The new DEC Recommended Practices Family monograph is available! This Ignite session will highlight some of the articles illustrating ways the RPs can be put into practice. Monograph authors will briefly present the unique features reflected in their articles, resulting in a lively discussion of the similar and distinctive themes in partnering with each and every family.

An evidence synthesis group has worked under the auspices of the DEC Recommended Practices Commission with assistance from ECTA to develop systematic and replicable procedures and guidelines for synthesizing research evidence supporting the DEC recommended practices. This session presents the guidelines, illustrations, and impacts of syntheses completed to date.

The new DEC Recommended Practices Family monograph is available! This Ignite session will highlight some of the articles illustrating ways the RPs can be put into practice. Monograph authors will briefly present the unique features reflected in their articles, resulting in a lively discussion of the similar and distinctive themes in partnering with each and every family.

For any user-adaptive system the most important task is to provide the users with what they want and need without them asking for it explicitly. This process can be called personalisation and is done by tailoring the service or product for individual users or user groups. In this thesis, we explore the possibilities to build a model that clusters users based on the user’s photo library. This was to create a better personalised experience within a service called Degoo. The model used to perform the clustering is called Deep Embedding Clustering and was evaluated on several internal indices alongside an automated categorization model to get an indication of what type of images the clusters had. The user clustering was later evaluated based on split-tests running within the Degoo service. The results shows that four out of five clusters had some general indication of types such as vacation photos, clothes, text, and people. The evaluation of the clustering impact on the split-tests shows that we could see patterns that indicated optimal attribute values for certain user clusters. / Det ultimata målet för alla användaranpassade system är att ge användarna det som de behöver utan att de begär det explicit. Denna process kan kallas användaranpassning och görs genom att skräddarsy tjänsten eller produkten för enskilda användare eller användargrupper. I denna avhandling undersöker vi möjligheterna att bygga en modell som grupperar användare baserat på användarnas fotodata. Motivationen bakom detta var att skapa en bättre personlig upplevelse inom en tjänst som heter Degoo. Modellen som används för att utföra grupperingen heter Deep Embedding Clustering och utvärderades på flera interna index tillsammans med en automatiserad kategoriseringsmodell för att få en indikation av vilken typ av bilder grupperna hade. Användargrupperingen utvärderades senare baserat på flera split-test som körs inom Degoo tjänsten. Resultaten visar att fyra av fem grupper hade en allmän indikation på typer som semesterbilder, kläder, text och människor. Utvärderingen av grupperingseffekten på split-testerna visar att vi kunde se mönster som indikerar optimala attributvärden för vissa grupper.

This thesis examines decentralized meta-reasoning. For a single agent or multiple agents, it may not be enough for agents to compute correct decisions if they do not do so in a timely or resource efficient fashion. The utility of agent decisions typically increases with decision quality, but decreases with computation time. The reasoning about one's computation process is referred to as meta-reasoning. Aspects of meta-reasoning considered in this thesis include the reasoning about how to allocate computational resources, including when to stop one type of computation and begin another, and when to stop all computation and report an answer. Given a computational model, this translates into computing how to schedule the basic computations that solve a problem. This thesis constructs meta-reasoning strategies for the purposes of monitoring and control in multi-agent settings, specifically settings that can be modeled by the Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP). It uses decision theory to optimize computation for efficiency in time and space in communicative and non-communicative decentralized settings. Whereas base-level reasoning describes the optimization of actual agent behaviors, the meta-reasoning strategies produced by this thesis dynamically optimize the computational resources which lead to the selection of base-level behaviors.

Au Québec, les infirmières n’ont pas l’obligation de détenir un diplôme universitaire pour exercer leur profession. Celles qui choisissent le DEC en soins infirmiers peuvent obtenir le diplôme de baccalauréat en deux ans au lieu de trois en empruntant le cursus DEC-BAC en sciences infirmières. Or, ce n’est pas la majorité d’entre elles qui se prévalent de cette possibilité, alors que des études ont démontré les avantages d’avoir un plus grand nombre d’infirmières détenant un baccalauréat dans les milieux de soins (Aiken, Clarke, Cheung, Sloane & Silber, 2003; Kane, Shamliyan, Mueller, Duval & Wilt, 2007; Tourangeau, Cranley & Jeffs, 2006 ; Aiken et al., 2014). Le but de la présente étude était d’explorer les incitatifs et les obstacles à entreprendre des études universitaires dans le cadre du cursus intégré DEC-BAC en sciences infirmières. Cinquante-six nouvelles diplômées ayant complété un DEC en soins infirmiers au Québec ont répondu au questionnaire auto-administré électronique à questions ouvertes. Le cadre de référence guidant la recherche exploratoire était la théorie intermédiaire de la transition de Meleis, Sawyer, Im, Hilfinger Messias et Schumacher (2010). Suivant cette théorie, les données ont d’abord été regroupées par thèmes, soit « incitatifs » et « obstacles » puis par dimensions, à savoir si les thèmes relèvent de conditions au plan personnel, communautaire ou sociétal pour entreprendre des études universitaires. Il ressort de l’étude que les incitatifs majeurs à entreprendre des études universitaires se situent au plan communautaire : meilleures conditions de travail anticipées et développement professionnel. Les obstacles majeurs à entreprendre des études universitaires se situent au plan personnel, en particulier en lien avec une situation financière ou familiale défavorable. Nous avons aussi trouvé que le contexte québécois exerce une influence sur la décision d’entreprendre des études universitaires. Des recommandations ont été formulées pour les milieux de pratique et de formation, ainsi que pour la recherche. / Quebec nurses do not require a bachelor’s degree in order to obtain their license to practice. Choosing the college diploma entitles nurses to obtain a bachelor’s degree in two years instead of three by doing a DEC-BAC in nursing. Although many studies have shown the positive impact of having a greater number of baccalaureate-level nurses in the health care system, (Aiken, Clarke, Cheung, Sloane & Silber, 2003 ; Kane, Shamliyan, Mueller, Duval & Wilt, 2007 ; Tourangeau, Cranley & Jeffs, 2006 ; Aiken et al., 2014) the majority of nursing students choose not to enroll in university studies. The goal of the present study was to explore the incentives and obstacles to engage in university studies in the context of an integrated DEC-BAC curriculum. Fifty-six new CEGEP graduates completed a self-administered open-ended questions survey on the Internet. The theoretical framework used to guide this exploratory study was the transition middle-range theory of Meleis, Sawyer, Im, Hilfinger Messias and Schumacher (2010). Following this theory, data was collected and grouped into two themes, « incentives » and « obstacles », which were then analysed in order to see if they were determined by personal, community or societal conditions. The major incentives to engaging in university studies in the context of a DEC-BAC curriculum were related to the community conditions and were found to be better anticipated working conditions and the possibility of professional development. The major obstacles found were related to personal conditions and, particularly, to an unfavorable financial or family situation. We also found that Quebec’s context influences the decision to engage in university studies. Recommendations were provided for nursing practice and education, as well as for research.

