This thesis addresses negotiation of bindings in QoS aware open systems and in particular how to characterize possible contracts, requirements and capabilities of heterogeneous environments. Our approach is (1) to use trading of policies as the principle for negotiation and (2) the use of declared or rule-based conformance for QoS statements to be used in negotiation and (3) a middleware binding ...

From the invention of the atomic force microscope (AFM) in 1986, tremendous efforts have been put into developing this tool. The AFM has long been considered as one of the top choices to probe the nanoscale world with the ability to achieve nanoscale resolution imaging of surfaces under different environments. Advances in instrumentation combined with the exploitation of sophisticated data analysis ...

A complete representation of the Arctic cryosphere has historically been restricted by its remoteness, large extent, and restrictions in measurement methods and equipment. Here, remote sensing of snow-cover is a central method to improve the current knowledge of the Earth's ecosystem, and hence a critical component in cryospheric models. The use of drone-borne radar systems has seen considerable ...

The Arctic offshore has a sensitive environment and is associated with a range of harsh operating conditions with considerable year-round variations. Such conditions can adversely affect the reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) of oil and gas (O&G) production facilities in different ways. One of the main challenges in RAM analysis of Arctic offshore O&G facilities is the lack of ...

This thesis presents the implementation of a numerical real-space method for the calculation of the electronic structure of molecular systems within the self-consistent field approximations of quantum chemistry. The code is based on the multi-resolution multiwavelet basis which provide sparse representations of functions and operators, in particular integral operators with Green's function convolution ...

Global warming is now highly concerned by society as extreme weather is more often than ever, and the Arctic is experiencing warming twice as fast as the global mean. A large amount of carbon is stored in the forms of methane and methane hydrate in the continental margins worldwide. Methane is the most predominant gaseous compound in natural gas hydrate, which is stable under low temperature and ...

NORSK SAMANDRAG: <br>Denne avhandlinga tek for seg endringane i relativt havnivå – strandforskyvinga – dei siste vel 11.500 åra på kysten av Finnmark og i midtre Hardanger. Ei stor mengd kjerneprøver frå avsettingane i innsjøar som ein gong låg under havnivået, er henta inn og analysert. Grenser mellom sediment som vart avsett i salt- eller ferskvatn er bestemt ved å analysere både kiselalgar ...

As the offshore industry expands into the Arctic and sub-Arctic areas, the oil and gas exploration activities generate all kinds of waste, varying from contaminated runoff water to material packaging; however, the majority of the waste is associated with the drilling cuttings from drilling activities. Offshore Arctic projects have a high degree of technical and social complexity. The technological ...

Greenhouse gas methane is contained as gas hydrate, an icy structure, under the seabed in enormous amounts of Arctic regions. West Svalbard continental margin, which we investigated here, is one of these regions. Also, in the Russian Kara Sea the subsea permafrost is acting as a cap for the gas to be released in the future. But continuous expulsions of methane have been already observed in both ...

The number of scale-space statistical algorithms has been greatly increased over the last 15 years. The concept originated from computer vision, introduced in Lindeberg (1994). The seminal paper by Chaudhuri and Marron (1999) brought the scale-space concept into smoothing of curves and kernel density estimation through the SiZer tool. By using all relevant smoothing bandwidths, i.e., the scale part, ...