Thesis advisor: John B. Williamson / Since the early 1980s, Uganda has been in the spotlight of global concerns about the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has almost brought the country to its knees. Consequently, a number of social epidemiologists and researchers from different social science fields have, over the past two and half decades, focused their attention on Uganda, attempting to identify the risk factors that expose people to HIV infection in order to inform intervention policy. Although studies coming out of this effort have provided important insights into risks of HIV infection, they have been criticized for almost entirely focusing on individual behavioral factors, such as prostitution and inconsistent condom use, as the primary causal factors of HIV infection, without comprehending the contextual background in which HIV infection takes place. Using the 2000/01 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey and employing multilevel logistic regression methods, I address this concern by investigating the influence of contextual factors on three behaviors related to the risk of HIV infection (HIV testing, multiple sexual partnering, and inconsistent condom use). Analyses reveal that educational attainment, socioeconomic status, and religion significantly predict HIV testing, multiple sexual partnering, and condom use for both men and women - and at both the individual and neighborhood levels. Analyses also reveal that age has an inverted U-shaped association with HIV testing and multiple sexual partnering for both men and women at the individual level. Despite important gains in slowing HIV infection rates over the past two decades, Uganda's increasing burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic - amid faltering healthcare and other social services investments - is inevitable. It is apparent that there are formidable obstacles to effectively eradicating HIV/AIDS, unless essential social services - such as education, accessible healthcare services - are enhanced, and policies are introduced to improve socioeconomic status of individuals and entire neighborhoods. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis advisor: Janet E. Helms / Multiracial people often experience challenges to developing positive racial identities and psychological well being in the racially stratified U.S. society. Research and theory suggest that contextual variables are important for the facilitation of positive adjustment for Multiracial individuals. However, despite the importance of social context, the majority of research has been limited by the use of small, non-generalizable samples, the lack of quantitative studies, a lack of consistent ways to measure these constructs, and researchers’ tendencies to examine well-being or racial identity in isolation. In addition, Multiracial identity typically has been assessed as a single racial identification categorization, rather than as the fluid racial identity process suggested by Helms’s (1995) People of Color (POC) racial identity theory. The present study proposed and examined a model that incorporated social context, racial identity, and well-being to better understand how Multiracial people develop racially and psychologically in a racially contentious society. Multiracial (Black/White and Asian/White) adults (N = 172) completed a demographic questionnaire, Multiracial Scales (Family Influence, Reflected Appraisals, Acceptance/Exclusion) created for this study, the Multiracial Challenges and Resilience Scale (Salahuddin & O’Brien, 2011), the People of Color Racial Identity Attitudes Scale (Helms, 2005), the Brief Symptom Inventory 18 (Derogatis, 2001), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larson, & Griffin, 1985). Multivariate multiple regression analyses (MMRAs) were conducted to examine relationships among social context (challenging and supportive) and psychological well-being, racial identity and well-being, and social context and racial identity. Results of the MMRAs favored supportive social contexts ( i.e., Acceptance by the White and Multiracial groups) as being related to better psychological well-being and challenging social contexts (i.e., Exclusion from the White racial group) as detracting from well-being. Conversely, challenging social contexts were more predictive of racial identity than supportive social contexts. Racial identity was also significantly related to psychological well-being. Results revealed differences between racial groups in the relationships among racial identity and well-being, such that Asian/White participants experienced greater life satisfaction and Multiracial pride than Black/White participants. Overall, the results of the analyses indicated support for the proposed model’s inclusion of social context, racial identity, and well-being in a single study. As anticipated, social context and racial identity were predictive of psychological well-being, and social context was predictive of racial identity. Results also provided preliminary evidence for the use of Helms’s (1995) POC theory with a Multiracial population. Methodological limitations and implications for future theory, research, and practice are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

This research offers permeable Spirit ecclesiology as a viable way forward for the churches in the context of the challenges in North India. Broadly, the challenges of the church in North India are twofold: one, to be an Indian Christian church amidst the plural religio-cultural context; second, to be in solidarity with the struggles of the marginalised. In other words, the church arguably ought to be relational with other communities and rooted in the North Indian context; on the other, it should critically and distinctly witness for Christ as a community of liberation in the context of the struggles of the marginalised. Thus, the church in North India arguably needs a relational-distinctive dialectics to address the challenges. This calls for a church with permeable borders to uphold the above in tension. I show that such dialectics can be upheld if ecclesiology in North India is construed from a pneumatological perspective with a Christological dimension. In dialogue with both Western and Indian theologians I show that a permeable Spirit ecclesiology is a viable way forward for the churches in North India.

