Les conseillers pédagogiques participent à la mise en œuvre des orientations du ministère de l’Éducation et de celles de leur conseil scolaire en matière d’enseignement afin de répondre aux besoins d’innovation, de communication et de collaboration des apprenants du 21e siècle. Outre leurs connaissances pédagogiques, leur propension pour l’innovation et leurs habiletés relationnelles, ils sont très peu préparés à exercer leur leadership quant à leurs fonctions d’agents de changement auprès de leurs collègues enseignants. L’objectif de cette recherche était de comprendre les manifestations du leadership transformationnel exercé par sept conseillers pédagogiques provenant de quatre conseils scolaires de l’Ontario. L’analyse de données recueillies a permis, à partir de leurs représentations, de dégager des liens entre la mobilisation des compétences qu’ils utilisent pour mener leurs collègues enseignants vers un changement de pratique et le leadership transformationnel tel qu’élaboré par Bass (1998).

Till följd av att företag använder sig av rösträttsdifferentiering uppstår det ofta en diskrepans mellan de större aktieägarnas röster och kapital. Tidigare forskning indikerar att en större diskrepans ökar förekomsten av agentproblem aktieägare emellan, då de största aktieägarna kontrollerar företagen och ibland agerar utifrån privata intressen eftersom de ofta endast bär en bråkdel av de finansiella konsekvenserna för besluten de fattar. Syftet med studien är att undersöka om en ökad diskrepans mellan de största aktieägarnas röster och kapital leder till en lägre abnorm avkastning vid tillkännagivanden av företagsförvärv. Undersökningen utgör 49 företag med rösträttsdifferentiering listade på Nasdaq Stockholm, som tillsammans genomfört 169 företagsförvärv under perioden 2010–2016. Studien finner ett signifikant omvänt u- samband, där en viss skillnad mellan röster och kapital kan ha en positiv påverkan på den abnorma avkastningen i samband med tillkännagivanden av företagsförvärv. När diskrepansen sedan blir alltför stor verkar dess påverkan på den abnorma avkastningen däremot övergå till negativ.

This study argues that the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is a constrained agent of Europe’s foreign policy. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty reform created the remodelled version of the High Representative of the Union as a potentially powerful agent to represent and coordinate Europe’s foreign policy. However, the analysis shows how and why the member states granted only limited discretion to the new foreign policy actor during the first years of the post’s existence. The aim of the study is to reveal the conditions of discretion of the High Representative. With the use of a principal-agent (PA) approach, the study shows that conflicting preferences of the member states, tight control mechanisms, as well as inadequate cooperation with the European Commission limited the High Representative’s room for manoeuvre. The findings suggest that the PA approach can be developed further in the future in order to better explain limited discretion of agents in matters of foreign policy. Based on the findings, the study also puts forward a number of characteristics of a ‘constrained agent’. It is suggested that the post of High Representative has the potential to emancipate from its status of a constrained agent over time, and to gain credibility as a foreign policy actor.

A complex system is a collection of parts, that can be identical or different, that interact with each other and environment, and exhibit emergent behaviour. Here, I consider the formation of vascular structures in the body as a complex system consisting of an emergent pattern in interacting endothelial cells. A cancer tumour is a different but related complex system that contains various types of cells, some of which having cancer-inducing mutations. To understand the formation of a vascular structure or a cancer tumour, it is important to understand both the single cells and cell-cell interactions. To study the physical interaction among cells in vascular formation or cancer cell growth, in this thesis an agent-based model is built based on the physical properties of cells which includes the size, shape, direction, and position of cells. In this way the mathematical equations in the model can show the physical variation among modelled cells. The 3-dimensional shape of cells is modelled, and so while I start with cell interactions in petri-dish the model can be easily extended to describe motility of cells in a 3-dimensional system in the future. The physical model is implemented and then simulated with in silico experiments, and then the spatial distribution of cells in in vitro experiments is analysed and used to calibrate the model. In vitro experiments with and without a drug in normal and hypoxic conditions are carried out. Also the patterns formed by cells with different treatment are analysed to produce different parameter combinations in the model. This physical model is shown to be able to predict vessel formation and be reused to predict the spatial distribution of cancer cells in in vitro growth experiments. With biological data such as cell size, cell shape, etc. this model is able to predict behaviours of various cell types, and can also be used to predict more complex phenomena, such as mixed type of cancer cells growing in 3-dimensions with vascular structures.

