Digital Commons Network^™

Spirits Of The King, Ali Al-Ani

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Spirits of the King (SotK) is a 1v1 card game where players use essential resources to conjure spirits from a shared pool to defeat their opponent. Players must make strategic sacrifices to keep themselves from danger or to threaten their opponent, ultimately revealing how much they are willing to risk for victory. The themes, mechanics, and material design of SotK are very heavily inspired by information found in Aleister Crowley’s The Lesser Key of Solomon.

Overcoming Foreign Language Anxiety In An Emotionally Intelligent Tutoring System, Daneih Ismail

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Learning a foreign language entails cognitive and emotional obstacles. It involves complicated mental processes that affect learning and emotions. Positive emotions such as motivation, encouragement, and satisfaction increase learning achievement, while negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, and confusion may reduce performance. Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) is a specific type of anxiety accompanying learning a foreign language. It is considered a main impediment that hinders learning, reduces achievements, and diminishes interest in learning.

Detecting FLA is the first step toward reducing and eventually overcoming it. Previously, researchers have been detecting FLA using physical measurements and self-reports. Using physical measures is direct …

Interposition Based Container Optimization For Data Intensive Applications, Rohan Tikmany

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Reproducibility of applications is paramount in several scenarios such as collaborative work and software testing. Containers provide an easy way of addressing reproducibility by packaging the application's software and data dependencies into one executable unit, which can be executed multiple times in different environments. With the increased use of containers in industry as well as academia, current research has examined the provisioning and storage cost of containers and has shown that container deployments often include unnecessary software packages. Current methods to optimize the container size prune unnecessary data at the granularity of files and thus make binary decisions. We show …

Attention Visual, Baris Dingil

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This research presents an innovative approach to improving visual-spatial attention using a research tool based on the web. Recognizing the significant role visual-spatial attention plays in everyday life and cognitive function for humans, this research was undertaken with the aim of developing a user-friendly, accessible web-based tool called Attention Visual (attentionvisual.com) to enhance this crucial cognitive skill. This tool also facilitates data collection, potentially accelerating the pace and enhancing the quality of related research. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were utilized for data collection and analysis. In order to stimulate improvements in visual-spatial attention, the tool’s algorithm was structured to …

Towards Generalizable Machine Learning Models For Computer-Aided Diagnosis In Medicine, Yiyang Wang

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Hidden stratification represents a phenomenon in which a training dataset contains unlabeled (hidden) subsets of cases that may affect machine learning model performance. Machine learning models that ignore the hidden stratification phenomenon--despite promising overall performance measured as accuracy and sensitivity--often fail at predicting the low prevalence cases, but those cases remain important. In the medical domain, patients with diseases are often less common than healthy patients, and a misdiagnosis of a patient with a disease can have significant clinical impacts. Therefore, to build a robust and trustworthy CAD system and a reliable treatment effect prediction model, we cannot only pursue …

Hacker, Influencer, Counter-Culture Spy: Cyberspace Actors’ Models Of Misinformation And Counter-Operations, Benjamin Kessell

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

As misinformation continues to spread on social media, its residents have begun to fight back, independent of any platform. This organic resistance to the diffusion of misinformation is a clearly observable phenomenon with roots in Anonymous’ distributed campaigns from the 2010s outwards. Hacker and information security communities are acting in defense of some of their favorite spaces, most notably, Twitter. Security researchers of all stripes use it for sharing indicators of compromise but, as the diffusion of misinformation becomes more problematic it becomes more difficult to find signals in the noise.

