The future smart home will be enhanced and driven by the recent advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), which advocates the integration of computational devices within an Internet architecture on a global scale [1, 2]. In the IoT paradigm, the smart home will be developed by interconnecting a plethora of smart objects both inside and outside the home environment [3-5]. The recent take-up of these connected devices within home environments is slowly and surely transforming traditional home living environments. Such connected and integrated home environments lead to the concept of the smart home, which has attracted significant research efforts to enhance the functionality of home environments with a wide range of novel services. The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments make their management a challenging and rewarding task. The trend whereby the development of smart home services is decoupled from that of smart home devices increases the complexity of this task. As such, it is desirable that smart home services are developed and deployed independently, rather than pre-bundled with specific devices, although it must be recognised that this is not always practical. Moreover, systems need to facilitate the deployment process and cope with any changes in the target environment after deployment. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. Although significant research has been directed towards achieving auto-configuration, none of the existing solutions is sufficient to achieve auto-configuration within smart home environments. All such solutions are considered incomplete, as they lack the ability to meet all smart home requirements efficiently. These requirements include the ability to adapt flexibly to new and dynamic home environments without direct user intervention. Fulfilling these requirements would enhance the performance of smart home systems and help to address cost-effectiveness, considering the financial implications of the manual configuration of smart home environments. Current configuration approaches fail to meet one or more of the requirements of smart homes. If one of these approaches meets the flexibility criterion, the configuration is either not executed online without affecting the system or requires direct user intervention. In other words, there is no adequate solution to allow smart home systems to adapt dynamically to changing circumstances, hence to enable the correct interconnections among its components without direct user intervention and the interruption of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient, adaptive, agile and flexible system that adapts dynamically to each new requirement of the smart home environment. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and Semantic Web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the Knowledge-based Auto-configuration Software Robot (Sobot) for Smart Home Environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. The research work was conducted under the Distributed Integrated Care Services and Systems (iCARE) project, which was designed to accomplish and deliver integrated distributed ecosystems with a homecare focus. The auto-configuration Sobot which is the focus of this thesis is a key component of the iCARE project. It will become one of the key enabling technologies for generic smart home environments. It has a profound impact on designing and implementing a high quality system. Its main role is to generate a feasible configuration that meets the given requirements using the knowledgebase of the smart home environment as a core component. The knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in helping the Sobot to automatically select the most appropriate resources in a given context-aware system via semantic searching and matching. Ontology as a technique of knowledgebase representation generally helps to design and develop a specific domain. It is also a key technology for the Semantic Web, which enables a common understanding amongst software agents and people, clarifies the domain assumptions and facilitates the reuse and analysis of its knowledge. The main advantages of the Sobot over traditional applications is its awareness of the changing digital and physical environments and its ability to interpret these changes, extract the relevant contextual data and merge any new information or knowledge. The Sobot is capable of creating new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system's goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment. Furthermore, the Sobot has the capability to execute the generated reconfiguration plan without interrupting the running of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed and implemented. The case studies carried out have shown the potential of the proposed approach to achieve flexible and reliable auto-configuration of the smart home system, with promising directions for future research.

Diversity and Teamwork are currently some of the trendiest human resources strategies of boosting team performance and ultimately, organizational performance. This study analyzes the impact of gender, racial, age and employment status diversity on teamwork, and is one of the first studies on diversity and teamwork in the mature phase of Japanese transplants. The theoretical framework includes elements of the symbolic interactionist theory, Kanter.s theory on tokenism, revised contact hypothesis and perspectives on cultural diversity (Ely and Thomas, 2001). The data were collected from interviews with 87 workers from 16 production teams working on the assembly line at a top Japanese auto transplant in US, as well as from observation, analysis of corporate literature and the annual opinion survey. Furthermore, intermediary variables like team climate or team spirit have been found to mediate the relationships between diversity and team performance. Gender mixed teams reported a more enjoyable and pleasant experience in teams, whereas the male teams exposed more rivalry and competition and the female teams had more interpersonal conflicts. Similarly, the racially diverse teams have more fun and more interesting things to discuss at work, which alleviates the boredom caused by the routine of the assembly-line. Age-balanced teams also have optimal functioning in terms of productivity, quality, safety and problem-solving. Differences in employment status were found to bring inequality and different standards of performance for permanent and temporary workers, which can threaten the fundamental principles of teamwork.

