Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Lisa K. Spainhour, Florida State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Civil Engineering. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed 6/16/04). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-129).

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Business / Master / Master of Philosophy

With the rapid advance of information technologies, human beings increasingly rely on computers to accumulate, process, and make use of data. Knowledge discovery techniques have been proposed to automatically search large volumes of data for patterns.Group Support Systems (GSS) play an important role in streamlining group activities and improving group outcomes. Various attempts have been made to help automate several tasks in group activities under GSS environment. One of the approaches is to apply automatic approach to idea organization task in GSS.This research designed and tested an SVD-enabled system to automate the idea organization task in GSS. Specifically, this research was conducted to examine how the idea organization task, typically regarded as the most labor-intensive and cognitively demanding in group problems solving, can be automated using a system enabled by singular value decomposition techniques. For the purpose of evaluation, we compared the performance of our automated approach using SVD algorithm against that of human subjects. Two separate experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the automatic approach on two essential components of an idea organization; namely, generation of topic categories and placement of relevant comments into their respective categories.The general conclusion that can be made from this research is that idea organization in group problem solving can be facilitated both efficiently and effectively with the SVD-enabled system that can automatically generate topic categories and place relevant comments into their respective topic categories. Therefore, our automatic approach may provide a useful and promising tool for the idea organization task in GSS.

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No description available.

The province of Ontario is the primary focus of a growing body of research discussing migrant agricultural labour in Canada. This thesis shifts the focus of inquiry to Quebec, a province that has not received the attention it warrants, given that it is “home” to the second largest temporary migrant population in Canada. Currently, Mexicans constitute the bulk of labourers contracted through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). With the establishment in 2003 of the Foreign Worker Program (FWP), however, the number of Guatemalans on the Quebec scene has increased significantly. The situation of workers from both countries is addressed in the form of a case study of St. Rémi. The thesis argues that the migrant experience in St. Rémi is characterized by a struggle to cope with: (1) an “unfree” labour status; (2) social and geographical isolation; and (3) lack of social assistance and community acknowledgement. An attempt is made to give migrant workers a voice, since their contribution for the most part is either unknown or unappreciated. The support system now in place in St. Rémi affords migrants some minimal rights, but much remains to be done, in Quebec and across Canada, to make the plight of workers better known and their situation improved. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-27 22:28:11.532

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No description available.