Graph neural networks (GNN) are vital for analyzing real-world problems (e.g., network analysis, drug interaction, electronic design automation, e-commerce) that use graph models. However, efficient GNN acceleration faces with multiple challenges related to high and variable sparsity of input feature vectors, power-law degree distribution in the…

The dream of intelligent assistants to enhance programmer productivity has now become a concrete reality, with rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various domains based on the vast amount of data used to train them. However, tasks which require structured reasoning or…

In this study, I investigated how information technology (IT) professionals learn/acquire soft skills. Little is understood about how IT professionals describe and apply the soft skills that they consider necessary for their own employability. Exploring how IT professionals describe and apply soft skills is important to their future work and…

Practical work involving laboratory experiments is agreed upon to be an essential component of secondary science education. Practical work encompasses a broad range of activity types. The different forms of practical work are not equal in terms of cognitive demand and learning benefit. Inquiry-based investigations provide experience of cognitive…

Shoeprints are a common type of evidence found at crime scenes and are regularly used in forensic investigations. However, their utility is limited by the lack of reference footwear databases that cover the large and growing number of distinct shoe models. Additionally, existing methods for matching crime-scene shoeprints to reference databases…

The purpose of this descriptive research study was to evaluate the web-based practice experience tracking system at a school of public health (SPH) at a large southeastern university. Applied practice experiences (APEs) are a key component of public health education, and schools and programs of public health in the United States must provide…

New forms of visualizations are transforming how people interact with data. This dissertation explored how undergraduates learn with infographics. The following questions guided this research: (i) What do we know about the factors influencing the processing of data visualizations? (ii) How do task-level and learner-level characteristics impact the…

Educational data mining focuses on exploring increasingly large-scale data from educational settings, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), and developing computational methods to understand students' behaviors and learning settings better. There has been a multitude of research dedicated to studying the student learning process, leading to…

In the age of big data, interactive data visualizations are becoming increasingly prevalent. The ability to focus on subsets of data is essential for exploring large temporal, geospatial, topical, and network datasets. In order to categorize all parts of data visualizations, various attempts have been made to build frameworks for how to interpret,…