Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Coupled human and natural systems'

Human and freshwater ecosystems are intrinsically interconnected. To better design effective policies, modeling tools and valuation methods are necessary to help understanding the complex reciprocal linkages between ecosystem processes and human actions, and coupled human and natural systems (CNHS) sets up a critical paradigm to do so. It is thus of both academic and empirical appeal to integrate reliable economic valuation methods with tools and models from multiple disciplines in order to quantify the feedbacks between human and natural systems and to inform better policy design. Using freshwater resources as an example, this dissertation contains three essays which integrate natural science and economics models to understand how changes in human behavior and societal policies lead to changes in ecosystem services, and how changes in ecosystem services, in return, affect human decisions. The first two essays focus on agricultural nonpoint source pollution problems in United States and examines the impacts of potential water polices on both water polluters and water demanders. Specifically, in the first essay, a novel coupling between an ecological model of within-lake hydrodynamics and an economic model of hedonic property prices has been developed to quantify the connections between nutrient loading, lake water quality, and economic outcomes. Linking ecological processes with human decision-making provides a basis for enhanced evidence-based decision making in the context of reducing nonpoint-source pollution. In the second essay, an economic mathematical programming model is coupled with an agro-ecosystem model to investigate the behavioral adjustments and environmental pollution outcomes of water quality policies. A complete quantification of costs from all regulating sources are necessary to help pinpoint the efficient water policy design and reflecting the connection between human decisions and ecosystem processes. The third essay focus on the water quantity problem in another developed country, Australia. A discrete choice experiment method has been explored and used to provide estimates of willingness to pay for purchasing irrigation rights to restore a Ramsar-convention wetland. Water policy scenario described in this essay could directly affect the feedback between human and ecosystem processes and serve as a baseline for future planning and policy designs. By offering both conceptual and methodological advancements, this dissertation aims to improve the understanding of coupled human and natural systems and the implementation of water policies. This dissertation also provides a framework to establish multi-disciplinary dialogues and cooperation between scientists and economists in the search of efficient water polices.
Doctor of Philosophy

Human activities worldwide have altered nature in ways that create new combinations of species and environmental processes. To understand so-called "novel ecosystems" it is important to consider both the natural and the societal factors that shape them, and how those factors are interconnected or "coupled." We used such an approach to explore options for managing a non-native invasive frog, the coqui, which has become established on the island of Hawaii and threatens to spread to other parts of the state. The nighttime calls of the coqui create a nuisance for property owners when populations become dense enough, as often occurs in Hawaii where the frogs have no natural enemies. Humans have tried various ways to eliminate coqui on the island of Hawaii with little success. Therefore we studied how property owners cope with their presence, both through management practices and psychological coping strategies. We also examined results of those efforts. People whose properties had more frogs were more likely to take action to reduce their numbers, but also attitudes toward the coqui were less negative when people had grown used to having to share their properties with the frogs. For those who cannot cope psychologically, we found it would be possible to manage properties to reduce densities but only when leaf litter and low shrubs were completely removed from near a home. Information campaigns about managing coqui should be different when targeting people that already host frogs and those that do not.

Humans have fled environmental degradation for many millennia. Due partially to climate change, environments across the world have often degraded to the point that they can no longer securely sustain livelihoods. Entire communities and households have been displaced by extreme, rapid or creeping disasters; during their flight, they have left footprints across the globe that merit tracing. Sometimes this mobility is forced and at other times it is purely voluntary; for both, the mobility has roots in a changing environment. The footprint of environmentally influenced mobility (EIM) was traced through a series of three independent but related studies. The first study gained foundational perspective through an exploration of connections between climate drivers and natural and human impacts of climate change. This inquiry sought to answer the question, "How important is human mobility in the greater scheme of changing environments and changing climate?" Human mobility was one among 15 different climate drivers and impacts studied; the connections between all of them were examined to enable a quantitative comparison of system susceptibility, driving force, tight coupling and complexity. While degradation was the most complex of all natural elements, mobility surfaced as the human system element exerting the greatest forcing on other elements within the coupled system. The next study focused only on human mobility to explore how scholarly literature portrayed the two possible directions of the link between mobility and degrading environments--with a particular focus on urbanization as one manifestation of the phenomenon. Type A links, in which human mobility triggers environmental degradation, are portrayed in the literature as often as Type B links, in which degrading environments trigger human mobility. Surprisingly, science has not lent support to urbanization being a result of environmental change; plausible reasons for this are discussed. The final study canvassed expert opinion to examine why no scientific, humanitarian or governmental entity has succeeded in providing systematic support (e.g.., policy and interventions) to populations enduring environmentally influenced mobility. Four very different discourses emerged: Determined Humanists, Benevolent Pragmatists, Cynical Protectionists and Critical Realists. The complexity these discourses manifest help explain the inaction--a stalemate between actors--while confirming the inappropriateness of one-sided terminology and linear quantifications of environmentally influenced mobility. The results of these three studies demonstrate that human mobility has unequivocally destructive force that can trigger non-linear effects, potentially casting the coupled system into an unprecedented state; that the visible lack of scholarly exploration of environmentally influenced urbanization (EIU) can be partially explained by high system complexity and disciplinary research; and most important, that despite diametrically opposed viewpoints, experts unanimously agree that human mobility has strong connections to environmental change. Together, the results merge to confirm a "well-founded fear" on the part of those who dwell in degrading environments, and to highlight a pressing need to offer solutions both to those who remain in such environments as well as a name and protected status to those who flee them.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2015.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-240).
Scarce pipeline capacity in regions that rely on natural gas technologies for electricity generation has created volatile prices and reliability concerns. Gas-fired generation firms uniquely operate as large consumers in the gas market and large producers in the electricity market. To explore the effects of this coupling, this dissertation investigates decisions for firms that own gas-fired power plants by proposing a mixed-integer linear programming model that explicitly represents multi-year pipeline capacity commit- ments and service agreements, annual forward capacity offers, annual maintenance schedules, and daily fuel purchases and electricity generation. This dissertation's primary contributions consist of a detailed representation of a gas-fired power-plant owner's planning problem; a hierarchical application of a state-based dimensionality reduction technique to solve the hourly unit commitment problem over different tem- poral scales; a technique to evaluate a firm's forward capacity market offer, including a probabilistic approach to evaluate the risk of forced outages; a case study of New England's gas-electricity system; and an exploration of the applicability of forward capacity markets to reliability problems for other basic goods.
by Tommy Leung.
Ph. D.

Decreasing gas prices and the pressing need for fast-responding electric power generators are currently transforming natural gas networks. The intermittent operation of gas-fired plants to balance wind generation introduces spatiotemporal fluctuations of increasing gas demand. At the heart of modeling, monitoring, and control of gas networks is a set of nonlinear equations relating nodal gas injections and pressures to flows over pipelines. Given gas demands at all points of the network, the gas flow task aims at finding the rest of the physical quantities. For a tree network, the problem enjoys a closed-form solution; yet solving the equations for practical meshed networks is non-trivial. This problem is posed here as a feasibility problem involving quadratic equalities and inequalities, and is further relaxed to a convex semidefinite program (SDP) minimization. Drawing parallels to the power flow problem, the relaxation is shown to be exact if the cost function is judiciously designed using a representative set of network states. Numerical tests on a Belgian gas network corroborate the superiority of the novel method in recovering the actual gas network state over a Newton-Raphson solver. This thesis also considers the coupled infrastructures of natural gas and electric power systems. The gas and electric networks are coupled through gas-fired generators, which serve as shoulder and peaking plants for the electric power system. The optimal dispatch of coupled natural gas and electric power systems is posed as a relaxed convex minimization problem, which is solved using the feasible point pursuit (FPP) algorithm. For a decentralized solution, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used in collaboration with the FPP. Numerical experiments conducted on a Belgian gas network connected to the IEEE 14 bus benchmark system corroborate significant enhancements on computational efficiency compared with the centralized FPP-based approach.
Master of Science

After more than a century, there are very few examples of excellent interdisciplinary work in landscape architecture, like the "Emerald Necklace" designed by Frederick Law Olmsted or Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord by Peter Latz. Most of the projects still have only one purpose: they are either reserved for conservation as are the great national parks, or are planned for recreation or development that ignores natural systems. "Most...landscape designers are still inspired by and primarily focused on aesthetics; society's other major objectives are secondary for them" (Richard Forman 2002, p: 85). In 1993, American Society of Landscape Architects defined sustainable development as, "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the future." Thus designers need to understand how natural and human systems work and design for the protection of our environmental as an integral part of any development. Landscape architects can achieve this by borrowing principles of legendary works like the "Emerald Necklace" and combining those with new technology to meet changing cultural and ecological needs. This thesis asserts that sustainable development should be achieved by reconciling human systems and its effects on the surrounding environment by using and revealing natural systems to spread consciousness and earn attention and care for our environment. Suitability analysis by Ian McHarg, Bioregionalism by Clair Reiniger, Regenerative design process by Lyle, and Framework for ecological design by Prof. Carl Steinitz are various design processes to create developments, which can respond to both natural and human needs. The thesis project, Riverside Park and Biomedical Complex in the South Jefferson Redevelopment Area in Roanoke, VA, explores how a design process, consisted of framework for ecological design and principals of eco-revelatory design, can help to plan a sustainable development, which uses and reveals natural systems to reconciling human systems and its effects on the surrounding environment. The project demonstrates how a multidisciplinary approach towards landscape design can help to create a multifunctional design that meets the, ecological and cultural, needs of the present without compromising the future.
Master of Landscape Architecture

Thesis: Ph. D., Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, February, 2021
Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 133-148).
Interest in the use of exoskeletons (wearable robotic devices tightly-coupled to the user's body) for human gait augmentation has soared recently, with research flourishing in system design, control, and use efficacy. Use cases span many fields, from military (e.g. load carriage assistance) to medicine (e.g. gait rehabilitation or restoration) and industry (e.g. injury prevention). Evaluating the human factors of human-exoskeleton interaction is an essential step towards operationalization. Unexplained variation in gait strategy and adaptation observed across individual operators must be better understood to enable safe and effective exoskeleton use in real-life environments. Cognitive fit is an individuals' understanding and ability to operate a system. Exoskeletons and similar tightly-coupled lower-extremity (TCLE) systems entail new interaction modalities that may affect cognitive fit.
This thesis explores how cognitive factors and alternative interaction modalities impact individuals' gait and task performance. Two studies were conducted, one evaluating inhibitory control as measured by a modified Simon task using interaction modalities relevant to TCLE system use, i.e. tactile cues and lower-extremity responses. Second, the Human-Exoskeleton Strategy & Adaptation (HESA) study was implemented, in which individuals completed tasks assessing cognitive factors, i.e. inhibitory control and attention, then walked with an ankle exoskeleton. Evaluation of inhibitory control with tactile cues and lower-extremity responses resulted in slower response times and decreased response accuracy. A probe of attention in the HESA study, i.e. completion of a walking task on a self-paced treadmill, showed modified gait characteristics under increased attentional loads, particularly at slower walking speeds and with the addition of a secondary task.
Individualized variation in exoskeleton gait, quantified by spatiotemporal gait characteristics, was explicitly presented for the first time, showing that distinct individuals initially prioritize goals like stability and coordination with an ankle exoskeleton differently. Finally, select measures of cognitive function were found to be correlated to individuals' exoskeleton gait strategy. Individual differences in baseline factors like inhibitory control and ability to perform tasks under divided attention impact individuals' cognitive fit with exoskeleton systems. This individualized variation, as well as broader population patterns, should inform exoskeleton design and training by encouraging gait strategies that support desired exoskeleton use goals. For example, stroke patients using an exoskeleton to restore their gait and mitigate fall risk should prioritize stability during system use, while factory workers should prioritize system coordination to minimize injury risk.
This thesis provides foundational insights into human-exoskeleton interaction and gait strategy from a human factors perspective.
by Aditi Gupta.
Ph. D.
Ph.D. Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology

