The Master Thesis of Mosh\'e Flato

The genesis and impact of the M.Sc. thesis by Mosh\'e Flato is analysed. In this connection, the fruitful passage of Mosh\'e in Lyon, capitale mondiale de la gastronomie, is evoked. Finally, some basic elements for a model in crystal- field theory are given as a important step on the way opened by Mosh\'e.Comment: 10 pages, Tex file. Contributed paper submitted for the proceedings of the `Conf\'erence Mosh\'e Flato 1999' held in Dijon (France), 5 - 8 September 1999. The proceedings will be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in the series `Mathematical Physics Studies', eds. G. Dito and D. Sternheimer, founded by the late Professor Mosh\'e Flat

Master Thesis in Informatics. Guidelines

A master-thesis means that students must demonstrate that they can formulate a research question. Furthermore they must design and conduct an investigation. The investigation and the findings from it must be reported according to standards and guidelines for academic and/or scholarly reports. There must be a chain of evidence starting with the research question and ending with the conclusions. In a master-thesis (as any other academic report) there must be a research question. Literature, theories and previous investigations, which are appropriate and relevant for the research question, must be presented and reviewed. Based on literature and theories the relevant ones must be chosen, based on an assessment of the theories, which must result in a research (investigation) model. Methods to be used in conducting the investigation should be based on a motivated selection, which must be presented and argued in the master thesis. It is important to present the literature and theories that have been used. There must be a connection with previous research and literature. So a master-thesis must have references, and references must be written according to the applicable guidelines. The contents and layout of a master-thesis are essential to present and mediate the investigation and findings of the thesis in a solid and readable way. The chain of evidence must be clear through the whole master-thesis. Teaching consists of a series of lectures, supervision and seminars. The seminars are intended to provide support during the process of conducting an investigation and writing a master-thesis. The process is concluded with pre-seminars and final seminars, where the master-thesis is presented and discussed, as well as assessed. During these seminars student-teams must review the master-theses of other student-teams

Harry Potter and the Master Thesis

This thesis was made to explore the possibility of incorporating movie adaptions of novels into the English Second Language classrooms to facilitate learning. The following research question for this thesis was then formed: "How can a teacher work with movie adaptions as texts in the ESL-classroom?”. To answer this question, I chose a qualitative research approach, document analysis. I would analyze documents for research on the subject and didactical textbooks to create a lesson plan that would work for a typical 8th grade English class in Norwegian schools. The documents analyzed were peer reviewed works from other academics as well as didactical theory, and these sources were chosen to create a solid foundation to build the lesson plan on. This research resulted in a lesson plan that would take about five weeks to complete in a classroom. The lessons include tasks that allow for level differentiation, teamwork, and development of the basic skills in the current curriculum (LK20). The planning process was influenced by the backwards planning model and the didactical relationship model, which both brought order and structure to the planning process resulting in a thoroughly planned lesson plan

Sumol+Compal : equity research master thesis

The purpose of this dissertation is to evaluate Sumol+Compal equity value at the end of 2016. In this sense a detailed analysis on the company financials and industry sector was done, followed by a DCF and Multiples valuation. The DCF resulted in a share price of 1.01€, that represents a downside of 48.5% when compared to the value of the homologous period, 1.96€. The multiples valuation resulted in a share price of 1.55€, 20.9% below the close price of the year 2015. After an extensive sensitivity analysis, the final outcome was defined, Sumol+Compal share price, at the end of 2016, will be around 1.18€. This value represents a downside of 39.8% when compared to value recorded at the end of the previous year and 10.9% regarding September, 27th, 2016 (most recent information). At this date Sumol+Compal share price was at 1.33€, therefore the outcome of this dissertation is a Sell recommendation.O objetivo desta dissertação é calcular o valor do capital próprio da Sumol +Compal no final do ano de 2016. Para este efeito foi feita uma análise detalhada à situação financeira da empresa e à indústria onde esta está inserida, seguidas de uma avaliação DCF e por múltiplos. O DCF resultou num preço por acção de 1.01€, que representa um prejuízo de 48.5% quando comparada com o valor da mesma acção no período homólogo, 1.96€. A avaliação por múltiplos resultou num preço de 1.55€, 20.9% abaixo do preço de fecho do ano de 2015. Depois de uma extensa análise de sensibilidade, o resultado final foi definido, o preço da ação da Sumol+ Compal, no final do ano de 2016, será à volta de 1.18€. Este valor representa um prejuízo de 39.8% quando comparado com o valor registado no final do ano passado e de 10.9% quando comparado com informação mais recente, 27 de Setembro de 2016. Nesta data a Sumol +Compal registava um preço de 1.33€, por isso a conclusão desta dissertação recai sobre a recomendação de venda das ações desta empresa

