This thesis offers an account of how the Colombian Army recovered from a series of humiliating defeats inflicted upon it by illegal armed groups led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the 1990s. It explains how a combination of internally generated, bottom-up and top-down organizational innovations, U.S. security assistance, and dynamic management from President Alvaro Uribe and a civilianized Ministry of Defense was able to restore Colombian Army morale, and to restructure and reorganize the military into an offensive force able to gain battlefield dominance and restore government authority over a greater part of the national territory.

Purpose: To denaturalize the concept of corporate values as a necessary managerial practice to engineer culture in organizations and to explore how its enactment influences power - resistance interplays and the workplace construction of selves. Method: We engaged in Critical Management Studies (CMS), using an interpretative approach to our empirical material. Theoretical framework: The study is based on the concepts of organizational control, corporate values enactment, workplace resistance and construction of selves. Empirical Foundation: The empirical data was gathered based on a triangulation method by employing qualitative interviews, analysis of corporate material and fieldwork observation in Asian Monetary Fund, an Indonesian financial institution headquartered in Jakarta. Conclusion: We found that corporate values is a fragmented, fluid and fragile concept which can be used by employees to reproduce, rationalize and transform power relations in the organization and this process to resist “through” rather than “against” corporate values affects the construction of selves at work; producing individuals who simultaneously identify and dis-identify to the organization.

In the Healthcare field, Business Intelligence and Data Mining techniques have been proven efficient mainly in the fields of contagious diseases and hospital productivity, however their usage is today still very limited, specially in specific fields like chronic disease management. This paper presents a methodology to develop Data Mining and Business Intelligence based on remote chronic patient management databases. This document also introduces a technical methodology to build a conceptual Data Model for Data Mining based on HL7-v3, with the objective of analyzing patient behavior, detecting triggers for future patient crisis, predicting patient behavior and contribute to improve management plans, resource usage optimization and higher Returns on Investment. Distinciones: Graduado como mejor estudiante de la promoción.

The governance perspective provides a methodical approach to identify key actors and trends affecting public authority in specific contexts. This paper looks at private mining companies, which have become a critical factor to understand development paths followed by resource-rich districts in developing countries. It is argued private mining companies need to master the concept of governance and consequently work more decidedly with their stakeholders in recipient communities. Failing in doing so corrodes local democratic institutions and is detrimental for businesses´ profitability. The insights presented in this paper suggest that the most effective way to build up well-functioning local governance environments is by means of facilitating processes that bring different groups into constructive engagement, dialogue and decision making.

Generally studies about identity and consumption have assumed that individuals are immersed in a context of abundance, in which their possibilities to fulfil their needs and desires to purposefully construct a consumption lifestyle are granted. Within this context, studies from the Consumer Culture Theory perspective have described how individuals navigate consumer culture by developing enduring relationships with possessions that help them to build identities and a sense of self. However, this is not always possible during every individual’s life. Certain situational factors not only provoke the individual’s loss of what they have already built, but also lead them to a restricted consumption context. The present study focuses on forced and uncertain changing events, those whose severity and/or rapid change disrupts an individual’s entire life. Through a phenomenological approach of the homeless experience, this study attempts to understand individuals’ transition into a restricted consumption context. The empirical data obtained from a twenty two month ethnographic study evidences that experiencing homelessness, individuals’ loss of possessions and the perceived uncertainty that characterizes life on the streets, trigger not only a self-transformation process, but also alter their relationship with the material world. The findings are contrasted with the current literature extending previous work about transition and consumption by: a) Proposing a new transformational routine to describe the forced self-transformations and how consumption (or the lack of it) becomes an element that influences the deconstruction and construction of a new self. b) Identifying how in a restricted consumption context, individuals develop a different relationship with the material world, and how this changes their modes of consumption.

