Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Major Automação). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

The goal of the following project is to probe into the early knowledge of the syntactic and the pragmatic components of language at the syntax-pragmatics interface, as exemplified by discourse-related elements such as object clitics. Object clitics, in addition to allowing for cross-linguistic generalizations, provide an insight into the early clause structure and the mechanisms which constrain the syntax-pragmatics interface. Cross linguistic variation has been found to be limited and well-governed, and has been attributed to the underlying syntactic mechanism, such as the Unique Checking Constrain or a number of pragmatic constraints operative in the child's grammar such as inability to mark referentiality. In addition, this study explores a theory which attempts to integrate the acquisition of syntax and pragmatics by attributing early non-finite structures in child grammar to a maturational discourse linking mechanism. The present project seeks to validate the claims of the above theories by offering new data and a novel perspective. The empirical part presents the results of one pilot study based on naturalistic language production by a monolingual Polish child age 2;1 - 2;9, and three data elicitation experiments conducted with 53 monolingual Polish children age 2;9 - 5;10. the clitic production experiment composed of two types of data. The pilot study establishes the relative age of clitic production. The data elicitation experiments focus on clitic production, clitic comprehension and knowledge of Principle B, as well as clitic referentiality resolution in pragmatically infelicitous contexts. It is shown that Polish children do not produce clitics from the beginning. It is concluded based on group and individual results that comprehension of objects clitic precedes production and that production is unlikely without comprehension. It is shown that age is a significant factor in clitic comprehension, production and referentiality resolution. It is demonstrated that Polish children exhibit early knowledge of Principle B. Also, it is suggested that children who produce object clitics are more likely to resolve clitic referentiality in pragmatically infelicitous contexts.

Particle Collision Electrochemistry (PCE) has gained considerable attention in heterogeneous catalysis, petroleum chemistry and pharmaceutical fields. The PCE refers to a phenomenon in which a particle strikes on an inert electrode surface as a consequence of its Brownian motion and produces a spike of current for the direct oxidation/reduction of the individual particle. This method allows us characterization of individual particles and in-situ study of electrochemical reactions coupled to the particle. Herein, emulsion droplets were studied by PCE where toluene droplets contained hydrophobic tetrachloro-1,4-benzoquinone (Q). This was investigated as a model system to study the molecular effects that arise due to hydrogen bonding reagents (oleic acid, acetic acid) inside and outside of the droplets. The emulsions were prepared by sonicating toluene-quinone solution with the water phase containing an ionic liquid to provide conductivity to the droplet. Each droplet produced a current spike while colliding with the electrode surface that was held at a potential to reduce tetrachoro-1,4-benzoquinone. In bulk acetonitrile and toluene, tetrachoro-1,4-benzoquinone undergoes a two electron reduction process to form the tetrachloro phenolate di-anion (Q2-). It was shown that the hydrogen bonding affinity of Q2- for acetic acid (pKa = 4.8) was higher than for oleic acid (pKa = 9.9) for both bulk systems (as acetic acid is stronger hydrogen bonding donor than oleic acid). However, the reversed trend was observed in emulsified toluene droplets when studied by PCE. This was attributed to the preferential partition of the carboxylic acids between the two phases in the emulsion. Oleic acid stays inside the droplets due its hydrophobic nature and hydrogen bonding with Q2- takes place inside the droplet. In contrast, solvation of acetic acid by the surrounding water, causes the hydrogen bonding with Q2- to occur significantly less inside the droplet. Another redox system studied by PCE was hydrophobic ferrocene (Fc) trapped in the toluene droplet to determine the effect of surfactant on the particle size. The diameter determined electrochemically was compared with Dynamic Light Scattering (DSL) measurements. The presence of nonionic surfactant (triton X-100) was observed to affect the droplet’s size easily monitored by PCE. The mediated oxidation of cysteine by the oxidized Fc inside the droplet was investigated at different concentrations of cysteine.

