This study compares engineering expert problem-solving on a highly constrained routine problem and an ill-defined complex problem. The participants (n=7) were recruited from two large public Research I institutions. Using a think aloud methodology, the experts solved both routine and non-routine problems. The protocols were transcribed and coded in Atlas ti. The first round of coding followed a grounded theory methodology, yielding interesting findings. Unprompted, the experts revealed a strong belief that the ill-defined problems are developmentally appropriate for PhD students while routine problems are more appropriate for undergraduate students. Additional rounds of coding were informed by previous problem solving studies in math and engineering. In general, this study confirmed the 5 Step Problem Solving Method used in previous challenged based instruction studies. There were observed differences based on problem type and background knowledge. The routine problem was more automatic and took significantly less time. The experts with higher amounts of background knowledge and experience were more likely to categorize the problems. The level of background knowledge was most apparent in the steps between conducting an overall energy balance and writing more problem specific relationships between the variables. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for improving undergraduate engineering education. / text

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Due to its hazardous nature, occupational injuries are unavoidable in the construction industry. Although many precautions are taken and educations are given to the laborers and employers, zero occupational injury rate could not be achieved, but a decrease in the number of injuries and fatalities could be maintained. The conventional studies conducted so far, usually focused on the prevention and causation models. The approach of the researchers was, either proactive or reactive about the accidents which offered preventive or protective precautions. However, after the occurrence of an injury, these precautions become useless and from this point on, determination of the fault rates for the parties being involved in that injury becomes the critical issue. Mostly, it is difficult to reach an objective and correct conclusion at the phase of determining fault rates and decisions achieved may display great fluctuations from one expert to another. The aim of this study is to develop an expert system that reflects the knowledge of occupational safety experts for the determination of fault rates. In order to facilitate this research, required data were collected from related organizations and experts. These data were compiled and classified, the significant factors were determined and all of these factors were evaluated within a quantitative approach. In addition to this evaluation, questionnaires were submitted to the experts / at which they were asked to rate the factors which were determined by the researcher of this study. The expert system is based on these ratings and factors obtained from questionnaires.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Depuis de nombreuses années, le déploiement des TIC dans la prise en charge médicale de pathologies chroniques joue un rôle majeur notamment dans l’évolution des pratiques de santé et l’amélioration du bien-être du patient. Les pathologies chroniques sont de nature longue et évolutive et nécessitent un suivi régulier effectué par une équipe pluridisciplinaire où différents acteurs interviennent auprès du patient. Le patient à son tour, est amené à respecter à domicile, un protocole de soins défini et personnalisé par cette équipe. Cependant, la forme dans la quelle le contenu du protocole est représenté n’est pas forcément complète ni facile à comprendre par les patients. De plus, chaque patient est unique, et la définition du protocole de soins doit être personnalisée et appropriée à ses soins et traitements individuels, parfois même à ses souhaits et contraintes personnelles. L’expertise du patient sur sa maladie chronique est une information précieuse que nous souhaitons intégrer dans un protocole de soins personnalisé afin d’améliorer la prise en charge médicale, le suivi à distance de la maladie chronique et à terme améliorer la connaissance de la pathologie chronique. Pour ce faire,nous avons proposé (i) un langage de représentation informatisée de protocole de soins personnalisé, destiné aux professionnels de santé et aux patients,suffisamment simple,intuitif et facile à comprendre.(ii) une ontologie de l’expertise patient (tirée de son vécu avec la pathologie) permettant de signaler des imprévus dans le déroulement du protocole (actions non prévus ou évènements non prévus). / For several years, the deployment of information and communication technologyintothemanagementofchronicalpathologiesistakingaconsiderableplace, more particularly in the evolution of health’s practices and in the improvement of the well-being of the patient Chronical pathologies are of long duration and they need to be under a regular monitoring of the healthcare professional, composed of multidisciplinary or different actors in charge with the patients. On the other side the patients are alsochargedoffollowingahealthcareprotocolathomepreviouslydefinedbythe health care team. Nevertheless, the different forms of representing the contests of this protocol, it is not always complete and comprehensible for the patients. Furthermore, each one of the patients is unique and a proper definition of the health care protocol must be personalised and conform to his individual treatment and even to his personal wishes or constraints. But this is not the case of information guides or medical references that are supplied in general. With the intent to improve the interaction between the patient and the healthcareprofessionalsrelatedtothehealthcareprotocol,wepropose(i)alanguagefor the computerised representation of the healthcare protocol, sibling the healthcare professionals and the patients, enough simple, intuitive and easy to understand, (ii) an ontology for the patient expertise (based on his experience on the disease) allowingsotheinteractionofthepatientwithhishealthcareprotocolbyreporting all the unexpected behaviours. These behaviours are events that are not defined in the initial health care protocol.

