<p>Europe is taking on a new meaning to many people these days and is now referred to as the European Union. For those countries, which are not yet members, to join the European Union is a very important and defining decision. Romania is one of the “next to be” members. With Romania being the next inline to join the Union, large corporations and enterprises are turning to Romania for new opportunities. It might be interesting for Swedish or foreign companies to open a business or start investing in Romania. That step is a very important one because there is no specific literature, which can provide relevant information about the Romanian business market and management style. These potential investors or business executives have no idea about the project management procedures or the implementation of technical projects inside the Romanian economy.</p><p>To provide the answer to these questions more extensive and deeper studies will have to be done in the future. The purpose of this thesis is to become a reference in the future for those companies which are considering doing business in Romania. The goal of this research is to provide valuable and reliable answers concerning the attitude of Swedish and Romanian leaders in meetings with their employees. These attitudes build on the differences in culture and nationality. The leadership of companies in Romania and Sweden has very different meanings in those countries. In the beginning I will provide definitions to the terms that will use: attitude, culture, leadership and meeting. The respondents were chosen based on their previous leadership positions in the institution they used to work. This research will demonstrate the aspects that Swedish leaders have or do not have in common with their Romanian colleagues.</p>

This thesis explores Shaker (architectural) intentionality through an examination of and proposed addition to the Shaker’s Holy City design template. The Holy City drawing and its accompanying text, ‘Explanations of the Holy City with its various parts and appendices pointed out’, depict a master plan of Shaker ‘Heaven’ and template from which Shaker settlements were to be constructed. This thesis proposes the addition of a meeting house design to the Holy City master plan, an addition through which intrinsic elements of Shaker architecture may be readily understood. The project encompasses two stages. The first involves an overall analysis of the Holy City, Shaker meeting house and village typologies. Secondly, ‘drawing’ upon the lessons arising from the analysis, the project proposes the addition of a meeting house to the Holy City documents. The proposed design is sited within the Holy City map and retrospectively mediates the Shakers idealized and constructed works.

This study’s general purpose was to examine nontraditional students’ satisfaction with services provided by community colleges. A survey was administered to 81 Coahoma Community College students who identified themselves as nontraditional students. The Nontraditional Students’ Satisfaction survey was designed to examine the needs and satisfaction of nontraditional students. The nontraditional students at Coahoma Community College deemed getting information on financial aid opportunities, studying and test taking, computers and Internet use, job opportunities in their majors and academic tutoring as most important. The nontraditional students at Coahoma Community College deemed getting information on campus events and/or campus job opportunities as least important. In addition, the nontraditional students deemed getting advice on careers, getting advice on choosing courses, taking an active part in what goes on in their classes, having one place to go for general questions and problems, and having access to campus services and offices and/or on weekends as most important. The nontraditional students indicated participating in social activities on campus and being involved in extracurricular activities such as clubs, organizations, and student government as least important. Overall, the research data indicated that nontraditional students were satisfied with the services provided by Coahoma Community College. The nontraditional students were more satisfied with the opportunities to take an active part in what goes on in classes and instructors’ availability outside of classes. The findings suggested that there was no significant relationship between nontraditional students encountering problems and their expressions of satisfaction.

