Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Transition Experiences Of International Graduate Students In Clark University School Of Professional Studies, Xuesong Huang, Mingyang Lian, Dang Trung, Jay Sheth, Yuwei Yang, Irina Klimenko

School of Professional Studies

In the last decade, the School of Professional Studies at Clark University has witnessed a sharp increase in international students. More and more international students in the millennial generation have entered the School of Professional Studies pursuing one of the two-year graduate programs: Master of Science in Professional Studies, Master of Science in Public Administration, and Master of Science in Information Technology. In the past, working adult student dominant the program. These students already had a career outside the classrooms before them came to study. The millennial international students have generated new adjustment problems. Some of the transition issues of …

On The Promotion Of The Social Web Intelligence, Taraneh Khazaei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Given the ever-growing information generated through various online social outlets, analytical research on social media has intensified in the past few years from all walks of life. In particular, works on social Web intelligence foster and benefit from the wisdom of the crowds and attempt to derive actionable information from such data. In the form of collective intelligence, crowds gather together and contribute to solving problems that may be difficult or impossible to solve by individuals and single computers. In addition, the consumer insight revealed from social footprints can be leveraged to build powerful business intelligence tools, enabling efficient and …

A Statistical Approach To Characterize And Detect Degradation Within The Barabasi-Albert Network, Mohd-Fairul Mohd-Zaid

Theses and Dissertations

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is widely used by the intelligence community when analyzing the relationships between individuals within groups of interest. Hence, any tools that can be quantitatively shown to help improve the analyses are advantageous for the intelligence community. To date, there have been no methods developed to characterize a real world network as a Barabasi-Albert network which is a type of network with properties contained in many real-world networks. In this research, two newly developed statistical tests using the degree distribution and the L-moments of the degree distribution are proposed with application to classifying networks and detecting degradation …

Profiling Social Media Users With Selective Self-Disclosure Behavior, Wei Gong

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Social media has become a popular platform for millions of users to share activities and thoughts. Many applications are now tapping on social media to disseminate information (e.g., news), to promote products (e.g., advertisements), to manage customer relationship (e.g., customer feedback), and to source for investment (e.g., crowdfunding). Many of these applications require user profile knowledge to select the target social media users or to personalize messages to users. Social media user profiling is a task of constructing user profiles such as demographical labels, interests, and opinions, etc., using social media data. Among the social media user profiling research works, …

Magnopark, Smart Parking Detection Based On Cellphone Magnetic Sensor, Maryam Arab

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

We introduce a solution that uses the availability of heavy crowds and their smart devices, to gain more result as to where potential parking is possible. By leveraging the raw magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer data, we are able to detect parking spots through the natural movement exerted by the walking pedestrians on the sidewalks beside the streets. Dating back as far as 2013, a very large portion of pedestrians composing the crowds on the sidewalk, possessed at least one smart device in their hand or pocket14]. It is this statistic that fuels our application, in which we depend on crowds …

Digital Integration, Jacob C. Boccio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology; something far beyond smartphones, cloud integration, or surgical microchip implantation. Utilizing the work of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and Steven Shaviro, this thesis investigates technology and artificial intelligence through the lens of the cinema. It does this by mapping contemporary concepts and the imagined worlds in film as an intersection of reality and fiction that examines issues of individual identity and alienation. I look at a non-linear timeline of films involving machine advancement, machine intelligence, and stages of post-human development; Elysium (2013) and Surrogates (2009) are about technology as an extension of the self, …

Effect Of Deictic Gestures On Direction-Giving In Virtual Humans, Anthony Pham

Honors Theses

Virtual agents are animated characters that use speech and gesture to interact with human users. They can serve as an intuitive interface for a variety of purposes. I am investigating the use of deictic gestures by a direction-giving agent. Deictic gestures are pointing gestures that humans often use in direction-giving to help clarify the route and destination. In my experiment, I developed a virtual agent to give directions to people to six different locations with the following spatial relationships to the starting point: left, right, left behind, right behind, left up, and right up. Three versions of the virtual agent …

