It has been suggested that theoretical computer science (TCS) suffers more than average from a lack of intrinsic motivation. The reasons provided in the literature include the difficulty of the subject, lack of relevance to the informatics degree or future careers, and lack of enjoyment of the learning experience. This thesis presents evidence of these claims derived from the results of an expert survey. Increasing the students’ perceived control of the learning experience has been shown to increase student motivation in numerous different settings. A few of those also showed increased student performance. This thesis proposes that game-building can be such a setting for the area of TCS. Within the area of TCS, the focus will be on the modelling skills (finite state automata, push-down automata, Turing machines, CCS, etc.) since they form the majority of the curriculum at undergraduate level. It will be demonstrated how arbitrary TCS modelling skills can be mapped onto a game-building framework and allow the students to learn about the former by using the latter. It is hypothesized that the success of the approach depends on the amount of control given to the student. To test this claim, two experimental conditions were used in a repeated-measures design: (1) own-game and (2) pre-defined game. In the former, students are asked to write a game of their own, whereas in the latter, they are asked to copy a pre-defined game. A large demand for the own-game context was observed and results of its effect on performance and enjoyment are presented. Although no main effect of the owngame condition versus the pre-defined game condition was found in terms of either enjoyment or performance, some interesting interaction effects between condition and motivational type were unveiled.

The specification and verification of communicating systems has captured increasing interest in the last decades. CCS, a Calculus of Communicating Systems [Milner 89a], was especially designed to help this enterprise; it is widely used in both industry and academia. Most efforts to automate the use of CCS for verification have centered around the explicit construction of a bisimulation [Park 81]. This approach, however, presents severe limitations to deal with systems that contain infinite states (e.g. systems with evolving structure [Milner 89a] or that comprise a finite but arbitrary number of components (e.g. systems with inductive structure [Milner 89a]). There is an alternative approach to verification, based on equational reasoning, which does not exhibit such limitations. This formulation, however, introduces significant proof search control issues, and, hence, has remained far less explored. This thesis investigates the use of explicit proof plans [Bundy 88] for problems of automatic verification in the context of CCS. We have conducted the verification task using equational reasoning, and centred on infinite state systems, and parameterised systems. A parameterised system, e.g. a system with inductive structure, circumscribes a family of CCS systems, which have fixed struture and finitely many states. To reason about theses systems, we have adopted Robin Milner's approach [Milner 89a], which advocates the use of induction to exploit the structure and/or the behavior of a system during its verification. To automate this reasoning, wehave used proof plans for induction [Bundy 88]- built within CLAM [Bundy et al 90b], and extended it with special CCS proof plans. We have implemented a verification planner by adding these special proof plans to CLAM. The system handles the search control problems prompted by CCS verification satisfactorily, though it is not complete. Moreover, the system is capable of dealing with the verification of finite state systems, infinite state systems, and parameterised systems, hence, providing a uniform method to analyse CCS systems, regardless of their state space. Our results are encouraging: the verification planner has been successfully tested on a number of examples drawn from the litereature. We have planned proofs of conjectures that are outside the domain of existing verification methods. Furthernore; the verification planning is fully automated. Because of this, even though the verification plan has still got plenty of room for improvement, we can state that proof planning can handle the equational verication of CCS systems, and, therefore, advocate its use within this interesting field.