Multi-agent systems are increasingly popular for modeling distributed environments that are highly complex and dynamic such as e-commerce, smart buildings, and smart grids. Often in open multi-agent systems, agents interact with other agents to meet their own goals. Trust is considered significant in multi-agent systems to make interactions effectively, especially when agents cannot assure that potential partners share the same core beliefs about the system or make accurate statements regarding their competencies and abilities. This work describes a trust model that augments fuzzy logic with Q-learning, and a suspension technique to help trust evaluating agents select beneficial trustees for interaction in uncertain, imprecise, and the dynamic multi-agent systems. Q-Learning is used to evaluate trust on the long term, fuzzy inferences are used to aggregate different trust factors and suspension is used as a short-term response to dynamic changes. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated using simulation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed model can help agents select trustworthy partners to interact with. It has a better performance compared to some of the popular trust models in the presence of misbehaving interaction partners. When interactions are based on trust, trust establishment mechanisms can be used to direct trustees, instead of trustors, to build a higher level of trust and have a greater impact on the results of interactions. This work also describes a trust establishment model for intelligent agents using implicit feedback that goes beyond trust evaluation to outline actions to guide trustees (instead of trustors). The model uses the retention of trustors to model trustors’ behaviours. For situations where tasks are multi-criteria and explicit feedback is available, we present a trust establishment model that uses a multi-criteria approach to help trustees to adjust their behaviours to improve their perceived trust and attract more interactions with trustors. The model calculates the necessary improvement per criterion when only a single aggregated satisfaction value is provided per interaction, where the model attempts to predicted both the appropriate value per criteria and its importance. Then we present a trust establishment model that integrates the two major sources of information to produce a comprehensive assessment of a trustor’s likely needs in multi-agent systems. Specifically, the model attempts to incorporates explicit feedback, and implicit feed-back assuming multi-criteria tasks. The proposed models are evaluated through simulation, we found that trustees can enhance their trustworthiness, at a cost, if they tune their behaviour in response to feedback (explicit or implicit) from trustors. Using explicit feedback with multi-criteria tasks, trustees can emphasize on important criterion to satisfy need of trustors. Trust establishment based on explicit feedback for multi-criteria tasks, can result in a more effective and efficient trust establishment compared to using implicit feedback alone. Integrating both approaches together can achieve a reasonable trust level at a relatively lower cost.

In this work we present the problem of multi-agent path-finding with dynamic obstacles, a generalisation of multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) in which the environment contains randomly-moving dynamic obstacles. This generalisation can be though of as an abstraction of incomplete knowledge of the environment or as a simplification of the multi-agent path-finding where we do not include all agents in the cooperative planner. We adapt three planning algorithms for MAPF to work in an environment with dy- namic obstacles: Local-Repair A* (LRA*), Windowed Hierarchical Cooper- ative A* (WHCA*) and Operator Decomposition with Independence Detec- tion (OD/ID). In addition, we propose two heuristics for these algorithms in dynamic environments: Path Rejoining and Obstacle Predictor. In our experiments, we find that LRA* and WHCA* are best suited for the dy- namic environment. The Path Rejoining heuristic is successful in improving run-times at a small cost in makespan. Obstacle Prediction is capable of lowering the number of times a plan has to be found, but the overhead of our implementation outweighs any performance benefits in most cases. 1

