Intern kriskommunikation syftar till kommunikation som sker inom en verksamhet i samband med en kris. Utan förberedelser för en välfungerande intern kriskommunikation, ökar risken för att krisen resulterar i stora konsekvenser för både verksamheten och dess anställda. Syftet med studien är att undersöka anställdas upplevelse av den interna kriskommunikationen under covid-19-pandemin, samt hur upplevelsen relateras till eventuella psykologiska kontraktsbrott. 12 semistrukturerade intervjuer med undersköterskor och vårdbiträden inom äldreomsorgen utfördes. Resultatet om informanternas upplevelse av den interna kriskommunikationen kan sammanfattas i tre teman; Motstånd eller samförstånd, Värdelös eller värdefull samt Reaktiv eller proaktiv. Beroende på hur den interna kriskommunikationen upplevts av den anställde, kan relationen till psykologiska kontraktsbrott sammanfattas i de två teman Bortglömd eller uppskattad samt Individ eller verksamhet. Resultaten diskuteras i relation till tidigare forskning om intern kriskommunikation och psykologiska kontraktsbrott, och bidrar med ny kunskap inom området.

Contributors from the mid 20th century up to now have developed and refined virtual assistants, taking the technology from a set of rules to assistants driven by Artificial Intelligence. Today, virtual assistants can provide value in organisation and support a sustainable society by conducting basic and repetitive tasks, and help reduce inequalities caused by biased advisors on sensitive topics. Despite its prosperity, current research somewhat lack focus on the evaluation of virtual assistants in industrial applications. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate virtual assistants from a technical, economical and organisational perspective, in order to understand their performance and value in an industrial environment. This has been done in collaboration with IBM and a client company which prefers to remain anonymous in this report. In this company, two IBM Watson Assistants are under development; one for the IT Service Desk, and one for the Ethics & Compliance department. To cover all aspects of the virtual assistants’ performance, quantitative and qualitative methods were used by conducting user testings and surveys. In this process, discussions have been conducted with IBM experts and employees of the firm for which the practical implementation has been studied, to gain a general and specific understanding from different perspectives. From this paper, the following can be concluded. First, technological performance can be described using quantitative metrics such as coverage, confidence, precision and helpfulness, and should be complemented using qualitative measures such as user satisfaction and perceived user understanding. Second, specific technological performance is relative and the technical limitations as well as it’s maturity should be used as a complement to the evaluation of the assistants. Third, identified organisational benefits include: • reduced time-to-resolution, • reduced handling time, • all-hour-support, • scalability and • user understanding Conclusions specific for the use cases show that an assistant implemented in a narrower use case, that is the Ethics & Compliance assistant, easier can be implemented and performs relatively well also in less developed environments. A broader use case, such as the IT assistant, requires more effort to perform at a high level but may be even more beneficial than in the narrow use case once sufficiently refined. / Från mitten av 1900-talet har virtuella assistenter utvecklats och förfinats där teknologin gått från en mängd regler till assistenter drivna av artificiell intelligens. Idag kan virtuella assistenter tillföra värde till organisationer och bidra till ett hållbart samhälle bland annat genom att utföra enkla och återkommande uppgifter samt minska ojämlikheter orsakad av partiska rådgivare i känsliga frågor. Trots framgången har nuvarande forskning inte fokuserat på evalueringen av virtuella assistenter i industriella sammanhang. Syftet med denna rapport är att utvärdera virtuella assistenter från ett tekniskt, ekonomiskt och organisationellt perspektiv för att förstå dess prestation i industriella miljöer. Arbetet har genomförts i samarbete med IBM och en av deras kunder som föredrar att förbli anonyma. I detta företag är två IBM Watson Assistant under utveckling; en för deras IT Service Desk och en för deras avdelning för Ethics & Compliance. I studien har både kvantitativa och kvalitativa metoder använts, däribland användartestning och frågeformulär, för att inkludera alla aspekter av de virtuella assistenternas prestation. I denna process har diskussioner förts med experter inom IBM samt medarbetare på företaget för vilket den praktiska implementationen studerats för att få en förståelse för både generell och specifik kunskap ur olika perspektiv. I denna rapport kan följande slutsatser dras. Ett, den tekniska prestationen kan bestämmas med kvantitativa mätetal så som täckning (coverage), säkerhet (confidence), precision och hjälpsamhet (helpfulness), och kompletteras med kvalitativa mätetal som användarnöjdhet och upplevd förståelse för användaren. Två, specifik teknisk prestation är relativ och de tekniska  begränsningarna samt mognad bör användas som komplement till utvärderingen av assistenterna. Tre, identifierade organisationsfördelar inkluderar: • reducerad time-to-resolution, • reducerad hanteringstid, • support ¨öppen dygnet runt, • skalbarhet, och • användarförståelse Slutsatserna i de specifika fallen visar att en virtuell assistent som implementeras inom ett smalare område, som en assistent för Ethics & compliance, enklare kan implementeras samt presterar relativt bra även i en mindre utvecklad miljö. Bredare områden, som en assistent för IT-support, kräver mer arbete för att prestera på en hög nivå men kan vara ännu mer värdefull än assistenten i det smala området när den blivit tillräckligt utvecklad.

