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…

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,…

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…

The Science DMZ is a network research tool offering superior large science data transmission between two locations. Through a network design that places the Science DMZ at the edge of the campus network, the Science DMZ defines a network path that avoids packet inspecting devices (firewalls, packet shapers) and produces near line-rate transmission…

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…

With the increase in technology in all facets of our lives and work, there is an ever increasing set of expectations that people have regarding information availability, response time, and dependability. While expectations are affected by gender, age, experience, industry, and other factors, people have expectations of technology, and from…

This dissertation concerns the secure processing of distributed data by multiple terminals, using interactive public communication among themselves, in order to accomplish a given computational task. In the setting of a probabilistic multiterminal source model in which several terminals observe correlated random signals, we analyze secure…

An increasingly common pattern is for newly-released web applications to succumb to a "Success Disaster". In this scenario, overloaded database machines and resultant high response times destroy a previously good user experience, just as a site is becoming popular. Unfortunately, the data independence provided by a traditional relational…

Ecosystem health is deteriorating in many parts of the world due to direct and indirect anthropogenic pressures. Generating accurate, useful, and impactful models of past, current, and future states of ecosystem structure and function is a complex endeavor that often requires vast amounts of data from multiple sources and knowledge from…

Traditional information systems return answers after a user submits a complete query. Users often feel "left in the dark" when they have limited knowledge about the underlying data, and have to use a try-and-see approach for finding information. The trend of supporting autocomplete in these systems is a first step towards solving this problem. A…

In the Information Age, a proliferation of unstructured text electronic documents exists. Processing these documents by humans is a daunting task as humans have limited cognitive abilities for processing large volumes of documents that can often be extremely lengthy. To address this problem, text data computer algorithms are being developed.…

Workflow technology has emerged as an eminent way to support scientific computing nowadays. Supported by mature technological infrastructures such as web services and high performance computing infrastructure, workflow technology has been well adopted by scientific community as it offers an effective framework to prototype, modify and manage…

The study of this dissertation provides a solution to a very specific problem instance in the area of data mining, data warehousing, and service-oriented architecture in publishing and newspaper industries. The research question focuses on the integration of data mining and data warehousing. The research problem focuses on the development of…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) that adapt to an individual student's needs have shown significant improvement in achievement over non-adaptive instruction (Murray 1999). This improvement occurs due to the individualized instruction and feedback that an ITS provides. In order to achieve the benefits that ITSs provide, we must find a way to…