AMBIENT-PRISMA: Distribution and Mobility in Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures

This thesis presents a framework called Ambient-PRISMA for describing and developing distributed and mobile software systems in an abstract way. Ambient-PRISMA enriches an aspect-oriented software architecture approach called PRISMA with concepts of Ambient Calculus (AC). Ambient Calculus (AC) is a formalism that provides primitives to describe distribution and mobility characteristics in an abstract way. It introduces a concept called ambient which is a bounded place where computation happens. This enrichment is performed by extending the PRISMA metamodel, and Aspect-Oriented Architecture Description Language (AOADL). A case study of an electronic Auction System with mobile agents is used throughout the thesis in order to illustrate the work.Ali Irshaid, N. (2007). AMBIENT-PRISMA: Distribution and Mobility in Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12900Archivo delegad

Perehdyttäminen ja tehtäväkortit Case: Suur-Seudun Osuuskauppa Prisma Lohja

Tämän toiminnallisen opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena oli tuottaa uudet tehtäväkortit Prisma Lohjan päivittäistavaraosastolle. Tehtäväkortit on toteutettu Suur-Seudun Osuuskaupan Prisma Lohjan toimeksiantona. Opinnäytetyön tavoitteena oli tehdä ajantasaiset, työvuorokohtaiset tehtäväkortit, jotka tukevat sekä perehdytystä että työvuorojen etenemistä. Opinnäytetyö sai alkunsa päivittäistavaraosastoilla tehdyistä muutoksista, joiden myötä työtehtävät sekä tehtäväkorttien sisältötarve muuttuivat. Tehtäväkortteja tehtiin yhteensä kahdeksan kappaletta, joista viisi oli aamu- ja kolme iltavuoroon. Tehtäväkortti on S-ryhmän oma termi perehdyttämisessä sekä työvuoroissa käytettävästä tukimateriaalista, josta selviää työvuoron eteneminen sekä se, mitä työvuoron aikana tulee tehdä. Tehtäväkortit sisältävät työvuoron tehtävät, odotukset sekä kyseisen työvuoron tärkeimmät tehtävät. Tämä opinnäytetyö toteutettiin toiminnallisena työnä, jolloin työn pääpaino oli tehtäväkorttien suunnittelussa ja toteutuksessa. Tämän opinnäytetyön teoreettinen viitekehys koostuu perehdyttämisestä ja perehdyttämisen prosessista, seurannasta ja arvioinnista sekä lainsäädännöstä. Lisäksi työssä käsiteltiin Prisma Lohjan yleisiä perehdyttämiskäytänteitä. Tehtäväkortit toteutettiin havainnoimalla päivittäistavaraosaston työvuoroja. Tämän lisäksi tehtäväkorttien toteuttamisessa käytettiin teemahaastattelua, jotta saatiin selville jokaisen osastovastaavan mielipiteet oman osastonsa tehtäväkortteihin. Lopuksi tehtäväkorttien toimivuutta testattiin, perehdyttämällä uusi työntekijä tehtäväkorttien avulla päivittäistavaraosastolle. Tehtäväkorttien laatimisessa lähdemateriaalina toimi opinnäytetyöntekijän oma työkokemus sekä osastovastaavien haastattelu. Toimeksiantaja oli uusiin tehtäväkortteihin tyytyväinen, joten tehtäväkortit tulivat heti käyttöön osastoilla. Jatkoa ajatellen tehtäväkortit tulisi tarkistaa kaksi kertaa vuodessa sekä merkitä tehtäväkortteihin niiden muokkauspäivämäärä. Näin niistä selviäisi, koska ne on viimeksi muokattu ja tehtäväkortit pysyisivät ajan tasalla helpommin.The purpose of this functional thesis was to produce new task cards for daily consumer goods department in Prisma hypermarket. The assignment was commissioned by Suur-Seudun Osuuskauppa Prisma Lohja. The main target of this thesis was to produce up-to-date and shift-specific task cards, which support orientation and progress of shifts. This thesis started from changes made in daily consumer goods departments, which changed duties and content of the need for task cards. A total of eight task cards were made. Five of them for the morning and three for the evening shift. Task card is the S Group’s own term for support material that is used for orientation and work shifts. Task cards tell how work shift should progress and what is to be done during the work shift. Task cards include assignments, expectations and the most important tasks on the work shift. This thesis was executed as a functional research, which means that the main focus was on the design and preparation of the task cards. The theoretical frame of reference focused on orientation and orientation process, control and evaluation and legislation. In addition, this thesis handles the current orientation practices at Prisma Lohja. Observation of work tasks in daily consumer goods department was used as a basis for the creation of the task cards. In addition, to the implementation of task cards, theme interviews were used to find out every department management's opinions regarding the task cards. Finally, task cards were tested by familiarizing a new worker to the daily consumer goods department. The information sources for the task cards were collected from the writer’s own work experience and personnel interviews. The commissioner of the thesis and the persons in charge of orientation were pleased with the task cards and they were taken into use instantly on departments. Thinking about the future, task cards should be checked twice a year and the revision date should be marked. This way the last modification date would be available and the task cards would stay up-to-date more easily