The IoT-embedded smart homes have a high level of home automation and could change many aspects of the residents' daily lives, such as control, convenience, comfort, and energy-saving. The rise of voice-based virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google assistants in the past five years has brought new potentials to provide occupants with a convenient and intuitive interface to interact with smart homes through conversations. However, the one-way communications in the form of user commands to control building systems does not result in the optimal course of actions. As such, in this thesis, we proposed the concept of proactive smart home assistants and explored the occupants' perception towards smart home assistants proactively providing suggestions to adapt them into energy-saving behaviors. We also investigated the impact of occupants' personal features on their intention in taking energy-saving behaviors. A comprehensive data collection was conducted through online surveys, in which 307 valid responses with participant's personal profile information, their perceptions of smart home assistants, and their feedback to our designed messages were collected. The first manuscript compared participants' responses to traditional plain-text energy-saving suggestions and suggestions provided by smart home assistants. The nudging effect of smart home assistants was justified to be significant in affecting occupant's energy-saving behaviors. Occupant's thermal comfort range, smart home device previous experience, values and beliefs were then proved to have significant impact on their intention in taking the smart home assistant's suggestions. The second manuscript fitted 21 personal characteristics features in machine learning models (SVM, Random Forest, Logistic Regression) to predict occupant's intention and attitude towards energy-saving suggestions. The results indicated that occupant's beliefs about interests in taking actions and beliefs about energy expenses, occupant's education level, residence occupancy type, thermal comfort ranges, and smart home device experiences are important features in occupants' energy-saving behavior intention prediction. This research demonstrates the effect of proactive smart home assistants in human-building interaction as well as the impact of personal characteristic features on occupant's energy-saving behaviors, paving a path to the future development of bi-directional human-building communication. / Master of Science / With the technology development in the fields of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart homes have made it possible to help occupants conserve energy in an efficient way without sacrificing the occupants' comfort. The rise of voice-based virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google assistants accompany the proliferation of smart speaker products in the past five years has brought new potentials to provide occupants with a convenient and intuitive interface to interact with smart homes through conversations. Based on IoT, the virtual assistants are able to control a broad range of Wi-Fi connected home devices like thermostats, lighting systems, and security systems. As such, through the simple wake words (e.g., "Alexa", "Hey, Google"), occupants can easily control the home environment with their voice commands. Despite the potentials brought by these voice-based virtual assistants, it has been shown that users might not know about all the supported features and limit their interaction with smart home assistants to simple daily tasks. The one-way communications in the form of user commands to control building systems do not result in the optimal course of actions. Therefore, in this study, we have envisioned that these virtual assistants, coupled with their corresponding smart home ecosystems could act proactively as a bridge to facilitate human-building interaction and achieve goals like nudging occupants to adopt sustainable and healthy behaviors. A comprehensive data collection was conducted through online surveys, in which 307 valid responses with participant's personal profile information, their perceptions of smart home assistants, and their feedback to our designed messages were collected. The first manuscript compared participants' responses to traditional plain-text energy-saving suggestions and suggestions provided by smart home assistants. The nudging effect of smart home assistants was justified to be significant in affecting occupant's energy-saving behaviors. Occupant's thermal comfort range, smart home device previous experience, values and beliefs were then proved to have significant impact on their intention in taking the smart home assistant's suggestions. The second manuscript fitted 21 personal characteristics features in machine learning models (SVM, Random Forest, Logistic Regression) to predict occupant's intention and attitude towards energy-saving suggestions. The results indicated that occupant's beliefs about interests in taking actions and beliefs about energy expenses, occupant's education level, residence occupancy type, thermal comfort ranges, and smart home device experiences are important features in occupants' energy-saving behavior intention prediction. This research demonstrates the effect of proactive smart home assistants in human-building interaction as well as the impact of personal characteristic features on occupant's energy-saving behaviors, paving a path to the future development of bi-directional human-building communication.