Kreativitet är en av de viktigaste komponenterna i effektiv marknadsföring. Årligen anordnas hundratals branschtävlingar runt om i världen där de mest kreativa kommunikationsinsatserna belönas med priser. Dessa tävlingar har stort inflytande i branschen, men kritiseras även för att premiera nyskapande över andra faktorer trots att forskning visat att effektiv, kreativ reklam innehåller tre dimensioner: nyskapande, meningsfullhet och anknytning.Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om denna kritik är applicerbar även på svenska kommunikationstävlingar, genom att studera i vilken utsträckning vinnare av kreativitetstävlingen Guldägget innehåller de olika kreativitetsdimensionerna.En kvantitativ enkätundersökning genomfördes där respondenter ur två olika grupper, yrkesverksamma respektive icke-yrkesverksamma inom kommunikationsbranschen, fick ta ställning till nio olika Guldägget-vinnande annonskampanjer. Resultatet baseras på de 198 inskickade enkätsvaren och indikerar att alla kreativitetsdimensionerna finns representerade, men att nivån av anknytning är lägre än övriga två. Tänkbara orsaker är att anknytning är mer subjektivt, att respondenterna inte ingick i annonsernas ursprungliga målgrupp samt att annonsernas ålder påverkat anknytningen negativt.Icke-yrkesverksamma tenderade att skatta meningsfullhet och anknytning lägre än yrkesverksamma inom branschen. Detta kan bero på yrkesverksamma är mer vana vid att analysera reklam, men begränsningar i urvalet gör att inga generella slutsatser kan dras. / Creativity is an essential component in advertising, and there are hundreds of advertising awards that honour the most creative concepts. These creativity awards are influential in the industry, but have received criticism for favouring novelty over other factors. Meanwhile, research shows that advertising creativity has three dimensions: novelty, meaningfulness and connectedness. This thesis investigates if Swedish creativity awards are guilty of the same misrepresentation, by studying which creativity dimensions can be found among winners of the Guldägget award.Respondents from two separate groups – workers in the advertising industry versus outside of the industry – participated in a quantitative survey, where their attitudes towards nine Guldägget-winning advertisements were measured. The results are based off 198 questionnaires and indicate that all dimensions are present. However, connectedness was rated lower than the rest. Possible reasons include connectedness being inherently more subjective, the respondents not being part of the original target group as well as the advertisements’ age having a negative impact.People from outside the advertising industry rated meaningfulness and connectedness lower than those in the industry. A possible reason is that industry people are more accustomed to analysing advertisements; however, shortcomings in the sample prevent general conclusions to be drawn.

In recent years, Swedish school children have experienced a decline in reading motivation. This is no less true for middle school students both in and outside of school. This thesis aims to find ways in which robot book-talks can be used in a school setting to motivate middle schoolers to read. With a Research through Design approach, the study also aims to find recommendations for designers in the future. These goals were achieved through a design process in three phases, in which the author developed and tested book-talks between fourth graders and the robot Furhat from Furhat Robotics, using the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) technique. In the final evaluative phase, the students had book-talks with Furhat in two different modes, over two sessions. In Passive mode, the robot asked general questions and made little effort to make sure the students were concentrating on the task. This mode served as a baseline for the “novelty effect”. The other – Active mode – built on the ideas created throughout the process. In this mode, the robot asked questions directly related to the students’ books and made more effort to guide the students through their task. Results show that while the robot interaction was appreciated by all partaking students, it was not possible to prove if it spurred genuine reading motivation. Nevertheless, results showed that the interaction could potentially fulfil the basic psychological needs of competence and relatedness. Along with autonomy, both needs are fundamental to motivation and well-being, according to Self-Determination Theory. The book-talks’ effect on students’ autonomy could not be tested properly, as there were too few copies of the books which the students could read for the book-talks. The study also showed signs of the “novelty effect”, as some students were interested in reading more so that they could talk to the robot again. Three main takeaways for future designers were found as a result of the study: using Self-Determination Theory to create UX goals and to design; make designs that encourage people to interact with people; both follow and guide the users throughout the WOZ interaction, to create moments where the students can experience relatedness and show competence.

