The popularity of MPI-based middleware and applications has led to their wide deployment. Such systems, however, are not inherently reliable and cannot tolerate external faults. This thesis presents a novel model-based approach for exploiting application features and other characteristics to categorize and create AEMs (Application Execution Model). This work realizes MPI/FT(tm), a middleware derived by selective incorporation of fault-tolerant features into MPI/Pro(tm) for two relevant AEMs. This thesis proves the following hypothesis: it is possible to successfully complete select MPI applications even in the presence of external faults, and such fault-tolerance can be achieved with acceptable performance overhead. This work defines parameters to measure the impact of this middleware on performance through faultree and fault-injected overheads. The hypothesis is validated through experimentation and measurement of sample MPI applications for two AEMs.

This study explores the experiences of people who have lost loved ones due to socially stigmatized deaths. Drawing from eight individual interviews, the author argues that the stigma associated with death due to drug overdose, suicide, substance abuse, or murder can cause traumatic or prolonged grief and can complicate the way the bereaved talk about grief as a part of their healing process. With the mortality rate in the U.S. rising, there is an epidemic of disenfranchised grief affecting millions of bereaved individuals. Using Coordinated Management of Meaning and Communication Privacy Management theories, the author uncovers strategies the traumatically bereaved employ to manage interactions and relationships with others. A qualitative analysis of participant interviews revealed that social stigma, whether experienced or anticipated, affects the way the bereaved communicate and can cause self-silencing. Findings indicate a need for safe, supportive, and non-judgmental spaces for the traumatically bereaved to share their stories.

The Internet has been growing rapidly during the past threedecades, evolving into a new paradigm called the Internet ofThings where all electronic devices are to be connected tothe global network. One of the most crucial needs forcommunication in this future global network is assuring its security.Datagram Transport Layer Security is a de facto standard protocolto secure end-to-end communication in the IoT. However, there isalso an increasing need for secure and efficient groupcommunication due to the frequently resource-constrained IoTenvironment. A DTLS adaptation for multicast communication hasbeen already proposed but protection of responses to multicastrequests has not been fully addressed yet. Furthermore, there is nopublicly available implementation of this adaptation. This thesis work is conducted in collaboration with SICS SwedishICT which is a research organization with a focus on appliedComputer Science. We have implemented the existing DTLS-basedapproach for multicast communication for the Contiki OS. We havealso implemented an approach for efficient response protectionthat was initially proposed at SICS and that we analyse andenhance in this thesis. Finally, we have experimentally evaluatedour and other approaches on a constrained hardware platform interms of memory requirements, communication performance andenergy consumption. We demonstrate advantages of our approachbased upon obtained results. / Internet har vuxit snabbt under de tre senaste decennierna, ochutvecklas till ett nytt paradigm kallat Internet of Things där allaelektroniska enheter kopplas till det globala nätverket. Ett av deviktigaste behoven för kommunikation i detta framtida globalanätverk är att garantera säkerhet. Datagram Transport LayerSecurity protokollet är en de facto-standard för säker end-to-endkommunikation i IoT. Det finns emellertid också ett ökande behovav säker och effektiv gruppkommunikation på grund av att IoTmiljöni regel är resursbegränsad. En anpassning av DTLS förmulticast-kommunikation har föreslagits men skydd av svar påmulticast-förfrågningar har ännu inte till fullo behandlats.Dessutom finns ingen offentligt tillgänglig implementation av dennaanpassning. Detta examensarbete utförs i samarbete med SICS Swedish ICTsom är en forskningsorganisation med fokus på tillämpaddatavetenskap. Vi har implementerat den existerande DTLSbaseradelösningen för multicast-kommunikation föroperativsystemet Contiki. Vi har också implementerat en lösningför effektivt skydd av svar på förfrågningar som ursprungligenföreslogs hos SICS och som vi analyserar och förbättrar i dettaexamensarbete. Slutligen har vi experimentellt utvärderat vår ochandra metoder på en begränsad hårdvaruplattform när det gällerminnesbehov, kommunikationsprestanda och energiförbrukning. Vivisar fördelar med vår metod baserat på de erhållna resultaten.