The use, reuse and manipulation of information has become a key factor in the success of any organisation in an increasingly competitive and global business environment. Ensuring that employees are able to access (or are provided with) the right information in a timely manner is one of the key challenges facing organisations. Amongst the dominant communication methods email fills an important role in facilitating distributed communication and it is seen as a key target for improvement. Email is being used extensively and increasingly as a significant (and often dominant) method for communication within engineering organisations and projects and there exists significant opportunity and requirement to improve the use and reuse of email. This thesis contributes a rich understanding of the practise and perception of email use and reuse developed through a comprehensive review of the literature and three investigative studies: a study of the content of emails exchanged during an engineering project, a survey of practising engineers describing the role of email in supporting communication in projects and engineers perception of email, and a investigation of the information about the relationships between engineers participating in a project as represented by their exchanges of email. The second main contribution is a set of scenarios that were developed to summarise the understanding developed in the investigative studies, and form a core set of contextualised problems that can be used to communicate the research to industry and around which an holistic proposal is described to improve engineers use and reuse of email. The final contribution is an approach for supporting engineers in interpreting emails by the provision of additional contextual information, mitigating a core problem identified during the course of the research for which a well established information management solution does not already exist.

Diariamente, novos sistemas ubíquos são desenvolvidos e integrados ao nosso cotidiano, cuja presença às vezes não é percebida pelos seus usuários. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar as questões de segurança e privacidade existentes nos paradigmas de computação ubíqua e ciente de contexto. Utilizando um protótipo de TV interativa - TV-I (Goularte, 2003) - que possui características de mobilidade e ciência de contexto, este trabalho define um conjunto de requisitos mínimos para a garantia de segurança e privacidade em sistemas ubíquos. É também objetivo deste trabalho utilizar informações contextuais para gerenciamento dinâmico de requisitos de segurança e privacidade por meio de políticas expressas em linguagem EPAL. Para validar os resultados desta pesquisa, foi implementado o Gerente de Segurança como um serviço do protótipo TV-I. A principal característica desse gerente é controlar o acesso a informações pessoais por meio de informações de contexto fornecidas pelo Gerente de Contexto, de autoria de Santos (2004) / Every day, new ubiquitous systems are being developed and integrated into our daily routines, whose presence is sometimes not even perceived by the casual user. The aim of this work is to investigate questions of security and privacy in ubiquitous and context aware computing. Using a prototype for interactive television - TV-I (Goularte, 2003) - that has characteristics of mobility and contextual-awareness, this work defines a set of basic requirements that are fundamental in order to guarantee security and privacy in ubiquitous systems. Furthermore, this work uses contextual information in order to dynamically manage security and privacy requirements according to security and privacy policies that are expressed in the EPAL language. In order to validate the experimental results, a Security Manager has been implemented as a service of the TV-I prototype. The principal characteristic of this manager is to enforce access control over the personal information using contextual information of the ubiquitous system, and which is supplied via the Context Manager, designed by Santos (2004).

Research and interventions concerning anti-social behaviour have neglected the bad behaviour of “good” people or those who typically behave pro-socially. Additionally, past and current research and practice in this area have often neglected how factors in one’s current environment influence behaviour. Instead, the focus has been on how individual characteristics—borne of the interplay of genetic composition and environmental influences over time—result in anti-social behaviour. However, evidence suggests immediate contexts can foster even atypical behaviour, behavior not correlated with genetic and long-term environmental influences. The thesis is presented in four parts. Part One introduces the idea that immediate group context can have a significant effect on anti-social behaviour, particularly that of “good” people. Part Two reviews research on the impact of social dynamics on behaviour. Part Three presents the empirical study on the role of a particular group dynamic, social dilemmas, in relation to a specific type of anti-social behaviour, bullying. Finally, Part Four considers the implications of the thesis for future research and practice. Social dilemmas are situations in which individual motives are at odds with the best interests of the group and help to explain why individuals sometimes make anti-social decisions. The study at the core of this thesis tested two hypotheses: 1) both individual and group factors are associated with behaviour in bullying situations; and 2) attitudes, group norms, and social dilemmas each have a unique contribution to predicting behaviour in bullying situations. Participants were 292 middle school students at a residential school in the U.S., and data were analysed using multi-level modelling. The primary findings were, in general, consistent with the two hypotheses. The research suggests that social dilemma dynamics might be an important group factor in predicting behaviour in bullying situations.

