Contributions Of Thesis Research Articles

Learning and adaptation of strategies in automated negotiations between context-aware agents

This work presents the hypothesis that guided the research efforts and a summary of the contributions of the doctoral thesis '`Aprendizaje y adaptación de estrategias para negociación automatizada entre agentes conscientes del contexto'. Succinctly, the thesis focuses on agents for automated bilateral negotiations that make use of the context as a key source of information to learn and adapt negotiation strategies in two levels of temporal abstraction. At the highest level, agents employ reinforcement learning to select strategies according to contextual circumstances. At the lowest level, agents use Gaussian Processes and artificial Theory of Mind to model their opponents and adapt their strategies. Agents are then tested in two Peer-to-Peer markets comprising an Eco-Industrial Park and a Smart Grid. The results highlight the significance for the automation of bilateral negotiations of incorporating the context as an informative source.

Assessment for Learning of Design Teamwork Skills

AbstractThis article seeks to contribute to the reflection around the training of future designers regarding teamwork. Collaboration, teamwork and negotiations are common everyday interactions that are now known to contribute positively to the design process. This article builds on a theoretical model that was initially proposed as a Ph.D. thesis contribution: the zone of proximal development for learning teamwork skills. The objective of this article is to share the first implementation of the model in a real educational situation and seize this opportunity to develop it further. The framework of assessment for learning and the concept of the zone of proximal development guide this research. The data collection is based on the observations of teamwork during a design seminar. The analysis is structured around the theoretical definitions of the model's components and in situ observations of the participants. This process guides us to share indicators allowing to confirm if a level or set of skills are achieved by a student. Plus, we propose a set of related teaching guidance to use when skills are identified as underdeveloped or to develop. Through this work, we wish to discuss how design students can be better equipped to enter the profession and play a significant role as team players.

A Unified Lyapunov Framework for Finite-Sample Analysis of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a paradigm where an agent learns to accomplish tasks by interacting with the environment, similar to how humans learn. RL is therefore viewed as a promising approach to achieve artificial intelligence, as evidenced by the remarkable empirical successes. However, many RL algorithms are theoretically not well-understood, especially in the setting where function approximation and off-policy sampling are employed. My thesis [1] aims at developing thorough theoretical understanding to the performance of various RL algorithms through finite-sample analysis.Since most of the RL algorithms are essentially stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms for solving variants of the Bellman equation, the first part of thesis is dedicated to the analysis of general SA involving a contraction operator, and under Markovian noise. We develop a Lyapunov approach where we construct a novel Lyapunov function called the generaled Moreau envelope. The results on SA enable us to establish finite-sample bounds of various RL algorithms in the tabular setting (cf. Part II of the thesis) and when using function approximation (cf. Part III of the thesis), which in turn provide theoretical insights to several important problems in the RL community, such as the efficiency of bootstrapping, the bias-variance trade-off in off-policy learning, and the stability of off-policy control.The main body of this document provides an overview of the contributions of my thesis.

Building Sociomuseology: an analysis of the PhD’ theses defended in Museology at ULHT (2008-2020)

This article aims to present preliminary data from an investigation that seeks to help to understand the contributions of thesis and dissertations defended at the Museology Department of Universidade Lusófona for the development of Sociomuseology between the years 2008 and 2020. This study has among its concerns understand how the production of knowledge in the area of Museology is being structured, based on research developed at ULHT, and the emergence of the School of Thought of Sociomuseology. In this article we focus our analysis on the doctoral thesis, analyzing 46 papers defended between 2008 and 2020, which corresponds to all the researchs located for the period. We discussed this production through the analysis of the treated themes, covered geographical spaces and a brief profile of the researchers involved, seeking to point out interpretations and possibilities for understanding Sociomuseology. Keywords: Sociomuseology, Museology, Doctoral Thesis, Universidade Lusófona.

Characterization of teaching and learning styles in geography: a step towards their inclusion in secondary classrooms

This paper constitutes a summary of the main contributions of a PhD thesis focused on the understanding of the processes of educational influence; that is to say, the practices that allow teachers and other educational agents to help, in an adjusted way, the students. Specifically, this is a study that attempt to define the learning and teaching styles as a decisive aspect in these processes of influence and, therefore, in the evaluation of the students and their performance. Highlighting the necessity to transfer our results to classroom practices and taking as a theoretical reference the cycle of experiential learning, the methodological research procedure is approached from a mixed design and structured according to the CIPP model of evaluative research of an educational geography program. The participants are teachers and students from 10 secondary schools in Murcia (Spain), including a group of 23 students who received the implementation of the defined educational sequence whose evaluation, analysis and discussion have led a series of conclusions that will guide future educational designs, through the learning and assessment activities, according to the learning style of the students.

