Therapeutic Assessment (TA) is a semi-structured hybrid of assessment and intervention methods that aims to promote positive change in clients through collaboration. Studies have shown it to be an effective therapeutic intervention, but few studies have focused on adolescents. This comparative study examines the effects of TA, compared with assessment as usual, with an adolescent population. Dependent measures include symptom reduction and components of the assessment experience, specifically self-knowledge, feeling understood by the assessor, positive relationship with the assessor, and negative feelings about the assessment. A repeated measure ANOVA will examine the group effects on symptom reduction, while a MANOVA will be used to determine the effects of TA on the variables of assessment experience. / text

Hollywood film editing remains on the theoretical margins of contemporary film scholarship, and the cause of this is three-fold. First, despite advances in collaborative authorship studies, the Hollywood film director is still largely regarded as the sole creative lynchpin upon which the film’s success or failure ultimately lies. Second, Classical Hollywood film editing—commonly referred to as the continuity aesthetic—is considered successful if it remains unnoticed, if it remains invisible. Therefore, within this continuity aesthetic, the editor’s ultimate goal is to hide his or her own labor. Third, determining exactly how and where a film editor contributed to a film text during post-production is an incredibly difficult task. So, what is the solution? This dissertation explores how film archives can contribute to knowledge about the cinematic post-production process. My central research questions are: what kinds of information do film archives contain regarding the creative collaboration between the director and the editor? And, what does available archive material tell us about the changes and creative revisions in post-production? To answer these questions, I conducted original archival research on the following Hollywood Renaissance films: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Conversation (1974), Annie Hall (1977), and Raging Bull (1980). These films reflect a highly creative era in the Hollywood industry and are well-known for the collaborative relationship between the directors and the editors. To determine how and where collaborative authorship occurred in these films, I compared archival documents such as the storyboards and shooting scripts to the final film texts. These documents contain explicit instructions about how the scenes should be lit, decorated, and shot and how the film itself should be edited together. Therefore, I argue that any editing discrepancies between these documents and the final films were the result of a creative collaboration between the director and the editor. Ideally, this model of “script-to-screen” archival research will inspire other academics to investigate how and where a film’s creative revision occurs during post-production—and to what effect. / text

The objective of this dissertation study is to provide the theoretical foundation for collaborative information technology moderation on team performance and give empirical evidence to support this relationship. The model provided in this study is supported by analytical proofs for the proposed hypotheses to define relationships among constructs in this research including departure (reduction in the number of team members), collaborative information technology functionality, transactive memory strength, and team performance. This research offers a theory that utilizes transactive memory systems (TMS) to examine the departure problem. The main research question is: Can collaborative information technologies (CIT) alleviate negative effects of departure? The theory in this study is structured around the indicators of TMS: specialization, coordination, and credibility. Findings showed that CIT functionality level plays a role in enhancing the group performance. This role is not direct but instead, is a moderation effect that alleviates the negative departure impact. In absence of departure, CIT impact can be confusing as it can be either positive or negative. My analytical results explain why information systems literature has had conflicting arguments on the role of technology. I propose that particular dynamic events and incidents, such as employee departure, help us understand the impact of CIT more clearly. Moreover, I employ transactive memory theory to explain how individuals develop and exchange knowledge in a group and how skills and knowledge can be lost due to departure. I also explain why and how team performance benefits from CIT when departure occurs. / text

Older adults increasingly face difficult decisions in life threatening contexts as they move closer to death, become more likely to be diagnosed with life threatening diseases, and encounter more death within their social network (Greenberg, 2011). The purpose of this research was to understand the effect of a life-threatening decision context centered around cancer, self-esteem, other individual difference factors and cancer experience on older adults’ decision making competence, and preferences for collaborative decision making. Study participants were recruited through online circulation of the study recruitment flyer and in-person solicitations at meetings and other events at community locations (senior centers, civic group centers, and churches, etc.). Participants age 55-90 (N=202) were randomly assigned to either a mundane or life threatening condition and asked to complete the corresponding survey packet containing a measurement questionnaire. Analyses consisted of a series of analyses of variance (ANOVA) and regressions. The dependent variables were 3 major components of the DeBruin et al. (2007) Adult Decision Making Competence Scale: (a) Resistance to Framing, (b) Resistance to Sunk Cost Bias, and (c) Over/under confidence, in addition to a measure of Maximizing Tendency (Diab et al., 2008). Analyses revealed mixed results. Decision context did have an effect on decision making competence, while self-esteem showed little effect. No main effects or interactions were found between decision context, self-esteem, and preferences for collaborative decision making. Individual difference factors did effect decision making competence, with future time perspective, risk tolerance, and ego-integrity emerging as significant predictors. Furthermore, compelling results emerged pertaining to the effect of previous cancer experience on decision making competence. Results highlight the lasting effect of context and a previous cancer diagnosis on decision making competence and have implications in health care, psycho-oncology, and treatment decision making domains.