This dissertation aims mainly at obtaining robust variants of Gaussian processes (GPs) that do not require using non-Gaussian likelihoods to compensate for outliers in the training data. Bayesian kernel methods, and in particular GPs, have been used to solve a variety of machine learning problems, equating or exceeding the performance of other successful techniques. That is the case of a recently proposed approach to GP-based novelty detection that uses standard GPs (i.e. GPs employing Gaussian likelihoods). However, standard GPs are sensitive to outliers in training data, and this limitation carries over to GP-based novelty detection. This limitation has been typically addressed by using robust non-Gaussian likelihoods. However, non-Gaussian likelihoods lead to analytically intractable inferences, which require using approximation techniques that are typically complex and computationally expensive. Inspired by the use of weights in quasi-robust statistics, this work introduces a particular type of weight functions, called here data weighers, in order to obtain robust GPs that do not require approximation techniques and retain the simplicity of standard GPs. This work proposes implicit weighted variants of batch GP, online GP, and sparse online GP (SOGP) that employ weighted Gaussian likelihoods. Mathematical expressions for calculating the posterior implicit weighted GPs are derived in this work. In our experiments, novelty detection based on our weighted batch GPs consistently and significantly outperformed standard batch GP-based novelty detection whenever data was contaminated with outliers. Additionally, our experiments show that novelty detection based on online GPs can perform similarly to batch GP-based novelty detection. Membership scores previously introduced by other authors are also compared in our experiments.

I present a new approach to evolutionary search called novelty search, wherein only behavioral novelty is rewarded, thereby abstracting evolution as a search for novel forms. This new approach contrasts with the traditional approach of rewarding progress towards the objective through an objective function. Although they are designed to light a path to the objective, objective functions can instead deceive search into converging to dead ends called local optima. As a significant problem in evolutionary computation, deception has inspired many techniques designed to mitigate it. However, nearly all such methods are still ultimately susceptible to deceptive local optima because they still measure progress with respect to the objective, which this dissertation will show is often a broken compass. Furthermore, although novelty search completely abandons the objective, it counterintuitively often outperforms methods that search directly for the objective in deceptive tasks and can induce evolutionary dynamics closer in spirit to natural evolution. The main contributions are to (1) introduce novelty search, an example of an effective search method that is not guided by actively measuring or encouraging objective progress; (2) validate novelty search by applying it to biped locomotion; (3) demonstrate novelty search’s benefits for evolvability (i.e. the ability of an organism to further evolve) in a variety of domains; (4) introduce an extension of novelty search called minimal criteria novelty search that brings a new abstraction of natural evolution to evolutionary computation (i.e. evolution as a search for many ways of iii meeting the minimal criteria of life); (5) present a second extension of novelty search called novelty search with local competition that abstracts evolution instead as a process driven towards diversity with competition playing a subservient role; and (6) evolve a diversity of functional virtual creatures in a single run as a culminating application of novelty search with local competition. Overall these contributions establish novelty search as an important new research direction for the field of evolutionary computation.

In the literature, electoral accountability has been explored in many ways. Among those are the studies of economic voting examining to what degree government parties are held accountable for the state of the economy. By now, the studies have incorporated variables that reflect how clear is the chain of responsibility for the economic policies. Among those are national level variables, such as the clarity of responsibility index, and party level variables, such as the number of seats a party occupies in a government. This dissertation suggests that the responsibility for the government policies can be obscured by yet another party level variable - party novelty. I define party novelty as the quality that reflects the degree of change within a party in terms of its structure (mergers, splits, etc) and attributes (name, leader, and program) within one electoral cycle. I argue that party change obscures party identity and, thus, affects voters' ability to hold it accountable for the state of the economy. This study explores the concept of party novelty and its effects on voter's party preferences in various economic conditions. I construct the Party Novelty Database (1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, and 2009) and show that party novelty can be measured. Moreover, I demonstrate that party novelty varies in understandable ways, and, most importantly, that party novelty matters. Using the European Election Study and the Euromanifesto Project (1994, 1999, 2004, and 2009) I show that party novelty moderates economic voting, and this effect differs across types of party changes and the timing of change. / Political Science