Emergence of a new type of doctorate; professional doctorate

Increasing number of students enrolled in doctoral programmes and the emergence of the new types of doctoral programmes across the world's universities as a response to various demands from a wide range of professional context has shown that professional doctorate has become a new challenge and opened new horizons in higher education. This article examines the road of the professional doctorate from beginning to current status and possible trends. The professional doctorate is examined in its relationship with the so-called traditional scientific doctorate. The paper focuses on some of the aspects that gives identity and legitimacy to this type of doctorate: programme aims, structure, content, duration, recruitment and admissions, students' motivation to enroll professional doctorate, status, financial support, standards, and thesis contributions. It also presents the status of the professional doctorate in Romania and some ideas as a basis for further examination of the professional doctorate.

Selection of relevant information to improve Image Classification using Bag of Visual Words

One of the main challenges in computer vision is image classification. Nowadays the number of images increases exponentially every day; therefore, it is important to classify them in a reliable way.The conventional image classification pipeline usually consists on extracting local image features, encoding them as a feature vector and classify them using a previously created model. With regards to feature codification, the Bag of Words model and its extensions, such as pyramid matching and weighted schemes, have achieved quite good results and have become the state of the art methods.The process as mentioned above is not perfect and computers, as well as humans, may make mistakes in any of the steps, causing a performance drop in classification. Some of the primary sources of error on large-scale image classification are the presence of multiple objects in the image, small or very thin objects, incorrect annotations or fine-grained recognition tasks among others.Based on those problems and the steps of a typical image classification pipeline, the motivation of this PhD thesis was to provide some guidelines to improve the quality of the extracted features to obtain better classification results. The contributions of the PhD thesis demonstrated how a good feature selection can contribute to improving the fine-grained classification, and that there would even be no need to have a big training data set to learn the key features of each class and to predict with good results.

Retracted: E-Learning Recommender Systems Based on Goal-Based Hybrid Filtering

This research work is based on the thesis contribution by proposing the goal-based hybrid filtering approach in e-learning recommender systems (eLearningRecSys). The proposed work has been used to ...

Retracted: E-Learning Recommender Systems Based on Goal-Based Hybrid Filtering

This research work is based on the thesis contribution by proposing the goal-based hybrid filtering approach in e-learning recommender systems (eLearningRecSys). The proposed work has been used to analyze the personalized similarities between learner's profile preferences collaboratively. The proposed work consists of two hybridizations: the first hybridization has been made with content-based filtering and collaborative features to overcome the new-learners zero-rated profile recommendations issue; the second hybridization has been done with collaborative filtering and k-neighborhood scheme features to improve the average-learner's low-rated profile recommendations issue. Therefore, the proposed goal-based hybrid filtering approach that hybridized content-based filtering, collaborative filtering and k-neighborhood features simultaneously works on both types of learner's profiles recommendation issues in e-learning environments. The experiments in the proposed work are done using the famous “MovieLens” dataset, while the evaluation of experimental results has been performed with mean of precision 83.44% and mean of recall 85.22%, respectively. t-test result shows the probability difference value of 0.29 between the proposed hybrid approach and the evaluated literature work. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid recommender systems in e-learning scenarios.

Traffic-Adaptive and Link-Quality-Aware Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper is a summary of the main contributions of the PhD thesis published in [1]. The main research contributions of the thesis are driven by the research question how to design simple, yet efficient and robust run-time adaptive resource allocation schemes within the communication stack of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes. The thesis addresses several problem domains with contributions on different layers of the WSN communication stack.

Emergence of a new type of doctorate; professional doctorate

Increasing number of students enrolled in doctoral programmes and the emergence of the new types of doctoral programmes across the world's universities as a response to various demands from a wide range of professional context has shown that professional doctorate has become a new challenge and opened new horizons in higher education. This article examines the road of the professional doctorate from beginning to current status and possible trends. The professional doctorate is examined in its relationship with the so-called traditional scientific doctorate. The paper focuses on some of the aspects that gives identity and legitimacy to this type of doctorate: programme aims, structure, content, duration, recruitment and admissions, students' motivation to enroll professional doctorate, status, financial support, standards, and thesis contributions. It also presents the status of the professional doctorate in Romania and some ideas as a basis for further examination of the professional doctorate.

On the use of machine learning methods for modern drug discovery

Machine learning techniques provide a strong basis for enhancing the process of drug discovery within the pharmaceutical industry. During the last decade, chemoinformatics - briefly defined as informatics applied on chemical data - has gained much importance due to the economical benefits obtained from the application of in silico (i.e., computer-based) models. Prediction of candidate compounds for medicinal use is a hard task due to the complex and usually unknown relationships between structure and biological properties. This short article aims at summarizing the main contributions of a PhD thesis [PhD thesis, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina, 2010] and, at the same time, at encouraging research on this challenging area.

