L'« hypercompétitivité » (D'Avenir & Gunther, 1994) qui caractérise notre environnement économique contemporain fait de l'innovation une préoccupation stratégique pour les organisations. Celles-ci tentent de répondre à cette injonction par le recours à une multitude de « systèmes experts », caractéristique de la « modernité avancée » (Giddens, 1990). Parmi ceux-ci, la stimulation des activités de R&D est reconnue comme une contribution majeure qui nécessite l'utilisation croissante de champs d'expertises variés. C'est dans ce contexte que les sciences sociales sont mobilisées comme forme d'expertise contributives des « recherches spéculatives pour l'innovation » (Stewart & Claeys, 2009). Ces recherches interviennent en amont de processus d'innovation, en un lieu nommé « Fuzzy Front End » (Smith & Reinertsen, 1995), lieu dans lequel se forge la construction de la réalité sociale de l'invention : son usage ou plutôt sa projection. Notre thèse s'interroge sur ces technologies de production de connaissances que sont les projections d'usage et ambitionne de rendre intelligibles les politiques qu'elles mettent en oeuvre, la performance des collectifs mobilisés sur les recherches et sur eux-mêmes ainsi que les arrangements déployés par les acteurs durant ces processus. Notre immersion dans le tissu industriel grenoblois, et en particulier dans l'environnement du CEA-LETI, nous a permis de proposer une lecture des projections d'usage comme des compositions de fictions axiomatiques au service de la recherche technologique. En scrutant le concept d'usage, nous mettons en lumière les carrières empruntées par celui-ci et les mutations des pratiques associées. En interrogeant l'une des formes de la projection d'usage, le scénario, nous mettons en évidence les liens entre performativité et recours à la fiction. En interrogeant les mutations des composantes du projet, nous démontrons le caractère axiomatique des projections, en tant que forme de réponse à une demande sociale qui émane de plusieurs endroits et dont l'exigence de production de savoirs actionnables nécessite de composer avec des données en mouvement. / Innovation is today a major and strategic asset for organisations that compete in a hypercompetitive world (D'Avenir & Gunther, 1994). They are trying to face these new challenges, by using a diversity of “expert systems” typical of our « advanced modernity » (Giddens, 1990). Amongst those, boosting R&D activities is major inputs that demand the use of different expertises. Speculative researches for innovation are one of them. They take place in the “Fuzzy Front End” of innovation, a place where the construction of the social reality of invention is made : its usage, or to be more precise, its projection. Our thesis examines these knowledge-producing technologies and tries to make understable the policies at work, the performance of embedded collectives on the innovation itself, and on themselves, and the arrangements made during this process. Our work in the Grenoble industrial area and collaboration with the CEA-LETI helped us to propose an understanding of these projections as compositions of axiomatic fictions for technological research. Analysing the concept of usage, we highlight its careers and the mutation of associated practices. Interrogating one form of projection, the scenario, we show the links that lie between fiction and perfomativity. By leaning on the project mutating components, we demonstrate the axiomatic character of the projection, understood as a form of answer made to a social demand that comes from different places, and whose necessity of actionnable knowledge is solved by composing with moving data.

Durante o ciclo de vida de um web service, diversas mudanças são feitas na sua interface, eventualmente causando incompatibilidades em relação aos seus clientes e ocasionando a quebra de suas aplicações. Os provedores precisam tomar decisões sobre mudanças em seus serviços frequentemente, muitas vezes sem um bom entendimento a respeito do efeito destas mudanças sobre seus clientes. Os trabalhos e ferramentas existentes não fornecem ao provedor um conhecimento adequado a respeito do uso real das funcionalidades da interface de um serviço, considerando os diferentes tipos de consumidores, o que impossibilita avaliar o impacto das mudanças. Este trabalho apresenta um framework para a descoberta de perfis de uso de serviços web, os quais constituem um modelo descritivo dos padrões de uso dos diferentes grupos de clientes do serviço, com relação ao uso das funcionalidades em sua interface. O framework auxilia no processo de descoberta de conhecimento através de tarefas semiautomáticas e parametrizáveis para a preparação e análise de dados de uso, minimizando a necessidade de intervenção do usuário. O framework engloba o monitoramento de interações de web services, a carga de dados de uso pré-processados em uma base de dados unificada, e a geração de perfis de uso. Técnicas de mineração de dados são utilizadas para agrupar clientes de acordo com seus padrões de uso de funcionalidades, e esses grupos são utilizados na construção de perfis de uso de serviços. Todo o processo é configurado através de parâmetros, permitindo que o usuário determine o nível de detalhe das informações sobre o uso incluídas nos perfis e os critérios para avaliar a similaridade entre clientes. A proposta é validada por meio de experimentos com dados sintéticos, simulados de acordo com características esperadas no comportamento de clientes de um serviço real. Os resultados dos experimentos demonstram que o framework proposto permite a descoberta de perfis de uso de serviço úteis, e fornecem evidências a respeito da parametrização adequada do framework. / During the life cycle of a web service, several changes are made in its interface, which possibly are incompatible with regard to current usage and may break client applications. Providers must make decisions about changes on their services, most often without insight on the effect these changes will have over their customers. Existing research and tools fail to input provider with proper knowledge about the actual usage of the service interface’s features, considering the distinct types of customers, making it impossible to assess the actual impact of changes. This work presents a framework for the discovery of web service usage profiles, which constitute a descriptive model of the usage patterns found in distinct groups of clients, concerning the usage of service interface features. The framework supports a user in the process of knowledge discovery over service usage data through semi-automatic and configurable tasks, which assist the preparation and analysis of usage data with the minimum user intervention possible. The framework performs the monitoring of web services interactions, loads pre-processed usage data into a unified database, and supports the generation of usage profiles. Data mining techniques are used to group clients according to their usage patterns of features, and these groups are used to build service usage profiles. The entire process is configured via parameters, which allows the user to determine the level of detail of the usage information included in the profiles, and the criteria for evaluating the similarity between client applications. The proposal is validated through experiments with synthetic data, simulated according to features expected in the use of a real service. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework allows the discovery of useful service usage profiles, and provide evidences about the proper parameterization of the framework.

