Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Empirical Investigation Of Privacy And Security Concerns On Doctors’ And Nurses’ Behavioral Intentions To Use Rfid In Hospitals, Thomas George Winston

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is a useful technology that has myriad applications in technology, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare settings. Not dependent upon line-of-sight, RFID can scan devices in their proximity and report the information to connected (wired or other wireless) information systems. Once touted as the panacea for home healthcare, RFID devices can add benefit to patients in remote settings. RFID devices have been used to optimize systems in areas such as manufacturing and healthcare to expose inefficiencies in a system or process. Unlike manufacturing, however, RFID in healthcare settings presents security and privacy concerns to the people being …

Effective Teaching Practices In Online Higher Education, Kim Mcmurtry

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In the context of continuing growth in online higher education in the United States, students are struggling to succeed, as evidenced by lower course outcomes and lower retention rates in online courses in comparison with face-to-face courses. The problem identified for investigation is how university instructors can ensure that effective teaching and learning is happening in their online courses. The research questions were:

1. What are the best practices of effective online teaching in higher education according to current research?
2. How do exemplary online instructors enact teaching presence in higher education?
3. What are the best practices of effective online teaching in …

Algorithmic Foundations Of Heuristic Search Using Higher-Order Polygon Inequalities, Newton Henry Campbell Jr.

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The shortest path problem in graphs is both a classic combinatorial optimization problem and a practical problem that admits many applications. Techniques for preprocessing a graph are useful for reducing shortest path query times. This dissertation studies the foundations of a class of algorithms that use preprocessed landmark information and the triangle inequality to guide A* search in graphs. A new heuristic is presented for solving shortest path queries that enables the use of higher order polygon inequalities. We demonstrate this capability by leveraging distance information from two landmarks when visiting a vertex as opposed to the common single landmark …

Aspect Mining Using Multiobjective Genetic Clustering Algorithms, David G. Bethelmy

CCE Theses and Dissertations

In legacy software, non-functional concerns tend to cut across the system and manifest themselves as tangled or scattered code. If these crosscutting concerns could be modularized and the system refactored, then the system would become easier to understand, modify, and maintain. Modularized crosscutting concerns are known as aspects and the process of identifying aspect candidates in legacy software is called aspect mining.

One of the techniques used in aspect mining is clustering and there are many clustering algorithms. Current aspect mining clustering algorithms attempt to form clusters by optimizing one objective function. However, the objective function to be optimized tends …

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 …

An Empirical Assessment Of Employee Cyberslacking In The Public Sector, Wilnelia Hernández

CCE Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing use of the Internet, new challenges are presented to employees in the workplace. Employees spend time during work hours on non-work related activities including visiting e-commerce Websites, managing personal email accounts, and engaging in e-banking. These types of actions in the workplace are known as cyberslacking. Cyberslacking affects the employees’ productivity, presents legal concerns, and undermines the security of the organization’s network. This research study addressed the problem of cyberslacking in the public sector, by assessing the ethical severity of cyberslacking activities, as well as how employees perceived that the frequency of such activities occurred by their …

Mutable Class Design Pattern, Nikolay Malitsky

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation proposes, presents and analyzes a new design pattern, the Mutable Class pattern, to support the processing of large-scale heterogeneous data models with multiple families of algorithms. Handling data-algorithm associations represents an important topic across a variety of application domains. As a result, it has been addressed by multiple approaches, including the Visitor pattern and the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) paradigm. Existing solutions, however, bring additional constraints and issues. For example, the Visitor pattern freezes the class hierarchies of application models and the AOP-based projects, such as Spring AOP, introduce significant overhead for processing large-scale models with fine-grain objects. The …

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 …

An Experimental Study On The Role Of Password Strength And Cognitive Load On Employee Productivity, Stephen Mujeye

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of information systems (IS) over the past decades has increased the demand for system authentication. While the majority of system authentications are password-based, it is well documented that passwords have significant limitations. To address this issue, companies have been placing increased requirements on the user to ensure their passwords are more complex and consequently stronger. In addition to meeting a certain complexity threshold, the password must also be changed on a regular basis. As the cognitive load increases on the employees using complex passwords and changing them often, they may have difficulty recalling their passwords. As such, the …

Blended Learning For Faculty Professional Development Incorporating Knowledge Management Principles, Julie E. Hewitt

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Adjunct faculty comprise a large percentage of part-time faculty for many colleges and universities today. Adjunct faculty are hired because they are experts in their content areas; however, this does not guarantee that they are skilled in effective classroom management. These instructors can become bewildered and frustrated because they lack the knowledge and skills that are needed to run an effective classroom.