Master Thesis Paper

Beginning at a very young age, my inability to satisfactorily learn the traditional skills of reading , writing and arithmetic, brought continual reprimands from both my parents and teachers, as well as a subtle ostracism from my peers. This consistent pressure upon me, eventually resulted in strong feelings of inferiority. I attempted to hide my inadequacy by deceiving people; pretending to read silently in class, plagiarizing on my written assignments, talking less and so on. In addition, I discovered I could further counteract these inabilities through drawing. As my use of pictures and drawings developed , as a communicative channel, they became the focus of strength and the clearest means of expressing ideas. This paper is supposed to be a discussion reflecting those aspects of my work which have taken shape in the course of my graduate study, however, the significance of my work during this period can only be understood by casting back to what was evolving in my work shortly before this time. &nbsp;</p

Hydro/Battery Hybrid Systems for frequency regulation

An innovative Hydro/Battery Hybrid System (HBHS), composed of a hydropower plant (HPP) and a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is proposed to provide frequency regulation services in the Nordic Power System (NPS). The HBHS is envisioned to have a faster and more efficient response compared to HPPs currently providing these services, whilst retaining their high energy capacity and endurance, thus alleviating stand-alone BESS operation constraints. This Thesis aims to explore the operation and optimization of such a hybrid system in order to make it efficient and economically viable. A power plant perspective is employed, evaluating the impact different control algorithms and parameters have on the HBHS performance. Providing Frequency Containment Reserves for Normal Operation (FCR-N), to the national TSO in Sweden, is defined from technology and market analyses as the use case for the HBHS. The characteristics of HPPs suitable for HBHS implementation are found theoretically, by evaluating HPP operational constraints and regulation mechanisms. With the aim of evaluating the dynamic performance of the proposed HBHS, a frequency regulation model of the NPS is built in MATLAB and Simulink. Two different HBHS architectures are introduced, the Hydro Recharge, in which the BESS is regulating the frequency and the HPP is controlling its state of charge (SoC), and the Frequency Split, in which both elements are regulating the frequency with the HPP additionally compensating for the SoC. The dynamic performance of the units is qualitatively evaluated through existing and proposed FCR-N prequalification tests, prescribed by the TSO and ENTSO-E. Quantitative performance comparison to a benchmark HPP is performed with regards to the estimated HPP regulation wear and tear and BESS degradation during 30-day operation with historical frequency data. The two proposed HBHS architectures demonstrate significant reductions of estimated HPP wear and tear compared to the benchmark unit. Simulations consistently report a 90 % reduction in the number of movements HPP regulation mechanism performs and a more than 50 % decrease in the distance it travels. The BESS lifetime is evaluated at acceptable levels and compared for different architectures. Two different applications are identified, the first being installing the HBHS to enable the HPP to pass FCR-N prequalification tests. The second application is increasing the FCR-N capacity of the HPP by installing the HBHS. The Frequency Split HBHS shows more efficient performance when installed in the first application, as opposed to the Hydro Recharge HBHS, which shows better performance in the second application. Finally, it is concluded that a large-scale implementation of HBHSs would improve the frequency quality in the NPS, linearly decreasing the amount of time outside the normal frequency band with increasing the total installed HBHS power capacity