This study investigates the effects of implementing Collaborative Strategic Reading–High School (CSR–HS) on reading comprehension and challenging behavior outcomes for three high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Using a combined single subject research design consisting of a delayed, concurrent multiple-baseline and an alternating treatments with reversal, three high school students with ASD were paired with neurotypical reading partners to learn and use reading strategies with informational text two to three times per week. The alternating treatment conditions were CSR-HS with choice of text (i.e., CSR-HS-C) and CSR-HS without the opportunity to choose the reading text (i.e., CSR-HS-NC). Daily comprehension checks were collected and visually inspected along with data on occurrences of various challenging behaviors exhibited by each participant during intervention. Fidelity of implementation was also measured. Increased reading comprehension scores and decreased incidences of challenges behaviors were detected for the three participants upon implementation of intervention conditions. As for the influence of the choice component on the measured outcomes, no clear differentiation between conditions was observed in terms of reading comprehension gains and reduction in challenging behavior across the three participants, suggesting that the addition of choice did not show an added value to CSR-HS intervention. / text

L'objectif du TCAO (Travail Collaboratif Assisté par Ordinateur), est de trouver les moyens par lesquels les applications collaboratives sont susceptibles d'améliorer la collaboration entre les individus. De ce fait, il existe une grande nécessité de remédier des contraintes liées au manque de flexibilité et la rigidité des systèmes collaboratifs actuels, par l'adoption des solutions adéquates pour mettre en oeuvre une meilleure collaboration, selon le contexte et la tâche à effectuer entre les utilisateurs. En effet, le domaine du TCAO doit évoluer avec l'évolution des systèmes et des technologies qui touchent notre vie quotidienne, surtout l'évolution de l'internet qui nous rend totalement dépendant des services et applications qui existent "virtuellement", où la plupart des utilisateurs passent une bonne partie de leurs temps à exploiter des méthodes à rechercher et utiliser ces services qui correspondent le plus à leurs préférences. C'est pour cette raison que l'évolution du TCAO se montre essentielle pour faire face à l'évolution exponentielle des technologies d'internet, afin de créer ou de réutiliser plus facilement des applications chargées d'assister le travail communautaire des hommes, que l'on nomme applications collaboratives, ou collecticiels. Le sujet de thèse proposé couvre les aspects collaboratifs d'un système et les questions concernant son intégration. Plus particulièrement, notre objectif essentiel est de concevoir une architecture logicielle pour les collecticiels malléables, de sorte qu'elle puisse s'adapter aux changements et aux diversités des besoins des utilisateurs, ainsi que la tâche à effectuer. En conséquence, une forte exigence surgit en terme d'ouverture, où le système peut dynamiquement intégrer de nouveaux services sans arrêter le déroulement de la collaboration, ni manuellement recoder et recompiler l'application. Une deuxième exigence est d'assurer une certaine adaptabilité, où le système peut générer de nouveaux comportements à partir de la composition de deux ou plusieurs services. Finalement, une exigence surgit en terme d'interopérabilité, surtout dans le cas où les utilisateurs utilisent des applications incompatibles ou hétérogènes. Ainsi, la création, l'ajout, la suppression ou la manipulation des composants du système collaboratif sont faites via les services web. De plus, la recherche, l'invocation et l'intégration de ces services se fait à l'aide d'agents logiciels qui se chargeront, avec une assistance minimale de l'utilisateur, de rechercher les services les mieux adaptés à leurs spécifications. Dans cette thèse, nous créons un lien entre les concepts théoriques qui se développent au sein des laboratoires de recherche, et les technologies qui se développent d'une façon très rapide dans le secteur industriel, afin de concevoir des systèmes collaboratifs plus adaptés au monde informatique quotidien.

Computer technologies have revolutionised the processing of information and the search for knowledge. With the ever increasing computational power, it is becoming possible to tackle new data analysis applications as diverse as mining the Internet resources, analysing drugs effects on the organism or assisting wardens with autonomous video detection techniques. Fundamentally, the principle of any data analysis task is to fit a model which encodes well the dependencies (or patterns) present in the data. However, the difficulty is precisely to define such proper model when data are noisy, dependencies are highly stochastic and there is no simple physical rule to represent them. The aim of this work is to discuss the principles, the advantages and weaknesses of the probabilistic modelling framework for data analysis. The main idea of the framework is to model dispersion of data as well as uncertainty about the model itself by probability distributions. Three data analysis tasks are presented and for each of them the discussion is based on experimental results from real datasets. The first task considers the problem of linear subspaces identification. We show how one can replace a Gaussian noise model by a Student-t noise to make the identification more robust to atypical samples and still keep the learning procedure simple. The second task is about regression applied more specifically to near-infrared spectroscopy datasets. We show how spectra should be pre-processed before entering the regression model. We then analyse the validity of the Bayesian model selection principle for this application (and in particular within the Gaussian Process formulation) and compare this principle to the resampling selection scheme. The final task considered is Collaborative Filtering which is related to applications such as recommendation for e-commerce and text mining. This task is illustrative of the way how intuitive considerations can guide the design of the model and the choice of the probability distributions appearing in it. We compare the intuitive approach with a simpler matrix factorisation approach.