The goal of this research is increased safety in aviation. Aviation is a highly automated and complex, as well as, safety critical human-machine system. The pilot communicates with the system via a human-machine interface in cockpit. In an alerting situation this interface is in part an auditory alerting system. Human errors are often consequences of actions brought about by poor design. Pilots complain that they may be both disturbed and annoyed of alerts, which may affect performance, especially in non-normal situations when the mental workload is high. This research is based on theories in ergonomics and cognitive engineering with the assumption that improved human performance within a system increase safety. Cognitive engineering is a design philosophy for reducing the effort required by cognitive functions by changing the technical interface, which may lead to improved performance. Knowledge of human abilities and limitations and multidisciplinary interrelated theories between humans, sounds and warnings are used. Several methods are involved in this research, such as literature studies, field studies, controlled experiments and simulations with pilots. This research defines design requirements for sounds appropriate in auditory alerts as Natural Warning Sounds. For example, they have a natural meaning within the user’s context, are compatible with the auditory information process, are pleasant to listen to (not annoying), are easy to learn and are clearly audible. A design process for auditory alerting systems is suggested. It includes methods of associability and sound imagery, which develop Natural Warning Sounds, and combines these with an appropriate presentation format. Associability is introduced and represents the required effort to associate sounds to their assigned alert function meaning. An associable sound requires less effort and fewer cognitive resources. Soundimagary is used to develop sound images. A sound image is a sound, which by its acoustics characteristics has a particular meaning to someone without prior training in a certain context. Simulations of presentation formats resulted in recommendations for cancellation capabilities and avoiding continuously repeated alerts. This research brings related theories closer to practice and demonstrates general methods that will allow designers, together with the users of the system, to apply them in their own system.
QC 20100910

We live in the Anthropocene – an age where humans dominate natural systems – and there is ample evidence that our current practices degrade the capacity of natural systems to provide us with natural resources. How we, as humans, organize and learn, in communities and among state and other societal actors, constitute a decisive factor for both local management of natural resources and the functioning of the planet Earth. In other words, the outcome of learning has become a matter of governance across multiple levels. This thesis studies the role of social learning in governance of natural resources, asking the following three overarching questions: i) What are the institutional barriers limiting better environmental governance at different scales? ii) Is there a causal connection between social learning and better environmental governance? iii) What are the normative challenges with better environmental governance or social-ecological resilience being linked to the adaptive capacity of actors to learn socially? The primary method is semi-structured in-depth interviews. Papers provide results on institutional barriers such as competency traps and show how customs and current practices and collaborations limit better environmental governance. It is found that social learning might, and might not, lead to better environmental governance, and the causal connection between social learning and better environmental governance is found to be rather weak, with both variables depending on other factors. Enabling policy, a mandate to make broad assessments, or an engaged leader facilitating social learning, are examples of factors that explain the existence of both social learning and outcomes in terms of better environmental governance. It is concluded that since conditions for, and facilitation of, social learning are so important, research should focus more on what initiates social learning and how social learning can be mainstreamed across multiple levels of governance
At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Submitted: Paper 4: Submitted; Paper 5: Submitted.

Thesis (PhD (Molecular Biology and Human Genetics))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The growing global epidemic of human tuberculosis (TB) results in 8 million new cases of this disease and 2 million deaths annually. Control thereof will require greater insight into the biology of the causative organism, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and into the pathogenesis of the disease. This will benefit the design of new vaccines and diagnostic assays which may reduce the degree of both disease transmission and progression. Animal models have played a vital role in the understanding of the aetiology, pathogenesis, and treatment of TB. Much of such insight has been obtained from experimental infection models, and the development of new vaccines, for example, is dependant on these. Nonetheless, studies utilising naturally occurring TB in animals, such as those which have investigated the use of interferon-gamma release assays (IGRA) for its diagnosis, have contributed substantially to the body of knowledge in this field. However, there are few such examples, and this study sought to identify and investigate naturally occuring animal TB in South Africa as an opportunity to gain further insight into this disease. During the course of this study, the dassie bacillus, a distinctly less virulent variant of M. tuberculosis, was isolated from a rock hyrax from the Western Cape Province of South Africa. This has provided new insight into the widespread occurrence of this organism in rock hyrax populations, and has given impetus to further exploring the nature of the difference in virulence between these pathogens. Also investigated was M. tuberculosis infection in dogs in contact with human TB patients. In so doing, the first reported case of canine TB in South Africa was described, v a novel canine IGRA was developed, and a high level of M. tuberculosis infection in these animals was identified. This supports human data reflecting high levels of transmission of this pathogen during the course of human disease. Additionally, the fact that infected companion animals may progress to disease and potentially act as a source of human infection was highlighted. However, an attempt to adapt a flow cytometric assay to study cell-mediated immune responses during canine TB revealed the limitations of such studies in species in which the immune system remains poorly characterised. The use of IGRAs to diagnose TB was further explored by adapting a human assay, the QuantiFERON-TB Gold (In-Tube Method), for use in non-human primates. These studies have shown that such an adaption allows for the sensitive detection of TB in baboons (Papio ursinus) and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and may be suitable for adaption for use in other species. However, they have also evidenced the limitation of this assay to specifically detect infection by M. tuberculosis. Finally, to contextualise the occurrence of the mycobacterial infections described above, and other similar examples, these have been reviewed as an opinion piece. Together, these investigations confirm that animal models will continue to make important contributions to the study of TB. More specifically, they highlight the opportunities that naturally occuring animal TB provides for the discovery of novel insights into this disease.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Wêreldwye tuberkulose (TB) epidemie veroorsaak agt miljoen nuwe gevalle en twee miljoen sterftes jaarliks. Ingryping by die beheer hiervan vereis begrip van die biologie van die mikroörganisme Mycobacterium tuberculosis, die oorsaak van TB, asook van die patogenese van die siekte self. Hierdie kennis kan lei tot ontwerp van nuwe entstowwe en diagnostiese toetse wat gevolglik beide die oordrag- en vordering van die siekte mag bekamp. Dieremodelle speel lankal 'n rol in ons begrip van die etiologie-, patogenese- en behandeling van TB. Insig is grotendeels verkry vanaf eksperimentele infeksiemodelle, en ontwikkeling van entstowwe, onder andere, is afhanklik van soortgelyke modelle. Desnieteenstaande, studies wat natuurlike TB voorkoms in diere ondersoek, byvoorbeeld dié wat op die ontwikkeling van interferon-gamma vrystellingstoetse (IGVT) fokus, het merkwaardige bydrae gemaak tot kennis en begrip in hierdie studieveld. Daar is slegs enkele soortgelyke voorbeelde. Om hierdie rede is die huidige studie uitgevoer waarbinne natuulike diere-TB geïdentifiseer en ondersoek is in Suid-Afrika om verdere kennis en insig te win aangaande TB. Die "dassie bacillus", bekend om beduidend minder virulent te wees as M. tuberculosis, is tydens hierdie studie geïsoleer vanuit 'n klipdassie (Procavia capensis) in die Wes-Kaapse provinsie, Suid-Afrika. Insig in die wydverspreide voorkoms van hierdie organisme in klipdassie bevolkings is gevolglik verkry en verskaf momentum om die aard van verskil in virulensie tussen dié patogene te bestudeer. vii Voorts is M. tuberculosis infeksie bestudeer in honde wat in kontak is met menslike TB pasiënte en word die eerste geval van honde TB dus in Suid-Afrika beskryf. In hierdie groep diere, is 'n hoë vlak van M. tuberculosis infeksie geïdentifiseer deur gebruik te maak van 'n nuut ontwikkelde IGVT vir die diagnose van honde TB. Gevolglik ondersteun dié studie bevindinge van menslike studies wat toon dat besondere hoë vlakke van M. tuberculosis oordrag voorkom gedurende die verloop van die siekte. Verder toon die studie dat geïnfekteerde troeteldiere 'n bron van menslike infeksie kan wees. 'n Poging om 'n vloeisitometriese toets te ontwikkel om die aard van selgefundeerde immuunreaksies te bestudeer in honde met TB toon die beperkings van dergelike studies in spesies waarin die immuunsisteem gebrekkig gekarakteriseer is. Die gebruik van IGVT'e in die diagnose van TB is verder ondersoek deur 'n menslike toets (QuantiFERON-TB Gold, In-Tube Method) aan te pas vir die gebruik van nie-menslike primaat gevalle. Hierdie studies toon gevolglik dat so 'n aanpassing toepaslik is vir hoogs sensitiewe deteksie van TB in chacma bobbejane (Papio ursinus) en rhesus ape (Macaca mulatta), en mag ook aangepas word vir gebruik in ander spesies. Tog word die beperkings van hierdie toets om infeksie wat spesifiek deur M. tuberculosis veroorsaak uitgelig. Ter afsluiting word hierdie studie in konteks geplaas deur 'n oorsig te gee van bogenoemde- en soortgelyke gevalle van dierlike infeksie deur mikobakterieë in Suid-Afrika. Hierdie studies bevestig dat dieremodelle steeds belangrike toevoegings maak tydens die bestudering van TB en lig veral die moontlikhede uit dat bestudering van natuulike TB in diere kan lei tot die ontdekking van nuwe insigte ten opsigte van die siekte self.

Achieving long-term conservation gains through the framework of conservation incentive programs requires an understanding of both the ecological and social components of these programs. Landowner program experiences and management decisions after program participation are important for long-term conservation, but these aspects of conservation programs are not well understood. To address this research gap related to conservation program participation, this thesis investigates Natural Resources Conservation Service programs that provide private landowners with financial and technical assistance to manage for young forest habitat in the eastern United States. We conducted a telephone survey to investigate private landowner experiences during and after participation in these NRCS conservation programs. Coordinating with biologists monitoring managed properties for birds, we assessed how in-person outreach and mailed monitoring results influenced landowners. Next, we evaluated how landowner motivations, resources, and cognitions were related to post-program young forest management intentions. Finally, we applied a coupled human and natural systems lens to investigate the linkage between wildlife outcomes, landowner perceptions, and continued young forest management. Our results demonstrate how in-person outreach can shape positive conservation experiences and increasing landowner trust in resource agencies. We also demonstrate the importance of both social and environmental factors for influencing landowner decision-making after conservation program participation. We detail the applications of this research for conservation agencies and professionals who work with private landowners.
Master of Science

Critical infrastructure systems are essential for the continuous functionality of modern global societies. Some examples of these systems include electric energy, potable water, oil and gas, telecommunications, and the internet. Different topologies underline the structure of these networked systems. Each topology (i.e., physical layout) conditions the way in which networks transmit and distribute their flow. Also, their ability to absorb unforeseen natural or intentional disruptions depends on complex relations between network topology and optimal flow patterns. Most of the current research on large networks is focused on understanding their properties using statistical physics, or on developing advanced models to capture network dynamics. Despite these important research efforts, almost all studies concentrate on specific networks. This network-specific approach rules out a fundamental phenomenon that may jeopardize the performance predictions of current sophisticated models: network response is in general interdependent, and its performance is conditioned on the performance of additional interacting networks. Although there are recent conceptual advances in network interdependencies, current studies address the problem from a high-level point of view. For instance, they discuss the problem at the macro-level of interacting industries, or utilize economic input-output models to capture entire infrastructure interactions. This study approaches the problem of network interdependence from a more fundamental level. It focuses on network topology, flow patterns within the networks, and optimal interdependent system performance. This approach also allows for probabilistic response characterization of interdependent networked systems when subjected to disturbances of internal nature (e.g., aging, malfunctioning) or disruptions of external nature (e.g., coordinated attacks, seismic hazards). The methods proposed in this study can identify the role that each network element has in maintaining interdependent network connectivity and optimal flow. This information is used in the selection of effective pre-disaster mitigation and post-disaster recovery actions. Results of this research also provide guides for growth of interacting infrastructure networks and reveal new areas for research on interdependent dynamics. Finally, the algorithmic structure of the proposed methods suggests straightforward implementation of interdependent analysis in advanced computer software applications for multi-hazard loss estimation.

