In the present study, using both implicit and explicit measures, we addressed the issue of whether strongly developed relationships towards brands could be modified through the use of evaluative conditioning. Using an online survey, individual participant brand lists were created, and formed the basis of this experiment. Participants were then exposed to conditioning during a longitudinal study. Throughout the experiment, a combination of explicit and implicit measures was used to assess changes in attitude. Specifically, participants were asked to rate the brand names on a Likert-type scale. Simultaneously, changes in the brains electrical activity in response to the brands were recorded via electroencephalography (EEG). Upon completion of this task, participants underwent two Implicit Association Tests (IAT; one for liked brands and one for disliked brands). There were two main findings of this study. Firstly, no significant changes in attitude were observed via the use of explicit measures, and those that were found relating to the IAT were regarded as questionable. Secondly, EEG presented consistent results which showed that conditioning elicited changes in cortical activity towards both liked and disliked brands, which suggest it may be a useful tool in measuring the impact of evaluative conditioning that is not reflected in verbal responses.

La modélisation des objets géométriques est incontournable dans de nombreuses disciplines et applications. L'évolution des moyens l'acquisition et de stockage a produit une hausse énorme des volumes utilisés pour stocker ces objets. La réduction des tailles de ces volumes fait l'objet de plusieurs domaines de recherches ; comme la compression, qui vise à compresser le volume au maximum, et l'élaboration de structures théoriques compactes qui minimisent la taille nécessaire à la représentation. Le but de cette thèse est de concevoir, et d'évaluer des solutions pratiques et exploitables pour représenter de<br />façon compacte les triangulations. Pour ce faire, deux issues sont explorées : modifier la représentation interne en mémoire des objets géométriques, et redéfinir les types abstraits des objets géométriques correspondants. Une première solution consiste à utiliser des indices sur une taille arbitraire de bits, au lieu des références absolues. Les gains dépendent de la taille de la triangulation, et aussi de la taille du mot mémoire de la machine. Le handicap majeur est le coût élevé de la méthode en termes de temps d'exécution. Une deuxième piste consiste à utiliser des catalogues stables. L'idée consiste à regrouper les triangles dans des micro-triangulations, et de représenter la triangulation comme un ensemble de ces micro-triangulations. Le nombre des références multiples vers les sommets, et des références réciproques entre voisins est alors nettement réduit. Les résultats sont <br />prometteurs, sachant que le temps d'exécution n'est pas dramatiquement altéré par la modification des méthodes d'accés aux triangles. Une troisième solution consiste à décomposer la triangulation en plusieurs sous-triangulations permettant ainsi de coder les références dans une sous-triangulation sur un nombre réduit de bits par rapport aux références absolues. Les résultats de cette techniques sont encourageants, et peuvent être amplifiés par d'autres techniques comme le codage relatif des références, ou le partage de l'information géométrique des sommets sur les bords entre les différentes sous-triangulations. L'élaboration de structures compactes nécessite encore plus d'intérêts, et plusieurs pistes sont à explorer pour pouvoir arriver à des solutions plus économiques en termes d'espace mémoire.

When triangulating a belief network we aim to obtain a junction tree of minimum state space. Searching for the optimal triangulation can be cast as a search over all the permutations of the network's vaeriables. Our approach is to embed the discrete set of permutations in a convex continuous domain D. By suitably extending the cost function over D and solving the continous nonlinear optimization task we hope to obtain a good triangulation with respect to the aformentioned cost. In this paper we introduce an upper bound to the total junction tree weight as the cost function. The appropriatedness of this choice is discussed and explored by simulations. Then we present two ways of embedding the new objective function into continuous domains and show that they perform well compared to the best known heuristic.

La planification de chemin est un domaine de l'intelligence artificielle permettant à un personnage, un objet, une unité de se déplacer automatiquement, dans un environnement, en évitant les obstacles et sans intervention humaine. Ce déplacement s'effectue entre une configuration de départ et une configuration d'arrivée. Lors de ce déplacement, à aucun moment le personnage ne doit se retrouver dans une configuration invalide. Dans le contexte des jeux vidéo commerciaux actuels, cette technique est malheureusement encore peu utilisée correctement. De plus, peu de publications concernent la planification de chemin lorsqu'effectuée dans un environnement triangularisé. Lorsqu'utilisé dans un jeu vidéo, il est nécessaire que le calcul du chemin soit effectué très rapidement afin de fournir un temps de réaction presque immédiat au joueur. La solution calculée n'est alors pas forcément optimale mais propose un bon compromis si l'on souhaite mettre l'accent sur la vitesse de réponse. Nous expliquons d'abord le principe de la planification de chemin en détail et ensuite certaines des techniques les plus connues tels que Dijkstra, A*, Breadth First Search, Depth First Search, etc. Nous détaillons les avantages et inconvénients des environnements triangularisés par rapport aux autres techniques de maillage. Nous exposons aussi dans ce mémoire le fruit de nos recherches et expérimentations sur l'environnement de recherche Mammoth en comparant l'évolution de la planification de chemin dans ce contexte précis. Nous utilisons également les techniques existantes pour parcourir les cartes du jeu et discutons des problèmes rencontrés et des évolutions possibles. De nos jours, lorsque la planification de chemin est effectuée dans un environnement triangularisé, on parle souvent de A* pour la sélection des triangles et ensuite de parcours par les milieux des côtés des triangles ou bien par leur centre. Or, cela est loin d'être optimal et bien que rapide, propose un déplacement nettement plus long dans ce cas. Pour répondre à cette problématique, nous utilisons en particulier trois algorithmes spécifiques : Triangulation A* et Triangulation Reduction A* afin de sélectionner les triangles par lesquels le personnage va passer et l'algorithme funnel modifié pour le déplacement à l'intérieur de ces triangles. Pour conclure, nous comparons ces différentes techniques de planification de chemin dans ce contexte en comparant la vitesse d' exécution, le nombre de nœuds explorés et la distance parcourue notamment afin d'en déduire la technique la plus appropriée pour Mammoth. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Planification de chemin, pathfinding, triangulation, algorithmes, A*, funnel, TA*, TRA*

Our research focusses on the problem of finding nearby peers in the Internet. We focus on one particular approach, Beacon Triangulation that is widely used to solve the peer-finding problem. Beacon Triangulation is based on relative distances of nodes to some special nodes called beacons. The scheme gives an error when a new node that wishes to join the network has the same relative distance to two or more nodes. One of the reasons for the error is that two or more nodes have the same distance vectors. As a part of our research work, we derive the conditions to ensure the uniqueness of distance vectors in any network given the shortest path distribution of nodes in that network. We verify our analytical results for G(n, p) graphs and the Internet. We also derive other conditions under which the error in the Beacon Triangulation scheme reduces to zero. We compare the Beacon Triangulation scheme to another well-known distance estimation scheme known as Global Network Positioning (GNP).

published_or_final_version / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Triangle meshes can provide an effective geometric representation of images. Although many mesh generation methods have been proposed to date, many of them do not explicitly take image discontinuities into consideration. In this thesis, a new mesh model for images, which explicitly represents discontinuities (i.e., image edges), is proposed along with two corresponding mesh-generation methods that determine the mesh-model parameters for a given input image. The mesh model is based on constrained Delaunay triangulations (DTs), where the constrained edges correspond to image edges. One of the proposed methods is named explicitly-represented discontinuities-with error diffusion (ERDED), and is fast and easy to implement. In the ERDED method, the error diffusion (ED) scheme is employed to select a subset of sample points that are not on the constrained edges. The other proposed method is called ERDGPI. In the ERDGPI method, a constrained DT is first constructed with a set of prespecified constrained edges. Then, the greedy point insertion (GPI) scheme is employed to insert one point into the constrained DT in each iteration until a certain number of points is reached. The ERDED and ERDGPI methods involve several parameters which must be provided as input. These parameters can affect the quality of the resulting image approximations, and are discussed in detail. We also evaluate the performance of our proposed ERDED and ERDGPI methods by comparing them with the highly effective ED and GPI schemes. Our proposed methods are demonstrated to be capable of producing image approximations of higher quality both in terms of PSNR and subjective quality than those generated by other schemes. For example, the reconstructed images produced by the proposed ERDED method are often about 3.77 dB higher in PSNR than those produced by the ED scheme, and our proposed ERDGPI scheme produces image approximations of about 1.08 dB higher PSNR than those generated by the GPI approach. / Graduate

Introduction The NHS emphasises programme approaches to commissioning (Health Improvement Programmes and National Service Frameworks) but research is limited. I evaluated the Health Care Programme Approach (HCPA) for stroke whose individual elements are: a co-ordinating group; a co-ordinator; a technical document; and agreement of priorities. Methods 1 Four rounds of interviews with managers and clinicians; observation at meetings; analysis of documentary sources. 2 Quantitative indicators of progress measured at two time points. 3 Estimation of the Programme Budget and Transaction Costs from published sources and local data. 4 Interviews with Directors of Public Health from nine comparator districts. Results 1A structured process led to a set of priorities, which were widely accepted across all agencies, allowing the co-ordinating group to focus on facilitating change. This group took two years to reach a stage where it could change services. Most peoples upportedth e approachb ut were not alwaysc lear aboutt he process. 2 The indicators showed improvements in some aspects of care. 3 The programme budget was £IOm, mostly in long-term care (£5.5m) and hospital care (£3m). The transaction costs amounted to 0.25% of the programme budget. Preface 4 All comparator districts reported changes to commissioning and improvements in stroke services, but I found more widespread change in the study district. Discussion The detailed description of process, and use of multiple methods, gives strength to the findings. A collaborative approach has developed across the NHS during the period of this study making the findings highly relevant. There were important lessons for multiagency groups including: the time needed to function effectively; the need for individuals to clarify whether they represent an organisation or their own perspective; the need to review the group remit and the group's routes of communication; and the ability to adapt to changes in national policy while focusing on improving the health of the patients who fall within the programme. Keywords Planning, Purchasing, Commissioning, Stroke Services, Health Care Programme Approach, Evidence-Based, Multiagency Collaboration, Triangulation, Evaluation, Case Study.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madiosn, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 434-442).

Thesis (Professional Degree)--University of Missouri, School of Mines and Metallurgy, 1937. / The entire thesis text is included in file. Typescript. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed June 9, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 59) and index (p. 60-63).