A Graph Based Departmental Spoken Dialogue System, Julia Isaac

Honors Theses

Spoken dialogue systems are automatic, computer based systems that are a great way for people to receive important information. In this project, I created a spoken dialogue system that people can use to learn about the Computer Science Department at Union College. The system was built by populating an open source dialogue system using a graph based dialogue manager. I improved upon a previous working dialogue system by making the conversations sound more natural, improving the flexibility of the system and making the system more robust. To help with this process a corpus was created using about 200 different dialogues …

User Behavior Mining In Microblogging, Tuan Anh Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the modeling of factors concerning microblogging users' content and behavior. We focus on two sets of factors. The first set includes behavioral factors of users and content items driving content propagation in microblogging. The second set consists of latent topics and communities of users as the users are engaged in content generation and behavior adoptions. These two sets of factors are extremely important in many applications, e.g., network monitoring and recommender systems. In the first part of this dissertation, we identify user virality, user susceptibility, and content virality as three behavioral factors that affect users' behaviors in …

Information Technology Proposal For The Town Of Spencer, Vijay Basava, Corey Kenyon, Mahdi Soltani

School of Professional Studies

The Town of Spencer came to us looking for a plan to build and maintain their own personal fiber network for connection between departments and to improve data security for important information. After assessing the existing landscape and determining the various paths forward, we created network diagrams and plans for the movement forward of this project.

After assessing a variety of plans, we found that a full single-mode fiber network would be the best system for the implementation in Spencer. While it was the highest cost, it also scored the highest in our assessment.

Charlton Fire Department Resident Expectations: Survey And Analysis, Natalie Omary, Jingxin Wen, Junchen Chen, Denis Kornev

School of Professional Studies

The Town of Charlton is located in the heart of the Massachusetts with a resident population of just under 14,000 people. The Charlton Fire Department serves the town for needs related to fire fighting, fire prevention, burning permits and inspection services along with emergency medical services. The Department has requested the assistance of the Clark University COPACE Capstone students in creating and conducting survey in order to get a sense of what the resident of the town know about the fire department and to better gauge their expectations about what the department can provide for them. The survey was formulated …

Cybersecurity Awareness Shrewsbury Public Schools, Brittany Crompton, David Thompson, Manuel Reyes, Xueyan Zhao, Xueke Zou

School of Professional Studies

In the 21st Century, technology reaches every aspect of our lives. As “digital citizens” we must be aware of the dangers both to our technological equipment and our personal information stored, transmitted, and processed on this equipment. The Cybersecurity Awareness curriculum developed for the Shrewsbury Public School district is designed to meet this need, as well as foster an interest in technology and ethical computer use.

Analysis Of The Point Of Sales System At Tower Hill Botanical Garden And Suggested Courses Of Action, Brian Dunn, Keerthi Bandi, Chantal Kopwa Epse Kassa, F.N.U Shelly

School of Professional Studies

As Tower Hill Botanic Garden continues to improve on its operations and enhance the experience of its visitors and members, they are on a quest for a new Point-Of-Sale (POS) system that not only works with its existing hardware and interface with Raiser’s Edge, a smartcloud fundraising and relationship management software central to the garden’s operations but also, have a restaurant module and the capability of operating both in a wireless and hard-wired environment.

Alternatives Unlimited Inc. Property Service Application, Jalpa Dave, Pennie Nataliya, Neelakshi Bali

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this project is to propose Property service application to be enforced for documenting and managing the work orders raised throughout the residencies. The company is looking into an application that would facilitate to track and monitor the maintenance request received in a systematic order and ensuring priority work request is resolved within the set time frame. The project is to enhance the property service's work more efficiently as this will provide a high level of charge for the occupants by providing quicker response to their requests. The Objectives set to achieve for this project are realistic and …

Developing An Online Database Of Experts For The Worcester Regional Chamber Of Commerce, Zikan Chen, Douglas Grey, Pranjal Shah

School of Professional Studies

The Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce as part of their mission to attract business to the Worcester area, want to create an online searchable database of industry experts made up of faculty members of the Colleges and Universities in the Worcester area. This online database will be placed on the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce Higher Education – Business Partnership page on their website. The limitations placed on this request are that the Regional Chamber as of this moment have no monetary or Information Technologies resources to provide for the realization of this request.

