The domain of molecular biology is complex and vast. Bio-ontologies and information visualisation have arisen in recent years as means to assist biologists in making sense of this information. Ontologies can enable the construction of conceptual queries, but existing systems to do this are too technical for most biologists. OntoDas, the software developed as part of this thesis work, demonstrates how the application of techniques from information visualisation and human computer interaction can result in software which enables biologists to construct conceptual queries. / Thesis (M.Comp.Sc.)-Universty of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

by Ling Ho-Wan Howard, Ryoo Byung-Hoon. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-74). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS --- p.vi / LIST OF TABLES --- p.vii / PREFACE --- p.viii / Chapter / Chapter I. --- IT PROFILE OF HONG KONG --- p.1 / IT Penetration in2002 --- p.1 / Government Initiatives --- p.2 / Software Industry of Hong Kong --- p.2 / Chapter II. --- IT STRATEGY --- p.5 / IT Strategy - 3 Check Points --- p.5 / Flexible Platform --- p.5 / Strategy vs. ROI --- p.8 / Outsourcing or Internal Development --- p.9 / Quality Management System ´ؤ Instituting Best Practices --- p.10 / Deming's 14 Points --- p.11 / The Juran Trilogy --- p.12 / Crosby's 14 Quality Steps --- p.13 / Chapter III. --- SOFTWARE QUALITY MANAGEMENT - CMM --- p.16 / Software Development Project --- p.16 / Software Project Process Model --- p.17 / Software Quality Management --- p.19 / Capability Maturity Model (CMM) --- p.20 / Bootstrap 3.2 --- p.23 / Trillium --- p.25 / ISO 9001/TickIT --- p.26 / SPICE --- p.27 / Chapter IV. --- CMM PRACTICES IN THE WORLD --- p.29 / The CMM Practices - Worldwide --- p.29 / Two studies on Software Process Management in Taiwan --- p.32 / Software Process Management in Taiwan: A Longitudinal Study of Top 1000 Companies --- p.32 / Software Project Process Management Maturity and Project Performance --- p.34 / Chapter V. --- SOFTWARE PROCESS MANAGEMENT IN HONG KONG --- p.36 / The CMM in Hong Kong --- p.37 / Case Studies on the SPM in Hong Kong --- p.41 / Case 1: Dow Chemical --- p.41 / Case 2: Oracle Hong Kong --- p.44 / Case 3: Bentley Systems Inc. (Hong Kong) --- p.48 / Case 4: i-Cable --- p.50 / Case 5: SinoPac Securities (Asia) Ltd --- p.53 / Implications of the Statistics --- p.55 / Factor comparison of mean value --- p.56 / Implications --- p.58 / Chapter VI. --- CONCLUSION --- p.60 / APPENDIX --- p.62 / BIBLOGRAPHY --- p.72

In the United States, between 90 and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. In most circumstances, the birth of a deaf child is the first experience these parents have with American Sign Language (ASL) and the Deaf community. Parents learn ASL as a second language to provide their children with language models and to be able to communicate with their children more effectively, but they face significant challenges. To address these challenges, I have developed a mobile learning application, SMARTSign, to help parents of deaf children learn ASL vocabulary. I hypothesize that providing a method for parents to learn and practice ASL words associated with popular children's stories on their mobile phones would help improve their ASL vocabulary and abilities more than if words were grouped by theme. I posit that parents who learn vocabulary associated with children's stories will use the application more, which will lead to more exposure to ASL and more learned vocabulary. My dissertation consists of three studies. First I show that novices are able to reproduce signs presented on mobile devices with high accuracy regardless of source video resolution. Next, I interview hearing parents with deaf children to discover the difficulties they have with current methods for learning ASL. When asked which methods of presenting signs they preferred, participants were most interested in learning vocabulary associated with children's stories. Finally, I deploy SMARTSign to parents for four weeks. Participants learning story vocabulary used the application more often and had higher sign recognition scores than participants who learned vocabulary based on word types. The condition did not affect participants' ability to produce the signed vocabulary.

