Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012INFO001.
Creating autonomous agents that learn to act from sequential interactions has long been perceived as one of the ultimate goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Reinforcement Learning (RL), a subfield of Machine Learning (ML), addresses important aspects of this objective. This dissertation investigates a particular problem encountered in RL called representation generation. Two related...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM006.
Since the 1990s, a wide debate has been generated around the "learners-new media dichotomy", with a consequent journalistic reverberation. In particular, expressions like “digital natives”, “Y” generation, or “net-generation” contributed to diffuse the hypothesis that– since the 1980s – a generation of learners with typical characteristics related to their great familiarity with...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM005.
Collaborative practices in real groups are rarely studied as they develop in research teams, despite the importance of the topic. The present study aims to address this lack and is focused on how collaboration develops in an academic research team. It draws specific attention to group practices that enhance mutual engagement within the team and the socialization of doctoral students....
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2011 ; 2011ECO010.
The main goal of this thesis is to present and evaluate different procedures for modeling and forecasting volatility, and examine the relative accuracy of these forecasts using data from the light, sweet crude oil futures market traded at New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). First, we consider various volatility models and find that the models, which account for long memory, has the best...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM004.
Il concetto di cultura è divenuto pervasivo nella descrizione della realtà sociale ed il suo ruolo nel determinare le relazioni tra gruppi sociali sembra aver acquisito una posizione di prominenza in particolare a seguito agli attentati dell’11 settembre 2001, confermando secondo alcuni autori la tesi dello scontro di civiltà avanzata da Huntington nel 1993 ed attribuendo un ruolo centrale...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM002.
Working together benefits from colleagues, team members, or peers being at the same place. With collaborating teams being more and more dispersed in an increasingly networked world, people and organizations turn to the Internet as a medium to work and learn together. Collaborative virtual environments (CVE) in general attempt to provide settings in which the users or participants feel...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012ECO001.
The thesis focuses on the determinants of immigrant self-employment rates and self-employment transitions. The research is divided into three chapters. The focus of the first essay is on the effects of group characteristics and market conditions on self-employment propensity of immigrants. The results show that group characteristics such as linguistic ability and time elapsed since...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2011 ; 2011COM006.
Public information campaigns have played an important role in increasing awareness of organ donation and the need for more organ donors. In a recent study, it was found that awareness and knowledge, regarding organ donation, represented only two of several factors in people’s decisions to engage in organ donation-related behaviors (Schulz et al., 2006). In addition, it was noted that the...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012COM001.
Introduction: Promoting health and physical activity in the workplace is advocated by public health institutions across the globe. There is a need to find effective ways to understand the determinants of participation in physical activity in order to outline appropriate communication strategies to promote physical activity behaviour change in the workplace setting. E-mails and text messages...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2011 ; 2011INFO011.
Many if not most computer systems are used by human users. The performance of such interactive systems ultimately affects those users. Thus, when measuring, understanding, and improving system performance, it makes sense to consider the human user's perspective. Essentially, the performance of interactive applications is determined by the perceptible lag in handling user requests. So, when...
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