Vosso, the second-largest watershed in Norway, was considered special as it produced some of the biggest salmon in the country. This salmon had economic, cultural as well as ecological importance. Due to its diversity, it was regarded a unique biological resource. Yet in the late 1980s the stock collapsed, quite abruptly and unexpected. This triggered a large-scale scientific research and eventually led to a rescue project to restore the wild Vosso salmon. The goal of this thesis was to explore the fundamental questions about the impact of human activity on nature and the conflicts of interest that exist within the management for the restoration of the wild salmon population in Vosso. The study aimed to answer the following question: “How does the strategy of the salmon restoration project in Vosso address the human dimensions for the restoration of the wild Vosso salmon population on a short and long term?” A systems approach was used for data collection and analysis. According to Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology, the researcher first started with an examination of the background of the problem. The second step was to examine systems thinking about the situation. This step was operationalized with help of interviews, a questionnaire, content analyses and a discourse analysis. The third step of SSM required the development of a common understanding of the change and the change processes needed among the stakeholders involved in the rescue project. The strategy of the salmon restoration project in Vosso is mostly directed towards finding the causes for the decline of the Vosso salmon population. The measures taken to restore the salmon are primarily centered on producing salmon and treating sea lice. In the short term, this may lead to an increase of salmons in the river. But, if the sources of salmon threats are not eliminated, the survival of the salmon stock will be at risk, and the goal of reaching a sustainable salmon stock that reproduces naturally will be a challenging one. The inclusion of human dimensions in the rescue project is based on the involvement of people with different world views, neglecting differences in interest and centering on achieving the same objective: a wild salmon population that is able to reproduce naturally. However, salmon management in Vosso disregards long-term human dimensions: those human values embedded in institutions and passed on from generation to generation. For reaching sustainable salmon stocks, it is not only important to involve stakeholders with different values in salmon management, it is also crucial to understand the environmental discourses that trigger these values. This understanding needs to occur at all levels of management that influence the outcome of the salmon restoration project in Vosso. This study has shown that the salmon restoration management is trying to achieve sustainability, while employing a problem-solving discourse of administrative rationalism. For the achievement of a sustainable salmon population, the prevailing discourse of administrative rationalism in salmon management needs to make room for the discourse of sustainability.

Barren-ground caribou herds are part of social-ecological systems that are of critical importance to northern Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic, contributing to nutritional, cultural, and spiritual well being that are today undergoing significant changes. This dissertation uses multiple disciplinary lenses to understand the dynamics of these systems and to clarify methods for studying them. Chapter 1 focuses on a prediction of summer (June 1- August 31) mosquito activity and potential insect harassment of caribou in response to a changing climate. The Mosquito Activity Index (MAI) was based on daily ambient temperature and wind velocity obtained from the North American Regional Reanalysis dataset (NARR) from 1979 to 2009 for summer ranges of Alaska’s four Arctic herds: Western Arctic Herd (WAH), Teshekpuk Caribou Herd (TCH), Central Arctic Herd (CAH), and Porcupine Caribou Herd (PCH). Mean MAI was lowest for TCH, followed by WAH and PCH and highest for CAH. Over 31 years there was an increasing trend in MAI that affected the summer habitat of TCH and PCH, but a decreasing trend for WAH. Intra-annual patterns in MAI among herds differed in peak MAI. Chapter 2 presents a novel method of participatory videography to document the knowledge and experiences of Caribou People. Ninety-nine interviews were videoed in six arctic communities of North America in the summer of 2008 as part of the International Polar Year. Chapter 3 presents “Voices of Caribou People,” a composite film of those interviewed, portraying the range of topics reported. Chapter 4 presents the results of an open-coding content analysis of a sample of 34 of the Voices Project interviews. Interviews described people’s rich memories of the past, aspects of their traditional knowledge and practices, the changes they have observed, the challenges they face, and what they perceive as their needs to meet present and future challenges. A key finding of the analysis is that while the research community and funding agencies are highly focused on climate change, Caribou People expressed greater concern about their social, economic, and political challenges. Caribou people noted that more studies undertaken in full partnership with caribou user communities along with community authority in decision-making are needed to sustain their human-caribou systems.

Synchronous Distributed Collaborative Work (SDCW) occurs when group members work together at the same time from different places together to achieve a common goal. Effective SDCW requires good communication, continuous coordination and shared information among group members. SDCW is possible because of groupware, a class of computer software systems that supports group work. Shared-workspace groupware systems are systems that provide a common workspace that aims to replicate aspects of a physical workspace that is shared among group members in a co-located environment. Shared-workspace groupware systems have failed to provide the same degree of coordination and awareness among distributed group members that exists in co-located groups owing to unintuitive interaction techniques that these systems have incorporated. Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) focus on reusing natural human abilities such as touch, speech, gestures and proximity awareness to allow intuitive human-computer interaction. These interaction techniques could provide solutions to the existing issues of groupware systems by breaking down the barrier between people and technology created by the interaction techniques currently utilised. The aim of this research was to investigate how NUI interaction techniques could be used to effectively support SDCW. An architecture for such a shared-workspace groupware system was proposed and a prototype, called GroupAware, was designed and developed based on this architecture. GroupAware allows multiple users from distributed locations to simultaneously view and annotate text documents, and create graphic designs in a shared workspace. Documents are represented as visual objects that can be manipulated through touch gestures. Group coordination and awareness is maintained through document updates via immediate workspace synchronization, user action tracking via user labels and user availability identification via basic proxemic interaction. Members can effectively communicate via audio and video conferencing. A user study was conducted to evaluate GroupAware and determine whether NUI interaction techniques effectively supported SDCW. Ten groups of three members each participated in the study. High levels of performance, user satisfaction and collaboration demonstrated that GroupAware was an effective groupware system that was easy to learn and use, and effectively supported group work in terms of communication, coordination and information sharing. Participants gave highly positive comments about the system that further supported the results. The successful implementation of GroupAware and the positive results obtained from the user evaluation provides evidence that NUI interaction techniques can effectively support SDCW.

Bioeconomy strategies in high income societies focus at replacing finite, fossil resources by renewable, biological resources to reconcile macro-economic concerns with climate constraints. However, the current bioeconomy is associated with critical levels of environmental degradation. As a potential increase in biological resource use may further threaten the capacity of ecosystems to fulfil human needs, it remains unclear whether bioeconomy transitions in high income countries are sustainable. In order to fill a gap in bioeconomy sustainability assessments, we apply an ontological lens of coupled social-ecological systems to explore critical mechanisms in relation to bioeconomy activities in the global resource system. This contributes to a social-ecological systems (SES)-based understanding of sustainability from a high income country perspective: the capacity of humans to satisfy their needs with strategies that reduce current levels of pressures and impacts on ecosystems. Building on this notion of agency, we develop a framework prototype that captures the systemic relation between individual human needs and collective social outcomes on the one hand (microlevel) and social-ecological impacts in the global resource system on the other hand (macro-level). The BIO-SES framework emphasizes the role of responsible consumption (for physical health), responsible production (to reduce stressors on the environment), and the role of autonomy and selforganisation (to protect the reproduction capacity of social-ecological systems). In particular, the BIO-SES framework can support (1) individual and collective agency in high income country contexts to reduce global resource use and related ecosystem impacts with a bioeconomy strategy, (2) aligning social outcomes, monitoring efforts and governance structures with place-based efforts to achieve the SDGs, as well as (3), advancing the evidence base and social-ecological theory on responsible bioeconomy transitions in the limited biosphere.

Measurement of visual quality is crucial for various image and video processing applications.

The goal of objective image quality assessment is to introduce a computational quality metric that can predict image or video quality. Many methods have been proposed in the past decades. Traditionally, measurements convert the spatial data into some other feature domains, such as the Fourier domain, and detect the similarity, such as mean square distance or Minkowsky distance, between the test data and the reference or perfect data, however only limited success has been achieved. None of the complicated metrics show any great advantage over other existing metrics.

The common idea shared among many proposed objective quality metrics is that human visual error sensitivities vary in different spatial and temporal frequency and directional channels. In this thesis, image quality assessment is approached by proposing a novel framework to compute the lost information in each channel not the similarities as used in previous methods. Based on natural scene statistics and several image models, an information theoretic framework is designed to compute the perceptual information contained in images and evaluate image quality in the form of entropy.

The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter I give a general introduction about previous work in this research area and a brief description of the human visual system. In Chapter II statistical models for natural scenes are reviewed. Chapter III proposes the core ideas about the computation of the perceptual information contained in the images. In Chapter IV, information theoretic criteria for image quality assessment are defined. Chapter V presents the simulation results in detail. In the last chapter, future direction and improvements of this research are discussed.

Motor impaired people are faced with many challenges, one being the of lack integration into certain spheres of society. Access to information is seen as a major issue for the motor impaired since most forms of interaction or interactive devices are not suited to the needs of motor impaired people. People with motor impairments, like the rest of the population, are increasingly using mobile phones. As a result of the current devices and methods used for interaction with content on mobile phones, various factors prohibit a pleasant experience for users with motor impairments. To counter these factors, this study recognizes the need to implement better suited methods of interaction and navigation to improve accessibility, usability and user experience for motor impaired users. The objective of the study was to gain an understanding of the nature of motor impairments and the challenges that this group of people face when using mobile phones. Once this was determined, a solution to address this problem was found in the form of natural user interfaces. In order to gain a better understanding of this technology, various forms of NUIs and the benefits thereof were studied by the researcher in order to determine how this technology can be implemented to meet the needs of motor impaired people. To test theory, the Samsung Galaxy s5 was selected as the NUI device for the study. It must be noted that this study started in the year 2013 and the Galaxy S5 was the latest device claiming to improve interaction for disabled people at the time. This device was used in a case study that made use of various data collection methods, including participant interviews. Various motor impaired participants were requested to perform predefined tasks on the device, along with the completion of a set of user experience questionnaires. Based on the results of the study, it was found that interaction with mobile phones is an issue for people with motor impairments and that alternative methods of interaction need to be implemented. These results contributed to the final output of this study, namely a set of user experience guidelines for the design of mobile human computer interaction for motor impaired users.

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Ciências do Ambiente, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia.
A conservação da biodiversidade, o desenvolvimento e a ciência modernos tiveram um impacto profundo nos sistemas humanos e naturais acoplados e na sua gestão. Os desafios que hoje se colocam a este nível em regiões moldadas no longo prazo pela presença humana, como é o caso do Mediterrâneo, são exemplo evidente das limitações criadas pela dicotomização entre economia e ecologia, humanos e natureza, conhecimento leigo e científico, práticas institucionais formais e locais informais e perspectivas tecnocráticas ou sociais; resultantes daquelas tendências. O presente trabalho foi ancorado num tema de estudo que evidencia tais tensões: o processo de implementação da Rede Natura 2000, que se dedica à conservação da biodiversidade na Europa e ao mesmo tempo prioriza a consideração de características rurais culturais e socioeconómicas. Neste contexto, desenvolveu-se um estudo de caso sobre as Ribeiras Mediterrânicas de Monfurado (RMM), que vão de encontro a esta descrição. Foram articuladas diferentes tradições científicas e tipos de conhecimento de modo a testar a hipótese de que desta forma seria possível: i) compreender os agregados humano-natureza existentes nas RMM e contribuir para a sua gestão; ii) compreender as relações sociais no longo prazo, especificamente a nível da conexão entre diferentes grupos de actores sociais ligados às RMM, caracterizando o seu diálogo. Desta forma, foi proposto e aplicado um enquadramento transdisciplinar orientado para a prática e inspirado nos pensamentos coevolutivo e de investigação-acção utópica crítica. Para analisar as RMM, foram combinadas metodologias das ciências naturais e sociais, que variam desde biomonitorização à aplicação de um índice de integridade biótica, à análise interpretativa de entrevistas e à revisão histórica. A caracterização das ribeiras e da relação humano-natureza nelas existente contribuiu ao nível da gestão e da compreensão dos sistemas sócio-ecológicos das RMM. A importância da herança histórica de características sociais no longo prazo (como se mostrou ser o caso da desigualdade social) e de episódios históricos políticos específicos para as relações sociais actuais, e consequentemente para os programas de conservação, foi ainda assinalada. Os resultados também permitiram explorar e fundar perspectivas de melhoria futura do diálogo entre grupos sociais e da gestão de recursos naturais, adoptando-se uma postura de abertura perante a mudança sócio-ecológica e considerando-se o caso de estudo ‘inacabado’. Os resultados obtidos permitiram verificar ainda a possibilidade de reduzir as fronteiras entre sectores disciplinares, tipos de conhecimento e na conceptualização da divisão ontológica humano-natureza; cuja combinação, como se ilustra, pode contribuir para a gestão de recursos naturais e, mais importante, pode potenciar conhecimento e experiências acumuladas. Finalmente, colocou-se o caso de estudo nos contextos global e de longo prazo, ampliando o significado das relações humano-natureza e sociais tratadas; e gerando uma discussão sobre paradigmas de desenvolvimento e sistema mundial, sobre mudança e sua relação com utopia e experiências biográficas, sobre o potencial coevolutivo, sobre os significados de natureza e sobre a significância da capacidade humana de aspirar, pensar e agir.

