Search Based Software Engineering is one of the important field of software engineering. Over the past few years even though there is a lot of study performed on SBSE and its search techniques in software development areas, it appears SBSE is not very industry relevant at the moment because most of the academic work was limited towards the application of search techniques. Hence, author proposes a study to know the trend of SBSE literature over the past few years and also analyze to what degree current SBSE research is industry relevant

This thesis explores and compares different methods of optimizing queries in Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks are graph-structured models that model probabilistic variables and their influences on each other; a query poses the question of what probabilities certain variables assume, given observed values on certain other variables. Bayesian inference (calculating these probabilities) is known to be NP-hard in general, but good algorithms exist in practice. Inference optimization traditionally concerns itself with finding and tweaking efficient algorithms, and leaves the choice of algorithms' parameters, as well as the construction of inference-friendly Bayesian network models, as an exercise to the end user. This thesis aims towards a more systematic approach to these topics: We try to optimize the structure of a given Bayesian network for inference, also taking into consideration what is known about the kind of queries that are posed. First, we implement several automatic model modifications that should help to make a model more suitable for inference. Examples of these are the conversion of definitions of conditional probability distributions from table form to noisy gates, and divorcing parents in the graph. Second, we introduce the concepts of usage profiles and query interfaces on Bayesian networks and try to take advantage of them. Finally, we conduct performance measurements of the different options available in the used library for Bayesian networks, to compare the effects of different options on speedup and stability, and to answer the question of which options and parameters represent the optimal choice to perform fast queries in the end product. The thesis gives an overview of what issues are important to consider when trying to optimize an application's query performance in Bayesian networks, and when trying to optimize Bayesian networks for queries. The project uses the SMILE library for Bayesian networks by the University of Pittsburgh, and includes a case study on script-generated Bayesian networks for troubleshooting by Scania AB.

In 2005 the Swedish government introduced a law of amnesty for refugees in the country which made the Minister of Integration invite a number of national organizations to discuss this law. After that, seven organizations in Gothenburg also felt that something should be done and they started talking about a cooperation to improve the situation for newly arrived people to Gothenburg. They formed a project, “Plattform Göteborg”, which in this paper will be evaluated according to a manual from Sida. The project consists of seven organizations which have their separate activities formed by them to improve the integration. They do things such as teach Swedish, offer a place for counseling, teach sports to young people and have different activities for children. I will here present these activities, how the organizations planned this, whether these plans is in accordance with what really happened and evaluate the results. To do this I have preformed interviews with the people involved. I have then examined and evaluated the project according to five different criteria; effectiveness, impact, relevance, sustainability and efficiency. From this I have concluded that the idea of a cooperation between organizations is good and necessary a better cooperation with the municipality is needed to make it work better. The project also needs to be structured in a better way and more well-planned, and here the organizations could help each other better. It is also necessary to take effects in to consideration in a better way than done up until now, to see what they want to get out from the project and also think to examine more after which effects that have come from this.

