Technology such as television, computers, and video games are often in the line for reasons of why people lack physical activity and tend to gain weight and become obese. In the case of video games, with the advent of the so called “serious games initiative”, a new breed of video games have come into place. Such games are called “exergames” and they are intended to motivate the user to do physical activity. Although there is some evidence that some types of Exergames are more physically demanding than traditional sedentary games, there is also evidence that suggests that such games are not really providing the intensity of exert that is at the recommended levels for a daily exercise. Currently, most exergames have a passive approach. There is no real tracking of the players progress, there is no assessment of his/her level of exert, no contextual information, and there is no adaptability on the game itself to change the conditions of the game and prompt the desired physiological response on the player. In this thesis we present research work done towards the design and development of an architecture and related systems that support a shift in the exertion game paradigm. The contributions of this work are enablers in the design and development of exertion games with a strict serious game approach. Such games should have “exercising” as the primary goal, and a game engine that has been developed under this scheme should be aware of the exertion context of the player. The game should be aware of the level of exertion of the player and adapt the gaming context (in-game variables and exertion interface settings) so that the player can reach a predefined exertion rate as desired. To support such degree of adaptability in a multimedia, multimodal system, we have proposed a system architecture that lays down the general guidelines for the design and development of such systems.

Engineering design often requires the optimisation of multiple objectives, and becomes significantly more difficult and time consuming when the response surfaces are multimodal, rather than unimodal. A surrogate model, also known as a metamodel, can be used to replace expensive computer simulations, accelerating single and multi-objective optimisation and the exploration of new design concepts. The main research focus of this work is to investigate the use of a neural network surrogate model to improve optimisation of multimodal surfaces. Several significant contributions derive from evaluating the Cascade Correlation neural network as the basis of a surrogate model. The contributions to the neural network community ultimately outnumber those to the optimisation community. The effects of training this surrogate on multimodal test functions are explored. The Cascade Correlation neural network is shown to map poorly such response surfaces. A hypothesis for this weakness is formulated and tested. A new subdivision technique is created that addresses this problem; however, this new technique requires excessively large datasets upon which to train. The primary conclusion of this work is that Cascade Correlation neural networks form an unreliable basis for a surrogate model, despite successes reported in the literature. A further contribution of this work is the enhancement of an open source optimisation toolkit, achieved by the first integration of a truly multi-objective optimisation algorithm.

This thesis aims at contributing to the research on academic conference paper presentations, particularly to the discussion sessions that follow them. The main purpose of this study is to explore the speaker's expression of evaluation in the discussion session of two specialised conference paper presentations in Linguistics and Chemistry from a multimodal approach. I set out to investigate evaluation in spoken academic discourse beyond the traditional linguistic approach to foreground the role of kinesics and paralanguage that co-occur with the linguistic expression of evaluation. To meet the objective of the thesis, the theoretical framework was embedded in techniques of genre analysis (Bhatia 1993, Swales 1990) and discourse analysis, including the theoretical orientations of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1978, 1985a), conversation analysis (Schegloff & Sack 1973), pragmatics (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987), and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001). This framework allowed me to identify the structure of the interaction, the rhetorical moves in which the interaction is organised, and finally the linguistic and multimodal expression of evaluation that articulates the rhetoric of the interaction.

Sistema de Gestión de Interfaces de Usuario (UIMS) capaz de analizar el comportamiento de los usuarios (de forma constante) para establecer perfiles de interacción, modificando los niveles léxico, sintáctico y semántico de la interfaz (canal de comunicación, apariencia, lenguaje, etc.) para adaptarlos a las características cognitivas, perceptivas y motrices de usuarios concretos.

Perçus pendant longtemps comme faisant parti d'un secteur d'activité économique archaïque, les terminaux portuaires de conteneurs constituent un maillon important et méconnue de plusieurs chaînes de transport intermodal. La croissance rapide des volumes de conteneurs manutentionnés dans ces terminaux a pour conséquence d'entraîner une congestion de ceux-ci et, par le fait même, une perturbation des réseaux d'approvisionnements de plusieurs entreprises. En conséquence, l'objectif de ce mémoire peut être divisé en deux temps. Dans un premier temps, la première partie de ce mémoire vise à comprendre le fonctionnement et les problématiques liées à la gestion des terminaux portuaires de conteneurs. Pour ce faire, une revue de la littérature liée à la planification et la gestion des terminaux portuaires de conteneurs est effectuée, ainsi qu'une étude des processus de ces terminaux. Dans un second temps, ce mémoire vise à proposer des pistes de solutions afin de faciliter la transition des conteneurs dans ces terminaux. La principale piste de solution identifiée est l'application des systèmes de transport intelligents aux terminaux portuaires de conteneurs. Dans ce sens, une étude comparative de l'utilisation des systèmes de transport intelligents entre les ports de la côte est canadienne et les ports du reste du monde est présentée. Ensuite, une première version d’un simulateur des opérations d’un terminal portuaire de conteneurs est développée, afin d'être utilisée comme outil d'analyse pour mesurer l'impact d'une introduction plus importante des systèmes de transport intelligents dans les terminaux portuaires de conteneurs. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Terminaux portuaires de conteneurs, systèmes de transport intelligents, simulation, transport intermodal, transport de marchandises.

