Broadcasts and timelines are the primary mechanism of information exchange in online social platforms today. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have enabled ordinary people to reach large audiences spanning cultures and countries, while their massive popularity has created increasingly competitive marketplaces of attention. Timing broadcasts to capture the attention of such geographically diverse audiences has sparked interest from many startups and social marketing gurus. However, formal study is lacking on both the timing and frequency problems. In this thesis, we introduce, motivate and solve the broadcast scheduling problem of specifying the timing and frequency of publishing content to maximise the attention received. We validate and quantify three interacting behavioural phenomena to parametrise social platform users: information overload, bursty circadian rhythms and monotony aversion, which is defined here for the first time. Our analysis of the influence of monotony refutes the common assumption that posts on social network timelines are consumed piecemeal independently. Instead, we reveal that posts are consumed in chunks, which has important consequences for any future work considering human behaviour over social network timelines. Our quantification of monotony aversion is also novel, and has applications to problems in various domains such as recommender list diversification, user satiation and variety-seeking consumer behaviour. Having studied the underlying behavioural phenomena, we link schedules, timelines, attention and behaviour by formalising a timeline information exchange process. Our formulation gives rise to a natural objective function that quantifies the expected collective attention an arrangement of posts on a timeline will receive. We apply this formulation as a case-study on real-data from Twitter, where we estimate behavioural parameters, calculate the attention potential for different scheduling strategies and, using the method of marginal allocation, discover a new scheduling strategy that outperforms popular scheduling heuristics while producing fewer posts.

Searching for resources that are related to time periods or events can be frustrating and even problematic since it is often bound to keyword matching or prior knowledge of the exact dates of occurrence. Additionally, the ordered and itemized list that is often returned as a result is unable to provide the required affordances and constraints that users need and desire to conduct scholarly research properly. The following thesis proposes the implementation of timelines and calendar-based interfaces to browse and search through the life events and artworks documented in the Online Picasso Project. The affordances, constraints and inherent visual nature of the proposed interfaces aid scholars and general users in answering questions regarding the relationship between life events and artworks of the famous Spanish artist. The temporal interfaces are used specifically in the context of the Online Picasso Project and provide several advantages over standard HTML interfaces.

Training emergency response decision makers using live, virtual and/or constructive simulations can be highly complex since certain situations can generate stimulusresponse cycles that depend significantly on unpredictable human judgments. In particular, effective training scenarios require a combination of content contributed via pre-authored scripts and content generated dynamically during the training exercise. Large-scale exercises require multiple domain experts contributing oversight and content to the scenario as it proceeds. Such real-time adaptation requires situational and group awareness based on an understanding of pre-scripted materials and the adaptations of others. This thesis describes the evolution and evaluation of a collaborative graphical timeline system, called the Scenario Timeline System (STS), which facilitates asynchronous and synchronous collaborative timeline management, and its application in large-scale, computer-supported emergency response training exercises.

This study discusses how the literary device of time travel can limit or empower protagonists. The main focus is on H.G. Wells The Time Machine and the two films of the same name inspired by the novel. The popularity of time travel in film springs from the myriad storytelling possibilities the device provides, and the writers agenda determines what place, if any, logic and causality have in the story. Some narratives endorse the theory of eternalism, where time is fixed and the time travellers actions are fated to be consistent with the history the traveller knows. But many films rely on theories of multiple timelines and many worlds, giving the traveller a much greater range of agency. Paradoxes of causality can inhibit the travellers actions as well. This essay discusses the broad spectrum in time travel narrative, where at one end travellers are imprisoned in history, and at the other they enjoy a great deal of freedom.

This study discusses how the literary device of time travel can limit or empower protagonists. The main focus is on H.G. Wells The Time Machine and the two films of the same name inspired by the novel. The popularity of time travel in film springs from the myriad storytelling possibilities the device provides, and the writers agenda determines what place, if any, logic and causality have in the story. Some narratives endorse the theory of eternalism, where time is fixed and the time travellers actions are fated to be consistent with the history the traveller knows. But many films rely on theories of multiple timelines and many worlds, giving the traveller a much greater range of agency. Paradoxes of causality can inhibit the travellers actions as well. This essay discusses the broad spectrum in time travel narrative, where at one end travellers are imprisoned in history, and at the other they enjoy a great deal of freedom.