L'un des principaux problèmes que les applications Webs doivent gérer aujourd'hui est l'évolutivité des données. Dans cette thèse, nous considérons ce problème et plus précisément l'évolution des documents actifs. Les documents actifs sont documents XML pouvant évolués grâce à l'activation d'appel de services Web. Ce formalisme a déjà été utilisé dans le cadre de la gestion d'information distribuée. Les principales contributions de cette thèse sont l'étude théorique de différentes notions pour l'implémentation de deux systèmes gérant des applications manipulant des flux de données et des applications de type workflow. Dans un premier temps, nous étudions des notions reliées à la maintenance de vues sur des documents actifs. Ces notions sont utilisées dans l'implémentation d'un processeur de flux de données appelé Axlog widget manipulant des flux à travers un document actif. La deuxième contribution porte sur l'expressivité de différents formalismes pour contraindre le séquencement des activations d'un document actif. Cette étude a été motivée par l'implémentation d'un système gérant des workflows focalisés sur les données utilisant les documents actifs, appelé Axart. / One of the major issues faced by Web applications is the management of evolving of data. In this thesis, we consider this problem and in particular the evolution of active documents. Active documents is a formalism describing the evolution of XML documents by activating Web services calls included in the document. It has already been used in the context of the management of distributed data \cite{axml}. The main contributions of this thesis are theoretical studies motivated by two systems for managing respectively stream applications and workflow applications. In a first contribution, we study the problem of view maintenance over active documents. The results served as the basis for an implementation of stream processors based on active documents called Axlog widgets. In a second one, we see active documents as the core of data centric workflows and consider various ways of expressing constraints on the evolution of documents. The implementation, called Axart, validated the approach of a data centric workflow system based on active documents. The hidden Web (also known as deep or invisible Web), that is, the partof the Web not directly accessible through hyperlinks, but through HTMLforms or Web services, is of great value, but difficult to exploit. Wediscuss a process for the fully automatic discovery, syntacticand semantic analysis, and querying of hidden-Web services. We proposefirst a general architecture that relies on a semi-structured warehouseof imprecise (probabilistic) content. We provide a detailed complexityanalysis of the underlying probabilistic tree model. We describe how wecan use a combination of heuristics and probing to understand thestructure of an HTML form. We present an original use of a supervisedmachine-learning method, namely conditional random fields,in an unsupervised manner, on an automatic, imperfect, andimprecise, annotation based on domain knowledge, in order to extractrelevant information from HTML result pages. So as to obtainsemantic relations between inputs and outputs of a hidden-Web service, weinvestigate the complexity of deriving a schema mapping between databaseinstances, solely relying on the presence of constants in the twoinstances. We finally describe a model for the semantic representationand intensional indexing of hidden-Web sources, and discuss how toprocess a user's high-level query using such descriptions.

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La thèse propose une étude de l’expérience du patrimoine et de sa médiation à travers les publicités touristiques du territoire. Ces dernières actualisent la totalité du système « territoire-patrimoine-acteurs » et le mécanisme trinitaire qui fait du territoire un construit. Elles traduisent ainsi les regards croisés des touristes ( l’étranger), des locaux (l’indigène ) et du terroir, leurs logiques d’acteurs, d’authenticité, d’identité et d’imaginaire et les processus touristiques et culturels qui les accompagnent en termes de réenchantement, de réappropriation et de représentations. L’étude de l’expérience du patrimoine se déploie en trois temps. Le premier dessine les prolégomènes de l’analyse. Il étudie dans une perspective systémique, soutenue par la méthode des études de cas, le cadre territorial et touristique de l’expérience du patrimoine. La capacité du patrimoine à « faire monde » et à faire sens, à travers les stratégies de développement et de communication touristique territoriale, constitue le cadre premier de l’expérience. Le deuxième temps envisage de manière théorique et pratique à travers un corpus de visuels le cadre publicitaire de l’expérience du patrimoine. Cette partie s’appuie notamment sur une vision ontologique de l’expérience à « l’intersection de l’esthésique, de l’esthétique et de l’éthique » pour analyser le rôle du patrimoine dans un système d’objets et d’échanges contenus dans des images spécifiques, et dans le contexte de la sémiose des territoires. Le troisième temps étudie l’expérience patrimoniale du cadre des publicités touristiques territoriales. Les démarches empiriques menées sont organisées, dans le prolongement de l’analyse du cadre, par les trois catégories qui selon Peirce structurent l’expérience humaine : éprouver le patrimoine (priméité), faire l’expérience du choix avec le patrimoine (secondéité), percevoir la contribution du patrimoine à la construction identitaire de l’image dans le cadre d’une expérience congruente ou partagée des valeurs (tiercéité). / The thesis proposes a study of the overall experience of heritage through tourism advertising of territories. They actualise the system "territory-heritage actors", the Trinitarian mechanism and the territory as a "constructed". Therefore, they reflect the viewpoints of tourists ("foreign"), local ("native") and the "terroir", their logics of actors, the authenticity, the identity and the imagination and the tourist and cultural processes that accompany them in terms of "re-enchantment, reappropriation and representations". The study of the heritage experience unfolds in three stages. The first step describes the prolegomena of the analysis. It deals in a systemic perspective, supported by the case study method, the territorial and touristic aspect of the experience of heritage. The capacity of the heritage to "make worlds" and to make sense, through the development strategies and territorial tourism communication is the first part of the experiment. The second stage deals a part of the heritage experience from a theoretical and practical point of vue through a visual corpus of advertising . This part is based mainly on the ontological vision of the experience at "the intersection of the aesthesic, the aesthetics and the ethics" , concepts developed by J.J. Boutaud and E. Véron (2007) to analyze the role of Heritage in a system of objects and exchanges activated in specific images, and in a particular context, semiose of territories. The third stage analyzes the heritage experience of the framework of territorial tourism advertisements. The conducted empirical approaches are organized in the framework of the extension of the analysis by the three categories according to Peirce structure of human experience : taste the heritage (firstness), experiment the choice with the heritage (secondness), understand Heritage's contribution to building the identity into the image in the context of a shared experience or congruent values (thirdness).

