A rectal cancer patient decision aid (PtDA) was developed to help patients consider the benefits and risks associated with two surgical treatment options. The current thesis evaluated the effect of the PtDA on patients and explored surgeons’ perceived factors influencing the implementation of the PtDA in clinical practice. Using a before and after study design, the PtDA was given to patients with rectal cancer at a cancer assessment center. Based on 28 patients recruited, the PtDA improved their knowledge, lowered decisional conflict, and patients rated it acceptable. A cross-sectional survey was mailed to 105 Canadian colorectal surgeons and 49 responded (46.7% response rate). Commonly perceived barriers were time constraint, need for multiple visits, and additional personnel and facilitators were simplifying the decision aid, adding to content, and translating to other languages. The PtDA improved patient decision making outcomes but requires interventions to overcome surgeon-identified barriers to use in clinical practice.

Country risk is an important concern in international business. Country risk classification refers to determining the risk level at which a country will not repay its international debt. Traditionally, country risk classification resorts to statistics methods such as discriminant analysis. In the past two decades, the so-called multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) methods have been proved to enjoy better performance than the standard statistics methods. Nevertheless, the performance of the MCDA methods is still far away from satisfactory and can be improved significantly. The better performance of several MCDA methods, such as UTADIS (UTilités Additives DIScriminantes) and MHDIS (Multigroup Hierarchical Discrimination), is achieved by exploiting the rater’s background knowledge. In the standard MCDA model, we assume that the criterion function for every factor is monotone and all the factors are independent. Then, we approximate the impact of every factor and use the sum of the corresponding criterion functions to determine the risk level of a country. By discretizing the feasible domain of the factor, the MCDA method solves a linear program to find a classifier for country risk classification. This thesis tries to enhance the capability of MCDA methods by allowing a class of non-monotone criteria: the unimodal ones. For this purpose, we developed an integer quadratic (non-convex) program for general unimodal criteria. Further, if we restrict ourselves to convex or concave unimodal criteria, then we can still use a linear program to find a classifier. For the case where all the factors are correlated, a simple quadratic form of aggregation is proposed to deal with it. Compared with the original UTADIS model, our generalized model is more flexible and can deal with more complex scenarios. Finally, our generalized model is tested based on cross-validation and our experiment is carried out under the AMPL+sovers environment. Promising numeric results indicate that except for its theoretical advantages, our generalized model exhibits practical efficiency and robustness as well. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

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Investigate the use of partial relations for multicriteria reverse auctions. At first, a theoretical framework is introduced. Then, an extension of traditional multicriteria tools is considered. This is referred to as the Butterfly model. Finally, the concept of Bidding Niches partitions is formalized and tested.

Automated products, especially automated decision aids, have the potential to improve the lives of older adults by supporting their daily needs. Although automation seems promising in this arena, there is evidence that humans, in general, tend to have difficulty optimizing their behavior with a decision aid, and older adults even more so. In a human-automation collaborative system, the ability to balance costs involved in relying on the automation and those involved in verifying the automation is essential for optimal performance and error minimization. Thus, this study was conducted to better understand the processes associated with balancing these costs and also to examine age differences in these processes. Cost of reliance on automation was evaluated using an object counting task. Participants were required to indicate the number of circles on a display, with support coming from a computer estimate decision aid. They were instructed to rely on the aid if they believed its answer or verify the aid by manually counting the circles on the screen if they did not believe the aid to be correct. Manipulations in this task were the cost of a wrong answer, either -5, -10, -25, or -50 points and the cost of verification, either high or low. It was expected that participants would develop a general pattern of appropriate reliance across the cost conditions, but would not change their reliance behavior enough to reach optimality. Older adults were expected to rely on the decision aid to a lesser extent than younger adults in all conditions, yet rate the automation as being more reliable. It was found that older and younger adults did not show large differences in reliance, although older adults tend to be more resistant to changing their reliance due to costs than younger adults. Both age groups significantly underutilized the computer estimate, yet overestimated its reliability. The results are important because it may be necessary to design automated devices and training programs differently for older adults than for younger adults, to direct them towards an optimal strategy of reliance.

Doctor of Philosophy / Psychological Sciences / Patrick A. Knight / In this research, two studies were conducted to examine the factors influencing reliance on a decision aid in personnel selection decisions. Specifically, this study examined the effect of feedback, the validity of selection predictors, and the presence of a decision aid on the use of the decision aid in personnel selection decisions. The results of both studies demonstrate that when people are provided with the decision aid, their predictions were significantly more similar to (but not the same as) the predictions made by the aid than people who were not provided with the decision aid. This suggests that when people are provided with an aid, they will use it at least to some degree. This research also shows that when provided with a decision aid that has high validity, people will increase their reliance on the decision aid over multiple decisions. Finally, this research shows that, in general, there are individual differences that influence how participants weight the different selection predictors.