Heterologous immunity is a mechanism by which immunological memory within an individual, developed in response to a previous infection, plays a role in the immune response to a subsequent unrelated infection. In murine studies, heterologous immunity facilitated by cross-reactive CD8 T-cell responses can mediate either beneficial (protective immunity) or detrimental effects (e.g. enhanced lung and adipose immunopathology and enhanced viral titers) (Selin et al., 1998; Chen et al., 2001; Welsh and Selin, 2002; Nie et al., 2010; Welsh et al., 2010). Protective heterologous immunity results in enhanced clearance of virus during a subsequent infection with an unrelated pathogen. Such is the case when mice are immunized with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) and subsequently challenged with Pichinde virus (PV) or vaccinia virus (VACV) (Selin et al., 1998). However, heterologous immunity may also mediate enhanced immunopathology as mice immunized with influenza A virus (IAV) and challenged with LCMV show increased viral titers and enhanced lung immunopathology (Chen et al., 2003). The role heterologous immunity plays during infection is not limited to the murine system. In fact, there have now been several reports of enhanced immunopathology due to heterologous immunity during human infections, involving viruses such as IAV, Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and dengue virus (DENV) (Mathew et al., 1998; Wedemeyer et al., 2001; Acierno et al., 2003; Nilges et al., 2003; Clute et al., 2005; Urbani et al., 2005). Interestingly, in all reported cases in humans, heterologous immunity mediated enhanced immunopathology. Upon infection with EBV the clinical presentation can range from asymptomatic to severe, occasionally fatal, acute infectious mononucleosis (AIM) (Crawford et al., 2006b; Luzuriaga and Sullivan, 2010) which is marked by a massive CD8 lymphocytosis. This lympho-proliferative effect in AIM was shown to be partially mediated by reactivation of cross-reactive IAV-M1 58-66 (IAV-GIL) specific CD8 memory T-cells in HLA-A2 patients reacting to the EBV-BMLF1 280 (EBV-GLC) epitope (Clute et al., 2005). Interestingly, EBV infects ~90% of individuals globally by the third decade of life, establishing a life-long infection (Henle et al., 1969). However, it is unknown why 5-10% of adults remain EBV-sero-negative (EBV-SN), despite the fact that the virus infects the vast majority of the population and is actively shed at high titers even during chronic infection (Hadinoto et al., 2009). Here, we show that EBV-SN HLA-A2+ adults possess cross-reactive IAV-GIL/EBV-GLC memory CD8 T-cells that show highly unique properties. These IAV-GIL cross-reactive memory CD8 T-cells preferentially expand and produce cytokines to EBV antigens at high functional avidity. Additionally, they are capable of lysing EBV-infected targets and show the potential to enter the mucosal epithelial tissue, where infection is thought to initiate, by CD103 expression. This protective capacity of these cross-reactive memory CD8 T-cells may be explained by a unique T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire that differs by both organization and CDR3 usage from that in EBV-seropositive (EBV-SP) donors. The composition of the CD8 T-cell repertoire is a dynamic process that begins during the stochastic positive selection of the T-cell pool during development in the thymus. Thus, upon egress to the periphery a naïve T-cell pool, or repertoire, is formed that is variable even between genetically identical individuals. This T-cell repertoire is not static, as each new infection leaves its mark on the repertoire once again by stochastically selecting and expanding best-fit effectors and memory populations to battle each new infection while at the same time deleting older memory CD8 T-cells to make room for the new memory cells (Selin et al., 1999). These events induce an altered repertoire that is unique to each individual at each infection. It is this dynamic and variable organization of the T-cell repertoire that leads to private specificity even between genetically identical individuals upon infection with the same pathogens and thus a different fate (Kim et al., 2005; Cornberg et al., 2006a; Nie et al., 2010). It is this private specificity of the TCR repertoire that helps explain why individuals with the same epitope specific cross-reactive response, but composed of different cross-reactive T-cell clones, can either develop AIM or never become infected with EBV. Our results suggest that heterologous immunity may protect EBV-SN adults against the establishment of productive EBV infection, and potentially be the first demonstration of protective T-cell heterologous immunity between unrelated pathogens in humans. Our results also suggest that CD8 T-cell immunity can be sterilizing and that an individual’s TCR repertoire ultimately determines their fate during infection. To conclusively show that heterologous immunity is actively protecting EBV-SN adults from the establishment of a productive EBV infection, one would have to deliberately expose an individual to the virus. Clearly, this is not an acceptable risk, and it could endanger the health of an individual. A humanized mouse model could allow one to address this question. However, before we can even attempt to address the question of heterologous immunity mediating protection from EBV infection in humanized mice, we must first determine whether these mice can be infected with, and build an immune response to the two viruses we are studying, EBV and IAV. We show here that these mice can indeed be infected with and also mount an immune response to EBV. Additionally, these mice can also be infected with IAV. However, at this time the immune responses that are made to these viruses in our established humanized mouse model are not substantial enough to fully mimic a human immune response capable of testing our hypothesis of heterologous immunity mediating protection from EBV infection. Although the immune response in these mice to EBV and IAV infection is not suitable for the testing of our model the data are promising, as the humanized mouse model is constantly improving. Hopefully, with constant improvements being made there will be a model that will duplicate a human immune system in its entirety. This thesis will be divided into 5 major chapters. The first chapter will provide an introduction to both general T-cell biology and also to the role of heterologous immunity in viral infection. The second chapter will provide the details of the experimental procedures that were performed to test our hypothesis. The third chapter will describe the main scientific investigation of the role of heterologous immunity in providing natural resistance to infection in human subjects. This chapter will also consist of the data that will be compiled into a manuscript for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The fourth chapter will consist of work performed pertaining to the establishment of a humanized mouse model of EBV and IAV infection. The establishment of this model is important for us to be able to show causation for protection from EBV infection mediated by heterologous immunity.

Using references in language is a major part of communication, and understanding them is not a challenge for humans. Recent years have seen increased usage of dialog systems that interact with humans in natural language to assist them in various tasks, but even the most sophisticated systems still struggle with understanding references. In this thesis, we adapt a coreference resolution system for usage in dialog systems and try to understand what is needed for an efficient understanding of references in dialog systems. We annotate a portion of logs from a customer service system and perform an analysis of the most common coreferring expressions appearing in this type of data. This analysis shows that most coreferring expressions are nominal and pronominal, and they usually appear within two sentences of each other. We implement Stanford's Multi-Pass Sieve with some adaptations and dialog-specific changes and integrate it into a dialog system framework. The preprocessing pipeline makes use of already existing NLP-tools, while some new ones are added, such as a chunker, a head-finding algorithm and a NER-like system. To analyze both user input and output of the system, we deploy two separate coreference resolution systems that interact with each other. An evaluation is performed on the system and its separate parts in five most common evaluation metrics. The system does not achieve state-of-the art numbers, but because of its domain-specific nature that is expected. Some parts of the system do not have any effect on the performance, while the dialog-specific changes contribute to it greatly. An error analysis is concluded and reveals some problems with the implementation, but more importantly, it shows how the system could be further improved by using other types of knowledge and dialog-specific features.

A key challenge of the Anthropocene is to advance human development without undermining critical ecosystem services. Central to this challenge is a better understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, which interact in dynamic and complex social-ecological systems. These relationships have been the focus of much work in the past decades, however more remains to be done to comprehensively identify and quantify them, especially at larger scales. In this thesis, a social-ecological systems approach is adopted to investigate connections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being in South Africa. The country’s high levels of biological and socio-economic diversity, as well as its emerging economy make South Africa an interesting case for exploring these connections. Using data from a variety of public sources, and at different sub-national scales, the thesis first identifies and analyses a variety of bundles of ecosystem service use. Based on these bundles, three social-ecological system archetypes were identified and mapped in South Africa, namely the green-loop (high overall use of local ecosystem services), transition, and red-loop (low overall use of local ecosystem services) systems. Further analysis explored the social and ecological drivers of these patterns, and found the distribution of systems mainly influenced by social factors including household income, gender of the household head, and land tenure. Second, this thesis uses human well-being indicators to construct, analyse and map multi-dimensional human well-being bundles. These bundles were found to spatially cluster across the landscape, and were analysed for congruence with the ecosystem service use bundles. Discrepancies in the expected overlap of ecosystem service use and human well-being were highlighted and concur with findings elsewhere and the ongoing debate in the literature on the impacts of time-lags, indicator choice and scale of these interactions. Third, biodiversity in South Africa was analysed by employing an indicator of biodiversity intactness (BII) at the population level. The BII was found to have declined by 18.3% since pre-industrial times. Biodiversity loss was linked to the potential supply of ecosystem services, as well as human well-being patterns. A potential threshold at 40% biodiversity loss was detected, beyond which population abundances decline sharply. Finally, the thesis examines multiple perspectives on ecosystem services in sustainability research, including the social-ecological systems perspective, and discusses the complementarity of the different perspectives in furthering a deeper understanding of the connections between people and ecosystems. The social-ecological systems perspective employed throughout the empirical work presented in this thesis contributed towards cross-cutting insights, the testing of new kinds of data and the development of new approaches, all of which represent important steps towards unravelling the connections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, and contributing to the key Anthropocene challenge of sustainable development.

At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.

The field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has suggested various methods for evaluating systems in order to improve their usability and User eXperience (UX). The advent of Web 2.0 has allowed the development of applications marked by collaboration, communication and interaction among their users in a way and on a scale never seen before. Social Systems (SS) (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc.) are examples of such applications and have features such as: frequent exchange of messages, spontaneity and expression of feelings. The opportunities and challenges posed by these types of applications require the traditional evaluation methods to be reassessed, taking into consideration these new characteristics. For instance, the postings of users on SS reveal their opinions on various issues, including on what they think of the system. This work aims to test the hypothesis that the postings of users in SS provide relevant data for evaluation of the usability and of UX in SS. While researching through literature, we have not identified any evaluation model intending to collect and interpret texts from users in order to assess the user experience and system usability. Thus, this thesis proposes MALTU - Model for evaluation of interaction in social systems from the Users Textual Language. In order to provide a basis for the development of the proposed model, we conducted a study of how users express their opinions on the system in natural language. We extracted postings of users from four SS of different contexts. HCI experts classified, studied and processed such postings by using Natural Language Processing (PLN) techniques and data mining, and then analyzed them in order to obtain a generic model. The MALTU was applied in two SS: an entertainment and an educational SS. The results show that is possible to evaluate a system from the postings of users in SS. Such assessments are aided by extraction patterns related to the use, to the types of postings and to HCI factors used in system.
A Ãrea de InteraÃÃo Humano-Computador (IHC) tem sugerido muitas formas para avaliar sistemas a fim de melhorar sua usabilidade e a eXperiÃncia do UsuÃrio (UX). O surgimento da web 2.0 permitiu o desenvolvimento de aplicaÃÃes marcadas pela colaboraÃÃo, comunicaÃÃo e interatividade entre seus usuÃrios de uma forma e em uma escala nunca antes observadas. Sistemas Sociais (SS) (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc.) sÃo exemplos dessas aplicaÃÃes e possuem caracterÃsticas como: frequente troca de mensagens e expressÃo de sentimentos de forma espontÃnea. As oportunidades e os desafios trazidos por esses tipos de aplicaÃÃes exigem que os mÃtodos tradicionais de avaliaÃÃo sejam repensados, considerando essas novas caracterÃsticas. Por exemplo, as postagens dos usuÃrios em SS revelam suas opiniÃes sobre diversos assuntos, inclusive sobre o que eles pensam do sistema em uso. Esta tese procura testar a hipÃtese de que as postagens dos usuÃrios em SS fornecem dados relevantes para avaliaÃÃo da Usabilidade e da UX (UUX) em SS. Durante as pesquisas realizadas na literatura, nÃo foi identificado nenhum modelo de avaliaÃÃo que tenha direcionado seu foco na coleta e anÃlise das postagens dos usuÃrios a fim de avaliar a UUX de um sistema em uso. Sendo assim, este estudo propÃe o MALTU â Modelo para AvaliaÃÃo da interaÃÃo em sistemas sociais a partir da Linguagem Textual do UsuÃrio. A fim de fornecer bases para o desenvolvimento do modelo proposto, foram realizados estudos de como os usuÃrios expressam suas opiniÃes sobre o sistema em lÃngua natural. Foram extraÃdas postagens de usuÃrios de quatro SS de contextos distintos. Tais postagens foram classificadas por especialistas de IHC, estudadas e processadas utilizando tÃcnicas de Processamento da Linguagem Natural (PLN) e mineraÃÃo de dados e, analisadas a fim da obtenÃÃo de um modelo genÃrico. O MALTU foi aplicado em dois SS: um de entretenimento e um SS educativo. Os resultados mostram que à possÃvel avaliar um sistema a partir das postagens dos usuÃrios em SS. Tais avaliaÃÃes sÃo auxiliadas por padrÃes de extraÃÃo relacionados ao uso, aos tipos de postagens e Ãs metas de IHC utilizadas na avaliaÃÃo do sistema.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) form part of a range of virtual characters whose intended purpose include engaging in natural conversations with human users. While works in literature are ripe with descriptions of attempts at producing viable ECA architectures, few authors have addressed the role of episodic memory models in conversational agents. This form of memory, which provides a sense of autobiographic record-keeping in humans, has only recently been peripherally integrated into dialog management tools for ECAs. In our work, we propose to take a closer look at the shared characteristics of episodic memory models in recent examples from the field. Additionally, we propose several enhancements to these existing models through a unified episodic memory model for ECAÂ s. As part of our research into episodic memory models, we present a process for determining the prevalent contexts in the conversations obtained from the aforementioned interactions. The process presented demonstrates the use of statistical and machine learning services, as well as Natural Language Processing techniques to extract relevant snippets from conversations. Finally, mechanisms to store, retrieve, and recall episodes from previous conversations are discussed. A primary contribution of this research is in the context of contemporary memory models for conversational agents and cognitive architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at providing a comparative summary of existing works. As implementations of ECAs become more complex and encompass more realistic conversation engines, we expect that episodic memory models will continue to evolve and further enhance the naturalness of conversations.
M.S.Cp.E.
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Engineering MSCpE