Exploration of methods for in-hand slip detection with an event-based camera during pick-and-place motions

Pick-and-place motions executed by robotic arms are widely used in the industry and they need to be performed effectively and without errors, such as slips and grasp failures. Concretely, rotational slip may occur when the object is grasped away from its center of mass and may cause issues when placing it due to its change of orientation. In this thesis, this problem is tackled using an event-based camera, which is designed to trigger an input event only the change in illumination at a specific image location crosses a predefined threshold. This enables us to exclude redundant information from static parts of the scene and build systems with low latency, high dynamic range, high temporal resolution and low power consumption. The topic of slip detection in manipulation tasks using event-based cameras is novel. Only a handful of papers in the literature tackle this problem and most of them do not perform as large motions as this thesis considers, typical of pick-and-place scenarios. The main contributions of this work are the design of the data acquisition system and some exploration on data processing methods to infer properties of the scene (motion, slip, etc.) from the data acquired by the platform. In terms of the experiment setup, the event-based camera (DAVIS 346) is mounted to the robotic arm (Panda) with the designed reconfigurable camera mount, offering an external view of the contact between the object and the two-finger parallel gripper used as end-effector. With this setup some small sets of data were recorded, containing slip and non-slip cases during pick-and-place motions with different objects and backgrounds. Since this is an exploratory topic and data is therefore scarce, the approach to data processing consists of feature engineering. To this end, events are processed to investigate the usefulness of alternative representations, such as event histograms and optical flow, to detect slip. Concretely, the ratio between the events coming from the object and the whole image and the vertical absolute mean velocity of the object are considered as one-dimensional signals, which can be thresholded to determine whether a slip is happening or not. In order to discriminate the events related to the object from the background, several solutions are proposed and compared. The results show that indeed, both signals are informative for slip detection, present- ing some limitations to generalize for different objects and backgrounds. In the end, some possible solutions to the detailed limitations are proposed.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::7 - Energia Assequible i No Contaminant::7.1 - Per a 2030, garantir l’accés universal a serveis d’energia assequibles, confiables i modern

A genetic algorithm for the mixed flow shop problem

In this thesis we present a new interesting version of the mixed flow shop se-quencing problem, which at the same time is a version of the classic flow shop,a very common topic on operations research.We propose a genetic algorithm to solve it that we will compare at the endwith a simple initial genetic-based algorithm previously design. For that wefirst focus on the crossover operator as we consider it the most challenging parton a sequencing problem. We study and compare 5 different crossover operatorsand we choose the one that performs better. Finally we calibrate the populationsize, the weight of mutation and crossover operators on the algorithm and alsothe mutations operator itself.The goal of the thesis is to better understand the specific mixed flow shopproblem version presented and design a genetic algorithm that clearly improvesthe performance of the initial algorith

Analysis of brain structure in premature-born adults

My master’s thesis with the title “Analysis of brain structure in premature-born adults” is based on the discoveries of various developmental differences that have been found in premature-born individuals, both shortly after birth and in adults. However, it was not known to what extent these developmental differences are correlated and whether there might even be a causal relationship between structural differences and cognitive performance. To investigate these questions, MRI derived information on brain structure is combined in order to compute dependencies between different affected developmental processes. The analyses include statistical testing, correlation analysis as well as causal inference on a dataset consisting of 101 very preterm-born/ very low birth weight adults and 111 term-born control subjects. We found significant differences in very preterm- compared to term-born adults in multiple developmental processes, and these processes can be grouped by similarity into four main clusters. Furthermore, we found causal relationships between several developmental processes and cognitive performance. These findings pave the way for further research with the goal to improve risk prediction and the development of drug targets for preterm-born neonates