The problem of finding a schedule with the lowest makespan in the class of all flowtime-optimal schedules for parallel identical machines is an NP-hard problem. Several approximation algorithms have been suggested for this problem. We focus on algorithms that are fast and easy to implement, rather than on more involved algorithms that might provide tighter approximation bounds. A set of approaches for proving conjectured bounds on performance ratios for such algorithms is outlined. These approaches are used to examine Coffman and Sethi's conjecture for a worst-case bound on the ratio of the makespan of the schedule generated by the LD algorithm to the makespan of the optimal schedule. A significant reduction is achieved in the size of a hypothesised minimal counterexample to this conjecture.

The aim of this study is to investigate the critical design and development issues for educational robotics training camps. More specifically, the purpose of the study is to explore and describe critical design issues for educational robotics training camps, illustrating how each factor affects robotic camps and enlightening how these factors should be implemented for the design of a robotic training camp. For this purpose, two robotic training camps were organized with elementary school students. Thirty children attended the first camp and twenty two children attended to the second one. The research design was qualitative in nature, more specifically / multiple-case design approach was used. Interviews with children and instructors, observations, field notes, and camp evaluation forms were the data collection methods. The data were analyzed through the qualitative data analysis techniques. The data were categorized under emerged themes, learning outcomes, evaluation of the camps&rsquo / components, career, group issues, competition, coaching, technical issues, challenges and camp duration. Some prominent findings of the study are / the instruction strategy for a robotics camp should be designed from simple to complex. The most effective and liked part of the camps are project studies, therefore projects studies should be encouraged at robotic camps. Robotics training camps should give chance to practice to the children what they have learned at schools. The group size should be arranged that every child in the group should have duties at any time. The study was concluded with a robotics camp design guideline and a sample robotic training camp curriculum.

Reproduction de : Thèse de docteur-ingénieur : informatique : Grenoble, INPG : 1985. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre.

The problem of finding a schedule with the lowest makespan in the class of all flowtime-optimal schedules for parallel identical machines is an NP-hard problem. Several approximation algorithms have been suggested for this problem. We focus on algorithms that are fast and easy to implement, rather than on more involved algorithms that might provide tighter approximation bounds. A set of approaches for proving conjectured bounds on performance ratios for such algorithms is outlined. These approaches are used to examine Coffman and Sethi's conjecture for a worst-case bound on the ratio of the makespan of the schedule generated by the LD algorithm to the makespan of the optimal schedule. A significant reduction is achieved in the size of a hypothesised minimal counterexample to this conjecture.

Master of Engineering (Research) / Educational standards are having a significant impact on e-Learning. They allow for better exchange of information among different organizations and institutions. They simplify reusing and repurposing learning materials. They give teachers the possibility of personalizing them according to the student’s background and learning speed. Thanks to these standards, off-the-shelf content can be adapted to a particular student cohort’s context and learning needs. The same course content can be presented in different languages. Overall, all the parties involved in the learning-teaching process (students, teachers and institutions) can benefit from these standards and so online education can be improved. To materialize the benefits of standards, learning resources should be structured according to these standards. Unfortunately, there is the problem that a large number of existing e-Learning materials lack the intrinsic logical structure required, and further, when they have the structure, they are not encoded as required. These problems make it virtually impossible to share these materials. This thesis addresses the following research question: How to make the best use of existing open learning resources available on the Internet by taking advantage of educational standards and specifications and thus improving content reusability?In order to answer this question, I combine different technologies, techniques and standards that make the sharing of publicly available learning resources possible in innovative ways. I developed and implemented a three-stage tool to tackle the above problem. By applying information extraction techniques and open e-Learning standards to legacy learning resources the tool has proven to improve content reusability. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of how these technologies can be used in real scenarios and shows how online education can benefit from them. In particular, three main components were created which enable the conversion process from unstructured educational content into a standard compliant form in a systematic and automatic way. An increasing number of repositories with educational resources are available, including Wikiversity and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseware. Wikivesity is an open repository containing over 6,000 learning resources in several disciplines and for all age groups [1]. I used the OpenCourseWare repository to evaluate the effectiveness of my software components and ideas. The results show that it is possible to create standard compliant learning objects from the publicly available web pages, improving their searchability, interoperability and reusability.

