An increased focus on the development of autonomous safety-critical systems requiresmore attention at ensuring safety of humans and the environment. The mainobjective of this thesis is to explore the state of the art and to identify the safetyrelatedchallenges being addressed for using autonomy in safety-critical systems. Inparticular, the thesis explores the nature of these challenges, the different autonomylevels they address and the type of safety measures as proposed solutions. Above all,we focus on the safety measures by a degree of adaptiveness, time of being activeand their ability of decision making. Collection of this information is performedby conducting a Systematic Literature Review of publications from the past 9 years.The results showed an increase in publications addressing challenges related to theuse of autonomy in safety-critical systems. We managed to identify four high-levelclasses of safety challenges. The results also indicate that the focus of research wason finding solutions for challenges related to full autonomous systems as well assolutions that are independent of the level of autonomy. Furthermore, consideringthe amount of publications, results show that non-learning solutions addressing theidentified safety challenges prevail over learning ones, active over passive solutionsand decisive over supportive solutions.

The voices of eleven Aboriginal and ten non-Aboriginal adult social work educators who volunteered to participate in this qualitative research study represent a diverse range of practice and teaching experiences. Participants with experience teaching social work courses that included the enrollment of Aboriginal students were interviewed to gain knowledge about their self-location, lived experiences, their insight, and their perceptions of the ways in which they have and continue to support and influence the retention of Aboriginal post-secondary students. This study utilized phenomenology as a philosophical approach. The interview process was guided by a phenomenological investigation to identify and explore themes that emerged from the data. The major findings of the study revealed the the many facets to the social work educator-student relationship. The major findings of the study revealed the ways social work educators with experience teaching Aboriginal social work students from northern and remote communities, are involved in providing personal and academic support. Examples of the support provided includes the daily maintenance of an open door policy, reaching out and providing offers of help to students, and assuming roles as advocates, resource brokers, mentors, advisors and counsellors. / October 2016