Chronic fatigue affects athletes' abilities to maintain force and power capabilities over the course of a season. The ability for sport scientists and coaches to monitor and manage fatigue is beneficial for all sports, especially those with lengthy seasons. Although methods of monitoring and managing fatigue have been suggested for various sports, there is currently limited research examining methods of monitoring fatigue in baseball over the course of a season. To effectively maintain peak performance, potential methods for monitoring and managing fatigue in baseball players need to be discussed.

The purpose of the present study was two-fold: (1) to investigate various degrees of counselor-offered empathy in initial interviews, in order to determine whether consistently high levels of counselor-- offered empathy in the initial therapy interview causes high levels of client anxiety, and (2) to determine whether increased client anxiety or the levels of counselor-offered empathy that the client receives in the initial counseling interview affects the client's likelihood to continue in counseling following one session. To accomplish the purpose of the study 27 high-anxiety and 27 low-anxiety undergraduate, incentive volunteers were seen in an initial counseling session by one of three psychology, graduate-student counselors. During the interview the counselor offered the clients one of three predetermined levels of empathy (high, medium, or low). The subject's state-anxiety level was measured prior to the interview and during the interview by two paper and pencil, self-report measures, and also by heart rate. The likelihood to continue in counseling following the initial interview was also measured by a specially designed questionnaire. Results revealed that there were no differences between the anxiety scores of the subjects receiving high, medium, or low counselor-offered empathy. No relationship was found to exist between the subjects' anxiety scores and their choice to terminate or continue counseling after the initial interview. However, an interaction effect upon the subjects' likelihood to continue in counseling was found to exist between their trait anxiety level and the level of counselor-offered empathy which they received.

Although the therapeutic alliance is known to be a principal therapeutic factor, little attention has focused on therapists’ perspectives on the impact of the first session on the development of the therapeutic alliance. The present study is a qualitative exploration of interviews with ten therapists regarding the first session and their efforts to establish a therapeutic alliance with their new clients. The data were analyzed using Clara Hill’s Consensual Qualitative Research paradigm (CQR). In considering Bordin’s (1979) three components of the alliance (tasks, goals, bond), therapists viewed the bond as the most influential contributor to the development of the alliance in the first session. The therapists emphasized being attuned to the client, being honest and open, generating curiosity, gently challenging, and setting the frame and expectations for therapy as important actions to take when working to establish an alliance in the first session. The findings from this study contribute to the literature on the therapeutic alliance, with particular attention to strategies for facilitating alliance development from the outset of therapy.

Over the past five decades, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) have been an active research field. Maps of high accuracy are required for AMRs to operate successfully. In addition to this, AMRs needs to localise themselves reliably relative to the map. Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) address the problem of both map building and robot localisation. When exploring large areas, Multi-Robot SLAM (MRSLAM) has the potential to be far more efficient and robust, while sharing the computational burden across robots. However, MRSLAM encounters issues such as difficulty in map fusion of multi-resolution maps, and unknown relative positions of the robots. This thesis describes a distributed multi-resolution map merging algorithm for MRSLAM. HectorSLAM, which is one of many single robot SLAM implementations, has demonstrated exceptional results and was selected as the basis for the MRSLAM implementation in this project. We consider the environment to be three-dimensional with the maps being constrained to a two-dimensional plane. Each robot is equipped with a laser range sensor for perception and has no information regarding the relative positioning of the other robots. The experiments were conducted both in simulation and a real-world environment. Up-to three robots were placed in the same environment with Hector-SLAM running, the local maps and localisation were then sent to a central node, which attempted to find map overlaps and merge the resulting maps. When evaluating the success of the map merging algorithm, the quality of the map from each robot was interrogated. Experiments conducted on up to three AMRs show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in an indoor environment.