This thesis explores the use and potential of digital timelines in public history projects. Digital timelines have become a popular and accessible ways for institutions and individuals to write history. The history of timelines indicates that people understand timelines as authoritative information visualizations because they represent concrete events in absolute time. The goals of public history often conflict with the linear, progressive nature of most timelines. This thesis reviews various digital timeline tools and uses The Print Center's Centennial Timeline as an in-depth case study that takes into account the multifaceted factors involved in creating a digital timeline. Digital history advocates support digital scholarship as an alternative to traditional narrative writing. This thesis illustrates that digital timelines can enable people to visualize history in unexpected ways, fostering new arguments and creative storytelling. Despite their potential, digital timelines often replicate the conventions of their paper counterparts because of the authoritative nature of the timeline form. / History

Les dossiers patients électroniques contiennent des informations importantes pour la santé publique. La majeure partie de ces informations est contenue dans des documents rédigés en langue naturelle. Bien que le texte texte soit pertinent pour décrire des concepts médicaux complexes, il est difficile d'utiliser cette source de données pour l'aide à la décision, la recherche clinique ou l'analyse statistique.Parmi toutes les informations cliniques intéressantes présentes dans ces dossiers, la chronologie médicale du patient est l'une des plus importantes. Être capable d'extraire automatiquement cette chronologie permettrait d'acquérir une meilleure connaissance de certains phénomènes cliniques tels que la progression des maladies et les effets à long-terme des médicaments. De plus, cela permettrait d'améliorer la qualité des systèmes de question--réponse et de prédiction de résultats cliniques. Par ailleurs, accéder aux chronologiesmédicales est nécessaire pour évaluer la qualité du parcours de soins en le comparant aux recommandations officielles et pour mettre en lumière les étapes de ce parcours auxquelles une attention particulière doit être portée.Dans notre thèse, nous nous concentrons sur la création de ces chronologies médicales en abordant deux questions connexes en traitement automatique des langues: l'extraction d'informations temporelles et la résolution de la coréférence dans des documents cliniques.Concernant l'extraction d'informations temporelles, nous présentons une approche générique pour l'extraction de relations temporelles basée sur des traits catégoriels. Cette approche peut être appliquée sur des documents écrits en anglais ou en français. Puis, nous décrivons une approche neuronale pour l'extraction d'informations temporelles qui inclut des traits catégoriels.La deuxième partie de notre thèse porte sur la résolution de la coréférence. Nous décrivons une approche neuronale pour la résolution de la coréférence dans les documents cliniques. Nous menons une étude empirique visant à mesurer l'effet de différents composants neuronaux, tels que les mécanismes d'attention ou les représentations au niveau des caractères, sur la performance de notre approche. / Important information for public health is contained within Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The vast majority of clinical data available in these records takes the form of narratives written in natural language. Although free text is convenient to describe complex medical concepts, it is difficult to use for medical decision support, clinical research or statistical analysis.Among all the clinical aspects that are of interest in these records, the patient timeline is one of the most important. Being able to retrieve clinical timelines would allow for a better understanding of some clinical phenomena such as disease progression and longitudinal effects of medications. It would also allow to improve medical question answering and clinical outcome prediction systems. Accessing the clinical timeline is needed to evaluate the quality of the healthcare pathway by comparing it to clinical guidelines, and to highlight the steps of the pathway where specific care should be provided.In this thesis, we focus on building such timelines by addressing two related natural language processing topics which are temporal information extraction and clinical event coreference resolution.Our main contributions include a generic feature-based approach for temporal relation extraction that can be applied to documents written in English and in French. We devise a neural based approach for temporal information extraction which includes categorical features.We present a neural entity-based approach for coreference resolution in clinical narratives. We perform an empirical study to evaluate how categorical features and neural network components such as attention mechanisms and token character-level representations influence the performance of our coreference resolution approach.

