This study examines the instructional leadership practices of 5 elementary principals as self -reported in recorded semi-structured interviews. The seven claims of instruction leadership as identified by Leithwood, Day, Sammons, Hopkins, Harris, Leithwood, Gu, Brown, Ahtaridou and Kington (2009) were used to frame the interview protocol which is designed to develop a deeper understanding of each principal's practices as instructional leaders in their schools. The data indicated that these principals were committed to their work and undertook specific leadership practices to accomplish school initiatives. However, two leadership practices, distributing leadership and acting as a visionary leader, were not revealed in the data. These findings may indicate a need to study the impact of the dual role of manager and instructional leader and of divisional culture on the work of school principals. In addition, there is no reference within the model with respect to what constitutes good teaching and learning and therefore it is not useful in determining and/or assessing leadership behaviours related to these areas. As such, Leithwood’s model may benefit from closer examination in order to provide a broad and clearly articulated set of guidelines for assessing instructional leadership practices.

The major objective of this dissertation is extending the capabilities of game theoretic distributed control to more general settings. In particular, we are interested in drifting environments and/or constrained communications. The first part of the dissertation concerns slowly varying dynamics, i.e., drifting environments. A standard assumption in game theoretic learning is a stationary environment, e.g., the game is fixed. We investigate the case of slow variations and show that for sufficiently slow time variations, the limiting behavior “tracks” the stochastically stable states. Since the analysis is regarding Markov processes, the results could be applied to various game theoretic learning rules. In this research, the results were applied to log-linear learning. A mobile sensor coverage example was tested in both simulation and laboratory experiments. The second part considers a problem of coordinating team players' actions without any communications in team-based zero-sum games. Generally, some global signalling devices are required for common randomness between players, but communications are very limited or impossible in many practical applications. Instead of learning a one-shot strategy, we let players coordinate a periodic sequence of deterministic actions and put an assumption on opponent's rationality. Since team players' action sequences are periodic and deterministic, common randomness is no longer required to coordinate players. It is proved that if a length of a periodic action sequence is long enough, then opponents with limited rationality cannot recognize its pattern. Because the opponents cannot recognize that the players are playing deterministic actions, the players' behavior looks like a correlated and randomized joint strategy with empirical distribution of their action sequences. Consequently players can coordinate their action sequences without any communications or global signals, and the resulting action sequences have correlated behavior. Moreover, the notion of micro-players are introduced for efficient learning of long action sequences. Micro-player matching approach provides a new framework that converts the original team-based zero-sum game to a game between micro-players. By introducing a de Bruijn sequence to micro-player matching, we successfully separate the level of opponent's rationality and the size of the game of micro-players. The simulation results are shown to demonstrate the performance of micro-player matching methods. Lastly, the results of the previous two topics are combined by considering a problem of coordinating actions without communications in drifting environments. More specifically, it is assumed that the opponent player in the team-based zero-sum games tries to adjust its strategy in the set of bounded recall strategies. Then the time-varying opponent's strategy can be considered as a dynamic environment parameter in a coordination game between the team players. Additionally, we develop a human testbed program for further study regarding a human as an adaptive opponent in the team-based zero-sum games. The developed human testbed program can be a starting point for studying game theoretic correlated behavior learning against a human.

Distributed generation (DG) is increasingly employed in modern utility grids to address the growing complexity and size of consumer energy demands. The obstacles associated with DG integration are related to the additive effect the DG has on the short circuit current characteristics of power systems during short circuit conditions. This thesis proposes a novel mitigation technique for synchronous machine based DG integration effects on existing radial fuse-recloser protection infrastructure. The mitigation method provides a comparative analysis of the utilization of resistive (R), inductive (L) and resonant (LC) type superconducting fault current limiters (FCLs) for prevention of excessive fault current contribution from DG sources. Within the frame of reference of this thesis is an interrogation into the effects of synchronous machine based DG sources, in conjunction with mitigation capabilities of FCL integration in the context of fuse-recloser coordination, recloser sensitivity and recloser directionality behavior during radial distribution short circuit conditions. For validation purposes, the proposed methods are demonstrated on a suburban test benchmark using the PSCAD/EMTDC program.