There is an increased number of childhood cancer survivors living into adulthood. As more survivors live into adulthood, researchers have been able to study and better understand the late effects of cancer treatment. A well-known late effect of cancer treatment is the risk of infertility. Cancer-related infertility is a source of distress to cancer survivors. There have been many advances to fertility preservation over the last few years and there are now multiple options available for both men and women. Despite the improved understanding of the risk of cancer-related infertility and advances to fertility preservation treatment, these services remain underutilized by cancer patients. It is known that discussing fertility preservation options with newly diagnosed cancer patients improves survivors’ long-term quality of life and reduces decisional regret, regardless of if they pursue fertility preservation treatment. Survivors often report that the risk of treatment-related infertility and/or available fertility preservation options was often inadequately or not discussed with them at the time of diagnosis. The use of fertility preservation decision aids for adult patients newly diagnosed with cancer have been proven to be effective at improving participants’ knowledge surrounding fertility preservation, reducing decisional conflict, and reducing long term decisional regret. A fertility preservation decision aid has not yet been developed for use by adolescents newly diagnosed with childhood cancer. This study aims to engage survivors and providers to develop a fertility preservation decision aid to improve the decision quality of adolescents newly diagnosed with childhood cancer who are determining their preferences on accepting a referral to a fertility specialist. This study then proposes to field test the decision aid with newly diagnosed patients. The use of a decision aid will lead adolescents with childhood cancer to have increased knowledge on the risk of infertility and the fertility preservation options available. This study also aims to lower participants’ levels of decisional conflict about their fertility preferences. There is a need to incorporate the use of a fertility preservation decision aid into childhood cancer treatment. If this decision aid proves effective, referral to the fertility preservation decision aid may become common practice at the time of initial diagnosis. If the decision aid is effect at improving decision quality and reducing decisional conflict, survivors may experience long-term benefits including improved quality of life and reduced levels of decisional regret.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / One of the most important characteristics of an aircraft is its capability to return to its stable trimmed flight state after the occurrence of a disturbance or gust without the pilot intervention. The evaluation of such behavior, known as the aircraft stability, is divided into three sections: Lateral; Directional; and Longitudinal stabilities. The determination of the stability of an experimental aircraft requires the execution of a Flight Test Campaign (FTC). For the stability FTC the test bed should be equipped with a complete Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) System which is typically composed by: a Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) Data Acquisition System (DAS); A sensor set; An airborne transmitter; and A data recorder. In the real-time operations, live data received over the Telemetry Link, that are processed, distributed and displayed at the Ground Telemetry System (GTS) enhances the FTC safety level and efficiency. The due to the lack of reliability, recorded data is retrieved in the post mission operations to allow the execution of data reduction analysis. This process is time consuming because recorded data has to be downloaded, converted to Engineering Units (EU), sliced, filtered and processed. The reason for the usage of this less efficient process relies in the fact that the real-time Telemetry data is less reliable as compared to recorded data (i.e. noisier). The upcoming iNET technology could provide a very reliable Telemetry Link. Therefore the data reduction analysis can be executed with live telemetry data in quasi-real time after the receipt of all valid tests points. In this sense the Brazilian Flight Test Group (GEEV) along with EMBRAER and with the support of Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos (FINEP) started the development of several applications. This paper presents the design of a tool used in the Longitudinal Static Stability Flight Tests Campaign. The application receives the Telemetry data over either a TCP/IP or a SCRAMnet Network, performs data analysis and test point validation in real time and when all points are gathered it performs the data reduction analysis and automatically creates Hyper Terminal Markup Language (HTML) formatted tests reports. The tool evaluation was executed with the instruction flights for the 2009 Brazilian Flight Test School (CEV). The result shows an efficiency gain for the overall FTC.

Multi-criteria decision aid has emerged from the operational research field as the answer given to a couple of important questions encountered in complex decisions problems. Firstly, as decision aiding tools, such methods do not replace the decision maker with a mathematical model, but support him to construct his solution by describing and evaluating his options. Secondly, instead of using a unique criterion capturing all aspects of the problem, in the multi-criteria decision aid methods one seeks to build multiple criteria, representing several points of view. This work explores the application of multi-criteria decision aid methods for optimising food chain countermeasure strategies after a radioactive release to the environment. The core of the thesis is dedicated to formulating general lines for the development of a multi-criteria decision aid model. This includes the definition of potential actions, construction of evaluation criteria and preference modelling and is essentially based on the results of a stakeholders’ process. The work is centred on the management of contaminated milk in order to provide a concrete focus and because of its importance as an ingestion pathway in short term after an accident. Among other issues, the public acceptance of milk countermeasures as a key evaluation criterion is analysed in detail. A comparison of acceptance based on stochastic dominance is proposed and, based on that, a countermeasures’ acceptance ranking is deduced. In order to assess “global preferences” taking into account all the evaluation criteria, an ordinal method is chosen. This method allows expressing the relative importance of criteria in a qualitative way instead of using, for instance, numerical weights. Some algorithms that can be used for robustness analysis are also proposed. This type of analysis is an alternative to sensitivity analysis in what concerns data uncertainty and imprecision and seeks to determine how and if a model result or conclusion obtained for a specific instance of a model’s parameters holds over the entire domain of acceptable values for these parameters. The integrated multi-criteria decision aid approach proposed makes use of outranking and interactive methodologies and is implemented and tested through a number of case studies and prototype tools.

Depression is a common mental health problem. This study utilized a randomized, controlled trial design to assess the effect of a new web-based depression information decision aid compared to general depression information available on a well-known website on important factors involved in decision-making: knowledge of depression and treatment options, stigma, help-seeking attitudes, confidence in making a decision, sense of being well-informed, and preference for different treatment options. Introductory psychology students completed pre-, post-, and follow-up assessments in Study 1, and post- and follow-up assessments in Study 2. Overall, the two depression websites yielded similar responses across the measures, and the information decision aid was not superior to general information on the currently available website. Study 1 participants reported less decisional conflict and felt more informed following the review of the website compared to before website review. There were no changes from pre- to post-assessment on knowledge, stigma, or help-seeking attitudes. Study 2 also found few differences between the groups. Participants in this study indicated reduced stigma one-month after website review, which could be due to a delayed effect of the information, or exposure to other sources of information. In addition, decisional conflict increased and participants felt less informed one-month following the review of the website, compared to just after review. This is not surprising given that different treatment options are likely fresh in their minds just after review compared to one-month later. Given the largely negative findings in the two studies, alternative research approaches to comparing information resources are discussed. / October 2016