Les digues de protection contre les inondations sont d’une importance stratégique incontournable pour la sécurité des personnes et des biens. Une meilleure connaissance de leur fiabilité structurelle constitue un enjeu majeur pour les ingénieurs et pour les gestionnaires de ces ouvrages afin de répondre aux réglementations en vigueur et potentiellement les faire évoluer. La réglementation en France relative à la sûreté des ouvrages hydrauliques exige la réalisation d’études de dangers, au sein desquelles les démarches probabilistes d’évaluation de la sécurité prennent une place de plus en plus importante. De par la complexité de leurs mécanismes de rupture et l’absence de condition d’état-limite précis pour certains mécanismes de défaillance tels que l’érosion interne, la surverse ou l’affouillement, le calcul d’une probabilité de défaillance par des approches quantitatives demeure à ce jour impossible. Les digues induisent des problématiques particulières pour l’évaluation de leur fiabilité structurelle où l’intervention d’experts s’avère nécessaire et centrale. Ceux-ci doivent procéder à l’interprétation des données disponibles et la prise en compte de leurs incertitudes, pour pouvoir ensuite évaluer la fiabilité structurelle de digues en termes de probabilité de défaillance. L’objectif de la thèse est l’élaboration d’une démarche complète d’aide à l’évaluation probabiliste de la fiabilité structurelle des digues à partir du jugement expert. Une démarche scientifiquement justifiée pour le recueil et l’exploitation des évaluations expertes, incertaines mais quantitatives, de la fiabilité structurelle des ouvrages, sous la forme d’une probabilité de défaillance ou d’un coefficient de sécurité, assorti(e) d’une marge d’incertitude probabiliste. Afin de répondre à cet objectif, deux démarches ont été développée, « EiCAD » et « EiDA », toutes reposant (dans des ordres différents) sur les phases suivantes :- Une phase d’élicitation individuelle des avis experts (Ei) permettant le recueil des évaluations expertes probabilistes par la construction d’un formulaire de questionnement ;- Une phase de calibration (C) permettant de pondérer les évaluations expertes en fonction des degrés de précision et de justesse ;- Une phase d’agrégation (A) permettant une prise en compte simultanée de plusieurs évaluations expertes probabilistes ;- Une phase de débiaisage (D) permettant de traiter les biais susceptibles d’entacher les évaluations expertes probabilistes. Les démarches développées ont été mises en œuvre sur des cas de digues du Drac, dans l’agglomération grenobloise, pour évaluer la probabilité de défaillance, par jugement expert, vis-à-vis de mécanisme de rupture par glissement et par érosion interne / River levees as protective measures against flooding are a matter of utmost strategic importance for the security of people and property. A better knowledge of their structural reliability is a major challenge for engineers and managers of these structures in order to meet current regulations and potentially develop them. In France, the regulations relating to the safety of hydraulic structures require the realization of hazard studies, in which probabilistic safety evaluation procedures take on a more and more important role. Due to the complexity of their failure mechanisms and the lack of a specific condition of limit-state for some failure mechanisms such as internal erosion and overtopping or scour, calculating a probability of failure by quantitative approaches remains impossible to this day. Levees induce specific problems in evaluating their structural reliability where expert intervention is necessary and pivotal. They must interpret the available data and take into account the uncertainties in their analysis, in order to evaluate the structural reliability of levees in terms of probability of failure. The aim of the thesis is to develop and elaborate a complete approach for supporting probabilistic evaluation of structural reliability of levees based on expert judgments. It is designed as a scientifically justified approach to collect and use uncertain but quantitative expert evaluations of structural reliability, in the form of a failure probability or a safety factor, accompanied by a margin of probabilistic uncertainty. To meet this goal, two approaches have been developed, "EiCAD" and "EiDA" composed of the following phases (in different orders):- individual elicitation phase of expert judgment (Ei) allowing the collection of probabilistic expert evaluations by a constricted questionnaire ;- calibration phase (C) to weigh the probabilistic expert evaluations elicited depending on the degrees of precision and accuracy that can be provided;- aggregation phase (A) during which the probabilistic expert evaluations elicited by several experts are taken into account ;- debiasing phase (D) during which biases that may affect the probabilistic expert evaluations are removed. The developed approaches have been implemented for the cases of Drac levees, located in the Grenoble agglomeration, to assess the probability of failure, by expert judgment, with regard to sliding and internal erosion mechanism of failure

