In recent years, metadata-driven software development has gained prominence. In this implementation model, various application concerns are provided as third-party frameworks and libraries that the programmer configures through metadata, such as XML configuration files or Java annotations. Metadata-driven software development is a special case of declarative programming: metadata serves as a domain-specific language that the programmer uses to declare various concerns, whose implementation is provided by an elaborate ecosystem of libraries and frameworks that serve as pre-defined application building blocks. Examples abound: transparent persistence mechanisms facilitate data management; security frameworks provide access control and encryption; unit testing frameworks provide abstractions for implementing and executing unit tests, etc. Metadata-driven software development has been particularly embraced in enterprise computing as a means of providing standardized solutions to common application scenarios. Despite the conciseness and simplicity benefits of metadata-driven software development, this implementation model introduces a unique set of reuse and evolution challenges. In particular, metadata is not reusable across application modules, and program evolution causes unsafe discrepancies between the main source code and its corresponding metadata. The research described in this dissertation addresses five fundamental problems of metadata-driven software development: (1) bytecode enhancements that transparently introduce concerns hinder program understanding and debugging; (2) mainstream enterprise metadata formats are hard to understand, evolve, and reuse; (3) concerns declared via metadata cannot be reused when source-to-source compiling emerging languages to mainstream ones; (4) metadata correctness cannot be automatically ensured as application source code is being refactored and enhanced; and (5) lacking built-in metadata, JavaScript programs can be enhanced with additional concerns only through manual source code changes. The research described in this dissertation leverages domain-specific languages and automated code generation to enable effective reuse and safe evolution in metadata-driven software development. The specific innovations that address the problems outlined above are as follows: (1) a domain-specific language (DSL) describing bytecode enhancement that facilitates the understanding and debugging of additional concerns; (2) a novel metadata format expressed as a DSL that is easier to author, understand, reuse, and maintain than existing metadata formats; (3) automated metadata translation that enables effective reuse of target language additional concerns from source-to-source compiled source language programs; (4) metadata invariants---a new abstraction for expressing and verifying metadata coding convention; and (5) a new approach to declaratively enhancing JavaScript programs with additional concerns. / Ph. D.

The task of implementing a programming language is a task that entails a great deal of work. Yet much of this work is similar for different programming languages: most languages require, e.g., parsing, name resolution, type-checking, and optimization. When implementing domain-specific languages (DSLs) the reimplementation of these largely similar tasks seems especially redundant. A number of approaches exist to alleviate this issue, including embedded DSLs, macro-rewriting systems, and more general systems intended for language implementation. However, these tend to have at least one of the following limitations: They present a leaky abstraction, e.g., error messages do not refer to the DSL but rather some other programming language, namely the one used to implement the DSL. They limit the flexibility of the DSL, either to the constructs present in another language, or merely to the syntax of some other language. They see an entire language as the unit of composition. Complete languages are extended with other complete language extensions. Instead, this thesis introduces the concept of a syntax construction, which represents a smaller unit of composition. A syntax construction defines a single language feature, e.g., an if-statement, an anonymous function, or addition. Each syntax construction specifies its own syntax, binding semantics, and runtime semantics, independent of the rest of the language. The runtime semantics are defined using a translation into another target language, similarly to macros. These translations can then be checked to ensure that they preserve binding semantics and introduce no binding errors. This checking ensures that binding errors can be presented in terms of code the programmer wrote, rather than generated code in some underlying language. During evaluation several limitations are encountered. Removing or minimizing these limitations appears possible, but is left for future work / Att implementera ett programmeringsspråk är ett mycket arbetstungt åtagande. Detta trots att mycket av det som behöver göras inte skiljer sig särskilt mycket mellan olika språk, de flesta behöver exempelvis parsning, namnupplösning, typcheckning och optimering. För ett domänspecifikt programmeringsspråk (DSL) är denna upprepning ännu mer tydlig. Det finns ett antal olika metoder för att hantera detta, exempelvis embeddade DSLer, macro-system, och mer generella system för programspråksimplementation. Dessa tenderar dock att ha en eller flera av följande begränsningar: De abstraktioner som introduceras "läcker", felmeddelanden kan exempelvis referera till abstraktioner i ett annat programmeringsspråk, nämligen det som användes för att implementera DSLet. DSLet som implementeras blir begränsat, antingen till vad som finns i implementationsspråket, eller till implementationsspråkets syntax. Ett DSL ses som den minsta hela beståndsdelen i systemet. Om delar av språket ska återanvändas eller inkluderas i ett annat måste hela språket följa med. Denna avhandling introducerar istället syntaxkonstruktioner som minsta beståndsdel. En syntaxkonstruktion representerar en enskild del av ett språk, exempelvis en if-sats, en anonym funktion, eller addition. Varje syntaxkonstruktion definierar sin egen syntax, bindningssemantik och exekveringssemantik, utan referenser till språket som helhet. Exekveringssemantiken liknar en macro, den uttrycks som en översättning till ett implementationsspråk. Tack vare att bindningssemantiken är specifierad kan vi sedan kontrollera översättningen så att den inte kan introducera bindningsfel. Detta medför att felmeddelanden kan referera enbart till kod som programmeraren faktiskt skrev, istället för genererad kod i implementationsspråket. Evalueringen påvisar flera begränsningar med systemet. Begränsningarna tycks lösbara, men detta arbete lämnas till framtiden.