Le contrôle du paludisme ne semble aujourd'hui envisageable que par stratégies combinées ciblant différents stades du parasite. Chez le vecteur, certains mécanismes de la réponse immunitaire pourraient être manipulés pour bloquer le développement sporogonique du parasite. Cette thèse examine les effets de la diversité du vecteur et du parasite dans le couple le plus important en termes d'épidémiologie, A. gambiae - P. falciparum. Des polymorphismes de gènes de l'immunité du moustique contrôlant le niveau d'infection ont été identifiés par étude d'association. Certains d'entre eux ont un effet spécifique selon les isolats de parasites, suggérant de potentielles interactions génotype X génotype. Nous avons déterminé un déséquilibre de liaison très bas dans les populations naturelles de vecteurs, validant notre approche par gènes candidats. Les caractéristiques et les forces évolutives faisant d'A. gambiae un vecteur du paludisme majeur sont discutées. Les diverses populations de vecteurs et parasites peuvent interagir de manière spécifique. Pour tester cela, des infections par des isolats de parasites sympatriques et allopatriques ont été comparées, montrant des intensités plus faibles dans les couples sympatriques. Les profils d'expression des gènes montrent cependant peu de régulations spécifiques aux populations, mais plutôt des différences extrêmes selon les isolats de parasites. Ces résultats suggèrent des effets importants de la diversité entre populations et individus. En conclusion, cette thèse souligne l'importance de la prise en compte de la diversité naturelle des vecteurs et parasites dans les recherches futures sur leurs interactions
To achieve malaria control a variety of approaches must be combined targeting different stages of the parasites life cycle. With better understanding of mosquito immunity, it is hoped that aspects of natural resistance can be manipulated to prevent parasite development. This thesis investigates the effect of both mosquito and parasite diversity on the mosquitoes response to malaria using the most important human malaria system; Anopheles gambiae-Plasmodium falciparum in natural/semi-natural conditions. Mosquito loci are identified that significantly control infection phenotype, some of which act in a parasite isolate specific manner, highlighting their potential involvement in genotype by genotype interactions. Such research is moving towards genomewide studies; however, on finding very low linkage disequilibrium in wild mosquitoes, it favors candidate gene association studies. A. gambiae characteristics that make it such a good malaria vector are discussed and the evolutionary forces driving these traits. Selection behind vector-parasite interactions can differ spatially and temporally causing specificities in sympatric couples. Sympatric and allopatric mosquito infections with malaria are compared, showing that sympatric infections develop lower infection intensities suggesting local adaptation. Mosquito gene expression profiles highlight a small number of genes differentially regulated between sympatric and allopatric infections, however extreme differences in gene regulation are observed within populations, probably driven by the variable nature of malaria parasites. This thesis highlights the importance of taking into account natural diversity in future research

Language is the principal medium for ideas, while dialogue is the most natural and effective way for humans to interact with and access information from machines. Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact on usability and perceived quality. Many commonly used NLG systems employ rules and heuristics, which tend to generate inflexible and stylised responses without the natural variation of human language. However, the frequent repetition of identical output forms can quickly make dialogue become tedious for most real-world users. Additionally, these rules and heuristics are not scalable and hence not trivially extensible to other domains or languages. A statistical approach to language generation can learn language decisions directly from data without relying on hand-coded rules or heuristics, which brings scalability and flexibility to NLG. Statistical models also provide an opportunity to learn in-domain human colloquialisms and cross-domain model adaptations. A robust and quasi-supervised NLG model is proposed in this thesis. The model leverages a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based surface realiser and a gating mechanism applied to input semantics. The model is motivated by the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. The RNN-based surface realiser and gating mechanism use a neural network to learn end-to-end language generation decisions from input dialogue act and sentence pairs; it also integrates sentence planning and surface realisation into a single optimisation problem. The single optimisation not only bypasses the costly intermediate linguistic annotations but also generates more natural and human-like responses. Furthermore, a domain adaptation study shows that the proposed model can be readily adapted and extended to new dialogue domains via a proposed recipe. Continuing the success of end-to-end learning, the second part of the thesis speculates on building an end-to-end dialogue system by framing it as a conditional generation problem. The proposed model encapsulates a belief tracker with a minimal state representation and a generator that takes the dialogue context to produce responses. These features suggest comprehension and fast learning. The proposed model is capable of understanding requests and accomplishing tasks after training on only a few hundred human-human dialogues. A complementary Wizard-of-Oz data collection method is also introduced to facilitate the collection of human-human conversations from online workers. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can talk to human judges naturally, without any difficulty, for a sample application domain. In addition, the results also suggest that the introduction of a stochastic latent variable can help the system model intrinsic variation in communicative intention much better.

Maintaining cognitive health is often a pressing concern for aging adults, and given the world's shifting age demographics, it is impractical to assume that older adults will be able to rely on individualized human support for doing so. Recently, interest has turned toward technology as an alternative. Companion robots offer an attractive vehicle for facilitating cognitive exercise, but the language technologies guiding their interactions are still nascent; in elder-focused human-robot systems proposed to date, interactions have been limited to motion or buttons and canned speech. The incapacity of these systems to autonomously participate in conversational discourse limits their ability to engage users at a cognitively meaningful level. I addressed this limitation by developing a platform for human-robot book discussions, designed to promote cognitive exercise by encouraging users to consider the authors' underlying intentions in employing creative metaphors. The choice of book discussions as the backdrop for these conversations has an empirical basis in neuro- and social science research that has found that reading often, even in late adulthood, has been correlated with a decreased likelihood to exhibit symptoms of cognitive decline. The more targeted focus on novel metaphors within those conversations stems from prior work showing that processing novel metaphors is a cognitively challenging task, for young adults and even more so in older adults with and without dementia. A central contribution arising from the work was the creation of the first computational method for modelling metaphor novelty in word pairs. I show that the method outperforms baseline strategies as well as a standard metaphor detection approach, and additionally discover that incorporating a sentence-based classifier as a preliminary filtering step when applying the model to new books results in a better final set of scored word pairs. I trained and evaluated my methods using new, large corpora from two sources, and release those corpora to the research community. In developing the corpora, an additional contribution was the discovery that training a supervised regression model to automatically aggregate the crowdsourced annotations outperformed existing label aggregation strategies. Finally, I show that automatically-generated questions adhering to the Questioning the Author strategy are comparable to human-generated questions in terms of naturalness, sensibility, and question depth; the automatically-generated questions score slightly higher than human-generated questions in terms of clarity. I close by presenting findings from a usability evaluation in which users engaged in thirty-minute book discussions with a robot using the platform, showing that users find the platform to be likeable and engaging.

There are three main purposes for this thesis; the first is to distinguish the possible violations that can occur in time of natural disasters. The second is to analyze if there is a correlation between political systems and how the effected country handles the aftermath of a natural disaster. The third purpose is to determine the role of the global community and what responsibility lies with them. The issue is often that the aid becomes the main object for discussion and analysis, but the focus rarely shifts to the effected State. Therefore the focus in this essay is the political system and how they cope with the human rights violations that can occur in a time of natural disaster. The questions are; what human rights are at risk of being violated during a natural disaster? What general impact do the different political systems have on how they handle the human rights violations that arises? In which ways can other countries assist in a natural disaster and what responsibility do the global communities have?To be able to discuss human rights, it is necessary to know one perspective of how they came to be. For this purpose, this thesis will explain human rights from the perspectives of Jack Donnelly and Ronald Dworkin. They speak about rights and obligations; Donnelly means to say that all rights are universal and Dworkin put rights in a perspective of equal respect and concern. Some of the rights violated in the aftermath of the natural disaster were the right to a family life, the right to personal security and the right to ones property. When analyzing the political systems and the responsibility of the world in the consequences of a natural disaster, I applied Ulla Erikson-Zeterqvists explanation of early institutional theory that implies tree conditions that make an organization successful. The first condition is where the administrative control lays, second the commitment of grassroots organizations and third, the participation of the local community. In this analysis the conclusion is that the political system is not the main factor in upholding human rights. The main factor is the stability of the State and what the State is willing to do for its citizens. The stability of the States determines the standard for what human rights mean and how the aid is structured. If the State is corrupted it makes it harder for the global community to assist. The countries history affects their behavior and in a time of crisis, the States true commitment is shown.

Drivers of environmental change in one location can have profound effects on ecosystem services and human well-being in distant locations, often across international borders. The telecoupling provides a conceptual framework for describing these interactions-for example, locations can be defined as sending areas (sources of flows of ecosystem services, energy, or information) or receiving areas (recipients of flows). However, the ability to quantify feedbacks between ecosystem change in one area and societal benefits in other areas requires analytical approaches. We use spatial subsidies-an approach developed to measure the degree to which a migratory species' ability to provide services in one location depends on habitat in another location-as an example of how telecoupling can be operationalized. Using the cotton pest control and ecotourism services of Mexican free-tailed bats as an example, we determined that of the 16 states in the United States and Mexico where the species resides, three states (Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado) are receiving areas, while the rest of the states are sending areas. In addition, the magnitude of spatial subsidy can be used as an indicator of the degree to which different locations are telecoupled to other locations. In this example, the Mexican free-tailed bat ecosystem services to cotton production and ecotourism in Texas and New Mexico are heavily dependent on winter habitat in four states in central and southern Mexico. In sum, spatial subsidies can be used to operationalize the telecoupling conceptual framework by identifying sending and receiving areas, and by indicating the degree to which locations are telecoupled to other locations.

Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the Kinect, oh my! With so many devices available to the average consumer, the limitations and pitfalls of each interface are becoming more apparent. Swimming in devices, users often have to stop and think about how to interact with each device to accomplish the current tasks at hand. The goal of this thesis is to minimize user cognitive effort in handling multiple devices by creating a context aware hybrid interface. The context aware system will be explored through the hybridization of gesture and touch interfaces using a multi-touch coffee table and the next-generation Microsoft Kinect. Coupling gesture and touch interfaces creates a novel multimodal interface that can leverage the benefits of both gestures and touch. The hybrid interface is able to utilize the more intuitive and dynamic use of gestures, while maintaining the precision of a tactile touch interface. Joining these two interfaces in an intuitive and context aware way will open up a new avenue for design and innovation.

