Multiagent systems and online communities rely on rating systems to infer the reputation given to an individual within a particular context. The notion of reputation is essential for helping a given individual to trust in other individuals and for being…

The objective of this thesis is to clarify the ways that organizational factors influence nuclear power plant performance in order to improve performance. Therefore, this thesis studied the nuclear power plant organizational environment by identifying and detailing its important work…

Continued advances in the semiconductor industry will require the introduction of new materials and processes concurrent with shrinking device dimensions. These simultaneous demands drastically reduce margins for error and necessitate an increasingly quantitative understanding of semiconductor processes. Leaders of the…

Undergraduate physiotherapy programmes aim to equip graduates with basic skills, knowledge and behaviours to allow them to
enter the profession. The aim of this study was to explore employers’ perceptions of key factors in work place preparedness of novice
physiotherapists.…

All intelligence relies on search - for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

Two-electron mixed-valence complexes of rhodium may be supported by diphosphazane ligands (RN(PY2)2). Whereas diphosphazane ligands with strongly [pi]-acidic phosphine groups (Y = F, OCH2CF3) react with RhI starting materials to afford binuclear Rh20,II complexes, Rh20,II(MeN(PY)2)3X2(L) or Rh2"II(MeN(PY),)3X2 (X = Cl,…

Modem society requires reliable and safe operation of its infrastructure. Policymakers believe that, in many industries, competitive markets and regulatory incentives will result in system performance superior to that under command-and-control regulation. Analytical techniques to evaluate the reliability and safety…

(cont.) multiple Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) demonstrate that the new DMPC algorithm offers significant computational improvement compared to its centralized counterpart. The controllers developed in this thesis are demonstrated throughout in simulated examples related to vehicle control. Also, some of…

Over the past several decades, abundant research has investigated the onset of gender role development in early childhood, suggesting that children as young as 3 possess substantial awareness of gender stereotypes and, by age 5, strong beliefs about the need…

Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies,…