Scientific workflow systems enable scientists to perform large-scale data intensive scientific experiments using distributed computing resources. Due to the diversity of domains and complexity of technology, delivering a successful outcome efficiently requires collaboration between domain experts and technical experts. However, existing scientific workflow systems require a large investment of time to familiarise and adapt existing workflows. Thus, many scientific workflows are still being implemented by script based languages (such as Python and R) due to familiarity and extensive third party library support. In this thesis, we implement a framework that uses a domain specific language that enables domain experts to collaborate on fine-tuning workflows. Technical experts are able to use Python for task implementations. Moreover, the framework includes support for parallel execution without any specialized code. It also provides a provenance capturing framework that enables users to analyse past executions and retrieve complete lineage of any data item generated. Experiments which were performed using a real-world scientific workflow from the bioinformatics domain show that users were able to execute workflows efficiently while using our DSL for workflow composition and Python for task implementations. Moreover, we show that captured provenance can be useful for analysing past workflow executions. / Vetenskapliga arbetsflödessystem gör det möjligt för forskare att utföra storskaliga dataintensiva vetenskapliga experiment med hjälp av distribuerade datorresurser. På grund av mångfalden av domäner, och komplexitet i teknik, krävs samarbete mellan domänexperter och tekniska experter för att på ett effektivt sätt leverera en framgångsrik lösning. Befintliga vetenskapliga arbetsflödessystem kräver dock en stor investering i tid för att bekanta och anpassa befintliga arbetsflöden. Som ett resultat av detta implementeras många vetenskapliga arbetsflöden fortfarande av skriptbaserade språk (som Python och R) på grund av förtrogenhet och omfattande support från tredje part. I denna avhandling implementeras ett framework som använder ett domänsspecifikt språk som gör det möjligt för domänexperter att samarbeta med att finjustera arbetsflöden. Tekniska experter kan använda Python för att genomföra uppgifter. Dessutom innehåller ramverket stöd för parallell exekvering utan någon specialkod. Detta ger också ett ursprungsfångande framework som gör det möjligt för användare att analysera tidigare exekveringar och att hämta fullständiga härstamningar för samtliga genererade dataobjekt. Experiment som utfördes med hjälp av ett verkligt vetenskapligt arbetsflöde från bioinformatikdomänen visar att användarna effektivt kunde utföra arbetsflöden medan de använde en DSL för arbetsflödesammansättning och Python för uppdragsimplementationer. Dessutom visar vi hur fångade ursprung kan vara användbara för att analysera tidigare genomförda arbetsflödesexekveringar.

Diploma thesis Assessment of language skills of specific language impaired children deals with children with specific language impairment in preschool and early school age (6-8 years). The thesis is to map the resources that are dealing with this issue and define the concept of specific language impairment in our country and foreign environment, because it is a very problematic term The theoretical part describes the status of speech therapy and special education diagnosis of children with specific language impairment in Czech Republic and foreign countries. It maps out how this developmental disorder speech therapists and special educators diagnose, what tools to use and what diagnostic criteria used in their practices. The aim of our research activities in the framework of this thesis is to determine whether and what value could have a Battery of tests of phonological skills (Seidlová Málková, Caravolas 2013) for the diagnostic process of specific language impairment. And also try to detect whether the battery includes tests to detect potential child with specific language impairment and thus contribute to the differential diagnosis. Keywords: Specific language impairment, language assessment, diagnostic markers, Battery of tests of phonological skills

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / John M. Hatcliff / Guardol, a domain-specific language (DSL) developed by Rockwell Collins, was designed to streamline the process of specifying, implementing, and verifying Cross Domain Solution (CDS) security policies. Guardol’s syntax and intended computational behavior tightly resembles the core of many functional programming languages, but a number of features have been added to ease the development of high assurance cross domain solutions. A significant portion of the formalization and implementation of Guardol’s grammar and type system was performed by the SAnToS group at Kansas State University. This report summarizes the key conceptual components of Guardol’s grammar and tool- chain architecture. The focus of the report is a detailed description of Guardol’s type system implementation and formalization. A great deal of effort was put into a formalization which provided a high level of assurance that the specification of types and data structures were maintained in the intended implementation.