The ever increasing capabilities of mobile devices such as smartphones and their ubiquity in daily life has resulted in a large and interesting body of research into context awareness { the `awareness of a situation' { and how it could make people's lives easier. There are, however, diculties involved in realising and implementing context aware systems in the real world; particularly in a mobile environment. To address these diculties, this dissertation tackles the broad problem of designing and implementing mobile context aware systems in the eld. Spanning the elds of Articial Intelligence (AI) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI), the problem is broken down and scoped into two key areas: context sensing and interactive intelligence. Using a simple design model, the dissertation makes a series of contributions within each area in order to improve the knowledge of mobile context aware systems engineering. At the sensing level, we review mobile sensing capabilities and use a case study to show that the everyday calendar is a noisy `sensor' of context. We also show that its `signal', i.e. useful context, can be extracted using logical data fusion with context supplied by mobile devices. For interactive intelligence, there are two fundamental components: the intelligence, which is concerned with context inference and machine learning; and the interaction, which is concerned with user interaction. For the intelligence component, we use the case of semantic place awareness to address the problems of real time context inference and learning on mobile devices. We show that raw device motion { a common metric used in activity recognition research { is a poor indicator of transition between semantically meaningful places, but real time transition detection performance can be improved with the application of basic machine learning and time series processing techniques. We also develop a context inference and learning algorithm that incorporates user feedback into the inference process { a form of active machine learning. We compare various implementations of the algorithm for the semantic place awareness use case, and observe its performance using a simulation study of user feedback. For the interaction component, we study various approaches for eliciting user feedback in the eld. We deploy the mobile semantic place awareness system in the eld and show how dierent elicitation approaches aect user feedback behaviour. Moreover, we report on the user experience of interacting with the intelligent system and show how performance in the eld compares with the earlier simulation. We also analyse the resource usage of the system and report on the use of a simple SMS place awareness application that uses our system. The dissertation presents original research on key components for designing and implementing mobile context aware systems, and contributes new knowledge to the eld of mobile context awareness.

This thesis investigates whether the use of hand-held technology affects motivation and learning in science. An innovative mixed methods approach was used to provide new insights into an emerging area of research. First, two pilot observational studies were conducted, which aimed to establish how a school currently uses hand held dataloggers, and gain further insight into how learners respond to this technology. This was followed by a primarily quantitative experiment that was concerned with the role of data ownership and the impact of ‘seams’ on the transformation process of the collected data. The results indicated that a hands-on experience increased confidence among students in explaining their own data, as opposed to data collected by someone else. A third study was designed to compare how student motivation and learning were affected when carrying out the same inquiry task either with or without the support of dataloggers. The results revealed no difference in accuracy or motivation for learning. The final, fourth, study was a longitudinal study designed in collaboration with a secondary science teacher, comparing three conditions: the inclusion of cameras to support student reflection, the inclusion of both cameras and the use of dataloggers to support teaching, and a control condition where the lessons were not changed. This study found that inclusion of dataloggers into modules led to increased assessment scores, while the use of cameras indicated that students are adept at taking relevant photos, and did not suffer from an extensive novelty effect. The results highlighted the importance of using a range of methods and tools for teaching students. The thesis concludes with recommendations and future research ideas, including exploring how data is visualised and the role of physical context. Of key importance is that future work is conducted in collaboration with educators in the wild.