Security awareness is becoming an increasingly valuable characteristic due to the increased digitization of society. The commonality of constantly connected devices, such as smartphones and tablets, along with the threat of malware and cyber-attacks has sparked an interest in creating a system with the purpose of training people in security awareness. This thesis aims to show the presence of patterns in mobile device usage, and explore the possibility of using pattern detection as a means to predict riskful actions on mobile devices as a step to evaluate the prediction approach for use in the training system.A survey has been conducted by gathering usage data from a number of participants through the use of a logging application. This data was then analyzed using artificial neural networks provided by the open source FANN library in search for patterns preluding certain events. The results lend support to the claim that patterns exist in the way mobile devices are used, but the usefulness of FANN as a tool for finding these patterns was shown to be questionable.

Method forms the basis of scientific research, enabling criticism, selection and extension of current knowledge. However, methods are usually confined to the literature, where they are often difficult to find, understand, compare, or repeat. Bioinformatics and computational biology provide a rich opportunity for resource creation and discovery, with a rapidly expanding "resourceome". Many of these resources are difficult to find due to the large choice available, and there are only a limited number of sufficiently populated lists that can help inform resource selection. Text mining has enabled large scale data analysis and extraction from within the scientific literature, and as such can provide a way to help explore the vast wealth of resources available, which form the basis of bioinformatics methods. As such, this thesis aims to survey the computational biology literature, using text mining to extract database and software resource name mentions. By evaluating the common pairs and patterns of usage of these resources within such articles, an abstract approximation of the in silico methods employed within the target domain is developed. Specifically, this thesis provides an analysis of the difficulties of resource name extraction from the literature, then using this knowledge to develop bioNerDS - a rule-based system that can detect database and software name mentions within full-text documents (with a final F-score of 67%). bioNerDS is then applied to the full-text document corpus from PubMed Central, the results of which are then explored to identify the differences in resource usage between different domains (bioinformatics, biology and medicine) through time, different journals and different document sections. In particular, the well established resources (e.g., BLAST, GO and GenBank) remain pervasive throughout the domains, although they are seeing a slight decline in usage. Statistical programs see high levels of usage, with R in bioinformatics and SPSS in medicine being frequently mentioned throughout the literature. An overview of the common resource pairs has been generated by pairing database and software names which directly co-occur after one another in text. Combining and aggregating these resource pairs together across the literature enables the generation of a network of common resource patterns within computational biology, which provides an abstract representation of the common in silico methods used. For example, sequence alignment tools remain an important part of several computational biology analysis pipelines, and GO is a strong network sink (primarily used for data annotation). The networks also show the emergence of proteomics and next generation sequencing resources, and provide a specialised overview of a typical phylogenetics method. This work performs an analysis of common resource usage patterns, and thus provides an important first step towards in silico method extraction using text-mining. This should have future implications in community best practice, both for resource and method selection.

