Time management | EPFL Graph Search

Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities - especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. It involves of various demands upon a person relating to work, social life, family, hobbies, personal interests, and commitments with the finite nature of time. Using time effectively gives the person "choice" on spending or managing activities at their own time and expediency. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects, and goals complying with a due date. Initially, time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually, the term broadened to include personal activities as well. A time management system is a designed combination of processes, tools, techniques, and methods. Time management is usually a necessity in any project management as it determines the project completion time and scop

Digital transformation, business models and the postal industry

Nandkumar Harshan Kollara

For many decades, the postal industry offered postal services and in parallel, had a monopoly over the national postal markets. Recently, the postal industry endured a phase where their national postal markets were subjected to liberalisation by the respective nations. This was due to various reasons such as inefficiencies of the postal services, ambiguous monopoly legislations, mounting pressure from competitors, and changing nature of customer demands. The liberalisation of the European Union postal markets is an example of a liberalisation that was based on the unique requirement of harmonising the postal services across the whole European Union. Other nations outside the European Union liberalised their postal markets either completely or partially based on their own unique requirements. After the liberalisation phase, the postal industry faced a significant challenge from digital services. Digital services were responsible for the constant declines in profitable letter service volumes. In response, the postal industry started developing digital postal services. However, therein lies the problem. The postal industry is unaware of the steps needed to develop digital postal services and has not had a great deal of financial success in this area. I address this problem by referring to âbusiness models. Business models have been a recent area of interest in management literature and, as such, offer an innovative perspective on the postal industry development activities in digital postal services. The main goal of my dissertation is to provide recommendations for the postal industrys development of digital postal services via business models. The four sub-goals of the dissertation are as follows: determine the business model framework, determine the different types of business models for digital postal services using the business model framework, determine the antecedents to these business models, and determine the performance effects of these business models on the postal industry. The targeted research methodology involves multiple exploratory case studies and explanatory survey studies on the digital service activities of the postal operators. I initially developed a business model framework from the literature review. The business model framework has four components that help identify business models within firms: value proposition, resources, network and finance. Subsequently, I conducted case studies on the digital postal services activities of six postal operators, in order to investigate the different types of business models for digital postal services. I identified four types of business models for digital postal services based on my developed business model framework: traditional add-ons, digital add-ons, hybrid ecosystem and digital ecosystem. I then conducted survey studies with postal operators in a number of countries, in order to investigate the antecedents of the business models described above, as well as the performance effects of these business models on the postal industry. The findings suggest that dynamic capabilities have a statistically significant impact on the business models that are in synergy with the postal operators physical postal services. In addition, the business models that are in synergy with the postal operators physical postal services have a statistically significant impact on firm performance.

EPFL2017

Interaction Mirrors for Face-to-Face Meetings

Flaviu Roman

To be successful, a group requires an appropriate quality of coordination among its members. Even with the advent of remote communication, face-to-face meetings remain the context that offers the best interaction support to an effective collaboration. However, face-to-face meetings seem to suffer from recurring shortcomings which are yet to be alleviated. One of them is the omniscience and persistence of undetected gaps between the actual and the desired (or intended) state of the meeting. The evolution of technology has spawned the creation and availability of large sets of data, giving birth to what we call today analytics, the science of discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in this data. This thesis aims to explore the potential of technology to process meeting-related data and help reveal these gaps to the participants. We also conduct an analysis of the actions that the participants perform, as an effect of becoming aware of such gaps, and we reflect on their possible role in increasing the effectiveness of the meeting. Our technologies collect interaction data in real-time during face-to-face meetings, perform analytics to transform this raw data into explicit representations, and then use visualizations to communicate knowledge about the interaction back to the participants. This thesis expands the concept of Group Mirrors, to define the concept of Interaction Mirrors, which are tools that perform this instant transformation of meeting data into explicit repre- sentations, and return this knowledge back to the group during the meeting. We present the implementation of three types of Interaction Mirrors that tackle aspects of interaction related to Participation, Time management, and Mutual Knowledge. They vary with respect to data collection, being either implicit (continuous) or explicit (discrete), and to their presentation to the group (continuous or discrete). We perform a total of 7 experiments, ranging from basic usability observations, to year-long, longitudinal studies. Conducted in real-world situations, most of these studies are set up in the field, in various organizations, corporations and institutions. We show that each type of interaction mirror has an influence on the group, and discuss the capacity of this influence to improve the outcomes of the collaboration.

EPFL2013

Preventing Use-After-Free Attacks with Fast Forward Allocation

Sanidhya Kashyap, Jungwon Lim

Memory-unsafe languages are widely used to implement critical systems like kernels and browsers, leading to thousands of memory safety issues every year. A use-after-free bug is a temporal memory error where the program accidentally visits a freed memory location. Recent studies show that use-after-free is one of the most exploited memory vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, previous efforts to mitigate use-after-free bugs are not widely deployed in real-world programs due to either inadequate accuracy or high performance overhead. In this paper, we propose to resurrect the idea of one-time allocation (OTA) and provide a practical implementation with efficient execution and moderate memory overhead. With one-time allocation, the memory manager always returns a distinct memory address for each request. Since memory locations are not reused, attackers cannot reclaim freed objects, and thus cannot exploit use-after-free bugs. We utilize two techniques to render OTA practical: batch page management and the fusion of bump-pointer and fixed-size bins memory allocation styles. Batch page management helps reduce the number of system calls which negatively impact performance, while blending the two allocation methods mitigates the memory overhead and fragmentation issues. We implemented a prototype, called FFmalloc, to demonstrate our techniques. We evaluated FFmalloc on widely used benchmarks and real-world large programs. FFmalloc successfully blocked all tested use-after-free attacks while introducing moderate overhead. The results show that OTA can be a strong and practical solution to thwart use-after-free threats.

USENIX ASSOC2021