Current research on automated vehicles focuses mainly on the drivers of automated vehicles, on its potential to improve the efficiency of traffic operations, safety, congestion and societal benefits, public’s acceptance of automated vehicles as a transport system and the willingness to buy automated vehicles. Nevertheless, there is a research gap in an equally important topic of research; the interactions of the automated vehicles with Vulnerable Road Users (VRU), i.e., cyclists and pedestrians. The WEpods (shuttle buses) are the first automated pods on public roads amidst other traffic, for an extended period of time in the province of Gelderland, in the Netherlands. The main research question revolves around the safety perception of vulnerable road users (VRUs) when interacting with automated vehicles, specifically at unsignalised intersections, and their crossing behaviour in comparison with traditional motor vehicles. The data on road users’ perception was gathered through face-to-face interviews (𝑁=22), a focus group (𝑁=8), and an online survey (𝑁=198). The results of this research showed that in terms of perceived safety, in general, VRUs (pedestrians and cyclists) feel significantly safer when sharing the road with the WEpods (max. speed of 15 𝑘𝑚/ℎ) compared to traditional motor vehicles (max. speed of 30 𝑘𝑚/ℎ). However, cyclists reported feeling less safe when interacting at unsignalised intersections with the automated vehicles, while there was not significant effect on pedestrians. Similarly, pedestrians more often opted for crossing facilities in the presence of the WEpods than in the presence of traditional motor vehicles (this can be interpreted as the result of perhaps feeling less safe), while no significant difference was reported for cyclists. Some of the reasons that could explain the trust in the WEpods are its low operational speed and the trust of most (81.1%) of the VRUs in the automated technology. This makes them expect the WEpods will stop in all possible instances, even when other traffic participants violate traffic rules. Surprisingly, a significant proportion (63.2%) of the participants was not aware of the presence of the steward on board of the WEpods. On the other hand, variables such as the awareness of the steward and having interacted with the WEpods increased the perceived safety amongst VRUs. Moreover, eye contact and gestures use as part of the actual interaction with human drivers of traditional motor vehicles particularly when crossing, was reported to be of importance by the respondents and has also been previously reported in the literature. The VRUs who said that they rely on cues given by drivers, more often indicated a preference to cross at dedicated facilities in the presence of the WEpods than those who stated not to depend on this type of communication. In order to substitute this lack of “real” interaction, information about the WEpods’ operations appeared to be desired by most of the participants in the form of visual information or a mix of auditory and visual. Finally, it was found that individual characteristics of the VRUs, such as their gender and other demographic variables could also have an impact on their perceived safety of VRUs interacting with the WEpods. The findings of the current research appear to point at a prudent attitude of cyclists and pedestrians in their interaction with automated vehicles. Nevertheless, this conservative mindset could be balanced by informing other road users about both, the features (e.g., the presence of a steward on board) and the limitations (e.g., the technology unable to respond to unexpected conditions) of the WEpods. It is considered that this information, along with a suitable communication of intentions of the vehicle to its surroundings are adequate tools to achieve a safe interaction between VRUs and automated vehicles.

