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Automatic Identification System (AIS) was introduced with the overall aim to promote efficiency and safety of navigation, protection of environment, and safety of life at sea. Consequently, ship-borne AIS was implemented on a mandatory basis by IMO in 2000 and later amendments to chapter V of Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention. Therefore SOLAS Convention vessels were required to carry AIS in a phased approach, from I" July 2002 to end of December 2004. The intention is to provide more precise information and a clear traffic view in navigation operations, particularly in anti-collision operation. This mandatory implementation of AIS has raised a number of issues with respect to its success in fulfilment of the intended role. In order to improve the efficiency of the AIS in navigation operation, this research mainly focused on the accuracy of AIS information, and practical use of the technology on board the ships. The intentions were to assess reliability of data, level of human failure associated with AIS, and the degree of actual use of the technology by navigators. This research firstly provided impressions about AIS technology for anti-collision operation and other marine operation and, about a system's approach to the issue of human failure in marine risk management. Secondly, this research has assessed reliability of AIS data by examination of data collected through three AIS data studies. Thirdly, it has evaluated navigators' attitude and behaviour to AIS usage by analysing the data from navigators' feedback collected through the AIS questionnaire survey focused on their perceptions about different aspects of AIS related to its use. This research revealed that some aspects of the AIS technology and some features of its users need further attention and improvement, so as to achieve its intended objectives in navigation. This study finally contributed in proposing the AIS User Satisfaction Model as a suitable framework for evaluation of navigators' satisfaction and extent of the use of AIS. This model can probably be used as the basis for measuring navigators' attitude and behaviour about other similar maritime technologies.

There is a requirement for systems methodologies and approaches that can cope with real life information systems that are subject to changing situations and therefore changing requirements. This has not been achieved previously and has seen a gap open up between information systems and information technology. it is recognised that information technology solutions can adapt to changing situations and subsequently changing requirements, however, this has not been possible for information systems thinking. This represents itself in the real world through information systems being used that no longer meet their original objectives and can provide a significant blockage to achieving effective work.

Children with cerebral palsy suffer from primary abnormalities that affect their ability to control movement of body segments. There is evidence that the core (trunk and pelvis) of the body activates prior to the periphery (extremities) during human movement, and so improvement in controlling the core first, then the periphery, could lead to carrying out activities of daily living more effectively. Virtual rehabilitation is developing as a method for the training and assessment of movement function, with evidence suggesting games controlled by the periphery can lead to improvements in activities of daily living, but virtual rehabilitation on the core is scarce. Study One (feasibility study) assessed the changes in gait in response to a six week virtual reality intervention training the core in children with cerebral palsy diplegia (n = 5), using a laboratory based virtual reality system. Improvement in selective motor control of the core occurred after VR training, represented by increased VR game performance (maximum settled speed). Participants showed that single plane trunk movement was better controlled than cross plane trunk movement, trunk rotation was better controlled than trunk tilt, and the trunk was controlled better than the pelvis. Changes in game performance did not transfer to improvements in gait as measured using the Gait Deviation Index. Study Two used a portable virtual reality system in primary schools to train the core and periphery in children with cerebral palsy. A randomised, cross-over design on children with cerebral palsy (n = 8) found that VR game performance improved after receiving VR training, represented by an increase in maximum settled speed and a reduction in variation of pass distance. Single plane movement of the trunk was better controlled than cross plane movement during each assessment, ankle control was better than knee control at each assessment, and control of peripheral segments was better than control of core segments. There were no significant differences in performance of the sit -to-stand movement in response to core training (one week) followed by peripheral training (one week), or when training order was reversed. Overall, Study One and Study Two found no improvements in activities of daily living. Low levels of exposure to virtual reality training, inappropriate outcome measures, in addition to low sample sizes, may have reduced the effect on performance of activities of daily living. Study Two demonstrated that portable virtual reality training is feasible in schools, and can be provided on a daily basis to children with movement difficulties. Overall, the findings provide an important insight into virtual reality training aimed at improving control of the core and periphery in children with cerebral palsy.

This thesis addresses research on the introduction, use and effectiveness of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), learning resource supports and experiences of applying these as blended learning supports for modules and programmes in universities. The author's five selected papers, which span seven years, address these perspectives and outline experiences of how student feedback can inform design of the learning blend and the effects on student learning experiences in business higher education. The papers relate to linked strands of enquiry within the set of publications, namely: Web-based Learning Supports for Higher Education; Web-based administrative supports and Infrastructure Issues for Higher Education; Developing e-resources for Higher Education Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs); Use of e-Learning resources and VLEs to support action learning for postgraduate students in Higher Education; Developing models to evaluate Student Satisfaction. The contribution to knowledge consists of a foundation for understanding new skills and competences for digital supports as they contribute to blended learning environments and in their support of different learning approaches and for a range of historical approaches that evolve to currently used methods in strategy, design; infrastructure; student feedback/assessment issues. Also evaluations undertaken in support of the papers demonstrate how academics and students behave, relate and learn in digital media, including resource provision and perspectives on how instructors' can promote blended, problem-based and action learning. The papers present the development of a series of evaluation models that have proven to be robust in terms of adapting to changes in the support of VLEs, the differing blends and the approaches to learning. The models are flexible enough to incorporate the variable elements of a full range of philosophical stances to evaluations, where necessity requires.

In recent years, such vast archives of video information have become available that human annotation of content is no longer feasible; automation of video content analysis is therefore highly desirable. The recognition of semantic content in images is a problem that relies on prior knowledge and learnt information and that, to date, has only been partially solved. Salient analysis, on the other hand, is statistically based and highlights regions that are distinct from their surroundings, while also being scalable and repeatable. The arrangement of salient information into hierarchical tree structures in the spatial and temporal domains forms an important step to bridge the semantic salient gap. Salient regions are identified using region analysis, rank ordered and documented in a tree for further analysis. A structure of this kind contains all the information in the original video and forms an intermediary between video processing and video understanding, transforming video analysis to a syntactic database analysis problem. This contribution demonstrates the formulation of spatio-temporal salient trees the syntax to index them, and provides an interface for higher level cognition in machine vision.

The classical Hospitals / Residents problem (HR) is a many-to-one bipartite matching problem involving preferences, motivated by centralised matching schemes arising in entry level labour markets, the assignment of pupils to schools and higher education admissions schemes, among its many applications. The particular requirements of these matching schemes may lead to generalisations of HR that involve additional inputs or constraints on an acceptable solution. In this thesis we study such variants of HR from an algorithmic and integer programming viewpoint. The Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples (HRC) is a variant of HR that is important in practical applications because it models the case where couples submit joint preference lists over pairs of (typically geographically close) hospitals. It is known that an instance of HRC need not admit a stable matching. We show that deciding whether an instance of HRC admits a stable matching is NP-complete even under some very severe restrictions on the lengths and the structure of the participants’ preference lists. However, we show that under certain restrictions on the lengths of the agents’ preference lists, it is possible to find a maximum cardinality stable matching or report that none exists in polynomial time. Since an instance of HRC need not admit a stable matching, it is natural to seek the ‘most stable’ matching possible, i.e., a matching that admits the minimum number of blocking pairs. We use a gap-introducing reduction to establish an inapproximability bound for the problem of finding a matching in an instance of HRC that admits the minimum number of blocking pairs. Further, we show how this result might be generalised to prove that a number of minimisation problems based on matchings having NP-complete decision versions have the same inapproximability bound. We also show that this result holds for more general minimisation problems having NP-complete decisions versions that are not based on matching problems. Further, we present a full description of the first Integer Programming (IP) model for finding a maximum cardinality stable matching or reporting that none exists in an arbitrary instance of HRC. We present empirical results showing the average size of a maximum cardinality stable matching and the percentage of instances admitting stable matching taken over a number of randomly generated instances of HRC with varying properties. We also show how this model might be generalised to the variant of HRC in which ties are allowed in either the hospitals’ or the residents’ preference lists, the Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples and Ties (HRCT). We also describe and prove the correctness of the first IP model for finding a maximum cardinality ‘most stable’ matching in an arbitrary instance of HRC. We describe empirical results showing the average number of blocking pairs admitted by a most-stable matching as well as the average size of a maximum cardinality ‘most stable’ matching taken over a number of randomly generated instances of HRC with varying properties. Further, we examine the output when the IP model for HRCT is applied to real world instances arising from the process used to assign medical graduates to Foundation Programme places in Scotland in the years 2010-2012. The Hungarian Higher Education Allocation Scheme places a number of additional constraints on the feasibility of an allocation and this gives rise to various generalisations of HR. We show how a number of these additional requirements may be modelled using IP techniques by use of an appropriate combination of IP constraints. We present IP models for HR with Stable Score Limits and Ties, HR with Paired Applications, Ties and Stable Score limits, HR with Common Quotas, Ties and Stable Score Limits and also HR with Lower Quotas, Ties and Stable Score limits that model these generalisations of HR. The Teachers’ Allocation Problem (TAP) is a variant of HR that models the allocation of trainee teachers to supervised teaching positions in Slovakia. In TAP teachers express preference lists over pairs of subjects at individual schools. It is known that deciding whether an optimal matching exists that assigns all of the trainee teachers is NP-complete for a number of restricted cases. We describe IP models for finding a maximum cardinality matching in an arbitrary TAP instance and for finding a maximum cardinality stable matching, or reporting that none exists, in a TAP instance where schools also have preferences. We show the results when applying the first model to the real data arising from the allocation of trainee teachers to schools carried out at P.J. Safarik University in Kosice in 2013.

The research that is described in detail in this thesis investigates key characteristics of the operation of Tunable Laser Diodes (TLDs), such as Continuous Wave (CW) operation, discontinuous, continuous and quasicontinuous wavelength tuning and direct Intensity Modulation (IM) (small-signal analysis). Two software simulation tools were used to model the TLDs and investigate their operation, Crosslight PICS3D and VPI (Virtual Photonics Incorporated). Two different Free-Carrier (FC) contributions to the refractive index change of the TLD during FC tuning were investigated, the FC plasma effect and the band-filling effect which uses the Kramers-Kronig (KK) relations (KK effect). It was found that the band-filling effect is heavily underestimated due to the lack of its investigation in published literature as it is the main contributor to the refractive index change instead of the plasma effect. Investigation on different types of wavelength tuning also took place. It was found that with careful design of the passive sections, such as the κL product, grating composition, section length and passive waveguide thickness the discontinuous, continuous and quasicontinuous tuning range can be enhanced greatly. The issue of output power decrease during discontinuous tuning in bulk and Multiple Quantum Well (MQW) TLDs was also addressed and it was found that the power drop can be delayed at latter stages of the tuning range by carefully selecting the Lorentzian lineshape of the gain spectrum. A power stabilisation was realised with continuous tuning. A small-signal analysis of directly intensity modulated TLDs during discontinuous tuning was also made and was found that the increase of the resonance frequency depends mainly on the increase of the differential gain with the wavelength change.

In previous research, scientists were able to use transient facial thermal features extracted from Thermal Infra-Red Images (TIRIs) for making binary distinction between the affective states. For example, thermal asymmetries localised in facial TIRIs have been used to distinguish anxiety and deceit. Since affective human-computer interaction would require machines to distinguish between the subtle facial expressions of affective states, computers’ able to make such binary distinctions would not suffice a robust human-computer interaction. This work, for the first time, uses affective-state-specific transient facial thermal features extracted from TIRIs to recognise a much wider range of facial expressions under a much wider range of conditions. Using infrared thermal imaging within the 8-14 μm, a database of 324 discrete, time-sequential, visible-spectrum and thermal facial images was acquired, representing different facial expressions from 23 participants in different situations. A facial thermal feature extraction and pattern classification approach was developed, refined and tested on various Gaussian mixture models constructed using the image database. Attempts were made to classify: neutral and pretended happy and sad faces; multiple positive and negative facial expressions; six (pretended) basic facial expressions; partially covered or occluded faces; and faces with evoked happiness, sadness, disgust and anger. The cluster-analytic classification in this work began by segmentation and detection of thermal faces in the acquired TIRIs. The affective-state-specific temperature distributions on the facial skin surface were realised through the pixel grey-level analysis. Examining the affectivestate- specific temperature variations within the selected regions of interest in the TIRIs led to the discovery of some significant Facial Thermal Feature Points (FTFPs) along the major facial muscles. Following a multivariate analysis of the Thermal Intensity values (TIVs) measured at the FTFPs, the TIRIs were represented along the Principal Components (PCs) of a covariance matrix. The resulting PCs were ranked in the order of their effectiveness in the between-cluster separation. Only the most effective PCs were retained to construct an optimised eigenspace. A supervised learning algorithm was invoked for linear subdivision of the optimised eigenspace. The statistical significance levels of the classification results were estimated for validating the discriminant functions. The main contribution of this research has been to show that: the infrared imaging of facial thermal features within the 8-14 μm bandwidth may be used to observe affective-state-specific thermal variations on the face; the pixel-grey level analysis of TIRIs can help localise FTFPs along the major facial muscles of the face; cluster-analytic classification of transient thermal features may help distinguish between the facial expressions of affective states in an optimized eigenspace of input thermal feature vectors. The Gaussian mixture model with one cluster per affect worked better for some facial expressions than others. This made the influence of the Gaussian mixture model structure on the accuracy of the classification results obvious. However, the linear discrimination and confusion patterns observed in this work were consistent with the ones reported in several earlier studies. This investigation also unveiled some important dimensions of the future research on use of facial thermal features in affective human-computer interaction.

Many researchers have discussed the student-lecturer relationship in the classroom. These studies have concluded that the association between student and lecturer must be positive in order for each of them to benefit. Studies carried out so far have focused on the studentlecturer relationship and the impact of factors such as age, gender and the cultural background of the student or lecturer. Most of these studies have discussed the studentlecturer relationship in terms of the lecturer’s power in the classroom and classroom management. Previous studies have also discussed student engagement in the classroom and have shown evidence of how it impacts on student learning outcomes. Studies have discussed the positive impact of websites on students and lecturers’ performance along with improving teaching strategies. Previous studies have also shown the importance of the student-lecturer relationship and their academic engagement in the classroom. However, there are as yet no studies that have highlighted the impact of internet website use by students, as additional sources of information, in relation to their relationship with their lecturers and their academic engagement in the classroom. This study aims to investigate this impact from a students’ perspective. The impact of websites in this research focuses on and investigates social power in the classroom i.e. expert power and referent power and academic engagement i.e. academic self-confidence, academic reliance and connectedness. A mixed method approach was employed to collect the required data from respondents. This method included quantitative data to measure the impact and qualitative data to study the reasons behind the impact. To achieve these objectives, a questionnaire targeting undergraduate and graduate students was sent to 30 universities and educational organisations in Saudi Arabia. In total, 1361 valid responses were collected. Of these, 969 identified themselves as male, and 377 as females, while 15 did not specify their gender. Quantitative data was analysed using PASW and thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data with results presented and discussed together. The findings of the study show that there is an impact on the student-lecturer relationship, when websites are used, in all tested criteria but at different levels. Results of this study show that the relationship gap between students and their lecturers is increasing due to website use by students. The results also show that websites have impacted positively on students’ academic engagement in the classroom. The author’s recommendations to reduce the negative impact of websites on student-lecturer relationship are provided at the end of this thesis.