Yes / That organizations exist in a fluid environment of unprecedented and discontinuous change seems beyond debate. We seem to find ourselves immersed in a world in which events have a tendency to unfold and overtake us in unforeseeable and novel ways that defy comprehension; a crisis of meaning takes place and conventional sensemaking is disrupted. Our need to imaginatively construct new meanings that allow us to understand what is going on and to work out how to respond becomes ever more pressing. We do live in interesting times. The emergence of the new, however, challenges current established ways of knowing and opens a creative space for radical learning to take place. Novelty stimulates the generative process by which organizations and individuals learn, adapt to and cope with the exigencies they face in order to survive and progress. Such radical learning occurs when creative linguistic interventions in dialogue opens up semantic spaces whereby new terms are coined and old ones broken up, combined and/or redeployed in novel ways, in an effort to give expression to the fresh circumstances experienced or new phenomena observed. We call this kind of imaginative linguistic intervention semantic transformation. In this paper we argue that it is this semantic transformation that promotes radical transformational learning. Such semantic transformation is predicated on the improvisatory character of dialogue as a form of communication. We explore how, through this dialogical process of semantic transformation, we discover the resources and means to respond to the vagueness and equivocality experienced, by exploiting language in novel ways in our attempts to make sense of and account for such experiences.

No / It is challenging to use traditional data mining techniques to deal with real-time data stream classifications. Existing mining classifiers need to be updated frequently to adapt to the changes in data streams. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an adaptive ensemble approach for classification and novel class detection in concept drifting data streams. The proposed approach uses traditional mining classifiers and updates the ensemble model automatically so that it represents the most recent concepts in data streams. For novel class detection we consider the idea that data points belonging to the same class should be closer to each other and should be far apart from the data points belonging to other classes. If a data point is well separated from the existing data clusters, it is identified as a novel class instance. We tested the performance of this proposed stream classification model against that of existing mining algorithms using real benchmark datasets from UCI (University of California, Irvine) machine learning repository. The experimental results prove that our approach shows great flexibility and robustness in novel class detection in concept drifting and outperforms traditional classification models in challenging real-life data stream applications. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Human adolescents exhibit higher levels of sensation seeking behaviour than younger or older individuals, and sensation seeking is higher in males than females from adolescence onwards. Data suggest that changes in gonadal hormone levels during adolescence and differences in the dopamine neurotransmitter system are the bases for why some people exhibit sensation seeking behaviour while others do not. However, causal relationships between physiology and behaviour have been difficult to establish in humans. In order to explore the physiological influences on novelty-seeking behaviour, we looked at response to novelty in a laboratory rodent. This research examined responses to novelty in the conditioned place preference (CPP) task and the novel object recognition (NOR) task in Lister-hooded rats, and assessed the benefits and limitations of each methodology. While the CPP task was not found to provide a reliable measure of response to novelty, the NOR task was more successful. In order to understand the ontogeny of sex differences in novelty responses, both males and females were tested from adolescence through to adulthood. While no sex difference was found in adults in the NOR test, mid-adolescent males exhibited higher novelty preference behaviour than either younger or older males, or females at each stage of development. Since gonadal hormones levels rise during adolescence, a pharmacological agent (a gonadotrophin-releasing hormone antagonist) was used to suppress gonadal hormone levels from early adolescence before again examining responses on the NOR test at mid-adolescence. Gonadal hormone suppression from early adolescence onwards eliminated the sex difference in the NOR test at mid-adolescence by reducing the male response to novelty, while no difference was measured in the female animals. These findings suggest that gonadal hormones play a significant role in the development of response to novelty, especially in males, and the implications for our understanding of human sensation-seeking behaviour are discussed.

