Dissertations / Theses: 'Task-oriented'

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Strickland, Paul. "Task oriented robotics." Thesis, University of Portsmouth, 1993. https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/task-oriented-robotics(2d98c551-7b7d-4dcf-ad19-23b0c5c060ee).html.

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An alternative between product dedicated automation and general purpose robots is presented. with the new approach a given robot is customised to fulfil the requirements of the manufacturing tasks to be automated, is programmed in terms of production tasks or can be truly automated. This allows exploitation of the natural relationship between production tasks and robot systems. Current construction of industrial robots relies on a one-to-one relationship between robot and controller. The perceived way forward with this constraint has been the functionally related general purpose Industrial Robot. paradoxically, industrial robots are 'bolted' to task specific environments which have fixed repertoires of materials and tools to act upon. Computer integration of these functional machines involves human interaction to constrain the general purpose robots to relatively simple production tasks. This increases the overall cost, levels of expertise required to program the robots and lead-times in reprogramming. Unquestionably these factors have led to a reluctance towards exploitation of industrial robots. The research undertaken endeavoured to provide an alternative to this method of automation. The research completed allows robots to be programmed in terms of production tasks and dissolves the necessity to specifically design a robot controller for a given robot configuration. A modular robotic framework which consists of a number of generic modules has been employed. A loosely coupled transputer computer network has been implemented to encompass task, robot coordination and robot axis levels. At task level a 'production orientated programming environment' reflects the corresponding manual production activities. Information is gathered from this environment to allow 'task related rules' to be formulated. These 'task rules' have been utilised to fully automate, allowing product specifications to be translated to machine actions. The robot coordination level translates global coordinates to joint actions. A set of closed loop inverse kinematic equations have been generalised to ensure that the robot controller is not dependent upon a given robotic structure. These generic equations are customised to the localised constraints of each modular robotic element of the robot structure. Robust axis control is utilised to decouple robot control at joint level. 'Mix-and match' hardware and software techniques have been created which facilitate customisation of a given robot axis, and in turn, the ascending levels of the system. Hardware design capitalised on new advances in compact components which allowed self contained modular robotics elements to be formed.

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Sanchis, Trilles Germán. "Building task-oriented machine translation systems." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de València, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/17174.

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La principal meta de esta tesis es desarrollar sistemas de traduccion interactiva que presenten mayor sinergia con sus usuarios potenciales. Por ello, el objetivo es hacer los sistemas estado del arte mas ergonomicos, intuitivos y eficientes, con el fin de que el experto humano se sienta mas comodo al utilizarlos. Con este fin se presentan diferentes t�ecnicas enfocadas a mejorar la adaptabilidad y el tiempo de respuesta de los sistemas de traduccion automatica subyacentes, as�ÿ como tambien se presenta una estrategia cuya finalidad es mejorar la interaccion hombre-m�aquina. Todo ello con el proposito ultimo de rellenar el hueco existente entre el estado del arte en traduccion automatica y las herramientas que los traductores humanos tienen a su disposici�on. En lo que respecta al tiempo de respuesta de los sistemas de traducci�on autom�atica, en esta tesis se presenta una t�ecnica de poda de los par�ametros de los modelos de traducci�on actuales, cuya intuici�on est�a basada en el concepto de segmentaci�on biling¤ue, pero que termina por evolucionar hacia una estrategia de re-estimaci�on de dichos par�ametros. Utilizando esta estrategia se obtienen resultados experimentales que demuestran que es posible podar la tabla de segmentos hasta en un 97%, sin mermar por ello la calidad de las traducciones obtenidas. Adem�as, estos resultados son coherentes en diferentes pares de lenguas, lo cual evidencia que la t�ecnica que se presenta aqu�ÿ es efectiva en un entorno de traducci�on autom�atica tradicional, y por lo tanto podr�ÿa ser utilizada directamente en un escenario de post-edici�on. Sin embargo, los experimentos llevados a cabo en traducci�on interactiva son ligeramente menos convincentes, pues implican la necesidad de llegar a un compromiso entre el tiempo de respuesta y la calidad de los sufijos producidos. Por otra parte, se presentan dos t�ecnicas de adaptaci�on, con el prop�osito de mejorar la adaptabilidad de los sistemas de traducci�on autom�atica. La primera
Sanchis Trilles, G. (2012). Building task-oriented machine translation systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17174
Palancia

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Elliot, Mark James. "A computational model of task oriented discourse." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.284055.

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Gutierrez, Reymundo A. (Reymundo Alejandro). "Learning task-oriented grasp heuristics from demonstration." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113153.

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Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.
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 79-82).
When people plan their motions for dexterous work, they implicitly consider the next likely step in the action sequence. Almost without conscious thought, we select a grasp that meets the implicit constraints related to the task to be performed. A robot tasked with dexterous manipulation should likewise aim to grasp the intended object in a way that makes the next step straightforward. In some cases, lack of consideration of these implicit constraints can result in situations in which the object cannot be manipulated in the desired manner. While recent work has begun to address task dependent constraints, they require direct specification of task constraints or rely on grasp datasets with manually defined task labels. In this thesis, we present a framework that leverages human demonstration to learn task-oriented grasp heuristics for a set of known objects in an unsupervised manner and defined a procedure to instantiate grasps from these learned models. Equating distinct motion profiles with the execution of distinct tasks, our approach leverages the motion during human demonstration in order to partition the accompanying grasp examples into tasks in an unsupervised manner through the incorporation of unsupervised motion clustering algorithms into a grasp learning pipeline. In order to evaluate the framework, a set of human demonstrations of real world manipulation tasks were collected. The framework with unsupervised task clustering produced comparable results to the semi-supervised condition. This translated to the discovery of the correct relationship between the tasks and objects, with the distributions of the resultant grasp point models following intuitive heuristic rules (e.g. handle grasps for tools). The grasps instantiated from these grasp models followed the learned heuristics, but had some limitations due to the choice of grasp model and the instantiation method utilized. Overall, this work demonstrates that the inclusion of unsupervised motion clustering techniques into a grasp learning pipeline can assist in the production of task-oriented models without the typical overhead of direct task constraint encoding or hand labeling of datasets.
by Reymundo A. Gutierrez.
M. Eng.

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Bouchacourt, Diane. "Task-oriented learning of structured probability distributions." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0665495b-afbb-483b-8bdf-cbc6ae5baeff.

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Machine learning models automatically learn from historical data to predict unseen events. Such events are often represented as complex multi-dimensional structures. In many cases there is high uncertainty in the prediction process. Research has developed probabilistic models to capture distributions of complex objects, but their learning objective is often agnostic of the evaluation loss. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned defficiency by designing probabilistic methods for structured object prediction that take into account the task at hand. First, we consider that the task at hand is explicitly known, but there is ambiguity in the prediction due to an unobserved (latent) variable. We develop a framework for latent structured output prediction that unifies existing empirical risk minimisation methods. We empirically demonstrate that for large and ambiguous latent spaces, performing prediction by minimising the uncertainty in the latent variable provides more accurate results. Empirical risk minimisation methods predict only a pointwise estimate of the output, however there can be uncertainty on the output value itself. To tackle this deficiency, we introduce a novel type of model to perform probabilistic structured output prediction. Our training objective minimises a dissimilarity coefficient between the data distribution and the model's distribution. This coefficient is defined according to a loss of choice, thereby our objective can be tailored to the task loss. We empirically demonstrate the ability of our model to capture distributions over complex objects. Finally, we tackle a setting where the task loss is implicitly expressed. Specifically, we consider the case of grouped observations. We propose a new model for learning a representation of the data that decomposes according to the semantics behind this grouping, while allowing efficient test-time inference. We experimentally demonstrate that our model learns a disentangled and controllable representation, leverages grouping information when available, and generalises to unseen observations.

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Abbott, Terence S. "Task-Oriented Display Design: Concept and Example." W&M ScholarWorks, 1989. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626821.

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Foix, Salmerón Sergi. "Task-oriented viewpoint planning for free-form objects." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/396623.

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This thesis deals with active sensing and its use in real exploration tasks under both scene ambiguities and measurement uncertainties. While object modeling is the implicit objective of most of active sensing algorithms, in this work we have explored new strategies to deal with more generic and more complex tasks. Active sensing requires the ability of moving the perceptual system to gather new information. Our approach uses a robot manipulator with a 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera attached to the end-effector. For a complex task, we have focused our attention on plant phenotyping. Plants are complex objects, with leaves that change their position and size along time. Valid viewpoints for a certain plant are hardly valid for a different one, even belonging to the same species. Some instruments, such as chlorophyll meters or disk sampling tools, require being precisely positioned over a particular location of the leaf. Therefore, their use requires the modeling of specific regions of interest of the plant, including also the free space needed for avoiding obstacles and approaching the leaf with tool. It is easy to observe that predefined camera trajectories are not valid here, and that usually with one single view it is very difficult to acquire all the required information. The overall objective of this thesis is to solve complex active sensing tasks by embedding their exploratory goal into a pre-estimated geometrical model, using information-gain as the fundamental guideline for the reward function. The main contributions can be divided in two groups: first, the evaluation of ToF cameras and their calibration to assess the uncertainty of the measurements (presented in Part I); and second, the proposal of a framework capable of embedding the task, modeled as free and occupied space, and that takes into account the modeled sensor's uncertainty to improve the action selection algorithm (presented in Part II). This thesis has given rise to 14 publications, including 5 indexed journals, and its results have been used in the GARNICS European project. The complete framework is based on the Next-Best-View methodology and it can be summarized in the following main steps. First, an initial view of the object (e.g., a plant) is acquired. From this initial view and given a set of candidate viewpoints, the expected gain obtained by moving the robot and acquiring the next image is computed. This computation takes into account the uncertainty from all the different pixels of the sensor, the expected information based on a predefined task model, and the possible occlusions. Once the most promising view is selected, the robot moves, takes a new image, integrates this information intothe model, and evaluates again the set of remaining views. Finally, the task terminates when enough information is gathered. In our examples, this process enables the robot to perform a measurement on top of a leaf. The key ingredient is to model the complexity of the task in a layered representation of free-occupied occupancy grid maps. This allows to naturally encode the requirements of the task, to maintain and update the belief state with the measurements performed, to simulate and compute the expected gains of all potential viewpoints, and to encode the termination condition. During this work the technology of ToF cameras has incredibly evolved. Nowadays it is very popular and ToF cameras are already embedded in some consumer devices. Although the quality of the measurements has been considerably improved, it is still not uniform in the sensor. We believe, as it has been demonstrated in various experiments in this work, that a careful modeling of the sensor's uncertainty is highly beneficial and helps to design better decision systems. In our case, it enables a more realistic computation of the information gain measure, and consequently, a better selection criterion.
Aquesta tesi aborda el tema de la percepció activa i el seu ús en tasques d'exploració en entorns reals tot considerant la ambigüitat en l'escena i la incertesa del sistema de percepció. Al contrari de la majoria d'algoritmes de percepció activa, on el modelatge d'objectes sol ser l'objectiu implícit, en aquesta tesi hem explorat noves estratègies per poder tractar tasques genèriques i de major complexitat. Tot sistema de percepció activa requereix un aparell sensorial amb la capacitat de variar els seus paràmetres de forma controlada, per poder, d'aquesta manera, recopilar nova informació per resoldre una tasca determinada. En tasques d'exploració, la posició i orientació del sensor són paràmetres claus per resoldre la tasca. En el nostre estudi hem fet ús d'un robot manipulador com a sistema de posicionament i d'una càmera de profunditat de temps de vol (ToF), adherida al seu efector final, com a sistema de percepció. Com a tasca final, ens hem concentrat en l'adquisició de mesures sobre fulles dins de l'àmbit del fenotipatge de les plantes. Les plantes son objectes molt complexos, amb fulles que canvien de textura, posició i mida al llarg del temps. Això comporta diverses dificultats. Per una banda, abans de dur a terme una mesura sobre un fulla s'ha d'explorar l'entorn i trobar una regió que ho permeti. A més a més, aquells punts de vista que han estat adequats per una determinada planta difícilment ho seran per una altra, tot i sent les dues de la mateixa espècie. Per un altra banda, en el moment de la mesura, certs instruments, tals com els mesuradors de clorofil·la o les eines d'extracció de mostres, requereixen ser posicionats amb molta precisió. És necessari, doncs, disposar d'un model detallat d'aquestes regions d'interès, i que inclogui no només l'espai ocupat sinó també el lliure. Gràcies a la modelització de l'espai lliure es pot dur a terme una bona evitació d'obstacles i un bon càlcul de la trajectòria d'aproximació de l'eina a la fulla. En aquest context, és fàcil veure que, en general, amb un sol punt de vista no n'hi ha prou per adquirir tota la informació necessària per prendre una mesura, i que l'ús de trajectòries predeterminades no garanteixen l'èxit. L'objectiu general d'aquesta tesi és resoldre tasques complexes de percepció activa mitjançant la codificació del seu objectiu d'exploració en un model geomètric prèviament estimat, fent servir el guany d'informació com a guia fonamental dins de la funció de cost. Les principals contribucions d'aquesta tesi es poden dividir en dos grups: primer, l'avaluació de les càmeres ToF i el seu calibratge per poder avaluar la incertesa de les seves mesures (presentat en la Part I); i en segon lloc, la proposta d'un sistema capaç de codificar la tasca mitjançant el modelatge de l'espai lliure i ocupat, i que té en compte la incertesa del sensor per millorar la selecció de les accions (presentat en la Part II). Aquesta tesi ha donat lloc a 14 publicacions, incloent 5 en revistes indexades, i els resultats obtinguts s'han fet servir en el projecte Europeu GARNICS. La funcionalitat del sistema complet està basada en els mètodes Next-Best-View (següent-millor-vista) i es pot desglossar en els següents passos principals. En primer lloc, s'obté una vista inicial de l'objecte (p. ex., una planta). A partir d'aquesta vista inicial i d'un conjunt de vistes candidates, s'estima, per cada una d'elles, el guany d'informació resultant, tant de moure la càmera com d'obtenir una nova mesura. És rellevant dir que aquest càlcul té en compte la incertesa de cada un dels píxels del sensor, l'estimació de la informació basada en el model de la tasca preestablerta i les possibles oclusions. Un cop seleccionada la vista més prometedora, el robot es mou a la nova posició, pren una nova imatge, integra aquesta informació en el model i torna a avaluar, un altre cop, el conjunt de punts de vista restants. Per últim, la tasca acaba en el moment que es recopila suficient informació.

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Kowtko, J. C. "The function of intonation in task-oriented dialogue." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.508706.

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Carletta, Jean. "Risk-taking and recovery in task-oriented dialogue." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/20370.

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The Principle of Parsimony states that by and large, agents try to complete tasks using as little effort as possible. This thesis demonstrates that the Principle of Parsimony operates in human task-oriented dialogue by showing the effects of Parsimony in a corpus of human dialogues about a map navigation task and by using the main points of the analysis in order to guide simulated conversations between two computer agents within the JAM system. It makes four major contributions: an analysis of 'communicative posture', or a range of choices in dialogue which can be characterised by decisions about how much effort to spend constructing one's utterances, leading to either careful or risky behaviour about different aspects of communication, an analysis of 'recovery strategies' which allow the participants to recover from failures which have been brought about due to risky postures, a heuristic model of belief which risks failing to capture the full meaning of the dialogue in favour of efficiency in a way which models human belief updating more plausibly than previous models, and a layered agent architecture which allows the simulated agents to make all of their decisions based on the Principle of Parsimony.

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Sotillo, Catherine Frances. "Phonological reduction and intelligibility in task-oriented dialogue." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/21544.

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This thesis explores the implications of Lindblom's theory of Hyper- and Hypo-articulation (Lindblom, 1983, 1990) for word intelligibility and the likely application of phonological reduction processes in spontaneous discourse, using data from the HCRC Map Task Corpus. Lindblom claims that variability in articulatory clarity is a reflection of speakers' assessments of their listeners' information requirements: speakers hyper-articulate when listeners require maximum acoustic input from with information from other sources. To prevent speakers from over-economising to a point of unintelligibility, hypo-articulation is governed by a constraint of lexical distinctiveness: speakers hypo-articulate only while listeners are able to distinguish the target from competing lexical items. Three main questions are addressed. First, do the informational needs of the listener affect the articulatory clarity of words produced in spontaneous conversation? A series of intelligibility experiments shows that repeated mentions of landmark names are less intelligible than their introductory mentions, independent of which speaker utters either mention, and who can see the landmark on their map. Although the results can be interpreted as supporting Lindblom's view, textual Giveness (Prince, 1981) is shown to depend upon what the speaker knows, rather than what the speaker believes her listener to know. The reduction in clarity associated with an increase in available information is not necessarily listener-oriented as the H & H theory proposes. Secondly, do phonological processes such as word-final /d/-deletion or place assimilation contribute to intelligibility loss? Although reduction processes are found to be more prevalent in tokens from spontaneous discourse than in matched citation forms, they generally fail to account for effects of repetition. An increase in assimilation is found for repeated mentions of nasal-final stimuli in pre-velar position, but no effects is found for assimilation in pre-label position, or for word-final /d/-deletion, nor is an effect found for the duration of schwa in metrically Weak initial syllables of polysyllabic words.

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Brown, Barbara B. "Employees' Organizational Commitment and Their Perceptions of Supervisors' Relations-Oriented and Task-Oriented Leadership Behaviors." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/26676.

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The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between employees' perceptions of their immediate supervisors' relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviors and different types of organizational commitment. Bass & Avolio's (1995) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ Form 5X) was used to measure relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviors. Meyer & Allen's (1997) Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) was used to measure organizational commitment. Participants in the research included 361 employees who worked for the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. These employees were located in eight departments that varied in the area of technical functioning, size, and academic levels. Factor analyses, with principal component extraction and varimax rotation, were performed to determine how the MLQ Form 5X items would load onto a 2-factor model of relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership behaviors. The task-oriented items of contingent reward loaded with the relations-oriented items, and the non-leadership items of laissez-faire loaded with the task-oriented items. These findings resulted in an arrangement of relations-oriented and task-oriented subscales that was different than the arrangement proposed by Bass & Avolio (1995). Correlations for the MLQ Form 5X revealed multicollinearity among all the relations-oriented subscales and two of the task-oriented subscales, preventing any interpretations about the amount of variance that any particular type of relations-oriented or task-oriented leadership behavior might explain in organizational commitment. Factor scores were used to perform regressions and investigate the amount of variance relations-oriented leadership behaviors and task-oriented leadership behaviors explained in organizational commitment. Relations-oriented leadership behaviors explained the greatest amount of variance in affective commitment, somewhat less variance in normative commitment, and no variance in continuance commitment. The results for task-oriented leadership behaviors revealed the same pattern of relationships with the different types of organizational commitment, only weaker.
Ph. D.

