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…

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…

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…

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…

Learning probabilistic classification and prediction models that generate accurate probabilities is essential in many prediction and decision-making tasks in machine learning and data mining. One way to achieve this goal is to post-process the output of classification models to obtain more accurate probabilities. These post-processing methods are…

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,…

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…

Net Promoter System (NPS) is well known as an evaluation measure of the growth engine of big companies in the business area. The ultimate goal of my research is to build an action rules and meta-actions based recommender system for improving NPS scores of 34 companies (clients) dealing with similar businesses in the US and Canada. With the given…

The emerging large datasets have made efficient data processing a much more difficult task for the traditional methodologies. Invariably, datasets continue to increase rapidly in size with time. The purpose of this research is to give an overview of some of the tools and techniques that can be utilized to manage and analyze large datasets. We…

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…

Paid employment is one of the most common extracurricular activities among full-time undergraduates, and an array of studies has attempted to measure its impact. Methodological concerns with the extant literature, however, make it difficult to draw reliable conclusions. Furthermore, the research on working college students has little to say about…