Master of Engineering (Research) / In many multi-objective missions there are situations when actions based on maximum information gain may not be the `best' given the overall mission objectives. In addition to properties such as entropy, information also has value, which is situationally dependent. This thesis examines the concept of information value in a multi-objective mission from an information theory perspective. A derivation of information value is presented that considers both the context of information, via a fused world belief state, and a system mission. The derived information value is used as part of the objective function for control of autonomous platforms within a framework developed for human robot cooperative control. A simulated security operation in a structured environment is implemented to test both the framework, and information value based control. The simulation involves a system of heterogeneous, sensor equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), tasked with gathering information regarding ground vehicles. The UAVs support an e ort to protect a number of important buildings in the area of operation. Thus, the purpose of the information is to aid the security operation by ensuring that security forces can deploy e ciently to counter any threat. A number of di erent local controllers using information based control are implemented and compared to a task based control scheme. The relative performance of each is examined with respect to a number of performance metrics with conclusions drawn regarding the performance and exibility of information value based control.

Health Sciences Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg is the major healthcare facility serving Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, and Nunavut. An evaluation of HSC’s adult surgical patient flow revealed that one major barrier to smooth flow was their Operating Room (OR) scheduling system. This thesis presents a new two-stage elective OR scheduling system for HSC, which generates weekly OR schedules that reduce artificial variability in order to facilitate smooth patient flow. The first stage reduces day-to-day variability while the second stage reduces variability occurring within a day. The scheduling processes in both stages are mathematically modelled as multi-objective optimization problems. An attempt was made to solve both models using lexicographic goal programming. However, this proved to be an unacceptable method for the second stage, so a new multi-objective genetic algorithm, Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II – Operating Room (NSGAII-OR), was developed. Results indicate that if the system is implemented at HSC, their surgical patient flow will likely improve. / October 2008

This thesis explores the moral significance of agent beliefs and epistemic states. In particular it will explore the following question: is an agent's moral obligation a function of her actual circumstances, what she believes those circumstances to be, or what her evidence indicates those circumstances are? Three corresponding views are explored and it is argued that each of these views is subject to one of two substantial worries, which are developed in this thesis (i.e. the manipulation worry and the unreasonableness worry).

Under sommaren 2011 utvecklade jag en iPhone applikation för tidrapportering åt Cygate AB. Denna rapport beskriver min arbetsprocess samt diskuterar och motiverar de tekniska lösningar som valts.

Abstract of the research: What does Dancing Have to Do with Blogging? A  Study of Verbal and Non-verbal Communication among Dance Bloggers Dance, in its essence can be seen as a form of social interaction. Unique role of dancing is the recurrent motif in dance-related theories which underline that dance should not be approached only from the perspective of physical exercise but also interpreted within its social context.  In other words, dance is a symbol of a changing society Dance is can be also seen as a non-verbal expression of emotions. These are projected from the inner subjective world of an individual onto the audience. Non-verbal communication through movement and gestures, as well as spatial arrangement of bodies predominates but the recent trends show the development of a ‘verbal’ dancing occurring online via specialized blogs and social networks. The growing popularity of dance blogs implies a great diversity within the communicative methods used by dancers. The traditional view of dance as a representative of non-verbal interaction will be challenged in this paper and hypothesis stating that the verbal and non-verbal communication are strictly interrelated will be suggested. Moreover, the paper will concentrate on the impact that online blogging communities have on socialization and identity formation among dancers. The research question revolves around the idea that dance blogging demonstrates the need to use verbal signs to complete the predominantly non-verbal communication. Furthermore, the reasons motivating bloggers to write about dance will be analyzed. This will be done in order to demonstrate how attitudes to dancing and communicating as well as dancers’ distinctive ways of socialization are reflected by their belongingness to the blogging community. The investigation attempts at identifying the mechanism behind online interactions among dancers and the ways in which the Internet influences socialization and formation of dancer’s identity. The theories used in study are rooted in both macro- and micro-sociology and their aim is to clarify concepts such as communication, meaning and identification within a group. The data will be collected through interviews conducted with dance bloggers and through the observations of thirty dance blogs. Content analysis of such data will, hopefully, demonstrate how significant blogging is for the online and offline communication processes.

