A Contextual Approach To Learning Collaborative Behavior Via Observation

This dissertation describes a novel technique to creating a simulated team of agents through observation. Simulated human teamwork can be used for a number of purposes, such as expert examples, automated teammates for training purposes and realistic opponents in games and training simulation. Current teamwork simulations require the team member behaviors be programmed into the simulation, often requiring a great deal of time and effort. None are able to observe a team at work and replicate the teamwork behaviors. Machine learning techniques for learning by observation and learning by demonstration have proven successful at observing behavior of humans or other software agents and creating a behavior function for a single agent. The research described here combines current research in teamwork simulations and learning by observation to effectively train a multi-agent system in effective team behavior. The dissertation describes the background and work by others as well as a detailed description of the learning method. A prototype built to evaluate the developed approach as well as the extensive experimentation conducted is also described

Design and Implementation of Automated Mapping System: With Emphasis on Image Handling

This thesis is concerned with the design and the implementation of an automated mapping system. Automation of the mapping process is a major concern in the geomatics discipline as the role of geospatial information is becoming more important in the 'information society'. Automation has been successful in some tasks of the mapping process, whereas it is faced with difficulties in other more complex tasks. In all of these automation efforts, software development is inevitably involved. In software development, software design should be carried out prior to its implementation but at present, software design is not widely practiced by research organisations in the geomatics discipline. Research into systematic design of software for the geomatics discipline will prove beneficial for both the research organisations and the end users in the long run. An Object Oriented software design using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is presented in this thesis for some of the subsystems of the automated mapping system, namely: the image acquisition subsystem; the positioning subsystem; and, the image point referencing subsystem. For each of these subsystems, the domain knowledge and the software implementation aspects were investigated and analysed. Based on the results of this analysis, the software design for the subsystems was produced using UML. The design was then implemented in C++ programming language and tested with practical data. This study concludes that the software design of this study enhances the implementation effort. For example, the same classes which had already been implemented in the positioning subsystem were reused in the image point referencing subsystem with only little changes. It is also emphasized in this study that the Object Oriented design using UML should be used by research organisations of the geomatics discipline. The software design of the automated mapping system presented in this thesis will lay a foundation for further development of software which could be effectively used for geospatial research

Domestic Violence and Gender-Based Persecution: How Refugee Adjudicators Judge Women Seeking Refuge from Spousal Violence—and Why Reform Is Needed

This report is an effort to address information gaps regarding how gendered claims are addressed by adjudicators at Canada’s Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (the RPD). It looks at one specific type of gendered claim: persecution through domestic or intimate violence. The study considers all the RPD decisions from 2004 to 2009 and judicial reviews from 2005 to 2009 that were reported in the Quicklaw LexisNexis service. These decisions are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. This report finds adjudicators consistently identify domestic violence as a form of gendered persecution that can form a nexus to a convention ground. However, despite contrary directions from the Gender Guidelines, adjudicators often fail to recognize the social, cultural, economic, and psychological dynamics of domestic abuse as legally relevant for their assessment of state protection. There is a striking failure on this account when it comes to determining if it was reasonable to expect the claimant to seek state protection. This report presents data on factors such as the rates at which adjudicators consider the adequacy of women’s shelters and the responsiveness of local police to complaints. As well as identifying the frequency and grounds for which judicial reviews are granted, this report also presents a series of recommendations for reform. These recommendations identify where studies are needed, how the Gender Guidelines need reform to make them a helpful instrument, and how training and support for PRD adjudicators needs to be enhanced.Le présent article tente de combler des lacunes documentaires tenant à la façon dont les juges de la Section de la protection des réfugiés (SPR) à la Commission de l’immigration et du statut de réfugié du Canada traitent les revendications genrées. Un type particulier de revendication genrée est examiné : la persécution par la violence domestique ou conjugale. L’étude considère l’ensemble des décisions de la SPR de 2004 à 2009 et des commentaires judiciaires de 2005 à 2009 signalés dans le service LexisNexis Quicklaw. Ces décisions sont analysées à la fois quantitativement et qualitativement. Il est constaté que les juges identifient systématiquement la violence domestique comme forme de persécution genrée, y trouvant motif à s’appuyer sur la Convention. Cependant, malgré les instructions contraires que renferment les directives sur le genre, les juges omettent souvent de reconnaître la dynamique sociale, culturelle, économique et psychologique de la violence conjugale comme juridiquement pertinente pour leur évaluation de la protection de l’État . Il y a un échec frappant à cet égard quand il s’agit de déterminer s’il eût été raisonnable de s’attendre que le demandeur d’asile cherche la protection de l’État . L’auteure présente des données sur des facteurs tels que la fréquence à laquelle les juges considèrent le caractère adé-quat des refuges pour femmes et l’aptitude de la police locale à réagir aux plaintes. Tout en identifiant la fréquence et les motifs pour lesquels les contrôles judiciaires sont accordés, l’auteure présente une série de recommandations en vue d’une réforme. Ces recommandations indiquent où des études sont nécessaires, comment réformer les directives sur le genre pour en faire un instrument utile et comment la formation et le soutien des juges de la SPR doivent être renforcés