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Les récents développements de l’intelligence artificielle, de l’Internet des objets et des outils de reconnaissance vocale, couplés à la démocratisation des appareils électroniques de grande consommation et à la couverture Internet étendue maintenant disponible dans plusieurs pays industrialisés, ont permis la mise en marché à grande échelle d’assistants vocaux personnels, qui consistent en des logiciels installés sur différents appareils tels que des téléphones cellulaires et des haut-parleurs connectés permettant aux utilisateurs de ces appareils d’interagir avec ceux-ci au moyen de commandes vocales. L’adoption de technologies permettant aux utilisateurs d’interagir avec des objets connectés à l’Internet au moyen de leur voix connaît une forte croissance, et celles-ci constitueront bientôt l’un des modes d’interaction privilégiés pour utiliser l’Internet. Considérant la vaste nature des opérations réalisées au moyen de l’Internet en général et de l’Internet des objets en particulier, il convient de se questionner sur la manière de documenter les interactions entre un utilisateur et un assistant vocal. Le présent mémoire adopte une approche comparant le cadre juridique québécois à différents cadres juridiques avec l’objectif de procéder à une qualification technique et juridique des assistants vocaux et des éléments de preuve en découlant. Dans un second temps, ce mémoire s’intéresse à la recevabilité et à la force probante de ces éléments de preuve dans le contexte du droit civil québécois. L’auteur se penche sur les conditions de recevabilité, discutant de la qualification du document technologique et de ses attributs, nommément ainsi qu’en premier lieu son authenticité et son intégrité et de la proportionnalité. L’auteur discute des exceptions à la recevabilité, soit spécifiquement l’atteinte aux droits fondamentaux et le respect du secret professionnel. Ensuite, l’auteur discute de la force probante de la preuve technologique en avançant que la compréhension de la technologie sous-jacente est l’élément clef dans l’évaluation de la force probante de tout élément de preuve technologique. L’auteur propose que l’intelligence artificielle relève d’une nouvelle catégorie de preuve qui commande peut-être des changements à la procédure et aux principes judiciaires québécois. / Recent developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, of the Internet of Things and of voice recognition, together with the accessibility to electronic devices and wide Internet connection in the industrialized countries, led to the introduction of virtual personal assistants. This software, installed on various devices such as mobile phones and smart speakers, allow their users to interact with these devices using their voice. As these technologies allow their users to interact with connected devices through the Internet, they will most likely become the main gateway to the Internet in a near future. Considering the great variety of tasks performed with connected devices, the legal questions regarding evidence generated by and collected from their use must now be asked. First, this master’s thesis will compare the normative frameworks of both Quebec and other jurisdictions in order to define, technologically and legally, the virtual personal assistants and the evidence they generate. In a second time, this thesis will focus on the admissibility and the probative value of the evidence garnered from virtual personal assistants, in the context of Quebec’s civilist tradition. The author focuses on the conditions of admissibility and on the designation of technological documents and of their characteristics, analyzing first and foremost the criteria of authenticity and integrity and the questions of proportionality. The author discusses exceptions to admissibility, especially the violation of a fundamental right and privilege considerations. Furthermore, the author discusses the probative value of technological evidence, proposing that the understanding of the underlying technology is a key factor in the determination of the probative value of any technological evidence. Finally, the author suggests that artificial intelligence creates a new category of technological evidence that might be calling for changes in the judicial principles and procedures of the province of Quebec.