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Glasgow, Trevin Earl. "Person-Oriented Versus Task-Oriented Spin Instruction: Differential Impact on Participants' Mood and Sociability." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/79953.

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Exercise has been shown to improve mood (Stöhle, 2009). Research has explored how exercise instructors can affect class participants' mood (Edmunds, Ntoumanis, & Duda, 2008). One style of instruction that is less understood relates to task-oriented vs. person-oriented instruction. The primary aim of this research was to explore the impact of spin-class instruction style on mood among spin-class participants. In Study 1, research assistants (RAs) evaluated the instruction of spin-class instructors and administered mood surveys to spin-class participants and instructors. Overall, positive mood improved for all spin-class participants and instructors. Instruction style did not moderate this effect. In Study 2, a refined instruction evaluation form was used to better detect person-oriented vs. task-oriented instruction. Unlike in Study 1, RAs also completed mood surveys. Overall, positive mood improved as a function of the exercise class for spin-class members and instructors, but not for RAs. Instruction style did not moderate this mood effect. Overall, the results support prior research that exercise leads to mood improvement. However, an impact of instruction style on class participants' mood was not found. One novel approach of this study was that instruction style was not manipulated. This pragmatic approach allowed the research team to explore organic instructor-student dynamics in a spin-class, which may improve the generalizability of the findings.
Master of Science

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Hernansanz, Prats Albert. "Multi-robot cooperative platform : a task-oriented teleoperation paradigm." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/393921.

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This thesis proposes the study and development of a teleoperation system based on multi-robot cooperation under the task oriented teleoperation paradigm: Multi-Robot Cooperative Paradigm, MRCP. In standard teleoperation, the operator uses the master devices to control the remote slave robot arms. These arms reproduce the desired movements and perform the task. With the developed work, the operator can virtually manipulate an object. MRCP automatically generates the arms orders to perform the task. The operator does not have to solve situations arising from possible restrictions that the slave arms may have. The research carried out is therefore aimed at improving the accuracy teleoperation tasks in complex environments, particularly in the field of robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. This field requires patient safety and the workspace entails many restrictions to teleoperation. MRCP can be defined as a platform composed of several robots that cooperate automatically to perform a teleoperated task, creating a robotic system with increased capacity (workspace volume, accessibility, dexterity ...). The cooperation is based on transferring the task between robots when necessary to enable a smooth task execution. The MRCP control evaluates the suitability of each robot to continue with the ongoing task and the optimal time to execute a task transfer between the current selected robot and the best candidate to continue with the task. From the operator¿s point of view, MRCP provides an interface that enables the teleoperation though the task-oriented paradigm: operator orders are translated into task actions instead of robot orders. This thesis is structured as follows: The first part is dedicated to review the current solutions in the teleoperation of complex tasks and compare them with those proposed in this research. The second part of the thesis presents and reviews in depth the different evaluation criteria to determine the suitability of each robot to continue with the execution of a task, considering the configuration of the robots and emphasizing the criterion of dexterity and manipulability. The study reviews the different required control algorithms to enable the task oriented telemanipulation. This proposed teleoperation paradigm is transparent to the operator. Then, the Thesis presents and analyses several experimental results using MRCP in the field of minimally invasive surgery. These experiments study the effectiveness of MRCP in various tasks requiring the cooperation of two hands. A type task is used: a suture using minimally invasive surgery technique. The analysis is done in terms of execution time, economy of movement, quality and patient safety (potential damage produced by undesired interaction between the tools and the vital tissues of the patient). The final part of the thesis proposes the implementation of different virtual aids and restrictions (guided teleoperation based on haptic visual and audio feedback, protection of restricted workspace regions, etc.) using the task oriented teleoperation paradigm. A framework is defined for implementing and applying a basic set of virtual aids and constraints within the framework of a virtual simulator for laparoscopic abdominal surgery. The set of experiments have allowed to validate the developed work. The study revealed the influence of virtual aids in the learning process of laparoscopic techniques. It has also demonstrated the improvement of learning curves, which paves the way for its implementation as a methodology for training new surgeons.
Aquesta tesi doctoral proposa l'estudi i desenvolupament d'un sistema de teleoperació basat en la cooperació multi-robot sota el paradigma de la teleoperació orientada a tasca: Multi-Robot Cooperative Paradigm, MRCP. En la teleoperació clàssica, l'operador utilitza els telecomandaments perquè els braços robots reprodueixin els seus moviments i es realitzi la tasca desitjada. Amb el treball realitzat, l'operador pot manipular virtualment un objecte i és mitjançant el MRCP que s'adjudica a cada braç les ordres necessàries per realitzar la tasca, sense que l'operador hagi de resoldre les situacions derivades de possibles restriccions que puguin tenir els braços executors. La recerca desenvolupada està doncs orientada a millorar la teleoperació en tasques de precisió en entorns complexos i, en particular, en el camp de la cirurgia mínimament invasiva assistida per robots. Aquest camp imposa condicions de seguretat del pacient i l'espai de treball comporta moltes restriccions a la teleoperació. MRCP es pot definir com a una plataforma formada per diversos robots que cooperen de forma automàtica per dur a terme una tasca teleoperada, generant un sistema robòtic amb capacitats augmentades (volums de treball, accessibilitat, destresa,...). La cooperació es basa en transferir la tasca entre robots a partir de determinar quin és aquell que és més adequat per continuar amb la seva execució i el moment òptim per realitzar la transferència de la tasca entre el robot actiu i el millor candidat a continuar-la. Des del punt de vista de l'operari, MRCP ofereix una interfície de teleoperació que permet la realització de la teleoperació mitjançant el paradigma d'ordres orientades a la tasca: les ordres es tradueixen en accions sobre la tasca en comptes d'estar dirigides als robots. Aquesta tesi està estructurada de la següent manera: Primerament es fa una revisió de l'estat actual de les diverses solucions desenvolupades actualment en el camp de la teleoperació de tasques complexes, comparant-les amb les proposades en aquest treball de recerca. En el segon bloc de la tesi es presenten i s'analitzen a fons els diversos criteris per determinar la capacitat de cada robot per continuar l'execució d'una tasca, segons la configuració del conjunt de robots i fent especial èmfasi en el criteri de destresa i manipulabilitat. Seguint aquest estudi, es presenten els diferents processos de control emprats per tal d'assolir la telemanipulació orientada a tasca de forma transparent a l'operari. Seguidament es presenten diversos resultats experimentals aplicant MRCP al camp de la cirurgia mínimament invasiva. En aquests experiments s'estudia l'eficàcia de MRCP en diverses tasques que requereixen de la cooperació de dues mans. S'ha escollit una tasca tipus: sutura amb tècnica de cirurgia mínimament invasiva. L'anàlisi es fa en termes de temps d'execució, economia de moviment, qualitat i seguretat del pacient (potencials danys causats per la interacció no desitjada entre les eines i els teixits vitals del pacient). Finalment s'ha estudiat l'ús de diferents ajudes i restriccions virtuals (guiat de la teleoperació via retorn hàptic, visual o auditiu, protecció de regions de l'espai de treball, etc) dins el paradigma de teleoperació orientada a tasca. S'ha definint un marc d'aplicació base i implementant un conjunt de restriccions virtuals dins el marc d'un simulador de cirurgia laparoscòpia abdominal. El conjunt d'experiments realitzats han permès validar el treball realitzat. Aquest estudi ha permès determinar la influencia de les ajudes virtuals en el procés d'aprenentatge de les tècniques laparoscòpiques. S'ha evidenciat una millora en les corbes d'aprenentatge i obre el camí a la seva implantació com a metodologia d'entrenament de nous cirurgians.

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14

Yang, Fan. "Directing the flow of conversation in task-oriented dialogue." Full text open access at:, 2008. http://content.ohsu.edu/u?/etd,625.

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15

Piemontese, Andrea. "Un'architettura dinamica service-oriented per l'esecuzione distribuita di task." Master's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2011. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/2739/.

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16

Sahindal, Boran. "Detecting Conversational Failures in Task-Oriented Human-Robot Interactions." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap (EECS), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-272135.

