The experiments reported in this thesis were conducted to examine the effects of executive-control and associative-learning processes on performance in conventional executive-control paradigms. For this purpose, I developed comparative task-switching and response-inhibition paradigms, which were used to assess the performance of pigeons, whose behaviour is presumably based purely on associative processes, and of humans, whose behaviour may be guided by executive control and by associative processes. Pigeons were able to perform accurately in the comparative paradigms; hence, associative-learning processes are sufficient to account for successful performance. However, some task-specific effects that can be attributed to executive-control processes, and which were found in humans applying executive control, were absent or greatly reduced in pigeons. Those effects either reflect the mental operations that are performed to ensure that a specific set of stimulus-response-contingencies is applied and any contingencies belonging to a different set are suppressed, or reflect mental preparations for the possibility that the requirement to execute a certain response suddenly changes. In particular, in Chapter 3, it is shown that the benefits of repeatedly applying the same set of stimulus-response contingencies (or, in reverse, the costs of switching from one set to another) do not apply when Pavlovian processes dominate learning, which is likely the case for pigeons. Furthermore, as shown in Chapters 4 and 5, the behavioural effects of preparing for an unpredicted change in response requirements appeared to be absent when behaviour was based purely on associative processes. Instead, associatively mediated performance was primarily influenced by the stimulus-response contingencies that were effective in each paradigm. Repeating the same response in consecutive trials facilitated the performance of pigeons and associatively learning human participants in the task-switching paradigms, and performing a particular Go response increased the pigeons' likelihood of executing that response in the following trial in two response-inhibition paradigms. In summary, any behavioural effects that can be observed at the level of abstract task requirements reflect the influence of executive-control processes, both in task-switching paradigms and in response-inhibition paradigms.

O objetivo deste trabalho é propor técnicas de alocação dinâmica de tarefas periódicas em MPSoCs homogêneos, com processadores interligados por uma rede emchip do tipo malha, visando redução do consumo de energia do sistema. O foco principal é a definição de uma heurística de alocação, não se considerando protocolos de escalonamento distribuído, uma vez que este ainda é um primeiro estudo para o desenvolvimento de um alocador dinâmico. Na arquitetura alvo utilizada, cada nodo do sistema é dado como autônomo, possuindo seu próprio escalonador EDF. Além disso, são aplicadas técnicas de voltage scaling e power managmenent para redução do consumo de energia durante o escalonamento. Durante a pesquisa do estado da arte, não foram encontradas técnicas de alocação dinâmica em NoCs com restrições temporais e minimização do consumo de energia. Por isso, esse trabalho se concentra em avaliar técnicas de alocação convencionais, como bin-packing e técnicas baseadas em teoria de grafos, no contexto de sistemas embarcados. Dessa forma, o modelo de estimativas do consumo de energia de alocações é baseado no escalonamento de grafos de tarefas, e foi utilizado para implementar a ferramenta Serpens com este propósito. Os grafos de tarefas utilizados nos experimentos são tirados do benchmark E3S – Embedded System Synthesis Benchmark Suite, composto por um conjunto de grafos de tarefas gerados aleatoriamente com a ferramenta TGFF – Task Graph for Free, a partir de dados de aplicações comuns em sistemas embarcados obtidos no EEMBC – Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium. Entre as heurísticas de bin-packing, Best-Fit, First-Fit e Next-Fit geram alocações com concentração de carga, enquanto a heurística Worst-Fit faz balanceamento de carga. O balanceamento de carga favorece a aplicação de voltage scaling enquanto a concentração favorece o power management. Como o bin-packing não contempla comunicação e dependência entre tarefas em seu modelo, o mesmo foi reformulado para atender esta necessidade. Nos experimentos, a alocação inicial com bin-packing original apresentou perdas de deadlines de até 84 % para a heurística Worst-Fit, passando para perdas em torno de 16% na alocação final, praticamente com o mesmo consumo de energia, após a reformulação do modelo. / The goal of this work is to offer dynamic allocation techniques of periodic tasks in mesh