The proliferation of as A Service …

Doc Wayne Youth Services, Inc. Capstone Project Youth Employment And Mentoring, Bongani T. Jeranyama, Zhengjun Liu, Sarah Parsons

School of Professional Studies

In Boston, Massachusetts, young adults age 16-19 who have dropped out of high school have a very high unemployment rate of 43.8%. Additionally, in the United States of America the difference between a young adult with a high school diploma as opposed to a young adult without a high school diploma in terms of weekly income is $180 USD; between a young adult with a high school diploma versus a young professional with a bachelor’s degree is $433 USD. These numbers demonstrate the need for services that improve academic achievement, job readiness and preparedness, and youth mentorship for struggling young …

A Nonprofit Model In A For-Profit World: A Closer Look At Sheltered Workshops And Sustainability As An Employee Run Business, Bing Jang, Mitchell Perry, Nikolin Vangjeli, Laura Ducharme

School of Professional Studies

Historically, society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Despite improvements such forms of discrimination continue to be a serious social problem. On October 11, 2011, the Department of Justice began an investigation into several state’s systems of providing vocational services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This action came about due to several states being out of compliance around Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title II of the ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability for all services, programs and activities provided to the public by state and …

Analyzing Shared Value And Social Business Principles: A Case Study Of Honeydrop Beverages And Seven Hills Foundation, Sarah Dys, Maya Grevatt, Brianna Mirabile

School of Professional Studies

Can the business world come together with the nonprofit world to create systems to lift low income women, children, and families out of poverty? The following report aims to show how the changing principles of business have the potential to serve international populations living on less than $2USD per day. For-profit organizations working with citizen sector organizations instead of giving charity provides a sustainable model to connect profit maximization with social good.

Honeydrop Beverages is a company based out of New York that produces lemonade sweetened with honey. Their products do not contain any refined products, only using fresh and …

Understanding Millennial, Generation X, And Baby Boomer Preferred Leadership Characteristics: Informing Today’S Leaders And Followers, Lee-Volker Cox

Dissertations

Purpose. This quantitative study’s purpose was to describe and determine the degree of difference and importance of leadership characteristics as perceived by Baby Boom, Generation X, and Millennial generational cohort followers in STEM-related U.S.-based or headquartered aerospace and computer organizations as measured by the Multigenerational Leadership Characteristics Questionnaire (MLCQ).

Methodology. This was a cross-sectional, nonexperimental, comparative and correlational quantitative, ex post facto study. A web-based MLCQ was developed after conducting an academic literature review. Participants used a 6-point Likert scale identifying the importance of 30 characteristics with 2 aggregation questions identifying the most and least important characteristics; 408 members of …

Best Practices To Increase Efficacy Of Graduate School Admissions Communications At Clark University, Diana Curran, Nikki Feinberg, Mitchell Kelley, Ruiqi Li, Anning Zhou

School of Professional Studies

Within the period of time that a graduate student deposits and subsequently arrives at their academic institution, receiving timely information is important for their preparation. This process has been deemed by the Deans of the Enterprise Schools at Clark University as one that needs further investigation. As such, this Capstone looks at the array of communication that goes out to each graduate student during this four-month period. The purpose of examining this communication is to analyze its effectiveness in engaging students. To analyze the effectiveness of this communication, surveys were distributed to current students in these schools to gather data …

An Investigation Of Socio-Technical Components Of Knowledge Management System (Kms) Usage, Noel Wint Jr.