Esta tese aborda o problema de entender videos digitais algoritmicamente aplicado ao design de sistemas de Interação Homem-Computador (HCI do Inglês: Human-Computer Interaction) baseados na postura e movimento da mão. Tais sistemas são frequentemente referidos como um tipo de Interface Perceptual com o usuário (PUI do Inglês: Perceptual User Interface), que é uma interface que habilita o computador a detectar e reconhecer ações dos usuários de forma ativa. Acredita-se que PUI é um paradigma que irá suplementar o padrão atual, as Interfaces Gráficas com o Usuário (GUI do Inglês: Graphical User Interfaces), que são baseadas em mouses e teclados para entrada do usuário. A principal motivação da pesquisa feita em HCI por gestos manuais é habilitar as pessoas a interagir de uma forma mais natural com dispositivos computacionais, por exemplo, ao permitir que usuários manipulem programas, arquivos e pastas de computador de uma forma similar ao manuseio de objetos físicos familiares. Neste trabalho é proposto um ferramental para rastreamento da mão --posição e rotação no plano-- assim como para reconhecimento de postura da mão a partir dos contornos da mão. Uma nova abordagem de processamento de pixels baseada em aprendizagem de máquina forma o bloco fundamental para um método level set de extração de contornos, tão bem como para um módulo de mensuração do rastreador, que é formulado como um problema de filtragem em espaço de estados onde a dinâmica do sistema é modelada com sistemas lineares com saltos markovianos. Baixas taxas de erro de classificação de postura são alcançadas com o uso de um descritor de formas baseados em medidas invariantes de momentos bidimensionais.

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemática
Service robots operate in the same environment as humans and perform actions that a human usually performs. These robots must be able to operate autonomously in unknown and dynamic environments, as well as to maneuver with several people and know how to deal with them. By complying with these requirements, they are able to successfully address humans and fulfill their requests whenever they need assistance in a certain task. Natural language communication, including speech that is the most natural way of communication between humans, becomes relevant in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). By endowing service robots with intuitive spoken interfaces, the specification of the human required tasks is facilitated. However, this is a complicated task to achieve due to the resources involved in creating a sufficiently intuitive spoken interface and because of the difficulty of deploying it in different robots. The main objective of this thesis is the definition, implementation and evaluation of a dialogue system that can be easily integrated into any robotic platform and that functions as a flexible base for the creation of any conversational scenario in the Portuguese language. The system must meet the basic requirements for intuitive and natural communications, namely the characteristics of human-human conversations. A system was developed that functions as a base to give continuity to future work on Spoken Dialog Systems. The system incorporates the client-server architecture, where the client runs on the robot and captures what the user says. The client takes advantage on external dialogue management services. They are executed by the server, which processes the audio obtained, returning an appropriate response given the context of the dialogue. The development was based on a critical analysis of the state of the art in order for the system to be as faithful as possible to what is already done. Through the evaluation phase of the system, it was managed to obtain by few volunteers the conclusion that the main objective was accomplished: a base system was created that is flexible enough to explore different contexts of conversation, such as interacting with children or providing information on a university environment.
Os robôs de serviço operam no mesmo ambiente dos humanos e executam ações que um humano normalmente executaria. Estes robôs devem ser capazes de operar de forma autónoma em ambientes desconhecidos e dinâmicos, assim como de manobrar em ambientes com várias pessoas e de saberem lidar com elas. Ao respeitarem estes requisitos, conseguirão abordar com sucesso os humanos e cumprir as suas solicitações sempre que estes precisem de assistência em alguma tarefa. A comunicação por linguagem natural, nomeadamente a fala que é a forma mais abrangente de comunicação entre humanos, torna-se relevante na área da Interação humano-robô (IHR). Ao dotar os robôs de serviço com sistemas de voz intuitivos facilita-se a especificação das tarefas a realizar. No entanto, é uma tarefa complicada de se realizar devido aos recursos envolvidos na criação de uma interação suficientemente intuitiva e devido à dificuldade de funcionar em diversos robôs. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é a definição, implementação e avaliação de um sistema de diálogo que seja de fácil integração em qualquer sistema robótico e que funcione como uma base flexível para qualquer cenário de conversação na língua Portuguesa. Deve obedecer a requisitos base de comunicação intuitiva e natural, nomeadamente a características de conversas entre humanos. Foi desenvolvido um sistema que funciona como uma base para dar continuidade a trabalho futuro em sistemas de diálogo. O sistema incorpora a arquitetura cliente-servidor onde o cliente é executado no robô e capta o que o utilizador diz. O cliente tira partido de serviços de gestão de diálogo externos ao robô, executados pelo servidor, que processa o áudio obtido, devolvendo uma resposta ao cliente adequada ao contexto do diálogo. O desenvolvimento foi baseado numa análise crítica do estado da arte para se tentar manter fiel ao que já foi feito e de forma a se tomarem as principais decisões durante a implementação. Mediante a fase de avaliação do sistema, tanto a nível do ponto de vista da interação como do programador, conseguiu-se obter por parte de alguns voluntários que o objetivo principal foi cumprido: foi criada uma base suficientemente flexível para explorar diferentes contextos de conversação, nomeadamente interagir com crianças ou fornecimento de informações em ambiente universitário.

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CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
Os Sistemas de Interação Multimodal possibilitam uma utilização mais amigável dos sistemas de computação. Eles permitem que os usuários recebam informações e indiquem suas necessidades com maior facilidade, amparados por recursos de interação cada vez mais diversos. Neste contexto, um elemento central é o diálogo que se estabelece entre os usuários e estes sistemas. Alguns dos desafios observados na área de Interação Multimodal estão ligados à integração dos diversos estímulos a serem tratados, enquanto outros estão ligados à geração de respostas adequadas a estes estímulos. O gerenciamento do diálogo nestes sistemas envolve atividades diversas associadas tanto com a representação dos assuntos tratados, como com a escolha de alternativas de resposta e com o tratamento de modelos que representam tarefas e usuários. A partir das diversas abordagens conhecidas para estas implementações, são observadas demandas de modelos de diálogo que aproximem os resultados das interações que são geradas pelos sistemas daquelas interações que seriam esperados em situações de interação em linguagem natural. Uma linha de atuação possível para a obtenção de melhorias neste aspecto pode estar ligada à utilização de estudos da psicologia cognitiva sobre a memória de trabalho e a integração de informações. Este trabalho apresenta os resultados obtidos com um modelo de tratamento de diálogo para sistemas de Interação Multimodal baseado em um modelo cognitivo, que visa proporcionar a geração de diálogos que se aproximem de situações de diálogo em linguagem natural. São apresentados os estudos que embasaram esta proposta e a sua justificativa para uso no modelo descrito. Também são demonstrados resultados preliminares obtidos com o uso de protótipos para a validação do modelo. As avaliações realizadas demonstram um bom potencial para o modelo proposto.
Multimodal interaction systems allow a friendly use of computing systems. They allow users to receive information and indicate their needs with ease, supported by new interaction resources. In this context, the central element is the dialogue, established between users and these systems. The dialogue management of these systems involves various activities associated with the representation of subjects treated, possible answers, tasks model and users model treatment. In implementations for these approaches, some demands can be observed to approximate the results of the interactions by these systems of interaction in natural language. One possible line of action to obtain improvements in this aspect can be associated to the use of cognitive psychology studies on working memory and information integration. This work presents results obtained with a model of memory handling for multimodal dialogue interaction based on a cognitive model, which aims to provide conditions for dialogue generation closer to situations in natural language dialogs. This research presents studies that supported this proposal and the justification for the described model’s description. At the end, results using two prototypes for the model’s validation are also shown.

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This thesis addresses the problem of algorithmic understanding of digital video applied to the design of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems based on hand posture and motion. Such systems are often referred as a type of Perceptual User Interface (PUI), which is an interface that enables the computer to detect and recognize users' actions in an active way. PUI is believed to be a paradigm that is going to supplement the current standard Graphical User Interfaces(GUI), that are based on mice and keyboards for user input. The main motivation of the research done in hand-gesture HCI is to enable people to interact in a more natural way with computational devices, for example, by letting the users manipulate computer programs, files and folders in a way that resembles the handling of familiar physical objects. In this work a toolset is proposed for hand tracking -position and in-plane rotation- as well as posture recognition from hand contours. A novel approach to pixel-level processing based on machine learning forms the fundamental building block of a level set contour tracking method, as well as for the measurement module of the tracker, which is formulated as a filtering problem in state-spaces where the dynamics is modeled with Markov jumps linear systems. Low error rates are achieved for posture classification using a shape descriptor based on 2D moments invariant measures.
Esta tese aborda o problema de entender videos digitais algoritmicamente aplicado ao design de sistemas de Interação Homem-Computador (HCI do Inglês: Human-Computer Interaction) baseados na postura e movimento da mão. Tais sistemas são frequentemente referidos como um tipo de Interface Perceptual com o usuário (PUI do Inglês: Perceptual User Interface), que é uma interface que habilita o computador a detectar e reconhecer ações dos usuários de forma ativa. Acredita-se que PUI é um paradigma que irá suplementar o padrão atual, as Interfaces Gráficas com o Usuário (GUI do Inglês: Graphical User Interfaces), que são baseadas em mouses e teclados para entrada do usuário. A principal motivação da pesquisa feita em HCI por gestos manuais é habilitar as pessoas a interagir de uma forma mais natural com dispositivos computacionais, por exemplo, ao permitir que usuários manipulem programas, arquivos e pastas de computador de uma forma similar ao manuseio de objetos físicos familiares. Neste trabalho é proposto um ferramental para rastreamento da mão --posição e rotação no plano-- assim como para reconhecimento de postura da mão a partir dos contornos da mão. Uma nova abordagem de processamento de pixels baseada em aprendizagem de máquina forma o bloco fundamental para um método level set de extração de contornos, tão bem como para um módulo de mensuração do rastreador, que é formulado como um problema de filtragem em espaço de estados onde a dinâmica do sistema é modelada com sistemas lineares com saltos markovianos. Baixas taxas de erro de classificação de postura são alcançadas com o uso de um descritor de formas baseados em medidas invariantes de momentos bidimensionais.

En 2015, la FAO estimait qu’environ 795 millions de personnes sont sous-alimentées dans le monde. Les Nations Unies ont régulièrement qualifié cette situation « d’atteinte à la dignité humaine ». La coopération internationale est légitimement devenue dans ce contexte un moyen privilégié de lutter contre la malnutrition. Cependant, l’alimentation est au carrefour de nombreuses problématiques. Certains Etats sont soucieux d’affirmer leur autosuffisance alimentaire tandis que d’autres rencontrent des difficultés à gérer leurs surplus. Les enjeux de qualité sanitaire ou nutritionnelle côtoient les inquiétudes liées à la diminution accélérée de la diversité génétique. Face à ces préoccupations diverses, les aliments ont fait l’objet de nombreuses règles internationales. Certaines favorisent la libéralisation de leur production et de leur commerce, au détriment parfois d’une prise en compte du niveau de développement des pays, de la diversité biologique ou de la qualité des aliments. D’autres tiennent compte de ces questions mais leur articulation paraît délicate avec les règles de la libéralisation économique. Pourtant, les Etats ont érigé l’accès à l’alimentation comme un objectif mondial et la cohérence du droit international semble indispensable pour sa réalisation. La présente étude vise ainsi à déterminer dans quelle mesure le droit international, caractérisé par la fragmentation de ses règles, contribue à l’amélioration des conditions d’accès à une alimentation adéquate au niveau mondial
In 2015, FAO estimated that approximately 795 million people are undernourished in the world. The United Nations has regularly qualified this situation as “a violation of human dignity”. In this context, the international cooperation legitimately became a privileged means to fight against malnutrition. However, the access to food is at the crossroads of numerous problems. Some States are eager to assert their self-sufficiency while others meet difficulties managing their surpluses. Health or nutritional quality issues join concerns about the accelerated loss of genetic diversity. Responding to these various concerns, food has been the subject of many international rules. Some promote the liberalization of their production and trade, sometimes to the detriment of a consideration of the level of development of countries, of the biological diversity or the quality of food. Some take account of these issues but their coordination seems difficult with the rules of economic liberalization. Nevertheless, States set up the access to food as a global goal and the coherence of international law seems essential for its achievement. The present study aims to determine to what extent international law, characterized by the fragmentation of its rules, contributes to improving the conditions of access to adequate food at the world level