networks-on-chip, aiming to reduce the system power consumption. The main focus is the definition of an allocation heuristic, which does not consider distributed scheduling protocols, since this is the beginning of a study for the development of a dynamic partitioning tool. In the target architecture, each system node is self-contained, that is, the nodes contain their own EDF scheduler. Besides, voltage-scaling and power management techniques are applied for reducing power consumption during the scheduling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort considering both temporal constraints and power consumption minimization on the dynamic allocation of tasks in a mesh NoC. This way, our concentrates in the evaluation of dynamic allocation techniques, which are generally used in distributed systems, in the embedded systems context, as bin-packing and graph theory based techniques. Therefore, the estimation model for power consumption is based on task graph scheduling, and it was used for implementing the Serpens tool with this purpose. The task graphs used in the experiments were obtained from the E3S benchmark (Embedded System Synthesis Benchmark Suite), which is composed by a set of task graphs randomly generated with the TGFF tool (Task Graph for Free), from common application data obtained from the EEMBC (Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium). Among the bin-packing heuristics, Best-Fit, First-Fit, and Next-Fit generate allocations with load concentration, while the Worst-Fit heuristics works with load balancing. Load balancing favors the application of voltage scaling, while load concentration favors the utilization of power management. Since the bin-packing model does not consider inter-task communication and dependency, it has been modified to fulfill this need. In the experiments, the initial allocation using the original bin-packing model presented deadline losses of up to 84% for the Worst-Fit heuristic, changing for losses around 16% in the final allocation, after modification of the model, maintaining almost the same power consumption.

The Transformer model is a very recent, fast and powerful discovery in neural machine translation. We experiment with multi-task learning for enriching the source side of the Transformer with linguistic resources to provide it with additional information to learn linguistic and world knowledge better. We analyze two approaches: the basic shared model with multi-tasking through simple data manipulation, and multi-decoder models. We test joint models for machine translation (MT) and POS tagging, dependency parsing and named entity recognition as the secondary tasks. We evaluate them in comparison with the baseline and with dummy, linguistically unrelated tasks. We focus primarily on the standard- size data setting for German-to-Czech MT. Although our enriched models did not significantly outperform the baseline, we empirically document that (i) the MT models benefit from the secondary linguistic tasks; (ii) considering the amount of training data consumed, the multi-tasking models learn faster; (iii) in low-resource conditions, the multi-tasking significantly improves the model; (iv) the more fine-grained annotation of the source as the secondary task, the higher benefit to MT.

The purpose of the current studies was to determine whether "matches", or fit, between actual task control and participants' desire for control over their environment lead to better stress and task performance outcomes than "mismatches", or misfit, in high work demand environments only. These studies also investigated the mediating effects of cognitive stressor appraisals and stress, as well as the moderating influence of hardiness on threat appraisals. Data were collected on 366 undergraduate students, who were asked to complete individual difference measures and engage in timed performance tasks. Results indicated no significant interactions between actual task control and desire for control for the outcomes of cognitive stressor appraisals, experienced stress, or task performance. No mediating influence was found for cognitive appraisals or stress, nor was there a buffering effect of hardiness on the cognitive appraisal process. Despite the non-significant results, the effects on task performance trended in the predicted direction in both studies, such that the highest task performance was found in cases of match between actual task control and desire for control, whereas the lowest task performance was found in cases of mismatch. These findings yield some support for Person-Environment Fit theory, demonstrating that actual task control and desire for control should be considered together when predicting task performance in workplace contexts.