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In conversations between humans, not only the content of the utterances but also our social signals provide information on the state of communication. Similarly, in the field of human-robot interaction, we want the robots to have the capability of interpreting social signals given by human users. Such social signals can be operationalised in order to detect unexpected behaviours of robots. This thesis work aims to compare machine learning based methods to investigate robots’ recognition of their own unexpected behaviours based on human social signals. We trained support vector machine, random forest and logistic regression classifiers with a guided task human-robot interaction corpus that includes planned robot failures. We created features based on gaze, motion and facial expressions. We defined data points of different window lengths and compared effects of different robot embodiments. The results show that there is a promising potential in this field and also that the accuracy of this classification task depends on different variables that require careful tuning.
I samtal mellan människor är det inte bara yttrandens innehåll utan också våra sociala signaler som bidrar till kommunikationstillståndet. Inom området människa-robot-interaktion vill vi på samma sätt att robotarna ska kunna tolka sociala signaler som ges av människor. Sådana sociala signaler kan utnyttjas för att upptäcka oväntade beteenden hos robotar. Detta examensarbete syftar till att jämföra maskininlärningsbaserade metoder för att undersöka robotars igenkänning av sina egna oväntade beteenden baserat på mänskliga sociala signaler. Vi tränade SVM, Random Forest- och Logistic Regression-klassificerare med en styrd människa-robot-interaktionskorpus som inkluderar planerade robotfel. Vi skapade attribut baserade på blick, rörelse och ansiktsuttryck. Vi definierade datapunkter med olika fönsterlängder och jämförde effekter av olika robotformer. Resultaten visar att det finns en lovande potential inom detta fält och att noggrannheten för denna klassificeringsuppgift beror på olika variabler som kräver noggrann inställning.

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Mayo, Kevin A. "Definition and evaluation of a synthesis-oriented, user-centered task analysis technique: the Task Mapping Model." Diss., Virginia Tech, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/40167.

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A software system is an aggregate of communicating modules, and there are several different types of communication among these modules (direct, indirect, and global). Therefore, understanding the interfaces among these modules can characterize the system and are a major factor in the system's complexity. These interfaces could possibly also show and predict inadequacies in the reliability and maintenance of a system. Interfaces are defined early in the development life cycle at a detailed or high level design stage. Knowing that these interfaces exist and their structure leads us to measure them for an indication of the designed interface complexity. This designed interface complexity can then be utilized for software quality assurance by allowing users to choose from among several designs. With data provided by an Ada software developer, the interface complexity metrics correlated with established metrics, but also found complex interfaces that established metrics missed.
Ph. D.

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ISOMURA, Naoki, Fujio TORIUMI, and Kenichiro ISHII. "EVALUATION METHOD OF NON-TASK-ORIENTED DIALOGUE SYSTEM BY HMM." INTELLIGENT MEDIA INTEGRATION NAGOYA UNIVERSITY / COE, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/10479.

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19

Jafer, Yasser. "Task Oriented Privacy-preserving (TOP) Technologies Using Automatic Feature Selection." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/34320.

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A large amount of digital information collected and stored in datasets creates vast opportunities for knowledge discovery and data mining. These datasets, however, may contain sensitive information about individuals and, therefore, it is imperative to ensure that their privacy is protected. Most research in the area of privacy preserving data publishing does not make any assumptions about an intended analysis task applied on the dataset. In many domains such as healthcare, finance, etc; however, it is possible to identify the analysis task beforehand. Incorporating such knowledge of the ultimate analysis task may improve the quality of the anonymized data while protecting the privacy of individuals. Furthermore, the existing research which consider the ultimate analysis task (e.g., classification) is not suitable for high-dimensional data. We show that automatic feature selection (which is a well-known dimensionality reduction technique) can be utilized in order to consider both aspects of privacy and utility simultaneously. In doing so, we show that feature selection can enhance existing privacy preserving techniques addressing k-anonymity and differential privacy and protect privacy while reducing the amount of modifications applied to the dataset; hence, in most of the cases achieving higher utility. We consider incorporating the concept of privacy-by-design within the feature selection process. We propose techniques that turn filter-based and wrapper-based feature selection into privacy-aware processes. To this end, we build a layer of privacy on top of regular feature selection process and obtain a privacy preserving feature selection that is not only guided by accuracy but also the amount of protected private information. In addition to considering privacy after feature selection we introduce a framework for a privacy-aware feature selection evaluation measure. That is, we incorporate privacy during feature selection and obtain a list of candidate privacy-aware attribute subsets that consider (and satisfy) both efficacy and privacy requirements simultaneously. Finally, we propose a multi-dimensional, privacy-aware evaluation function which incorporates efficacy, privacy, and dimensionality weights and enables the data holder to obtain a best attribute subset according to its preferences.

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Xu, Jun. "Displaying overt recipiency : reactive tokens in Mandarin task-oriented conversation." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2009. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11006/.

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This thesis examines the interconnection between the linguistic forms of reactive tokens and their associated conversational actions in Mandarin conversation. It aims to show how reactive tokens are produced and interpreted by participants themselves as the display of an awareness of being a recipient in longer sequences. The central argument of the thesis is that participants display overt recipiency through variation and selection of reactive tokens in longer sequences in Mandarin conversation. This thesis shows that a consideration of the sequential organization of reactive tokens is as important as a consideration of their forms and functions in order to understand their prominent role in longer conversational sequences. Through sequential analysis, the investigation of reactive tokens shows that participants orient to and design a diversity of reactive tokens to construct and maintain mutual understanding and to create and secure recipient engagement. Through quantitative analysis, the frequency and distribution of six types of reactive tokens demonstrate their significant roles in first and second language interaction. Through deviant case analysis, the examination of miscues of reactive tokens reveals that reactive tokens might be a potential “barrier” in second language interaction, in contrast to being a “facilitator” in first language interaction. I propose a framework for displaying levels of recipiency through the selection of reactive tokens in longer conversational sequences in Mandarin. The framework proposed here implies that the selection of one particular reactive token over another is more a question of varying degrees of recipient engagement, than of different linguistic forms. The use of reactive tokens in interaction is shown to be systematic, conversationally strategic, sequentially and socially organized. It can be concluded that seemingly trivial and random reactive tokens are more significant and orderly in Mandarin conversation than one may assume.

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Aper, Julie A. "Task and ego oriented athletes and zone of optimal function." Virtual Press, 1993. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/879852.

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The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between task and ego goal orientation and ZOF. The subjects consisted of interscholastic athletes of the men's varsity and junior varsity baseball, men's track and field, and women's track and field teams from a local Midwestern high school. By providing a more concise zone of optimal function (ZOF) by breaking down the zone into three components: psychological, physiological, and competitive (evaluated by the Sport Participation Questionnaire) the athletes may be able to manipulate their ZOF by using the characteristics of their task and ego orientation (evaluated by the TEOSQ). The data was analyzed by doing a series of factor analyses and multiple regressions. After finding four significant factors (two separate psychological, one physiological, one competitive) a multiple regression was employed to determine the relationship between the factors and task and ego orientaXon.Nearly significant was the regression with ego-oriented athletes and the thinking construct which consisted of items 16-18 of the Sport Participation Questionnaire. Also, significant were relationships of the task or ego score and the demographic findings.
School of Physical Education

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22

Parente, Peter Bishop Gary. "Clique perceptually based, task oriented auditory display for GUI applications /." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,1983.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.
Title from electronic title page (viewed Dec. 11, 2008). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Computer Science." Discipline: Computer Science; Department/School: Computer Science.

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23

Pieropan, Alessandro. "Structure learning of graphical models for task-oriented robot grasping." Master's thesis, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, 2010. http://amslaurea.unibo.it/1641/.

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In the collective imaginaries a robot is a human like machine as any androids in science fiction. However the type of robots that you will encounter most frequently are machinery that do work that is too dangerous, boring or onerous. Most of the robots in the world are of this type. They can be found in auto, medical, manufacturing and space industries. Therefore a robot is a system that contains sensors, control systems, manipulators, power supplies and software all working together to perform a task. The development and use of such a system is an active area of research and one of the main problems is the development of interaction skills with the surrounding environment, which include the ability to grasp objects. To perform this task the robot needs to sense the environment and acquire the object informations, physical attributes that may influence a grasp. Humans can solve this grasping problem easily due to their past experiences, that is why many researchers are approaching it from a machine learning perspective finding grasp of an object using information of already known objects. But humans can select the best grasp amongst a vast repertoire not only considering the physical attributes of the object to grasp but even to obtain a certain effect. This is why in our case the study in the area of robot manipulation is focused on grasping and integrating symbolic tasks with data gained through sensors. The learning model is based on Bayesian Network to encode the statistical dependencies between the data collected by the sensors and the symbolic task. This data representation has several advantages. It allows to take into account the uncertainty of the real world, allowing to deal with sensor noise, encodes notion of causality and provides an unified network for learning. Since the network is actually implemented and based on the human expert knowledge, it is very interesting to implement an automated method to learn the structure as in the future more tasks and object features can be introduced and a complex network design based only on human expert knowledge can become unreliable. Since structure learning algorithms presents some weaknesses, the goal of this thesis is to analyze real data used in the network modeled by the human expert, implement a feasible structure learning approach and compare the results with the network designed by the expert in order to possibly enhance it.

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Ozog, David. "PRESTO: A Parallel Runtime Environment for Scalable Task-Oriented Computations." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/13239.

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While the message-passing paradigm, seen in programming models such as MPI and UPC, has provided a solution for efficiently programming on distributed memory computer systems, this approach is not a panacea for the needs of all scientists. The traditional method of developing parallel applications in C/C++ and Fortran potentially leaves behind high-level and heterogeneous environments which are the most conducive for supporting modern computational science endeavors. PRESTO alleviates this problem with an easy-to-use framework which provides multi-language adapters to a flexible MPI middleware supporting common computational models such as the asynchronous master/worker and ring pipeline in heterogeneous environments.