Communication between deaf individuals and hearing individuals can be very difficult. For people who are born deaf, English is often a second language with the first language being American Sign Language (ASL). Very few hearing people in the United States sign or are aware of Deafness, Deaf culture, or how to appropriately communicate with people with hearing loss. In this thesis, I concentrate on the role that mobile technologies can play in ameliorating some of these issues. In formative work with Deaf teenagers in the metro-Atlanta area, I investigate the role that communication technologies play in the lives of many Deaf individuals and examine how these devices have effected their communication patterns and social circles. Specifically, the teens identified problems communicating with hearing individuals such as close friends and family in face-to-face situations. Having identified sign language use at home as one of the earliest interventions for Deaf children, I investigated the use of mobile phones for learning survival-level ASL. I created a prototype software application which presented short ASL lessons via either a mobile phone or desktop web-browser. The software presented the lessons via one of two different scheduling methods designed to take advantage of the spacing effect during learning. I designed and conducted a study of forty individuals with no prior ASL knowledge which compared the effects of both scheduling algorithm and platform. My results show that individuals who used a mobile phone platform and received a group of lessons at one time performed better on post-test receptive and generative ASL metrics than did participants in the three other conditions.

Software development is no longer a task limited to professionally trained computer programmers. Increasing support for software customization through scripting, the opening of application programmer interfaces on the Web, and a growing need for domain specific application support have all contributed to an increase in end-user programming. Unfortunately, learning to program remains a challenging task, and the majority of end-user programmers lack any formal education in software development. Instead, these users must piece together their understanding of programming through trial and error, examples found online, and help from peers and colleagues. While current approaches to address the difficulties facing end-user programmers seek to change the nature of the programming task, I argue that these challenges often mirror those faced by all novice programmers. Thus, pedagogical solutions must also be explored. This dissertation work investigates the challenges that end-user programmers face from a computer science education perspective. I have engaged in a cycle of learner-centered design to answer the high-level questions: What do users know; what might they need to know; how are they learning; and how might we help users discover and learn what they need or want to know? In so doing, I uniquely frame end-user programming challenges as issues related to knowledge and understanding about computer science. Rather than building new languages or programming tools, I address these difficulties through new types of instructional materials and opportunities for felicitous engagement with them. This work is contextualized within a specific domain of non-traditional programmers: graphic and web designers who write scripts as part of their careers. Through an in-depth, learner-centered investigation of this user population, this dissertation makes five specific contributions: (1) A detailed characterization of graphic and web design end-user programmers and their knowledge of fundamental computing concepts. (2) An analysis of the existing information space that graphic and web designers rely on for help. (3) The implementation of a novel case-based learning aid named ScriptABLE that is explicitly designed to leverage existing user practices while conveying conceptual knowledge about programming. (4) Initial confirmatory evidence supporting case-based learning aids for the informal computing education of web and graphic design end-user programmers. (5) An argument in support of the value of normative computing knowledge among informally trained programmers.

We present a system architecture and a set of control techniques that allow heterogeneous software design tools to collaborate intelligently and automatically. One of their distinguishing features is the ability to perform concurrent processing. Systems based on this architecture are able to effectively solve large electromagnetic analysis problems, particularly those that involve loose coupling between several areas of physics. The architecture can accept any existing software analysis tool, without requiring any modification or customization of the tool. This characteristic is produced in part by our use of a neutral virtual representation for storing problem data, including geometry and material definitions. We construct a system based on this architecture, using several circuit and finite-element analysis tools, and use it to perform electromagnetic analyses of several different devices. Our results show that our architecture and techniques do allow practical problems to be solved effectively by heterogeneous tools. / On présente une architecture de système et un ensemble de techniquesde contrôle qui permettent aux logiciels d'analyse hétérogènes de collaborerde façon intelligente et automatique. Un de ses traits caractéristiques est sacapacité d'effectuer simultanément plusieurs traitements. Les systèmes baséssur cette architecture sont capables de résoudre de manière efficace des grandsproblèmes dans le domaine de l'analyse électromagnétique, particulièrementceux où existe un accouplement dégagé entre plusieurs domaines de physique.L'architecture peut accepter n'importe quel logiciel d'analyse existant; ellen'exige pas que les logiciels soyent modifiés ou fabriqués sur mesure. Cettecaractéristique est produite en partie par notre utilisation d'une représentationneutre virtuelle pour représenter les données du problème, y inclus sa géométrieet les proprietés de ses matériels. On construit un système basé sur cettearchitecture, comprenant plusieurs logiciels de simulation, et on l'emploie pourexécuter des analyses électromagnétiques de plusieurs appareils différents. Nosrésultats montrent que notre architecture et nos techniques permettent desproblèmes pratiques d'être résolus efficacement par les outils hétérogènes.