O objetivo deste trabalho é propor técnicas de alocação dinâmica de tarefas periódicas em MPSoCs homogêneos, com processadores interligados por uma rede emchip do tipo malha, visando redução do consumo de energia do sistema. O foco principal é a definição de uma heurística de alocação, não se considerando protocolos de escalonamento distribuído, uma vez que este ainda é um primeiro estudo para o desenvolvimento de um alocador dinâmico. Na arquitetura alvo utilizada, cada nodo do sistema é dado como autônomo, possuindo seu próprio escalonador EDF. Além disso, são aplicadas técnicas de voltage scaling e power managmenent para redução do consumo de energia durante o escalonamento. Durante a pesquisa do estado da arte, não foram encontradas técnicas de alocação dinâmica em NoCs com restrições temporais e minimização do consumo de energia. Por isso, esse trabalho se concentra em avaliar técnicas de alocação convencionais, como bin-packing e técnicas baseadas em teoria de grafos, no contexto de sistemas embarcados. Dessa forma, o modelo de estimativas do consumo de energia de alocações é baseado no escalonamento de grafos de tarefas, e foi utilizado para implementar a ferramenta Serpens com este propósito. Os grafos de tarefas utilizados nos experimentos são tirados do benchmark E3S – Embedded System Synthesis Benchmark Suite, composto por um conjunto de grafos de tarefas gerados aleatoriamente com a ferramenta TGFF – Task Graph for Free, a partir de dados de aplicações comuns em sistemas embarcados obtidos no EEMBC – Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium. Entre as heurísticas de bin-packing, Best-Fit, First-Fit e Next-Fit geram alocações com concentração de carga, enquanto a heurística Worst-Fit faz balanceamento de carga. O balanceamento de carga favorece a aplicação de voltage scaling enquanto a concentração favorece o power management. Como o bin-packing não contempla comunicação e dependência entre tarefas em seu modelo, o mesmo foi reformulado para atender esta necessidade. Nos experimentos, a alocação inicial com bin-packing original apresentou perdas de deadlines de até 84 % para a heurística Worst-Fit, passando para perdas em torno de 16% na alocação final, praticamente com o mesmo consumo de energia, após a reformulação do modelo. / The goal of this work is to offer dynamic allocation techniques of periodic tasks in mesh networks-on-chip, aiming to reduce the system power consumption. The main focus is the definition of an allocation heuristic, which does not consider distributed scheduling protocols, since this is the beginning of a study for the development of a dynamic partitioning tool. In the target architecture, each system node is self-contained, that is, the nodes contain their own EDF scheduler. Besides, voltage-scaling and power management techniques are applied for reducing power consumption during the scheduling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort considering both temporal constraints and power consumption minimization on the dynamic allocation of tasks in a mesh NoC. This way, our concentrates in the evaluation of dynamic allocation techniques, which are generally used in distributed systems, in the embedded systems context, as bin-packing and graph theory based techniques. Therefore, the estimation model for power consumption is based on task graph scheduling, and it was used for implementing the Serpens tool with this purpose. The task graphs used in the experiments were obtained from the E3S benchmark (Embedded System Synthesis Benchmark Suite), which is composed by a set of task graphs randomly generated with the TGFF tool (Task Graph for Free), from common application data obtained from the EEMBC (Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium). Among the bin-packing heuristics, Best-Fit, First-Fit, and Next-Fit generate allocations with load concentration, while the Worst-Fit heuristics works with load balancing. Load balancing favors the application of voltage scaling, while load concentration favors the utilization of power management. Since the bin-packing model does not consider inter-task communication and dependency, it has been modified to fulfill this need. In the experiments, the initial allocation using the original bin-packing model presented deadline losses of up to 84% for the Worst-Fit heuristic, changing for losses around 16% in the final allocation, after modification of the model, maintaining almost the same power consumption.

