M.Sc. / Advancements in technology used in financial markets have led to substantial automation of tasks within the financial industry. Data analysis, trade execution and trade processing have been automated, reducing costs and increasing productivity. Algorithmic trading is the automated execution of trades on an electronic trading platform; it has been used to gain competitive advantage in financial markets since the early 1990s. Algorithmic trading applications, which must analyse information and determine whether to buy or sell, are well suited to the use of autonomous software agents. Multi-agent systems are better suited to the increasing complexity of algorithmic trading systems and the flexibility required by rapidly changing markets than single-agent systems. The granularity of components (agents) in multi-agent systems also promotes reuse and simplifies individual agent design. Algorithmic trading is, however, subject to challenges specifically in terms of data volume, speed of access and speed of processing. In order to utilise a multi-agent system solution the interactions between agents which allow distributed problem solving must be as efficient as possible. This dissertation investigates the use of indirect coordination to improve the efficiency of interactions between agents in multi-agent systems and to simplify agent design. Indirect coordination utilises environment abstractions known as artefacts to facilitate interaction between agents; such interaction can be simple data transfer or requests, complex coordination protocols as well as negotiation protocols. The investigation resulted in a framework that allows agents to transition between direct and indirect interaction techniques based on the specific interaction task at hand. The framework is built on two existing platforms, ii Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE) and Common ARTifact Infrastructure for AGents Open environments (CARTAGO). These platforms are combined into the JADE-CARTAGO Algorithmic Trading (JCAT) framework that provides the infrastructure needed for both direct and indirect interactions. Investigations into the performance of the JCAT framework have shown that artefacts improve interaction efficiency by reducing data loss in tasks such as information publishing, and perform as well as direct communication within certain constraints for other tasks. When limiting the number of agents in an interaction to 50 agents, artefacts perform at least as well as direct communication using agent communication language messages.

L'autophagie est une voie cellulaire strictement régulée dont le but principal est la dégradation lysosomale et le recyclage ultérieur du matériel cytoplasmique afin de maintenir l'homéostasie cellulaire normale. Des défauts dans l'autophagie sont liés à une variété d'états pathologiques, dont le cancer. Le cancer est une maladie associée aux modifications des processus cellulaires fondamentaux tels que l'apoptose et l'autophagie. Le calcium régule une série de processus physiologiques et pathologiques tels que le vieillissement, la neurodégénérescence et le cancer. Si le rôle du calcium et des canaux calciques dans le cancer est bien établi, l'information sur la nature moléculaire des canaux régulant l’autophagie ainsi que les mécanismes de cette régulation reste encore limitée. Le rôle de l'autophagie dans le cancer est complexe. En effet, elle peut favoriser à la fois la prévention tumorale et la résistance aux traitements. Elle est souvent détectée dans les cellules cancéreuses en réponse aux expositions aux rayons et la chimiothérapie. Elle semble contribuer à la résistance thérapeutique de certains cancers. Il est maintenant bien établi que sa modulation peut potentiellement contribuer à la mise en œuvre des méthodes de traitement du cancer. Dans cette étude, nos travaux ont permis d’identifier le calcium intracellulaire, comme un régulateur important de l'autophagie. Ainsi, nous proposons un lien possible entre le calcium, les canaux calciques, l’autophagie et la progression du cancer. De plus, nous avons mis en évidence un nouveau modulateur de l’autophagie, le ML-9. Cet outil pourrait cibler l'autophagie et être utilise dans le traitement des cancers. / Autophagy is a tightly regulated cellular pathway the main purpose of which islysosomal degradation and subsequent recycling of cytoplasmic material to maintain normal cellular homeostasis. Defects in autophagy are linked to a variety of pathological states,including cancer. Cancer is the disease associated with abnormal tissue growth following an alteration in such fundamental cellular processes as apoptosis, proliferation, differentiation,migration and autophagy. Calcium is a ubiquitous secondary messenger which regulates plethora of physiological and pathological processes such as aging, neurodegeneration and cancer. The role of calcium and calcium-permeable channels in cancer is well-established, whereas theinformation about molecular nature of channels regulating autophagy and the mechanisms of this regulation is still limited. The role of autophagy in cancer is complex, as it can promoteboth tumor prevention and survival/treatment resistance. Elevated autophagy is often detected in cancer cells in response to radiation and chemotherapy. Furthermore, autophagy seems to contribute to the therapeutic resistance of some cancers. It's now clear that modulation of autophagy has a great potential in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Our findings identified intracellular calcium as an important regulator of autophagy. We propose a possible link between calcium, calcium permeable ion channels, autopohagy and cancer progression. Further, our results revealed a new autophagy modulator ML-9 as an attractive tool for targeting autophagy in cancer therapy.