Scanner Invariant Representations for Diffusion MRI Harmonization

Purpose: In the present work we describe the correction of diffusion-weighted MRI for site and scanner biases using a novel method based on invariant representation. Theory and Methods: Pooled imaging data from multiple sources are subject to variation between the sources. Correcting for these biases has become very important as imaging studies increase in size and multi-site cases become more common. We propose learning an intermediate representation invariant to site/protocol variables, a technique adapted from information theory-based algorithmic fairness; by leveraging the data processing inequality, such a representation can then be used to create an image reconstruction that is uninformative of its original source, yet still faithful to underlying structures. To implement this, we use a deep learning method based on variational auto-encoders (VAE) to construct scanner invariant encodings of the imaging data. Results: To evaluate our method, we use training data from the 2018 MICCAI Computational Diffusion MRI (CDMRI) Challenge Harmonization dataset. Our proposed method shows improvements on independent test data relative to a recently published baseline method on each subtask, mapping data from three different scanning contexts to and from one separate target scanning context. Conclusion: As imaging studies continue to grow, the use of pooled multi-site imaging will similarly increase. Invariant representation presents a strong candidate for the harmonization of these data

Implementing PRISMA/DB in an OOPL

PRISMA/DB is implemented in a parallel object-oriented language to gain insight in the usage of parallelism. This environment allows us to experiment with parallelism by simply changing the allocation of objects to the processors of the PRISMA machine. These objects are obtained by a strictly modular design of PRISMA/DB. Communication between the objects is required to cooperatively handle the various tasks, but it limits the potential for parallelism. From this approach, we hope to gain a better understanding of parallelism, which can be used to enhance the performance of PRISMA/DB.\ud The work reported in this document was conducted as part of the PRISMA project, a joint effort with Philips Research Eindhoven, partially supported by the Dutch "Stimuleringsprojectteam Informaticaonderzoek (SPIN)

PRISMA: PRoximal Iterative SMoothing Algorithm

Motivated by learning problems including max-norm regularized matrix completion and clustering, robust PCA and sparse inverse covariance selection, we propose a novel optimization algorithm for minimizing a convex objective which decomposes into three parts: a smooth part, a simple non-smooth Lipschitz part, and a simple non-smooth non-Lipschitz part. We use a time variant smoothing strategy that allows us to obtain a guarantee that does not depend on knowing in advance the total number of iterations nor a bound on the domain

Extending a multi-set relational algebra to a parallel environment

Parallel database systems will very probably be the future for high-performance data-intensive applications. In the past decade, many parallel database systems have been developed, together with many languages and approaches to specify operations in these systems. A common background is still missing, however. This paper proposes an extended relational algebra for this purpose, based on the well-known standard relational algebra. The extended algebra provides both complete database manipulation language features, and data distribution and process allocation primitives to describe parallelism. It is defined in terms of multi-sets of tuples to allow handling of duplicates and to obtain a close connection to the world of high-performance data processing. Due to its algebraic nature, the language is well suited for optimization and parallelization through expression rewriting. The proposed language can be used as a database manipulation language on its own, as has been done in the PRISMA parallel database project, or as a formal basis for other languages, like SQL