Objective: Although findings have been mixed, accumulating evidence suggests that co-occurring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses and symptoms negatively predict cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) outcomes for anxious youth. The current study extends past research by examining the association of not only ADHD but also other features of ADHD with treatment outcomes of youth who received an intensive CBT for a specific phobia. Method: 135 youth (ages 6-15; 52.2% female; 88.2% white) were randomized to either an individual or parent-augmented intensive CBT targeting a specific phobia. Latent growth curve models were used to explore the association of ADHD symptoms, effortful control, sluggish cognitive tempo, maternal depression and the two treatment conditions (i.e., individual versus parent-augmented) with pre-treatment severity of the specific phobia and the trajectory of change in the severity of the specific phobia from pre-treatment to the 6-month follow up after the intervention. Results: As expected, higher levels of ADHD symptoms were associated with lower levels of effortful control and increased maternal depression at pre-treatment. Contrary to expectations, ADHD symptoms and its associated difficulties were not significantly associated with treatment outcomes. Conclusion: Overall, the findings lend support to the generalizability of intensive CBT for a specific phobia to youth with comorbid ADHD and associated difficulties. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed. / Ph. D.

In recent years, there has been an ever increasing emphasis placed on the collection and use of patient reported outcome measures (PROM) in mental health services. This emphasis stems from a culture of evidence based practice, wherein PROM are shown to improve therapeutic outcomes at the clinical level, as well as provide information for the appropriate development of services and commissioning at a national level. This study uses an online survey to explore the use of PROM by mental health staff (n=112) in various Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services across England. Attitudes toward routine outcome monitoring practices and perceived competency around PROM use were also measured. Results found that although significant numbers of staff were using PROM, the amount of data being collected falls short of policy targets. Staff’s attitudes towards the practice are shown to be ambivalent, whereas overall perceived levels of competency were reasonably good. The relationships between attitudes, competence and PROM usage are discussed and a prediction model for PROM usage is developed in light of existing psychological theory. Results showed that training played an important role in the uptake of PROM and implications for the dissemination of training programs are emphasised.

<p>This research concerns exploiting knowledge of the user's environment (i.e., context information) to enrich a user's communication making it more personal, by ensuring that the user receives only relevant messages and calls in his/her current context, and to facilitate more opportunities for communication interactions with people that are in the same context and that share the same interests as this user. We describe in this licentiate thesis the concepts of context-addressed messaging and context-aware session control that enable users to: (1) send messages to others based on their context, rather than their network address and (2) to initiate, adapt, and terminate user's communication sessions based on this user's current context, respectively. These concepts address questions such as: how to discover, select, and switch to an optimal communication means to meet varying user, contextual, communication, and device resource requirements and preferences. A key to solving these problems is to create a representation of the user's context-dependent preferences and to process the user's context-dependent preferences which are part of context triggers. These context triggers can initiate a communication event upon a particular context update. Additionally, in order to provide the described context-aware communication functions, these mechanisms need timely access to the acquired (desired) context information. This in turn raises a plethora of other questions, such as how to discover sensors that provide the desired context information; how to acquire raw context data from these sensors; how to abstract, process, and model this data to become "understandable" to applications and system components; and how to distribute this context to applications that are running on different nodes.</p><p> </p><p>This research is split into three different parts. The first part concerns investigating and implementing context management functions. As part of this research we propose a novel approach for context synthesis using context operators. We also propose a design architecture for context-aware middleware that mediates between the sensors and applications, and that is able to share and retrieve context from other nodes in the network. The second part of our research concerns our proposed mechanism for context-addressed messaging. To implement this mechanism we designed our own message format, called the Common Profile for Context-Addressed Messaging (CPCAM) that is able to use any high level context to compose a context-based address. Additionally, we proposed to use context-based filtering to find the correct message recipients and determine if this message is relevant to these potential message recipients in their current context, as well as to deliver this message to the recipients' preferred device that is adapted using their preferred communication means. At the end of this second part we design context-addressed messaging system operations on top of a SIP and SIMPLE-based network infrastructure. The third part of our research describes context-aware session control mechanisms using context switch and context trigger constructs. A context-switch selects an action from a set of context-dependent actions upon an incoming communication event based on the receiver's current context. In contrast, a context trigger initiates an action based on a context update and the user's preferences that are specified in this updated context. This part illustrates in several examples the context-aware session control mechanisms, i.e. the initiation of a communication session based on the match of a user's preferences and current context, as well as adaptation and (if necessary) termination of an ongoing communication session based upon the user's context-dependent preferences.</p><p> </p><p>The research leading to this licentiate has created network and system level models necessary for implementation of a context-addressed communication system that would enable users to easily design their own personalized, context-aware communication services. The necessary constructs and properties of these models are designed and analyzed in the thesis, as well as in conference papers and other documents published in the process of doing the research for this thesis. A number of remaining open issues and challenges have been outlined as part of the future work.</p><p> </p> / EU FP6 MIDAS (Middleware Platform for Developing and Deploying Advanced Mobile Services) / EU FP6 MUSIC (Self-adapting Applications for Mobile Users In Ubiquitous Computing Environments)