The intellectual contribution of this thesis lies within the area of computer supported co-operative work (CSCW), and more specifically, computer supported co-operative design (CSCD). CSCW is concerned with the development of information systems and technological support for multi-participant work activities. Research into CSCW seeks to understand how people and organisations interact with one another, and to integrate this understanding with the development of computer based tools to support real world settings. Much of the technology developed to support the work of designers has been developed to aid individuals working alone, with tools like computer aided drafting (CAD), scheduling, and database software. The growth of interest in ‘groupware’ has led many technology developers to adapt these design tools for use in group situations. However, joint activities are different from those performed alone, and organisational structures can both interfere with, and supplement co-operative work practices in a way that the current technologies cannot provide support for. To develop effective group design tools, we need to understand more about collaborative processes in design. This thesis draws from the theoretical underpinning of cognitive science and the methods of anthropology and sociology, in an interdisciplinary study of design performance in the construction industry. Fieldwork is used as a method of qualitative data collection and this is examined within the analytic framework of distributed cognition. The results of this analysis provide a useful and usable description of the work of design that technology developers can use to support collaborative design work. In line with the methods of distributed cognition, the activities observed in the workplace studies are examined in terms of their processes and representations. The resources that were available to the design participants are made explicit, as are their situation-specific work patterns. Two case studies of design are examined. The first of these describes design work in a civil engineering project, which involves a number of different design activities. The second describes the work of consulting engineers in building design, focusing on a more limited design role, which is used to back up and supplement areas of the first study that were understood to be particularly relevant. The findings of the study demonstrate how design processes operate simultaneously at personal, organisational and inter-organisational levels. The distinction between the formal, organisational procedures, and the informal, social processes that compliment them is examined to show how these are interrelated in the performance of the design task and their importance to the mechanisms used to co-ordinate actions. The findings of the study have implications for the development of novel technologies to augment the engineering design process, and have already been used in the development of assistive design technologies. The thesis demonstrates that the framework of distributed cognition can be used in the analysis of cognition within a setting, involving multiple individuals, in concert with 'natural' and 'artificial' artefacts. The thesis makes clear a number of processes in design that can only be examined from a perspective which includes the social dimensions of work. The methods of study focus on the resources in collaborative activities, whilst the analysis, structured in terms of the representations and processes of collaborative activity, shows that the method can be used effectively in the development of CSCW and CSCD technologies.

With the rapid development of information technology, applications referring to the Internet of things are booming. Applications that gather information from sensors and affect the context environment with actuators can provide customized and intelligent behaviour to users. These applications have become widely used nowadays in daily life and have initiated the multi-dimensional range query demand referring to the Internet of things. As the data information is fully distributed and the devices like sensors, mobile phones, etc., has limited resources and finite energy, supporting efficient range query is a tough challenge. In this paper, we have proposed a distributed range query framework for Internet of things. In order to save energy costs and reduce the network traffic, we suggest a reporting data range mechanism in the sensing peers, which choose to report a data range and report again only when the peer senses an abnormal data instead of the common moving data method. In addition, we selected some strong peers to be used as the super peers to create a data index by collecting the reporting data range, which will be used for performing range queries. The study has shown that our proposal framework could reduce resource costs in the less strong peers like sensors and mobile phones, and reduce network traffic among all the peers within the network, as well as support a range query function. According the evaluation results, the reporting data range method could greatly reduce the data migration times and save energy costs, and the data index could significantly reduce accessing unnecessary peers and diminish the network traffic.

A key debate within leadership research is whether leadership can be conceptualized as a specialized role occupied by individuals or as a shared influence process amongst all members of a group (Yukl, 2006). Since the mid-­‐ 1990s some leadership scholars, as a counterpoint to the dominance of the former and using terms such as shared and distributed leadership, have attempted to elaborate new ‘post-­‐heroic’ leadership models (Badaracco, 2001) of the latter, in which leadership is something that involves all group members. These new forms of leadership are often positioned as something that organizations can implement as part of an adaptive response to a rapidly changing world. Despite a 50-­‐year tradition of construing leadership as a group level construct, little attention has been paid in these emerging debates to the systems psychodynamic perspective. From this perspective there are grounds for suspecting that attempts to implement shared leadership may compound rather than ameliorate issues related to adaptive challenges (Huffington, James and Armstrong, 2004). This thesis engages with the shared and distributed leadership literatures and examines how a systems psychodynamic perspective can contribute not only to debates within these literatures but to the wider controversies in the leadership literature. This thesis reports on the findings of a single, 18-­‐month, longitudinal case study of a senior team whose managing director attempted to implement shared leadership. Using a clinical fieldwork methodology (Schein, 1987) in the systems psychodynamic tradition (Miller, 1993b; Miller and Rice, 1967), this study advances a number of contributions to theory. These include: findings that challenge existing approaches to conceptualizing leadership – shared or otherwise; the elucidation of complex unconscious team processes that are mobilized as a senior team undertakes adaptive work; and thirdly, a more sophisticated and theoretically robust conceptualization of leadership as a group level phenomenon.

Distributed Leadership is often considered an optimal form of leadership to improve student achievement. The challenge though is that previous research on distributed leadership has often described what distributed leadership is as opposed to what distributed leadership's impact on student achievement might be. Since leadership has an indirect effect on student achievement, exploring organizational factors that may have a more direct impact on student achievement is important. Academic optimism describes teachers' perceptions of the staff's collective efficacy, the trust experienced between teachers, and between teachers and administrators, and the extent to which academic press (high expectations) is evident in the school. Academic optimism is an organizational factor that improves student achievement according to previous research. This thesis examined patterns of distributed leadership and their correlation to academic optimism. Further I examined the impact that academic optimism has on student achievement. By surveying 2122 teachers in 113 schools in a large school board in south-central Ontario, I determined that planfully aligned distributed leadership had a significant correlation to academic optimism but academic optimism did not have a significant correlation to student achievement. Rather, academic press, one of the variables within academic optimism, did have a significant correlation to student achievement in language and math. This study concluded that planfully aligned distributed leadership mediated by academic press had a significant impact on student achievement.