These actors’ response to the issues at hand is …

Identifying And Transforming Sites Of Power In Collaborative Community-Based Research, Jessa Dickinson

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

For this dissertation, I analyzed collaboration practices and power structures within three community-based participatory research (CBPR) studies I conducted for my Ph.D. I ask: 1) How do dominant power structures, epistemologies, and narratives manifest in HCI research and praxis? 2) How can we structure research to support our community partners' goals while resisting dominating and extractive practices in academic research? To respond to these questions, I conducted member checking interviews with my collaborators and a duoethnography with my dissertation advisor, Dr. Sheena Erete, about our experiences in the studies as a Black female professor and a white female graduate student. …

An “Other” Experience Of Videogames: Analyzing The Connections Between Videogames And The Lived Experience Of Chronic Pain, Gracie Straznickas

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the “human” and a false idea of “universal” experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider …

Code Generation Based On Inference And Controlled Natural Language Input, Howard R. Dittmer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Over time the level of abstraction embodied in programming languages has continued to grow. Paradoxically, most programming languages still require programmers to conform to the language's rigid constructs. These constructs have been implemented in the name of efficiency for the computer. However, the continual increase in computing power allows us to consider techniques not so limited. To this end, we have created CABERNET, a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) based approach to program creation. CABERNET allows programmers to use a simple outline-based syntax. This syntax enables increased programmer efficiency.

CNLs have previously been used to document requirements. We have taken this …

Predicting Code Refactoring Via Analyzing The History Of Quality Metrics And Code Anti-Patterns, Sarah Alanqari

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Code refactoring is the process of improving the internal structure of existing code without altering its functionality. Refactoring can help to reduce technical debt, enhance the quality of the code and make the code easy to evolve. However, the manual identification of the proper code refactoring operations to apply can be time-consuming and not scalable. In this thesis, we propose an approach based on data mining and machine learning techniques to analyze historical data and predict refactoring operations that may occur in a future release of a project. The approach uses a combination of techniques to identify patterns in the …

Empirical Assessment Of Big Data Technology Adoption Factors For Organizations With Data Storage Systems, Ahmad B. Alnafoosi

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Many organizations have on-premises data storage systems. Data storage systems are evolving in multiple ways. One way is the adoption of Big Data. Big Data is a data storage system with the ability to analyze large volumes, velocity, and a variety of data. Per the Economist, data is now the most valuable resource (Parkins, 2017). Big Data holds the promise of unlocking a substantial value of data stored. Yet many organizations are not implementing Big Data. There is a need to identify key factors affecting adoption for such organizations. The literature review revealed multiple gaps in studied adoption factors (un-studied …

Raid Elite, Wenda Li

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This game inspiration are the real-time strategy game and raid in MMORPG. In this game, you need to get familiar with and operate five different characters. There are two bosses you can choose to fight. This game use Unity 2020.3.18f2c2 as game engine. All art is hand drawn. The design goal is making a game with certain depth which requires some effort to win. The design challenge for myself is design some interesting boss fights and accomplish a complete game which has good visual feedback.

The Machine Upstairs, Jacob Friedfeld

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Immersive simulation design, broadly speaking, is a game design philosophy centered around player expression, emergent gameplay, and dynamic narrative. Contrary to what the phrase may imply simply by reading it, immersion in and of itself is not necessarily enough for a game to be classified as an “immersive sim” (or IMSIM for short). Many different types of games can utilize immersion to great effect, but immersive simulations require a level of flexibility and rule/system-based approaches beyond the scope of games that occupy similar genres.

The Machine Upstairs represents an exploration of the immersive simulation philosophy and an investigation into its …

Text Summarization Towards Scientific Information Extraction, Abigail Keller

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Despite the exponential growth in scientific textual content, research publications are still the primary means for disseminating vital discoveries to experts within their respective fields. These texts are predominantly written for human consumption resulting in two primary challenges; experts cannot efficiently remain well-informed to leverage the latest discoveries, and applications that rely on valuable insights buried in these texts cannot effectively build upon published results. As a result, scientific progress stalls. Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) and Information Extraction (IE) are two essential fields that address this problem. While the two research topics are often studied independently, this work proposes to …

Lucid, Gabriela Garcia

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The PC video game, Lucid, promotes self-reflection and emotional exploration by balancing interactive dream journals with a meditative platform puzzle. Players switch between reflecting on their dreams through dream journals and following the main character’s story as they realize they are in a dream. To finish the platforming portion, the player travels up and around the mountain by completing short puzzles. This is done to deliver the last living flower from the garden to the castle at the top of the mountain.