Through immersive stereoscopic displays and natural user interfaces, virtual reality (VR) is capable of offering the user a sense of presence in the virtual space, and has been long expected to revolutionize how people interact with virtual content in various application scenarios. However, with many technical challenges solved over the last three decades to bring low cost and high fidelity to VR experiences, we still do not see VR technology used frequently in many seemingly suitable applications. Part of this is due to the lack of expressiveness and efficiency of traditional “simple and reality-based� 3D user interfaces (3DUIs). The challenge is especially obvious when complex interaction tasks with diverse requirements are involved, such as editing virtual objects from multiple scales, angles, perspectives, reference frames, and dimensions. A common approach to overcome such problems is through hybrid user interface (HUI) systems that combine complementary interface elements to leverage their strengths. Based on this method, the first contribution of this dissertation is the proposal of Force Extension, an interaction technique that seamlessly integrates position-controlled touch and rate-controlled force input for efficient multi-touch interaction in virtual environments. Using carefully designed mapping functions, it is capable of offering fluid transitions between the two contexts, as well as simulating shear force input realistically for multi-touch gestures. The second contribution extends the HUI concept into immersive VR by introducing a Hybrid Virtual Environment (HVE) level editing system that combines a tablet and a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). The HVE system improves user performance and experience in complex high-level world editing tasks by using a “World-In-Miniature� and 2D GUI rendered on a multi-touch tablet device to compensate for the interaction limitations of a traditional HMD- and wand-based VR system. The concept of Interaction Context (IC) is introduced to explain the relationship between tablet interaction and the immersive interaction, and four coordination mechanisms are proposed to keep the perceptual, functional, and cognitive flow continuous during IC transitions. To offer intuitive and realistic interaction experiences, most immersive 3DUIs are centered on the user’s virtual avatar, and obey the same physics rules of the real world. However, this design paradigm also employs unnecessary limitations that hinders the performance of certain tasks, such as selecting objects in cluttered space, manipulating objects in six degrees of freedom, and inspecting remote spaces. The third contribution of this dissertation proposes the Object Impersonation technique, which breaks the common assumption that one can only immerse in the VE from a single avatar, and allows the user to impersonate objects in the VE and interact from their perspectives and reference frames. This hybrid solution of avatar- and object-based interaction blurs the line between travel and object selection, creating a unique cross-task interaction experience in the immersive environment. Many traditional 3DUIs in immersive VR use simple and intuitive interaction paradigms derived from real world metaphors. But they can be just as limiting and ineffective as in the real world. Using the coordinated HUI or HVE systems presented in this dissertation, one can benefit from the complementary advantages of multiple heterogeneous interfaces (Force Extension), VE representations (HVE Level Editor), and interaction techniques (Object Impersonation). This advances traditional 3D interaction into the more powerful hybrid space, and allows future VR systems to be applied in more application scenarios to provide not only presence, but also improved productivity in people’s everyday tasks.

Orientador: Rony Farto Pereira / Banca: Maria Lúcia da Cunha Victório de Oliveira / Banca: Renilson José Menegassi / Banca: Alessandra Del Ré / Banca: Marco Antônio Domingues Sant'Anna / Resumo: O trabalho procura investigar os mecanismos de referenciação usados em produções de alunos de Ensino Médio para deixar pistas para que seu leitor faça inferências durante a leitura para produzir sentidos ao que lê. A reconstrução por inferenciação permite estabelecer o elo entre as informações explícitas e as implícitas no co-texto, em um determinado contexto. A inferência é uma estratégia muito importante para que se tome um texto como coeso e coerente, em termos de progressão referencial, colaborando de maneira decisiva para a produção de sentidos.A partir dos pressupostos da Lingüística textual e das teorias sobre leitura, apresenta a relação autor-texto-leitor no processo de produção e recepção do texto. Analisaram-se quantitativa e qualitativamente produções de textos de alunos de Ensino Médio nas quais se verificou o uso de seqüências pronominais, de repetições lexicais, das expressões nominais definidas, anáforas indiretas no texto ou referentes ao contexto, as quais permitem ao leitor fazer inferências e aturar como co-autor na produção dos sentidos. / Abstract: The work investigates the mechanisms of reference used in High School student’s productions in order to leave hints so that the reader com make inferences during the reading to produce meanings of what is being read. The reconstructions through inference permits to stablish the link among the explicit and implicit pieces of information in the co-text, in a determined context. The inference is a very important strategy to make a text cohesive and coherent, in terms of reference progression, contributing in a essencial way in the meaning production. From the textual linguistic and the theories about reading. The work presents the relationship author-text-reader in the process of text production and reception. It was analysed High School student’s productions in quality and amount in which it was verified the use of pronominal sequences, of lexical repetitions, of defined nominal expressions, indirect anaphora in the text or referred to the context, wich allow the reader to make inferences and act as co-author in the production of meanings. / Doutor