Palliativ vård innebär ett förhållningssätt som bekräftar livet och ser döden som en normal process och som en viktig slutpunkt av livet. Den palliativa vården bör omfatta symtomkontroll, samarbete av mångprofessionellt arbetslag, god kommunikation samt stöd till närstående. Palliativ omvårdnad ställer höga krav på sjuksköterskan, inte minst vad gäller kommunikativa färdigheter. Syftet var att beskriva sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av kommunikation med patienter i palliativ vård. Metoden som valdes var en litteraturbaserad studie. Datamaterialet bestod av 12 kvalitativa, vetenskapliga artiklar. Tre kategorier och nio underkategorier identifierades. Kategorierna var: förutsättningar på arbetsplatsen, sjuksköterskans handlingsberedskap samt patientens och närståendes medverkan. Förhållanden på arbetsplatsen såsom samarbete, vårdideologi och emotionellt stöd är betydelsefulla förutsättningar för kommunikation. Sjuksköterskans erfarenhet, förmåga att hantera tankar och känslor kring döden samt förmåga att se och förstå patienten påverkar också, liksom patientens och de närståendes förhållningssätt. Möjlighet till reflektion och handledning, en tydlig vårdideologi på vårdavdelningen samt utbildning i kommunikation och/eller palliativ vård skulle enligt resultaten kunna bidra till ökade förutsättningar för en god kommunikation mellan sjuksköterskan och patienter i palliativ vård. / Palliative care is an approach that affirms life and sees death as a normal process and as an important end point of life. The palliative care should include symptom control, cooperation of multi-professional team, good communication and support for families. Palliative nursing put high demands on the nurse, not least in terms of communication skills. The aim was to describe nurses' experiences of communication with patients in palliative care. The chosen method was a literature based study. The data material consisted of 12 qualitative research articles. Three categories and nine subcategories were identified. The categories were: conditions in the workplace, the nurse’s readiness to act and patient and relatives’ involvement. Conditions in the workplace, such as cooperation, care ideology and emotional support are important preconditions for communication. The nurse’s experience, ability to manage thoughts and feelings about death and the ability to see and understand the patient also affects the communication, as well as the patients’ and the relatives’ approach. Opportunity for reflection and clinical supervision, a clear ideology of care in the ward as well as education in communication and/or palliative care would, according to the results, contribute to better conditions for good communication between the nurse and patients in palliative care.

Covert channels are means of communication that allow agents in a system to transfer information in a manner that violates the system’s security policy. Covert channels have been well studied in the constrained and old sense of the term where two agents are communicating through a channel while an intruder interferes to hide the transmission of a message. In an increasingly connected world where modern computer systems consist of broad and heterogeneous communication networks with many interacting agents, distributed covert channels are becoming increasingly available. For these distributed forms of covert channels, there are shortcomings in the science, mathematics, fundamental theory, and tools for risk assessment, and for proposing mechanisms and design solutions for averting these threats. Since current formal methods for specifying concurrent systems do not provide the tools needed to efficiently tackle the problem of distributed covert channels in systems of communicating agents, this thesis proposes Communicating Concurrent Kleene Algebra (C²KA) which is an extension to the algebraic model of concurrent Kleene algebra (CKA) first presented by Hoare et al. C²KA is used to capture and study the behaviour of agents, and description logic is used to capture and study the knowledge of agents. Using this representation of agents in systems of communicating agents, this thesis presents a formulation and verification approach for the necessary conditions for the existence of distributed covert channels in systems of communicating agents. In this way, this thesis establishes a mathematical framework for the modelling, analysis, and mitigation of distributed covert channels in systems of communicating agents. This framework enhances the understanding of covert channels and provides a basis for thinking and reasoning about covert channels in new ways. This can lead to a formal foundation upon which guidelines and mechanisms for designing and implementing systems of communicating agents that are resilient to covert channels can be devised. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A growing number of smart items are entering our daily lives as the Internet of Things becomes increasingly prevalent. ICT device miniaturization introduces a brand-new material type called Communicating Material (CM). The term “communications material” refers to a single system that includes a material equipped with communication devices. In this paper, the main limitation of CM was studied - the issue of energy consumption. Due to the limited battery capacity of sensor nodes, the issue of network lifetime comes to the fore, emphasizing the importance of power management and optimization for each sensor node. The first and most important step in tackling this problem is to precisely estimate and calculate each node's power usage. In addition, the WSN's embeddedness in the material makes it challenging to replace batteries and measure network power consumption, necessitating the development of a different approach to power consumption estimation. Thus, our work explores all the different approaches to energy estimation in WSN and tries to choose the best method that fits our WSN platform.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / Distributed applications that operate on networks of sensors to gather data are important in real world. TinyOS is an operating system designed to support wireless sensor networks. . It has interfaces and components, which provide functionalities for sensing parameters in the environment, packet communication and computation. These sensors have multiple purposes such as gathering different kinds of data and can be deployed in distributed networks to gather important information. NesC is a language which is used to write sensor applications for TinyOS which are deployment on the sensors. TinyViz is an application which simulates the NesC applications on a computer so that the applications can be tested first in the simulation environment and then can be tested on the sensors and deployed. However, TinyViz by default represents a static and closed environment where the conditions simulated may not be realistic. This project aims at providing real-world scenarios on the platform TinyViz, by communicating with TinyViz using Tython, a script language for this specific purpose. In terms of sensor network applications, events are classified into categories, which can be mapped to tangible parameters. This project takes as input the real-world parameters as input by the developer of the NesC applications in the form of a configuration file and converts them into implementable threads that run in parallel with TinyViz and keep sending instructions to the TinyViz which then simulates real-world environment. Thus, it helps simulate NesC applications in a realistic environment even before the real deployment. This is packaged as an Eclipse plug-in for portability and ease of implementation, using which developers of NesC applications can give as input configuration and obtain the files required for simulation. The implementation is done in java, using ‘Tython’.

