Amsterdam quays under pressure: Modelling and testing of historic canal walls

Amsterdam faces the challenge of maintaining a domain of 200 km historic quay walls, which is a vital part of the city’s historical landscape. Many quays are currently in poor condition and require renovation or replacement in the near future, significantly impacting the city. The quay walls can be up to 300 years old and their structure...

User Modeling for Privacy-preserving Explanations in Group Recommendations

My thesis investigates what makes good explanations for group recommendations, considering the privacy concerns of group members. Let’s give an example. Have you ever been to lunch with other colleagues on a business trip? Do you recall how long it took you to pick a restaurant? In these situations, recommender systems could help people decide,...

The Structure of Hecke Operator Algebras

This dissertation is concerned with the study of the structure of certain deformations of operator algebras associated with Coxeter groups. These operator algebras, called Hecke C*-algebras and Hecke-von Neumann algebras, are operator algebraic completions of Iwahori-Hecke algebras. They occur as natural abstractions of certain endomorphism...

An agent-based exploration of complex heat transitions in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, a complex heat transition is taking place. Currently, the country's built environment largely relies on natural gas for heating. By 2050, the housing sector should, in principle, be free of this fuel. Changes in laws, policies, regulations, and technical solutions to achieve this goal will be challenging. Their implementation...

Cost Allocation in Integrated Community Energy Systems

With the growing concerns over energy depletion and environmental protection all over the world, more and more attention is being paid to energy transition towards renewable energy sources (RESs), energy efficiency improvement, and CO$_2$ emission reduction. Integrated community energy systems (ICESs) emerge in the development of local energy...

Collecting lessons learned: How project-based organizations in the oil and gas industry learn from their projects

Project-based organizations collect lessons learned in order to improve the performance of projects. They aim to repeat successes by using positive lessons learned, and to avoid repeating negative experiences by using negative lessons learned. Cooke-Davies (2002) claimed that the ability to learn from past projects for future projects is a key...

Selective mobility, segregation and neighbourhood effects

Despite a large body of research on neighbourhood effects, there are no clear conclusions how much, if any, independent effect the neighbourhood has on its residents. This is largely due to selection effects. It is therefore crucial to gain more insight in selective residential mobility and neighbourhood choice. A better understanding of...

Interfacial bonding mechanisms of carboxylic coatings on pretreated zinc surfaces

The aim of this Ph.D. work is to investigate the adhesion and de-adhesion of organic coatings on galvanized steel substrate. Chapter 1 introduces the project aim and research outline. Chapter 2 investigates Zn oxide semiconductor properties as the major compound formed on galvanized steel. The results showed a clear effect of surface treatment...

The Terra Incognita of sampling: Grouping and segregation

Theoretical foundations for collaboration engineering

Collaboration is often presented as the solution to numerous problems in business and society. However, collaboration is challenging, and collaboration support is not an off-the-shelf-product. This research offers theoretical foundations for Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy high value...

Constructing snake-in-the-box codes and families of such codes covering the hypercube

A snake-in-the-box code (or snake) is a list of binary words of length n such that each word differs from its successor in the list in precisely one bit position. Moreover, any two words in the list differ in at least two positions, unless they are neighbours in the list. The list is considered to be a cyclic list which implies that the \verb+'...

Coordinating distributed work: Exploring situated coordination with gaming-simulation

Organizational work has become more and more distributed nowadays. Information and communication technologies (ICT) provide opportunities to improve coordination of distributed work, but in practice many organizations struggle with integrating new organizational structures, new work practices and ICT. In this dissertation we present a design...

Adoption and Diffusion of Group Support Systems in Tanzania

SCAFFOLD Structuring communicaton in the architectural forum for one-line design

Barier island coasts and relative sea level rise: Preservation potential, facies architecture and sequence analysis