Although the house that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, DC has had numerous books written about it and its occupants, the President of the United States and the First Lady, there is very little research to be found on the marriage of the two individuals who reside in the White House and, together, sit at the pinnacle of political power. Many argue the Vice-President is second-in-command, but when you think about it, spouses confess and mull over ideas with one another and may never speak to anyone else about those ideas in such an intimate setting. The marriage created by the interpersonal communication between the President and his wife can expose many elements to decision-making, the level of the First Lady's influence over her husband, and the level of respect each has for the sacredness of the traditional institution of marriage. Miss Hayes has researched the marriages and lives of five First Couples (John and Abigail Adams, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and George W. and Laura Bush) and the marital and family communication styles between the two spouses within the marriage. Those two individuals who occupy the residency of the White House are America's First Couple and the marriage the two create before their arrival in the nation's capital is a crucial element that should play a part in every American's decision before casting his or her vote for the presidency.

Since the inception of AI research, great strides have been made towards achieving the goal of extending natural language conversation as a medium of interaction with machines. Today, we find many Conversational Agents (CAs) situated in various aspects of our everyday life such as information access, education and entertainment. However, most of the existing work on CAs has focused on agents that support only one user in each interactive session. On the other hand, people organize themselves in groups such as teams of co-workers, family and networks of friends. With the mass-adoption of Internet based communication technologies for group interaction, there is an unprecedented opportunity for CAs to support interactive situations involving multiple human participants. Support provided by these CAs can make the functioning of some of these groups more efficient, enjoyable and rewarding to the participants. Through our work on supporting various Multi-Party Interactive Situations (MPIS), we have identified two problems that must be addressed in order to embed effective CAs in such situations. The first problem highlights the technical challenges involving the development of CAs in MPIS. Existing approaches for modeling agent behavior make assumptions that break down in multi-party interaction. As a step towards addressing this problem, this thesis contributes the Basilica software architecture that uses an event-driven approach to model conversation as an orchestration of triggering of conversational behaviors. This architecture alleviates the technical problems by providing a rich representational capability and the flexibility to address complex interaction dynamics. The second problem involves the choice of appropriate agent behaviors. In MPIS, agents must compete with human participants for attention in order to effectively deliver support and interventions. In this work, we follow a model of human group interaction developed by empirical research in small group communication. This model identifies two fundamental processes in human group interaction, i.e., Instrumental (Task-related) and Expressive (Social-Emotional). Behaviors that constitute this expressive process hold the key to managing and regulating user attention and serve other social functions in group interaction. This thesis describes two socially capable conversational agents that support users in collaborative learning and group decision making activities. Their social capabilities are composed of a set of behaviors based on the Social-Emotional interaction categories identified by work in small group communication. These agents demonstrate the generalizability of our methodology for designing and implementing social capabilities across two very different interactive situations. In addition to the implementation of these agents, the thesis presents a series of experiments and analysis conducted to investigate the effectiveness of these social capabilities. First and foremost, these experiments show significant benefits of the use of socially capable agents on task success and agent perception across the two different interactive situations listed above. Second, they investigate issues related to the appropriate use of these social capabilities specifically in terms of the amount and timing of the constituent social behaviors. Finally, these experiments provide an understanding of the underlying mechanism that explains the effects that social capabilities can achieve.

The Affectionate Gesture Planner (AGP) is a smartphone application (i.e., “app”) that aims to increase relationship satisfaction for couples in long-term relationships by prompting couples to complete loving acts for each other on a daily basis. The AGP app is informed by concepts from social exchange theory and the investment model (Rusbult, 1983), which predict that increasing the mutual exchange of beneficial investments to the relationship improves the quality and stability of the relationship. The present study is a formative evaluation on the prototype of the AGP app. Based on participant feedback, the AGP app will be improved prior to future trials. Future models of the AGP app will be used to compare the efficacy of using standardized suggestions versus personalized prompts.

This experimental study examined the effects of an instructor’s face threat mitigation tactics on student self-efficacy for learning and perceived emotional support from the instructor in a written feedback setting. Participants (N = 401) were randomly assigned to one of four feedback scenarios in which level of face threat mitigation and instructor age and status were manipulated. Student grade orientation and state feedback apprehension were measured prior to being exposed to the feedback scenario. Results indicate that high face threat mitigation is positively associated with student self-efficacy for learning and perceived emotional support from the instructor. Results also revealed that state feedback apprehension predicts self-efficacy for learning and perceived emotional support from the instructor. Grade orientation predicted self-efficacy for learning but did not significantly predict perceived emotional support from the instructor providing feedback. Finally, scenarios manipulated for instructor age and status did not significantly differ in self-efficacy for learning or perceived emotional support from the instructor. Implications regarding theory, the measurement of feedback apprehension, and student-instructor communication are discussed.