Ce travail de thèse s’intéresse au sujet de la normalisation dans le champ de la formation à distance. Parmi les multiples propositions de normalisation, notre intérêt porte plus particulièrement sur l’enrichissement du dernier standard de fait IMS-LD. Nous souhaitons de ce fait introduire la notion de pertinence de la normalisation qui signifie la capacité d’IMS-LD de prescrire des scénarios pédagogiques qui répondent réellement à certains principes pédagogiques. Pour notre recherche, nous nous sommes intéressés à une des composantes essentielles de l’apprentissage (Leontiev, 1981), il s’agit de la motivation à apprendre. Ce travail nous a permis d’obtenir trois principaux résultats qui ont été validés en effectuant des études de cas: il s’agit d’abord d’une démarche de scénarisation à posteriori fondée sur les théories de l’activité ; Elle décrit, à partir des traces, le déroulement effectif d’une activité d’apprentissage. Le deuxième résultat est une taxonomie fondée sur la théorie des actes de langage ; Elle permet de traduire quelques composantes de la motivation en un ensemble d’actes de langage observables dans une trace de discussion par « Chat ». Quant au troisième résultat, il s’agit d’un modèle descriptif de la motivation qui rend compte, à partir des traces, des perceptions et ses origines. Ce modèle se sert de notre taxonomie et repose sur le concept des paires adjacentes issu de l’analyse conversationnelle. Enfin, nos conclusions exposent de plus des résultats secondaires et ouvrent des perspectives pour la poursuite de notre question sur la pertinence des normes. / This thesis focuses on standardization in the field of distance learning. Among the many proposed standards, our interest focuses on the enrichment of latest standard proposal, which is the IMS-LD standard. We would therefore introduce the standardization relevance notion which means the ability of IMS-LD prescribes learning scenarios that actually meet certain educational principles. For our research, we focused on an essential component of learning (Leontiev, 1981), it is the motivation to learn. From this thesis, we obtained three main results validated by conducting case studies: first, is an activity theories’ posteriori design based approach; It describes, from traces, the actual learning activity scenario taking into account its human factors. The second result is a taxonomy based on the speech acts theory; it allowed us to translate some motivation components as a set of speech acts observed in « Chat » discussion. The third result is a motivation descriptive model that reflects, from the traces, the perceptions and their origins. This model uses our taxonomy and is based on the adjacency pairs concept derived from conversational analysis. Finally, our conclusions explain further, our secondary results and provide opportunities for continuing our question about standards relevance.

L’avènement du génotypage à haut débit permet aujourd’hui de mieux exploiter le phénomène d’association, appelé déséquilibre de liaison (LD), qui existe entre les allèles de différents loci sur le génome. Dans ce contexte, l’utilité de certains modèles utilisés en cartographie de locus à effets quantitatifs (QTL) est remise en question. Les objectifs de ce travail étaient de discriminer entre des modèles utilisés en routine en cartographie et d’apporter des éclaircissements sur la meilleure façon d’exploiter le LD, par l’utilisation d’haplotypes, afin d’optimiser les modèles basés sur ce concept. On montre que les modèles uni-marqueur de liaison, développés en génétique il y a vingtaine d’années, comportent peu d’intérêts aujourd’hui avec le génotypage à haut débit. Dans ce contexte, on montre que les modèles uni-marqueur d’association comportent plus d’avantages que les modèles uni-marqueur de liaison, surtout pour des QTL ayant un effet petit ou modéré sur le phénotype, à condition de bien maîtriser la structure génétique entre individus. Les puissances et les robustesses statistiques de ces modèles ont été étudiées, à la fois sur le plan théorique et par simulations, afin de valider les résultats obtenus pour la comparaison de l’association avec la liaison. Toutefois, les modèles uni-marqueur ne sont pas aussi efficaces que les modèles utilisant des haplotypes dans la prise en compte du LD pour une cartographie fine de QTL. Des propriétés mathématiques reliées à la cartographie de QTL par l’exploitation du LD multiallélique capté par les modèles haplotypiques ont été explicitées et étudiées à l’aide d’une distance matricielle définie entre deux positions sur le génome. Cette distance a été exprimée algébriquement comme une fonction des coefficients du LD multiallélique. Les propriétés mathématiques liées à cette fonction montrent qu’il est difficile de bien exploiter le LD multiallélique, pour un génotypage à haut débit, si l’on ne tient pas compte uniquement de la similarité totale entre des haplotypes. Des études sur données réelles et simulées ont illustré ces propriétés et montrent une corrélation supérieure à 0.9 entre une statistique basée sur la distance matricielle et des résultats de cartographie. Cette forte corrélation a donné lieu à la proposition d’une méthode, basée sur la distance matricielle, qui aide à discriminer entre les modèles utilisés en cartographie.