Nées au cours des années 1960 pour faire face à l’exode rural, les politiques de développement local ont une particularité, celle d’être plurielles. Elles présentent une logique partenariale issue de domaines spécialisés divers (économique, social, culturel…) pour favoriser la construction d’un projet global sur un territoire rural en vue de sa redynamisation. Bénéficiant d'une écoute toujours plus attentive par les pouvoirs publics, notamment depuis les premières lois de décentralisation (1982), le secteur du développement local s’est considérablement structuré. Cette structuration amène la nécessité pour les organisations de développement local de se doter de professionnels formés, aux côtés des élus locaux. De la pluralité du développement local s'adjoint une hétérogénéité des professionnels que nous avons nommés les agents de développement. Il s'agit de professionnels chargés de faire vivre, d'animer les différents projets sur un territoire intercommunal. Ils se situent à l'interface des différents partenaires des projets et leur première mission est de les mettre en réseau dans le souci de préserver l'intérêt général des actions. Issus d'horizons divers, leur recrutement est prioritairement orienté sur des capacités personnelles, humaines avant même une technicité particulière. Or, cette activité professionnelle du développement local ne bénéficie pas d'une reconnaissance spécifique à son activité (statuts divers, rémunération faible, appellations diverses, champs de compétences et de missions relativement flous…). Il est alors intéressant de se questionner sur la forme de reconnaissance possible pour un métier pluriel. Doit-elle être uniforme et permettre l’émergence d’une véritable profession du développement local ou doit-elle laisser la primauté à la diversité et permettre ainsi des logiques diversifiées de métiers ? / Born in the sixties in order to counter balance the drift of the population from the countryside to the cities, many various policies aiming at the development of local rural areas were implemented. They came as a logical necessity stemming from diverse specialized sectors (economic, social, cultural…) to organize the realisation of global projects in order to boost a certain rural area and help its being more dynamic. The people involved in the development of local rural areas have received an always greater consideration from the government (public sector) especially since the first laws of decentralization (1982), it is when this sector considerably started to structure itself. These structures brought the need of recruiting specialized trained professionals in order to work side by side with the local elected people. The more varied the policies and needs for local and rural development were, the more diverse and heterogeneous the people working at it became. These people are professionals called “agents in charge of the local development”. Their mission consists in implementing and organizing different projects in local rural areas. They are at the heart of the project, being in charge of bringing together the professionals from various sectors, structuring their actions in order to safeguard the general interest of the outcome of these actions. These agents have various backgrounds ; but they are usually hired according to their personal, human qualities rather than to a special training they might have. It goes without saying that these “agents” do not receive the professional consideration their work deserves (status, low incomes, diverse titles for the job, undefined training, unclear missions..) It is therefore interesting to wonder if it would be possible to give such a diverse work a real status. Should this status encompass these various missions and allow the creation of a specific trained profession as “agent in charge of local development”, or should it respect the diversity in the professional background or training of each agent according to the specific needs of each mission or project ?

