Three experiments examine how collaboration influences visual search performance. Working with a partner or on their own, participants reported whether a target was present or absent in briefly presented search displays. The search performance of individuals working together (collaborative pairs) was compared to the pooled responses of the individuals working alone (nominal pairs). Collaborative pairs were less likely than nominal pairs to correctly detect a target and they were less likely to make false alarms. Signal detection analyses revealed that collaborative pairs were more sensitive to the presence of the target and had a more conservative response bias than the nominal pairs. This pattern was observed when the search difficulty was increased and when the presence of another individual was matched across pairs. The results are discussed in the context of task sharing, social loafing and current theories of visual search.

Three experiments examine how collaboration influences visual search performance. Working with a partner or on their own, participants reported whether a target was present or absent in briefly presented search displays. The search performance of individuals working together (collaborative pairs) was compared to the pooled responses of the individuals working alone (nominal pairs). Collaborative pairs were less likely than nominal pairs to correctly detect a target and they were less likely to make false alarms. Signal detection analyses revealed that collaborative pairs were more sensitive to the presence of the target and had a more conservative response bias than the nominal pairs. This pattern was observed when the search difficulty was increased and when the presence of another individual was matched across pairs. The results are discussed in the context of task sharing, social loafing and current theories of visual search.

Context. Resource allocation is an important issue in order to complete a task in the field of agent system. Several protocols are available for task distribution and for efficient resource allocation among agents. Efficient task distribution and resource allocation among agents are often play important roles to obtain high performance. However, the situation becomes more complicated when the resources are dependent on each other where multiple buyers and providers of resources negotiate in parallel. Objectives. In this paper, we proposed an agent based protocol for synchronizing and allocating dependent resources that involves parallel negotiation between multiple buyers and providers of resources. Methods. Literature survey has been conducted in the studied areas in order to position the work and gain more knowledge. Moreover, to validate the proposed protocol, a simulation study was performed. Results. The suggested protocol can handle dependent resources negotiation parallel and the result illustrates that. Moreover, the approach can avoid broadcasting of call for proposals to reduce the communication overhead, which usually occur in many other protocols. Conclusion. In the suggested protocol, we have presented a new idea of re-planning with other techniques like Information board and leveled commitment. In a simulation study, it was identified that this approach is able to deal with the dependent resources according to the simulation results.

Background: Symptoms of depression and anxiety are highly prevalent amongst perinatal women in low-resource settings of South Africa, but there is no access to standardised counselling support for these conditions in public health facilities. The aim of this study was to report on the development of a maternal mental health counselling intervention for routine treatment of mild to moderate symptoms of depression and anxiety for primary healthcare in South Africa, as part of the Health Systems Strengthening in sub-Saharan Africa (ASSET) study. Methods: A four-phase study process informed the counselling intervention and training manual designed to train lay health workers. We first conducted a review of manuals from seven counselling interventions for depression and anxiety in low- and middle-income countries and two local health system training programmes to gather information on common counselling components used across maternal mental health and other evidence-based task-sharing interventions. Thereafter, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 health workers and 37 pregnant women from four Midwife Obstetric Units in Cape Town to explore mental health views and needs. In the third stage, multi-sector stakeholder engagements further informed the choice of intervention design and service provider. In the final phase, a four-day pre implementation pilot training with community-based health workers refined the counselling content and training material. Results: The manual review identified problem-solving, psychoeducation, basic counselling skills and behavioural activation as common counselling components across interventions. The interviews found that participants mostly identified symptoms of depression and anxiety in behavioural terms and lay health workers and pregnant women demonstrated their understanding through a range of contextual terms. Perceived causes of symptoms related to interpersonal conflict and challenging social circumstances. Stakeholder engagements identified a three session counselling model as most feasible for delivery as part of existing health care practices and community health workers in ward-based outreach teams as the best placed delivery agents. Pilot training of a three-session intervention with community-based health workers resulted in minor adaptations of the counselling assessment method. Conclusion: The study demonstrates how common therapeutic elements can be adapted to a local context and developed into an evidence-based manualised therapeutic programme while remaining sensitive to a health system's needs. While a problem-solving counselling approach, delivered in a structured format, was best suited for training lay health workers, input from health workers and perinatal mothers informed the manualised counselling content. The latter was a critical supplement to align the programme with contextual needs. Stakeholder engagements helped to align the intervention design to health system requirements and guidelines. Structured training practices and ongoing supervision of mental health workers are vital to develop counselling skills over time and to enhance personal support.

Thesis advisor: Theresa Betancourt / Families in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face significant mental health and psychosocial care gaps. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have addressed these gaps by task-sharing evidence-based mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) interventions to nonspecialist community providers. Task-shared interventions have demonstrated effectiveness (improvements in MHPSS outcomes of intervention participants); however, quality of delivery (fidelity and competence) has rarely been examined as a factor associated with effectiveness despite implementation science models suggesting a causal link between quality of delivery and effectiveness. In this study, I apply a mixed methods approach to examine the quality of delivery by nonspecialists who are facilitating an evidence-based, early childhood development and family violence prevention program, known as Sugira Muryango, in Rwanda. Currently, Sugira Muryango is being expanded and implemented through the Promoting Lasting Anthropometric Change and Young Children’s Development (PLAY) Collaborative, which scales up Sugira Muryango to 10,000 households living in extreme poverty in Ngoma, Nyanza, and Rubavu districts. The program has strong ties to the Rwanda National Government and their social protection and policy goals. I find that nonspecialist age is significantly associated with higher initial fidelity and competence scores and smaller improvements in fidelity and competence over time. In addition, nonspecialists in Nyanza district were more likely to have higher initial fidelity and competence scores but also see smaller changes over time. Fidelity and competence were found to significantly co-vary. Multi-level growth models revealed that fidelity was not a significant predictor of changes in any child discipline outcomes or of any responsive caregiving outcomes. However, competence significantly predicted changes in some responsive caregiving practices, specifically acceptance and learning materials, and it predicted decreases in physical punishment. In semi-structured interviews, the nonspecialists provided examples of using skills such as rapport-building, empathy, and active listening to deliver Sugira Muryango effectively. Nonspecialists also provided examples of barriers to quality of delivery, including compensation and technology issues. Overall, this dissertation contributes empirical evidence to what we understand theoretically and moves towards development of best practices for monitoring and supervising nonspecialists in task-shared MHPSS interventions. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

This thesis studies the area of virtualization. The focus is on the sub-area live migration, a technique that allows a seamless migration of a virtual machine from one physical machine to another physical machine. Virtualization is an attractive technique, utilized in large computer systems, for example data centers. By using live migration, data center administrators can migrate virtual machines, seamlessly, without the users of the virtual machines taking notice about the migrations. Manually initiated migrations can become cumbersome, with an ever-increasing number of physical machines. The number of physical and virtual machines is not the only problem, deciding when to migrate and where to migrate are other problems that needs to be solved. Manually initiated migrations can also be inaccurate and untimely. Two different strategies for automated live migration have been developed in this thesis. The Push and the Pull strategies. The Push strategy tries to get rid of virtual machines and the Pull strategy tries to steal virtual machines. Both of these strategies, their design and implementation, are presented in the thesis. The strategies utilizes Shannon's Information Entropy to measure the balance in the system. The strategies further utilizes a cost model to predict the time a migration would require. This is used together with the Information Entropy to decide which virtual machine to migrate if and when a hotspot occurs. The implementation was done with the help of OMNeT++, an open-source simulation tool. The strategies are evaluated with the help of a set of simulations. These simulations include a variety of scenarios with different workloads. Our results shows that the developed strategies can re-balance a system of computers, after a large amount of virtual machines has been added or removed, in only 4-5 minutes. The results further shows that our strategies are able to keep the system balanced when the system load is at medium. This while virtual machines are continuously added or removed from the system. The contribution this thesis brings to the field is a model for how automated live migration of virtual machines can be done to improve the performance of a computer system, for example a data center.

Recent discussions on corporate citizenship (CC) highlight the new political role of corporations in society by arguing that corporations increasingly act as quasi-governmental actors and take on what hitherto had originally been governmental tasks. By examining political and sociological citizenship theories, the authors show that such a corporate engagement can be explained by a changing (self-)conception of corporate citizens from corporate bourgeois to corporate citoyen. As an intermediate actor in society, the corporate citoyen assumes co-responsibilities for social and civic affairs and actively collaborates with fellow citizens beyond governmental regulation. This change raises the question of how such corporate civic engagement can be aligned with public policy regulations and how corporate activities can be integrated into the democratic regime. To clarify the mode of CC contributions to society, the authors will apply the tenet of subsidiarity as a governing principle which allows for specifying corporations’ tasks as intermediate actors in society. By referring to the renewed European Union strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility, the authors show how such a subsidiary corporate-governmental task-sharing can be organized.