Accurate assessment of a child’s health is critical for appropriate allocation of medical resources and timely delivery of healthcare in both primary care (GP consultations) and secondary care (ED consultations). Serious illnesses such as meningitis and pneumonia account for 20% of deaths in childhood and require early recognition and treatment in order to maximize the chances of survival of affected children. Due to time constraints, poorly defined normal ranges, difficulty in achieving accurate readings and the difficulties faced by clinicians in interpreting combinations of vital signs, vital signs are rarely measured in primary care and their utility is limited in emergency departments. This thesis aims to develop a monitoring and data fusion system, to be used in both primary care and emergency department settings during the initial assessment of children suspected of having a serious infection. The proposed system relies on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) which is routinely recorded in different clinical settings with a pulse oximeter using a small finger probe. The most difficult vital sign to measure accurately is respiratory rate which has been found to be predictive of serious infection. An automated method is developed to estimate the respiratory rate from the PPG waveform using both the amplitude modulation caused by changes in thoracic pressure during the respiratory cycle and the phenomenon of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the heart rate variability associated with respiration. The performance of such automated methods deteriorates when monitoring children as a result of frequent motion artefact. A method is developed that automatically identifies high-quality PPG segments mitigating the effects of motion on the estimation of respiratory rate. In the final part of the thesis, the four vital signs (heart rate, temperature, oxygen saturation and respiratory rate) are combined using a probabilistic framework to provide a novelty score for ranking various diagnostic groups, and predicting the severity of infection in two independent data sets from two different clinical settings.

Ce mémoire traite des brevets d'invention. Le premier volet dresse un portrait global de l'institution juridique du brevet, tout en en rappelant sommairement les fondements économique et philosophique. Après une brève présentation des conditions préalables à sa délivrance, nous discutons des composantes matérielles du brevet, soit la description de l’invention et les revendications. Une attention particulière est portée à la rédaction ainsi qu'à l'interprétation des revendications. Nous traitons ainsi de deux types de revendications spécialisées qui se sont développés avec l'usage, respectivement les revendications de type Jepson et Markush, pour ensuite recenser les principes d'interprétation des revendications que les tribunaux ont établis. Le deuxième volet traite de la validité et de la contrefaçon de brevet. Sur la question de la validité, nous abordons les principaux motifs pouvant entraîner l'invalidité du brevet, soit: l’ambiguïté, l'insuffisance de la divulgation, le double brevet, l'absence de nouveauté, l'évidence et l'absence d'utilité. Enfin, sur la question de la contrefaçon, nous examinons les circonstances dans lesquelles les actes commis par les tiers portent atteinte au monopole du titulaire de brevet. Pour ce faire, nous nous attardons à la portée des droits exclusifs qui sont reconnus à ce dernier. Tant en ce qui a trait à la validité qu'à la contrefaçon, nous recourons à des illustrations jurisprudentielles permettant de constater les incidences litigieuses afférentes, d'une part, aux motifs d'invalidité et, d'autre part, aux actes de contrefaçon. / This thesis pertains to patent law. The first part of the study is an overview of patents, where both economic and philosophical justifications for this legal regime are shortly addressed. After reviewing the requirements for the grant of a patent, we turn our attention to the main sections of a patent, namely the description of the invention and the claims. We then proceed to a thorough analysis of both the writing and construction of patent claims. More specifically, Jepson and Markush claims command our attention, having emerged as widespread methods for writing patent claims. Moreover, principles of claim construction, as devised by courts in the context of litigation, are also examined. The second part of this study pertains to patent validity and infringement. Regarding validity, we discuss a number of irregularities that may be cause for the invalidity of a patent, namely: ambiguity, insufficiency of the disclosure, double patenting, anticipation, obviousness and lack of utility. Lastly, with respect to infringement, we consider the circumstances from which it may arise, based on the actions of a third party alleged to be in violation of the patentee’s monopoly. This is carried by way of appraising the extent of said patentee's exclusive rights. With respect to both validity and infringement, we discuss case law pertaining, in a first instance, to validity issues and, in a second instance, to infringement matters.