Les sciences qui traitent de la réalité, qu'elles soient naturelles, de la société ou de la vie, fonctionnent avec des modèles. Une partie de ces modèles décrivent les relations entre certaines grandeurs mesurables de la réalité, sans aller jusqu'au détail des interactions entre les éléments qui la composent. D'autres modèles décrivent ces interactions en prenant le point de vue des individus qui constituent le système, le comportement global n'est alors plus décrit à priori, mais observé à posteriori. Nous faisons le constat que dans les deux cas le scientifique a peu de liberté pour décrire les structures, en particulier spatiales, susceptibles de porter ces interactions. Nous proposons une approche de modélisation que l'on peut situer à mi-chemin entre les deux, et qui incite à étudier un système à travers la nature de ses interactions et des structures de graphes qui peuvent les porter. En plaçant au même niveau les relations spatiales, fonctionnelles, sociales ou hiérarchiques, nous tentons aussi de nous affranchir des contraintes induites par le choix effectué souvent à priori d'une forme de représentation de l'espace. Nous avons formalisé les concepts de base de cette approche, et ceux-ci ont constitué les éléments d'un langage métier, nommé Ocelet, que nous avons défini. Les outils permettant la mise en œuvre de ce langage ont été développés et intégrés sous la forme d'un environnement de modélisation et de simulation. Enfin nous avons pu expérimenter notre nouvelle approche de modélisation et le langage Ocelet à travers la réalisation de plusieurs modèles présentant des situations variées de dynamiques paysagères / Sciences dealing with reality be it related to nature, society or life, use models. Some of these models describe the relations that exist between measurable properties of that reality, without detailing the interactions between its components. Other models describe those interactions from the point of view of the individuals that form the system, in which case the overall behaviour is not defined a priori but observed a posteriori. In both cases, it can be noted that the scientist is often limited in its capacity to describe the structures, especially those spatial, which support the interactions. We propose a modelling approach that can be considered intermediate, where the system is studied by examining the nature of the interactions involved and the graph structures needed to support them. By unifying the description of spatial, functional, social or hierarchical relationships, we attempt to lift constraints induced by the form of spatial representation that are often chosen a priori. The basic concepts of this approach have been formalized, and were used to define and build a domain specific language, called Ocelet. The tools related to the implementation of the language have also been developed and assembled into an integrated modelling and simulation environment. It was then possible to experiment our new modelling approach and the Ocelet language by developing models for a variety of dynamic landscapes situations

The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the level of comprehension of czech sentences with a different syntactic complexity in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children at family risk for dyslexia (experimental groups) compared to typically developing peers (control group). Statistically significant differences were proven both between the SLI group and the family risk group and between the SLI group and control group. The assumed descending tendency of achievement in the test blocks was not substantiated.