Integrating case based reasoning and geographic information systems in a planing support system: Çeşme Peninsula study

Thesis (Doctoral)--Izmir Institute of Technology, City and Regional Planning, Izmir, 2009Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 110-121)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxii, 140 leavesUrban and regional planning is experiencing fundamental changes on the use of of computer-based models in planning practice and education. However, with this increased use, .Geographic Information Systems. (GIS) or .Computer Aided Design.(CAD) alone cannot serve all of the needs of planning. Computational approaches should be modified to deal better with the imperatives of contemporary planning by using artificial intelligence techniques in city planning process.The main aim of this study is to develop an integrated .Planning Support System. (PSS) tool for supporting the planning process. In this research, .Case Based Reasoning. (CBR) .an artificial intelligence technique- and .Geographic Information Systems. (GIS) .geographic analysis, data management and visualization techniqueare used as a major PSS tools to build a .Case Based System. (CBS) for knowledge representation on an operational study. Other targets of the research are to discuss the benefits of CBR method in city planning domain and to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of this technique in a PSS. .Çeşme Peninsula. case study which applied under the desired methodology is presented as an experimental and operational stage of the thesis.This dissertation tried to find out whether an integrated model which employing CBR&GIS could support human decision making in a city planning task. While the CBS model met many of predefined goals of the thesis, both advantages and limitations have been realized from findings when applied to the complex domain such as city planning

Toward a Bio-Inspired System Architecting Framework: Simulation of the Integration of Autonomous Bus Fleets & Alternative Fuel Infrastructures in Closed Sociotechnical Environments

Cities are set to become highly interconnected and coordinated environments composed of emerging technologies meant to alleviate or resolve some of the daunting issues of the 21st century such as rapid urbanization, resource scarcity, and excessive population demand in urban centers. These cybernetically-enabled built environments are expected to solve these complex problems through the use of technologies that incorporate sensors and other data collection means to fuse and understand large sums of data/information generated from other technologies and its human population. Many of these technologies will be pivotal assets in supporting and managing capabilities in various city sectors ranging from energy to healthcare. However, among these sectors, a significant amount of attention within the recent decade has been in the transportation sector due to the flood of new technological growth and cultivation, which is currently seeing extensive research, development, and even implementation of emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles (AVs), the Internet of Things (IoT), alternative xxxvi fueling sources, clean propulsion technologies, cloud/edge computing, and many other technologies. Within the current body of knowledge, it is fairly well known how many of these emerging technologies will perform in isolation as stand-alone entities, but little is known about their performance when integrated into a transportation system with other emerging technologies and humans within the system organization. This merging of new age technologies and humans can make analyzing next generation transportation systems extremely complex to understand. Additionally, with new and alternative forms of technologies expected to come in the near-future, one can say that the quantity of technologies, especially in the smart city context, will consist of a continuously expanding array of technologies whose capabilities will increase with technological advancements, which can change the performance of a given system architecture. Therefore, the objective of this research is to understand the system architecture implications of integrating different alternative fueling infrastructures with autonomous bus (AB) fleets in the transportation system within a closed sociotechnical environment. By being able to understand the system architecture implications of alternative fueling infrastructures and AB fleets, this could provide performance-based input into a more sophisticated approach or framework which is proposed as a future work of this research