Šio magistro darbo užduotis – apžvelgti šiuo metu labiausiai naudojamas vartotojo sąsajas, kurios padeda žmogui sąveikauti su kompiuteriais ir kitais įrenginiais bei sąsajų architektūros būdus, kurie palengvina programų kūrimą. Taip pat išanalizuoti šiuo metu plačiausiai naudojamus metodus interneto paslaugoms įgyvendinti, kad būtų rastas sprendimas, kaip interaktyvios informacinės sistemos galėtų bendrauti tarpusavyje be apribojimų reikiamam funkcionalumui gauti pasirenkant geriausią būdą saugoti ir atvaizduoti reikiamus programos duomenis kuo paprastesniu ir lankstesniu būdu. Sukurti lygiagrečių tekstynų prototipą, kuris leistų matyti gautą rezultatą su galimybe kuo lengviau ir greičiau rasti bei koreguoti automatiškai sugeneruotus netikslumus, jei tokie yra, pritaikant sąsają, kuri būtų patogesnė ir reikalautų kuo mažiau darbo pastangų. Pasinaudojant prototipu atlikti tyrimą, kuris parodytų įvesties įrenginių naudojimo tendencijas. Darbą sudaro 8 dalys: įvadas, vartotojo sąsajų apžvalga, vartotojo sąsajos atskyrimas, interneto paslaugų analizė, XML duomenų bazės, vartotojo sąsajos kūrimas, išvados ir literatūros sąrašas. Darbo apimtis – 48 p. teksto be priedų, 25 paveikslai ir 2 lentelės. Atskirai pridedami 2 darbo priedai.
The purpose of this thesis is to review most currently used user interfaces that help people interact with computers and other equipment, and begin exploring new user interface paradigm, which allows humans to interact naturally with the computer. Furthermore, analyze the most widely used methods today for implementing web services, to find a solution how interactive information systems could communicate with each other without any restrictions to gain an overall result choosing the best way to store and display relevant data to the program simpler and more flexible way. Create an interactive parallel corpus development environment prototype for minimizing available errors, if they occur, from the generated parallel translation as easy as possible using as less human labor as possible. Using the prototype, perform a study that will show trends in the use of different interface input devices. The work consists of 8 parts: introduction, overview of user interfaces, user interface separation, web services analysis, XML databases, user interface development, conclusions and references. Thesis consists of: 48 pages of text without appendixes, 25 pictures and 2 tables. Two enclosures of the work are enclosed separately.

Många företag har idag intranät som misslyckas med att möta användarnas behov och det mest förekommande klagomålet är att användarna inte hittar vad de letar efter. Detta leder till att företagen tappar både tid och pengar på att ha personal som inte kan nyttja systemet på ett effektivt sätt, vilket ofta leder till dyra utbildningskostnader och produktivitetsförluster. Den främsta anledningen till att information inte hittas är att det saknas en konsekvent navigation som ger tydliga indikationer på vart användaren ska ta sig för att finna det den letar efter. Design och struktur i gränssnitt spelar även en stor roll för hur användarna förstår och tolkar gränssnitt och ett klassiskt tillvägagångsätt för designers är att utveckla utifrån datorparadigmets grafiska gränssnitt, vars bekymmer oftast är att de tenderar att bli visuellt giriga och minneskrävande. Idag sker även en stark utveckling av mobila enheter och hur dess gränssnitt kan optimeras för att underlätta för användaren till den mobila kontexten och de begränsningar det medför. För att göra detta bör designers utveckla naturliga interaktioner vilket ska främja den kognitiva belastningen. I denna studie undersöks därför hur designriktlinjer för naturliga interaktioner och mobilitet påverkar användbarheten och användarvänligheten för arbete i en stationär datormiljö. Studien har genomförts på uppdrag av CLX Networks som skapar lösningar för bland annat sms, röst och data. Uppdraget har inneburit att förbättra företagets intranäts meny som ansetts bristfällig av CLX. I denna studie genomfördes först ett användartest på CLXs befintliga intranäts meny samt fem stycken intervjuer med de som arbetar med support som använder systemet, inom huvudområdena hittbarhet, handlingsbarhet, användbarhet och mobil användarvänlighet. Vidare gjordes en struktureringsmetod för att låta informanterna själva visualisera en tänkt meny. Resultaten från den empiriska studien användes för att skapa en interaktiv prototyp. Designprinciper för hittbarhet, handlingsbarhet, användbarhet och naturliga interaktioner har nyttjats i skapandet av den nya menyn. Utifrån de undersökningar som har genomförts i denna studie har det framkommit att designprinciper för naturlig interaktion och mobilitet har en positiv inverkan på användarvänligheten gällande menyn i grafiska gränssnitt i en stationär datormiljö. Studien visar även att en kombination av de två synsätten, naturliga interaktioner och datorparadigmet underlättar användandet och den kognitiva belastning som tidigare var ett bekymmer för de anställda.
Today many companies have intranet failing to meet the users need and the most frequent complaint is that users do not find what they are looking for. This leads companies to lose both time and money on having employees that are unable to utilize the system in a sufficient manner, which often leads to expensive educational costs and loss of productivity. The primary reason that information is not found is that there is a lack of a consistent navigation tool that clearly indicates where the user should go to find what he/she is looking for. Design and structure in an interface plays a large role when it comes to how users understand and interpret an interface. However, the difficulty is that it tends to be visually disruptive and provide a cognitive load. Currently are a strong development of mobile devices taking place and questions are raised regarding how these interfaces can be optimized to make it easier for the user. Especially, when it comes to the mobile context and the limitations it causes. To make it easier are designers advised to develop natural interactions which are supposed to ease the cognitive load. This study therefore explores how design principles stemming from natural interactions, together with the mobility, affect the usability and ease of use for work in a desktop environment. The study has been conducted upon request of CLX Networks, a company that provide solutions for, among others, sms, voice and data. The assignment has entailed suggestions of improvements of the company’s intranet menu, which has been considered as inadequate by CLX. In this study, a user test of CLX’s current intranet menu was performed as well as five interviews with employees that work and use the system. The interviews concerned the topics of findability, actability, usability and mobile usability. Continuously was a card sorting performed to let the informants themselves visualize a proposed menu. The results from the empirical investigation were used to create an interactive prototype. Design principles from findability, actability, usability and natural interactions have been utilized in the creation of the new menu. Based on the investigations performed in this study is it possible to conclude that design principles from natural interactions and the mobility have a positive influence on ease of use concerning the menu in the graphical interface in a desktop environment. The study also confirms that a combination of the two viewpoints, natural interactions and desktop paradigm that facilitate the usage and cognitive load, which previously was troublesome for the employees.

Die weltweit steigende Nachfrage nach land-basierten Rohstoffen erhöht stetig den Druck auf Land und Landnutzung, vor allem in ressourcenreichen Frontierregionen. Eine gegenwärtige Erscheinungsform dessen stellen Transnationale Landnahmen dar, die den Landnutzungswandel vorantreiben und die landbasierte Lebensgrundlage insbesondere der ländlichen Bevölkerung in vielen Teilen der Welt massiv bedroht. Ziel dieser Doktorarbeit ist es, ein besseres Verständnis der komplexen Prozesse zu schaffen, die Landnahmen befördern. Erstens untersucht sie die rezente Konjunktur des Bananenanbaus in der Provinz Luang Namtha, Laos, die von Chinesischen Investoren getrieben wird. Zweitens zieht die Arbeit das telecoupling Konzept heran und unterzieht es einer kritischen Diskussion in Bezug auf seinen Mehrwert für die Analyse räumlich entkoppelter sozioökonomischer und ökologischer Wechselwirkungen. Eine mehrmonatige ethnographische Feldforschung und deren qualitative Analyse stellen die Grundlage dieser Arbeit dar. Ausgehend von zwei Bananenplantagen in einer kleinen ländlichen Gemeinde fokussiert die Arbeit die Mechanismen und Prozesse, die die Bananenexpansion befördern. Das telecoupling Konzept dient als Instrument, um zu analysieren, welchen Einfluss die multiplen und ko-konstitutiven Interaktionen auf den Vorstoß des Bananenanbaus haben. Darüber hinaus verdeutlichen die tiefgehenden lokalitätsbezogenen Analysen die verschiedenen Kontexte auf, die dieses Wechselspiel spezifisch lokal verorten und gestalten. Die Fallstudie zeigt auf, wie die räumlich entkoppelten Beziehungen durch ein grenzüberspannendes Netzwerk chinesischer Investoren mit sozialen Verbindungen in die Provinz hinein, sowie auf den (chinesischen) Obstmarkt vermittelt werden. Außerdem stellt die Studie heraus, dass die Strategien der Investoren zur Landgewinnung und der daraus resultierende verheerende Landnutzungswandel einer Entfremdung der Dorfbewohner_innen ‘vom Boden’ gleichkommen. Durch die empirische, methodologische sowie konzeptuelle Auseinandersetzung mit dem telecoupling Konzept verweist die Arbeit letztlich auf den Wert qualitativer Analysen für die schwer greifbaren, ‚immateriellen’ Interaktionen sowie mögliche Feedbackmechanismen, welche Landnutzungswandel in einer globalisierten Welt bestimmen.
The global demand for land resources has increased the pressures on land, especially in resource-rich frontier regions. Transnational land acquisitions constitute one of these pressures that currently shape land use change and threaten land access and land-based livelihoods in rural areas. This thesis contributes to create a better understanding of the complex processes involved in such land acquisitions in two ways. First, it examines a recent boom in banana cultivation in Luang Namtha Province, Lao PDR driven by Chinese investors leasing land from Lao farmers and exporting the bananas to China. Second, it critically engages with the emerging telecoupling framework proposed in Land System Science as an analytical framework for dealing with distal causal interactions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and using qualitative analyses, the thesis examines two plantations in a small village and traces the actors, mechanisms and processes driving the banana expansion. Using the telecoupling framework as a heuristic device, the study illuminates how multiple and co-constitutive economic, environmental, political and discursive interactions influence the banana expansion. Furthermore, the in-depth place-based analyses reveal how different contextual factors ground and shape these interactions in this particular location. In this case, the distal interactions are mediated through a cross-border network of Chinese investors with social ties in the local area, as well as in the fruit market in China. The study shows that the investors’ strategies to obtain access to the land combined with the resulting destructive land use conversion amount to an alienation of land from the villagers. By engaging empirically, methodologically and conceptually with the telecoupling framework, the thesis advances the discussion on telecoupling by demonstrating the value of qualitative analysis for capturing some of the more elusive and immaterial interactions, as well as potential feedbacks influencing land use change in a globalised world.

In urbanized river basins, sanitary wastewater and urban runoff (non-sanitary water) from urban agglomerations drain to complex engineered networks, are treated at centralized wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and discharged to river networks. Discharge from multiple WWTPs distributed in urbanized river basins contributes to impairments of river water-quality and aquatic ecosystem integrity. The size and location of WWTPs are determined by spatial patterns of population in urban agglomerations within a river basin. Economic and engineering constraints determine the combination of wastewater treatment technologies used to meet required environmental regulatory standards for treated wastewater discharged to river networks. Thus, it is necessary to understand the natural-human-engineered networks as coupled systems, to characterize their interrelations, and to understand emergent spatiotemporal patterns and scaling of geochemical and ecological responses.

My PhD research involved data-model synthesis, using publicly available data and application of well-established network analysis/modeling synthesis approaches. I present the scope and specific subjects of my PhD project by employing the Drivers-Pressures-Status-Impacts-Responses (DPSIR) framework. The defined research scope is organized as three main themes: (1) River network and urban drainage networks (Foundation-Pathway of Pressures); (2) River network, human population, and WWTPs (Foundation-Drivers-Pathway of Pressures); and (3) Nutrient loads and their impacts at reach- and basin-scales (Pressures-Impacts).

Three inter-related research topics are: (1) the similarities and differences in scaling and topology of engineered urban drainage networks (UDNs) in two cities, and UDN evolution over decades; (2) the scaling and spatial organization of three attributes: human population (POP), population equivalents (PE; the aggregated population served by each WWTP), and the number/sizes of WWTPs using geo-referenced data for WWTPs in three large urbanized basins in Germany; and (3) the scaling of nutrient loads (P and N) discharged from ~845 WWTPs (five class-sizes) in urbanized Weser River basin in Germany, and likely water-quality impacts from point- and diffuse- nutrient sources.