Adverse post-natural disaster outcomes in low-income regions, like elevated internal migration levels and low consumption levels, are the result of market failures, poor mechanisms for stabilizing income, and missing insurance markets, which force the affected population to respond, and adapt to the shock they face. In a spatial environment, with multiple locations with independent but interconnected markets, these transitions quickly become complex and highly non-linear due to the feedback loops between the micro individual-level decisions and the meso location-wise market decisions. To capture these continuously evolving micro-meso interactions, this paper presents a spatially explicit bottom-up agent-based model to analyze natural disaster-like shocks to low-income regions. The aim of the model is to temporally and spatially track how population distributions, income, and consumption levels evolve, in order to identify low-income workers that are "food insecure". The model is applied to the 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan, which faced catastrophic losses and high levels of displacement in a short time span, and with market disruptions, resulted in high levels of food insecurity. The model is calibrated to pre-crisis trends, and shocked using distance-based output and labor loss functions to replicate the earthquake impact. Model results show, how various factors like existing income and saving levels, distance from the fault line, and connectivity to other locations, can give insights into the spatial and temporal emergence of vulnerabilities. The simulation framework presented here, leaps beyond existing modeling efforts, which usually deals with macro long-term loss estimates, and allows policy makers to come up with informed short-term policies in an environment where data is non-existent, policy response is time dependent, and resources are limited.

With the help of rapidly advancing communication technology, control systems are increasingly integrated via communication networks. Networked control systems (NCSs) bring significant advantages such as flexible and scalable structures, easy implementation and maintenance, and efficient resources distribution and allocation. NCSs empowers to finish some complicated tasks using some relatively simple systems in a collaborated manner. However, there are also some challenges and constraints subject to the imperfection of communication channels. In this thesis, the stabilization problems and the performance limitation problems of control systems subject to networked-induced constraints are studied. Overall, the thesis mainly includes two parts: 1) Consensus and consensusability of multi-agent systems (MASs); 2) Delay margins of NCSs. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 deal with the consensus problems of MASs, which aim to properly design the control protocols to ensure the state convergence of all the agents. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 focus on the consensusability analysis, exploring how the dynamics of the agents and the networked induced constraints impact the overall systems for achieving consensus. Chapter 6 pays attention to the delay margins of discrete-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems, studying how the dynamics of the plants limit the time delays that can be tolerated by LTI controllers. In Chapter 2, the leader-following consensus problem of MASs with general linear dynamics and arbitrary switching topologies is considered. The MAS with arbitrary switching topologies is formulated as a switched system. Then the leaderfollowing consensus problem is transformed to the stability problem of the corresponding switched system. A necessary and sufficient consensus condition is derived. The condition is also extended to MASs with time-varying delays. In Chapter 3, the consensus problem of MASs with general linear dynamics is studied. Motivated by the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication technique, a general framework is considered in which different state variables are exchanged in different independent communication topologies. This novel framework could improve the control system design flexibility and potentially improve the system performance. Fully distributed consensus protocols are proposed and analyzed for the settings of fixed and switching multiple topologies. The protocols can be applied using only local information. And the control gains can be designed depending on the dynamics of the individual agent. By transforming the overall MASs into cascade systems, necessary and sufficient conditions are provided to guarantee the consensus under fixed and switching state-variables-dependent topologies, respectively. Chapter 4 investigates the consensusability problem for MASs with time-varying delays. The bounded delays can be arbitrarily fast time-varying. The communication topology is assumed to be undirected and fixed. Considering general linear dynamics under average state protocols, the consensus problem is then transformed into a robust control problem. Sufficient frequency domain criteria are established in terms of small-gain theorem by analyzing the delay dependent gains for both continuoustime and discrete-time systems. The controller synthesis problems can be solved by applying the frequency domain design methods. The consensusablity problem of general linear MASs considering directed topologies are explored from a frequency domain perspective in Chapter 5. By investigating the properties of Laplacian spectra, a consensus criterion is established based on the stability of several complex weighted closed-loop systems. Furthermore, for singleinput MASs, frequency domain consensusability criteria are proposed on the basis of the stability margins, which depend on the H∞ norm of the complementary sensitivity function determined by the agents’ unstable poles. The corresponding design procedure is also developed. Chapter 6 studies the delay margin problem of discrete-time LTI systems. For general LTI plants with multiple unstable poles and nonminimum phase zeros, we employ analytic function interpolation and rational approximation techniques to derive bounds on delay margins. Readily computable and explicit lower bounds are found by computing the real eigenvalues of a constant matrix, and LTI controllers can be synthesized based on the H∞ control theory to achieve the bounds. The results can be also consistently extended to the case of systems with time-varying delays. For first-order unstable plants, we also obtain bounds achievable by proportionalintergral- derivative (PID) controllers, which are of interest to PID control design and implementation. It is worth noting that unlike its continuous-time counterpart, the discrete-time delay margin problem being considered herein constitutes a simultaneous stabilization problem, which is known to be rather difficult. While previous work on the discrete-time delay margin led to negative results, the bounds developed in this chapter provide instead a guaranteed range of delays within which the delayed plants can be robustly stabilized, and in turn solve the special class of simultaneous stabilization problems in question. Finally, in Chapter 7, the thesis is summarized and some future research topics are also presented. / Graduate