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Dias, Marco António dos Santos. "Liderança Estratégica : Reacção Face à Mudança e Orientação dos Comportamentos dos Líderes." Master's thesis, Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/2391.

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Mestrado em Ciências Empresariais
A liderança nas organizações tem vindo a ser estudada pelos académicos há largos anos e as teorias têm se desenvolvido desde o início em torno das características do líder. Hoje em dia o estudo passa por um maior grau de atenção ao ambiente que rodeia o líder e às suas relações. As decisões tomadas pelo líder têm uma importante contribuição para a obtenção de uma vantagem competitiva que a empresa tanto necessita para sobreviver nos mercados ou podem levar a empresa ao fracasso caso tomadas de forma pouco reflectida, logo as decisões têm sempre de ser tomadas de forma sensata, pensando nos prós e contras de cada acção. É com este sentido que o presente trabalho tem como objectivo a análise da temática de liderança estratégica, mais propriamente da receptividade face à mudança e papel do líder e orientação das suas políticas por meio de uma matriz proposta, criada para a ocasião e com dimensões relacionadas com os temas mencionados. Com este trabalho pretende-se realizar uma pesquisa de literatura e colocar vários artigos que estão de acordo com as dimensões definidas para a matriz nos seus quadrantes correspondentes e proceder ainda a uma colocação de estilos de liderança que se assemelham aos quadrantes da matriz. Os resultados do trabalho verificaram a validação de três vectores da matriz, com a colocação de estilos de liderança nesses respectivos vectores, deixando um de fora que poderá ser alvo de futuros desenvolvimentos de outros trabalhos.
Leadership in organizations has been studied by scholars for many years and theories have developed since the beginning about the characteristics of the leader. Nowadays the studies involve a greater degree of attention to the environment surrounding the leader and their relationships. Decisions taken by the leader may have an important contribution to achieving a competitive advantage, which the company badly needs to survive in the markets, or may lead to failure if taken in a little reflected way, so the decisions must always be taken wisely, thinking of the pros and cons of each action. It is with this sense that the present work aims at examining the issue of strategic leadership, more properly address the receptivity to change and the role of the leader and orientation of his policies through a proposed matrix, which was created for the occasion with related dimensions to the themes mentioned. This work intends to perform a literature search and put various items that are in accordance with the dimensions defined for the matrix in their corresponding quadrants and also carry out a placing of leadership styles that resemble the quadrants of the matrix. The results of the study verified the validation of three quadrants of the matrix, with the placement of these leadership styles in those quadrants, leaving out one that may be subject to future developments of other works.

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26

Classon, Linnéa, and Siösteen Fanny Tofte. "Det agila ledarskapet och dess effekt på alienation : - En fallstudie om ledarskapets effekt på medarbetarnas alienation." Thesis, Örebro universitet, Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-55804.

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This study aims to enlighten the effect the agile leadership has on alienation. Two different companies, with different leadership styles, are examined in an attempt to determine if leadership is a contributing factor to alienation among the employees. The study was conducted through the use of a case study of two stores of two different companies. To obtain the purpose of this study the following questions have been asked: • Which features of alienation can be found among the employees? • What effect does the leadership have on the employee’s alienation? To acquire the purpose of the study the theoretical framework is based on a presentation of the traditional leadership, the agile leadership and alienation. The study shows that the employees have encountered some features of alienation. The study shows that the employee at the company who practices the agile leadership encounters fewer of the alienation features, than the employees at the company who practices the traditional leadership. The results of the study showed that some of the features had a bigger impact on the employees. We also found that the agile leadership had good effects on alienation, as the self organized-team, an including approach and lack of hierarchy had beneficial effects on the employee’s sense of control and motivation.
Studiens syfte är att belysa det agila ledarskapets påverkan på alienation. Två företag med två olika ledarskapsstilar har undersökts för att kunna avgöra om ledarskapet är en faktor som kan påverka alienation hos medarbetarna. Undersökningen har gjorts med hjälp av en fallstudie, där två butiker från två olika företag undersökts. Studiens syfte har lett till följande frågeställningar: • Vilka drag av alienation kan påträffas bland medarbetarna?• Vad har ledarskapet för effekt på medarbetarnas alienation? En teoretisk referensram bestående av en genomgång av det traditionella ledarskapet, det agila ledarskapet samt alienation har utformats för att svara på frågeställningarna. Då alienationsbegreppet har stor betydelse har det bearbetats noga och brutits ned i fem beståndsdelar. Studien visar att intervjupersonerna upplever drag av alienation. Det framgår att medarbetaren på företaget med agilt ledarskap påträffar färre drag av alienation än medarbetarna på företaget med traditionellt ledarskap. Studien visade att de olika dragen av alienation har olika inverkan på medarbetarna. Det framkom även att det agila ledarskapet hade goda effekter på alienation, då det självorganiserade teamet, ett inkluderande förhållningssätt och avsaknad av hierarki främjade medarbetarnas känsla av kontroll och motivation i arbetet.

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Drost, Ellen Antoinette. "Toward a unified theory of task-oriented and relationship-oriented leader behavior: a multi-country generalizability study." FIU Digital Commons, 2001. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3086.

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The theoretical foundation of this study comes from the significant recurrence throughout the leadership literature of two distinct behaviors, task orientation and relationship orientation. Task orientation and relationship orientation are assumed to be generic behaviors, which are universally observed and applied in organizations, even though they may be uniquely enacted in organizations across cultures. The lack of empirical evidence supporting these assumptions provided the impetus to hypothetically develop and empirically confirm the universal application of task orientation and relationship orientation and the generalizability of their measurement in a cross-cultural setting. Task orientation and relationship orientation are operationalized through consideration and initiation of structure, two well-established theoretical leadership constructs. Multiple-group mean and covariance structures (MACS) analyses are used to simultaneously validate the generalizability of the two hypothesized constructs across the 12 cultural groups and to assess whether the similarities and differences discovered are measurement and scaling artifacts or reflect true cross-cultural differences. The data were collected by the author and others as part of a larger international research project. The data are comprised of 2341 managers from 12 countries/regions. The results provide compelling evidence that task orientation and relationship orientation, reliably and validly operationalized through consideration and initiation of structure, are generalizable across the countries/regions sampled. But the results also reveal significant differences in the perception of these behaviors, suggesting that some aspects of task orientation and relationship orientation are strongly affected by cultural influences. These (similarities and) differences reflect directly interpretable, error-free effects among the constructs at the behavioral level. Thus, task orientation and relationship orientation can demonstrate different relations among cultures, yet still be defined equivalently across the 11 cultures studied. The differences found in this study are true differences and may contain information about cultural influences characterizing each cultural context (i.e. group). The nature of such influences should be examined before the results can be meaningfully interpreted. To examine the effects of cultural characteristics on the constructs, additional hypotheses on the constructs' latent parameters can be tested across groups. Construct-level tests are illustrated in hypothetical examples in light of the study's results. The study contributes significantly to the theoretical understanding of the nature and generalizability of psychological constructs. The theoretical and practical implications of embedding context into a unified theory of task orientated and relationship oriented leader behavior are proposed. Limitations and contributions are also discussed.

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Fields, Marc. "The Effect of Task Versus Ego Oriented Feedback on Exercise Enjoyment." TopSCHOLAR®, 2003. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/590.

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Intrinsic motivation has been shown to be a very important factor in exercise adherence. Research has found that factors such as exercise intensity, social feedback, goal orientation and perceived climate can affect intrinsic motivation. The purpose of this study was to assess situational goal orientation, specifically whether individuals in a task induced condition or ego induced condition would report different levels of intrinsic motivation (i.e., enjoyment, tension, effort and competence during exercise). Participants (N= 114) rode on an exercise bike for 24 minutes at a moderate intensity. A MANCOVA factorial design was used to examine differences in intrinsic motivation. The results of the study did not reveal any significant differences in the level of enjoyment, tension, effort and competence between the task and ego-oriented conditions. However, there were significant differences for outcome feedback (win vs. lose) for competence and tension as well as a significant interaction between goal orientation and outcome feedback for the dependent variable competence. Ego oriented individuals who won in the race function reported significantly higher levels of competence than ego oriented individuals who lost in the race function. Other results and limitations of the study are discussed.

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Eshky, Aciel. "Generative probabilistic models of goal-directed users in task-oriented dialogs." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15947.