This thesis presents an automated software design synthesis framework known as Project Calliope. This framework aligns with Harel's automated software development process as it addresses the aspect of automating design and implementation. Project Calliope is based on a Statecharts synthesis approach in the literature. The main goal of Project Calliope is to automatically generate testable Unified Modeling Language (UML) Statecharts that are deterministic, visually manageable and UML compliant. In order to minimise design errors in the generated UML Statecharts, Project Calliope supports model checking through Statecharts execution. In addition, executable code is automatically generated based on the synthesised UML Statecharts. This framework seeks to provide a pragmatic design framework that can be readily incorporated into software development methodologies that leverage UML. In this thesis, Project Calliope is applied to three simple applications from Whittle and Schumann's examples and a case study based on a commercial application. They are automatic teller machine, coffee dispenser, an agent application, and a groupware application respectively.

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Many variations of Systems Development Life Cycle models have evolved over the last fifty years of systems engineering and software science, yet not enough knowledge is available to better understand these as Complex Adaptive Systems by studying chaos and complexity theories. The primary application domain of the thesis is focused on the development of electronic hardware and software products. There is a great need for innovation to reach all corners of the development ecosystem; however a large cognitive distance exists between the concept of systematic product development and that of value creation. Instruments are needed to aid process agility, for defusing imminent problems as they mount, and for making effective decisions to sustain maximum productivity. Many of these objectives are neglected in systems development practices. As with so many management fads, it appears that no single one of these models lived up to all of the expectations and in many cases ended up being recipes for disaster. The statistics available on failed projects are concerning but has not stopped the scientific and engineering communities from trying over, and over again, to make progress. The goal of the thesis is therefore to identify the most viable model that supports the sustainability of systems development team performance. The research draws insights from extant literature, by applying a knowledge management theory based analysis on the various models with specific attention given to complexity theory. The dominant metric discovered is to measure the Value Velocity of a Systems Development Team. This metric is determined by two independent variables, being Value Created and Delivery Delay. Complex Adaptive Systems simply requires a guiding vision and a carefully selected set of generative rules for increasing and sustaining the Value Velocity. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Menige variasies van stelselsontwikkelingsmodelle het ontwikkel oor die afgelope vyftig jaar in stelselsingenieurswese en sagtewarewetenskap, en steeds is daar nie genoegsame kennis beskikbaar om beter begrip te kry oor hoe hierdie stelsels as Komplekse Aanpassende Sisteme bestudeer kan word nie, ten einde die bestuur daarvan te verbeter. Die primêre toepassingsgebied in die tesis is gespits op die ontwikkeling van rekenaarhardeware en - sagteware. Die behoefte vir innovasie moet al die fasette van die ontwikkelingsekosisteem bereik. Die bewusheidsgaping tussen sistemiese produkontwikkeling en waardeskepping, is te wyd. Instumentasie word benodig om te help met ratsheid in prosesuitvoering, om dreigende probleme te ontlont, en effektief besluitneming toe te pas, en sodoende produktiwiteit op ‘n maksimum vlak te hou. Hierdie doelwitte word tot ’n meerdere mate in die huidige praktyk verontagsaam. Net soos somige bestuursadvies oneffektief is, blyk dit dat daar nog steeds geen stelselsmodelle is wat alle verwagtinge bevredig nie. In baie gevalle eindig die toepassing daarvan in waan en mislukking. Die statistiek beskikbaar op mislukte projekte is onrusbarend, tog het dit nie vooruitgang gekelder nie, en die behoefte na verbetering bestaan steeds. Die doelwit van die tesis is dus om die mees lewensvatbare model wat die voortbestaan van stelselsontwikkelingsgroepe sal kan handhaaf, uit te sonder. Die navorsing neem insigte uit hedendagse literatuur en is gebasseer op ’n analiese van verskeide kennisbestuursteorieё teenoor die bestaande stelselsontwikkelingsmodelle. Die fokus is meer spesifiek toegespits op kompleksiteitsteorie. Die hoofmaatstaaf is om die Waardesnelheid van ’n stelselsontwikkelingspan te bepaal. Hierdie maatstaaf word gepyl deur twee onafhanklike veranderlikes, naamlik die Waarde Geskep en die Afleweringsvertraging. Ten slotte, vereis Kompleks Aanpassende Sisteme slegs die aanwesigheid van 'n leidende visie tesame met 'n goeddeurdagte stel ontwikkelingsreëls, wat aanleiding sal gee tot die verhoging en behoud van die Waardesnelheid.

Thesis (MSC (Mathematical Sciences. Computer Science))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This thesis describes the design and implementation of an application names GrailKnights that allows for the mass manipulation of automata, with added visual pattern analysis features. It comprises a database-driven backend for automata storage, and a graphical user interface that allows for filtering the automata selected from the database with visual interpretation of visible patterns over the resulting automata.

O uso de dispositivos móveis por um número cada vez maior de pessoas, e em um número crescente de atividades que requerem mais segurança da informação, coloca em evidência a necessidade de prover segurança nos softwares desse ambiente. O aspecto de segurança da informação em dispositivos móveis é preocupante. Entretanto os modelos utilizados pela indústria de software – e os encontrados na literatura atual - no desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis com requisitos de segurança da informação de alto nível ainda não respondem às necessidades de mais segurança reclamadas pelos usuários. O presente estudo considera que tais modelos podem ser melhorados com o incremento de métodos e técnicas específicas, algumas já utilizadas com sucesso no desenvolvimento de aplicações desktop ou não voltadas para o ambiente de dispositivos móveis. Este trabalho propõe a inclusão de abordagem de segurança da informação no início do ciclo de vida do desenvolvimento de software, a partir do estudo das ameaças e vulnerabilidades, da aplicação antecipada dos casos de abuso – aqui chamados de casos de uso impróprio, da análise de risco, dos testes de segurança baseados no risco e do uso de máquinas de ataque nos testes de segurança durante o processo de desenvolvimento do software. Para alcançar o objetivo desta pesquisa, os modelos mais conhecidos e utilizados no ciclo de vida do desenvolvimento de software são analisados do ponto de vista da segurança da informação, e uma nova abordagem é proposta por meio do uso de um modelo complementar de desenvolvimento de software voltado para a segurança. Alguns modelos de artefatos são apresentados e um estudo de caso aplicando os conceitos tratados na pesquisa é utilizado com o intuito de avaliar as principais contribuições discutidas no texto, e também alguns dos resultados preliminares obtidos com a realização do trabalho de pesquisa. / The increasingly wide and intense use of mobile devices - whose processing and storage capacity grows almost overcoming the desktops - exposes greatly issues relating to information security in this environment. This is a worrying fact. However, the models currently found in the literature and used by software industry in developing mobile applications with the highest information security requirements are not yet answering users’ needs for more security, and may be improved adding specific methods or techniques, sometimes already used in desktop - or not mobile ones - applications development. This work proposes to insert information security approach early in the software development life cycle using threats and vulnerabilities study, the early application of abuse case - also called misuse cases, the risk analysis, the risk based security test and the use of attack machines in the development process. To reach the research goal, this work analyzed usual models used on SDLC from the information security point of view, and presents a new approach thru the use of a security driven development complementary model. The work also presents some templates and uses a case study for apply the concepts and evaluate the main contributions discussed in the text, also as the preliminary results obtained on the research.