<p>The academic subject of mechatronics has been definedpreviously in numerous publications. This study aims atanalyzing mechatronics by using categories developed within theeducational science of Didactics. The result of the analysis,that relies on data from mechatronics education at KTH andother universities, shows that the identity of mechatronics canbe described as thematic, and the legitimacy as functional,which gives implications for the questions of communication andselection: what should be taught, and how. This is combinedwith a study of the evolution of the subject of mechatronics,where it is possible to see the gradually changing identity,from a combination of a number of disciplinary subjects to onethematic subject.</p><p>The first part of the thesis concludes that mechatronics isautonomous, thematic and functional. Teaching and learningmechatronics according to the identity and legitimacy of thesubject benefits from collaborative, experimental andinternational settings. The functional legitimacy todayrequires the collaborative and the international setting,meaning that the mechatronics employer requires these skillswhen employing a mechatronic engineer. Further, an exemplifyingselection requires the experimental setting, in particular whencomparing a representative selection with the reproduction ofknowledge, and an exemplifying selection with the creation ofknowledge.</p><p>To conclude, there are a number of important aspects to takeinto account when teaching and learning mechatronics. Three ofthese aspects, collaborative, experimental and internationalare suggested as important, and also a direct consequence ofthe identity of mechatronics. This thesis shows that thesethree aspects are indeed possible to integrate intomechatronics education, which will benefit greatly fromthis.</p> / QC 20100609

Dans un contexte de performances de plus en plus exigeantes, les acteurs de la conception de produits mécaniques sont invités à collaborer de plus en plus étroitement afin de mener à bien leur projet. Ces exigences de plus en plus pointues dans des domaines précis conduisent à une augmentation globale du patrimoine de connaissances des acteurs. La mise en commun de connaissances très diverses lors des phases de collaboration a très vite mis en évidence la nécessité de structurer ce patrimoine de manière à pouvoir le réutiliser à bon escient tout au long du cycle de vie du produit, afin notamment de prévenir d'éventuels conflits. La multiplicité des expertises et points de vue des acteurs rassemblés autour du projet de conception est un facteur d'amplification de ceux-ci. Dans ce contexte, notre travail propose une solution à la gestion et la résolution de conflits apparaissant autour des problèmes de conception. Nous présentons dans ce mémoire un référentiel pour la conception collaborative de produits spécifiquement dédié à la gestion de conflits. Ce référentiel propose une véritable infrastructure pour permettre aux différents acteurs impliqués dans un conflit de structurer leurs échanges et de capitaliser les solutions évoquées à des fins de réutilisation dans d'autres projets. Nous implémentons ce référentiel dans l'application logicielle CO²MED (COllaborative COnflict Management in Engineering Design). Nous validons celui-ci sur un cas industriel issu de la conception d'un stator de moteur électrique chez Alstom Moteurs Nancy.

<p>Denna forskningsrapport undersöker hur nya teknologier kan verka som stöd för visuellt informationsutbyte och koordination för kreativa arbeten på distans. Arbetsgruppen genomförde denna undersökning för att kunna utbyta prototyper och annat visuellt material på regelbunden basis med en beställare av ett projekt som har sitt säte i New York. Projektet använde sig av en så kallad projektblogg som kanal för att förmedla utfört arbete samt för att föra en diskussion och ge feedback på det. Eftersom detta projekt skulle genomföras inom ramen för detta examensarbete valde arbetsgruppen att även undersöka hur examensarbetet skulle kunna koordineras genom projektbloggen. Dessa två undersökningar skedde genom en fallstudie under 8 av examensarbetets totala 10 veckor. Samtidigt som fallstudien genomfördes gjordes även en litteraturstudie som undersökte om det fanns teori som kunde stödja användandet av en projektblogg på detta sätt. Efter fallstudien utvärderades resultatet och genom intervjuer med användare och enkätundersökningar med en referensgrupp framkom det att projektbloggen hade upplevts vara ett mycket användbart hjälpmedel för att förmedla visuell information samt för att ge feedback för det ena projektet. Det andra projektet (examensarbetet) hade mindre behov av visuellt informationsutbyte då arbetet huvudsakligen bestod av längre textdokument. Eftersom dessa dokument skulle editeras fann användaren inte projektbloggen som ett optimalt verktyg för detta, bloggen verkade i det projektet mer som samlingsställe för dessa dokument, där användarna kunde hämta informationen för att sedan editera på traditionellt vis. Litteraturstudien som genomfördes visade att det fanns gott om stöd som pekade på att en projektblogg skulle vara användbar för koordinering av kreativa projekt som skedde på distans, och en av de mest intressanta möjligheterna som beskrevs inom ämnet computer supported collaborative work(CSCW) var att den nya tekniken att genomföra distansarbeten framförallt öppnade dörrar för de yrkesgrupper som hade behov av att visa upp grafiskt material, en yrkesgrupp som normalt blir väldigt belastad om arbetsgruppen inte är närvarande.</p>