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A longstanding objective of human-computer interaction research is to develop better dialog systems for end users. The subset of user modelling research specifically, aims to provide dialog researchers with models of user behaviour to aid with the design and improvement of dialog systems. Where dialog systems are commercially deployed, they are often to be used by a vast number of users, where sub-optimal performance could lead to an immediate financial loss for the service provider, and even user alienation. Thus, there is a strong incentive to make dialog systems as functional as possible immediately, and crucially prior to their release to the public. Models of user behaviour fill this gap, by simulating the role of human users in the lab, without the losses associated with sub-optimal system performance. User models can also tremendously aid design decisions, by serving as tools for exploratory analysis of real user behaviour, prior to designing dialog software. User modelling is the central problem of this thesis. We focus on a particular kind of dialogs termed task-oriented dialogs (those centred around solving an explicit task) because they represent the frontier of current dialog research and commercial deployment. Users taking part in these dialogs behave according to a set of user goals, which specify what they wish to accomplish from the interaction, and tend to exhibit variability of behaviour given the same set of goals. Our objective is to capture and reproduce (at the semantic utterance level) the range of behaviour that users exhibit while being consistent with their goals. We approach the problem as an instance of generative probabilistic modelling, with explicit user goals, and induced entirely from data. We argue that doing so has numerous practical and theoretical benefits over previous approaches to user modelling which have either lacked a model of user goals, or have been not been driven by real dialog data. A principal problem with user modelling development thus far has been the difficulty in evaluation. We demonstrate how treating user models as probabilistic models alleviates some of these problems through the ability to leverage a whole raft of techniques and insights from machine learning for evaluation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by applying it to two different kinds of task-oriented dialog domains, which exhibit two different sub-problems encountered in real dialog corpora. The first are informational (or slot-filling) domains, specifically those concerning flight and bus route information. In slot-filling domains, user goals take categorical values which allow multiple surface realisations, and are corrupted by speech recognition errors. We address this issue by adopting a topic model representation of user goals which allows us capture both synonymy and phonetic confusability in a unified model. We first evaluate our model intrinsically using held-out probability and perplexity, and demonstrate substantial gains over an alternative string-goal representations, and over a non-goal-directed model. We then show in an extrinsic evaluation that features derived from our model lead to substantial improvements over strong baseline in the task of discriminating between real dialogs (consistent dialogs) and dialogs comprised of real turns sampled from different dialogs (inconsistent dialogs). We then move on to a spatial navigational domain in which user goals are spatial trajectories across a landscape. The disparity between the representation of spatial routes as raw pixel coordinates and their grounding as semantic utterances creates an interesting challenge compared to conventional slot-filling domains. We derive a feature-based representation of spatial goals which facilitates reasoning and admits generalisation to new routes not encountered at training time. The probabilistic formulation of our model allows us to capture variability of behaviour given the same underlying goal, a property frequently exhibited by human users in the domain. We first evaluate intrinsically using held-out probability and perplexity, and find a substantial reduction in uncertainty brought by our spatial representation. We further evaluate extrinsically in a human judgement task and find that our model’s behaviour does not differ significantly from the behaviour of real users. We conclude by sketching two novel ideas for future work: the first is to deploy the user models as transition functions for MDP-based dialog managers; the second is to use the models as a means of restricting the search space for optimal policies, by treating optimal behaviour as a subset of the (distributions over) plausible behaviour which we have induced.

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Freeman, Sabrina Karen. "Inferior performance, standards, and expectations in task-oriented same-sex dyads." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26468.

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This research examines the role of standards in the formation of performance expectations. In particular, the formation of inferior performance expectations of an actor relative to a partner are examined. The theoretical framework used is that of expectation states theory which is concerned with the development, maintenance and modification of power and prestige hierarchies in task-oriented groups. Subjects in same-sex dyads were assigned at random to one of two experimental conditions. Two sets of standards defined the presence or absence of ability. In the first condition, subjects were given a lower score than their partners and were informed that it could not be determined from these scores whether they lacked ability at the task or whether the partner possessed the task ability. In the second condition, subjects were given the same scores as in condition one, but were told that they definitely lacked the task ability, and that the partner definitely possessed the ability. The hypothesis states that subjects in the first condition will reject less influence than those in the second. The hypothesis was supported for women, but not for men. Gender differences in rejection of influence rates cannot be attributed to manipulation failures or other variables also measured in the study. It is argued that lack of support for the hypothesis with respect to male subjects can be attributed to a greater degree of caution amongst males in the formation of expectations based upon evaluations of past performance. Reasons for male reluctance in generalizing from information provided are suggested and the importance of these findings to expectation states theory and to the general role of standards is discussed.
Arts, Faculty of
Sociology, Department of
Graduate

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31

McLeod, Charles D. "Biblical concepts of task-oriented leadership based upon Joshua 1:11." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 1987. http://www.tren.com.

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32

Kulms, Philipp [Verfasser]. "Trust in interdependent and task-oriented human-computer cooperation / Philipp Kulms." Bielefeld : Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld, 2018. http://d-nb.info/117198782X/34.

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Fayyaz, Muhammad. "Task oriented fault-tolerant distributed computing for use on board spacecraft." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/36268.

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Current and future space missions demand highly reliable, High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC). The review of the literature has shown that no single solution could meet both issues efficiently at present addressing HPEC as well as reliability. Furthermore, there is no suitable method of assessing performance for such a scheme. In this thesis a novel cooperative task-oriented fault-tolerant distributed computing (FTDC) architecture is proposed, which caters for high performance and reliability in systems on board spacecraft. In a nut shell, the architecture comprises two types of nodes, a computing node and an input-output node, interfaced together through a high-speed network with bus topology. To detect faults in the nodes, a fault management scheme specifically designed to support the cooperative task-oriented distributed computing concept is proposed and employed, which is referred to as Adaptive Middleware for Fault-Tolerance (AMFT). AMFT is implemented as a separate hardware block and operates in parallel with the processing unit within the computing node. A set of metrics is designed and mathematical models of availability and reliability are developed, which are used to evaluate the proposed distributed computing architecture and fault management scheme. As a new development, extending the current state of the art, the proposed fault-tolerant distributed architecture has been subjected to a rigorous assessment through hardware implementation. Implementation approaches at two levels were adopted to provide a proof of concept: a board level and a Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) level. Both distributed computing system implementations were evaluated for functional validity and performance. To examine the FTDC architecture performance under a realistic space related distributed computing scenario a case-study application, representing a satellite Attitude and Orbit Control System (AOCS), was developed. The AOCS application was selected because it features a time critical task execution, in which system failure and reconfiguration time must be kept minimal. Based on the case-study application, it was demonstrated that the FTDC architecture is capable of fully meeting the desired requirements by timely migrating tasks to functional nodes and keeping rollback of task states minimal, which proves the advantages of the adopted cooperative distributed approach for use on board spacecraft.

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Farelo, Fabian. "Task oriented simulation and control of a wheelchair mounted robotic arm." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0003294.

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35

Gallivan, Michael Timothy. "An analysis of trajectory control strategies in a goal oriented throwing task /." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63949.

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36

Barange, Mukesh. "Task-oriented communicative capabilities of agents in collaborative virtual environments for training." Thesis, Brest, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015BRES0013/document.

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Les besoins croissants en formation et en entrainement au travail d’équipe ont motivé l’utilisationd’Environnements de réalité Virtuelle Collaboratifs de Formation (EVCF) qui permettent aux utilisateurs de travailler avec des agents autonomes pour réaliser une activité collective. L’idée directrice est que la coordination efficace entre les membres d’une équipe améliore la productivité et réduit les erreurs individuelles et collectives. Cette thèse traite de la mise en place et du maintien de la coordination au sein d’une équipe de travail composée d’agents et d’humains interagissant dans un EVCF.L’objectif de ces recherches est de doter les agents virtuels de comportements conversationnels permettant la coopération entre agents et avec l’utilisateur dans le but de réaliser un but commun.Nous proposons une architecture d’agents Collaboratifs et Conversationnels, dérivée de l’architecture Belief-Desire-Intention (C2-BDI), qui gère uniformément les comportements délibératifs et conversationnels comme deux comportements dirigés vers les buts de l’activité collective. Nous proposons un modèle intégré de la coordination fondé sur l’approche des modèles mentaux partagés, afin d’établir la coordination au sein de l’équipe de travail composée d’humains et d’agents. Nous soutenons que les interactions en langage naturel entre les membres d’une équipe modifient les modèles mentaux individuels et partagés des participants. Enfin, nous décrivons comment les agents mettent en place et maintiennent la coordination au sein de l’équipe par le biais de conversations en langage naturel. Afin d’établir un couplage fort entre la prise de décision et le comportement conversationnel collaboratif d’un agent, nous proposons tout d’abord une approche fondée sur la modélisation sémantique des activités humaines et de l’environnement virtuel via le modèle mascaret puis, dans un second temps, une modélisation du contexte basée sur l’approche Information State. Ces représentations permettent de traiter de manière unifiée les connaissances sémantiques des agents sur l’activité collective et sur l’environnement virtuel ainsi que des informations qu’ils échangent lors de dialogues.Ces informations sont utilisées par les agents pour la génération et la compréhension du langage naturel multipartite. L’approche Information State nous permet de doter les agents C2BDI de capacités communicatives leur permettant de s’engager pro-activement dans des interactions en langue naturelle en vue de coordonner efficacement leur activité avec les autres membres de l’équipe. De plus, nous définissons les protocoles conversationnels collaboratifs favorisant la coordination entre les membres de l’équipe. Enfin, nous proposons dans cette thèse un mécanisme de prise de décision s’inspirant de l’approche BDI qui lie les comportements de délibération et de conversation des agents. Nous avons mis en oeuvre notre architecture dans trois différents scénarios se déroulant dans des EVCF. Nous montrons que les comportements conversationnels collaboratifs multipartites des agents C2BDI facilitent la coordination effective de l’utilisateur avec les autres membres de l’équipe lors de la réalisation d’une tâche partagée
Growing needs of educational and training requirements motivate the use of collaborative virtual environments for training (CVET) that allows human users to work together with autonomous agents to perform a collective activity. The vision is inspired by the fact that the effective coordination improves productivity, and reduces the individual and team errors. This work addresses the issue of establishing and maintaining the coordination in a mixed human-agent teamwork in the context of CVET. The objective of this research is to provide human-like conversational behavior of the virtual agents in order to cooperate with a user and other agents to achieve shared goals.We propose a belief-desire-intention (BDI) like Collaborative Conversational agent architecture(C2BDI) that treats both deliberative and conversational behaviors uniformly as guided by the goal-directed shared activity. We put forward an integrated model of coordination which is founded on the shared mental model based approaches to establish coordination in a human-agent teamwork. We argue that natural language interaction between team members can affect and modify the individual and shared mental models of the participants. Finally, we describe the cultivation of coordination in a mixed human-agent teamwork through natural language conversation. In order to establish the strong coupling between decision making and the collaborative conversational behavior of the agent, we propose first, the Mascaret based semantic modeling of human activities and the VE, and second, the information state based context model. This representation allows the treatment of semantic knowledge of the collaborative activity and virtual environment, and information exchanged during the dialogue conversation in a unified manner. This knowledge can be used by the agent for multiparty natural language processing (understanding and generation) in the context of the CEVT. To endow the communicative capabilities to C2BDI agent, we put forward the information state based approach for the natural language processing of the utterances. We define collaborative conversation protocols that ensure the coordination between team members. Finally, in this thesis, we propose a decision making mechanism, which is inspired by the BDI based approach and provides the interleaving between deliberation and conversational behavior of the agent. We have applied the proposed architecture to three different scenarios in the CVET. We found that the multiparty collaborative conversational behavior of C2BDI agent is more constructive and facilitates the user to effectively coordinate with other team members to perform a shared task