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit der gekoppelten Simulation von Klimaanlage, Regelung und Gebäude mit Hilfe des Simulationssystems TRNSYS. Während für das Gebäude ein vorhandenes TRNSYS Modul verwendet wird, wurden für Klimaanlage und Regelung neue Simulationsmodule entwickelt. Der Klimaanlagensimulator ist seinerseits modular aufgebaut enthält sowohl geometrisch physikalische und empirische als auch kombinierte Modelle für die Simulation von Ventilatoren, Lufterhitzern, Feuchtluftkühlern, Befeuchtern, Regeneratoren, Plattenwärmeüberträgern, Kreislaufwärmerückgewinnern, Ventilen, hydraulischen Schaltungen usw., die für die Simulation sehr variabel miteinander verschaltet werden können. Es wurden optimierte Regelstrategien für konventionelle und DEC-Anlagen entwickelt und entsprechende TRNSYS-Module zur Umsetzung in die Simulation programmiert. Für die Sequenzregelung mehrerer Größen (z.B. Temperatur, Feuchte) wurde ein frei programmierbarer Mehrsequenzregler entwickelt, der den scheinbaren Reglerstillstand über Verknüpfungen blockierter Stellglieder einer Regelsequenz verhindert. Die Qualität der Regelsequenzen wurde mit Hilfe eines über das Rosenbrockverfahren und der dynamischen Optimierung ermittelten optimalen Vergleichsprozesses bewertet.

Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wird gezeigt, wie ein Gebäude- und Anlagensimulationsprogramm mit bekannten Optimierungsalgorithmen gekoppelt und zur theoretischen Lösung optimaler Steuer- und Regelprobleme in der Gebäudetechnik eingesetzt werden kann. Theoretische Optimallösungen erlauben im Sinne eines optimalen Vergleichsprozesses die Bewertung praktisch anderweitig umsetzbarer Steuerungs- und Regelungsmechanismen. Die im Hinblick auf ein gewähltes Gütekriterium erforderliche Notwendigkeit zur Verbesserung von vorhandenen Steuerungs- und Regelungsszenarien sowie die theoretisch maximal erreichbaren Extremwerte lassen sich leicht abschätzen.

This thesis compares four relevance feedback methods. The Rocchio and Ide dec-hi algorithms for the vector space model and the binary independence model and Okapi BM25 within the probabilistic framework. This is done in a custom-made Information Retrieval system utilizing a collection containing 131 896 LA-Times articles which is part of the TREC ad-hoc collection. The methods are compared on two grounds, using only the relevance information from the 20 highest ranked documents from an initial search and also by using all available relevance information. Although a significant effect of choice of method could be found on the first ground, post-hoc analysis could not determine any statistically significant differences between the methods where Rocchio, Ide dec-hi and Okapi BM25 performed equivalent. All methods except the binary independence model performed significantly better than using no relevance feedback. It was also revealed that although the binary independence model performed far worse on average than the other methods it did outperform them on nearly 20 % of the topics. Further analysis argued that this depends on the lack of query expansion in the binary independence model which is advantageous for some topics although has a negative effect on retrieval efficiency in general. On the second ground Okapi BM25 performed significantly better than the other methods with the binary independence model once again being the worst performer. It was argued that the other methods have problems scaling to large amounts of relevance information where Okapi BM25 has no such issues. / Uppsatsnivå: D

One of the hallmarks of being a professional field of practice with a united commitment to a competent and accountable workforce is having a set of agreed upon practice standards that guide practitioners and families about the most effective ways to improve learning and enhance outcomes for young children and their families. The 2014 DEC Recommended Practices represent the practice standards for EI/ECSE. DEC seeks your input and involvement with the dissemination and product development plan to ensure that the 2014 DEC Recommended Practices are understood and implemented across the broad field of early childhood, including Head Start, public pre-k, early care and education, and family support. Share your perspective, brainstorm with colleagues, and strengthen dissemination efforts.