I investigate the UDN scaling using two power-law scaling characteristics widely employed for river networks: (1) Hack’s law (length-area power-law relationship), and (2) exceedance probability distribution of upstream contributing area. For the smallest UDNs, length-area scales linearly, but power-law scaling emerges as the UDNs grow. While area-exceedance plots for river networks are abruptly truncated, those for UDNs display exponential tempering. The tempering parameter decreases as the UDNs grow, implying that the distribution evolves in time to resemble those for river networks. However, the power-law exponent for mature UDNs tends to be larger than the range reported for river networks. Differences in generative processes and engineering design constraints contribute to observed differences in the evolution of UDNs and river networks, including subnet heterogeneity and non-random branching.

In this study, I also examine the spatial patterns of POP, PE, and WWTPs from two perspectives by employing fractal river networks as structural platforms: spatial hierarchy (stream order) and patterns along longitudinal flow paths (width function). I propose three dimensionless scaling indices to quantify: (1) human settlement preferences by stream order, (2) non-sanitary flow contribution to total wastewater treated at WWTPs, and (3) degree of centralization in WWTPs locations. I select as case studies three large urbanized river basins (Weser, Elbe, and Rhine), home to about 70% of the population in Germany. Across the three river basins, the study shows scale-invariant distributions for each of the three attributes with stream order, quantified using extended Horton scaling ratios; a weak downstream clustering of POP in the three basins. Variations in PE clustering among different class-sizes of WWTPs reflect the size, number, and locations of urban agglomerations in these catchments.

WWTP effluents have impacts on hydrologic attributes and water quality of receiving river bodies at the reach- and basin-scales. I analyze the adverse impacts of WWTP discharges for the Weser River basin (Germany), at two steady river discharge conditions (median flow; low-flow). This study shows that significant variability in treated wastewater discharge within and among different five class-sizes WWTPs, and variability of river discharge within the stream order <3, contribute to large variations in capacity to dilute WWTP nutrient loads. For the median flow, reach-scale water quality impairment assessed by nutrient concentration is likely at 136 (~16%) locations for P and 15 locations (~2%) for N. About 90% of the impaired locations are the stream order < 3. At basin-scale analysis, considering in stream uptake resulted 225 (~27%) P-impaired streams, which was ~5% reduction from considering only dilution. This result suggests the dominant role of dilution in the Weser River basin. Under the low flow conditions, water quality impaired locations are likely double than the median flow status for the analyses. This study for the Weser River basin reveals that the role of in-stream uptake diminishes along the flow paths, while dilution in larger streams (4≤ stream order ≤7) minimizes the impact of WWTP loads.

Furthermore, I investigate eutrophication risk from spatially heterogeneous diffuse- and point-source P loads in the Weser River basin, using the basin-scale network model with in-stream losses (nutrient uptake).Considering long-term shifts in P loads for three representative periods, my analysis shows that P loads from diffuse-sources, mainly from agricultural areas, played a dominant role in contributing to eutrophication risk since 2000s, because of ~87% reduction of point-source P loads compared to 1980s through the implementation of the EU WFD. Nevertheless, point-sources discharged to smaller streams (stream order < 3) pose amplification effects on water quality impairment, consistent with the reach-scale analyses only for WWTPs effluents. Comparing to the long-term water quality monitoring data, I demonstrate that point-sources loads are the primary contributors for eutrophication in smaller streams, whereas diffuse-source loads mainly from agricultural areas address eutrophication in larger streams. The results are reflective of spatial patterns of WWTPs and land cover in the Weser River basin.

Through data-model synthesis, I identify the characteristics of the coupled natural (rivers) – humans – engineered (urban drainage infrastructure) systems (CNHES), inspired by analogy, coexistence, and causality across the coupled networks in urbanized river basins. The quantitative measures and the basin-scale network model presented in my PhD project could extend to other large urbanized basins for better understanding the spatial distribution patterns of the CNHES and the resultant impacts on river water-quality impairment.

碩士
國立臺北大學
都市計劃研究所
107
Today, when extreme weather frequently causes large-scale disasters, the speed of human engineering technology progress cannot be fully overcome to prevent it. In the past, engineering technology has not yet developed to dominate all surface runoff. Society can only adapt as much as possible. Up to now, flood control projects have been widely applied to significantly reduce the frequency of flooding. However, the past flooding adjustment strategies have been neglected. But the current situation should be discussed. The adaptation strategy for disasters needs to be based on the wisdom accumulated by humans in the past and learn from past experiences.Historically, there have been many floods in the lower reaches of Tsengwen River, and many times have been diverted. In the context of relatively insufficient economic and social conditions in the past, in order to survive and develop in a drastic environment, residents have accumulated time to develop a unique local life culture. It contains various traditional ecological wisdom coexisting with the natural environment of the lowland of the Tsengwen river, such as “Avoiding Floods, Find New Places To Live Together”, the local residents face the flood of Tsengwen River, migrate and settle down, and the residents work together to make house made of bamboo. The construction technology, the way of moving houses, and the attitudes and values of local residents facing the changes in the natural environment are traditional ecological wisdom worth exploring. First, this study uses the "Coupled Human-Natural Systems" as a framework for thinking to examine the interaction between people and Tsengwen River. This article explores how local residents interact with Tsengwen River, with particular emphasis on the feedback between humans and natural systems to consolidation the dynamics and complexity of interaction between people and river. In addition, through depth interviews and participatory observations to supplement historical text analysis, this study systematically summarizes the local traditional ecological wisdom in the coastal lowland of Tsengwen River, which is divided into " Environment Design", " Industrial Context", "Traditional Food Culture" and "Natural Legends". From the local architecture, agriculture and fisheries, common diet and sacrifices to the gods and other ceremonies, summed up the traditional ecological wisdom of the local residents. This study hopes to try to live in peace with the natural environment by learning from the traditional ecological wisdom of the past, as a policy reference for subsequent environmental governance.

Scientists expect temperatures on Earth to get substantially warmer over the course of the 21st century, causing storm systems to intensify and sea-level rise to accelerate--these changes will likely have dramatic impacts on how the coastlines of tomorrow will evolve. Humans are also playing an increasingly important role in shaping Earth's coastal systems. Coastal scientists have only a general understanding of how these three factors--humans, storms, and sea-level rise--will alter the evolution of coastlines over the coming century, however. I conduct numerical modeling experiments to shed light on the relative importance of these factors on the evolution of coastline geomorphology.

In a series of experiments using a numerical model of large-scale (1 to 100's km) and long-term (years to centuries) coastline evolution that results from gradients in alongshore sediment transport, I explore how the patterns and rates of shoreline erosion and accretion are affected by shifts in 'wave climate' (the mix of influences on alongshore sediment transport of waves approaching from different directions) induced by intensified storm systems and the direct manipulation of the shoreline system by humans through beach nourishment (periodically placing sand on an eroding beach). I use a cuspate-cape coastline, similar to the Outer Banks, North and South Carolina, USA, as an important case study in my experiments. I observe that moderate shifts in the wave climate can alter the patterns of shoreline erosion and accretion, potentially increasing migration rates by several times that which we see today, and nearly an order-of-magnitude larger than sea-level rise-related erosion alone. I also find that under possible wave climate futures, beach nourishment may also induce shoreline change on the same order of magnitude as does sea-level rise.

The decision humans make whether or not to nourish their beach often depends upon a favorable economic outcome in the endeavor. In further experiments, I couple a cost-benefit economic model of human decision making to the numerical model of coastline evolution and test a hypothetical scenario where two communities (one 'rich' and one 'poor') nourish their beaches in tandem, under different sets of economic and wave climate parameters. I observe that two adjacent communities can benefit substantially from each other's nourishment activity, and these effects persist even if the two communities are separated by several tens of kilometers.

In a separate effort, I employ techniques from dynamic capital theory coupled to a physically-realistic model of coastline evolution to find the optimum time a community should wait between beach nourishment episodes ('rotation length') to maximize the utility to beach-front property owners. In a series of experiments, I explore the sensitivity of the rotation length to economic parameters, including the discount rate, the fixed and variable costs of beach nourishment, and the benefits from beach nourishment, and physical parameters including the background erosion rate and the exponential rate at which both the cross-shore profile and the plan-view coastline shape re-adjusts following a beach nourishment episode ('decay rate' of nourishment sand). Some results I obtained were expected: if property values, the hedonic value of beach width, the baseline retreat rate, the fixed cost of beach nourishment, and the discount rate increase, then the rotation length of nourishment decreases. Some results I obtained, however, were unexpected: the rotation length of nourishment can either increase or decrease when the decay rate of nourishment sand varies versus the discount rate and when the variable costs of beach nourishment increase.

Dissertation

There is an increasing concern for the impact of humans on the environment. Traditionally, ecological models consider human influence as a constant or linearly varying parameter, whereas socioeconomic models and frameworks tend to oversimplify the ecological system. But tackling complex environmental challenges faced by our societies requires interdisciplinary approaches due to the intricate feedbacks between the socioeconomic and ecological systems involved. Thus, models of social-ecological systems couple an ecological system with a socioeconomic system to investigate their interaction in the integrated dynamical system. We define this coupling formally and apply the social-ecological approach to three ecological cases. Indeed, we focus on eutrophication in shallow freshwater lakes, which is a well-known system showing bistability between a clear water state and a turbid polluted state. We also study a model accounting for an aquifer (water stock) and a model accounting for a biotic population exhibiting bistability through an Allee effect. The socioeconomic dynamics is driven by the incentive that agents feel to act in a desirable or undesirable way. This incentive can be represented by a difference in utility, or in payoff, between two strategies that each agent can adopt: agents can cooperate and act in an environment-friendly way, or they can defect and act in an ecologically undesirable way. The agents' motivation includes such factors as the economic cost of their choice, the concern they feel for the environment and conformism to the collective attitude of the human group. Thus, the incentive to cooperate responds to the state of the ecological system and to the agents' collective opinion, and this response can be linear, nonlinear and monotonic, or non-monotonic. When investigating the mathematical form of this response, we find that monotonic non-linear responses may result in additional equilibria, cycles and basins of attraction compared to the linear case. Non-monotonic responses, such as resignation effects, may produce much more complicated nullclines such as a closed nullcline and weaken our ability to anticipate the dynamics of a social-ecological system. Regarding the modelling of the socioeconomic subsystem, the replicator dynamics and the logit best-response dynamics are widely used mathematical formulations from evolutionary game theory. There seems to be little awareness about the impact of choosing one or the other. The replicator dynamics assumes that the socioeconomic subsystem is stationary when all agents adopt the same behaviour, whereas the best-response dynamics assumes that this situation is not stationary. The replicator dynamics has formal game theoretical foundations, whereas best-response dynamics comes from psychology. Recent experiments found that the best-response dynamics explains empirical data better. We find that the two dynamics can produce a different number of equilibria as well as differences in their stability. The replicator dynamics is a limit case of the logit best-response dynamics when agents have an infinite rationality. We show that even generic social-ecological models can show multistability. In many cases, multistability allows for counterintuitive equilibria to emerge, where ecological desirability and socioeconomic desirability are not correlated. This makes generic management recommendations difficult to find and several policies with and without socioeconomic impact should be considered. Even in cases where there is a unique equilibrium, it can lose stability and give rise to sustained oscillations. We can interpret these oscillations in a way similar to the cycles found in classical predator-prey systems. In the lake pollution social-ecological model for instance, the agents' defection increases the lake pollution, which makes agents feel concerned and convince the majority to cooperate. Then, the ecological concern decreases because the lake is not polluted and the incentive to cooperate plummets, so that it becomes more advantageous for the agents to defect again. We show that the oscillations obtained when using the replicator dynamics tend to produce a make-or-break dynamics, where a random perturbation could shift the system to either full cooperation or full defection depending on its timing along the cycle. Management measures may shift the location of the social-ecological system at equilibrium, but also make attractors appear or disappear in the phase plane or change the resilience of stable steady states. The resilience of equilibria relates to basins of attraction and is especially important in the face of potential regime shifts. Sources of uncertainty that should be taken into account for the management of social-ecological systems include multistability and the possibility of counterintuitive equilibria, the wide range of possible policy measures with or without socioeconomic interventions, and the behaviour of human collectives involved, which may be described by different dynamics. Yet, uncertainty coming from the collective behaviour of agents is mitigated if they do not give up or rely on the other agents' efforts, which allows modelling to better inform decision makers.