Patient-reported depression measures in cancer: a meta-review

The patient-reported depression measures that perform best in oncology settings have not yet been identified. We did a meta-review to integrate the findings of reviews of more than 50 depression measures used in adults with, or recovering from, any type of cancer. We searched Medline, PsycINFO, Embase, and grey literature from 1999 to 2014 to identify 19 reviews representing 372 primary studies. 11 reviews were rated as being of high quality (defined as meeting at least 20 criteria in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement). The Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS) was the most thoroughly evaluated measure, but was limited by cutpoint variability. The HADS had moderate screening utility indices and was least recommended in advanced cancer or palliative care. The Beck Depression Inventory was more generalisable across cancer types and disease stages, with good indices for screening and case finding. The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale was the best-weighted measure in terms of responsiveness. This meta-review provides a comprehensive overview of the strengths and limitations of available depression measures. It can inform the choice of the best measure for specific settings and purposes

Tulospalkkausjärjestelmän vaatimukset ja odotukset market-toimialalla : Case Osuuskauppa KPO, Prisma Vaasa

Opinnäytetyömme tavoitteena oli selvittää kyselyn perusteella odotuksia ja vaati-muksia tulospalkkiojärjestelmälle market-toimialalla. Kohdeyrityksemme oli Osuuskauppa KPO:n Vaasan Prisma, jossa kysely suoritettiin alkuvuodesta 2010. Teoriaosassa tutkimme motivaatiota ja palkitsemista sekä palkitsemisen muodoista syvemmin tulospalkkausta. Keräsimme aineistoa kirjallisuudesta ja internetistä löytyvistä julkaisuista. Tulospalkkaus on yksi tunnetuimmista ja käytetyimmistä palkitsemisen muodoista tänä päivänä ja tietoa aiheesta löytyi helposti. Tutkimus-tulosten perusteella noin 80 % vähittäiskaupan alalla työskentelevistä työntekijöistä kuuluu tulospalkkausjärjestelmän piiriin, mikä kertoo aiheen tärkeydestä alalla. Työmme empiirisessä osassa selvitimme henkilöstön ja esimiesten mielipiteitä tulospalkitsemisen suhteen kohdeyrityksessämme. Tutkimus toteutettiin paperisena kyselylomakkeena, joka jaettiin myymälähenkilöstölle. Kyselylomakkeen laatimisessa käytimme apuna aikaisemmin tehtyjä kyselyitä ja esitestasimme lomakkeen ennen lopullista toteutusta. Johdon mielipiteet tulospalkkausjärjestelmästä selvitimme erillisellä kyselyllä. Tutkimuksemme tuloksena saimme hyvän kuvan siitä, miten tärkeänä eri tahot tulospalkkausta pitävät. Tavoitteenamme oli selvittää, mitkä ovat hyviä palkitsemistapoja ja -perusteita. Selvitimme lisäksi, mitkä ovat järjestelmän tärkeimpiä ominaisuuksia ja minkälaisia tiedotuskanavia tulisi käyttää.The aim of the thesis was to gather information on personnel’s expectations concerning a performance-related rewarding system in the market branch by executing an inquiry. The target company was Osuuskauppa KPO’s Prisma in Vaasa. The inquiry forms were distributed and collected at the beginning of the year 2010. In the theoretical section motivation, rewarding and especially performance-related pay was examined. Material was collected from literature and from publications on the Internet. Performance-related rewarding is one of the best known and most used rewarding methods and information on the topic was found easily. According to some studies approximately 80 percent of employees in the retail trade branch work in companies that have a performance-related rewarding system and this shows the importance of the topic in the branch. In the empiric section of our study opinions on the performance-related rewarding for the employees and managers in the target company were examined. The inquiry was put into practice by using paper inquiry forms which were distributed to the personnel. We used earlier made inquiry forms to help plan our inquiry form and we also pre-tested our inquiry form. The opinions of management on the performance-related rewarding system were studied a separate inquiry form. As the result of the study it was learnt how important performance-related rewarding is for both parties. The goal was to find out good means and reasons for rewarding. The most important features of the system, and also the information channels that should be used were examined