Video games have become a new platform for social interaction. I review the sociality of video games and the relationship between virtual- and real-world behaviors. I review and address the pros and cons of methods of measuring social behavior. Finally, I present two studies drawn from internet populations. In Study 1 (N = 250), I develop a scale, The Sociality in Multiplayer Online Games Scale (SMOG), which measures the frequency of social gaming behaviors in team-based, multiplayer online games. I hypothesized these to align on dominance and affiliation dimensions of social interaction (Kiesler, 1982). In Study 2 (N = 104), I conduct a confirmatory factor analysis, which supports a two-factor structure—Destructive and Constructive social behavior, resulting in the SMOG-6. I examine construct validity using measures of dominance and affiliation. Controlling for age, gender, and frequency of game-play, both factors predict dominance. SMOG-Destructive negatively, and SMOG-Constructive positively, predicted affiliation.

The purpose of this research study was to explore the topic of organizational communication in higher education and examine staff members’ perceptions about their level of communication and job satisfaction in their workplaces. This study was also designed to test the relationship between communication satisfaction and job satisfaction by analyzing the significance of different dimensions of Communication Satisfaction with the view that satisfaction is multifaceted. A total of 463 non-faculty staff members from different units of a single higher education institution participated in this study. This study included non-teaching staff, including student workers and both full-time and part-time staff members. A modified version of Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ) developed by Downs and Hazen was used to collect data. The study used a Likert-type scale with a 7-point scale and had eight dimensions (personal feedback, relationship to supervisors, horizontal and informal communication, organizational integration, organizational perspective, communication climate, media quality, and job satisfaction). The statistical analyses of the data from eight research questions revealed some significant relationships and differences. The results found that staff members perceived their level of satisfaction with communication satisfaction dimensions personal feedback, relationship to supervisors, horizontal and informal communication, organizational integration, and media quality from somewhat satisfied to satisfied, and communication satisfaction dimensions organizational perspective and communication climate as somewhat satisfied. The results found significant differences among different dimensions of CSQ, indicating that communication satisfaction is multi-faceted. The staff members perceived their level of job satisfaction to be among somewhat satisfied to satisfied range. The results indicated that gender and number of years in service do not seem to make a significant difference among staff members’ level of satisfaction, but level of education and job classification does. There were strong positive relations found among all dimensions of CSQ. A strong positive relationship and statistically significant correlation was found between overall communication satisfaction and job satisfaction scores, indicating that when staff members feel satisfied with communication in their workplace, they also tend to feel satisfied with their job in their workplace.

Public concern about teenage pregnancy and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS make sex education information vital for today's teenagers. A 1986 Harris survey of 1,000 teenagers cited parents as their primary source of sex education information, but 42% said they would be too nervous or afraid to bring up the subject of contraception or birth control with their parents. States like Kentucky have mandated sex education courses for all public schools to provide necessary instruction for teenagers. This study identifies communication barriers which teenagers say prevent communication with their parents about sex and sex-related topics. Questionnaires were administered to 249 high school sex education students. The majority of teenagers (71%) said they could communicate freely with their parents about most topics, but only half (52%) said they could communicate freely with their parents about sex or sex-related topics. Thirty percent of the teenagers said they could not talk comfortably with their mothers about sex as compared to 47% who said they could not talk with their fathers. Results showed gender differences in the ability to talk with fathers about sex. Fifty-eight percent of the females reported closed communication with fathers about sex topics as compared to 33 percent of males. Teenagers cited 13 main reasons why they could not talk with their parents about sex or sex-related topics: embarrassment (20%), poor communication in general (11%), different values about sex and dating (11%), avoidance of conflict (10%), teenager chooses not to discuss it with parents (10%), it's a topic simply not discussed (9%), parents might accuse them of being sexually active (7%), parents think they are too young (5%), they are too busy to talk about it (5%), parents don't want to discuss it (4%), parents are overprotective (4%), teenager is not close to parents (3%), and parents wouldn't understand (2%). Items which teenagers say would make it more comfortable to discuss sex topics with parents include: parents being more understanding, non-accusing, not embarrassed, willing to listen, closer in age, less old fashioned, more informed about today's teens, open minded and less judgmental.