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Existing literature indicates that although both academics and practitioners recognize knowledge management (KM) as a source of competitive advantage, users are not always willing to use a knowledge management system (KMS). Because of the social nature of knowledge transfer, a KMS can be considered a socio-technical system. Many explanations have been presented for this failure to utilize the KMS. These explanations include a number of the socio-technical factors relating to people, processes, and technologies. While these factors may have significant explanatory power when examined independently, existing studies have not sufficiently addressed the interactions among all three socio-technical factors or their …

Empirical Analysis Of Socio-Cognitive Factors Affecting Security Behaviors And Practices Of Smartphone Users, Joseph P. Simpson

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The overall security posture of information systems (IS) depends on the behaviors of the IS users. Several studies have shown that users are the greatest vulnerability to IS security. The proliferation of smartphones is introducing an entirely new set of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Smartphone devices amplify this data exposure problem by enabling instantaneous transmission and storage of personally identifiable information (PII) by smartphone users, which is becoming a major security risk. Moreover, companies are also capitalizing on the availability and powerful computing capabilities of these smartphone devices and developing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which makes companies susceptible to divulgence …

A Study Of The Success Of Group Formation In Virtual Teams Using Computer-Mediated Communications, Eliel Melón-Ramos

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In the digital domain, virtual teams within organizations and corporations are becoming common. Restructuring an organization or corporation is vital because competition and globalization are increasing. In this era of globalization, distributed working groups need to develop a competitive advantage in these ever-changing environments. Historically, teams had experienced problems stemming from geographical and temporal limitations. With the increase of technology in telecommunications, organizations are increasingly forming virtual teams, which have become critical to the survival of nearly any corporate entity.

Virtual teams have some of the same problems that regular teams have. One of the key challenges is the method …

Use Of Student Created Video Podcasts To Promote Foreign Language Grammar Acquisition In Middle School, Sergio Parra

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The use of video podcasts in education has emerged as a phenomenon that has gained a considerable amount of attention over the last few years. Although video podcasting is becoming a well-established technology in higher education, new multimedia instructional strategies such as student-created video podcasts in grades K-12 are under-researched.

The study investigated the effects of video podcasts created by students to promote foreign language grammar acquisition at the middle school level and find how students described such experience. The current investigation was conducted by using the explanatory sequential design, which is a mixed methods research design that occurs in …

Environmental Dynamics: A Compendium Of Rhetorical Application, Annalisa Perez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Technology, albeit exceedingly useful, has exponentially exacerbated the communications dilemma between the technical and the non-technical. Additionally, based on a current new understanding of the term environmental, it can no longer be fully defined by terms such as air, water, waste, or purification. Rather, the meaning of environmental has been globally transformed in several ways. The term environmental is encompassing an expansion of understanding and is further defined with words such as essence, perception, rapport and multi-dimensional spaces. This work, Environmental Dynamics: A Compendium of Rhetorical Application (EDC), provides a framework where communication can be enhanced in areas where communication …

Reliable And Secure Scada Framework For Residential Microgrid Communications, Goutham Krishna Chalamasetty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Cyber security is one of the major needs for electric power industry like many other industries and organizations. The advancements in technology provide numerous benefits to power industry as well as benefits cyber attackers to perform different cyber-attacks on the industry. Power system is a complex physical entity that deals with power generation, distribution, and transmission. In general, no individual or company or an organization can bear a one hour power cut, which shows the need for reliability in electric power industry.

In order to develop a reliable and secure Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) communication network, this Thesis …

Topic Analysis Of Tweets On The European Refugee Crisis Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Chong Shen

CMC Senior Theses

The ongoing European Refugee Crisis has been one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter for the past 8 months. This paper applies topic modeling on bulks of tweets to discover the hidden patterns within these social media discussions. In particular, we perform topic analysis through solving Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) as an Inexact Alternating Least Squares problem. We accelerate the computation using techniques including tweet sampling and augmented NMF, compare NMF results with different ranks and visualize the outputs through topic representation and frequency plots. We observe that supportive sentiments maintained a strong presence while negative sentiments such …

A Qualitative Examination Of The Perception Of Risk In Warnings For Severe Weather, Teresa Simmons

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In the past decade, weather disasters have claimed thousands of lives and resulted in billions of dollars in damages. Awareness of a storm threats can occur hours or days in advance, but disaster assessments indicate many people do not heed storm warnings. This problem is old. Despite 50 years of research, and new technologies and training to improve responsiveness, the basic issue– understanding how people interpret and respond to weather warnings–persists. An exploratory study that incorporated human behavior theories and communication models not traditionally associated with severe weather analysis was conducted to learn how weather risks are perceived by nonscientists. …