Le système autonome nécessite une consommation d'énergie inférieur à 100μW pour qu’ils puissent récupérer l’énergie environnementale. Le transistor MOSFET, étant le composé principal de ce système, peut permettre cela en améliorant ces performances. Le matériaux III-V présente un intérêt à être appliqué au transistor MOSFET en considérant ses propres propriétés tel la haute vitesse thermique d’électron, la haute vitesse de saturation, la faible bande interdite. D'aussi hautes performances de transistor avec de basse consommation d'énergie peut être envisagé grâce au MOSFET III-V. Des technologies de fabrication de MOSFET In0.53Ga0.47As ont été développées avec ces mesures statiques et dynamiques. Un IdMAX=180mA/mm, gmMAX=110mS/mm, fT=150GHz, et fMAX=47GHz ont été obtenus pour un transistor de longueur de grille de 50nm. Différentes voies d’amélioration ont été étudiées y compris le procédé gate-last comparé au gate-first, l’effet PDA, et l’effet PPA. Le procédé gate-last démontre moins de dégradation de l’oxyde avec de meilleures performances que gate-first. PDA n’a pas d'effet important sur les performances du transistor. PPA a démontré un effet de passivation de certains défauts dans l’oxyde et dans l’interface. Des structures alternatives ont été étudiées comme la structure MOSHEMT de maille adapté et pseudomorphique, montrant de meilleures performances avec une IdMAX=300mA/mm, gmMAX=200mS/mm, fT=200GHz et fMAX=50GHz pour un transistor de longueur de grille de 100nm. Ces performances DC sont loin de l’état de l’art, tandis que les performances RF sont parmi les meilleures. La perspective de ce travail est d’améliorer la qualité d’oxyde en baissant le budget thermique et aussi d'utilier de prometteuses strucutres comme MOS-COMB (la structure MOS-Thin body avec couche barrière entre l’oxyde et le semiconducteur). La structure MOSFET InAs de haute performance pourrait aussi être envisagé en réduisant le budget thermique au cours de la fabrication. / The autonomous system requires a power consumption of less than 100μW so that they can recover energy from the environment. MOSFET, being a major component of this system can achieve this low power consumption requirement by improving its performance. III-V materials are of interest to be applied to MOSFET considering its own properties such as high electron thermal mobility, high saturation velocity, and low band gap. So high-performance transistor with low power consumption can be expected by III-V MOSFETs. Fabrication technologies of In0.53Ga0.47As MOSFETs have been developed with its static and dynamic measurements. An IdMAX=180mA/mm, gmMAX=110mS/mm, fT=150GHz and fMAX=47GHz were obtained for a transistor gate length of 50nm. Different ways of improvement were studied including the gate-last process compared with gate-first, the PDA effect, and the PPP effect. The gate-last process shows less degradation of the oxide with better performance than gate-first. PDA has no prominent effect on the performance of transistor. PPA has been shown to have a passivation effect of certain defects in the oxide and interface. Alternative structures have been studied such as the structure MOSHEMT with lattice matched and pseudomorphic, showing best performances like IdMAX=300mA/mm, gmMAX=200mS/mm, fT=200GHz and fMAX=50GHz for a transistor gate length of 100nm. DC performance is far from the state of the art, while the RF performances are among the best. The perspective of this work is to improve the oxide quality by lowering the thermal budget and also to use promising structures as MOS-COMB (MOS-Thin body structure with barrier layer between the oxide and semiconductor). The MOSFET InAs with high-performance could also be expected by reducing the thermal budget during the fabrication.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation.

The thesis examines the factors that need to be considered in order to undertake successful design of user interfaces for older users. The literature on aging is surveyed for age related changes that are of relevance to interface design. The findings from the literature review are extended and placed in a human context using observational studies of older people and their supporters as these older people attempted to learn about and use computers. These findings are then applied in three case studies of interface design and product development for older users. These case studies are reported and examined in depth. For each case study results are presented on the acceptance of the final product by older people. These results show that, for each case study, the interfaces used led to products that the older people evaluating them rated as unusually suitable to their needs as older users. The relationship between the case studies and the overall research aims is then examined in a discussion of the research methodology. In the case studies there is an evolving approach used in developing the interface designs. This approach includes intensive contribution by older people to the shaping of the interface design. This approach is analyzed and is presented as an approach to designing user interfaces for older people. It was found that a number of non-standard techniques were useful in order to maximize the benefit from the involvement of the older contributors and to ensure their ethical treatment. These techniques and the rationale behind them are described. Finally the interface design approach that emerged has strong links to the approach used by the UTOPIA team based at the university of Dundee. The extent to which the thesis provides support for the UTOPIA approach is discussed.

The theory of Gestalt was proposed in the nineteenth century to explain and predict the way that people perceptually group visual elements, and it has been used to develop guidelines for designing visual computer interfaces. In this thesis we seek to extend the use of Gestalt principles to the design of haptic and visual-haptic displays. The thesis begins with a survey of Gestalt research into visual, auditory and haptic perception. From this survey the five most commonly found principles are identified as figure-ground, continuation, closure, similarity and proximity. This thesis examines the proposition that these five principles can be applied to the design of haptic interfaces. Four experiments investigate whether Gestalt principles of figure-ground, continuation, closure, similarity and proximity are applicable in the same way when people group elements either through their visual (by colour) or haptic (by texture) sense. The results indicate significant correspondence between visual and haptic grouping. A set of haptic design guidelines for haptic displays are developed from the experiments. This allows us to use the Gestalt principles to organise a Gestalt-Taxonomy of specific guidelines for designing haptic displays. The Gestalt-Taxonomy has been used to develop new haptic design guidelines for information displays.

No description available.

<p> </p><p>With  this  thesis  we  have  been  interested  in  how  to  utilise  an  user  interface beta  test  period.  Which  activities  are  appropriate  to  be  performed,  with  focus  on  how  activities  contribute  to  user  interface  validation,  further  user  interface  improvements,  and  improvements  of  the  user  interface  roll‐out.  Additionally  we  have  tried  to  couple  this  to  end‐user  satisfaction  and  acceptance  of  this new user interface, since the usage of the system is mandatory for the end users.    </p><p> </p><p>We  have  approached  this  by  developing  a  method  that  is  based  on  four  different  perspectives.  Three  perspectives  are  studied theoretically,  and  one  perspective  is  based  on  empiric  research.  These  perspectives  are  separate  from  each  other;  to  combine  them  we  have  used  a  common  denominator  of  <em>increased </em> <em>system </em> <em>usage</em>.  This  denominator  is  derived  from  a  viewpoint upon  end‐users  and  how  <em>user </em> <em>satisfaction</em>,  <em>user </em> <em>acceptance</em>,  and  <em>behaviour </em> <em>incentives</em>  for  usage  affect  the  perspectives and consequently our result.  </p><p> </p><p>This  broad  research  has  resulted  in  a  self‐sustaining  method  that  we  describe  both  in  an  overview  and  in  greater  detail  explain  the  beta  period  and  the  associated  roles,  the  different  activities  and  how  they  should  be  executed  in  relevance  to  time.  For  every  activity  a  table  of  considerations,  i.e.  <em>when</em>,  <em>who</em>,  <em>how</em>,  and  <em>why</em>  are  presented  together  with  an  explanation  how  the  <em>activity</em>  can  influence end‐users to use the system.   </p><p> </p><p>We  conclude  that  the  result  of  this  thesis  will  aid  and  guide  vendor  companies  through  the  beta  testing  program  of  a  new  user  interface.  The  resulting  method  determines  which  activities  that  can  be  of  interest to carry out and how these will  contribute  to  future  development  and/or  improve  roll‐out.  By  utilising this  method as a framework we see the possibility to incorporate it in an existing user-centre development process, but it can also be used as a simple, straightforward,  and self‐sustaining method. </p><p> </p>

<p>Osseointegrated titanium implants have become a commonly used method in edentulous jaws and today there are success rates in the magnitude of 82 % in the lower jaw and 98 % in the upper. During first year after implantation a fully normal marginal bone loss of 1-2 mm occurs. If the bone loss continues there is a risk of implant failure. High tensions in bone and inflammation caused by bacteria are possible reasons for this problem. It has been shown that a leakage of bacterias occurs between the parts of the implant and there are theories that this has effects on the marginal bone loss.</p><p>The aim of this thesis has been to increase the knowledge about microbial leakage with help of in vitro tests and virtual simulations. The goal was to create a test method to measure differences of microbial leakage in two implant systems.</p><p>The developed test method includes an in vitro test of six implants and Finite Element Analysis. The test method is the product of a process with several small tests. The final test method measures leakage of a coloured fluid with a spectrophotometer. The results are then compared with the virtual simulations to draw conclusions and find explanations how the implants are functioning.</p><p>The result of test on six implants, four Ospol and two Nobel Replace, indicates that there are differences in the magnitude of microleakage in different implant systems in due to the implant-abutment interface. No conclusions can be drawn before the test method is refined and more implants are tested.</p>