In order to succeed, it is imperative that all e-commerce systems include an effective and reliable trust and reputation modeling system. This is particularly true of decentralized e-commerce systems in which autonomous software engage in commercial transactions. Many researchers have sought to overcome the complexities of modeling a subjective, human concept like trust, resulting in several trust and reputation models. While these models each present a unique offering and solution to the problem, several issues persist. Most of the models require direct experience in the e-commerce system in order to make effective trust decisions. This leaves new agents and agents who only casually use the e-commerce system vulnerable. Additionally, the reputation ratings of agents who are relatively new to the system are often indistinguishable from scores for poorly performing agents. Finally, more tactics to defend against agents who exploit the characteristics of the open, distributed system for their own malicious needs are required. To address these issues, a new metric is devised and presented: seniority. Based on agent age and activity level within the e-commerce system, seniority provides a means of judging the credibility of other agents with little or no prior experience in the system. As the results of experimental analysis reveals, employing a reputation model that uses seniority provides considerable value to agents who are new agents, casual buyer agents and all other purchasing agents in the e-commerce system. This new metric therefore offers a significant contribution toward the development of enhanced and new trust and reputation models for deployment in real-world distributed e-commerce environments.

The general purpose of this study was to examine transformations of human agency in natural contexts. Existing theoretical formulations have primarily been confined to laboratory investigations. Moreover, the principles generated by such theories have not been validated beyond the laboratory setting. With this purpose in mind, there were two immediate aims of the study. The first aim was to contribute to counselling theory by assessing five prominent theories of human agency and providing a basis from which to potentially establish more adequate theoretical formulations. The second aim was to contribute to counselling practice by providing concrete information and a more informed basis through which to enhance agency in clients. A multiple case study design integrating intensive interviewing and Q-methodology was utilized for the study. Ten individuals, five women and five men, ranging in age from 28 to 64, were identified through a network of contacts for participation in the study. Based upon convergence of qualitative evidence from interviews and quantitative evidence from Q-sorts, rich, detailed narrative accounts of transformation were constructed for each individual. Each account was validated by the individual for whom each was written and by an independent reviewer. Through a comparative analysis of the ten diverse accounts of transformation, extensive commonality was identified. Twenty-two common themes were extracted from the accounts that portrayed significant features of the transformation. Based on these themes, an abstract story of the common pattern revealed in the transformation was plotted. Individual aspects of each of the theories of agency were validated as well as qualified in some important ways. In addition, the results extended these theories in three main ways. First, the results indicated that transformations of human agency were complex wholes that involved a configuration of features rather than any one or two isolated features. Second, the findings indicated that context played a critical role in transformations of agency. And third, the results emphasized the important role of powerful emotions in the process of transformation. The results of this study also generated a beginning holistic portrait of transformation which has implications for counsellors in terms of understanding and facilitating transformations of agency in clients. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate