Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The use of clocks for timekeeping seems to be a straightforward and almost intuitive routine. Glancing at mechanical clocks designed in Edo period Japan, however, we witness how modern-day intuitions betray our attempts to understand devices created in a culture…

In recent research, it is claimed that deviant features of interlanguage grammars arise only
from the users' knowledge of the rule system of the target language. This paper examines
the relative contribution of the rule system of each of the…

Durante las pasadas dos décadas,
las personas que han realizado estudios
sobre enfermería han contribuido
con grandes cantidades de conocimientos
que han ayudado a mejorar
inmensamente la práctica clínica y los
resultados de salud. Una manera de
actualizar estos estudios…

The goal of this work involves the developing of an argumentation-based formalism that an agent could use for constructing plans. In this formalism, agents will have certain knowledge about the world, and a set of actions that they will be…

Due to the dynamic nature of the Web as well as its heterogeneous audience, web applications are more likely to rapidly evolve leading to inconsistencies among requirements during the development process. With the purpose to deal with these inconsistencies, web…

The aim of this work is to relate two apparently independent concepts as belief revision and relevance. We propose a formal characterization for the notion of (ir)relevance by means of a set of postulates. Then we define (ir)relevance using change…

This dissertation chronicles the emergence of economic calculation as an analytical, argumentative, and moral tool in British politics in the half-century after the 1688 Revolution. During Britain's "financial revolution," novel questions about the nation's "Trade & Revenue" were contested in…

When building Hypermedia/Web Applications, (different) designers are often faced with the same problems over and over again. Those recurring problems soon yield elegant solutions, which can be conveniently described as design patterns. In this paper we present two patterns for…

An audience driven philosophy for web site design takes the different target audiences as an explicit starting point, and organizes the basic navigation structure accordingly. However, for the designer it is not always easy, or sometimes even impossible, to assess…