Yes

Current video conferencing tools lack a sense of presence. Telepresence can improve the current video conferencing by providing feeling of presence at a different location from remote location. Most recent telepresence systems are built with the devices that are not accessible and uncomfortable for the daily meeting purpose. This work proposes a framework for embodied telepresence system that suits a daily meeting case the best. Based on our new telepresence framework, a new system architecture and design requirements are constructed. The system architecture shows how the telepresence system needs to be structured, and a design requirement helps to understand the needs of the system. With this framework we were able to implement a user friendly and accessible telepresence system. Our telepresence system enables users to control the telepresence robot with smartphone controller. The controller has four features: (1) Smartphone orientation control, (2) Position save and playback, (3) Local smart light bulb control, and (4) visual cue. At the end, our work evaluates the developed telepresence system by measuring the performances of given tasks to the participants. The evaluation shows that our system provides a sense of presence to both remote and local users. However, the proposed telepresence framework and system requires farther improvements to provide better usability. / Master of Science / During the pandemic, video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet showed the advantages of having meetings and working remotely. However, these tools do not provide a sense of presence and the necessary level of control of what can be seen from a remote user's point of view. Therefore, researchers investigated and developed various tools that can give remote users a sense of presence at a location where a face-to-face meeting is taking place. We call this a telepresence tool. Our systematic review of the current telepresence tool results that most of the telepresence tools use devices that are not familiar and hard to access for general users. Additionally, they do not consider the local users feeling about remote user's presence at the face-to-face meeting (local site). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a general guideline or framework to help build a telepresence tool that overcomes the current telepresence tools' problems. Our telepresence tool, developed based on our proposed framework, uses a smartphone to control the telepresence robot that represents a remote user at the local site. A remote user can control the local site light bulb, save the telepresence robot's position and place it back, and show the user is away or present at the meeting. The evaluation of our telepresence system shows that our system provides a sense of presence to both remote and local users

Agent-based computing has attracted much attention as a promising technique for application domains that are distributed, complex and heterogeneous. Current research on multi-agent systems (MAS) has become mature enough to be applied as a technology for solving problems in an increasingly wide range of complex applications. The main formal architectures used to describe the relationships between agents in MAS are centralised and distributed architectures. In computational complexity theory, researchers have classified the problems into the followings categories: (i) P problems, (ii) NP problems, (iii) NP-complete problems, and (iv) NP-hard problems. A method for computing the solution to NP-hard problems, using the algorithms and computational power available nowadays in reasonable time frame remains undiscovered. And unfortunately, many practical problems belong to this very class. On the other hand, it is essential that these problems are solved, and the only possibility of doing this is to use approximation techniques. Heuristic solution techniques are an alternative. A heuristic is a strategy that is powerful in general, but not absolutely guaranteed to provide the best (i.e. optimal) solutions or even find a solution. This demands adopting some optimisation techniques such as Evolutionary Algorithms (EA). This research has been undertaken to investigate the feasibility of running computationally intensive algorithms on multi-agent architectures while preserving the ability of small agents to run on small devices, including mobile devices. To achieve this, the present work proposes a new Hybrid Multi-Agent Architecture (HMAA) that generates new heuristics for solving NP-hard problems. This architecture is hybrid because it is "semi-distributed/semi-centralised" architecture where variables and constraints are distributed among small agents exactly as in distributed architectures, but when the small agents become stuck, a centralised control becomes active where the variables are transferred to a super agent, that has a central view of the whole system, and possesses much more computational power and intensive algorithms to generate new heuristics for the small agents, which find optimal solution for the specified problem. This research comes up with the followings: (1) Hybrid Multi-Agent Architecture (HMAA) that generates new heuristic for solving many NP-hard problems. (2) Two frameworks of HMAA have been implemented; search and optimisation frameworks. (3) New SMA meeting scheduling heuristic. (4) New SMA repair strategy for the scheduling process. (5) Small Agent (SMA) that is responsible for meeting scheduling has been developed. (6) “Local Search Programming” (LSP), a new concept for evolutionary approaches, has been introduced. (7) Two types of super-agent (LGP_SUA and LSP_SUA) have been implemented in the HMAA, and two SUAs (local and global optima) have been implemented for each type. (8) A prototype for HMAA has been implemented: this prototype employs the proposed meeting scheduling heuristic with the repair strategy on SMAs, and the four extensive algorithms on SUAs. The results reveal that this architecture is applicable to many different application domains because of its simplicity and efficiency. Its performance was better than many existing meeting scheduling architectures. HMAA can be modified and altered to other types of evolutionary approaches.