Face recognition is a specific case of object recognition. It has received special attention in the recent years due to a great variety of applications such as robot-human interaction, control by gesture, surveillance, security, and people tracking. The idea of face recognition is to give a computer system the ability of finding and recognizing human faces fast and precisely in images or videos. Face recognition aspires to work similar to human perception. Humans identify a big number of known faces, even after years of separation, or under extreme occlusion conditions, e.g. just by looking at a small part of a face. It is a complex task since faces can have different colors, poses, expressions, and sizes or they can be affected by illumination variations or occlusion conditions. Today, there are different methods of face recognition: feature-based approaches (low-level analysis, feature analysis, active shape models) that make explicit use of facial-features such as skin color, facial landmarks or face geometry, and image-based approaches (linear subspace models, neural networks, statistical approaches). The recent increase in the volume of data and computational resources has led to the need for fast and scalable recognition techniques. These techniques should be robust to non-rigid deformations, clutter, occlusion and illumination variations, but, at the same time, they must be sensitive to variations among faces from different persons. For these reasons, neural networks have become a surge of interest Initially, shallow regular neural networks could be used for small image sizes, but they would not scale to deeper networks since a huge amount of parameters would be necessary to be learnt, which can easily cause overfitting. As a result, Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were proposed. In a CNN, neurons in a layer are connected to small regions of previous layers, which is different to regular neural networks, where all neurons are connected in a full manner. Besides, CNNs make correct assumptions about the nature of the images, for example locality of pixel dependencies \cite{ImageNet}. In general, CNNs have fewer connections and parameters, they are easier to train, and they present similar or better performance than the regular neural networks \cite{ImageNet}. As an extension of the CNNs, deep CNNs were introduced by Imagenet authors because a big number of high-resolution images and powerful GPUs are now available. The authors increased the number of convolutional layers, and they use large receptive fields in the first convolutional layer. As a result, overfitting, which is inherent to the large size of the model, is avoided and effective results are achieved. In addition, the authors of the VGGnet continued adding convolutional layers, but they keep the size of the receptive fields very small (3x3 convolutions) with a stride of 1, throughout the whole network, which decreases the amount of parameters.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation investigates borderscaping processes faced by irregular migrants and their living conditions in Madrid. It aims to study how borders/social boundaries are constructed in the city as irregular migrants move around living their lives -and how they deal to work, to live, to access to healthcare, etc. in a context of borderscapes that are present in the everyday life. This paper also attempts to determine how irregular migrants navigate the city and find ways to contest those borders. Through the case study of irregular migrants, this research examines their social interactions, their experiences with borderscapes surrounding them in different scenarios, and the tactics they implement to make use of the public space. In doing so, it sheds light on the dynamics which link their motivations and ways of getting around in a context of invisible borders. This paper highlights the practices that irregular migrants use to overcome borderscapes in an urban context of precariousness while performing different tactics trying to find a room for maneuver for negotiating their place in the city. This study aims to contribute to broadening the literature on the relation between irregular migration and its impact on multi-ethnic cities. Therefore, the research provides insights to the scholarships of borderscapes, a theoretical approach to the concept of borders as analytical entities that follow the migrant, particularly the one in an administrative irregular situation.

After more than 50 years of internal armed conflict, the peace agreement between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- People’s Army (FARC-EP) raises both hope and concern. There are several opportunities for people, derived from wealth and land redistribution. However, the environmental sustainability of the mechanisms to implement the agreements represent the biggest challenges facing the future. Constructing future scenarios with indigenous peoples living in Forest Reserves and external agents working in La Pedrera, Amazonas Department, is a good case example to define what kind of futures they can envision. For this research project, I designed and served as facilitator during six scenario construction exercises, with 40 Forest Reserve dwellers. Additionally, I conducted six semi-structured formal interviews with relevant actors. The process of synthesising participants’ views, the current state of the territory, and perceived future opportunities and threats, lead me to a baseline and three future scenarios: Utopian, Business as Usual, and Dystopian. Furthermore, I used the capabilities approach, and Political Ecology, to understand the kinds of conflicts present in the area, to explore real possibilities of peace for the territory, and to expand the roles participants described as more conducive to achieve desirable futures.

A review of the main issues that affect the livelihoods of non timber forest products (NTFP) focusing on the commercialisation issues of gatherers/producers and traders, was made for Colombia. It aimed to investigate broadly which are some of the cultural, economic, social, environmental, marketing and legislative issues that affect the outcomes for NTFP livelihoods. The sustainable rural livelihood framework was used to understand the main issues affecting NTFP livelihoods and to propose alternatives to improve the constraints found in NTFP development and commercialisation. The study identify the great importance of NTFP local and regional markets for rural development, and some data was given for international markets in order to understand the magnitude of the commerce and the possibilities that might arise for some promissory products. The review of some institutional and organisation incentives influencing NTFP production and commercialisation was undertaken by reviewing the forestry policies and some of its instruments. The study used secondary data of reports made mainly in Latin-America. The report concludes that the policies and norms that influence NTFP, such as the forestry policy and plans do not consider the importance of NTFP for social and environmental objectives. For NTFP research, the analysis of the commercialisation process is strongly co-related to social networks, ecology, cultural taboos, norms for management of NTFP and effectiveness of support organisations. NTFP livelihoods can be seriously affected by government organisations and NGO’s if they are treated as traditional commodities because of the fragility and uniqueness of their ecology, economy and social structures. The report gives some recommendations to government agencies and researchers that wish to mend the constraints found for NTFP successful development.