Controlling the robots through a robotic platform has recently been used widely; however, it is necessary to make the platform friendlier in use to bring this product deeply into the family. The screenplay based performance platform (SBPP) of robotic puppet shows proposed in this thesis is a robotic platform composed with cloud computing, User Interface (UI) and Screenplay Interpreter(SI). The users can connect to the UI to edit and setup the screenplay ubiquitously through any device which can link to the internet. Through screenplay interpreter, the robot can perform as the designed screenplay after the setup; that is, one can always designate a different robot to execute during the process of editing, and the actions of these robots will be a message communication with preset meaning. The project of SBPP is divided into two modules: the UI and SI for multi-morphic robots. The work of this thesis takes charge mainly of screenplay interpreter for a variety of robot models and interfacing between NAO(pronounced now) which is a humanoid robot and the screenplay interpreter. And we integrate UI and SI. The integration of the work provides users a friendly UI to edit scenario of NAO and DARwIn-OP such the robot, NAO and DARwIn-OP(Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence - Open Platform), can play in a scenario as the screenplay describing. The system is demonstrated by a play of ¡§do-as-I-do¡¨ and recorded in a video at YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ErTOgAQSo.

Reducing high lost ratio of voluntary interpreters can save cost of recruiting and retraining for Taroko National Park¡¦s headquarters. The subjects of the study are the 114 voluntary interpreters in Taroko National Park. The methodologies applied here are, questionnaire and observation. The purpose of the study is to understand the relationship between the motivation of the voluntary interpreters and the job satisfaction of the voluntary interpreters to salve the problem of high lost ratio of voluntary interpreters. The findings of the study are as follows: 1.the motivation is mainly "self-growth". 2.the motivation will be changed with personal character and time passing by. 3. the factors influencing the voluntary interpreters¡¦ job satisfaction are "show loving care and support", "communication and co-operation", "responsibility and training". These factors will effect total satisfaction of voluntary interpreters. According to the findings of the study, proposes the headquarters of Taroko National Park how to provide relative courses, rich the content of work, and pay close attention for voluntary interpreters.

Ziel der Arbeit ist die Erweiterung des Software-Werkzeuges ¨SAPCDEM¨ um eine Skriptsprache. Dieses Werkzeug wurde in der Abteilung ¨SAP R/3 Software Factory¨ der SAP AG entwickelt und dient der Verwaltung und Qualitaetssicherung der SAP R/3 CD's. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird das Werkzeug hinsichtlich seines Aufbaus und seiner Arbeitsweise analysiert. Es werden die genauen Anforderungen an die Skriptsprache ermittelt und Loesungsansaetze diskutiert, diese in das vorhandene System zu integrieren. Ein Interpreter wird entworfen, der die Anweisungen der Sprache in entsprechende Aktionen des Werkzeuges umsetzt.

In Canada, the field of study related to teaching American Sign Language fingerspelling and numbering is very new. This study focused its examination on the potential educational benefits when incorporating fingerspelling and numbering within an ASL course as opposed to the potential educational benefits when creating a separate fingerspelling and numbering course for second language learners. The study was conducted by administering surveys, pre-tests, and post-tests with students from two Canadian Deaf Studies Programs, as well as interviewing instructors. The participants’ receptive skill acquisition and complex rule comprehension of fingerspelling and numbering was examined in both instances (with and without a separate course) but no distinct differences were found. Data analysis of instructor responses indicated a strong inclination for advanced studies of fingerspelling and numbering for students who continue on to higher levels of education, specifically in American Sign Language-English Interpretation Programs. Additional research is needed, as this study was limited due to the small number of participants. In general, the results of the study confirm that fingerspelling and numbering are challenging practices for second language learners of ASL and that more curricular materials, focused on teaching these skills in natural conversational contexts, are needed. / October 2015

