This study aimed to understand how parents’ experience of titration contributes to the adaptive tasks and coping skills associated with their child’s Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses. The primary research question asks: How does participation in the stimulant titration and Shared Decision-Making (SDM) process help parents create adaptive tasks and coping skills? The participants included 4 parents who have undergone the titration and SDM process as a part of treatment that addresses their child’s ADHD diagnosis. Analysis was conducted via an adapted grounded theory approach and resulted in 11 themes related to the core emergent theme of titration. Themes that were representative of the titration experience were related to the participant’s source of stress, cognitive appraisal of the ADHD diagnosis, adaptive tasks, coping skills, outcomes, and suggested improvements. The results have important implications for improving the titration process. The results also emphasize how titration has promoted adaptive tasks and coping skills which assisted participants to feel more in control and create a new sense of normalcy regarding their child’s ADHD diagnosis.

Real-time systems require a-priori temporal guarantees. While most of the normal operation in such a system is modeled using time-driven, hard-deadline sporadic tasks, event-driven behavior is modeled using aperiodic jobs with soft or no deadlines. To provide good Quality-of- Service for aperiodic jobs in the presence of sporadic tasks, aperiodic servers were introduced. Aperiodic servers act as a sporadic task and reserve a quota periodically to serve aperiodic jobs. The use of aperiodic servers in systems with caches is unsafe because aperiodic servers do not take into account, the indirect cache-related preemption delays that the execution of aperiodic jobs might impose on the lower-priority sporadic tasks, thus jeopardizing their safety. To solve this problem, we propose an enhancement to the aperiodic server that we call a Cache Delay Server. Here, each lower-priority sporadic task is assigned a delay quota to accommodate the cache-related preemption delay imposed by the execution of aperiodic jobs. Aperiodic jobs are allowed to execute at their assigned server priority only when all the active lower-priority sporadic tasks have a sufficient delay quota to accommodate it. Simulation results demonstrate that a Cache Delay Server ensures the safety of sporadic tasks while providing acceptable Quality-of-Service for aperiodic jobs. We propose a Integer Linear Program based approach to calculate delay quotas for sporadic tasks within a task set where Cache Delay Servers have been pre-assigned. We then propose algorithms to determine Cache Delay Server characteristics for a given sporadic task set. Finally, we extend the Cache Delay Server concept to multi-core architectures and propose approaches to schedule aperiodic jobs on appropriate Cache Delay Servers. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of all our proposed algorithms in improving aperiodic job response times while maintaining the safety of sporadic task execution.

In this dissertation, we experimentally examine individual preferences of effort, including time and risk preferences. In Chapter 3, we find that at least in certain settings and mindsets, individuals are very patient in their time preferences for effort, choosing to distribute effort evenly over time periods. However, they do not always live up to the stated plans, suggesting dynamic inconsistency or possibly two separate decision-making systems in the mind. This relates to our model in Chapter 2: a dual-self model of allocating effort between time periods in working toward a larger goal including incomplete information between different mindsets in the same person. Chapter 4 examines the risk preferences for effort, as a measurement of the utility function of effort, and finds that in this setting, subjects are very risk-averse over effort, compared to their preferences over money: they greatly avoid the possibility of having to complete a large number of tasks. These experiments and model help provide an understanding of how individuals allocate the scarce resource of time and energy to tasks they must complete.

La découverte de contingences sensorimotrices et leur structuration en compétences sont des enjeux importants en robotique. En particulier, on souhaite pouvoir apprendre ainsi des compétences qui soient à la fois riches sémantiquement et aussi générales que possible.Cette thèse s’est intéressée à la question du regroupement de compétences robotiques en compétences plus générales. Après avoir posé formellement les notions que l’on peut trouver dans la littérature de compétence et de compétence paramétrée, nous avons relié les compétences paramétrées aux modèles inverses et nous nous sommes inspirés du dualisme entre modèles directs et inverses pour proposer un formalisme dual, les compétences paramétrées directes.Nous avons ensuite entrepris de déterminer quand il était ou non pertinent de réunir des compétences au sein d’une même compétence paramétrée directe.Le problème est alors ramené à un problème de régression, et des algorithmes s’inspirant du principe du rasoir d’Ockham sont proposés pour y chercher une solution sous la forme d’un mélange d’experts de complexité minimale. Ces algorithmes sont ensuite appliqués à des données de manipulation d’objets en simulation / The discovery of sensorimotor contingencies and their structurationinto skills are both important topics in the field of robotics. In particular,robots need the ability to learn skills which are both semantically rich and as general as possible. During this thesis, we studied the question of merging robotic skills into more general skills. After formally defining the notions that can be found in the litterature of skills and parameterized skills, we established a link between paramaterized skills and inverse models, then mirrored the dualism between forward and inverse models to propose a dual type of parameterized skills:forward-parameterized skills. We went on to determine when merging skills into a forward-parameterized skill is relevant and when it’s not. The problem is then formulated as a regression problem, and algorithms inspired by the Occam Razor principle are proposed to find a mixture of experts that solves it with minimal complexity. Those algorithms are then applied to simulated object-manipulation data.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyze issues that come with the development of Moodle LMS modules. The theoretical part is devoted to the research of Moodle 2.0 programming framework capabilities, followed by the methodology of creating modules based on this platform. The verification of methodology is provided in the practical part by the development of a specific module, along with the effective installation of Moodle 2.0 LMS and documentation, that describes its functionality, installation procedure, critical points and a test of portability between other versions of this system.

