Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 1993. / Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

My thesis is focused on the observation of possible reasons why tennis has not been included in education at elementary schools so far. The research work was performed using questionnaires at elementary schools in regions Vysocina and South Bohemia (December 2007 {--} February 2008). Theoretical {--} didactic part of thesis is focused on tennis history, physical and psychological severity of this sport, but mostly on availability of tennis in wide surroundings (in the view of number of tennis courts and costs for tennis equipment). There are compared particular regions in the research part of the thesis and their results are demonstrated in charts. The conclusions are summarised in discussion and in final part of thesis.

This graduation theses is focus to implementation of CIP-World (continuous improvement program) and to fullfilment of requirements of Star Power Factory audit in Siemen Nízkonapěťová spínací technika Trutnov, s.r.o. company.

This master thesis focuses on the issue of tangible fixed assets management in the company HP spol. s r.o. which manufactures plastic bags and various technical parts. This thesis is based on the current state of the company and with attention to key areas such as care of the tangible fixed assets, organization and operation maintenance. The aim of the company analysis is to identify weaknesses and their resulting opportunities. In the next section are presented solutions to problems which were identified by analysis. Economic evaluation of the proposals with their benefits and timetable is carried out in conclusion of the thesis.

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A half hour comedy pilot about a guy that crowd sources his life.

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Many studies show that manual code generation is error-prone and results in vulnerabilities. Vulnerability fixing has been shown as the most time-consuming process among multiple steps of code repair. To help developers repair these security vulnerabilities, my dissertation aims to develop an automatic or semi-automatic secure code generation system with neural network based approaches. Trained with huge amounts of good-quality code, I expect the neural network to learn the secure usage and produce the correct code suggestions. Despite the great success of neural networks, the vision of comprehending and generating programming languages through neural networks has not been fully realized. There are many fundamental questions that need to be answered. These questions include 1) what are the accuracy impacts of the various choices in code embedding? 2) How to address the accuracy challenges caused by the programming language specific properties in the task of secure code suggestion? My dissertation work answers the two questions with a systematical measurement study and specialized neural network designs. My experiments show that program analysis is a necessary preprocessing step to guide the code embedding – resulting in a 36.1% accuracy improvement. Furthermore, I identify two previously unreported deficiencies in the cryptographic API suggestion task. To close the gap, I invent a highly accurate API method suggestion solution, referred to as Multi-HyLSTM, with specialized neural network designs to recognize unique programming language characteristics. My work points out the important differences between natural languages and programming languages, which pure data-driven learning approaches may not recognize. / Doctor of Philosophy / Neural network techniques that automatically learn rules from data show great potential to provide vulnerability-agnostic solutions for securing code. Recent research community has witnessed the rapid progress of neural network techniques in various application domains, such as computer vision, natural language processing, etc. However, how to harness the success of neural network based approaches for dealing with programs is still largely unknown. Many fundamental questions are required to be answered. This dissertation aims to provide neural network based solutions to help developers write secure code, as well as answer several important but unknown research questions about promoting neural network based approaches specialized for the programming language domain. Learning from Java cryptographic code, I explore the accuracy challenges for neural networks to understand the secure API usage rules and generate appropriate suggestions based on them. One of my research focuses is on how to express code in a way that neural networks can comprehend, aka code embedding. Code embedding is the process of transforming code into numeric vectors. It is important for accuracy as all the subsequent neural network calculation is performed on it. I conduct a systematic comparison to evaluate several key embedding design choices and reveal their impacts on accuracy improvements. To further improve the accuracy, I focus on the accuracy challenges in the specific task, generating API suggestions by neural networks. I identify the unreported program dependency specific challenges and present several specialized neural network designs to address them.

JavaScript (JS) is one of the most popular programming languages due to its flexibility and versatility, but debugging JS code is tedious and error-prone. In our research, we conducted an empirical study to characterize the relationship between co-changed software entities (e.g., functions and variables), and built a machine learning (ML)-based approach to recommend additional entity to edit given developers’ code changes. Specifically, we first crawled 14,747 commits in 10 open-source projects; for each commit, we created one or more change dependency graphs (CDGs) to model the referencer-referencee relationship between co-changed entities. Next, we extracted the common subgraphs between CDGs to locate recurring co-change patterns between entities. Finally, based on those patterns, we extracted code features from co-changed entities and trained an ML model that recommends entities-to-change given a program commit. According to our empirical investigation, (1) 50% of the crawled commits involve multi-entity edits (i.e., edits that touch multiple entities simultaneously); (2) three recurring patterns commonly exist in all projects; and (3) 80–90% of co-changed function pairs either invoke the same function(s), access the same variable(s), or contain similar statement(s); and (4) our ML-based approach CoRec recommended entity changes with high accuracy. This research will improve programmer productivity and software quality. / M.S. / This thesis introduced a tool CoRec which can provide co-change suggestions when JavaScript programmers fix a bug. A comprehensive empirical study was carried out on 14,747 multi-entity bug fixes in ten open-source JavaScript programs. We characterized the relationship between co-changed entities (e.g., functions and variables), and extracted the most popular change patterns, based on which we built a machine learning (ML)-based approach to recommend additional entity to edit given developers’ code changes. Our empirical study shows that: (1) 50% of the crawled commits involve multi-entity edits (i.e., edits that touch multiple entities simultaneously); (2) three change patterns commonly exist in all ten projects; (3) 80-90% of co-changed function pairs in the 3 patterns either invoke the same function(s), access the same variable(s), or contain similar statement(s); and (4) our ML-based approach CoRec recommended entity changes with high accuracy. Our research will improve programmer productivity and software quality.

Cette thèse étudie les méthodes de regroupement basées sur le principe des plus proches voisins partagés (SNN). Comme la plupart des autres approches de clustering à base de graphe, les méthodes SNN sont effectivement bien adaptées à surmonter la complexité des données, l'hétérogénéité et la haute dimensionnalité. La première contribution de la thèse est de revisiter une méthode existante basée sur les voisins partagés en deux points. Nous présentons d'abord un formalisme basé sur la la théorie de décision à contrario. Cela nous permet de tirer des scores de connectivité plus fiable des groupes et une interprétation plus intuitive des voisinage selectionnés optimalement. Nous proposons également un nouveau algorithme de factorisation pour accélérer le calcul intensif nécessaire des matrices des voisins partagés. La deuxième contribution de cette thèse est une généralisation de la classification SNNau cas multi-source. La principale originalité de notre approche est que nous introduisons une étape de sélection des sources d'information optimales dans le calcul de scores de groupes candidats. Chaque groupe est alors associé à son propre sous-ensemble optimal des modalités. Comme le montre le expériences, cette étape de sélection de source rend notre approche largement robuste à la présence de sources locales aberrantes. Cette nouvelle méthode est appliquée à un large éventail de problèmes, y compris la structuration multimodale des collections d'images et dans le regroupement dans des sous-espaces basés sur les projections aléatoires.La troisième contribution de la thèse est une tentative pour étendre les méthodes SNNdans le contexte des graphes biparites. Nous introduisons de nouvelles mesures de pertinence SNNrevisitées pour ce contexte asymétrique et nous montrons qu'elles peuvent être utiliséespour sélectionner localement des voisinages optimales. En conséquence, nous proposons un nouveau algorithme de clustering bipartite SNN qui est appliqué à la découverte d'objets visuels.Les expériences montrent que cette nouvelle méthode est meilleure par rapport aux méthodes de l'état de l'art. Basé sur les objets découverts, nous introduisons également un paradigme de recherche visuelle, c.-à-d les objet basés sur la suggestion de requêtes visuel les. / This thesis investigates new clustering paradigms and algorithms based on the principle of the shared nearest-neighbors (SNN. As most other graph-based clustering approaches, SNN methods are actually well suited to overcome data complexity, heterogeneity and high-dimensionality.The first contribution of the thesis is to revisit existing shared neighbors methods in two points. We first introduce a new SNN formalism based on the theory of a contrario decision. This allows us to derive more reliable connectivity scores of candidate clusters and a more intuitive interpretation of locally optimum neighborhoods. We also propose a new factorization algorithm for speeding-up the intensive computation of the required sharedneighbors matrices.The second contribution of the thesis is a generalization of the SNN clustering approach to the multi-source case. Whereas SNN methods appear to be ideally suited to sets of heterogeneous information sources, this multi-source problem was surprisingly not addressed in the literature beforehand. The main originality of our approach is that we introduce an information source selection step in the computation of candidate cluster scores. As shown in the experiments, this source selection step makes our approach widely robust to the presence of locally outlier sources. This new method is applied to a wide range of problems including multimodal structuring of image collections and subspace-based clustering based on random projections. The third contribution of the thesis is an attempt to extend SNN methods to the context of bipartite k-nn graphs. We introduce new SNN relevance measures revisited for this asymmetric context and show that they can be used to select locally optimal bi-partite clusters. Accordingly, we propose a new bipartite SNN clustering algorithm that is applied to visual object’s discovery based on a randomly precomputed matching graph. Experiments show that this new method outperformed state-of-the-art object mining results on OxfordBuilding dataset. Based on the discovered objects, we also introduce a new visual search paradigm, i.e. object-based visual query suggestion.