Drawing on a wide range of academic literature and one company case study (Kozhya), the purpose of this research is to bring the attention of the German cosmetic luxury companies into the Colombian market. This study builds on an extensive review of academic literature, primary empirical research, and secondary research through the consultation of official and updated sources. The outcomes present the market entry strategies to penetrate the Colombian cosmetic luxury market in the current context, answering to the contemporary problematics of the economic and cultural market entry barriers. Based on potential customers and experts’ interviews, these strategies are formulated from the customer’s point of view. This study extends luxury cosmetic studies to define an under-investigated potential market in Colombia, in the frame of the luxury cosmetic/anti-aging company, and the components that makeup Kozhya’s business model. By adopting a critical perspective of the existing secondary data and the empirical collected information, this investigation offers an original contribution to the field of international business, market entry barriers and market entry strategies, and introduces avenues for generalization and future research.

Placemaking and community engagement are ongoing concerns for the development of healthier and more inclusive cities. People move to cities looking for financial, social and political stability and by the year 2050, it is expected that two-thirds of the human population will be living in a city, spaces which represent beyond their physical infrastructures a multilayered complexity of human relations and interactions. This work aims to test the disruption possibilities of design, written language, and storytelling as tools to make evident the active role of individuals in the construction and development of their physical space. The objective of this project is to test design as a medium of positive activism to spark community creation. Through different experiments, I connect design thinking methods with the fields of storytelling and activism, in order to develop community-making processes. The concept of -The City- is approached from a scale perspective, from house, to neighbour, to district, to city, and points out the lack of interaction and communication among neighbours as one of the elements responsible of the insular lifestyle mode of today’s western societies. An issue which is playing a harmful effect in human health and politics. For the practical phase of the research, I chose a student accommodation building in the district of Deutz in the city of Cologne. A building initially characterized by the lack of care among its inhabitants but at the same time with the potential to become a hub for multicultural exchange. Concepts from psychology, architecture, storytelling, and language are intertwined through the research with the aim of making unknown individuals feel part of a group and envision a physical environment together. The same way as a narration the work is divided into three main phases: Reading cities, Writing cities and Re-reading cities. Through them, concepts of belonging and co-creation, are linked with the possibilities of design as a way of activism to become a tool to gradually change the perceptions of physical space and to build upon the idea of what is needed to design and who designs.

In season sensing of crop architectonics is important for identifying and preventing potential stresses as well as optimizing crop management logistics. Measurements of chlorophyll content, size, density, and/or temperature of the canopy have been used as primary in situ diagnostic tools. The goal of this study was to develop a prototype sensor system that would integrate laser proximity measurements as the basis for a low-cost instrumented system for green vegetable production. The system involves circular scanning of crop canopies to identify fresh biomass under different soil and management conditions. The first experiment was conducted in a greenhouse with lettuce and kale. Biomass was estimated from the sensor system's measurements resulting in R2 values between 0.74 and 0.93, percentage error between 25% and 55%, and root mean squared error (RMSE) between 0.295 ln(g) and 0.441 ln(g). These values include both dry and fresh biomass for lettuce and kale. The second experiment in a spinach field on a commercial farm produced similar results. Two approaches for processing the laser-based height profiles are discussed: regression of profile-representative features and inference of a canopy density function. Depending on the processing method, the R2 was either 0.78 or 0.94, and the RMSE was 4.18 t/ha and 2.16 t/ha for each case. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was around 30% for both methods. The second experiment featured improved hardware in terms of ease of operation. Proper use of this technology will allow farm managers to improve harvest plans and shipment schedules under variable plant growth dynamics. Resumen: La detección de la arquitectura de cultivos en temporada es importante para identificar y prevenir posibles estreses, así como para optimizar la logística de administración de cultivos. Mediciones del contenido de clorofila, del tamaño, de la densidad y/o de la temperatura del dosel de las plantas han sido usadas in situ como herramientas diagnósticas primarias. El objetivo de este estudio fue desarrollar el prototipo de un sistema de sensores que integrara mediciones de proximidad a partir de láser como base para un sistema de instrumentación de bajo costo para la producción de vegetales verdes. El sistema involucra un escaneo circular del dosel de los cultivos para identificar la biomasa fresca bajo diferentes condiciones de manejo y de suelo. Un primer experimento se llevó a cabo en un invernadero con lechuga y col rizada. La biomasa fue estimada a partir de las mediciones del sistema de sensores resultando en valores de R2 entre 0.74 y 0.93, porcentajes de error entre 25% y 55%, y un error cuadrático medio (RMSE) entre 0.295 ln(g) y 0.441 ln(g). Estos valores incluyen biomasa tanto fresca como seca para lechuga y col rizada. El segundo experimento en un campo de espinaca de una granja comercial produjo resultados semejantes. Se discuten dos métodos para procesar los perfiles de altura basados en láser: regresión de características representativas del perfil e inferencia de la función de densidad del dosel. Dependiendo del método de procesamiento, R2 fue 0.78 o 0.94 y RMSE fue 4.18 t/ha o 2.16 t/ha respectivamente. El error porcentual absoluto medio (MAPE) fue alrededor de 30% para ambos casos. El segundo experimento destacó mejoras en el equipo en términos de facilidad de operación. Un uso apropiado de esta tecnología permitirá a los gerentes de granja mejorar sus planes de cosecha y programación de transporte de sus mercancías bajo dinámicas variables de crecimiento de plantas.