La programmation par contraintes est souvent décrite, utopiquement, comme un paradigme déclaratif dans lequel l’utilisateur décrit son problème et le solveur le résout. Bien entendu, la réalité des solveurs de contraintes est plus complexe, et les besoins de personnalisation des techniques de modélisation et de résolution évoluent avec le degré d’expertise des utilisateurs. Cette thèse porte sur l’enrichissement de l’arsenal des techniques disponibles dans les solveurs de contraintes. D’une part, nous étudions la contribution d’un système d’explications à l’exploration de l’espace de recherche, dans le cadre spécifique d’une recherche locale. Deux heuristiques de voisinages génériques exploitant singulièrement les explications sont décrites. La première se base sur la difficulté de réparer une solution partiellement détruite, la seconde repose sur la nature non-optimale de la solution courante. Ces heuristiques mettent à jour la structure interne des problèmes traités pour construire des voisins de bonne qualité pour une recherche à voisinage large. Elles sont complémentaires d’autres heuristiques de voisinages génériques, avec lesquels elles peuvent être combinées efficacement. De plus, nous proposons de rendre le système d’explications paresseux afin d’en minimiser l’empreinte. D’autre part, nous effectuons un état des lieux des savoir-faire relatifs aux moteurs de propagation pour les solveurs de contraintes. Ces données sont exploitées opérationnellement à travers un langage dédié qui permet de personnaliser la propagation au sein d’un solveur, en fournissant des structures d’implémentation et en définissant des points de contrôle dans le solveur. Ce langage offre des concepts de haut niveau permettant à l’utilisateur d’ignorer les détails de mise en œuvre du solveur, tout en conservant un bon niveau de flexibilité et certaines garanties. Il permet l’expression de schémas de propagation spécifiques à la structure interne de chaque problème. La mise en œuvre et les expérimentations ont été effectués dans le solveur de contraintes Choco. Cette thèse a donné lieu à une nouvelle version de l’outil globalement plus efficace et nativement expliqué. / Constraint programming is often described, idealistically, as a declarative paradigm in which the user describes the problem and the solver solves it. Obviously, the reality of constraint solvers is more complex, and the needs in customization of modeling and solving techniques change with the level of expertise of users. This thesis focuses on enriching the arsenal of available techniques in constraint solvers. On the one hand, we study the contribution of an explanation system to the exploration of the search space in the specific context of a local search. Two generic neighborhood heuristics which exploit explanations singularly are described. The first one is based on the difficulty of repairing a partially destroyed solution, the second one is based on the non-optimal nature of the current solution. These heuristics discover the internal structure of the problems to build good neighbors for large neighborhood search. They are complementary to other generic neighborhood heuristics, with which they can be combined effectively. In addition, we propose to make the explanation system lazy in order to minimize its footprint. On the other hand, we undertake an inventory of know-how relative to propagation engines of constraint solvers. These data are used operationally through a domain specific language that allows users to customize the propagation schema, providing implementation structures and defining check points within the solver. This language offershigh-level concepts that allow the user to ignore the implementation details, while maintaining a good level of flexibility and some guarantees. It allows the expression of propagation schemas specific to the internal structure of each problem solved. Implementation and experiments were carried out in the Choco constraint solver, developed in this thesis. This has resulted in a new version of the overall effectiveness and natively explained tool.

There has been limited investigation into the nature of specific language impairment (SLI) in adolescence, and even less investigation into speech production in SLI, particularly beyond the preschool years. Phonological output is crucial to oral expressive language, one of the characteristic areas of deficit in SLI. It was hypothesized that adolescents with SLI present with residual speech errors. Accordingly, this study investigated the presence, nature and cause of speech deficits in adolescents with persistent SLI. Adolescents aged 13.0-14.0 years with persistent SLI (n=31) were compared to typically developing (TD) peers (n=31) on an Oral Motor Evaluation (OME) and a Speech Assessment Battery (SAB), consisting of: Multisyllabic Word Repetition, Nonsense Word Repetition, Phrase Repetition, Sentence Repetition and Tongue Twisters. Tasks were analysed in terms of accuracy and the amount of effort required, to determine efficiency and automaticity of phonological output. All participants completed a battery of memory tasks and the language abilities of the SLI group were evaluated. Caregivers completed questionnaires investigating risk factors. Results indicated that adolescents with persistent SLI produced a higher number of inconsistent and context-dependent deviant speech behaviours than TD peers, involving syllable structure changes (phoneme additions/omissions), phoneme substitutions, fluency errors and repetitions/revisions. Participants with SLI also had a higher incidence of neuromotor deficits. Persistent SLI appears to relate to a multifactorial etiology, involving both genetic and early history factors. There was high comorbidity of attention deficits, with implications for resource allocation. Results were interpreted within a functional capacity viewpoint. Speech deficits are thought to contribute to a threshold effect, where even subtle deficits in one area can compromise processing in another area. Speech production in this population appears to be more resource-demanding than in TD peers, which may affect concurrent performance on linguistic and memory tasks. This hypothesis is supported by the high correlation between speech tasks and expressive syntax for SLI participants. The high incidence of speech deficits in adolescents with SLI ii has implications for research and clinical practice with individuals of all ages with SLI.

Model-driven engineering promotes the migration from code-centric to model-based software development. Systems consist of model collections integrating different concerns and perspectives, while semi-automated model transformations generate executable code combining the information from these. Increasing the abstraction level to models required appropriate management technologies supporting the various software development activities. Among these, model comparison represents one of the most challenging tasks and plays an essential role in various modelling activities. Its hardness led researchers to propose a multitude of approaches adopting different approximation strategies and exploiting specific knowledge of the involved models. However, almost no support is provided for their evaluation against specific scenarios and modelling practices. This thesis presents Benji, a framework for the automated generation of model comparison benchmarks. Given a set of differences and an initial model, users generate models resulting from the application of the first on the latter. Differences consist of preconditions, actions and postconditions expressed using a dedicated specification language. The generator converts benchmark specifications to design-space exploration problems and produces the final solutions along with a model-based description of their differences with respect to the initial model. A set of representative use cases is used to evaluate the framework against its design principles, which resemble the essential properties expected from model comparison benchmark generators.