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Glaser, Andrea [Verfasser], and Jonas [Akademischer Betreuer] Kuhn. "Task-oriented specialization techniques for entity retrieval / Andrea Glaser ; Betreuer: Jonas Kuhn." Stuttgart : Universitätsbibliothek der Universität Stuttgart, 2020. http://d-nb.info/122991983X/34.

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38

Davies, B. L. "An empirical examination of cooperation, effort and risk in task-oriented dialogue." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/18133.

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This thesis presents a discussion of proposed structuring principles for dialogue, and tests them empirically using data from the HCRC Map Task Corpus. The concepts of Cooperation (as described by Grice, and as used more generally in Linguistics), Coordination, Collaboration, Parsimony, Risk and Effort are ex¬ amined, and empirically testable hypotheses are developed, with which we are able to evaluate the claims for these principles in the context of task-oriented dialogue. In order to test our hypotheses, we categorise the utterances in our database in terms of Risk and Effort. Unlike Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis or Dialogue Games, our approach is evaluative. The intent in our dialogue coding is not only to label what the speakers did, but also to assess it in terms of its appropriateness at that point in the dialogue: the system codes not only what people do, but also what they don't do. Therefore, our system marks both the presence and absence of dialogue attributes. The hypotheses derived from the structuring concepts were statistically tested on the data produced by the coding system. The results produced by the empiri¬ cal tests showed a relationship between dialogue errors and task errors, but not between increased effort and increased task success. The importance of matched effort was also demonstrated, as dialogue pairs who invested similar amounts of effort produced better task results. Dialogue pairs also produced better results over time, which we argue is due to the focusing of effort. Participants work out where their effort should be channelled so that they can increase risk-taking where problems have not occurred, and decrease risk-taking where problems have occurred. These results suggest that interactants' behaviour follows a Principle of Least Individual Effort, which we argue subsumes the Principle of Parsimony and thus the Risk-Effort Trade-Olf. We reject the Principle of Least Collaborative Effort because although the empirical result of high effort not being associated with task success supports this principle in theory, we argue that its motivation is not supported in practice. The empirical work also distinguishes between what we term 'Gricean Cooperation', and folklinguistic notions of Cooperation found in the literature. In general terms, Gricean Cooperation predicted the same type of effort-minimising behaviour as the Principle of Least Individual Effort, and was thus supported by the empirical work. However, the concept of 'helpfulness' suggested by more general uses of Cooperation made predictions which were in conflict with those of the Principle of Least Individual Effort, and were found not to be supported.

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39

Otsuki, Kyoko. "Cross-linguistic study of elliptical utterances in task-oriented dialogues with classroom implications." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5821.

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Ellipsis is a phenomenon whereby constituents which are normally obligatory in the grammar are omitted in actual discourse. It is found in all types of discourse, from everyday conversation to poetry. The omitted constituents can range from one word to an entire clause, and recovery of the ellipted item depends sometimes on the linguistic and sometimes on the non-linguistic context. From a practical point of view, the contribution of ellipsis in the context is twofold. First, it is one of several important means of achieving cohesion in a text. Secondly, ellipsis contributes to communicative appropriateness determined by the type of linguistic activity (e.g., narrative, casual conversation), the mode of communication (e.g., written / spoken) and the relationship between participants. The aim of this research is to provide a description of the functions of elliptical utterances – textual and interpersonal – in English and Japanese, based on a cross-linguistic analysis of dialogues in the English and Japanese map task corpora. In order to analyse ellipsis in relation to its two key functions, elliptical clauses in the map task dialogues were examined. I discuss how ellipsis is used to realise cohesion in the map task dialogues. The findings challenge the well-known claim that topics are established by full noun phrases, which are subsequently realised by pronouns (English) and null pronouns (Japanese). Rather, the results suggest that full noun phrases are used for topic continuity in both languages. Constituents which are ellipted in an utterance are identified and related to the moves types which the utterance realises within the exchange structure. The ellipted elements will be categorised according to the constituent types (Subject, Finite, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct), using the systemic functional approach. This analysis reveals that whereas in the English dialogues the most common types of ellipsis are that of Subject and Finite elements, in the Japanese dialogues the most common type is that of Subject. Types of ellipsis are also correlated with speech acts in the dialogues. The relation between types of ellipsis and particular speech acts associated with them is strikingly similar in the English and Japanese dialogues, despite the notable difference in grammar and pragmatics between the two languages. This analysis also shows how these types of ellipsis are associated with interpersonal effects in particular speech acts: ellipsis of Subject and Finite can contribute to a sharp contrast in the question and answer sequence, while Subject ellipsis in Japanese can contribute to modifying the command-like force in giving instructions. These effects can be summed up as epistemic and deontic modality respectively. Ultimately, it is argued that some types of ellipsis can serve as modality expressions. Additionally, in comparison to the way of realising the speech act of giving instructions in the English dialogues, it emerges that the Japanese speakers exploit ellipsis, which seems to be associated with lowering the degree of the speaker’s commitment to the proposition. As implications for pedagogical settings, I present pedagogical descriptions of ellipsis for Japanese learners of English and English learners of Japanese. Since the description is for specific learners, the approach which takes the difference in grammar and pragmatics between the two languages is made possible. Although descriptions state some detailed facts of ellipsis in English and Japanese, primarily highlighted is the importance of raising awareness of elliptical forms for particular functions in particular contexts. As ellipsis is a product of forms, functions and contexts, it is a most remarkable feature of spoken language. Spoken language is claimed by some researchers to show similar linguistic features among languages because of the restrictions inherent in the medium on communication. In the form of pedagogical description, I show the similarities and differences in ellipsis which derive from the grammar and pragmatics of each language, which are observed in the preceding linguistic research. Through the presentation of the findings which are modified for learners, learners will know how languages show convergence and divergence cross-linguistically.

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Arredondo, Kelley Arredondo. "Employee Perceptions of Leadership Styles: Integrating Consideration, Interpersonal Traits, and Task-Oriented Behavior." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1540306472533629.

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41

Golby, Christopher. "User-centred design of a task-oriented upper-limb assessment system for stroke." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/72926/.

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During rehabilitation from Stroke, patients require assessment of their upper-limb motor control. Outcome measures can often be subjective and objective data is required to supplement therapist/patient opinion on progress. This can be performed through goniometry; however, goniometry can be time-consuming, have inaccuracies of ±23º, and is therefore, often not used. Motion tracking technology is a possible answer to this problem, but can also be costly, time-consuming and not suitable for the clinical environment. This thesis aims to provide an objective, digital intervention method for assessing range of motion to supplement current outcome measures which is suitable for the clinical environment. This was performed by creating a low-cost technology through a user-centred design approach. Requirements elicitation demonstrated that a motivational, portable, cost-effective, non-invasive, time saving system for assessing functional activities was needed. Therefore, a system which utilised a Microsoft Kinect and EZ430 chronos wrist watch to track patient’s movements during and/or outside of therapy sessions was created. Measurements can be taken in a matter of minutes and provide a high quantity of objective data regarding patient movement. The system was verified, using healthy volunteers, by showing similar error rates in the system across 3 weeks in 10 able-bodied individuals, with error rates produced by a physiotherapist using goniometry. The system was also validated in the clinical setting with 6 stroke patients, over 15 weeks, as selected by 6 occupational therapists and 3 physiotherapists in 2 NHS stroke wards. The approach which has been created in this thesis is objective, repeatable, low-cost, portable, and non-invasive; allowing it to be the first tool for the objective assessment of upper-limb ROM which is efficiently designed and suitable for everyday use in stroke rehabilitation.