ABSTRACT ¡§Management by objectives¡¨ means proceeding management in accordance with objects. Several years ago, many advanced enterprises in America, Europe & Japan have led this into their management system and got positive result. It not only strengthens enterprises system, raises income, enhances staff¡¦s ability & skill but also focus staff¡¦s identification. Now, a succession of enterprises and government department in Taiwan are carrying out this management system to improve administration efficiency and enhance their competitive ability. ¡§Management by objectives¡¨ is a synthetic and overall management system, which combines corporate mission, management concept, vision, strategy, objective and all the other company resources and reach expected objective by the circle of P(plan), D(do), C(check) and A(action) . This research is adopted case study method. We survey via questionnaires to realize how manager maps out corporate mission, management concept, vision & strategy; how each department spreads out its objective, plan, efficiency & improvement policy and how staff reaches his personal objects & efficiency. After researching, we found carrying out ¡§Management by objectives¡¨ can reach the following effects: 1. Making company objectives more definite: 2. Strengthening communication & coordination between departments; 3. Making staff with more self-confidence, self-reliance and self-motion; 4. Raising staff¡¦s identification and making efficiency judging fair; 5. Focusing team¡¦s conception; 6. Developing and cultivating staff¡¦s ability. Followings are my suggestions for continued research: 1. Enlarging industrial survey range with statistics; 2. Expanding ¡§Management by objectives¡¨ into management by efficiency and budget. Keyword: Management by objectives; Circle of P-D-C-A

Subspace clustering identifies the attribute support for each cluster as well as identifying the location and number of clusters. In the most general case, attributes associated with each cluster could be unique. A multi-objective evolutionary method is proposed to identify the unique attribute support of each cluster while detecting its data instances. The proposed algorithm, Symbiotic Evolutionary Subspace Clustering (S-ESC) borrows from symbiosis in the sense that each clustering solution is defined in terms of a host, which is formed by a number of co-evolved cluster centroids (or symbionts). Symbionts define clusters and therefore attribute subspaces, whereas hosts define sets of clusters to constitute a non-degenerate clustering solution. The symbiotic representation of S-ESC is the key to making it scalable to high-dimensional datasets, while a subsampling process makes it scalable to large-scale datasets. Performance of the S-ESC algorithm was found to be robust across a common parameterization utilized throughout.

The de-facto standard for dysarthric intelligibility assessment is a subjective intelligibility test, performed by an expert. Subjective tests are often costly, biased and inconsistent because of their perceptual nature. Automatic objective assessment methods, in contrast, are repeatable and relatively cheap. Objective methods can be broken down into two subcategories: reference-free, and reference based. Reference-free methods employ estimation procedures that do not require information about the target speech material. This potentially makes the problem more difficult, and consequently, there is a deficit of research into reference-free dysarthric intelligibility estimation. In this thesis, we focus on the reference-free intelligibility estimation approach. To make the problem more tractable, we focus on the dysarthrias of cerebral palsy (CP). First, a popular standard for blind speech quality estimation, the ITU-T P.563 standard, is examined for possible application to dysarthric intelligibility estimation. The internal structure of the standard is discussed, along with the relevance of its internal features to intelligibility estimation. Afterwards, several novel features expected to relate to some of the acoustic properties of dysarthric speech are proposed. Proposed features are based on the high-order statistics of parameters derived from linear prediction (LP) analysis, and a mel-frequency filterbank. In order to gauge the complimentariness of P.563 and proposed features, a linear intelligibility model is proposed and tested. Intelligibility is expressed as a linear combination of acoustic features, which are selected from a feature pool using speaker-dependent and speaker-independent validation methods. An intelligibility estimator constructed with only P.563 features serves as the `baseline'. When proposed features are added to the feature pool, performance is shown to improve substantially for both speaker-dependent and speaker-independent methods when compared to the baseline. Results are also shown to compare favourably with those reported in the literature. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-28 18:44:51.103

Health Sciences Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg is the major healthcare facility serving Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, and Nunavut. An evaluation of HSC’s adult surgical patient flow revealed that one major barrier to smooth flow was their Operating Room (OR) scheduling system. This thesis presents a new two-stage elective OR scheduling system for HSC, which generates weekly OR schedules that reduce artificial variability in order to facilitate smooth patient flow. The first stage reduces day-to-day variability while the second stage reduces variability occurring within a day. The scheduling processes in both stages are mathematically modelled as multi-objective optimization problems. An attempt was made to solve both models using lexicographic goal programming. However, this proved to be an unacceptable method for the second stage, so a new multi-objective genetic algorithm, Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II – Operating Room (NSGAII-OR), was developed. Results indicate that if the system is implemented at HSC, their surgical patient flow will likely improve.

Session ID: SA-G4-3 / Joint 4th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems and 9th International Symposium on advanced Intelligent Systems, September 17-21, 2008, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan