Team | EPFL Graph Search

A team is a group of individuals (human or non-human) working together to achieve their goal. As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, "[a] team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, knowledge and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal". A group does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams normally have members with complementary skills and generate synergy through a coordinated effort which allows each member to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Naresh Jain (2009) claims: Team members need to learn how to help one another, help other team members realize their true potential, and create an environment that allows everyone to go beyond their limitations. While academic research on teams and teamwork has grown consistently and has shown a sharp increase over the past recent 40 years, the societal diffusion of teams and teamwork actually followed

Impact de la communication voco-visuelle dans le management sur la motivation des collaborateurs

Our research work wishes to highlight the importance of the relationship between the vocal and physical behaviour of the manager and team motivation. In order to investigate this important relationship, a survey by means of a questionnaire and two field studies were undertaken. The survey has notably showed that in communication situations the working population questioned is above all sensitive to physical behaviour. The people questioned often put vocal communication in second place. It should be noted that their principal factor of motivation within the professional environment is recognition and respect for the individual. According to them, for physical behaviour, it is mainly through the eyes, followed by facial expressions and then the manager's posture that recognition and respect for the individual are expressed. With regard to vocal behaviour, these elements can be expressed through the intonation, tone and loudness of the voice. The field studies and the decision to prioritize the analysis of physical behaviour allowed us to confirm whether this body language, a sign of recognition and respect of the individual and therefore source of motivation, was a reality and resulted in a successful contact. In the working place, the way the manager looks at his team, notably, can be lacking or even absent and consequently this absence can be perceived as a closure. Therefore, if we follow our logic, this could have an influence on staff motivation. We therefore decided to complete our field studies by having the teams pass a connotation test to find out their real feelings towards their manager's behaviour. It appears that the manager's recognition for them takes second place to other equally necessary managerial qualities such as strength, endurance and a proactive personality which are widely accepted. The conclusions of the questionnaire survey have therefore been confirmed by the qualitative study. By proceeding stage by stage, our research has therefore managed to confirm the real relationship between the principal factor of motivation for staff "recognition and respect of the individual" and the physical behaviour "look, facial expression and posture" which expresses this recognition. And by really taking into consideration the relationship of vocal and visual behaviour to motivation, every manager can encourage a better quality of understanding within his team. This active listening will allow him to build a complementary and successful team by placing the right person in the right place! Henceforth, every individual's satisfaction at work becomes progressively a collective effort and a real social culture within the working place begins to grow…

EPFL2009

Assessing Computational Thinking: Development and Validation of the Algorithmic Thinking Test for Adults

Cécile Hardebolle, Marc Lafuente Martinez, Olivier Lévêque

This study describes the development and validation process of a computational thinking (CT) test for adults. The team designed a set of items and explored a subset of those through two qualitative pilots. Then, in order to provide validity evidence based on the test content, a team of 11 subject-matter experts coded the initial pool of items using two different systems of categories based on CT components and contents. Next, the items were piloted on a sample of 289 participants, 137 experts in CT, and 152 novices. After a series of confirmatory factor analyses, a unidimensional model that represents algorithmic thinking was adopted. Further analyzing the psychometric quality of the 27 items, 20 of them with excellent reliability indices were selected for the test. Thus, this study provides a tool to evaluate adults’ CT: the Algorithmic Thinking Test for Adults (ATTA), which was developed according to psychometric standards. This article also reflects on the nature of CT as a construct.

2022

Fixed-wing drones for communication networks

Maja Varga

In the last decade, drones became frequently used to provide eye-in-the-sky overview in the outdoor environment. Their main advantage compared to the other types of robots is that they can fly above obstacles and rough terrains and they can quickly cover large areas. These properties also open a new application; drones could provide a multi-hop, line of sight communication for groups of ground users. The aim of this thesis is to develop a drone team that will establish wireless ad-hoc network between users on the ground and distributively adapt links and spatial arrangement to the requirements and motion of the ground users. For this application, we use fixed wing drones. Such platforms can be easily and quickly deployed. Fixed wing drones have higher forward speed and higher battery life than hovering platforms. On the other hand, fixed wing drones have unicycle dynamics with constrained forward speed which makes them unable to hover or perform sharp turns. The first challenge consists in bridging unicycle dynamics of the fixed wing drones. Some control strategies have been proposed and validated in simulations using the average distance between the target and the drone as a performance metric. However, besides the distance metric, energy expenditure of the flight also plays an important role in assessing the overall performance of the flight. We propose a new methodology that introduces a new metric (energy expenditure), we compare existing methods on a large set of target motion patterns and present a comparison between the simulation and field experiments on proposed target motion patterns. The second challenge consists in developing a formation control algorithm that will allow fixed wing robots to provide a wide area coverage and to relay data in a wireless ad-hoc network. In such applications fixed wing drones have to be able to regulate an inter-drone distance. Their reduced maneuverability presents the main challenge to design a formation algorithm that will regulate an inter-drone distance. To address this challenge, we present a distributed control strategy that relies only on local information. Each drone has its own virtual agent, it follows the virtual agent by performing previously evaluated and selected target tracking strategy, and flocking interaction rules are implemented between virtual agents. It is shown in simulation and in field experiments with a team of fixed wing drones that using this distributed formation algorithm, drones can cover an area by creating an equilateral triangular lattice and regulate communication link quality between neighboring drones. The third challenge consists in allowing connectivity between independently moving ground users using fixed wing drone team. We design two distributed control algorithms that change drones' spatial arrangement and interaction topology to maintain the connectivity. We propose a potential field based strategy which adapts distance between drones to shrink and expand the fixed wing drones' formation. In second approach, market-based adaptation, drones distributively delete interaction links to expand the formation graph to a tree graph. In simulations and field experiments we show that our proposed strategies successfully maintain independently moving ground users connected. Overall, this thesis presents synthesis of distributed algorithms for fixed wing drones to establish and maintain wireless ad-hoc communication networks.

EPFL2016

Fixed-wing drones for communication networks

Maja Varga

EPFL2016

Impact de la communication voco-visuelle dans le management sur la motivation des collaborateurs

EPFL2009