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Atkinson, Darren C. "The design and implementation of practical and task-oriented whole-program analysis tools /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9932587.

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Fazaeli, Ahmad, of Western Sydney Nepean University, and Faculty of Education. "Academic culture, attitudes and values of leaders, and students' satisfaction with academic culture in Australia's universities." THESIS_FE_XXX_FAZAELI_A.xml, 1998. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/126.

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This study examined staff and leadership's attitudes to their work organisation and its environment, and, in particular, the extent to which they preferred a human or task orientation. The study then defined and measured the 'academic culture' of the institution and explored the different effects of emphasising human or task orientations on this academic culture. Finally, the relationship between academic culture and student satisfaction within the institution was explored in the research. The measure of academic culture encompassed 3 domains - planning, the way of doing things, and relationships. A set of survey research instruments was developed and piloted. These instruments measured, in addition to background characteristics of respondents, aspects of attitude to the organisation and perceptions of its academic culture. The results of the study provided evidence that stronger task-oriented attitudes of leaders and staff were associated with academic culture subscales based on 'clarity of the job' and 'goal setting' within the planning domain and 'job performance' within the way of doing things domain. Although the relationship was much weaker, stronger human-oriented attitudes were related to the academic culture subscales of 'communication and relationship' and 'social acceptance' within the relationship domain, and 'leader-subordinate interaction' in the way of doing things domain. In as much as a strong academic culture needs an emphasis on the 3 domains (planning, the way of doing things in an organisation, and relationships), the research suggested that staff and leadership need to be versatile and incorporate both task-oriented and human-oriented approaches. A number of measures of attitudes and perceptions of academic culture were significantly related to the demographic backgrounds of the participants. This emphasised the importance of treating the constructs as multi-dimensional and the leaders, staff, and students as heterogeneous groups. Finally, and importantly, student satisfaction measures were associated with higher academic culture scores
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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44

Botes, Antonette, and Antonette Crouse. "The effect of rater-ratee personality similarity on ratings of task-oriented work behaviours." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/71936.

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Thesis (MComm)--Stellenbosch University, 2012.
As a means to measure job performance, performance appraisal plays a central role in effective individual and organisational management (Behn, 2003). Sound performance management and performance measurement are fundamental to a productive workplace and critical for a high-performing organisation (Jordan, 2002). Performance appraisal research has shifted its emphasis from psychometric issues to the examination of rater cognitive processes and the social and contextual variables which affect performance evaluation. Since raters are important factors in successful performance measurement, one line of research has investigated the effect of similarity, between rater and ratee, on subsequent performance ratings. These studies have mostly relied on similarity measures based on physical similarity characteristics, such as demographic variables. The inconclusive nature of these studies’ findings suggests that the complexity of interpersonal similarity and its effect on ratings has most likely been oversimplified. In the social-cognition literature, substantial evidence exists that rater-ratee acquaintance shifts the focus of similarity judgment to “deeper”, sometimes unobservable, characteristics, like values, motives and attitudes. This research study investigates whether rater-ratee similarity in Big Five personality traits unduly influences task-orientated performance ratings. Self-report personality data (IPIP; Goldberg, 2006) were collected from university lecturers and their students (N = 152). Actual lecturer task performance assessment data (end-of-semester student feedback ratings) were gathered concurrently. Data were analysed through polynomial regression analysis and response surface methodology. Results indicated that ratee (i.e., lecturer) extraversion (r = .357), conscientiousness (r = .413) and openness (r = .178) had significant main effects on average performance ratings. Also, rater-ratee personality similarity in extraversion (p < .001), neuroticism (p < .01) and openness (p < .001) had a significant effect on performance ratings, with the effects of agreeableness and conscientiousness also approaching significance. The present study further extends earlier research by using task performance ratings as criterion measures — as opposed to earlier studies that used contextual performance ratings — and also used “upward” ratings of seniors, instead of peer- or ‘downward’ ratings of performance, as was done in earlier studies of personality similarity effects. The results suggest that (a) earlier conclusions that personality similarity does not affect performance ratings seem to be premature, (b) more research is needed to investigate why personality similarity affects ratings and last, (c) we do not yet understand the boundary conditions that affect this phenomenon.

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Cunningham, Christofer, and Karin Lindén. "A dinosaur in a fast-changing environment : exploring employees’ adaptivity to task-oriented change." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Företagsekonomiska institutionen, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-388967.

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46

Marrugo, Hernández Andrés G. (Andrés Guillermo). "Comprehensive retinal image analysis: image processing and feature extraction techniques oriented to the clinical task." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/134698.

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Medical digital imaging has become a key element of modern health care procedures. It provides a visual documentation, a permanent record for the patients, and most importantly the ability to extract information about many diseases. Ophthalmology is a field that is heavily dependent on the analysis of digital images because they can aid in establishing an early diagnosis even before the first symptoms appear. This dissertation contributes to the digital analysis of such images and the problems that arise along the imaging pipeline, a field that is commonly referred to as retinal image analysis. We have dealt with and proposed solutions to problems that arise in retinal image acquisition and longitudinal monitoring of retinal disease evolution. Specifically, non-uniform illumination, poor image quality, automated focusing, and multichannel analysis. However, there are many unavoidable situations in which images of poor quality, like blurred retinal images because of aberrations in the eye, are acquired. To address this problem we have proposed two approaches for blind deconvolution of blurred retinal images. In the first approach, we consider the blur to be space-invariant and later in the second approach we extend the work and propose a more general space-variant scheme. For the development of the algorithms we have built preprocessing solutions that have enabled the extraction of retinal features of medical relevancy, like the segmentation of the optic disc and the detection and visualization of longitudinal structural changes in the retina. Encouraging experimental results carried out on real retinal images coming from the clinical setting demonstrate the applicability of our proposed solutions.

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47

Watanabe, Toyohide. "Agent-oriented model for managing long-lived transaction, based on work-flow and task-graph." IEEE, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/6933.

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48

Bobinski, Michal. "The Influence of Performance Measurement on Actor?s Perception of Task in Goal Oriented Systems." Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/895.

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This thesis addresses the problem of the influence of a control system on the behaviour of an actor in a social or socio-technical system. In particular, the influence of a performance measurement mechanism on the behaviour of an actor and on the development of workarounds is being studied.

Current literature on those topics generally addresses only selected and rather obvious reasons for the existence of dysfunctional behaviour or the workarounds. However, no precise models of the cognitive processes or the explanation of the mechanisms, which govern this problem, are proposed in a satisfactory manner. In addition, most researchers have focused only on the system?s point of view of the task, paying less attention to the actors? perception of that task. Furthermore, the existing body of work mainly uses a case study format to explain the phenomenon or to validate the proposed solutions and theories.

In this thesis, the problem of the influence control system on the behaviour of the actor is framed in terms of four major concepts: (1) the concept of complexity of the task not being fully captured by the performance measurement mechanism; (2) the concept of an actor perceiving that extra complexity is not being captured by the system and thus choosing alternate paths other than the system-prescribed path; (3) the concept of a network of valence forces associated with alternate paths; and finally, (4) the concept of similarity judgment between the alternative paths and the system-prescribed path based on the actor?s model of the control system?s point of view.

This thesis develops the theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the issues of dysfunctional behaviour and workarounds. It also presents an empirical experimental study in support of the theoretical discussion and the hypothesis. The experiment examines subjects? rating of quality, defined as a degree of similarity to a target object, of several objects on a page under various performance measurement conditions. The stimulus used for experiment was made up of two dimensional quadrangle figures, including rectangle, parallelograms and trapezes, in various shades of red colour.

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Lang, Christian [Verfasser]. "Facial Communicative Signals: valence recognition in task-oriented human-robot Interaction / Christian Lang. Technische Fakultät." Bielefeld : Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld, Hochschulschriften, 2012. http://d-nb.info/1027478891/34.

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50

Kristal-Ern, Alfred. "Can sound be used to effectively direct players' attention in a visual gameplay oriented task?" Thesis, Luleå tekniska universitet, Medier ljudteknik och upplevelseproduktion och teater, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-63621.

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In this study, the understanding about multimodal perception from previous studies has been used to create a perceptually demanding visual search task inside a game. Also, a subtle multimodal cue was created to be in-directly informative about the visual search target’s location by attracting subjects’ attention. 20 subjects were divided equally among the experiments two conditions, one where the subjects had no access to the multimodal information and one where the subjects did have access to the multimodal information. The multimodal information conveyed to the subjects in this experiment was temporal synchrony between a visual light pulsating and a sound being modulated using level and low-pass filtering. Results showed that the subjects that were given the multimodal information improved more on the search task than the group without multimodal information, but the subjects in the multimodal group also perceived the pace of the task as higher. However, it is unclear exactly how the multimodal cue helped the subjects since the playing subjects did not seem to change their search movement pattern to favor the location of the search target, as was expected. Further, the difficulties and considerations of testing in a game environment is discussed and it is concluded that the gamer population is a very varied group which has big impacts on methodology of in-game experiments. To identify sub-groups, further research could study why different players use different search behaviors.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Task-oriented'

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