A proposta deste trabalho é fazer uma apreciação crítica dos laudos periciais realizados em ações judiciais de responsabilidade civil por alegado erro médico. A prova pericial deve orientar o julgador para que este possa fixar os limites da responsabilidade do médico ou profissional de saúde. O perito deve responder adequadamente as questões discutidas no processo, bem como trazer ao juiz os elementos que considerar úteis ou necessários para auxiliar a decisão judicial. Na parte teórica são estudados os campos de apuração da responsabilidade por erro médico, os pressupostos da responsabilidade civil, os tipos de prova que podem ser produzidos no processo, quais são os elementos essenciais do laudo pericial e os critérios que devem ser usados pelo perito para determinar se estão presentes os requisitos do dever de indenizar. Em seguida, utilizando-se dados obtidos em processos judiciais, são abordados os aspectos mais relevantes nas ações desta espécie, como a incidência dos tipos de dano alegados pelos autores, as especialidades médicas mais acionadas judicialmente, o tempo médio entre o ajuizamento da ação e a sentença judicial e a relevância dos laudos nas decisões judiciais observadas. Ao final, é realizada uma análise crítica dos conteúdos dos laudos, verificando se eles contêm todos os elementos recomendados e descritos na parte teórica, fazendo-se críticas sobre se eles cumpriram sua função de forma adequada e propondo instrumentos para seu aperfeiçoamento. / The aim of this work is to do a critical appreciation of the expert reports in judicial proceedings for alleged medical malpractice. The expert report should guide the judge and help to determine the limits of the physician\'s or health professional\'s responsibility. The expert must answer appropriately the questions discussed in the lawsuit, as well as bringing the elements that he or she might consider useful or necessary to aid the judicial decision. The theoretical section concerns the medical malpractice responsibility verification, the presupposed civil responsibility, the kinds of proof that can be produced in the process, what are the essential elements of the expert report, and which criteria that should be used by the expert to determine if the requirements of the duty of compensating are present. Then, using data obtained from judicial proceedings, the most important aspects in this kind of lawsuit are exposed, such as the incidence of types of damage alleged by the authors, the most prosecuted medical specialties, the average time between the beginning of the action and the judicial sentence, and the relevance of the expert reports in the observed judicial decisions. At the end, a critical analysis of the reports is accomplished, verifying if they contain all the recommended elements described in the theoretical part, criticizing the accomplishment of their function, and proposing instruments for their improvement.

O presente trabalho analisa diferentes aspectos da perícia médico legal, visando buscar formas efetivas de otimizar seus laudos e aferir melhores resultados na busca da verdade dos fatos na Justiça brasileira. Para tanto, é feita uma análise etimológica e uma breve retrospectiva da história da perícia, como forma de melhor entender e contextualizar suas bases e origens. Após, é analisada a realidade brasileira nesta área, em especial no Estado de São Paulo, mediante a verificação da estrutura dos locais de perícia, bem como da qualidade das intervenções dos poderes legislativo e executivo nesta área. É discutida, ainda, a questão da desvinculação da perícia à Segurança Pública no Brasil, bem como é realizado um breve estudo de direito comparado, em que são focadas as diferenças no tratamento legal da perícia entre o ordenamento jurídico brasileiro e os ordenamentos estrangeiros. / This study analyzes several aspects of forensic expertise, aiming to seek effective ways to optimize the experts reports, consequently benchmarking best results in the search for the truth in investigations carried out in Brazil. Therefore, it was performed an etymological analysis and a brief retrospective of the history of forensic sciences as a way to understand and contextualize its origins and bases. In sequence it was analyzed the Brazilian reality in this field, especially in the State of São Paulo, by means of checking the structure of the locations where the States official examinations are conducted, as well as the quality of the interventions of the government and the parliament in this field. This work also discusses the issue of untying the States official examinations from the Citizen Security authorities in Brazil, as well as performs a brief study of comparative Law, which is focused on the differences related to the legal treatment of forensic sciences on foreign Legal systems compared to the Brazilian Legal system.