Gauteng is one of South Africa’s nine provinces, and is representative of a diversity of languages and cultures. It is a linguistic and cultural melting pot with all eleven official languages spoken in the province. Because of the language contact situation in this province, languages tend to influence one another and this results in situations wherein a majority of speakers are bi- or multilingual. Instances of code-switching, code-mixing, and lexical borrowing (or adoption) are also abounding. In Gauteng, young and old black people tend to use black urban speech varieties. Nonstandard black urban speech varieties such as Tsotsitaal and Is’camtho have been studied extensively in South Africa. The study of black urban language varieties in Gauteng, particularly in English, has not received much attention from sociolinguists and has only been discussed in passing by scholars (see Calteaux, 1994). Studies on Tsotsitaal and Is’camtho have attempted to discuss the structure of and reasons for the employment of these varieties. In conducting the research on black youth slang in English, this study is an attempt at contributing to available research on slang in South Africa. Studies on slang have focused on other language groups and regions. However, no attempts have been made at describing the slang of black youth in Gauteng Province, particularly those who are not L1 speakers of English. The present study aims at contributing to the study of non-standard black urban speech varieties such as Tsotsitaal and Is’camtho. The current study tries to provide a sociolinguistic description of the slang used by black youth in Gauteng, who use English as a second language (L2) or additional language (AL). The research begins with definitions and explanations of concepts relevant to the investigation. The study defines such terms as ‘slang’, ‘black’, ‘youth’ and ‘youth culture’ amongst others. The theoretical approach used in this study is also discussed in this section. Black youth slang in English (hereafter referred to as BYSE) in Gauteng (GP) is discussed in relation to other non-standard black urban language varieties such as Tsotsitaal and Is’camtho. This serves to explain how BYSE differs from the two varieties. The functions of slang as outlined by previous researchers on the subject are also discussed, with the intention of using these as a benchmark to the present study. This study used both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. These included a combination of written questionnaires, interviews (group discussions), and personal observations. The two methodologies were necessary in an attempt to arrive at a better comprehension of the slang used by the group under investigation. The data gathered served to investigate the reasons for using slang and the functions the words they employ serve, by looking at the slang as used in particular contexts as well as at the lexical items they employ. The study also looks at how their use of slang tends to draw on the lexicon from other languages spoken in the Province. The data gathered from the written questionnaires was then sent to Statkon, at the University of Johannesburg, for analysis. The researcher further used interviews (group discussions) and personal observations to augment the results from the questionnaires. The researcher adopts the notion of slang as a register according to use and discusses the findings according to Halliday’s theoretical stance of language as social practice (1978). Emphasis is on dimensions such as field, mode and tenor of discourse as relevant to this study in an attempt to explain the contexts of situation in which the youth under investigation use slang. The research also considers other social aspects of language variation as relevant to this study. The study concludes with recommendations on the need for further research on the language of youth. Amongst others is the recommendation it makes about the study of youth language (particularly slang) and its educational implications in the language classroom. / Dr. Anne-Marie Beukes

Testing the reliability of an application usually requires a good usage model that accurately captures the likely sequences of inputs that the application will receive from the environment. The models being used in the literature are mostly based on Markov chains. They are used to generate test cases that are statistically close to what the applica-tion is expected to receive when in production. In this thesis, we propose a model for reli-ability testing that is created directly from the log file of a web application. Our proposed model is also based on Markov chains and has two components: one component, based on a modified tree, captures the most frequent behaviors, while the other component is another Markov chain that captures infrequent behaviors. The result is a statistically cor-rect model that shows clearly what most users do on the site. The thesis also presents an evaluation method for estimating the accuracy of vari-ous reliability-testing usage models. The method is based on comparison between ob-served users’ traces and traces inferred from the usage model. Our method gauges the accuracy of the reliability-testing usage model by calculating the sum of goodness-of-fit values of each traces and scaling the result between 0 and 1. Finally, we present an experimental study on the log of a real web site and discuss the way to use proposed usage model to generate test sequences, as well as strength and weakness of the model for reliability testing.

Cette recherche porte sur les réseaux sociaux d’entreprise. Nous mobilisons la sociologie des usages afin d’étudier les enseignements à tirer de l’implantation d’un réseau social au sein d’une grande entreprise média au Canada, au regard des usages qui se sont développés chez les employés au cours de la première année de déploiement. Nous avons effectué une étude de cas diachronique d’Astral qui a lancé en décembre 2010 son propre réseau social d’entreprise, Astralbook. Ainsi, nous avons analysé les statistiques d’utilisation du site et réalisé deux séries d’entrevues semi-dirigés, en mai et en novembre 2011, auprès de dix employés et d’un gestionnaire. Les résultats révèlent que malgré un engouement initial, l’intérêt pour le réseau social s’est essoufflé et son utilisation s’est considérablement réduite. En cherchant à comprendre les motifs qui sous-tendent les situations de non-usages d’un réseau social d’entreprise, nous avons pu approfondir les connaissances entourant le non-usage des technologies de communication.

The problem of the present study is to investigate specific background areas of pupils who show average use of English, and of pupils who are recognized as having below-average use of English. The study will attempt to bring out certain tendencies, by the use of standardized tests, which the two groups investigated possess in varying degrees. The aim of the study will be to bring out and evaluate the differentiating background factors as revealed by the results obtained on the standardized tests used in the investigation.

Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms paired with cloud-based storage is a common schema used among software providers across the globe. Such solutions usually accumulate vast amounts of usage and usage behaviour data. Utilizing this data in the form of monitoring solutions can potentially generate great value for both software users and software providers. Swedish authorities have taken a restrictive standpoint against incorporating cloud-based storage solutions into software used in the public sector. The project aims to identify a practical and reusable way of utilizing cloud data and to demonstrate to Swedish authorities how cloud-based storage models can be beneficial. The case of this project is the SaaS solution Gemini Portal+, a water and sewage management solution. The end result was a monitoring module to Gemini Portal+ where users can view the digital maturity of their Gemini Portal+ usage. The digital maturity is conveyed in an easily digested manner, with concrete and actionable information on how to increase digital maturity. The result has passed the requirements and stakeholders are satisfied with the result.

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