The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Precalculus Concept Assessment (PCA), a 25-item multiple-choice instrument designed to assess student reasoning abilities and understanding of foundational calculus concepts (Carlson et al., 2010). When this study was conducted, the extant research on the PCA and the PCA…

Research has shown that computational thinking and kindergarten mathematics instruction can be integrated; however, evidence of how specific mathematical knowledge relates to computational thinking remains scarce. Additionally, we do not know if and how children's mathematical knowledge co-occurs with computational thinking and how these…

This multi-method case study explored the actual and perceived mathematical growth, as measured by the counting and measuring, problem writing tasks (CaMPWTs) and focus student interviews respectively, of fifth graders at Catherine Elementary Middle School as they completed tasks designed specifically to scaffold the development of a set of math…

When a new student comes to play an educational game, how can we determine what content to give them such that they learn as much as possible? When a frustrated customer calls in to a helpline, how can we determine what to say to best assist them? When an ill patient comes in to the clinic, how do we determine what tests to run and treatments to…

Due to their high fault-tolerance, ease of installation and scalability to large networks, distributed algorithms have recently gained immense popularity in the sensor networks community, especially in computer vision. Multi-target tracking in a camera network is one of the fundamental problems in this domain. Distributed estimation algorithms…

With the rise of the internet, mobile communications, electronic transactions, and personal broadcasting, the scale of connectedness has grown immensely. Not only can an individual interact with thousands and millions of others, but details about those interactions are being stored in databases, for later retrieval and analysis. Two key concepts…

Numerous organizations collect and distribute non-aggregate personal data for a variety of different purposes, including demographic and public health research. In these situations, the data distributor is responsible with the protection of the anonymity and personal information of individuals. Microaggregation is one of the most commonly used…

While the question of how to use human knowledge to guide evolutionary search is long-recognized, much remains to be done to answer this question adequately. This dissertation aims to further answer this question by exploring the role of domain knowledge in evolutionary computation as applied to real-world, complex problems, such as financial…

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…

Constraint satisfaction problems are a powerful way to abstract and represent academic and real-world problems from both artificial intelligence and operations research. A constraint satisfaction problem is typically addressed by a sequential constraint solver running on a single processor. Rather than construct a new, parallel solver, this work…

Link failures in wide area networks are common and cause significant data losses. Mesh-based protection schemes offer high capacity efficiency but they are slow, require complex signaling, and instable. Diversity coding is a proactive coding-based recovery technique which offers near-hitless (sub-ms) restoration with a competitive spare capacity…

A large body of literature exists on evolutionary computing, genetic algorithms, decision trees, codified knowledge, and knowledge management systems; however, the intersection of these computing topics has not been widely researched. Moving through the set of all possible solutions--or traversing the search space--at random exhibits no control…

Interdisciplinary research in computer science requires the development of computational techniques for practical application in different domains. This usually requires careful integration of different areas of technical expertise. This dissertation presents image and time series analysis algorithms, with practical interdisciplinary applications…

Automated grammar correction techniques have seen improvement over the years, but there is still much room for increased performance. Current correction techniques mainly focus on identifying and correcting a specific type of error, such as verb form misuse or preposition misuse, which restricts the corrections to a limited scope. We introduce a…

This research analyzes how external representations created by a student, Robert, helped him in building mathematical understanding over a sixteen-year period. Robert (also known as Bobby), was an original participant of the Rutgers longitudinal study where students were encouraged to work on problem-solving tasks with minimum intervention (Maher,…