This dissertation introduces a theory of information quality to explain macroscopic behavior observed in the systems engineering process. The theory extends principles of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication [1948] and statistical mechanics to information development processes concerned with the flow, transformation, and meaning 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…

The current Situational Space Awareness (SSA) is faced with a huge task of tracking the increasing number of space objects. The tracking of space objects requires frequent and accurate monitoring for orbit maintenance and collision avoidance using methods for statistical orbit determination. Statistical orbit determination enables us to obtain…

Most evaluations of education policies focus on their mean impacts; when distributional effects are investigated it is usually by comparing mean impacts across demographic subgroups. We argue that such estimates may overlook important treatment effect heterogeneity; in order to appreciate the full extent of a policy's distributional impacts one…

The authors present a generalization of the multiple-group bifactor model that extends the classical bifactor model for categorical outcomes by relaxing the typical assumption of independence of the specific dimensions. In addition to the means and variances of all dimensions, the correlations among the specific dimensions are allowed to differ…

Computational aesthetics is a relatively new subfield of artificial intelligence (AI). It includes research that enables computers to "recognize" (and evaluate) beauty in various domains such as visual art, music, and games. Aside from the benefit this gives to humans in terms of creating and appreciating art in these domains, there are perhaps…

"E"-pH (Pourbaix) diagrams provide an important graphical link between the thermodynamic calculations of potential, pH, equilibrium constant, concentration, and changes in Gibbs energy and the experimentally observed behavior of species in aqueous solutions. The utility of "E"-pH diagrams is extended with the introduction of an additional…

A general systematic approach including ionic strength effects is proposed for the numerical calculation of concentrations of chemical species in multiequilibrium problems. This approach extends the versatility of the approach presented in a previous article and is applied using the Solver option of the Excel spreadsheet to solve real problems…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

Hierarchical or multilevel linear models are widely used for longitudinal or cross-sectional data on students nested in classes and schools, and are particularly important for estimating treatment effects in cluster-randomized trials, multi-site trials, and meta-analyses. The models can allow for variation in treatment effects, as well as…

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…

For decades software managers have been using formal methodologies such as the Constructive Cost Model and Function Points to estimate the effort of software projects during the early stages of project development. While some research shows these methodologies to be effective, many software managers feel that they are overly complicated to use and…