This thesis explores approaches to modelling individual differences in language use. The differences under consideration fall into two broad categories: Variation of the personality projected through language, and modelling of language alignment behaviour between dialogue partners. In a way, these two aspects oppose each other – language related to varying personalities should be recognisably different, while aligning speakers agree on common language during a dialogue. The central hypothesis is that such variation can be captured and produced with restricted computational means. Results from research on personality psychology and psycholinguistics are transformed into a series of lexically-based Affective Language Production Models (ALPMs) which are parameterisable for personality and alignment. The models are then explored by varying the parameters and observing the language they generate. ALPM-1 and ALPM-2 re-generate dialogues from existing utterances which are ranked and filtered according to manually selected linguistic and psycholinguistic features that were found to be related to personality. ALPM-3 is based on true overgeneration of paraphrases from semantic representations using the OPENCCG framework for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), in combination with corpus-based ranking and filtering by way of n-gram language models. Personality effects are achieved through language models built from the language of speakers of known personality. In ALPM-4, alignment is captured via a cache language model that remembers the previous utterance and thus influences the choice of the next. This model provides a unified treatment of personality and alignment processes in dialogue. In order to evaluate the ALPMs, dialogues between computer characters were generated and presented to human judges who were asked to assess the characters’ personality. In further internal simulations, cache language models were used to reproduce results of psycholinguistic priming studies. The experiments showed that the models are capable of producing natural language dialogue which exhibits human-like personality and alignment effects.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a 6.5m diameter, segmented, deployable telescope for cryogenic IR space astronomy (similar to 40K). The JWST Observatory architecture includes the Optical Telescope Element (OTE) and the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) element that contains four science instruments (SI), including a guider. OSIM is a full field, cryogenic, optical simulator of the JWST OTE. It is the "Master Tool" for verifying the cryogenic alignment and optical performance of ISIM by providing simulated point source/star images to each of the four Science Instruments in ISIM. Included in OSIM is a Pupil Imaging Module (PIM) - a large format CCD used for measuring pupil alignment. Located at a virtual stop location within OSIM, the PIM records superimposed shadow images of pupil alignment reference (PAR) targets located in the OSIM and SI pupils. The OSIM Pupil Imaging Module was described by Brent Bos, et al, at SPIE in 2011 prior to ISIM testing. We have recently completed the third and final ISIM cryogenic performance verification test before ISIM was integrated with the OTE. In this paper, we describe PIM implementation, performance, and measurement results.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis examined how the Navy's Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (PEO C4I) has performed enterprise risk management (ERM). Based on ERM literature, the study developed an analytical framework to assess PEO C4I's ERM practices against documented ERM best practices, including evaluating a new risk in terms of its impact on existing risks and ensuring risks are managed at the most detailed level possible. The thesis also utilized organizational alignment literature to include organizational alignment principles in the evaluation. Key principles include 1) every employee has the responsibility to manage risk and 2) multiple teams are able to manage a single risk. The resultant analytical framework was applied to PEO C4I and documented for application to other organizations. PEO C4I performed well in the areas of 1) evaluating risks in areas other than the originating program office and 2) providing the framework to elevate risks to leadership. PEO C4I could use improvement in cross-team risk coordination and development of enterprise models to provide context for enterprise risks. Recommended interventions focus on having more functional areas involved in risk mitigation and developing a common enterprise architecture to improve understanding of potential areas of risk. / Civilian, Department of the Navy

The growing field of high-order aspheric and freeform optical fabrication has inspired the creation of optical surfaces and systems which are difficult to align. Advances in optical alignment technology are critical to fabricating and integrating aspheric components in advanced optical systems. This dissertation explores the field of optical alignment with a computer-generated hologram (CGH) used as a reference. A CGH is a diffractive optic which may be used to create a desired phase profile across a beam of light, project irradiance patterns, or serve as a mask for an incident beam. The alignment methods presented in this dissertation are concerned with the use of a CGH to create reference phase profiles, or "wavefronts" , in a beam. In one application a set of axisymmetric CGH references are co-aligned. Each CGH has also been aligned to an aspheric mirror so the co-alignment of the CGH references is also a co-alignment of the aspheric mirrors. Another application is concerned with aligning an interferometer to test an aspheric mirror surface. The interferometer measures a "null" interference pattern when its wavefront accommodates a known surface profile. In this alignment application the CGH creates wavefronts which accommodate a known set of small spherical reference features at the test surface. An interference null from all the "phase fiducial" reference features indicates an aligned projection of the CGH. The CGH co-alignment method is implemented on a 4-mirror prime focus corrector known as the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Wide Field Corrector (HET WFC). It is shown that this method was very successful for centration alignment of some mirrors, whereas mechanical stability was the hardware limitation for other degrees of freedom. The additional alignment methods used in this project are described in detail and the expected alignment of the HET WFC is reported.The fabrication, characterization and application of spherical phase fiducials is demonstrated in a CGH-corrected Fizeau test prototype. It is shown that these reference features achieve <±1.5µm transverse alignment precision. A pair of phase fiducials is also applied to constrain the clocking and magnification of a projected wavefront. Fabrication and coordinate measurement of the features present the dominant challenges in these demonstrations.