Social interactions in Ambient Intelligent environments

This thesis is focussing on research into Ambient Intelligence. More specific, the thesis will focus on infrastructures, methodology and applications deployed in Ambient Intelligence research. By presenting work on those three aspects the thesis contributes to the scientific research field of Ambient Intelligence research. It should be emphasized that this does not imply that all Ambient Inteligence related research should be done within the presented infrastructures and with the presented methodology. The applications of Ambient Intelligence presented in this thesis investigate the possible role of technology to support people in maintaining social connectedness. More specific, a series of empirical studies is reported that explore the potential for Ambient Intelligent environments to support and facilitate social affiliation through technology. By positioning the human need in the center of technology development, Ambient Intelligence (described in chapter 2) is an attractive approach to application development for social affiliation. The studies reported in this thesis have in large part been conducted in the ExperienceLabs at Philips Research. These test facilities (described in chapter 4) are specifically suitable for experience research (described and illustrated with a case study in chapter 3) that requires controlled yet realistic testing environments. In a first series of experiments with awareness systems to mediate presence through silhouette representations of remote activities is investigated (see chapter 5) and mediating availability through presence information (see chapter 6). The results of these studies show that providing simple presence information can create strong feelings of social connectedness while supporting the function of availability judgements (i.e. using the presence information to estimate the availability of the remote person to engage into a conversation). Taking Ambient Intelligence (AmI) to the next level, the role of social intelligence (see the extended AmI model in chapter 2) is investigated in a controlled laboratory study and discussed in chapter 7. From this study it is learned that equipping technical systems with a level of social intelligence results in enriched and human-like interactions with the system. The scientific contribution of this thesis is in: ? A Methodological Framework for Ambient Intelligent research ? The empirical validation of Experience and Application Research Centers as scientific instruments ? Demonstration of the affective benefits of Awareness Systems ? Illustration of how social intelligence can be manifested in a Home Dialogue System ? The Assessment of Social Intelligence in a Home Dialogue System ? Illustrated the spillover effects of Social Intelligence

Borrowers Perception of Select Housing Financial Institutions with Reference to Chennai City

India is home to over 1.1 billion people. With about one in every sixth person in the world living in India, Housing assumes significant importance .The Government of India has been transforming housing sector into an engine of economic growth through prudent policies and a host of initiatives. It has made the development of the housing sector a priority both from the demand and the supply side by fiscal concessions to the providers of the house and to the borrowers. In India traditionally Provident fund and Gratuity amounts received where the only options for buying a home. The emergence of housing finance as a major business in the country, has increased the prospects for home loans. While the Housing sector has been thronged by the borrowers community, the market has also witnessed change in lending practices in certain segments to accommodate the customer needs. The empirical research on housing market in India is scarce due to the paucity of information. With the objective of filling the void, this thesis contribution is to examine the Borrowers perception in the light of Housing Lenders in the housing finance industry. The Research design adopted is Descriptive research. Non Probability sampling procedure is adopted in the study. Housing Financial institutions are identified and selected based on their Merit and performances. In total only 5 Major (HFI) Financial Institutions and the Sample size was 300 borrowers have been chosen for the study. A Schedule was administered to 80 executives of (HFI) Housing Financial Institutions. The Choice criteria were based on the number of persons taking loans from the major financial Institutions which varied considerably. The study administered questionnaire to the borrowers covering questions pertaining to Demographics, Housing loan parameters . Secondary Data was collected from various Reports, Manuals, Journals and Reports of Housing companies. Statistical tools like Chi square tests, ANOVA t-test, were applied. The study has 75 findings. It is found that interest rate was the deciding factor, followed by the service charges which includes Processing fees. The level of satisfaction is moderate for all factors. The thesis concludes with the recommendations like tapping newer segments of borrowers, single clearance of loan, cross selling, competitive pricing in terms of lower interest rates, tie ups, improving credit delivery mechanism reducing time lag and capitalize on present customers and aggressive marketing through Newspapers, websites, Print Media which will enable the Housing Financial institutions to withstand competition.

Unconventional cable-stayed bridges: structural behaviour and design criteria

Under-deck and combined cable-stayed bridges are two relatively new bridge types that have been developed over the last 30 years. Most of these bridges have been constructed in Germany, Japan, France and Spain, and have been designed by outstanding structural engineers such as Leonhardt, Schlaich, Manterola, Virlogeux and Cremer. The main advantages of these bridge types are: their great structural efficiency; the small amount of materials that they require (allowing economic and sustainable proposals); their great construction possibilities, allowing an increase in the span range of certain construction methods; and their strong aesthetic characteristics owing to the different layouts that can be defined with the stay cables. This paper revises the structural behaviour and design criteria of under-deck and combined cable-stayed bridges, and summarises the main research contributions of the PhD thesis submitted by the author Dr Ana M. Ruiz-Teran, to whom the fib Diploma 2009 for Research (Young Engineers' Award) has been recently presented for this work.