The Crisis and Emergency-Risk Communication (CERC) model is effective in providing communication recommendations for public health agencies and shows potential for use by other agencies with similar crises characterizations. The current study explores the challenges of earthquake scientists in communicating earthquake risk during the pre-crisis stage in order to grasp experts’ experience and gain insight into the complex and multifaceted world of communicating earthquake risk. The researcher integrates the in-depth knowledge with the recommendations of the pre-crisis stage of the CERC model. This study employs qualitative interviewing with earthquake scientists (N = 21) from the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). Categorized under general challenges, communication challenges, and communicating probability challenges, findings from this study indicate that earthquake scientists face eight unique challenges, such as communicating uncertainty, emphasizing their responsibility as solely hazard communicators, and keeping public attention during earthquake quiet periods. Implications for earthquake scientists during the pre-crisis stage of CERC are discussed and recommendations are provided.

<p>In a broader sense the main research objective of this thesis (and ongoing research work) is distributed knowledge management for mobile dynamic systems. But the primary focus and presented work focuses on communication/interoperability of heterogeneous entities in an infrastructure less paradigm, a distributed resource manipulation infrastructure and distributed learning in the absence of global knowledge. The research objectives achieved discover the design aspects of heterogeneous distributed knowledge systems towards establishing a seamless integration. This thesis doesn’t cover all aspects in this work; rather focuses on interoperability and distributed learning.</p><p>Firstly a discussion on the issues in knowledge management for swarm of heterogeneous entities is presented. This is done in a broader and rather abstract fashion to provide an insight of motivation for interoperability and distributed learning towards knowledge management. Moreover this will also serve the reader to understand the ongoing work and research activities in much broader perspective.</p><p>Primary focus of this thesis is communication/interoperability of heterogeneous entities in an infrastructure less paradigm, a distributed resource manipulation infrastructure and distributed learning in the absence of global knowledge. In dynamic environments for mobile autonomous systems such as robot swarms or mobile software agents there is a need for autonomic publishing and discovery of resources and just-in-time integration for on-the-fly service consumption without any a priori knowledge. SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) serves the purpose of resource reuse and sharing of services different entities. Web services (a SOA manifestation) achieves these objectives but its exploitation in dynamic environments, where the communication infrastructure is lacking, requires a considerable research. Generally Web services are exploited in stable client-server paradigms, which is a pressing assumption when dynamic distributed systems are considered. UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) is the main pediment in the exploitation of Web services in distributed control and dynamic natured systems. UDDI can be considered as a directory for publication and discovery of categorized Web services but assumes a centralized registry; even if distributed registries and associated mechanism are employed problems of collaborative communication in infrastructure less paradigms are ignored.</p><p>Towards interoperability main contribution this thesis is a mediator-based distributed Web services discovery and invocation middleware, which provides a collaborative and decentralized services discovery and management middleware for infrastructure-less mobile dynamic systems with heterogeneous communication capabilities. Heterogeneity of communication capabilities is abstracted in middleware by a conceptual classification of computing entities on the basis of their communication capabilities and communication issues are resolved via conceptual overlay formation for query propagation in system.</p><p>The proposed and developed middleware has not only been evaluated extensively using Player Stage simulator but also been applied in physical robot swarms. Experimental validations analyze the results in different communication modes i. active and ii. passive mode of communication with and without shared resource conflict resolution. I analyze discoverable Web services with respect to time, services available in complete view of cluster and the impact and resultant improvements in distributed Web services discovery by using caching and semantics.</p><p>Second part of this thesis focuses on distributed learning in the absence of global information. This thesis takes the argument of defeasibility (common-sense inference) as the basis of intelligence in human-beings, in which conclusions/inferences are drawn and refuted at the same time as more information becomes available. The ability of common-sense reasoning to adapt to dynamic environments and reasoning with uncertainty in the absence of global information seems to be best fit for distributed learning for dynamic systems.</p><p>This thesis, thus, overviews epistemic cognition in human beings, which motivates the need of a similar epistemic cognitive solution in fabricated systems and considers formal concept analysis as a case for incremental and distributed learning of formal concepts. Thesis also presents a representational schema for underlying logic formalism and formal concepts. An algorithm for incremental learning and its use-case for robotic navigation, in which robots incrementally learn formal concepts and perform common-sense reasoning for their intelligent navigation, is also presented. Moreover elaboration of the logic formalism employed and details of implementation of developed defeasible reasoning engine is given in the latter half of this thesis.</p><p>In summary, the research results and achievements described in this thesis focus on interoperability and distributed learning for heterogeneous distributed knowledge systems which contributes towards establishing a seamless integration in mobile dynamic systems.</p> / QC 20100614 / ROBOSWARM EU FP6