Sveriges befolkning utgjordes år 2009 av 14 % utrikesfödda vilket kan leda till kommunikationsbrister inom bland annat vården. Det är viktigt att kartlägga eventuella kommunikationsproblem för att kunna arbeta för en patientsäker vård där auktoriserad tolk används som ett kommunikationsverktyg. Tidigare studier har visat på att det även i andra länder, så som Australien och Tyskland, finns en problematik vad gäller kommunikation och brist på tolkanvändning. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie var att beskriva sjuksköterskans erfarenheter av tolkanvändning. Metod: Studien var av kvalitativ ansats och utfördes på en avdelning på en kvinnoklinik i södra Sverige. Sju semi-strukturerade intervjuer utfördes med sjuksköterskor i olika åldrar och med olika lång arbetslivserfarenhet. Materialet analyserades med hjälp av innehållsanalys och resulterade i tre kategorier: tid, kommunikation och vårdkvalitet. Till dessa huvudkategorier följde åtta underkategorier. Resultat: Det framkom delade meningar mellan sjuksköterskorna huruvida det hanns kontakta tolk i akuta situationer eller inte. Sjuksköterskorna berättade att det rådde tidsbrist på avdelningen vilket resulterade i en minskad användning av auktoriserad tolk. Samtliga berättade om bristande kommunikation i samband med att patient och vårdgivare ej talade samma språk. Kroppspråk användes som ett alternativ till verbal kommunikation. Sjuksköterskorna använde övervägande anhörigtolk, trots att det framkom flera negativa aspekter med denna tolkform. Auktoriserad tolk sades vara det mest lämpade tolkalternativet men ansågs användas i för lite. Det berättades att patienter påverkades negativt i situationer där tolk inte användes och att det vid behov bör användas tolk. / Sweden’s population in 2009 consisted of 14 percent foreign borne, which can lead to communication gaps in areas such as healthcare. It is important to identify communication problems to pursue a patient safe healthcare, where professional interpreters are used as a tool in communication. Previous studies have shown that in other countries, like Australia and Germany, problems exist in communication and lack of use of interpreters. Aim: The aim of this study was to describe nurses’ experiences of using interpreters. Method: The study was of a qualitative approach and was performed in a ward at a women’s clinic in southern Sweden. Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with nurses of different ages and with different lengths of work experience. The data was analyzed by content-analyze and resulted in three categories: time, communication and care quality. To these main categories eight subcategories followed. Results: Divided opinions appeared between the nurses whether there was time or not to contact an interpreter in acute situations. The nurses said that there was a lack of time at the ward which resulted in a reduced use of professional interpreters. All of the nurses spoke of a lack in communication when the patient and the caregiver did not speak the same language. Body language was used as an alternative to verbal communication. The nurses mainly used family members to interpret, although it appeared several negative aspects of this interpretation form. Professional interpreters was said to be the most suitable interpreter option but was used too little. The nurses said that patients were negatively affected in situations where no interpreter was used and that interpreters should be used when needed.

Kommunikativa svårigheter är en funktionsnedsättning som kan innebära språk-, röst- eller talsvårigheter och kan leda till begränsad interaktion med omgivningen. Taltjänst är en tolkservice som erbjuder ett sätt för personer med kommunikativa svårigheter att lättare kommunicera med omgivningen. Syftet med föreliggande studie är att undersöka hur taltjänsttolkar kan underlätta kommunikationen för personer med kommunikativa svårigheter i samtal mellan tolk, tolkanvändare och tredje part. Materialet består av fem olika videoinspelningar av tolksamtal samt svar från en enkätundersökning till taltjänsttolkar. Videomaterialet transkriberades utifrån samtalsanalytiska principer. Återkommande teman identifierades i svaren från enkätundersökningen. I resultatet och analysen observerades strategier för att skapa gemensam förståelse i form av begäran om förtydligande och begäran om bekräftelse av förståelse. Även upprepning/återgivning samt delad kunskap är fenomen som framkom i analysen av data. Förberedande möten visade sig spela en avgörande roll för att uppnå gemensam förståelse i samtal mellan tolk, tolkanvändare och tredje part. / Communicative disorders may involve language, voice or speech impairment and can lead to limited interaction with social surroundings. Speech Interpreter Service is an interpretation service which provides a way for people with communication disorders to communicate more easily with their surroundings. The aim of the present study is to investigate how speech interpreters can facilitate communication for people with communication disorders in conversation between the interpreter, users and third parties. The material consists of five different video recordings of interpreter conversation, and answers from a questionnaire to speech interpreters. The video material was transcribed based on conversation analytical principles. Recurring themes were identified in the answers from the survey. In the results and analysis, strategies to create common understanding were observed in the form of clarification requests and requests for confirmation of understanding. Other phenomena that appeared in the analysis were repetition/reproduction and shared knowledge. Preparatory meetings were shown to play a crucial role in achieving common understanding in conversation between the interpreter, users and third parties.

Background: Community interpreters are employed to work across multiple settings in the UK, including mental health services, to support individuals whose first language is not English. To date, little research attention has been paid to the emotional impact of mental health interpreting on community interpreters. Aims: The aim of this study is to develop an in-depth understanding of the emotional challenges of mental health interpreting and the coping strategies employed by community interpreters to overcome these challenges. It is hoped that this research will raise practitioners’ awareness and help guide health services to support interpreters better, to enable the highest standards of care for clients. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight community interpreters working in mental health settings. The interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Four master themes emerged from analysis: ‘Feeling for the client’, ‘Relationships in Context’, ‘Balancing the personal self and the professional self’ and ‘You need to protect yourself’. These master themes, along with the subthemes contributing to them, are expanded in to a narrative account of interpreters’ experiences. Conclusions: This study has underscored the need for increased provision of support for interpreters, as well as training for practitioners in working with interpreters. Guidance for improved working relationships between interpreters, practitioners and employing agencies is given.