Syftet med denna C-uppsats var att skapa en inblick i den svenska mötesindustrin genom att undersöka tre större mötesanläggningar i Sverige. Detta har gjorts med hjälp av de anställda på de undersökta mötesanläggningarna. Utgångspunkten i denna uppsats var att de mest grundläggande delarna på en mötesanläggning innefattar dess fysiska struktur och organisationsstruktur. Syftet har även varit att lyfta fram de anställdas perspektiv då respondenterna pekat på de delar inom dessa områden som uppfattats som mest betydande för bedrivandet av respektive mötesverksamhet. Uppsatsen är huvudsakligen en kvalitativstudie med semistrukturerade intervjuer, vilka har genomförts för att få en djupare förståelse för de anställdas syn på verksamhetsdriften på respektive mötesanläggning. Intervjuerna har genomförts med sammanlagt nio anställda, varav tre genomfördes på plats på anläggningen,tre per telefon och tre per mail. Uppsatsen bygger på svaren från våra respondenter, tidigare forskning samt den presenterade referensram som har arbetats fram utifrån respondenternas svar. Resultatet av denna studie visar att de delar inom fysisk struktur och organisation som de anställda lyfter fram som mest betydande för bedrivandet av den egna verksamheten tar sig i uttryck genom lokalisering, flexibilitet, hållbarhet och samarbeten. / The purpose of this essay is to create a greater insight into the Swedish meetings industry by examining three major meeting facilities in Sweden, and to create this insight through the employees at the surveyed facilities. Our starting point was that the most basic elements of a meeting facility include the physical structure and the organizational structure. The aim has thus been to highlight the employees' perspective within these parts of the operations that is perceived as most significant for the conduct of each meeting operation. This study is primarily a qualitative one using semi-structured interviews conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the employees' vision of the operations at each meeting facility. The interviews were conducted with a total of nine employees, three of which were carried out on the spot, three by phone and three via e-mail. The essay is based on the responses of the respondents and previous research. The results of this study shows that the parts within physical structure and the organizational structure that the employees highlights as the most important for the conduct of the operations are presented as location, flexibility, sustainability and co-operations.

The growth of the internet combined with the proliferation of portable electronic devices has caused an increased use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at the workplace. Also in meetings, which present an important tool to communicate and interact within the team, the use of portable electronic devices is common. Individuals frequently use their smartphones and laptops while attending a meeting for meeting-related or -unrelated activities. This behaviour is defined as electronic multitasking. Literature indicates that there are both positive and negative effects of electronic multitasking that might improve the process of a meeting or impair the interaction during a meeting. Since it is the meeting leader’s responsibility to conduct effective and efficient meetings she has to manage potential effects of electronic multitasking. Hence, the meeting leader should make use of positive effects and in this case encourage Electronic Multitasking. On the other hand, if electronic multitasking has negative effects on the meeting, the leader has to limit this behaviour. Considering the entrance of younger generations into the workforce who are more confident in ICT use and view their devices as an important part of their life, the rising relevance of discussing and investigating the management of electronic multitasking in more depth is evident. However, there are only limited empirically developed approaches available to manage the effects of electronic multitasking. By conducting a multiple case study, this major gap was addressed.The case study has been carried out in November 2015 in Umeå, Sweden. Through seven semi-structured interviews with experienced meeting leaders, rich qualitative data has been collected. To analyse this data, a tool called Thematic Network Analysis has been used. Our results encompass several management approaches for meeting leaders to both enhance and limit the effects of electronic multitasking. The identified approaches serve as a toolbox from which a leader has to choose the appropriate approach according to the context that is shaped by the participants, meeting situation and organisation. Leaders can set strict rules at the beginning of a meeting, for example by banning devices. To improve the enforcement of rules, they should be negotiated and respected by the leader as well. Electronic multitasking can be limited by actively confronting multitasking participants during or after the meeting with their inappropriate behaviour. The leader can also make jokes to catch participants’ attention or encourage interaction. Similarly to confronting people with inappropriate electronic multitasking, the leader can encourage the behaviour in case it is useful. For example, one person can be assigned to take notes from the meeting or phases in which all meeting participants engage in electronic multitasking can be announced. Furthermore, the meeting leader can set up meetings by using features such as agenda, breaks, goals, length, size and topics to influence the amount of electronic multitasking. Finally, the company culture or guidelines regarding the use of portable electronic devices can be shaped and applied by meeting leaders. Hence, practical implications have been made to a large extent. Furthermore, this study provides theoretical contributions in the areas of meeting leadership and electronic multitasking.