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T lymphocytes and macrophages appear to play an important role in mediating ß-cell damage and causing Type 1 diabetes. Both activated T cells and macrophages operate and interact through the release of soluble factors called cytokines, which influence the type and magnitude of immune responses. It has been suggested that cytokines such as TNF-α and IL-1α can damage the N-cell directly. In Type 1 diabetes, cytokines are likely to have a critical role in individuals whose immune system is unbalanced allowing the emergence of self-destructive processes. To investigate this possibility, sensitive assays to detect a range of cytokines of potential relevance to the immune pathogenesis of diabetes were establised. Using these, serum levels of IL-1α, IL-1N, TNF-α and IL-6 (macrophage-derived cytokines), IFN-γ and IL-2 (T helper 1 cytokine profile) and IL-4 and IL-10 (T helper 2 profile) have been measured in patients with Type 1 diabetes of different disease duration. Increased levels of TNF-α, IL-1α, IL-2 and IFN-γ were found in recently diagnosed patients with Type 1 diabetes when compared with both disease and metabolic control subjects and with normal controls. The presence of this profile of cytokines implies activation of the TH1 subset of helper cells near to diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Magister en Análisis Sistémico Aplicado a la Sociedad / La Convención Internacional de los Derechos del Niño, apoyó la visualización de la infancia como segmento poblacional vulnerable a nivel mundial. En Chile, las intervenciones que trabajan con niños, niñas y jóvenes, son variadas y orientan sus comunicaciones hacia la inclusión. El éxito o el fracaso de estas intervenciones sociales, por lo general se define a través de sus criterios de ingreso/egreso, evaluaciones económicas y de resultados. La deserción de dichas intervenciones se vuelve relevante en dicho problema. Se observarán las descripciones que realizan los niños y niñas, sobre las causas de su deserción; los posibles beneficios de no desertar y su participación social como actores relevantes para la política pública. Por medio de la aplicación del Análisis del Discurso Estructural, y apoyado en técnicas conversacionales y el dibujo infantil, se pretende levantar información relevante.Así, los niños explican la deserción, desde las relaciones sociales dentro y fuera de la intervención, los proyectos de vida y el desajuste con sus intereses, refiriendo la adolescencia versus las actividades ofrecidas por la intervención social. El sistema familiar y la educación son los más referidos desde la exclusión. La intervención social es visualizada por los/as niños/as, como un proceso que les beneficiaría en tanto los re construye como personas sociables y socialmente buenas.Quien deserta, no debe ser observado como una pérdida, se debe incorporarlos como quienes marcan el lado no marcado del supuesto éxito de la intervención. La voz de los niños debe ser oída también en la exclusión social

The application of auto focus, using an optical beam deflection technique, to existing live cell interferometry measurements was developed and examined. The benefit to relevant experiments, currently being performed, is shown as well as its performance across various magnifications. Enough information is given so that the system can be reproduced to fit any end users needs.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

The professional auto body painter works in an extreme environment, where the painter faces constant movement, ever-changing working situations and pressure to deliver a flawless paint job: the paint booth. The temperature in the paint booth is high, often around 30˚ Celsius. The floor is very hard, made of metal grid or concrete, and the painter usually has to move around a lot, at least 9 km per day. For this project I chose to focus on the painter’s work footwear as a major part of the personal protective equipment. My goal is to create a new standard in working shoes, specifically made for this environment and context. A comfortable shoe that could withstand heat, paint dust and wear. A shoe that is made for its users: the FRM AIRCON.