The Web, being the most popular component of the Internet, has been transformed from a static information-serving medium into a fully interactive platform. This platform has been used by developers to create web applications rivaling traditional desktop systems. Designing, developing and evaluating these applications require new or modified methodologies, techniques and tools because of the different characteristics they exhibit. This dissertation discusses two important areas for developing and evaluating these applications: security and data mining. In the security area, a survey using a process similar to the Goal Question Metric approach examines the properties of web application vulnerabilities. Using results from the survey, a white-box approach to identify web applications vulnerabilities is proposed. Although the approach eliminates vulnerabilities during the development process, it does not protect existing web applications that have not utilized the approach. Hence, an Anomaly-based Network Intrusion Detection System, called AIWAS, is introduced. AIWAS protects web applications through the analysis of interactions between the users and the web applications. These interactions are classified as either benign or malicious; malicious interactions are prevented from reaching the web applications under protection. In the data mining area, the method of reliability estimation from server logs is examined in detail. This examination reveals the fact that the session workload is currently obtained using a constant Session Timeout Threshold (STT) value. However, each website is unique and should have its own STT value. Hence, an initial model for estimating the STT is introduced to encourage future research on sessions to use a customized STT value per website. This research on the STT leads to a deeper investigation of the actual session workload unit. More specifically, the distributional properties of the session workload are re-examined to determine whether the session workload can be described as a heavy-tailed distribution. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems

No description available.

Le formalisme CSP (Problème de Satisfaction de Contraintes) permet de représenter de nombreux problèmes de manière simple et efficace. Cependant, une partie de ces problèmes ne peut être résolue de manière classique et centralisée. Les causes peuvent être diverses : temps de rapatriement des données prohibitif, sécurité des données non garantie, etc. Les CSP Distribués(DisCSP), domaine intersectant celui des SMA et des CSP, permettent de modéliser et de résoudre ces problèmes naturellement distribués. Les raisonnements intra-agent et inter-agents sont alors basés sur un ensemble de relations entre différentes variables. Les agents interagissent afin de construire une solution globale à partir des solutions locales. Nous proposons, dans ce travail, un algorithme de résolution de DisCSP nommé Distributed Backtracking with Sessions (DBS) permettant de résoudre des DisCSP où chaque agent dispose d’un problème local complexe. DBS a la particularité de ne pas utiliser de nogoods comme la majorité des algorithmes de résolution de DisCSP mais d’utiliser à la place des sessions. Ces sessions sont des nombres permettant d’attribuer un contexte à chaque agent ainsi qu’à chaque message échangé durant la résolution du problème. Il s’agit d’un algorithme complet permettant l’utilisation de filtres sur les messages échangés sans remettre en cause la preuvede complétude. Notre proposition est évaluée, dans les cas mono-variable et multi-variables par agents, sur différents benchmarks classiques (les problèmes de coloration de graphes distribués et les DisCSP aléatoires) ainsi que sur un problème d’exploration en environnement inconnu. / The CSP formalism (Constraint Satisfaction Problem) can represent many problems in a simple and efficient way. However, some of these problems cannot be solved in a classical and centralized way. The causes can be multiple: prohibitive repatriation time, unsecured data and so on. Distributed CSP (DisCSP), domain intersecting MAS and CSP, are used to model and to solve these problems. The intra-agent and inter-agent reasonning are so based on a set of relation between different variables. The agents interact in order to build a global solution from local solutions. We propose, in this work, an algorithm for solving DisCSP named Distributed Backtracking with Sessions (DBS) which allows to solve DisCSP where each agent owns a complex local problem. DBS has the particularity to not use nogoods like the majority of algorithms for solvingDisCSP but to use instead of sessions. These sessions are numbers which allow to assign a context to each agent and each message exchanged during the resolution of the problem. DBS is a complete algorithm which allows the use of filters on messages exchanged without affecting the proof of completeness. Our proposal is evaluated, for mono-variable and multi-variables per agents problems, on different classical benchmarks (distributed graph coloring problems and random DisCSP) and on an unknown environment exploration problem.