The use of portable digital devices in the United States is increasing. With this increase in digital technology use comes an increase in interruptions between digital users. This study explores whether interruptions caused by a digital device evoke an emotion from members of the Millennial generation. In addition, this research aims to determine whether an interruption during a task causes a reduction in task efficiency amongst Millennials. The findings from this study can provide corporations and educational institutions with information about how portable digital technologies might affect the productivity of Millennial employees and students. / Department of Telecommunications

The dispute over interruption is one of the most intensive and most controversial political and ethical discussions in today{\crq}s modern civilization. It includes a great number of opposed, controversial opinions and attitudes both in the sphere of medicine and on the political or ethical ground. I have selected the topic of this work on the base of personal interest in the issue of termination of pregnancy, because this issue bears the basic questions and attitudes of man to the existence of the individual. Today the issue of interruption is sharply polarized into two controversial rivalling groups, i.e. the ``pro-life{\crqq} movement and the ``pro-choice{\crqq} movement. The dispute over termination of pregnancy has been becoming more and more topical issue not only in the Czech Republic but also in the world. The aim of this work was to map the attitudes of students not only of graduation classes of selected sanitary secondary schools to the issue of interruption and to compare the mapped attitudes of students of the Faculty of Health and Social Studies and of the Theological Faculty of the University of South Bohemia with the attitudes of respondents of graduation classes of the selected sanitary secondary schools to the issue of interruption. On the base of this aim, two hypotheses were stated in the research part of the work. After that, the questionnaire investigation was performed, for which a structured questionnaire had been elaborated. The questionnaire was filled out by fifty respondents of the Faculty of Health and Social Studies and fifty respondents of the theological Faculty of the University of South Bohemia of České Budějovice. On the base of that investigation, one of the hypotheses was not confirmed. Available literature and current Internet sources were used for the theoretical and for the practical part of the work. The work should serve primarily to the students themselves and to other readers as a modest data source for this extensive issue, and the research part of this work could be used as a small summary both for laymen and for professionals teaching at universities and high schools, so that they have the possibility to look at the issue of interruption from the point of view of the students, future professionals and workers of different areas.

This thesis aims at portraying interruptions in the socio-technical domain of manufacturing industry, from a distributed cognition perspective. The research problem addressed is the lack of naturalistic inquiry in prior interruption research. Further, manufacturing is a complex socio-technical domain where interruptions have not previously been studied. In this thesis, a workplace study is applied with distributed cognition as its theoretical framework. The results of the study identify two new types of interruptions, as well as one new dimension of interruptions. This result shows that interruptions are a multifaceted phenomenon that frequently occurs within manufacturing. An integration of the theoretical background and the empirical work resulted in five recommendations concerning how to reduce the amount of interruptions and how to minimize their disruptive effects. This study complements prior interruption research, emphasises the importance of studying interruptions in natural settings, and provides several insights regarding future interruption research.

La majorité des véhicules routiers électriques sont équipés d’un réducteur à ratio fixe, situé entre le moteur électrique et les roues du véhicule, afin d’exploiter adéquatement la puissance mécanique du moteur de traction. L’utilisation de transmissions multi-rapports offre plusieurs avantages en termes de performance, d’efficacité, de masse et de coût du groupe motopropulseur, en permettant un sous-dimensionnement du couple maximal produit par le moteur de traction. Toutefois, cela requiert l’utilisation d’une transmission peu coûteuse, robuste, et ayant une efficacité et une qualité de conduite similaire au réducteur à ratio fixe, c’est-à-dire une non-interruption de couple lors des changements de rapports. Également, la caractéristique des moteurs électriques à révolutionner à plus haute vitesse de rotation comparativement aux moteurs thermiques amène une problématique de gestion de l’énergie cinétique stockée dans le rotor du moteur lors des changements de rapports. Les transmissions et les embrayages à friction conventionnels ne possèdent pas l’ensemble des caractéristiques recherchées pour permettre leur utilisation dans les véhicules électriques. Ce projet de maîtrise, mené conjointement avec celui de Gabriel Pouliot, porte sur la conception et la validation expérimentale d’une transmission manuelle automatisée sans interruption de couple, employant un embrayage de transfert à courants de Foucault hautement contrôlable et sans usure. Un modèle analytique de véhicule de type «backward-facing» a permis de quantifier la consommation énergétique de plusieurs topologies de transmission sur des cycles routiers normalisés, afin de démontrer l’avantage d’utiliser une transmission multi-rapports sur l’efficacité globale du groupe motopropulseur. Un prototype d’embrayage de transfert à courants de Foucault a été conçu et intégré à une transmission manuelle automatisée à deux rapports pour un véhicule électrique de 80kW. Les modèles analytiques ont démontré qu’une transmission à deux rapports améliore l’efficacité du groupe motopropulseur de 7.2% pour un véhicule compact tel que la Nissan Leaf. De plus, l’utilisation de deux rapports permet de sous-dimensionner le moteur électrique, ce qui a pour effet de réduire le coût et la masse du groupe motopropulseur par 23.1% et 15.6%, respectivement. L’embrayage à courants de Foucault a été caractérisé expérimentalement et ses performances en couple maximal corroborent les modèles analytiques par moins de 6%. Le prototype de transmission a réalisé un changement de vitesse sans interruption de couple sur banc d’essai, ce qui démontre la viabilité d’utiliser un embrayage à courants de Foucault à l’intérieur d’une transmission manuelle automatisée pour les véhicules électriques.

Human-machine teaming aims to meld human cognitive strengths and the unique capabilities of smart machines to create intelligent teams adaptive to rapidly changing circumstances. One major contributor to the problem of human-machine teaming is a lack of communication skills on the part of the machine. The primary objective of this research is focused on a machine’s interruption timings or when a machine should share and communicate information with human teammates within human-machine teaming interactions. Previous work addresses interruption timings from the perspective of single human, multitasking and multiple human, single task interactions. The primary aim of this dissertation is to augment this area by approaching the same problem from the perspective of a multiple human, multitasking interaction. The proposed machine is the Collaborative Communication Interruption Management System (C-CIMS) which is tasked with leveraging speech information from a human-human task and making inferences on when to interrupt with information related to an orthogonal human-machine task. This study and previous literature both suggest monitoring task boundaries and engagement as candidate moments of interruptibility within multiple human, multitasking interactions. The goal then becomes designing an intermediate step between human teammate communication and points of interruptibility within these interactions. The proposed intermediate step is the mapping of low-level speech information such as prosodic and lexical information onto higher constructs indicative of interruptibility. C-CIMS is composed of a Task Boundary Prosody Model, a Task Boundary Topic Model, and finally a Task Engagement Topic Model. Each of these components are evaluated separately in terms of how they perform within two different simulated human-machine teaming scenarios and the speed vs. accuracy tradeoffs as well as other limitations of each module. Overall the Task Boundary Prosody Model is tractable within a real-time system because of the low-latency in processing prosodic information, but is less accurate at predicting task boundaries even within human-machine interactions with simple dialogue. Conversely, the Task Boundary and Task Engagement Topic Models do well inferring task boundaries and engagement respectively, but are intractable in a real-time system because of the bottleneck in producing automatic speech recognition transcriptions to make interruption decisions. The overall contribution of this work is a novel approach to predicting interruptibility within human-machine teams by modeling higher constructs indicative of interruptibility using low-level speech information.

Dans le domaine aéronautique, comme dans de nombreux autres domaines de la vie courante ou professionnelle, les erreurs ont souvent été associées à des défaillances attentionnelles. Nos travaux s’insèrent dans cette problématique, et sont plus particulièrement focalisés sur les variations de la capacité à allouer son attention sur une tâche donnée à la suite d’une interruption. Dans un premier temps, nous avons mis en place des expérimentations qui permettent d’évaluer l’étendue des variations de performances obtenues dans une tâche à la suite d’une interruption, en fonction des composantes attentionnelles sollicitées dans la tâche à exécuter. Dans un second temps, nous avons mis en place un indicateur fiable et objectif mettant en évidence des différences dans le fonctionnement physiologique cérébral en fonction de ces composantes attentionnelles. Dans un troisième temps, nous avons été amenés à vérifier l’effet de diverses interruptions dans des situations aéronautiques réalistes. Nos travaux permettent de conclure à l’existence de fluctuations de l’attention à la suite d’une interruption, fluctuations dont la conséquence peut se traduire par des variations de performances et par différentes stratégies de gestion des erreurs et des activités. / In the aviation field, as in many other areas of personal or professional life, errors have often been associated with attentional failures. Our work is related to this issue, and is more particularly focused on variations of attention following an interruption. In a first step, we have set up experiments to measure changes in performance obtained in a task after an interruption. These variations are studied systematically according to various attentional components requested in the task at hand. In a second step, we have set up an indicator showing differences in the physiological functioning of the brain depending on these attentional components. Thirdly, we have tested the effect of various interruptions in realistic aeronautical situations. From our work, we conclude that there is a variation in attention after an interruption, the consequences of which can result in errors, performance variations, and differences in the management of errors and activities.

This thesis deals with business interruption insurance. It deals with the possibilities of using this insurance product, its design and approach in its application, causes, that may lead to interruptions, and the procedure which leads to the conclusion of the insurance contract. Finally, discusses the specifics of which carries business interruption insurance for owner of commercial real estate.

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