Magister Educationis - MEd / The National Curriculum Statement introduced mathematical literacy officially in 2006. Learners in general perform poorly at mathematics in South Africa but there is strong belief that learners should graduate from schools sufficiently literate to deal with the mathematical issues they will encounter in out-of-school situations. Based on this, this study is an investigation of the contexts, which grades 8 - 10 learners would prefer to engage with mathematics. The aim of this study was thus to investigate mathematical literacy in relation to learners' motivations for the contexts they would prefer to deal with in mathematical literacy. The emphasis of the study is to concentrate on learners' written motivations for mathematical contexts. Data were collected using a questionnaire that deals with contexts for mathematics. / South Africa

Magister Educationis - MEd / The study explored the comparison of grade 8 to 10 urban and peri-urban learners' contexts preferences in mathematical literacy. There is currently a strong emphasis on the use of contexts for school mathematics. This has been also the case for South Africa when grade 10 learners have to make a choice between mathematics and mathematical literacy as one of their compulsory subjects for grade 10. This study focused more on the use of mathematics in real life situations. Data was collected by using questionnaires developed as part of the Relevance of School Mathematics Education (ROSME) project. The questionnaire dealt with contexts preferred by grade 10 learners from urban and peri-urban areas. The data were analysed using non-parametric statistical techniques. The findings radicate that there were contexts highly preferred by learners from both urban and peri-urban areas; least preferred by learners from both areas, highly preferred by learners from periurban areas but not by learners from urban areas and least preferred by learners from urban areas but not by those from peri-urban areas and vice versa. It is recommended that contexts highly preferred by learners should be incorporated in the learning experiences of learners. / South Africa

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / Groundwater is a truly hidden resource that millions of lives depend on for survival. The importance of this resource cannot be accentuated enough, yet for generations it has been abused and misused. Groundwater forms an integral part of the hydrological cycle and, therefore, holistic management, conservation, protection and efficient use is of paramount importance. In the past, regulation of this resource at international, regional and national level was minimal. Little progress has been made to accommodate groundwater in international and regional legal instruments.

This essay presents a study of retention of idioms delving into a pedagogical approach by presenting them to a group of lower secondary students. The study also explores students’ memory retention whilst concurrently investigating if certain types of idioms are retained to a greater extent than others. For the sake of assessing memory retention in relation to these various types of idiomatic transparency, the selected idioms have been divided into three separate categories; transparent, semi-transparent and opaque depending on their literal and figurative meaning. This essay argues that opaque idioms are retained to a lesser extent in memory due to their non-transparent metaphorical meaning. In fact, the most striking finding is that idioms pertaining to the opaque category are indeed more difficult for students to learn and are also forgotten the fastest. Previous research has put emphasis on the complex structure of idioms and opinions seem divided regarding to what extent the teaching of idioms should be implemented together with other vocabulary items in a classroom setting. On the other hand, the same research emphasizes the great value of idioms; potentially expanding student vocabulary and making the English language more nuanced and native-like.