Anglický název práce/ Abstract The course of a general meeting of a joint-stock company The main goal of the following diploma thesis is to comprehensively analyse the topic in question after the recent recodification of the Czech private law. The author aims to evaluate the current legal state of the course of a general meeting of a joint-stock company by studying multiple relevant sources, outlining the most important legal aspects and reviewing some of the frequently academically discussed issues and topics. Primarily the author aims to accomplish that by thoroughly studying and examining the newest legal doctrine and some of the most important existing judicial decisions. Systematically the thesis consists of four main chapters. The first chapter contains the general introduction of the matter and a legal definition of a joint-stock company while mainly focusing on its structure and bodies. The second chapter is divided into two parts and generally focuses on the matter of participation and the legal representation on a general meeting. The first part of the chapter highlights the legal reasons of why and by whom the general meeting of a joint-stock company can be convened. The author defines and discusses all its possible participants in the following part of the chapter. The third chapter is devoted...

Cette recherche porte sur un ensemble de déterminismes et contraintes d’ordre symbolique (rituel, endossement progressif du rôle présidentiel, transcendances mobilisables, impératifs scénographiques) et sociopolitique (trajectoires individuelles, rôle des appareils partisans, évolution des publics, interaction avec les autres compétiteurs et compétitrices, transformation des médias) qui pèsent sur le discours de meeting pour l’élection présidentielle française. « Le changement c’est maintenant », « Ensemble, tout devient possible », « Prenez le pouvoir » : alors que la campagne pour l’élection présidentielle vient placer en son coeur cette promesse fondamentale de « transformation du réel », ce qui pourrait laisser croire en une grande liberté énonciative des locuteurs et des locutrices, nous montrons ici qu’à l’inverse le discours de meeting électoral se trouve extraordinairement contraint et déterminé, que chaque candidat ou candidate doit se conformer à un faisceau d’attendus discursifs tacites, tout en répondant aux impératifs de renouvellement de messages inhérent à tout processus de légitimation politique par le discours.Voici résumée en quelques lignes la vocation de ce travail, fondé sur l’exploration lexicométrique menée avec le logiciel d’analyse de données textuelles Lexico 3, puis l’interrogation argumentative, pragmatico-énonciative et ponctuellement narrative d’unThèse préparée au CEDITEC, (Centre d'Étude des Discours, Images, Textes Écrits, Communication) Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne (UPEC) Centre Pyramide – Bureau 405 80, avenue du Général de Gaulle 94000 Créteil Cedexcorpus composé de quatre-vingt-seize discours de meeting électoral, tenus lors de périodes de campagne dites « officielles », par les candidates et les candidats en lice pour les élections présidentielles de 2002, 2007, 2012 en France. / This research focuses on a set of symbolic (ritual, progressive endorsement of the presidential role, transcendences mobilized, scenic imperatives), and sociopolitical pressures (individual paths, role of supporters, transformations of the audiences, interaction with other competitors, medias transformations), facing the rally speeches for the french presidential election. "Le changement c’est maintenant," "Ensemble, tout devient possible ", "Prenez le pouvoir": as the campaign for the presidential election has put in his heart that fundamental promise of "transformation of the reality", which could let presuppose freedom utterance of speakers, we show that the election rally speech is strongly constrained and determined. Thus, each candidate had to comply with an expected tacit discourse, while responding to messages renewal imperatives, inherent to any process of political legitimation through discourses. Here is summarized in a few lines the vocation of this study, based on the lexicometric exploration conducted with textual data analysis software Lexico 3 and argumentative, pragmatic, enunciative and timely narrative questionning of ninety-six election rally speeches, made during campaign periods called "official" by candidates to the presidential elections of 2002, 2007, 2012 in France.