Students diagnosed with specific learning disabilities struggle with spelling accuracy, but they do so for different reasons. For instance, students with dysgraphia, dyslexia, and oral-written language learning disability (OWL-LD) have distinct areas of weakness in cognitive processing and unique difficulties with the linguistic features necessary for accurate spelling (Silliman & Berninger, 2011). This project considered the spelling errors made by such students to determine if their unique learning profiles lead to distinct misspelling patterns. Academic summaries handwritten by 33 students diagnosed with dysgraphia (n=13), dyslexia (n=15), and OWL-LD (n=5) were analyzed for type/complexity and number of spelling errors. Additionally, the differences in error frequency and complexity were analyzed based on whether academic material had been listened to or read. Misspellings were extracted from the students' essays and evaluated using an unconstrained linguistic scoring system (POMAS). Then, the complexity/severity of the misspelling was computed using a complexity metric (POMplexity). Statistical results revealed that children within the diagnostic categories of dysgraphia, dyslexia, and OWL-LD appear to produce errors that are similar in complexity and frequency. Hence, students with specific learning disabilities do not appear to make patterns and numbers of errors specific to their diagnosis. Additionally, statistical results indicated that all students produced similar numbers of errors in both the reading and listening conditions, indicating that the mode of presentation did not affect spelling accuracy. When spelling errors were analyzed qualitatively, some differences across diagnostic categories and variability within groups was noted. Students with dysgraphia produced misspellings involving a phoneme addition or omission. Phonological and orthographic errors typical of younger children were characteristic of misspellings produced by students with dyslexia. Individuals with OWL-LD tended to omit essential vowels and were more likely to misspell the same word in multiple different ways. Overall, these results indicate that the subcategories of dysgraphia, dyslexia, and OWL-LD represent of gradients of impairment within the overarching category of specific learning disabilities. However, even within those subcategories, there is a wide degree of variability. Diagnostic categories, then, may suggest areas of linguistic weakness, but subcategories alone cannot be used for determining the nature of spelling intervention.

Diploma thesis deals with the construction of a moder semiconductor optical amplifier SOA. In the first chapter optical comunication and the use of optical amplifiers is described. In the next chapter some types of optical fibers, their chemical composition and properties are described in detail. The third chapter overviews optical amplifiers, their use today, describes their advantages and disadvantages and their proper use in optical comunications. The fourth chapter describes the solution of the objective, the right layout of separate blocks and connections used in measurements. Fifth chapter describes used components, describes their basic parameters and proper use in circuit. The last chapter evaluates outputs of measurements and their impact on the objective.

Institutional factors affecting implementation of policies are a reflection of the larger political context and setting of money in education. This has an impact on implementing accommodations for English Language Learners in standardized testing under No Child Left Behind. To see if this is true, four states: Indiana, New York, Tennessee and Wisconsin were chosen as examples of state policy adoption and their test contracts were collected from a test company. State accommodations for ELL in testing policy and state costs for standardized tests were analyzed in a comparative review. The diversity of methods in accommodation and lack of correlation between state standardized test costs to product illustrates institutional factors affecting NCLB implementation. Therefore it becomes essential for professional development to support states in implementing NCLB within an institutional context. Addressing these factors will lead to greater educational progress in U.S. federal policies.