetzt werden soll. Institutionen müssen sich nicht nur auf die Bereitstellung von Ökosystemleistungen von Riesen-Honigbienen konzentrieren, sondern auch Kultur- und Regulierungs-Dienstleistungen berücksichtigen. Auf Basis des Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurses und eines Systemdenkens zwingt diese These die Leser, auf zwei marginalisierte ‚Einheiten‘ zu achten: indigene Gruppen und wilde Honigbienenarten abseits der bekannte A. mellifera L. (Europäische Honigbiene). Schlussfolgernd fordert diese Forschungsarbeit die bessere Integration von sensiblen Naturschutz- und Entwicklungsprogrammen im Globalen Süden

Tracking Events in Social Media

Tracking topical events in social media streams, such as Twitter, provides a means for users to keep up-to-date on topics of interest to them. This tracking may last a period of days, or even weeks. These events and topics might be provided by users explicitly, or generated for users from selected news articles. Push notification from social media provides a method to push the updates directly to the users on their mobile devices or desktops. In this thesis, we start with a lexical comparison between carefully edited prose and social media posts, providing an improved understanding of word usage within social media. Compared with carefully edited prose, such as news articles and Wikipedia articles, the language of social media is informal in the extreme. By using word embeddings, we identify words whose usage differs greatly between a Wikipedia corpus and a Twitter corpus. Following from this work, we explore a general method for developing succinct queries, reflecting the topic of a given news article, for the purpose of tracking the associated news event within a social media stream. A series of probe queries are generated from an initial set of candidate keywords extracted from the article. By analyzing the results of these probes, we rank and trim the candidate set to create a succinct query. The method can also be used for linking and searching among different collections. Given a query for topical events, push notification to users directly from social media streams provides a method for them to keep up-to-date on topics of personal interest. We determine that the key to effective notification lies in controlling of update volume, by establishing and maintaining appropriate thresholds for pushing updates. We explore and evaluate multiple threshold setting strategies. Push notifications should be relevant to the personal interest, and timely, with pushes occurring as soon as after the actual event occurrence as possible and novel for providing non-duplicate information. An analysis of existing evaluation metrics for push notification reflects different assumptions regarding user requirements. This analysis leads to a framework that places different weights and penalties on different behaviours and can guide the future development of a family of evaluation metrics that more accurately models user needs. Throughout the thesis, rank similarity measures are applied to compare rankings generated by various experiments. As a final component, we develop a family of rank similarity metrics based on maximized effectiveness difference, each derived from a traditional information retrieval evaluation measure. Computing this maximized effectiveness difference (MED) requires the solution of an optimization problem that varies in difficulty, depending on the associated measure. We present solutions for several standard effectiveness measures, including nDCG, MAP, and ERR. Through experimental validation, we show that MED reveals meaningful differences between retrieval runs. Mathematically, MED is a metric, regardless of the associated measure. Prior work has established a number of other desiderata for rank similarity in the context of search, and we demonstrate that MED satisfies these requirements. Unlike previous proposals, MED allows us to directly translate assumptions about user behavior from any established effectiveness measure to create a corresponding rank similarity measure. In addition, MED cleanly accommodates partial relevance judgments, and if complete relevance information is available, it reduces to a simple difference between effectiveness values

Dynamic, data-driven decision-making in revenue management

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-241).Motivated by applications in Revenue Management (RM), this thesis studies various problems in sequential decision-making and demand learning. In the first module, we consider a personalized RM setting, where items with limited inventories are recommended to heterogeneous customers sequentially visiting an e-commerce platform. We take the perspective of worst-case competitive ratio analysis, and aim to develop algorithms whose performance guarantees do not depend on the customer arrival process. We provide the first solution to this problem when there are both multiple items and multiple prices at which they could be sold, framing it as a general online resource allocation problem and developing a system of forecast-independent bid prices (Chapter 2). Second, we study a related assortment planning problem faced by Walmart Online Grocery, where before checkout, customers are recommended "add-on" items that are complementary to their current shopping cart (Chapter 3). Third, we derive inventory-dependent priceskimming policies for the single-leg RM problem, which extends existing competitive ratio results to non-independent demand (Chapter 4). In this module, we test our algorithms using a publicly-available data set from a major hotel chain. In the second module, we study bundling, which is the practice of selling different items together, and show how to learn and price using bundles. First, we introduce bundling as a new, alternate method for learning the price elasticities of items, which does not require any changing of prices; we validate our method on data from a large online retailer (Chapter 5). Second, we show how to sell bundles of goods profitably even when the goods have high production costs, and derive both distribution-dependent and distribution-free guarantees on the profitability (Chapter 6). In the final module, we study the Markovian multi-armed bandit problem under an undiscounted finite time horizon (Chapter 7). We improve existing approximation algorithms using LP rounding and random sampling techniques, which result in a (1/2 - eps)- approximation for the correlated stochastic knapsack problem that is tight relative to the LP. In this work, we introduce a framework for designing self-sampling algorithms, which is also used in our chronologically-later-to-appear work on add-on recommendation and single-leg RM.by Will (Wei) Ma.Ph. D