By building personal dream journals into the game, Lucid highlights how games can be used as tools for …

Data-Driven Damage Initiation Criteria For Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composites, Alexander Richard Post

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Computational progressive failure analysis (PFA) is vital for the design, verification, and validation of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites. However, the computational cost of PFA is usually high due to the complexity of the model. The damage initiation criterion is one of the essential components of a PFA code to determine the transition of a material’s state from pristine or microscopically damaged to macroscopically damaged. In this thesis, data-driven models are developed to determine the matrix damage initiation based on the Mohr-Coulomb model and Hashin model. For 2D plane stress states, the computational cost for determining damage initiation can …

Facilitating Heuristic Evaluation For Novice Evaluators, Anas Abulfaraj

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Heuristic evaluation (HE) is one of the most widely used usability evaluation methods. The reason for its popularity is that it is a discount method, meaning that it does not require substantial time or resources, and it is simple, as evaluators can evaluate a system guided by a set of usability heuristics. Despite its simplicity, a major problem with HE is that there is a significant gap in the quality of results produced by expert and novice evaluators. This gap has made some scholars question the usefulness of the method as they claim that the evaluation results are a product …

Threshold Concepts In Web Development: The Impact Of Education And Experience On The Perceptions Of Practitioners, Michael Lee Mick

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The Threshold Concepts (TCs) framework posits characteristics of critical concepts that enable a learner to see things in a new and unforgettable way that allows the incorporation of cognitive approaches and skills needed by professionals in the discipline. All previous research has been qualitatively oriented toward discovery of candidate TCs, without, so far, quantitative studies of the candidate TCs recognition within the professional ranks. An underrepresented group in previous research is that of Web development professionals.

This proposal describes initial quantitative research utilizing the TCs framework in the Web development area to measure the perception of candidate TCs by professionals …

Meowster Thesis, Xiaojing (Monica) Fan

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Meowster Thesis is a game about cats, loneliness and what it means to be alive. It is also what keeps me alive thru isolation during Covid-19 pandemic.

Playfair Axiom, Alexander Bakos

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This game seeks to bridge nuanced gameplay with more expansive themes of existentialism, life, and death. I attempt to bridge these concepts together through the mechanics and visuals, both of which play an integral role to one another. Through consistently evolving imagery that increases in complexity from a gameplay perspective I seek to elicit a reflective and emotional response from the player. My attempts with the project are to allow players to draw their own conclusions on what the greater meaning of the game is as well as what each individual component in the game could represent. Oftentimes, the subtleties …

Examining Dimensions Of Patient Satisfaction With Telemedicine, Robert Garcia

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

During the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) medical institutions and practitioners have drastically increased their adoption of telemedicine. The proliferation of telemedicine systems has sparked renewed interest among IS researchers in evaluating its usage. One of the main indicators used to measure the success of telemedicine services is patient satisfaction. Yet several problems exist with current methods used to evaluate telemedicine satisfaction. Patient satisfaction with telemedicine is frequently evaluated using either single question items or handmade instruments that are seldom assessed for validity. While telemedicine satisfaction is typically evaluated through single measures, satisfaction is considered a complex and multidimensional …

Federated Learning In Gaze Recognition (Fligr), Arun Gopal Govindaswamy

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The efficiency and generalizability of a deep learning model is based on the amount and diversity of training data. Although huge amounts of data are being collected, these data are not stored in centralized servers for further data processing. It is often infeasible to collect and share data in centralized servers due to various medical data regulations. This need for diversely distributed data and infeasible storage solutions calls for Federated Learning (FL). FL is a clever way of utilizing privately stored data in model building without the need for data sharing. The idea is to train several different models locally …