Children and adolescents in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) suffer heightened vulnerability for the development of mental health conditions which is exacerbated due to enduring socioemotional, economic, and biological risk factors. The constellation of co-occurring adverse childhood experiences (ACEs; e.g. poverty, maltreatment, household dysfunction, exposure to violence) confer heightened vulnerability for the development of mental health disorders that may persist into adulthood. Although the mechanisms for transmission from one generation to the next has not yet been fully elucidated, contemporary evidence has converged primarily on maternal mental health as a key mediator between childhood exposure to ACEs, and the subsequent mental health of her children. Access to mental health assessment or treatment resources in Kenya are limited or non-existent. Due to the heightened risk for intergenerational transmission of mental health problems across generations, with support from the World Health Organization and key stakeholders in Kenya, the development of task-sharing approaches to address the unmet psychological needs of children and mothers has been advocated for. Task-sharing involves the rational redistribution of mental health care tasks from higher cadres of mental health professionals to non-specialized community health care workers in order to increase the capacity for, and access to, mental health services across Kenya. This dissertation seeks to explore: 1) the development of a partnership between the Africa Mental Health Research and Training Foundation and McMaster University to explore the use of task-sharing in the development of a technology-supported assessment for common mental disorders in children and adolescents; 2) the validity and reliability of the newly developed International Mobile Assessment for Children and Teens (IMPACT) administered by non-specialized community health workers when compared to a gold-standard assessment, the MINI-KID, when administered by trained psychology graduate students, and finally; 3) the association between maternal exposure ACEs and the subsequent mental health of her children, mediated by maternal mental health. The first study outlines the process of the development of the IMPACT using a novel blending of emic-etic approaches, and the practical evaluation of the IMPACT by ten local community health workers. Results from this study demonstrated the demand for, and utility of, the IMPACT and outlined the practical considerations of conducting field work of this nature. The second study examined the diagnostic agreement (e.g. validity) of mental health conditions in Kenyan school children (n=189) between the IMPACT and the MINI-KID. The results of this study demonstrated relatively high agreement between the diagnosis of common mental disorders in children between the IMPACT and the MINI-KID. The third study explores the relationship between ACEs (Y-VACS) of mothers (n=149) and the socioemotional wellbeing of her children (e.g. internalizing and externalizing problems; CBCL), mediated by maternal mental health (CBCL). The results of this study demonstrate the association between maternal ACEs and child internalizing and externalizing behaviours, mediated by maternal mental health and moderated by maternal education. Collectively, the results of these dissertation studies support the use of task-sharing approaches for the assessment of common mental disorders in children and adolescents, by non-specialized community health workers and that the transmission of mental health problems between generations is associated with a multitude of complex and inter-related factors (e.g. maternal ACEs and maternal mental health), exacerbated by chronic and co-occurring adversity. Additionally, the results of these studies demonstrated the need for further research that prioritizes the equitable accessibility interventions that target the mental health related-sequelae experienced by maternal-child dyads exposed to chronic and enduring adversity in LMIC. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Children who grow up in circumstances of chronic poverty and adversity suffer heightened risk for mental health problems as they grow up. This is especially true of children who live in low- and middle-income countries, where children are more likely to experience chronic and co-occurring forms of adversity. Access to mental health services in these contexts are limited or non-existent, conferring heightened vulnerability for mental health problems that may persist across the lifespan. The risk for mental health problems can be transmitted across generations. Although it is not fully understood how mental health problems can be transmitted from a mother to a child, one commonly studied mechanism is the role of maternal adversity and maternal mental health. Because the barriers to mental health care are abundant, the needs of children and mothers with mental health problems are frequently left unmet. The World Health Organization proposes a task-sharing solution, whereby less specialized community health care workers are trained to provide services to improve access to assessment and treatment in low income countries. Using data collected in rural Kenya, this dissertation seeks to explore: 1) the development of a partnership between the Africa Mental Health Research and Training Foundation and McMaster University with the aim of working together to create mental health assessment for children, using a task-sharing approach, 2) to compare the results of the novel mental health assessment to a gold-standard, and 3) to evaluate maternal adversity, maternal mental health, and the transmission of mental health problems between mothers and children in Kenya. Collectively, the results of this dissertation demonstrate that utilizing a task-sharing model for the development of a mental health assessment for use by community health workers is a valid method for assessing and diagnosing mental health problems in children, and that the transmission of mental health problems across generations is associated complex factors (e.g. maternal exposure to adversity and maternal mental health) as a result of exposure to chronic and enduring adversity in LMIC.