Orientador: Aleardo Manacero Junior / Coorientador: Miron Livny / Banca: Sergio Azevedo de Oliveira / Banca: Renata Spolon Lobato / Banca: Alfredo Goldman Lejbman / Banca: Henrique Mongelli / Resumo: Em sistemas distribuídos de larga escala; onde os recursos compartilhados são de propriedade de entidades distintas; existe a necessidade de refletir o fator propriedade dos recursos no processo de escalonamento de tarefas e alocação de recursos. Um sistema de gerenciamento de recursos apropriado deve garantir que os proprietários de recursos tenham acesso aos seus recursos ou ao menos a uma parcela de recursos que seja equivalente a eles. Diferentes políticas podem ser estabelecidas para que o sistema garanta esse direito aos proprietários de recursos; e nessa tese defende-se uma política de escalonamento e alocação de reucrsos chamada Owner-Share Enforcement Policy (OSEP) ou Política de Garantia da Porção do Proprietário; que tem por objetivo garantir o direito de acesso aos recursos através de um sistema de escalonamento baseado em preempção de tarefas e realocação de recursos. Avalia-se a política através da análise de testes e resultados envolvendo métricas de desempenho que descrevem fatores como violação da política; perdada capacidade de processamento; custo da política e satisfação do usuário. Os testes ainda envolveram a análise de desempenho da política em ambientes com a possibilidade de chekcpointing de tarefas; minimizando assim o desperdício de processamento. Fez-se ainda comparações com a política de compartilhamento justo Fair-Share; que permitiram estabelecer as vantagens e desvantagens de cada política e ainda identificar futuros problemas. Por fim; conclui-se a tese identificando as contribuições oferecidas por este trabalho e os trabalhos futuros que podem ser desenvolvidos. / Abstract: In large distributed systems, where shared resources are owned by distinct entities, there is a need to reflect resource ownership in resource allocation. An appropriate resource management system should guarantee that owners of resources have access to their resources or at least to a share of resources proportional to the share of resources they provide. Different policies can be established for guaranteeing the access to resources, and in this thesis we introduce a policy for scheduling and resource allocation named Owner Share Enforcement Policy (OSEP). This policy is based on the concept of distributed ownership and itguarantees the owner's right of accessing their share of resources in a distributed system with a preemptive share space. We evaluate this policy through tests and results analysis involving performance metrics that describe policy violation, loss of capacity, policy cost and user satisfaction. The tests were also conducted in environments withand without job checkpointing, and comparisons with the Fair-Share scheduling policy were made in order to capture the trade-offs of each policy. Finally, we conclude the thesis describing the contributions achieved with this work and pointing directions for future work. / Doutor

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This research studies delegation in outpatient physiotherapy and attempts to solve its deficiency by designing a theoretical model of constructive delegation (CD model). The CD model is functional and uses a systematic and rational approach to plan the level of delegation by using task and cost-benefit analysis and it supports delegation dynamically by organising training, working partnerships, communications and the working environment. An initial survey of tasks carried out by physiotherapists and assistants at ten sites found inconsistent approaches to delegation, with 80% of physiotherapists expressing concerns. This mirrored similar experiences in the literature where there was evidence of some delegation of technical clinical tasks, but also resistance within the profession. Generally in the literature delegation was defined and eluded to, but was not constructed in order to provide a planned system. The CD model was offered as a tool to, by construction, implement delegation safely and without loss of quality to ensure appropriate skills for appropriate tasks and to analyse current practice and implicitly suggest improvements.

First part of diploma thesis deals with decision making tasks in classification according to objective of expenses allocation and relationship with enterprise capacity. Thesis also deals with information support for managers while solving decision-making tasks. Second part od thesis contains an introduction of Druchema and description of three decision-making tasks solved by Druchema's managers.

The problem of this study is to determine if there are fictional books usable by teachers in helping preadolescent boys solve their problems of adjustment. The problem involves the analyses of twenty-five fiction books taken from those books listed by Virginia Bryson Blair in her study, "Directed Reading through the Library for Improving the Social Adjustment of Older Children."