When college composition teachers carefully consider the role and function of multimodal composition in their classrooms, they can enhance the teaching of writing and communication, engage and empower students, and better prepare students for the challenges and possibilities of life in our rapidly changing digital age. To meet this teaching challenge and study the impact of multimedia on student writers, I designed this mixed-methods case study to examine how video documentary essays function as a form of multimodal composition in first-year composition courses and how these types of texts may enhance the teaching of traditional composition skills, as well as contribute to the academic and professional communication skills of students. The study was designed to determine how students react to multimodal composition and how they view the benefits as well as pitfalls of composing new kinds of texts in their first-year writing courses. This teacher research was conducted at a mid-sized, urban community college located in southern Tennessee. I used surveys, interviews and reflection essays to collect the data from student participants. I then analyzed the collected data for this project. My conclusions are that students learn valuable skills in the multimodal composition process, such as organization and time management, in addition to learning how to use movie-making software. Students also develop a keener sense of audience and purpose when they compose video documentary essays. Multimodal composition can be used to teach traditional writing and rhetoric. Multimodal composition can be used to enhance the teaching of writing and communication, engage and empower students to participate in convergence culture, and better prepare them for the challenges and possibilities of life in our rapidly changing digital age.

This thesis explores ways evangelical Christian communicators remediate traditional ministry functions and community formation onto new media platforms. This exploration is framed by a discussion of literacy and digital composing reflecting Stuart Selber’s multiliteracy approach to teaching digital composition. The author positions evangelical churches’ approaches to texts, community, education, and communication as components of a distinct literacy that is often at odds with values, controls, and cultures found on the Internet and in new media. Discovering how church communicators use new media, how their education prepares them for effective digital communication, and how external sources, such as expert authors, aid the transition from print to new media helps us understand the gap between Selber’s ideal multiliteracy and the reality of new media literacy for this group. This also expands our understanding of digital composition, and the role it plays in both the classroom and in all students’ greater lives.

Despite being the most preventable cancer, cervical cancer remains the third leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Over 85% of cervical cancer incidence and mortality occurs in low-resource countries where screening programs for early detection are either inadequate or unavailable. In the developed world, where screening programs are well organized, incidence and mortality rates are greatly reduced. Recent advances in optical imaging have the potential to enable cervical cancer screening at the point-of-care, even in the hands of less experienced providers. High performance optical imaging systems can be constructed at relatively low cost, and image analysis can be automated; thus, these technologies may provide a way to bridge the gap to cervical cancer screening for developing countries. This work focuses on the design, construction, and clinical testing of a novel multimodal optical imaging (combination of wide-field imaging and high-resolution) for early detection of cervical neoplasia. The Multimodal Digital Imager (MDI) acquires in vivo images of cervical tissue in fluorescence, narrow band reflectance, and orthogonal polarized reflectance modes using multiple illumination wavelengths. The High Resolution Microendoscope (HRME) was used to interrogate clinically suspicious areas with subcellular spatial resolution, revealing changes in nuclear to cytoplasmic area ratio. In vivo image data from the wide-field system was combined with image data from a high- resolution microendoscope (HRME) in order to test the effectiveness of the multimodal optical imaging in discriminating between cervical neoplasia and non-neoplastic. Multimodal optical imaging coupled with computer aided diagnostic achieved a sensitivity of 82% and specificity of 85% for discriminating cervical neoplastic from non-neoplastic This work has demonstrated that multimodal optical imaging; combination of wide-field and high-resolution optical imaging of the cervix can assist in the detection of cervical neoplasia and can be implemented effectively in a low-resource setting.

An interesting problem in computer vision is that of image registration, which plays an important role in many vision-based recognition and motion analysis applications. Of particular interest among data registration problems are multimodal image registration problems, where the image data sets are acquired using different imaging modalities. There are several important issues that make real-world multimodal registration a difficult problem to solve. First, images are often characterized by illumination and contrast non-uniformities. Such image non-uniformities result in local minima along the convergence plane that make it difficult for local optimization schemes to converge to the correct solution. Second, real-world images are often contaminated with signal noise, making the extraction of meaningful features for comparison purposes difficult to accomplish. Third, feature space differences make performing direct comparisons between the different data sets with a reasonable level of accuracy a challenging problem. Finally, solving the multimodal registration problem can be computationally expensive for large images. This thesis presents a probabilistic complex phase representation (PCPR) objective function for registering images acquired using different imaging modalities. A probabilistic multi-scale approach is introduced to create image representations based on local phase relationships extracted using complex wavelets. An objective function is introduced for assessing the alignment between the images based on a Geman-McClure error distribution model between the probabilistic complex phase representations of the images. Experimental results show that the proposed PCPR objective function can provide improved registration accuracies when compared to existing objective functions.

Current multimodal interfaces for complex systems, such as those designed using the Ecological Interface Design (EID) methodology, have largely focused on effective design of interfaces that treat each sensory modality as either an independent channel of information or as a way to provide redundant information. However, there are many times when operationally related information is presented in different sensory modalities. There is very little research that has examined how this information in different modalities can be linked at a perceptual level. When related information is presented through multiple sensory modalities, interface designers will require perceptual methods for linking relevant information together across modalities. This thesis examines one possible crossmodal perceptual relationship, temporal synchrony, and evaluates whether the relationship is useful in the design of multimodal interfaces for complex systems. Two possible metrics for the evaluation of crossmodal perceptual relationships were proposed: resistance to changes in workload, and stream monitoring awareness. Two experiments were used to evaluate these metrics. The results of the first experiment showed that temporal rate synchrony was not resistant to changes in workload, manipulated through a secondary visual task. The results of the second experiment showed that participants who used crossmodal temporal rate synchrony to link information in a multimodal interface did not achieve better performance in the monitoring of the two streams of information being presented over equivalent unimodal interfaces. Taken together, these findings suggest that temporal rate synchrony may not be an effective method for linking information across modalities. Crossmodal perceptual relationships may be very different from intra-modal perceptual relationships. However, methods for linking information across sensory modalities are still an important goal for interface designers, and a key feature of future multimodal interface design for complex systems.