I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. I authorize the University of Waterloo to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authorize the University of Waterloo to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scho...

In this thesis, we present a novel multi-agent travel planning algorithm which finds shared journeys for multiple travellers. The algorithm uses existing planners and works in three phases: finding initial single-agent plans, their optimisation by the best-response approach and matching the plans to the timetable. The algorithm has been evaluated using real-world public transportation data of t...

iv CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1 Thesis Organization 5 Literature Cited 5 CHAPTER 2. A TEN-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE STUDY OF AVIAN 8 POPULATION TRENDS FROM WILDLIFE REHABILITATION SUBMISSIONS Abstract 8 Introduction 9 Materials and Methods 11 Results 13 Discussion 19 Acknowledgements 24 Literature Cited 24 CHAPTER 3. WILDLIFE REHABILITATION CENTERS IN 27 DISEASE SURVEILLANCE AND MONITORING Abstra...

for their love and support. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor Dr. Shreyes N. Melkote for his guidance and support during the course of this thesis research. Without his trust, encouragement, and patience, I would be unable to finish this thesis. I extend my deep appreciation to Dr. advanced knowledge of dynamics and vibrations, which was very helpful...

.....................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................3 List of figures ............................................................................................6 Introduction ........................................................................

........................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION ........................................................................ 1 Thesis Organization ..................................................................................................... 2 Literature Cited .........................

i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my master thesis advisors for their support and reviews. I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Gunter Saake for his support and confidence in me and allowing me to work on master thesis in his group. I would like to thank Marko Rosenmüller, Martin Kuhlemann and Norbert Siegmund for their helpful reviews and suggestions. Marko and Martin reviewed this thesis fo...

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............................................................................................................................. iii Table of contents................................................................................................................. v List of figures and tables.................................................................................................. viii Ackn...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x Chapter 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 The need for parallelism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Types of parallel architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.3 An alternative to message-passing languages . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4 Automatic data...