Ce manuscrit de thèse porte sur le problème du test basé modèle de systèmes de production existants, tels ceux de notre partenaire industriel Michelin, l’un des trois plus grands fabricants de pneumatiques au monde. Un système de production est composé d’un ensemble de machines de production contrôlées par un ou plusieurs logiciels au sein d’un atelier dans une usine. Malgré les nombreux travaux dans le domaine du test basé modèle, l’écriture de modèles permettant de décrire un système sous test ou sa spécification reste un problème récurrent, en partie à cause de la complexité d’une telle tâche. De plus, un modèle est utile lorsqu’il est à jour par rapport à ce qu’il décrit, ce qui implique de le maintenir dans le temps. Pour autant, conserver une documentation à jour reste compliqué puisqu’il faut souvent le faire manuellement. Dans notre contexte, il est important de souligner le fait qu’un système de production fonctionne en continu et ne doit être ni arrêté ni perturbé, ce qui limite l’usage des techniques de test classiques. Pour pallier le problème de l’écriture de modèles, nous proposons une approche pour construire automatiquement des modèles depuis des séquences d’événements observés (traces) dans un environnement de production. Pour se faire, nous utilisons les informations fournies par les données échangées entre les éléments qui composent un système de production. Nous adoptons une approche boîte noire et combinons les notions de système expert, inférence de modèles et machine learning, afin de créer des modèles comportementaux. Ces modèles inférés décrivent des comportements complets, enregistrés sur un système analysé. Ces modèles sont partiels, mais également très grands (en terme de taille), ce qui les rend difficilement utilisable par la suite. Nous proposons une technique de réduction spécifique à notre contexte qui conserve l’équivalence de traces entre les modèles de base et les modèles fortement réduits. Grâce à cela, ces modèles inférés deviennent intéressant pour la génération de documentation, la fouille de données, mais également le test. Nous proposons une méthode passive de test basé modèle pour répondre au problème du test de systèmes de production sans interférer sur leur bon fonctionnement. Cette technique permet d’identifier des différences entre deux systèmes de production et réutilise l’inférence de modèles décrite précédemment. Nous introduisons deux relations d’implantation : une relation basée sur l’inclusion de traces, et une seconde relation plus faible proposée, pour remédier au fait que les modèles inférés soient partiels. Enfin, ce manuscrit de thèse présente Autofunk, un framework modulaire pour l’inférence de modèles et le test de systèmes de production qui aggrège les notions mentionnées précédemment. Son implémentation en Java a été appliquée sur différentes applications et systèmes de production chez Michelin dont les résultats sont donnés dans ce manuscrit. Le prototype développé lors de la thèse a pour vocation de devenir un outil standard chez Michelin. / This thesis tackles the problem of testing (legacy) production systems such as those of our industrial partner Michelin, one of the three largest tire manufacturers in the world, by means of Model-based Testing. A production system is defined as a set of production machines controlled by a software, in a factory. Despite the large body of work within the field of Model-based Testing, a common issue remains the writing of models describing either the system under test or its specification. It is a tedious task that should be performed regularly in order to keep the models up to date (which is often also true for any documentation in the Industry). A second point to take into account is that production systems often run continuously and should not be disrupted, which limits the use of most of the existing classical testing techniques. We present an approach to infer exact models from traces, i.e. sequences of events observed in a production environment, to address the first issue. We leverage the data exchanged among the devices and software in a black-box perspective to construct behavioral models using different techniques such as expert systems, model inference, and machine learning. It results in large, yet partial, models gathering the behaviors recorded from a system under analysis. We introduce a context-specific algorithm to reduce such models in order to make them more usable while preserving trace equivalence between the original inferred models and the reduced ones. These models can serve different purposes, e.g., generating documentation, data mining, but also testing. To address the problem of testing production systems without disturbing them, this thesis introduces an offline passive Model-based Testing technique, allowing to detect differences between two production systems. This technique leverages the inferred models, and relies on two implementation relations: a slightly modified version of the existing trace preorder relation, and a weaker implementation proposed to overcome the partialness of the inferred models.Overall, the thesis presents Autofunk, a modular framework for model inference and testing of production systems, gathering the previous notions. Its Java implementation has been applied to different applications and production systems at Michelin, and this thesis gives results from different case studies. The prototype developed during this thesis should become a standard tool at Michelin.

The diploma thesis titled "Selected aspects of domestic violence described in court files and psychological expert opinions" deals with forensic - psychological issues. The theoretical part defines domestic violence, its forms and types. There is also space for individual aspects of domestic violence, including treatises on victims and perpetrators of domestic violence, related myths and consequences. This chapter also covers the issue of how to help. A separate part deals with the court file, its content and composition. The expert opinion, its assignment and content is then devoted to the conclusion of the theoretical part. The empirical part, focused on the examination of selected aspects of domestic violence, was based on an analysis of court files containing the psychological expert opinion in cases of abuse under §198 and §199 of the Criminal code. Keywords: Domestic violence, Court files, Expert witness psychologist, Expert opinion