abstract: Adapting to one novel condition of a motor task has been shown to generalize to other naïve conditions (i.e., motor generalization). In contrast, learning one task affects the proficiency of another task that is altogether different (i.e. motor transfer). Much more is known about motor generalization than about motor transfer, despite of decades of behavioral evidence. Moreover, motor generalization is studied as a probe to understanding how movements in any novel situations are affected by previous experiences. Thus, one could assume that mechanisms underlying transfer from trained to untrained tasks may be same as the ones known to be underlying motor generalization. However, the direct relationship between transfer and generalization has not yet been shown, thereby limiting the assumption that transfer and generalization rely on the same mechanisms. The purpose of this study was to test whether there is a relationship between motor generalization and motor transfer. To date, ten healthy young adult subjects were scored on their motor generalization ability and motor transfer ability on various upper extremity tasks. Although our current sample size is too small to clearly identify whether there is a relationship between generalization and transfer, Pearson product-moment correlation results and a priori power analysis suggest that a significant relationship will be observed with an increased sample size by 30%. If so, this would suggest that the mechanisms of transfer may be similar to those of motor generalization. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Biomedical Engineering 2018

På uppdrag av HOW Solutions AB har användartester utförts på deras applikation NPÖ Mobil. Applikationen bygger på det webbaserade systemet NPÖ (Nationell Patientöversikt) och ger vårdpersonal (främst distriktssköterskor) tillgång till patienters journaler i sin smartphone eller surfplatta vid hembesök. Syftet med studien är att dels se om det finns någon skillnad mellan smartphone och surfplatta med avseende på lostness och tid men också att identifiera problem i systemet som behöver designas om. För att få en bra överblick över distriktssköterskors arbetssätt intervjuades två stycken. Dessa intervjuer låg sedan till grund för användartestet som utvecklades. Användartest gjordes på 8 sjuksköterskor och distriktssköterskor i Östergötland. Ingen statistisk skillnad mellan surfplatta och smartphone med avseende på lostness eller tid kunde påvisas. Däremot påvisades lostness i ett flertal funktioner i applikationen och även en del uppgifter som försöksdeltagarna inte lyckades lösa. Med grund i de resultaten togs en del designförslag fram för att förbättra applikationen.

Master of Science / Department of Architectural Engineering and Construction Science / Raphael A. Yunk / Today's engineers of building lighting systems must maintain a careful balance between the demands of accepted standards of practice, the necessity of life safety, the system performance needs of the client, and the developing national energy standards and certifications gaining prominence in the public eye. These sources of influence on the design process can create conflicts between the pressing need to conserve system energy usage and a costlier and perhaps unacceptable end-result for the client. In this climate, various governmental organizations and industry cooperatives have been funding published research and case-studies in order to promote sustainable design practices. Within these publications are repeated references to a "Task-Ambient" lighting fixture layout strategy. Multiple recent publications cite profound energy-saving benefits attainable using this design method. However, there is a noticeable lack of measured data concerning other qualities of this layout scheme, such as the end-user's comfort and ability to perform tasks under the resulting light distributions. Whether this lack of data resulted from the added complexity associated with such non-numerical measurements, or for some other unknown reason, this report explores this gap in the available data. An extended survey procedure was developed to approach the problem of measuring these unknown qualities of the Task-Ambient design strategy. This involved constructing multiple physical lighting layout mockups, defining the features of the Task-Ambient strategy which necessitated measurement, and designing objective tasks tailored to measure each of these non-numerical qualities. The careful analysis of this study's data results yields trends indicative of the Task-Ambient strategy, relative to a standard uniform layout, adversely affecting productivity, concentration, and the participants' subjective perceptions of the space's light distribution. The lowered level of energy use was however affirmed. The implications of these results are that the Task-Ambient strategy, while an efficient method of lighting system layout design, may not be beneficial for the client in other respects.