State-based Safety of Component-based Medical and Surgical Robot Systems

Safety has not received sufficient attention in the medical robotics community despite a consensus of its paramount importance and the pioneering work in the early 90s. Partly because of its emergent and non-functional characteristics, it is challenging to capture and represent the design of safety features in a consistent, structured manner. In addition, significant engineering efforts are required in practice when designing and developing medical robot systems with safety. Still, academic researchers in medical robotics have to deal with safety to perform clinical studies. This dissertation presents the concept, model and architecture to reformulate safety as a visible, reusable, and verifiable property, rather than an embedded, hard-to-reuse, and hard-to-test property that is tightly coupled with the system. The concept enables reuse and structured understanding of the design of safety features, and the model allows the system designers to explicitly define and capture the run-time status of component-based systems with support for error propagation. The architecture leverages the benefits of the concept and the model by decomposing safety features into reusable mechanisms and configurable specifications. We show the concept and feasibility of the proposed methods by building an open source framework that aims to facilitate research and development of safety systems of medical robots. Using the cisst component-based framework, we empirically evaluate the proposed methods by applying the developed framework to two research systems -- one based on a commercial robot system for orthopedic surgery and another robot soon to be clinically applied for manipulation of flexible endoscopes

A Framework for Model-Driven Development of Mobile Applications with Context Support

Model-driven development (MDD) of software systems has been a serious trend in different application domains over the last 15 years. While technologies, platforms, and architectural paradigms have changed several times since model-driven development processes were first introduced, their applicability and usefulness are discussed every time a new technological trend appears. Looking at the rapid market penetration of smartphones, software engineers are curious about how model-driven development technologies can deal with this novel and emergent domain of software engineering (SE). Indeed, software engineering of mobile applications provides many challenges that model-driven development can address. Model-driven development uses a platform independent model as a crucial artifact. Such a model usually follows a domain-specific modeling language and separates the business concerns from the technical concerns. These platform-independent models can be reused for generating native program code for several mobile software platforms. However, a major drawback of model-driven development is that infrastructure developers must provide a fairly sophisticated model-driven development infrastructure before mobile application developers can create mobile applications in a model-driven way. Hence, the first part of this thesis deals with designing a model-driven development infrastructure for mobile applications. We will follow a rigorous design process comprising a domain analysis, the design of a domain-specific modeling language, and the development of the corresponding model editors. To ensure that the code generators produce high-quality application code and the resulting mobile applications follow a proper architectural design, we will analyze several representative reference applications beforehand. Thus, the reader will get an insight into both the features of mobile applications and the steps that are required to design and implement a model-driven development infrastructure. As a result of the domain analysis and the analysis of the reference applications, we identified context-awareness as a further important feature of mobile applications. Current software engineering tools do not sufficiently support designing and implementing of context-aware mobile applications. Although these tools (e.g., middleware approaches) support the definition and the collection of contextual information, the adaptation of the mobile application must often be implemented by hand at a low abstraction level by the mobile application developers. Thus, the second part of this thesis demonstrates how context-aware mobile applications can be designed more easily by using a model-driven development approach. Techniques such as model transformation and model interpretation are used to adapt mobile applications to different contexts at design time or runtime. Moreover, model analysis and model-based simulation help mobile application developers to evaluate a designed mobile application (i.e., app model) prior to its generation and deployment with respected to certain contexts. We demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of the model-driven development infrastructure we developed by seven case examples. These showcases demonstrate the designing of mobile applications in different domains. We demonstrate the scalability of our model-driven development infrastructure with several performance tests, focusing on the generation time of mobile applications, as well as their runtime performance. Moreover, the usability was successfully evaluated during several hands-on training sessions by real mobile application developers with different skill levels