The work in this thesis addresses design and development of multimodal dialogue recommender systems for the home context-of-use. In the design part, two investigations on multimodal recommendation dialogue interaction in the home context are reported on. The first study gives implications for the design of dialogue system interaction including personalization and a three-entity multimodal interaction model accommodating dialogue feedback in order to make the interaction more efficient and successful. In the second study a dialogue corpus of movie recommendation dialogues is collected and analyzed, providing a characterization of such dialogues. We identify three initiative types that need to be addressed in a recommender dialogue system implementation: system-driven preference requests, userdriven information requests, and preference volunteering. Through the process of dialogue distilling, a dialogue control strategy covering system-driven preference requests from the corpus is arrived at.

The technological development is enabling production of increasingly complex electronic systems. All those systems must be verified and tested to guarantee correct behavior. As the complexity grows, testing is becoming one of the most significant factors that contribute to the final product cost. The established low-level methods for hardware testing are not any more sufficient and more work has to be done at abstraction levels higher than the classical gate and register-transfer levels. This thesis reports on one such work that deals in particular with high-level test generation and design for testability techniques. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, we investigate the possibilities of generating test vectors at the early stages of the design cycle, starting directly from the behavioral description and with limited knowledge about the final implementation architecture. We have developed for this purpose a novel hierarchical test generation algorithm and demonstrated the usefulness of the generated tests not only for manufacturing test but also for testability analysis. The second part of the thesis concentrates on design for testability. As testing of modern

This thesis was written during the WITAS UAV Project where one of the goals has been the development of a software/hardware architecture for an unmanned autonomous helicopter, in addition to autonomous functionalities required for complex mission scenarios. The algorithms developed here have been tested on an unmanned helicopter platform developed by Yamaha Motor Company called the RMAX. The character of the thesis is primarily experimental and it should be viewed as developing navigational functionality to support autonomous flight during complex realworld mission scenarios. This task is multidisciplinary since it requires competence in aeronautics, computer science and electronics. The focus of the thesis has been on the development of a control method to enable the helicopter to follow 3D paths. Additionally, a helicopter simulation tool has been developed in order to test the control system before flight-tests. The thesis also presents an implementation and experimental evaluation of a sensor fusion technique based on a Kalman filter applied to a vision based autonomous landing problem. Extensive experimental flight-test results are presented.

Real-time software is commonly written in low level languages such as C and assembler. Such software is often hard to test, maintain, and port to other platforms. To improve this situation, high level languages are introduced in the real-time domain. The Java programming language has many properties that are appealing to real-time system development, e.g. robustness and portability. However, it is difficult to estimate the worstcase execution time of Java code using current implementations. This is due to several properties of Java, e.g. dynamic binding of method calls and automatic memory management. This thesis discusses the problems of introducing automatic memory management in hard real-time environments and proposes a technique called RT-Reference Counting to solve the problems. This technique is being integrated in a native Java compiler called RT-Java, being implemented at the Programming Environments Laboratory (PELAB) at Linköping University. An automatic memory manager for hard real-time systems must be able to guarantee that memory is always available to the application and that all memory management operations are fast and execution time predictable. Software based automatic memory managers for real-time systems exist, but they have problems, e.g. always guaranteeing short deadlines and/or handling large objects. RT-Reference Counting aims at solving these problems. The technique is not yet fully developed, but results so far are promising.

In this thesis we present an experimental research platform in robotics, XPROB. This platform has been designed to be a tool that facilitates the development of robotic applications. XPROB achieves a flexible prototyping system that features a task-level programming environment, a dynamic representation of the work-cell's equipment, and sensor data integration at runtime allowing on-line program monitoring and adaptation. This thesis describes how the object-orientation paradigm combined with a traditional layered-control structure lead to an open and dynamic architecture. It also presents an advanced object representation to handle high-level reasoning, even about partially recognized objects. The platform was first evaluated using simple robotic applications, such as assembly and sensor-guided actions. Afterwards, an industrial application, consisting of a disassembly line for worn-out electric motors,was successfully set upand controlled byour platform. This work has bee...

Design modifications to improve testability usually introduce large area overhead and performance degradation. One way to reduce the negative impact associated with improved testability is to take testability as one of the constraints during high-level design phases so that systems are not only optimized for area and performance, but also from the testability point of view. This thesis deals with the problem of optimizing testing-hardware resources by taking into account testability constraints at high-levels of abstraction during the design process. Firstly, we have provided an approach to solve the problem of optimizing built-in selftest (BIST) resources at the behavioral and register-transfer levels under testability and testing time constraints. Testing problem identification and BIST enhancement during the optimization process are assisted by symbolic testability analysis. Further, concurrent test sessions are generated, while signature analysis registers ’ sharing conflicts as well as controllability and observability constraints are considered. Secondly, we have introduced the problem of BIST resources insertion and

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or be transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanic, photocopying, The number of domains and tasks where information extraction tools can be used needs to be increased. One way to reach this goal is to construct user-driven information extraction systems where novice users are able to adapt them to new domains and tasks. To accomplish this goal, the systems need to become more intelligent and able to learn to extract information without need of expert skills or time-consuming work from the user. The type of information extraction system that is in focus for this thesis is semistructural information extraction. The term semi-structural refers to documents that not only contain natural language text but also additional structural information. The typical application is information extraction from World Wide Web hypertext documents. By making effective use of not only the link structure but also the structural information within each such document, user-driven extraction systems

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING, JÖNKÖPING UNIVERSITYPut up in a place where it’s easy to see, the cryptic admonishment; T.T.T. When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb, it’s well to remember that Things Take Time.

This thesis proposal discusses control of dynamic systems and its relation to time. Although much research has been done concerning control of dynamic systems and decision making, little research exists about the relationship between time and control. Control is defined as the ability to keep a target system/ process in a desired state. In this study, properties of time such as fast, slow, overlapping etc, should be viewed as a relation between the variety of a controlling system and a target system. It is further concluded that humans have great difficulties controlling target systems that have slow responding processes or "dead" time between action and response. This thesis proposal suggests two different studies to adress the problem of human control over slow responding systems and dead time in organisational control.

This thesis is about information technology for learning and acquiring of work knowledge among production workers in a manufacturing company. Focus is on production or factory workers in workplaces where the job workers do have a routine character. The thesis builds upon a research project aiming at developing an information system for learning and acquiring of work knowledge among production workers. The system manages manufacturing related operational disturbances and production workers use the system to learn from operational disturbances in such a way that workers do the job grounded on knowledge of prior disturbances. The thesis covers intervention measures aiming at integrating learning and work by developing an information system. The thesis presents and elaborates on the process and outcome of such a development. The empirical work in this thesis is based on an action case study research approach. The thesis proposes three interrelated aspects concerning use of information technology for learning and acquiring work knowledge among production workers. Such aspects are the (a) work practice, (b) learning and acquiring of work knowledge and (c) information systems. These