Master of Science / Department of Psychology / Richard J. Harris / The increasing number of non-native English-speaking instructors in American universities constitutes an issue of controversial debate, concerning the interaction of native English- speaking students and non-native English speaking instructors. This study investigated the effects of native or non-native speakers and audiovisual or audio-only lecture mode on English native speakers’ comprehension and memory for information from a classroom lecture, measuring both factual memory and strength of pragmatic inferences drawn from the text. College students (N = 130) were tested on their comprehension of information derived from basic entomology lectures given by both an English native speaker and an English non-native speaker GTA. Participants also evaluated both lecturers in terms of communication skills. Results indicated that participants evaluated the native speaker as having better communication skills, which is in accordance with previous studies suggesting that both the difficulty of understanding non-native-accented speech (Reddington, 2008) and the possibility of prejudice triggered when listeners hear a non-native accent (Bresnahan et al., 2002) influence listeners’ evaluations of English non-native speaker instructors. Results revealed that familiarity with the topic also played an important role in listening comprehension, especially for lectures given by the non-native speaker. Likewise, the access to visual cues (gestures and facial expressions) enhanced understanding, but it was not a pre-requisite for adequate comprehension when the topic of the lectures did not require visual information. These findings were consistent with the polystemic speech perception approach (Hawkins, 2003), in that it is not essential to recognize all words in text in order to make connections with previous knowledge and construct meaning. Furthermore, overall participants took longer to answer questions from lectures given by the non-native speaker than by the native speaker. This suggests that non-native-accented speech may require more time to answer questions related to that speech, although listeners can adapt to it quickly (Derwing, 1995). Findings from this study are important in suggesting tools for thinking about how different aspects of a lecture can contribute to the learning process. Implications for further research are addressed.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le domaine de la vérification dulogiciel. Le but de la vérification du logiciel est d'assurer qu'uneimplémentation, un programme, répond aux exigences, satisfait saspécification. Cela est particulièrement important pour le logicielcritique, tel que des systèmes de contrôle d'avions, trains oucentrales électriques, où un mauvais fonctionnement pendantl'opération aurait des conséquences catastrophiques.Les exigences du logiciel peuvent concerner la sûreté ou lefonctionnement. Les exigences de sûreté, tel que l'absence d'accès à lamémoire en dehors des bornes valides, sont souvent implicites, dans lesens que toute implémentation est censée être sûre. D'autre part, les exigences fonctionnelles spécifient ce que leprogramme est censé faire. La spécification d'un programme est souventexprimée informellement en décrivant en anglais la mission d'une partie du code source. La vérification duprogramme se fait alors habituellement par relecture manuelle,simulation et tests approfondis. Par contre, ces méthodes negarantissent pas que tous les possibles cas d'exécution sontcapturés. La preuve déductive de programme est une méthode complète pour assurerla correction du programme. Ici, un programme, ainsi que saspécification formalisée à l'aide d'un langage logique, est un objetmathématique et ses propriétés désirées sont des théorèmes logiques àprouver formellement. De cette façon, si le système logiquesous-jacent est cohérent, on peut être complètement sûr que lapropriété prouvée est valide pour le programme en question et pourn'importe quel cas d'exécution. La génération de conditions de vérification est une techniquecensée aider le programmeur à prouver les propriétés qu'il veut surson programme. Ici, un outil (VCG) analyse un programme donné avec saspécification et produit une formule mathématique, dont la validitéimplique la correction du programme vis à vis de saspécification, ce qui est particulièrement intéressant lorsque lesformules générées peuvent être prouvées automatiquement à l'aide desolveurs SMT. Cette approche, basée sur des travaux de Hoare et Dijkstra,est bien comprise et prouvée correcte en théorie. Des outils devérification déductive ont aujourd'hui acquis une maturité qui leurpermet d'être appliqués dans un contexte industriel où un hautniveau d'assurance est requis. Mais leurs implémentations doiventgérer toute sorte de fonctionnalités des langages et peuvent donc devenir très complexes et contenir des erreurs ellesmêmes - au pire des cas affirmer qu'un programme est correct alorsqu'il ne l'est pas. Il se pose donc la question du niveau de confianceaccordée à ces outils.Le but de cette thèse est de répondre à cette question. Ondéveloppe et certifie, dans le système Coq, un VCGpour des programmes C annotés avec ACSL, le langage logique pour laspécification de programmes ANSI/ISO C.Notre première contribution est la formalisation d'un VCGexécutable pour le langage intermédiaire Whycert, un langageimpératif avec boucles, exceptions et fonctions récursives, ainsi quesa preuve de correction par rapport à la sémantique opérationnelle bloquante à grand pas du langage. Une deuxièmecontribution est la formalisation du langage logique ACSL et lasémantique des annotations ACSL dans Clight de Compcert. De lacompilation de programmes C annotés vers des programmes Whycert et sapreuve de préservation de la sémantique