Children with autism spectrum disorders often have deficits in the area of social skills. Because of this deficit many children with autism avoid engaging in play activities with typically developing peers. The purpose of this study was to identify the utility of a photographic activity schedule, with embedded scripts, to teach three children with autism to play a complex social game with typically developing peers. In this study we used activity schedules to train children with autism to play hide-and-seek in a group with typically developing peers. All participants were prompted using physical guidance to follow the activity schedules to play hide-and-seek. Two activity schedules were present during teaching sessions, one was the seeker schedule and the other was the hider schedule. Each group member played the role of the seeker once and then the game ended. All of the participants were able to follow the activity schedules to play hide-andseek. We then systematically faded the activity schedules to the least intrusive version necessary. We were able to fade all of the scripts and several components of the activity schedules. For two of the three participants with autism we were able to fade the schedule from two binders to a visual cue displaying the order of the seekers. For the third participant we were able to fade one binder and the majority of the components in the second binder. The participants were able to continue to play hide-and-seek with the faded versions of the schedules in a novel environment and 2-weeks after treatment concluded.

Multiple Cooling Multi Objective Simulated Annealing algorithm has been combined with a conceptual design code written by the author to carry out a multi objective design optimization of an Agricultural Aerial Robot. Both the single and the multi objective optimization problems are solved. The performance figures of merits for different aircraft configurations are compared. In this thesis the potential of optimization as a powerful design tool to the aerospace problems is demonstrated.

Smart structures become highly popular with the developing technology. The aim of this study is to develop a basic model, which can be also used in the design of more complex systems by performing simultaneous optimization of a structure and associated controller with respect to some design parameters and feedback gains. In this thesis work, two smart structures are used as case studies and their results are compared with the available results in the literature. The first case study is simple twobar truss problem controlled by either one or two actuators. This problem is solved both numerically and analytically. The latter is a twenty-element parabolic truss, which is controlled by four actuators. This problem is solved numerically only. In the optimization process, the design parameters are taken as the cross sectional areas of bar elements, positions and/or number of actuators, and the elements of closed loop gain matrix. In the second case study, in addition to these parameters, shape design parameters are also optimized. A coordinate transformation is applied in both cases from the displacement space to the modal space. The modal model reduction method is used in the design of second problem. The optimization goal in both cases studies is to minimize the system energy while satisfying some frequency and mass constraints. In the second case study, in addition to the original objective function, system controllability and stability robustness are also maximized. In the solution of design problem, two optimization algorithms are used one embedded within the other. In the outer loop, a hide and seek simulated annealing algorithm optimizes structural design parameters, and positions and/or number of actuators. In order to generate a candidate design family for this level, optimal closed loop gain matrices are calculated by using MATLAB&reg / .

This study sets out to explore first person theatre as a means of opening the individual to the problems of contemporary capitalism and its increasing pervasion of the personal in an era of embeddedness enabled by networked pervasive technology. Firstly setting out key definitions and a theoretical analysis of the problems of being in the digital age in chapter 1, and then setting this against the history of interaction in performance in chapter 2. The study then goes on (in chapters 3-5) to investigate three key aspects of first person performance as personal-as-political; sound and the city, play and games, and interactive theatre. In the final chapter, The Umbrella Project develops a piece of first person theatre as practice, a method of investigation that is vital to a thesis that discusses politics, late capitalism, and the means to resist the message-sending of private interests as fundamentally only to be understood in practice. For this reason, too, chapters 3, 4 and 5 are supported by key case studies discussing other first person theatre practice. By placing the participant at the centre of the world-constituting process of theatre in the hot space between what is and what if this study suggests that first person theatre is able to open the contemporary individual to an inbetween where they might re-see, reflect and react to what is. To imagine and, if wished, act upon a what if. In an age of the disrupted near and far, the vanishing of the interface, of the false rhetoric of choice of personalisation , and the often false rhetoric of agency at the end of the era of broadcast, first person theatre offers the subject a route to individual agency, an understanding of the urban environment as construct, and to their relationship with the subjective other something which this thesis suggests is a personal-as-political practice to rival the Spectacle of late capitalism.