A perennial problem in moral philosophy concerns the formulation of an acceptable account of 'right action'. Act utilitarianism is one popular account, and much of its initial appeal involves the fact that it is taken to have practical application. However, it is the very attempt to apply act utilitarianism which raises questions about its tenability. These concerns become acute in the face of uncertainty about what constitutes tenability with respect to a moral theory. These issues relate to questions of methodology. One question concerning methodology involves the status of intuitions (in the sense of 'reflective judgements') in assessing moral theories and principles. Chapter one, Moral Methodology and Intuitions, examines the role of intuitions in theory assessment and, in particular, whether it is possible to avoid totally their employment. This question is explored with reference to the views of Peter Singer and John Rawls. The possibility of using the distinction between meta-ethics and normative ethics to avoid reliance on intuitions is considered. Chapter two, A Formulation of AU, utilizes the distinctions among agent, action and motive to present act utilitarianism in the strongest possible light. This involves discussion of whether it is more plausible to understand act utilitarianism in terms of actual or probable consequences. Finding neither account satisfactory, a fundamental question relevant to both models is then explored—what is the purpose of moral classification itself? With certain provisions, however, we return in the end to an actual consequences model for purposes of further exploration. Chapter three, AU and the Issue of Self-defeatingness, examines the issue of whether act utilitarianism is self-defeating. While it is not strictly self-defeating, act utilitarianism does incorporate a certain 'brinkmanship' with valuable moral norms which damages its plausibility. The distinction between decision-making procedures and rightness-making characteristics becomes important at this point. Act utilitarianism's account of moral responsibility seems to reduce the moral agent to a utility conductor and maximizer. Chapter four, The AU Moral Agent: Utility Machine, focuses on this problem, as well as related issues concerning basic values and the acts/omissions distinction. Chapter five, AU and Moral Responsibility, examines Bernard Williams' criticisms of act utilitarianism in terms of its implications for negative responsibility and integrity. Two different interpretations by prominant philosophers of Williams' critical suggestions about utilitarianism and integrity are examined and both are. found to be inadequate. Chapter six, AU and Integrity, explores further the nature of act utilitarianism's threat to integrity. Act utilitarianism's construal of moral agency threatens the personal integrity of the moral agent by requiring the sacrifice of personal projects and commitments, and, with them, the near abandonment of the personal self. Since morality is supposed to be for persons, this is a crippling objection. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is a critical examination of three influential and interrelated aspects of Donald Davidson’s philosophy of action.. The first issue that is considered is Davidson’s account of the logical form of action—sentences. After assessing the argument in support of Davidson’s account, and suggesting certain amendments to it, I show how this modified version of Davidson’s account can be extended to provide for more complicated types of action—sentences. The second issue that is considered is Davidson’s views concerning the individuation of actions; in particular, I examine Davidson’s theory concerning the ontological implications of those sentences that assert that an agent did something by means of doing something else. The conclusion that I seek to establish in this case is essentially negative—that Davidson’s theory is false. The third issue that is considered is Davidson’s theory concerning the logical implications of those sentences that assert that an agent did something as a means of doing something else, which is also commonly known as the causal theory of action. Here I argue against Davidson’s view by providing an alternative, and more satisfying response to the theoretical challenge that generates the causal theory. Subsequent to this I attempt to explain what motivates Davidson’s commitment to the causal theory. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

Only with a comprehensive detailed theory of the practical processes which agents engage in prior to successful action can one get a picture of all those junctures at which the mechanism of rationality may be applied, and at which irrationality may therefore occur. Rationality, I argue, is the exercise of normatives, such as believable and desirable, whose function is to control the formation of the stages in practical processes by determining what content and which functions of practical states are allowed into the process. Believable is a functional concept, and for an agent to wield it requires that he possess beliefs or a theory he can justify about which states are goal-functional. Desirable is likewise a functional concept, and its exercise requires that agents possess justifiable beliefs or a theory about which goals are to be functional. When the desirability belief functions, it does so according to ideals of the theory. For example, it functions saliently where desires become intentions. So long as the normatives function in these ways the agent is rational. To so function is to satisfy the ideal for agency itself. Chapter 2 presents a fine-grained model of the fundamental terms and relations necessary for practical reasoning and agency. In this model, the functions of belief, desire and intention are described in naturalized terms. On the basis of this account of the terms of agency, a taxonomy of the possible failures of rationally controlled practicality is presented in chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents a comprehensive and detailed account of intention formation comprised of the functions of belief, desire and intention. Wherever one of those functions occurs in the process is a juncture at which rationality may be exercised, and therefore a point at which irrationality may occur. In chapter 5 I describe some of the main ways that dysfunctional states may disrupt agency, creating irrationality. The measures agents may take to ameliorate or otherwise control such failures are discussed and distinguished according to the ideal of agency. Finally, and in these terms, I address the problem of akrasia, in particular the views of Davidson and Mele, and show that the room they make for strict akratic action involves a significant compromise of the ideals of agency, and therefore is not as "strict" as they and others have claimed. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