Would you like a stranger more who shifts his/her attitudes to more closely align with yours? How would you feel if he/she aligned with everyone as opposed to just you? In Experiment 1, participants discussed with a partner disagreed upon social issues and received false feedback about whether the partner engaged in attitude alignment (shifted his/her attitude toward the participant’s attitude) following discussion. Participants also received false feedback about proportion of similarity (25%, 50%, or 75%) to the partner. Participants reported greater attraction toward partners who engaged in attitude alignment and who were more similar. However, similarity only predicted attraction in the absence of attitude alignment. Additionally, partner attitude alignment led to participant attitude alignment, and perceived reasoning ability marginally mediated the attitude alignment-attraction relationship. Similar to Experiment 1, participants in Experiment 2 received attitude alignment feedback, but they also received feedback about whether the partner engaged in attitude alignment with no others besides the participant (selective) or with many others besides the participant (unselective). Participants reported greater attraction toward partners who engaged in attitude alignment with them regardless of the partners’ attitude alignment with others. Perceived reasoning ability again mediated the attitude alignment-attraction relationship, and appeared to be more important in explaining this relation than cognitive evaluation or inferred attraction. Finally, participants reported greater trust and respect for partners who engaged in attitude alignment, but were no more willing to help those partners. This work extends our understanding of attitude alignment and its potential to affect interpersonal relationships, and it considers the influence of judgments about individuals outside of the dyad (i.e., alignment with others relative to alignment with the self).

An individual's initial acceptance of a recruitment pitch from a community-based social movement organization is usually based upon minimal information about the group and its efforts. It is only during the subsequent period of orientation that new members begin to learn more about the organization. During this period, the retention of new members is dependent on the successful alignment of individual and organizational frames. The failure to achieve such an alignment is likely to result in the new member's departure from the organization. This study explores the frame alignment process during early orientation to community-based SMOs. Using nineteen qualitative interviews with three different community organizing efforts in Baltimore, the study suggests that organizational members feel most motivated to continue involvement when they feel that the organization is effective.

Dans le contexte globalisé de l'industrie moderne, l'innovation est devenue un enjeu majeur des entreprises. L'innovation ne doit plus être seulement vue comme le moyen de pérenniser ses activités à long terme, mais aussi comme une composante essentielle des activités quotidiennes de pilotage des organisations. Pour affronter ce problème, et plus particulièrement au sein du Pôle Innovation des Laboratoires Pierre Fabre, l'approche choisie se situe au croisement de deux ingénieries. L'ingénierie d'entreprise, premier prisme de notre étude, permet de déceler ce qui relève des activités quotidiennes dans les processus exécutés, tandis que l'ingénierie d'innovation révèle ce qui relève d'un processus d'innovation spécifique. Au croisement de ces deux ingénieries, une technique spécifique d'alignement a permis de définir une approche originale de management centré sur le processus d'innovation et favorisant la détection, le diagnostic et l'évaluation d'innovation potentielle au cœur même des activités quotidiennes et opérationnelles de réalisation des projets. L'ensemble des propositions de management de l'innovation ont été appliquées au Pôle Innovation, terreau de notre expérimentation, mettant en évidence des axes d'amélioration originaux. / In the globalised context of modern industry, innovation has become a major challenge for enterprises. Innovation should not only be seen as a way to sustain long-term activities, but also as an essential component of daily management activities of organizations. To address this problem, especially in the Innovation Center of Pierre Fabre Laboratories, the chosen approach is located at the crossroads of two engineerings. Enterprise engineering is the first prism of our study, detecting what is part of the daily activities in the running processes, while innovation engineering reveals what is specific to an innovation process. At the crossroads of these two engineerings, a specific alignment identifies an original management approach focused on the innovation process and promoting the detection, diagnosis and assessment of potential innovation in the daily activities and projects. All the proposals for an innovation management have been applied to the Innovation Center, a breeding ground for our experimentation, highlighting original areas for improvement.

Initiatives in many countries to improve learner performances in mathematics in poor communities have been described as largely unsuccessful mainly due to their cursory treatment of curriculum alignment. Empirical evidence has shown that in high achieving countries the notion of coherence was strongly anchored in cognitively demanding mathematics programs. The view that underpins this study is that a cognitively demanding and coherent mathematics curriculum has potential to level the playing field for the poor and less privileged learners. In South Africa beyond 1994, little has been done to understand the potential of such coherent curriculum in the context of the NCSM. This study examined the levels of cognitive demand and alignment between the written, tested and taught NCSM. The study adopted Critical Theory as its underlying paradigm and used a multiple case study approach. Wilson and Bertenthal’s (2005) dimensions of curriculum coherence provided the theoretical framework while Webb’s (2002) categorical coherence criterion together with Porter’s (2004) Cognitive Demand tools were used to analyse curriculum and assessment documents. Classroom observations of lesson sequences were analysed following Businskas’ (2008) model of forms of mathematical connections since connections of different types form the bases for high cognitive demand (Porter, 2002). The results indicated that higher order cognitive skills and processes are emphasized consistently in the new curriculum documents. However, in the 2008 examination papers the first examinations of the new FET curriculum, lower order cognitive skills and processes appeared to be emphasized, a finding supported by Umalusi (2009) and Edwards (2010). Classroom observations pointed to teachers focusing more on rote learning of both concepts and procedures and less on procedural and conceptual understanding. Given the widespread evidence of the tested curriculum impacting on the taught curriculum, this study suggests that this lack of alignment between the advocated curriculum on one hand, the tested and the taught curricula on the other, needs to be investigated further for it endangers the teaching and learning of higher order cognitive skills and processes in the FET mathematics classrooms for the poor and less privileged. Broader evidence suggests that this would work against efforts towards supporting the upward mobility of poor children in the labour market.

O advento do sequenciamento de nova geração (NGS - Next Generation Sequencing) nos últimos anos proporcionou um aumento expressivo no número de projetos genômicos. De maneira simplificada, as máquinas sequenciadoras geram como resultado fragmentos de DNA que são utilizados por programas montadores de genoma. Esses programas tentam juntar os fragmentos de DNA de modo a obter a representação completa da sequência genômica (por exemplo um cromossomo) da espécie sendo sequenciada. Em alguns casos o processo de montagem pode ser executado com maior facilidade para organismos com genomas de tamanhos pequenos (por exemplo bactérias com genoma em torno de 5Mpb), através de pipelines que automatizam a maior parte da tarefa. Um cenário mais complicado surge quando a espécie possui genoma com grande comprimento (acima de 1Gpb) e elementos repetidos, como no caso de alguns eucariotos. Nesses casos o resultado da montagem é geralmente composto por milhares de fragmentos (chamados de contigs), uma ordem de magnitude muito superior ao número de cromossomos estimado para um organismo (comumente da ordem de dois dígitos), dando origem a uma montagem altamente fragmentada. Uma atividade comum nesses projetos é a comparação da montagem com a de outro genoma como forma de validação e também para identificação de regiões conservadas entre os organismos. Embora o problema de alinhamento par-a-par de genomas grandes seja bem contornado por abordagens existentes, o alinhamento múltiplo (AM) de genomas grandes em estado fragmentado ainda é uma tarefa de difícil resolução, por demandar alto custo computacional e grande quantidade de tempo. Este trabalho consiste em uma metologia para fazer alinhamento múltiplo de genomas grandes de eucariotos com montagens altamente fragmentadas. Nossa implementação, baseada em alinhamento estrela, se mostrou capaz de fazer AM de grupos de montagens com diversos níveis de fragmentação. O maior deles, um conjunto de 5 genomas de répteis, levou 14 horas de processamento para fornecer um mapa de regiões conservadas entre as espécies. O algoritmo foi implementado em um software que batizamos de FROG (FRagment Overlap multiple Genome alignment), de código aberto e disponível sob licença GPLv3. / The advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in recent years has led to an expressive increase in the number of genomic projects. In a simplified way, sequencing machines generate DNA fragments that are used by genome assembler software. These programs try to merge the DNA fragments to obtain the complete representation of the genomic sequence (for example a chromosome) of the species being sequenced. In some cases the assembling process can be performed more easily for organisms with small-sized genomes (e.g. bacteria with a genome length of approximately 5Mpb) through pipelines that automate most of the task. A trickier scenario arises when the species has a very large genome (above 1Gbp) and complex elements, as in the case of some eukaryotes. In those cases the result of the assembly is usually composed of thousands of fragments (called contigs), an order of magnitude much higher than the number of chromosomes estimated for an organism (usually in the order two digits), giving rise to a highly fragmented assembly. A common activity in these projects is the comparison of the assembly with that of another genome as a form of validation and also to identify common elements between organisms. Although the problem of pairwise alignment of large genomes is well circumvented by existing approaches, multiple alignment of large genomes with highly fragmented assemblies remains a difficult task due to its time and computational requirements. This work consists of a methodology for doing multiple alignment of large eukaryotic genomes with highly fragmented assemblies, a problem that few solutions are able to cope with. Our star alignment-based implementation, was able to accomplish a MSA of groups of assemblies with different levels of fragmentation. The largest of them, a set of 5 reptilian genomes where the B. jararaca assembly (800,000 contigs, N50 of 3.1Kbp) was used as anchor, took 14 hours of execution time to provide a map of conserved regions among the participating species. The algorithm was implemented in a software named FROG (FRagment Overlap multiple Genome alignment), available under the General Public License v3 (GPLv3) terms.

O setor de telecomunicações tem papel essencial na vida das pessoas e na economia mundial, uma vez que este diminui as distâncias e liga qualquer parte do mundo em questão de segundos. No Brasil este mercado é dominado por poucas e grandes empresas que enfrentam o dinamismo da alta competitividade entre elas, e de outras variáveis de mercado como, por exemplo, a agência reguladora do setor, Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações - ANATEL. Este cenário faz com que as empresas do setor sejam constantemente impactadas pela emergência de estratégias, ou seja, estratégias que não foram previamente planejadas. A agilidade no alinhamento destas estratégias se faz essencial para o sucesso da execução das mesmas e instigou esta pesquisa que buscou entender como o alinhamento de estratégias emergentes é feito em uma operadora de telecomunicações. Baseado em um referencial teórico que aprofundou conceitos de estratégia, estratégia emergente e alinhamento estratégico, este estudo de caso realizado em uma operadora de telecomunicações, através da análise de entrevistas aprofundadas sobre a realidade da empresa detectou que quatro características bastante fortes são as bases para que o alinhamento estratégico aconteça nesta empresa: Ausência de processos estruturados, autonomia dos agentes, priorização da agilidade e pré-disposição ao risco. A descoberta destas características veio de encontro com os objetivos desta pesquisa, que além de investigar e analisar como o alinhamento de estratégias emergentes é feito em uma operadora de telecomunicações, considerando todas as particularidades do setor, também buscava aprofundar conhecimento sobre as práticas do mercado de telecomunicações no que tange o alinhamento de estratégias emergentes, identificar práticas deste mercado que possam contribuir com melhores práticas em outros mercados e averiguar elementos provenientes da experiência prática que possam contribuir com as teorias exploradas. Por fim, em nome do objetivo específico de apontar com base na teoria oportunidades de melhorias práticas, foram estudados quatro modelos teóricos de alinhamento estratégico, encontrando assim qual seria o que melhor para a realidade da empresa. / The telecommunications industry plays a key role in people\'s lives and in the world economy. It reduces distance and connects anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. In Brazil, this market is dominated by a few large companies that face the dynamism of high competitiveness between them, and the dynamism of other market variables as, for example, the sector\'s regulatory agency, the National Telecommunications Agency-ANATEL. This scenario ensures the companies within the telecommunications sector are constantly impacted by the emergence of strategies, i.e. strategies that were not planned in advance. The expeditious alignment of these strategies is essential to the success of their implementation and this fact encouraged this research to investigate and understand how the emerging strategies alignment is done in a telecommunications operator. Based on a theoretical framework that deepened on the concepts of strategy, emerging strategy and strategic alignment, this case study held in a telecommunications operator, through the analysis of in-depth interviews about the reality of the company, detected four strong characteristics that are the basis for strategic alignment to happen in this company: autonomy of agents, absence of structured processes, prioritization of expeditiousness, and predisposition to the risk. The discovery of these characteristics came to meet the objectives of this research. In addition to investigating and analyzing how the emerging strategies alignment is done in a telecommunications operator (considering all the particularities of the sector) this research also sought to deepen knowledge of the telecommunication market practices regarding the alignment of emerging strategies, identification of market practices that can contribute to best practices in other markets, and to find out elements from the practical experience that can contribute to the theories explored. Finally, on behalf of the specific goal that is to indicate based on theory, opportunities of practical improvement, four theoretical models of strategic alignment were studied, finding so which is the best for the company reality