Apresentamos um problema de dinâmica molecular e quatro algoritmos seqüenciais para a implementação do mesmo. Em seguida esses algoritmos são estudados quanto ao tempo de execução e possibilidades de paralelização. É escolhido então dentre os quatro o algoritmo que apresenta melhores características para a paralelização. Introduzimos a seguir uma proposta de implementação do mesmo em um rede de transputers, com a. definição das interligações entre os processadores e da. programação dos mesmos. A seguir é realizado um estudo da eficiência da estrutura proposta quanto a. tempo de execução e características de expansibilidade do número de processadores. Os resultados mostram que conseguem-se velocidades de execução próximas às de supercomputadores para redes com baixos números de elementos. / In the present work, we describe four sequential algorithms for simulating molecular dynamics. The parallelism and execution times of these algorithms are assessed. Using the best suited algorithm for parallelism exploitation a transputer based architecture is suggested including needed link and software. The evaluation of the eficiency regarding execution time and number of processors is analyzed. The results show that speeds dose to those of supercomputers can be achieved with a low number of processors.

The recent changes in legislation and codes of practice expand the role of the educational psychologist to a wider age range: 0-25. Moreover, surveys suggest an increasing number of children and young people experience difficulties with mental health, including depression. A systematic literature review of what narratives young people use to communicate depression was undertaken in the first paper. Despite an abundance of literature about depression in clinical settings, only eight studies met the inclusion criteria and were incorporated in the synthesis. A number of issues were identified including ways and methods of communicating depression and the impact of normative pressures and gendered experiences. Findings have implications for practitioners working with young people and have been used to develop a tentative framework for effective practice. The second paper reports on qualitative research, adapting a phenomenological approach. The self-selected participant sample (three university students, aged 19-21) had experiences of living with depression. Each participant was interviewed three times, using focused semi-structured interviews. The data were subsequently transcribed and analysed using a framework of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers &amp; Larkin, 2009). The themes were grouped into superordinate themes and interpreted in the light of researcher's own experiences and knowledge. Two reported themes 'the weariness of the world was upon me' and 'it all fell down to chance' discuss embodied experiences of living with depression and barriers and facilitators to accessing help, which was mostly coincidental. Finally, the third paper discusses evidence-based practice, ways of achieving impact in research, and dissemination of research at individual, organisational and academic level. Overall, the present research suggests that educational psychologists can play an important role in raising awareness of children and young people living with depression, as well as promoting mental health, wellbeing and resilience in a variety of educational settings and amongst practitioners working with children and young people.