abstract: This work describes an approach for distance computation between agents in a multi-agent swarm. Unlike other approaches, this work relies solely on signal Angleof- Arrival (AoA) data and local trajectory data. Each agent in the swarm is able to discretely determine distance and bearing to every other neighbor agent in the swarm. From this information, I propose a lightweight method for sensor coverage of an unknown area based on the work of Sameera Poduri. I also show that this technique performs well with limited calibration distances. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Mechanical Engineering 2020

Le formalisme CSP (Problème de Satisfaction de Contraintes) permet de représenter de nombreux problèmes de manière simple et efficace. Cependant, une partie de ces problèmes ne peut être résolue de manière classique et centralisée. Les causes peuvent être diverses : temps de rapatriement des données prohibitif, sécurité des données non garantie, etc. Les CSP Distribués(DisCSP), domaine intersectant celui des SMA et des CSP, permettent de modéliser et de résoudre ces problèmes naturellement distribués. Les raisonnements intra-agent et inter-agents sont alors basés sur un ensemble de relations entre différentes variables. Les agents interagissent afin de construire une solution globale à partir des solutions locales. Nous proposons, dans ce travail, un algorithme de résolution de DisCSP nommé Distributed Backtracking with Sessions (DBS) permettant de résoudre des DisCSP où chaque agent dispose d’un problème local complexe. DBS a la particularité de ne pas utiliser de nogoods comme la majorité des algorithmes de résolution de DisCSP mais d’utiliser à la place des sessions. Ces sessions sont des nombres permettant d’attribuer un contexte à chaque agent ainsi qu’à chaque message échangé durant la résolution du problème. Il s’agit d’un algorithme complet permettant l’utilisation de filtres sur les messages échangés sans remettre en cause la preuvede complétude. Notre proposition est évaluée, dans les cas mono-variable et multi-variables par agents, sur différents benchmarks classiques (les problèmes de coloration de graphes distribués et les DisCSP aléatoires) ainsi que sur un problème d’exploration en environnement inconnu. / The CSP formalism (Constraint Satisfaction Problem) can represent many problems in a simple and efficient way. However, some of these problems cannot be solved in a classical and centralized way. The causes can be multiple: prohibitive repatriation time, unsecured data and so on. Distributed CSP (DisCSP), domain intersecting MAS and CSP, are used to model and to solve these problems. The intra-agent and inter-agent reasonning are so based on a set of relation between different variables. The agents interact in order to build a global solution from local solutions. We propose, in this work, an algorithm for solving DisCSP named Distributed Backtracking with Sessions (DBS) which allows to solve DisCSP where each agent owns a complex local problem. DBS has the particularity to not use nogoods like the majority of algorithms for solvingDisCSP but to use instead of sessions. These sessions are numbers which allow to assign a context to each agent and each message exchanged during the resolution of the problem. DBS is a complete algorithm which allows the use of filters on messages exchanged without affecting the proof of completeness. Our proposal is evaluated, for mono-variable and multi-variables per agents problems, on different classical benchmarks (distributed graph coloring problems and random DisCSP) and on an unknown environment exploration problem.

The system in which atmospheric nitrogen succumbs to enter Nature's cycle has a yet proven evasive with respect to the actual chemical reactions. At present several types of systems are proposed but their chemical makeup is practically unknown.

No description available.