New approaches in the virtual reconstruction of fragmented specimen

Das Hauptaugenmerk dieser Arbeit liegt auf der virtuellen Rekonstruktion von Schädeln, die sich durch das Fehlen eines großen Teils der Schädelknochen auszeichnen. Mithilfe von Methoden der virtuellen Anthropologie und Geometrischen Morphometrie kann dabei eine Vielzahl von Problemen konfrontiert werden, die während der Rekonstruktion von fragmentierten fossilen Schädeln entstehen können. Denn jede Schädelrekonstruktion weisst generell eine gewisse Ungenauigkeit auf. Diese wird von verschiedenen Faktoren beeinflusst, z.B. Größe der fehlenden Schädelteile oder der Rekonstruktionsmethode. Ein Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit liegt deshalb in der Untersuchung der Auswirkungen verschiedener Faktoren auf die Ungenauigkeit fossiler Rekonstruktionen mithilfe von landmarks und semilandmarks. Darüber hinaus werden neue Ansätze für die anatomische Rekonstruktion von stark beschädigten Schädeln eingeführt. Bei der Rekonstruktion von fossilen Schädelfragmenten in einer virtuellen Umgebung wird jeder einzelne Schritt in einem ausführlichen Protokoll gespeichert. Dies ermöglicht die Erstellung einer großen Anzahl von verschiedenen Rekonstruktionen. Da eine Rekonstruktion niemals perfekt sein wird, berücksichtigt dieser Ansatz das mangelnde Wissen darüber, wie das Original-Indiviuum wirklich aussah. Mit anderen Worten zeichnet sich jede Rekonstruktion durch einen gewissen Grad an Ungenauigkeit aus. Die Ermittlung dieser Ungenauigkeit ist umso wichtiger, da heute hohe Maßstäbe an die Qualität von virtuellen Modellen gestellt werden, die in unterschiedlichen Studien der Ontogenie, Phylogenie und Biomechanik eingesetzt werden. Ich veranschauliche diese Ansätze durch die Rekonstruktion mehrerer virtuell fragmentierter Individuen und wende die gewonnenen Informationen unter anderem in der Rekonstruktion des Australopithecus afarensis Individuums A.L. 444-2 an. Desweiteren untersuche ich die morphologische Integration im kraniofazialen Komplex von Individuen der Überfamilie Hominoidea, um Kovariationsmuster aufzuzeigen, die während der Schätzung der Ungenauigkeit von anatomischen Rekonstruktionen von potenzieller Hilfe sein konnten.The main theme of this thesis is how different scenarios of missing data estimation influence the uncertainty of virtual reconstructions. Using a combination of tools from Virtual Anthropology and Geometrics Morphometrics, a variety of problems is approached comprising major problems that arise during the anatomical reassembly of fragmented fossil crania and the geometrical reconstruction of missing data. The focus is on the quantitavive description of accuracies and uncertainties in fossil reconstructions using landmarks and semilandmarks from different reference samples. Furthermore, new approaches for the anatomical reconstruction of severly damaged crania are introduced. When dealing with the reassembly of fragments in a virtual environment, every single step can be saved in a detailed protocol and used as a basis for subsequent modifications. This creates a large number of different reconstructions, considering the uncertainty of the reconstruction itself. Reconstructions of incomplete fossil specimens are needed in varying contexts from studies of ontogeny, phylogeny or biomechanics. I exemplify these approaches by reconstructing several virtually fragmented specimens from extant and extinct species, and applying part of this information to the Australopithecus afarensis specimens A.L. 444-2. Furthermore I investigate morphological integration in the hominoid craniofacial complex, showing patterns of covariation that could be of potential help estimating the uncertainty in the anatomical reconstruction of fragmented specimens

Mining and Managing User-Generated Content and Preferences

Ιn this thesis, we present techniques to manage the results of expressive queries, such as skyline, and mine online content that has been generated by users. Given the numerous scenarios and applications where content mining can be applied, we focus, in particular, to two cases: review mining and social media analysis. More specifically, we focus on preference queries, where users can query a set of items, each associated with an attribute set. For each of the attributes, users can specify their preference on whether to minimize or maximize it, e.g., "minimize price", "maximize performance", etc. Such queries are also know as "pareto optimal", or "skyline queries". A drawback of this query type is that the result may become too large for the user to inspect manually. We propose an approach that addresses this issue, by selecting a set of diverse skyline results. We provide a formal definition of skyline diversification and present efficient techniques to return such a set of points. The result can then be ranked according to established quality criteria. We also propose an alternative scheme for ranking skyline results, following an information retrieval approach

Проблеми використання інформаційних технологій в освіті, науці та промисловості: ХVI міжнар. конф. (15 грудня 2021 р., м. Дніпро)

Матеріали XVI Міжнародної конференції "проблеми використання інформаційних технологій в освіті, науці та промисловості" (15 грудня 2021 року м. Дніпро), яка щорічно відбувається в НТУ "ДП" на базі кафедри програмного забезпечення комп'ютерних систем.Подано результати теоретичних та експериментальних досліджень з різних аспектів використання інформаційних технологій в освіті, науці та керування промисловістю. У публікаціях розглянуто питання створення та вдосконалення програмних засобів обробки та передачі інформації, математичного моделювання, дистанційної освіти, інформаційної безпеки та телекомунікації. Для наукових, інженерно-технічних співробітників і студентів, які спеціалізуються в галузі обчислювальної техніки та інформаційних технологій

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute