Humans are relational beings, as they are constantly in interaction with others and with their environment. In schools, learners spend at least nine years of their lives in formal schooling, and the relationships they have with their teachers are bound to have an impact on their self-configuration. According to the Field theory, the Bioecological theory and the Dialogical theory of self, which were used as theoretical frameworks for this study, individuals’ self-configuration is impacted by their environment, experiences and interactions with others. The focus of this study was on Grade 7 learners’ self-configuration experiences within the teacher-learner relationship. Grade 7 learners are at the beginning of the adolescent phase, which is characterised by many changes, transitions, challenges and uncertainties. One of these transitions is the forthcoming transition from primary school to high school and a healthy self-configuration could assist learners to adapt to these changes in a positive manner. The research was qualitative in nature and made use of the case study method. This allowed the researcher to use data gathering approaches through which the subjective experiences of the participants could be explored. Twelve participants volunteered to take part in this study, and data was gathered by means of individual interviews as well as group discussions. All interviews and group discussions were voice and video recorded, where after they were transcribed and analysed by means of thematic analysis. The analysis allowed for data to be organised into meaningful themes. It was found that learners’ experiences of relationships with teachers are both positive and negative. Self-regulation in learners takes place through encouragement and disapproval from teachers, as well as through lessons learnt from teachers and from past experiences. Further studies around self-configuration and teacher-learner relationships are recommended, in order to make teachers more aware of the importance of the teacher-learner relationship, and also to determine what the obstacles are in developing supportive and caring teacher-learner relationships. By highlighting the importance, and by determining the obstacles, more meaningful teacher-learner relationships could be encouraged and developed in order to enhance learners’ self-configuration experiences. / MA (Psychology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Challenging behaviour poses problems for teachers globally and yet very little research has been done with regard to the teacher-learner relationship and what challenging behaviour does to the teacher. The goal of this study was to explore teachers’ experiences of challenging behaviour within their relationships with learners that display challenging behaviour regarding teacher’s self-configuration. A qualitative approach was pursued in the form of an interpretive descriptive design in order to gain a better understanding of the teachers’ self-configuration experiences. For the purpose of this study the field theory was used as the theoretical framework, viewing teachers in their environment, specifically focusing on the teacher-learner relationship. A total of 12 teachers were purposefully selected from a school in Observatory, Johannesburg. The data were collected through in-depth interviews. Additionally, incomplete sentences were used to enrich data and to enhance trustworthiness. Triangulation was ensured by using two data collection methods to increase the credibility and validity of the results. The interviews and incomplete sentences were recorded via audio recording equipment. The recordings were then transcribed in order to identify emerging themes and subthemes. Thematic analysis was used once the data had been transcribed in order to gain meaningful information. This study revealed teachers’ self-configuration experiences in their relationships with learners with challenging behaviour and experienced their relationships with these children as a foundation for self-configuration. Teachers’ self-configuration is embedded in their different selves at school and their love and passion for teaching are reduced due to negative emotions. Experiences within the relationship escalate to the home environment and challenging behaviour causes stress for teachers. Teachers viewed challenging behaviour as behaviour that is an internal challenge for the learner, but also behaviour that is directed externally towards the teacher and other learners. Trust and respect, class size, individual attention and communication were identified elements contributing to self-configuration within the teacher-learner relationship. This study showed the importance of relationships in the school context and specifically focused on teachers’ self-configuration. / MA (Psychology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

More often than not learners with learning difficulties are treated differently from normal mainstream learners. Often they experience themselves in a less positive manner because of the interactions with various teachers who may not always have enough patience to deal with these learners while trying to cope with large numbers of learners on a daily base. This study was conducted to explore self-configuration experiences of Intermediate Phase learners with learning difficulties within the learner-teacher relationship. Literature indicates that the self is a complex construct to define and can be interpreted in various ways. The researcher aimed to understand how the self is configured in experiences that learners have with their teachers and how these experiences contribute to and affect self-configuration. The theoretical frameworks of the Dialogical Theory of Self and the Gestalt Field Theory were used to gain an understanding of how vital relations and context are in the configuration experiences of the self. A qualitative case study with purposive sampling was conducted. The study was done at a single school where all the learners in the school have learning difficulties. There were nine learners that fell in the Intermediate Phase category and all of them were boys who voluntarily participated in the research. Data were collected by means of a semi-structured interview in which the participants were asked to use incomplete sentences and a visual map that they made to help them express their experiences. A follow-up interview was conducted to check that the meaning that the learner ascribed to his incomplete sentences and visual map was accurate and an opportunity was given to add something should the participant want to. Participants were given this opportunity as some of them had difficulty in expressing themselves adequately during the first session as a result of their learning difficulties in so much as they struggle to find words that express their feelings and what they wanted to communicate. Data were transcribed and analysed by means of thematic analysis. The study indicated that it was aspects such as quality time the teachers spent with the learners and the tone of voice of the teacher that contributed to the self-configuration experiences of the learners. Further research is necessary to determine whether this is the experience in other schools that cater for learners with learning difficulties and how this knowledge may be used to bring greater awareness to teachers to better understand how learners experience their relationship with regards to self-configuration. Quantitative studies can also be conducted to investigate the impact of teacher-learner relationships on self-configuration. / MA (Psychology), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

In this talk, we will present the design and evaluation of PeerDB, a peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed data sharing system. PeerDB distinguishes itself from existing P2P systems in several ways. First, it is a full-fledge data management system that supports fine-grain content-based searching. Second, it facilitates sharing of data without shared schema. Third, it combines the power of mobile agents into P2P systems to perform operations at peers' sites. Fourth, PeerDB network is self-configurable, i.e., a node can dynamically optimize the set of peers that it can communicate directly with based on some optimization criterion. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Communication network technologies have been evolving exponentially in the late decades. These innovations increase the network capabilities and open new horizons to creating novel and original services. The heterogeneity in equipment qualifications increases the level of complexity in the technological advancement. In such environment, service management has become an everyday challenge to service providers. Important efforts have been deployed to innovate in the exploitation of intelligent devices in the home and other private locations. In this Thesis, we propose a framework for self-configuration of devices within Hone Area Networks. We propose a device self-configuration architecture based on IBM Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute using Knowledge autonomic control loop. To prove the validity of our system architecture and support its applicability, we developed a prototype system that gives a general control loop implementation for device self-configuration using the CPE WAN Management Protocol. A video streaming scenario is implemented and used to evaluate validity our framework.

Communication network technologies have been evolving exponentially in the late decades. These innovations increase the network capabilities and open new horizons to creating novel and original services. The heterogeneity in equipment qualifications increases the level of complexity in the technological advancement. In such environment, service management has become an everyday challenge to service providers. Important efforts have been deployed to innovate in the exploitation of intelligent devices in the home and other private locations. In this Thesis, we propose a framework for self-configuration of devices within Hone Area Networks. We propose a device self-configuration architecture based on IBM Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute using Knowledge autonomic control loop. To prove the validity of our system architecture and support its applicability, we developed a prototype system that gives a general control loop implementation for device self-configuration using the CPE WAN Management Protocol. A video streaming scenario is implemented and used to evaluate validity our framework.

The advances in computing and communication technologies and software tools have resulted in an explosive growth in networked applications and information services that cover all aspects of our life. These services and applications are inherently complex, dynamic and heterogeneous. In a similar way, the underlying information infrastructure, e.g. the Internet, is large, complex, heterogeneous and dynamic, globally aggregating large numbers of independent computing and communication resources. The combination of the two results in application development and management complexities that break current computing paradigms, which are based on static behaviors. As a result, applications, programming environments and information infrastructures are rapidly becoming fragile, unmanageable and insecure. This has led researchers to consider alternative programming paradigms and management techniques that are based on strategies used by biological systems. Autonomic programming paradigm is inspired by the human autonomic nervous system that handles complexity, uncertainties and abnormality. The overarching goal of the autonomic programming paradigm is to help building systems and applications capable of self-management. Firstly, we investigated the large-scale scientific computing applications which generally experience different execution phases at run time and each phase has different computational, communication and storage requirements as well as different physical characteristics. In this dissertation, we present Physics Aware Optimization (PAO) paradigm that enables programmers to identify the appropriate solution methods to exploit the heterogeneity and the dynamism of the application execution states. We implement a Physics Aware Optimization Manager to exploit the PAO paradigm. On the other hand we present a self configuration paradigm based on the principles of autonomic computing that can handle efficiently complexity, dynamism and uncertainty in configuring server and networked systems and their applications. Our approach is based on making any resource/application to operate as an Autonomic Component (that means it can be self-managed component) by using our autonomic programming paradigm. Our POA technique for medical application yielded about 3X improvement of performance with 98.3% simulation accuracy compared to traditional techniques for performance optimization. Also, our Self-configuration management for power and performance management in GPU cluster demonstrated 53.7% power savings for CUDAworkload while maintaining the cluster performance within given acceptable thresholds.

Communication network technologies have been evolving exponentially in the late decades. These innovations increase the network capabilities and open new horizons to creating novel and original services. The heterogeneity in equipment qualifications increases the level of complexity in the technological advancement. In such environment, service management has become an everyday challenge to service providers. Important efforts have been deployed to innovate in the exploitation of intelligent devices in the home and other private locations. In this Thesis, we propose a framework for self-configuration of devices within Hone Area Networks. We propose a device self-configuration architecture based on IBM Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute using Knowledge autonomic control loop. To prove the validity of our system architecture and support its applicability, we developed a prototype system that gives a general control loop implementation for device self-configuration using the CPE WAN Management Protocol. A video streaming scenario is implemented and used to evaluate validity our framework.

Imagine the following situation. You give your favorite robot, named Pippi, the task to fetch a heavy parcel that just arrived at your front door. While pushing the parcel back to you, she must travel through a door. Unfortunately, the parcel she is pushing is blocking her camera, giving her a hard time to see the door. If she cannot see the door, she cannot safely push the parcel through it. What would you as a human do in a similar situation? Most probably you would ask someone for help, someone to guide you through the door, as we ask for help when we need to park our car in a tight parking spot. Why not let the robots do the same? Why not let robots help each other? Luckily for Pippi, there is another robot, named Emil, vacuum cleaning the floor in the same room. Since Emil has a video camera and can view both Pippi and the door at the same time, he can estimate Pippi's position relative to the door and use this information to guide Pippi through the door by wireless communication. In that way he can enable Pippi to deliver the parcel to you. The goal of this thesis is to endow robots with the ability to help each other in a similar way. More specifically, we consider distributed robot systems in which: (1) each robot includes modular functionalities for sensing, acting and/or processing; and (2) robots can help each other by offering those functionalities. A functional configuration of such a system is any way to allocate and connect functionalities configuration among the robots. An interesting feature of a system of this type is the possibility to use different functional configurations to make the same set of robots perform different tasks, or to perform the same task under different conditions. In the above example, Emil is offering a perceptual functionality to Pippi. In a different situation, Emil could offer his motion functionality to help Pippi push a heavier parcel. In this thesis, we propose an approach to automatically generate, at run time, a functional configuration of a distributed robot system to perform a given task in a given environment, and to dynamically change this configuration in response to failures. Our approach is based on artificial intelligence planning techniques, and it is provably sound, complete and optimal. In order to handle tasks that require more than one step (i.e., one configuration) to be accomplished, we also show how methods for automatic configuration can be integrated with methods for task planning to produce a complete plan were each step is a configuration. For the scenario above, generating a complete plan before the execution starts enables Pippi to know before hand if she will be able to get the parcel or not. We also propose an approach to merge configurations, which enables concurrent execution of configurations, thus reducing execution time. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on a specific type of distributed robot system, called Peis-Ecology, and show experiments in which configurations and sequences of configurations are automatically generated and executed on real robots. Further, we give an experiment where merged configurations are created and executed on simulated robots.

Communication network technologies have been evolving exponentially in the late decades. These innovations increase the network capabilities and open new horizons to creating novel and original services. The heterogeneity in equipment qualifications increases the level of complexity in the technological advancement. In such environment, service management has become an everyday challenge to service providers. Important efforts have been deployed to innovate in the exploitation of intelligent devices in the home and other private locations. In this Thesis, we propose a framework for self-configuration of devices within Hone Area Networks. We propose a device self-configuration architecture based on IBM Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute using Knowledge autonomic control loop. To prove the validity of our system architecture and support its applicability, we developed a prototype system that gives a general control loop implementation for device self-configuration using the CPE WAN Management Protocol. A video streaming scenario is implemented and used to evaluate validity our framework.