Syftet med denna avhandling var att studera problemen relaterade till grundskolans historieundervisning på lågstadiet och som bidrar till att gymnasieelever inte har den kunskap som krävs för att konstruera stora och användbara bilder av det förflutna. Denna undersökning syftar till att skapa en förståelse för vilka arbetssätt som lärare använder på lågstadiet i deras historieundervisning som gynnar elevens utveckling gällande förståelse och kunskaper för historiska tidsbegrepp, så eleverna får med sig de förkunskaper som krävs från lågstadiet. För att synliggöra lärandet hos eleverna kommer en kvalitativ metod att användas genom att undersöka sex lågstadielärares lektionsplanering vid arbete med historiska tidsbegrepp samt en semi-strukturerad intervju med samma lärare som är kopplad till deras historieundervisning vid arbete med historiska tidsbegrepp. Genom att använda historiskt tänkande som teoretisk grund för den empiriska analysen visade undersökningen att problemet gällande lågstadielärares historieundervisning inte var enkel att förstå, utan snarare mångfacetterad och knepigare än vad tidigare forskning visat. / The purpose of this thesis was to study the problems related to elementary school history teaching in primary school and which contributes to that high school students do not have the knowledge required to construct large and useful pictures of the past. This study therefore aims to create an understanding of which working methods that teachers use in primary school in their history teaching that benefit the pupil’s development regarding understanding and knowledge of historical time concepts, so that the pupils get the prior knowledge required from primary school. Therefore, a qualitative method will then be used to examine six primary school teachers´ lesson planning when working with historical time concepts and a semi-structured interview. That is linked to their history teaching when working with historical time concepts. By using historical thinking as a theoretical basis for the empirical analysis, the study showed that the problem regarding primary school teacher´s history teaching was not easy to understand, but rather multifaceted and trickier than previous research has shown. / <p></p><p></p>

At many traditional universities, the federal timelines for determining financial aid eligibility is based on releasing of the Free Application of Federal Student Aid each January, and the subsequent financial aid processing cycle July 1- June 30th. These federally established dates can conflict with traditional August class starts and creates a backlog and delayed processing of information that, in turn, hinders students from receiving timely information in order to make informed decisions based on financial aid awards. The purpose of this case study of a traditional university in Georgia was to apply net price theory and rational choice theory to evaluate the impact of timeline conflicts and how students make decisions about which institution to attend. Data consisted of internal documents, including the results of a prior survey of 425 freshmen, and 13 alumni focus group and survey participants. All data were inductively coded and analyzed using a constant comparative method to reveal key themes. Key findings indicated decision making by prospective students largely focused on accurate and timely communication and cost of attendance. One discrepant area was the decision maker's ability to differentiate between cost of attendance and net price which impacted some student decisions to enroll. The findings are consistent with both net price and rational choice theory. Recommendations to university leaders include encouraging early communication to prospective students and retraining efforts for financial aid staff in order to meet regulatory demands and timelines, increase student enrollment, and reduce anxieties for potential students and families associated with the financial aid process. These outcomes enhance social change by potentially opening doors to higher education for new generations of students.

The Windows registry serves as a valuable resource for both digital forensics experts and security researchers. This information is invaluable for reconstructing a user's activity timeline, aiding forensic investigations, and revealing other sensitive information. Furthermore, this data abundance in the Windows registry can be effortlessly tapped into and compiled to form a comprehensive digital profile of the user. Within this dissertation, we've developed specialized applications to streamline the retrieval and presentation of user activities, culminating in the creation of their digital profile. The first application, named "SeeShells," using the Windows registry shellbags, offers investigators an accessible tool for scrutinizing and generating event timelines based on specific criteria like file access patterns and system navigations. It boasts analytical features that can identify potentially suspicious events through a heat mapping system. In the context of our research, we've also crafted another application designed to collect and deduce a user's extensive activities by solely accessing the Windows registry. This program effectively sidesteps security software by utilizing native Windows application programming interface (API) to interact with the registry, granting unrestricted access to valuable information. This trove of data, often referred to as the user's digital footprint, holds the potential to either investigate or compromise both the user's privacy and security. Finally, we propose a custom-developed application that utilizes both software-based encryption and advanced hooking techniques to protect users' personal data within the registry. Our program is designed to create a more secure and discreet environment for users, effectively fortifying it against privacy and security threats while maintaining accessibility to legitimate users and applications.