combiné avec uneaxiomatisation en Whycert du modèle mémoire Compcert résulte notrecontribution principale: une chaîne intégrée certifiée pour lavérification de programmes C, basée sur Compcert. En combinant notrerésultat de correction avec celui de Compcert, on obtient un théorèmeen Coq qui met en relation la validité des l'obligations de preuvegénérées avec la sûreté du code assembleur compilé. / This thesis belongs to the domain of software verification. The goalof verifying software is to ensure that an implementation, a program,satisfies the requirements, the specification. This is especiallyimportant for critical computer programs, such as control systems forair planes, trains and power plants. Here a malfunctioning occurringduring operation would have catastrophic consequences. Software requirements can concern safety or functioning. Safetyrequirements, such as not accessing memory locations outside validbounds, are often implicit, in the sense that any implementation isexpected to be safe. On the other hand, functional requirementsspecify what the program is supposed to do. The specification of aprogram is often expressed informally by describing in English or someother natural language the mission of a part of the program code.Usually program verification is then done by manual code review,simulation and extensive testing. But this does not guarantee that allpossible execution cases are captured. Deductive program proving is a complete way to ensure soundness of theprogram. Here a program along with its specificationis a mathematical object and its desired properties are logicaltheorems to be formally proved. This way, if the underlying logicsystem is consistent, we can be absolutely sure that the provenproperty holds for the program in any case.Generation of verification conditions is a technique helpingthe programmer to prove the properties he wants about his programs.Here a VCG tool analyses a program and its formal specification andproduces a mathematical formula, whose validity implies the soundnessof the program with respect to its specification. This is particularlyinteresting when the generated formulas can be proved automatically byexternal SMT solvers.This approach is based on works of Hoare and Dijkstra and iswell-understood and shown correct in theory. Deductive verificationtools have nowadays reached a maturity allowing them to be used inindustrial context where a very high level of assurance isrequired. But implementations of this approach must deal with allkinds of language features and can therefore become quite complex andcontain errors -- in the worst case stating that a program correcteven if it is not. This raises the question of the level ofconfidence granted to these tools themselves. The aim of this thesis is to address this question. We develop, inthe Coq system, a certified verification-condition generator (VCG) forACSL-annotated C programs.Our first contribution is the formalisation of an executableVCG for the Whycert intermediate language,an imperative language with loops, exceptions and recursive functionsand its soundness proof with respect to the blocking big-step operational semantics of the language.A second contribution is the formalisation of the ACSL logicallanguage and the semantics of ACSL annotations of Compcert's Clight.From the compilation of ACSL annotated Clight programs to Whycertprograms and its semantics preservation proof combined with a Whycertaxiomatisation of the Compcert memory model results our maincontribution: an integrated certified tool chainfor verification of C~programs on top of Compcert. By combining oursoundness result with the soundness of the Compcert compiler we obtaina Coq theorem relating the validity of the generated proof obligationswith the safety of the compiled assembly code.

This diploma thesis deals with the development of the school climate in a classroom with a seriously physically disabled child who requires permanent presence of an assistant. The theoretical part focuses on physical disabilities and their impact on the psyche of the child, the specifics of including a seriously disabled child in educational instructional contexts and the life of the classroom, and on the cooperation between a form teacher and an assistant whose support and help is required by the child during all lessons. The practical part uses a narrative of two girls and people who are closely related to them to offer answers to the inquiries into how have relationships within such a classroom and the attitude of classmates to a disabled child changed over the years; how can the presence of an assistant affect the climate of the classroom; and whether the external perception of the inclusion of a disabled child as a successful one corresponds with the feelings of the disabled child, of if the child sees the process otherwise. Case studies which helped the author to get a general picture of the situation confirmed it appeared that the factor which immensely affects inclusion of a physically disabled child in the classroom is the age at which children meet and the attitude of the teacher and the...

A link between eye movement mechanics and the mental processing associated with text reading has been established in the past. The pausing of an eye gaze on a specific word within a sentence reflects correctness or fluency of a translated text. A cognitive translation system has been built employing a single, inexpensive web camera without the use of infrared illumination. It was shown that the system translates the text, detects rarely occurring and out-of-context words from eye gaze information, and provides solutions in real time while the user is still reading. The solutions are in form of a translation, definition or synonym for the word in question. The only effort required is that of reading.