A major issue in distributed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the design of efficient distributed algorithms for network-wide dissemination of information acquired by individual sensors, where each sensor, by itself, is unable to access enough data for reliable decision making. Without a centralized fusion center, network-wide reliable inferencing can be accomplished by recovering meaningful global statistics at each sensor through iterative inter-sensor message passing. In this dissertation, we first consider the problem of distributed estimation of an unknown deterministic scalar parameter (the target signal) in a WSN, where each sensor receives a single snapshot of the field. An iterative distributed least-squares (DLS) algorithm is investigated with and without the consideration of node failures. In particular, without sensor node failures it is shown that every instantiation of the DLS algorithm converges, i.e., consensus is reached among the sensors, with the limiting agreement value being the centralized least-squares estimate. With node failures during the iterative exchange process, the convergence of the DLS algorithm is still guaranteed; however, an error exists be- tween the limiting agreement value and the centralized least-squares estimate. In order to reduce this error, a modified DLS scheme, the M-DLS, is provided. The M-DLS algorithm involves an additional weight compensation step, in which a sensor performs a one-time weight compensation procedure whenever it detects the failure of a neighbor. Through analytical arguments and simulations, it is shown that the M-DLS algorithm leads to a smaller error than the DLS algorithm, where the magnitude of the improvement dependents on the network topology. We then investigate the case when the observation or sensing mode is only partially known at the corresponding nodes, perhaps, due to their limited sensing capabilities or other unpredictable physical factors. Specifically, it is assumed that the observation validity at a node switches stochastically between two modes, with mode I corresponding to the desired signal plus noise observation mode (a valid observation), and mode II corresponding to pure noise with no signal information (an invalid observation). With no prior information on the local sensing modes (valid or invalid), we introduce a learning-based distributed estimation procedure, the mixed detection-estimation (MDE) algorithm, based on closed-loop interactions between the iterative distributed mode learning and the target estimation. The online learning (or sensing mode detection) step re-assesses the validity of the local observations at each iteration, thus refining the ongoing estimation update process. The convergence of the MDE algorithm is established analytically, and the asymptotic performance analysis studies shows that, in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the MDE estimation error converges to that of an ideal (centralized) estimator with perfect information about the node sensing modes. This is in contrast with the estimation performance of a naive average consensus based distributed estimator (with no mode learning), whose estimation error blows up with an increasing SNR.

Solar power is considered a very promising source for electric power generation. The abundance of sunlight over a large area of the earth surface gives rise to several applications of photovoltaic systems. Electricity can be generated from sunlight either directly by employing the photovoltaic effect, or by using energy from the sun to heat up a working fluid that can be used to power up electricity generators. These two technologies are widely used today to provide power to either stand-alone loads or for connection to the power system grid. Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is a very important consideration that is taken into account when building a new photovoltaic power system. This is needed in order to extract maximum power output from a PV array under varying atmospheric conditions to maximize the return on initial investments. Several techniques have been used to tackle this problem including perturb and observe (P&O), incremental conductance (IncCond) and fuzzy logic based algorithms. Judging between these techniques is based on their speed of locating the maximum power point (MPP) of a PV array under given atmospheric conditions, besides the cost and complexity of implementing them. The P&O and IncCond algorithms have a low implementation complexity but their tracking speed is slow. Fuzzy logic techniques are faster but suffer from high implementation complexity. One of the goals of this thesis is to present an MPPT algorithm implementation that is based on the fractional open circuit voltage method. This technique is easy to implement and offers a fast tracking speed for the MPP of a PV array. It provides an approximation within 4-5% of the maximum power point, which is a tradeoff between the speed and accuracy of operation around the MPP. It offers a speed advantage in grid connected PV systems. The P&O algorithm, which is very common, is difficult to implement under these conditions due to its poor response time. There is also a need for developing control techniques for three phase grid connected PV systems including a method for DC link voltage control that can stabilize the voltage at the inverter input. This area of research is currently growing with the increase in number of PV installations backed up by government incentives in several countries. In addition to the previously mentioned points, this work is intended to be used in further research to replace the representation of PV arrays as a simple DC source when included in power system studies. That is a basic assumption and does not take into consideration the various dynamics caused by changing solar irradiation and surface temperature of the array.

Distributed- work has introduced challenges for both employees and managers alike. Maintaining a form of supervision and discipline remains then necessary as control is the ultimate means for the hierarchy to bridge the issue of distance. With regard to the unprecedented changes generated by the significant development of ICTs in organizations, we expressed the necessity to analyze how control is reconsidered within the managerial breakdown introduced by distributed-work. Our theoretical reasoning finally led us to use the works of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a basis for a more relevant conceptual framework. Data coming from 49 interviews and 7 days as non-participant observer enabled us to provide evidences for the disruption of management practices due to the reconsideration of control in distributed-work. Both for managers, evolving from a supervisory to a facilitator status, and distributed-workers themselves, whose activities will mainly be directed by the management of their visibility, responsiveness and modulation. Ultimately, this PhD dissertation provides concrete managerial manifestations for Deleuzian societies of control.