This paper concentrates specifically on the reintegration process of female ex-combatants and their role as peacebuilders in the aftermath of war. By privileging the personal experience of two female ex-combatants of guerrilla groups in Colombia, this thesis aims to explorer what are the main obstacles faced by these women in their process of reintegration into civilian life and how to strengthen the role of female ex-combatants as peacebuilders. I argue that DDR processes and reintegration programs are only one dimension of post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation. Notwithstanding, the real challenge is to demilitarize all aspects of social life including the people’s mind, the community, and the state with its hegemonic notions of security. Likewise, a reintegration process designed and implemented from a gender-sensitive approach can be an example of a practical and emancipatory project that brings more equitable relations between men and women in the aftermath of the war. Therefore, women's role as peacebuilders can be strengthened through a political reintegration process that emphasizes their transformative potential as influential citizens in the decision-making processes of their community in terms of reconciliation and national rehabilitation.

Knowledge about forests undergoing restoration across the world is becoming increasingly essential due to the benefits of restoring forest for ecosystem functions related to water, such as water infiltration. Although there is a growing literature regarding the biodiversity and some ecosystem functions in forest undergoing restoration, soil responses in these forests remain virtually unknown. Moreover, few works have analyzed the effects on soil of different restoration approaches (e.g., planting of native species and natural regeneration). In this context, the main objective of this work was to evaluate and gain a better understanding of the effects of different forest restoration methodologies on the recovery of soil physical and hydraulic properties, more specifically on water infiltration. In the first part of this study (Chapter 2) was conducted a systematic review of scientific literature, reporting and discussing the infiltration measures in tropical forests undergoing restoration by tree planting. The results of this review indicated that infiltration was likely to increase after tree planting; that infiltration recovery was faster when agriculture was the prior land use; that clayey soils (>30% clay) tended to exhibit greater increases in infiltration after tree planting; and that restored forests after 10 years evidenced more similar infiltration values with the pre-disturbance soil conditions (e.g., natural reference forest). The following two parts of the thesis (Chapter 3 and 4) were based on a restoration program using a high-diversity mix of native plantings in the county of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. In the Chapter 3 was investigated the effect of forest restoration on saturated soil hydraulic conductivity (Ks), verifying the Ks recovery to the pre-disturbance soil conditions. We sampled field Ks under three land-cover types: (i) a pasture; (ii) a restored forest of 9 years of age; and (iii) a remnant forest patch. Our results showed that Ks recovery differ markedly among the forests undergoing restoration; and that soil attributes and Ks recovery are influenced by the duration and intensity of land use prior to forest restoration. In the Chapter 4 we assessed the effects of land use history on the recovery of Ks, soil and vegetation attributes, comparing active vs. passive restoration (e.g., assisted restoration). In these chapters we conclude that forest restoration actions may improve soil physical and hydraulic properties, but in some cases a complete recovery to reference levels can be difficult, especially when land use was more intense prior to forest restoration actions. It is very important to understand soil recovery in forests undergoing restoration on different climate, forest and soil types. Thereby, in future research long-term studies are essential, which should focus in the water movement through the soil profile and aiming to understand how the forest restoration can recover the infiltration process, also including landscape scale (e.g., watershed).

This research is focused on the Colombian Government’s flagship post-conflict and statebuilding policy from 2009 to 2015, known as the “Consolidation Policy”. The Government’s policy aimed to transform the governance in post-conflict regions from a social order functional to the armed conflict to such a social order that would promote good governance and inclusive governmental institutions. The analysis sheds light on the limitations and achievements of the policy on the control of corruption and examines the extent to which it shaped the governance order of post-conflict regions in the short term using a mixed methods approach including a differences-in-differences estimation and semi-structured interviews. The analysis is based in the Equilibrium Theory of Control of Corruption, which identifies policy-actionable variables that promote good governance and the control of corruption. This theory was operationalized in the context of post-conflict Colombia. This research determined the changes produced by the Government policy on the control of corruption by comparing control and intervention municipalities. The analysis revealed a mixed effect on the control of corruption where the intervention occurred. The results showed that the Consolidation Policy was associated with more civil society collective actions, at least in a group of municipalities, and an increase in local government accountability to citizens. On the contrary, there seems to be no association of the policy with increments in local government procurement transparency, or disciplinary sanctions to local civil servants by the Office of the Inspector General, one of the state control agencies. The research identifies the main issues that limited the Consolidation Policy’s mixed effect on the control of corruption. First, instead of a quick-impact approach, this research recommends a gradualist, long-term approach that combines insecurity reduction and empowering citizen group’s to keep corruption in check. Second, given the limitations of the Colombian State to regulate governance in conflict affected areas, civil society should be a central partner in the initiatives of good governance promotion.

