The Arctic regions are affected by the modern climate change to a greater extent than the global average. This effect is called the Arctic amplification and is reflected in air temperatures rising with double rate and increased precipitation compared to the global average. The climate of Svalbard is strongly related to variations in the atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns, and the archipelago ...

Over the course of the last three decades, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has proven itself to be an effective monitoring technology for marine applications. The clear benefits of using SAR as opposed to optical devices is that SAR is insensitive to cloud cover, lighting conditions and can also provide imagery to a high degree of resolution. Given these benefits, there is a large incentive to implement ...

Banks need to develop effective credit scoring models to better understand the relationship between customer information and the customer's ability to repay the loan. The output of such a model is called the default probability and is used to rank loan applications in terms of their creditworthiness. The focus of this thesis is to develop novel credit scoring methodologies that solve well-known ...

<p>Kernel methods have been a central part of the machine learning arsenal for several decades. Within this framework, unsupervised learning has been a particularly challenging area. This is due to the inherent nature of unsupervised learning tasks, where important information about the structure of the data is unknown to the user, and as such it is difficult to design a kernel or system to solve ...

Cloud computing offers the convenience of outsourcing storage and processing power to a public shared environment. Physical infrastructure is managed by the cloud provider, allowing hosted services to be deployed without any upfront investment. Cloud infrastructure may additionally manage deployment, migration, scalability, and fault tolerance, transparently from the hosted service. Serverless ...

Polar lows are small, but extreme cyclones that develop in marine polar air mass. They feature one of the largest natural hazards in the polar regions. Their associated strong winds, high waves, substantial amounts of snow fall, low visibility and possibility for ice accumulation on ships and airplanes cause threats for coastal communities and marine operations. Hence, accurate prediction of polar ...

CO₂ is a non-toxic, abundant and readily available gas, which has the potential to become an important carbon source in chemical synthesis. The clear advantage of CO₂ is its sustainability, in contrast to typical carbon sources such as oil, coal, or natural gas, which are in the process of depletion. However, the use of CO₂ also poses a big challenge as it features ...

<p><i>Change detection</i> is a thriving and challenging topic in remote sensing for Earth observation. The goal is to identify changes that happen on the Earth by comparing two or more satellite or aerial images acquired at different times. Traditional methods rely on homogeneous data, that is, images acquired by the same sensor, under the same geometry, seasonal conditions,and recording ...

Accurate sea-ice prediction is essential for safe operations in the Arctic and potentially also for weather forecast at high-latitudes. The increasing number of sea-ice related satellite observations in the Arctic can be used to improve the model predictions through data assimilation. For sea ice, sea-ice concentration (SIC) observations have been available for many years. Observational information ...

This thesis proposes a novel approach to explore and extract context information attached with images, mainly gathered from social network sites. I first performed a user study, to understand the user behavior on social network sites. I inferred that the relationship among users have central importance.<p> <p>To assist users to annotate images in social network, I use existing metadata gathered ...