Quantitative Intersectional Data (Quinta): A #Metoo Case Study, Alicia E. Boyd

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This research began as an investigation of the #metoo movement, with the initial impetus to illuminate the voices located on the margins, those who often go unheard or are never recognized. This work aimed to understand the intersectional aspects of how these hashtag variations of the hashtag #metoo (i.e. #metoomosque, #churchtoo, #metoodisable, #metooqueer, #metoochina, etc) reveal the inequities of the #metoo movement on Twitter. The proliferation of these hashtag variations has often been ignored by scholars, and therefore absorbed into the larger #metoo movement conversation on Twitter. Therefore, the term `hashtag derivative' was created to describe the variation on the …

For|Rest, Jes Klass

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In for/rest, players navigate a world built around an interpretation of the liminal space of grief. Glitching, blinking roots are all around an otherwise grey, empty space and as players destroy these roots they gradually resaturate the landscape. Each time a root is destroyed, the player will watch it disintegrate in front of them while some form of animal or plant spawns in the root’s stead. On rare occasions, instead of a plant or animal, a human will phase into the world as a root disintegrates. This human, Charlie, roams around the forest and offers the player a chance to …

Abandoned Spaces, Anthony Tate

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The goal of this project is to show how color can display an emotional connection to the environment. How colors can be portrayed to human emotions without telling the audience. As well as having the audience imagining what kind of economy that used to be in the environment. The objective is to create a game that will tell a story from the environment and how colors are used to help tell a story of the environment. This thesis project is a game that attempts to show how colors can be related to emotions.

Atlas Planted, Annelise Belmonte

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In "Atlas Planted," the game world plays as a life theater production where the storyline is influenced by player and other characters in a metaphorical and literal gardening mechanic. The emphasis on selfish vs selfless action in regards to energy and foliage serves as a critique of social responsibility and objectivism, the philosophy developed by Ayn Rand where each person is their own hero. According to that philosophy, if everyone were free to pursue their own greatest desires without directly harming others, the whole world would be better for it. In the case of these characters, how they pursue their …

Designing An Interactive Theatre Game With Dynamic Asynchronous Play, Ardian Amiti

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This project proposes the use of asynchronous narrative mechanics and dynamic elements of gameplay to further the player’s sense of interaction with characters and the environment of the game, inspired by interactive theatre performances such as Sleep No More. The player plants seeds in a garden which is maintained by several Non-Playable Characters, influencing both the environment and the narrative. Scenes occur according to the state of the garden, but do not wait for the player to be present. Plants grow and wilt as time passes. Sometimes the player cedes control as the characters tend to or cut down plants, …

Bert Efficacy On Scientific And Medical Datasets: A Systematic Literature Review, Clayton Cohn

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) [Devlin et al., 2018] has been shown to be effective at modeling a multitude of datasets across a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks; however, little research has been done regarding BERT’s effectiveness at modeling domain-specific datasets. Specifically, scientific and medical datasets present a particularly difficult challenge in NLP, as these types of corpora are often rife with technical jargon that is largely absent from the canonical corpora that BERT and other transfer learning models were originally trained on. This thesis is a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of twenty-seven studies that were …

Ensemble Labeling Towards Scientific Information Extraction (Elsie), Erin Murphy

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Extracting scientific facts from unstructured text is difficult due to challenges specific to the ambiguity of the language, the complexity of the scientific named entities and relations to be extracted. This problem is well illustrated through the extraction of polymer names and their properties. Even in the cases where the property is a temperature, identifying the polymer name associated with the temperature may require expertise due to the use of acronyms, synonyms, complicated naming conventions and by the fact that new polymer names are being “introduced” to the vernacular as polymer science advances. While there exist domain-specific machine learning toolkits …

Auditing Database Systems Through Forensic Analysis, James Wagner

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The majority of sensitive and personal data is stored in a number of different Database Management Systems (DBMS). For example, Oracle is frequently used to store corporate data, MySQL serves as the back-end storage for many webstores, and SQLite stores personal data such as SMS messages or browser bookmarks. Consequently, the pervasive use of DBMSes has led to an increase in the rate at which they are exploited in cybercrimes. After a cybercrime occurs, investigators need forensic tools and methods to recreate a timeline of events and determine the extent of the security breach. When a breach involves a compromised …