An accurate understanding of the environment is key for a robot in order to execute tasks safe and efficiently. In the field of perception, after the introduction of deep learning, computer vision tasks have made big leaps, surpassing even the human inference capability. As a trade-off, big amounts of annotated data were required to train such algorithms. On its own, the collection of annotated dataset is a highly time consuming activity prone to human errors, setting a limit to the maximum achievable performance. In this sense, annotations (quality) and samples (quantity) bound the optimization of perception algorithms. One extra challenge encountered when training object detectors for robotics applications is that the sensor setup can be multi-modal, and vary significantly between robots. This work explores how to generate and use synthetic RGB-D training data from a near photo-realistic game engine to train modality-specific person detectors, and perform ablation studies on a challenging, real-world dataset recorded using a reference RGB-D sensor in different intralogistics environments. A virtual RGB-D camera was implemented, leveraging the underlying deferred rendering architecture. Multiple environments were tailored, exploring various data augmentation techniques and enabling the comparison between different types of synthetic data. Detection layers of a pre-trained object detector network have been trained from scratch for the RGB and depth modality, with the latter being transformed by applying a Jet-colormap. Compared to a pre-trained network, a domain gap of 5 mPA points was still present for RGB images. Meanwhile with synthetic (15k) and real (1.5k) depth images, it was already possible to train robust human detectors. Comparing simulation features against data preparation, filtering annotations had a major impact on performance than adopting an explicit time-of-flight sensor model.

A significant increase of 50.5 percent in the national production of cocoa was registered between 2011 and 2015 in Colombia. Nevertheless, 5,890 tons were imported in 2015 to supply domestic demand. Unlike other crops, the production of cocoa has made a significant contribution to the income of approximately 38,000 families of which 90 percent are small farm-producers with very little capital. Facilitating credit for investment is one of the main strategies of the national government to increase cocoa productivity. Correspondingly, the impact of the credit for investment on the cocoa agricultural productivity and if those investments have a spillover effect is studied in 584 municipalities in Colombia. I use a yearly municipal agricultural assessment combined with municipality socioeconomic variables and georeferenced data from 2007 to 2017 to measure this impact and spatial interactions, based on a fixed effect and a spatial autoregressive model - SAR. Overall, the results suggest a positive relationship of credit for investment on agricultural productivity. Similarly, I found positive and significant agricultural productivity spillover. My results suggest that access to credit for investment is fundamental in cocoa agricultural productivity but the impact is larger when spatial interactions are accounted for, which provides a rationale for the national government to increase the offer of credit for investment for the development of a regional economic agglomeration.

Following the end of a long-lasting armed conflict, Colombia created a peace and citizenship education course called Cátedra de la Paz, looking to promote a culture of peace in all schools in the country. However, teachers’ views about, practices in and responses to challenges of implementing the course remain unknown, as well as how they integrate data into their teaching practices. This study is focused on secondary school teachers’ understanding of Cátedra de la Paz, their instructional approaches and their views of the role of data in the course. To achieve this, 45 teachers participated in an online survey, from which 10 were selected for an interview. Findings show that teachers have complex views of the course, face several challenges to implement it and have a limited vision of data integration. These results highlight the need to provide context-oriented support that consider teachers way of understanding the course.

Nowadays, the alert about global warming has concerned the society and has raised the interest for everyone to seek different solutions to mitigate and stop the deterioration of the world. Thus, this thesis focuses on one of the solutions that has been reached by environmental and management researchers, which is the transition from non-renewable to renewable energy in order to alleviate the global warming. The transition from fossil fuels utilization to its substitute, the renewable energy is imminent. The concerns are on how fast this transition could be, since the depletion of natural resources, in particular fossil oil, is becoming a fact. Then, such a change necessarily implies to overcome the hurdles that slow it down as the society needs a source of energy to continue its pattern of life, and the fossil fuels will truly reach its depletion point. Finally, from a supply chain management perspective this thesis aims at reviewing the literature that provides meaningful insights to boost the sector.