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka om det fanns något samband mellanintolerans mot osäkerhet och optimism samt om det fanns något samband mellan intolerans motosäkerhet och smärtkatastrofiering. Utöver det ville vi undersöka om det fanns något sambandmellan upplevd stress under beteendetestet Beads task och förväntningar på kallvattentestet.Våra hypoteser var att vi skulle finna ett negativt samband mellan intolerans mot osäkerhet ochoptimism samt ett positivt samband mellan intolerans mot osäkerhet och smärtkatastrofiering.Vi trodde även att vi skulle finna ett positivt samband mellan upplevd stress under Beads taskoch negativa förväntningar på kallvattentestet. Studien utfördes genom tre enkäter som mätteintolerans mot osäkerhet, optimism och smärtkatastrofiering. Utöver det användes Beads taskför att mäta observerbara beteenden associerade med intolerans mot osäkerhet. Deltagarnabestod av 60 universitetsstudenter, varav 30 män och 30 kvinnor. Resultaten visade att det fannsett negativt samband mellan optimism och intolerans mot osäkerhet samt ett positivt sambandmellan intolerans mot osäkerhet och smärtkatastrofiering. Sålunda tenderar optimistiskapersoner att vara mindre intoleranta mot osäkerhet medan personer med hög grad avsmärtkatastrofiering är mer intoleranta mot osäkerhet. Tidigare studier har visat att optimistiskapersoner har lättare att hantera svåra situationer och att personer med hög grad avsmärtkatastrofiering har mer katastroftankar som leder till oro i osäkra situationer, vilket går ilinje med vårt resultat. / The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between intolerance ofuncertainty, optimism and pain catastrophizing. Furthermore we wanted to investigate therelationship between distress during the behavioral test Beads task and expectations on the ColdPressor Task. We hypothesized that we would find a negative relationship between intoleranceof uncertainty and optimism and a positive relationship between intolerance of uncertainty andpain catastrophizing. Furthermore we hypothesized that we would find a positive relationshipbetween distress during Beads task and negative expectations on the Cold Pressor Task. Theconvenient sample consisted of 60 university students, 30 males and 30 females. Ourresults showed a negative relationship between optimism and intolerance of uncertainty and apositive relationship between intolerance of uncertainty and pain catastrophizing. Thusoptimistic individuals tend to be less intolerant to uncertainty when individuals with a highlevel of pain catastrophizing are more intolerant to uncertainty. Previous studies showed thatoptimistic individuals have a better way of coping with difficult situations, and that individualswith a high level of pain catastrophizing have more catastrophizing related thoughts whichcause worrying in uncertain situations, which is in line with our results.

Este trabalho tem por objetivo a reflexão sobre uma alternativa de ensino e aprendizagem de Língua Portuguesa no Fundamental II cujo foco esteja no desenvolvimento efetivo das habilidades de leitura, oralidade e escrita por meio de atividades lúdicas. Para tanto, pautou-se pela experiência bem sucedida com esse tipo de recurso no ensino e aprendizagem de Língua Inglesa, notadamente em cursos de idiomas, cuja orientação metodológica é a Abordagem Comunicativa, e, em especial, o Task-based Language Teaching. O conceito de jogo aqui empregado provém das obras de Huizinga (2004), Wittgenstein (1975) e Brougère (1995, 1999), enquanto a relação entre jogo e Educação foi discutida tendo em vista as considerações de Kishimoto (1992, 1994, 1998, 2001, 2007), Brougère (1995, 1999) e Macedo, Petty e Passos (2005), e entre jogo e língua estrangeira, por Crookall e Oxford (1990) e Bullards (1990). Discutiu-se as abordagens e metodologias mais difundidas no Brasil (FERRO, 1998; RODRIGUES, 2005; BERGO E GOMES, 1985) com a finalidade de se contextualizar a utilização do jogo no Task-based Language Teaching (ELLIS, 2003). A análise do que se compreende como tarefa central do ensino e aprendizagem de Língua Portuguesa privilegiou quatro pontos de vista distintos: o da tradição escolar, dos resultados das avaliações do ensino Fundamental, da perspectiva oficial (PCN) e dos estudos lingüísticos voltados à Educação. Partindo desse referencial teórico, realizou-se em duas etapas uma pesquisa de cunho etnográfico. A Primeira Entrada em Campo consistiu na observação de aulas de Língua Portuguesa e de Língua Inglesa extracurricular em um colégio particular em São Paulo. Objetivou-se verificar como tem sido a prática efetiva nessas disciplinas com relação ao uso de jogos em sala de aula, concluindo-se que 60% do tempo das aulas observadas de Língua Inglesa foram ocupados por atividades lúdicas, enquanto, a rigor, nenhuma atividade desse caráter ocorreu na de Língua Portuguesa. Na Segunda Entrada em Campo realizou-se um minicurso de leitura, oralidade e escrita, ministrado pela pesquisadora a alunos da rede pública de ensino, no qual verificou-se as possibilidades reais de sucesso de uma metodologia de Língua Portuguesa cuja prática considerasse as atividades lúdicas como uma alternativa ao excesso de atividades metalingüísticas revelados por estudos de Neves (2003) e Semeghini- Siqueira (1998, 2006a). O referencial metodológico para a elaboração das aulas do minicurso pautou-se pelos conceitos de Avaliação Diagnóstica e Formativa (SEMEGHINI-SIQUEIRA, 1997, 2002) e Seqüência Didática (SCHNEUWLY; DOLZ; NOVERRAZ, 2007) como forma de estruturação para atividades lingüísticas e epilingüísticas (SEMGHINI-SIQUEIRA, 1977, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2006b, 2006c; FRANCHI, 1991; GERALDI, 1985, 1991, 2002; TRAVAGLIA, 1996; POSSENTI, 1996), organizadas em torno do gênero textual entrevista. A inserção de atividades lúdicas que privilegiaram diversas habilidades e diferentes formas de abordagem da língua resultou em um aprendizado mais significativo e eficiente do que aquele observado em aulas de Língua Portuguesa cujas atividades restringem-se apenas às metalingüísticas. / This dissertation aims at reflecting upon an alternative to Portuguese learning and teaching in Middle school1 in which the focus is the development of the proficiency in reading, writing and speaking by means of game-like activities. Therefore, it bears resemblance to the highly successful experience conducted by English courses in line with the Communicative Approach, specially, those of Task-based Language Teaching orientation. The concept of game hereafter presented comes from the works of Huizinga (2004), Wittgenstein (1975) and Brougère (1995, 1999), meanwhile the relationship between games and education relies upon the considerations of Kishimoto (1992, 1994, 1998, 2001, 2007), Brougère (1995, 1999) and Macedo, Petty e Passos (2005); as for games and second language learning and teaching, by Crookall and Oxford (1990) and Bullards (1990). Approaches and methodologies with a greater importance in the Brazilian context (FERRO, 1998; RODRIGUES, 2005; BERGO E GOMES, 1985) were discussed in order to provide background information on the usage of games in Task-based Language Teaching (ELLIS, 2003). Four points of view were privileged to the analysis of the main reasons for learning and teaching Portuguese: the schooling tradition, the results of the evaluation conducted to measure the performance of the students enrolled on the Middle school, the official perspective (PCN) and the linguistic studies related to Education. Having this theoretical scope in mind, two different pieces of ethnographic research were conducted. The first one consisted of the observation of both Portuguese and English (extracurricular) classes at a private school in São Paulo, so that it would be possible to verify whether their delivery has really been taking into consideration the use of games or not. It was reached the conclusion that 60% of the time spent in the English classes observed were on game activities. On the other hand, none activity was observed during the Portuguese class. In the SECOND FIELD STUDY, there was a mini-course of reading, writing and speaking, taught by the researcher, in which students from a public school in São Paulo participated in. Its main objective was to access the real possibilities of success in teaching Portuguese by making use of game activities instead of the metalinguistic ones, pointed as the major resource for Portuguese classes by Neves (2003) and Semeghini-Siqueira (1998, 2006a). The methodological reference for the mini-course is based upon the concepts of \"Avaliação Diagnóstica e Formativa\" (SEMEGHINI-SIQUEIRA, 1997, 2002) and \"Seqüência Didática\" (SCHNEUWLY; DOLZ; NOVERRAZ, 2007) as a means of structuring the linguistic and epilinguistic activities (SEMGHINI-SIQUEIRA, 1977, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2006b, 2006c; FRANCHI, 1991; GERALDI, 1985, 1991, 2002; TRAVAGLIA, 1996; POSSENTI, 1996) around the interview genre. As a result, the game activities carried out in the Portuguese classes held by the mini-course proved to be very effective, therefore the learning was enriched by the variety of approaches as well as the range of skills involved in performing the tasks.