This thesis draws onthree sets of recordings of Swedish-Russian interpreter-mediated conversations,carried out as role plays. First,scripted role plays, performed as part of the Swedish state interpretercertification test, involving candidate interpreters and officials from thegovernmental body providing these tests. Secondly, both scripted andnon-scripted role plays, performed during interpreter training courses at theSwedish Armed Forces’ Language School. And thirdly, non-scripted role playsorganised in order to explore differences in style between more and lessexperienced official negotiators, working at a high international diplomaticlevel, for Sweden and Russia respectively, assisted by interpreters. The thesisadopts a text-oriented as well as an interactionist approach oninterpreter-mediated interaction and compares the management of turn-taking andrepair sequences in the three types of setting, focusing particularly on howthe presence or absence of a script affects turn-taking and the unfolding ofrepair sequences.

The architecture of virtual machine (VM) interpreters has long been a subject of researchand discussion. The initial trend of stack-based interpreters was shortly thereafterchallenged by research showing the performance advantages of virtual register machines. Despite this, many VM interpreters are still stack-based, with some notable exceptions, like Lua, Android Runtime, and its predecessor Dalvik. A register architecture isusually associated with greater overhead from instruction dispatch, and to some extent, instruction decoding. By designing, and implementing a novel technique that replaces the conventional way of decoding instructions, this thesis attempts to reduce that overhead. More specifically, a VM interpreter is developed as an artifact of design-science research. The novel technique is then evaluated through benchmarking in various configurations. As the results indicate, however, using this technique showed no performance advantage, as the resulting machine instructions are exactly the same after compiler optimization. This suggests that there is no apparent decoding overhead to begin with. As a result, register-based VMs seem to not suffer from any dispatch related overhead, other than the fact that there are more operands per instruction to access. Source code is available on GitHub, at https://github.com/kaspr61/RackVM.

Our main objective is to design Dimensional Analysis (DA) algorithms for the multidimensional dialect PyLucid of Lucid, the equational data flow language. The significance is that the DA is indispensable for an efficient implementation of multidimensional Lucid and should aid the implementation of other data flow systems, such as Google’s TensorFlow. Data flow is a form of computation in which components of multidimensional datasets (MDDs) travel on communication lines in a network of processing stations. Each processing station incrementally transforms its input MDDs to its output, another (possibly very different) MDD. MDDs are very common in Health Information Systems and data science in general. An important concept is that of relevant dimension. A dimension is relevant if the coordinate of that dimension is required to extract a value. It is very important that in calculating with MDDs we avoid non-relevant dimensions, otherwise we duplicate entries (say, in a cache) and waste time and space. Suppose, for example, that we are measuring rainfall in a region. Each individual measurement (say, of an hour’s worth of rain) is determined by location (one dimension), day, (a second dimension) and time of day (a third dimension). All three dimensions are a priori relevant. Now suppose we want the total rainfall for each day. In this MDD (call it N) the relevant dimensions are location and day, but time of day is no longer relevant and must be removed. Normally this is done manually. However, can this process be automated? We answer this question affirmatively by devising and testing algorithms that produce useful and reliable approximations (specifically, upper bounds) for the dimensionalities of the variables in a program. By dimensionality we mean the set of relevant dimensions. For example, if M is the MDD of raw rain measurements, its dimensionality is {location, day, hour}, and that of N is {location, day}. Note that the dimensionality is more than just the rank, which is simply the number of dimensions. Previously, there’s extensive research on dataflow itself, which we summarize. However, an exhaustive literature search uncovered no relevant previous DA work other than that of the GLU (Granular Lucid) project in the 90s. Unfortunately the GLU project was funded privately and remains proprietary – not even the author has access to it. Our methodology is that we proceeded incrementally, solving increasingly difficult instances of DA corresponding to increasingly sophisticated language features. We solved the case of one dimension (time), two dimensions (time and space), and multiple dimensions. We also solved the difficult problem (which the GLU team never solved) of determining the dimensionality of programs that include user defined functions, including recursively defined functions. We do this by adapting the PyLucid interpreter (to produce the DAM interpreter) to evaluating the entire program over the (finite) domain of dimensionalities. As a result, the experimentally validated algorithms in our dissertation can produce useful upper bounds for the dimensionalities of the variables in multidimensional PyLucid programs. That also includes those with user-defined functions / Graduate