IMPACT OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES ON THE SOIL IN VASLUI COUNTY

The soil is a fundamental component of both urban and rural environment, the main reason behind the fact that the protection of soil and subsoil is a matter of national importance. By its position and characteristics, the soil is, in fact, the convergence area of all the pollutants, of which the most are airborne. The present paper, which presents the sources of heavy metals as well the impact of those on the soil from Vaslui county, is part of a series of papers published as preparation of the PhD. thesis Contributions to the impact assessment on the quality of the soil of the activities in Vaslui County .

Learning in an Ambient Intelligent Environment. Towards Modelling Learners through Stereotypes

E-learning in higher education faces challenges related to variation and personalization, after a decade of attention to learning objects and computer-supported collaboration. The main objective of the thesis is to investigate how to assure the quality of the development process of e-learning applications by the implementation of pedagogical principles into the software design process. Specifically this includes the pedagogical principles of individualization, variation, meta-learning and best practice. This thesis contributes to the field of e-learning by four main contributions (C1-C4): C1: Design pattern-based wizards to implement best practice The first main contribution of the thesis is the idea of using pedagogical design patterns as a basis for the development of wizards in e-learning applications. Design patterns are archetypes on well-used solutions and enable the implementation of best practice and the expertise of experienced online teachers into the application. In the process of a pedagogical and technological configuration of an application, the design pattern-based wizard provides an interface presenting pedagogical opportunities, hints and comments to novice online teachers.C2: The E-learning Circle The E-learning Circle is a software design tool, assuring the quality of the design process of e-learning applications, focusing on variation, individualization and meta-learning. It consists of a number of concentric circles, which are divided into three sectors; student, teacher and learning objectives. The inner circles cover pedagogical considerations, while the outer circles specify how the pedagogical theories may be implemented with technology. The strengths of the E-learning Circle are the compact presentation combined with the overview it provides. It is also useful in dealing with complexity, providing a common language and embedding best practice. The E-learning Circle is not a prescriptive method, but is useful in several design models and processes. It represents a holistic approach to the design of e-learning applications and prevents the overexposure of e.g. learning objects or assessment in an e-learning system.C3: The E-learning ontology The E-learning ontology is a contribution to the need of a formal representation of a set of concepts and the relationships between those concepts within the e-learning field. This is necessary when planning to use topic maps as a HCI-solution within e-learning. The E-learning ontology suggests a representation of topics useful for developing topic maps and illustrates an approach how to develop personalized e-learning applications.C4: The PLExus prototype The PLExus prototype is a working prototype of a personal learning environment based on the semantic technology of topic maps. PLExus provides a student interface allowing customized views of learning objects and learning activities. The customized views are mainly based on pedagogical methods, learning objective types and proficiency stages. PLExus provides a wizard for the teacher in the process of adding and structuring learning objects into the topic map. The research method of this thesis is Grounded Theory. This inductive, theory discovering approach allows the grounding of theory in empirical data and is appropriate for the exploratory nature of this thesis. The empirical data of the thesis were collected through 21 interviews, three focus groups, and three expert groups.

Legal and Regulatory Factors that Impede and Facilitate the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Market in Australia

Abstract In a residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) program, a bank or other financial institution sells its rights in a pool of home loans to a vehicle (SPV), which pays for the asset pool by issuing fixed or floating rate bonds in the financial markets to institutional investors. The SPV finances the interest and principal payments under these bonds from the pooled home loan repayments. The SPV is a special purpose vehicle in the sense that it is established especially, and solely, for the of acquiring the asset pool and issuing bonds against it. This paper outlines the findings and contributions of the author's PhD thesis entitled, Residential Mortgage Securitisation in Australia: Suggestions for the Reform of Commercial Law and Practice. The thesis analysed the features of the existing law and regulation that facilitate and hinder the market by using a public benefit test framework, which involves an assessment of the economic, financial and social benefits and costs associated with the current legislation and regulatory reform options. A summary of the analysis and assessment of the current law and regulation that facilitate and hinder the development of the market for RMBSs in Australia and the main findings of the thesis are outlined in the paper.

Trabalho Docente – Mapeando a Pesquisa em Teses e Dissertações Brasileiras

O texto apresenta um levantamento da pesquisa sobre Trabalho Docente encontrada em dissertações e teses defendidas em 23 programas de pós-graduação em educação do Brasil, no período 1997-2002. Constitui um recorte de estudo mais amplo sobre o Estado do Conhecimento da formação de profissionais da educação, cuja produção, compreendendo 792 títulos, foi organizada de acordo com sete categorias: Modelos Teóricos e Políticas de Formação de Professores, Cursos de Formação Inicial e Continuada, Trabalho Docente, Identidade e Profissionalização Docente.