The purpose of the present thesis was to investigate the role of specific cognitive representations in some of people's important life outcomes. Episodic memories were chosen as one type of specific cognitive representation and psychological need satisfaction was identified as…

Spoken dialogue systems are gaining popularity with improvements in speech recognition technologies. Dialogue systems have been modeled effectively using Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), achieving improvements in robustness. However, past research on POMDP-based dialogue systems usually assumes that the…

This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental study of the nonlinear behaviour of analog synthesizers' effects. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate and complete current research on nonlinear system modelling, both in and out of the field of…

My dissertation strives to understand the conditions under which peaceoperations in intra-state wars succeed or fail. I address two main questions: Whatis peace operation success, and what contributes to such an outcome? I define thesuccess of a peace operation based…

Energy detection has emerged as a prime technique for wideband spectrum sensing in cognitive radio applications. Much of the present research in the area of energy detection assumes that the occupancy of any particular frequency subband is independent of the…

Social scientists have been interested in studying families of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) for decades. Theoretically, parenting occurs in a family context. Yet, little is known about this relationship from an empirical standpoint among parents of children with NDD.…

Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork conducted in Guatemala's Metropolitan Area among indigenous and ladina women, this dissertation offers an ethnographic analysis of violence and women's lives in post-war urban Guatemala. First, this dissertation examines the ways in which intersecting…

In the continuous casting of steel shapes, a tundish feeds the molten steel alloy into oscillating moulds. Therefore, a better knowledge of some of the parameters of the steel in this phase of the process will lead to better quality…

This study explores the ways in which the intersections of sexuality and identity are experienced and understood by a queer woman living with a disability. Through a narrative account of critical moments and turning points in the participant's lived experience…

This study investigated children's perceptions of dance ability and disability and changes to perceptions following participation in an integrated dance program. Focus group interviews, field notes, and observations were used with children with physical disabilities (n =5) and without disabilities…