While educational organizations have adopted blended learning environments as an effective delivery method for their students, this method has not gained much traction as a way to deliver instruction to their own employees. Thus, there are opportunities to …

An Empirical Study Of Authentication Methods To Secure E-Learning System Activities Against Impersonation Fraud, Shauna Beaudin

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Studies have revealed that securing Information Systems (IS) from intentional misuse is a concern among organizations today. The use of Web-based systems has grown dramatically across industries including e-commerce, e-banking, e-government, and e learning to name a few. Web-based systems provide e-services through a number of diverse activities. The demand for e-learning systems in both academic and non-academic organizations has increased the need to improve security against impersonation fraud. Although there are a number of studies focused on securing Web-based systems from Information Systems (IS) misuse, research has recognized the importance of identifying suitable levels of authenticating strength for various …

Enhanced Method Call Tree For Comprehensive Detection Of Symptoms Of Cross Cutting Concerns, Saleem Obaidullah Mir

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Aspect oriented programming languages provide a new enhanced composition mechanism between the functional sub units as compared to earlier non aspect oriented languages. For this reason the refactoring process requires a new approach to the analysis of existing code that focuses on how the functions cross cut one another. Aspect mining is a process of studying an existing program in order to find these cross cutting functions or concerns so they may be implemented using new aspect oriented constructs and thus reduce the complexity of the existing code. One approach to the detection of these cross cutting concerns generates a …

Community College Faculty Dispositions Towards Blended Learning, Robin A. Hill

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Community colleges are being encouraged to find and provide access to higher education by offering more flexible course delivery methods to meet the needs of their diverse student body. At the same time, these institutions must retain their quality of instruction, accountability for learning outcomes, and institutional obligations. Blended learning, where students attend class both on campus and online, is promoted as one solution for attaining such goals. Among the four-year undergraduate population, blended learning has been shown to support student success, meet diverse learning styles, and meet institutional obligations; however, research within the community college population is limited. In …

A Big Idea: The Rollout Of Open Suny, Karen E. Case

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Leveraging technology may be a viable solution in the higher education industry as enrollments decline and institutions have a hard time meeting their projected budgets. One innovative approach to mitigating this problem was approved in March of 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY). It is called Open SUNY. Open SUNY consists of nine components: the creation and expansion of online programs to meet workforce development needs, the development of online credit-bearing experiential learning experiences, support for training of faculty who opt to use emerging technologies, support for student access to online courses, …

Automatically Defined Templates For Improved Prediction Of Non-Stationary, Nonlinear Time Series In Genetic Programming, David Moskowitz

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Soft methods of artificial intelligence are often used in the prediction of non-deterministic time series that cannot be modeled using standard econometric methods. These series, such as occur in finance, often undergo changes to their underlying data generation process resulting in inaccurate approximations or requiring additional human judgment and input in the process, hindering the potential for automated solutions.

Genetic programming (GP) is a class of nature-inspired algorithms that aims to evolve a population of computer programs to solve a target problem. GP has been applied to time series prediction in finance and other domains. However, most GP-based approaches to …

An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Security Information Technology Enhancements And Computer Security Breaches And Incidents, Linda Betz

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Financial services institutions maintain large amounts of data that include both intellectual property and personally identifiable information for employees and customers. Due to the potential damage to individuals, government regulators hold institutions accountable for ensuring that personal data are protected and require reporting of data security breaches. No company wants a data breach, but finding a security incident or breach early in the attack cycle may decrease the damage or data loss a company experiences. In multiple high profile data breaches reported in major news stories over the past few years, there is a pattern of the adversary being inside …

The Effects Of Time-Compression And Learner-Control In Multimedia Instruction, Jason Alan Pittman

CCE Theses and Dissertations

There is a significant gap in the body of knowledge concerning time-compressed multimedia instruction. Although research indicates that there is no loss in learning through well-designed multimedia instruction compressed at 25%, research is lacking that analyzes the effects of time-compression with learner-control included in the multimedia instruction. The aim of the study was to address this gap in the research by integrating learner-control into the interface of a time-compressed multimedia instructional lesson using similar methodologies from previous research.

Effects were analyzed of time-compressed learner-controlled multimedia instruction on learning and perceived cognitive load. Additionally, the researcher employed a participant population from …

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 …

Capturing, Eliciting, And Prioritizing (Cep) Non-Functional Requirements Metadata During The Early Stages Of Agile Software Development, Richard Rabin Maiti

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Agile software engineering has been a popular methodology to develop software rapidly and efficiently. However, the Agile methodology often favors Functional Requirements (FRs) due to the nature of agile software development, and strongly neglects Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Neglecting NFRs has negative impacts on software products that have resulted in poor quality and higher cost to fix problems in later stages of software development.

This research developed the CEP “Capture Elicit Prioritize” methodology to effectively gather NFRs metadata from software requirement artifacts such as documents and images. Artifact included the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifact which gathered metadata from images. The …

Electronic Medical Records (Emr): An Empirical Testing Of Factors Contributing To Healthcare Professionals’ Resistance To Use Emr Systems, Emmanuel Patrick Bazile

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The benefits of using electronic medical records (EMRs) have been well documented; however, despite numerous financial benefits and cost reductions being offered by the federal government, some healthcare professionals have been reluctant to implement EMR systems. In fact, prior research provides evidence of failed EMR implementations due to resistance on the part of physicians, nurses, and clinical administrators. In 2010, only 25% of office-based physicians have basic EMR systems and only 10% have fully functional systems. One of the hindrances believed to be responsible for the slow implementation rates of EMR systems is resistance from healthcare professionals not truly convinced …

Patient Portals: Achieving Technology Acceptance And Meaningful Use In Independent Physician-Managed Practices, Kimberly W. Bartholomew

CCE Theses and Dissertations

As the bulk of medical health records shift from paper-based file systems to electronic formats, the promise of the transformation process called healthcare reform included adding efficiencies to medical practice workflows, lower costs, improved quality of care and most important, and the freeing of patient information from traditional propriety silos. With this incoming largess of protected health information data now viewable through online patient portals, patients can be empowered to become educated and active in their own health care decisions, but only if they have admission to their information. A digital divide currently exists in many medical practices where only …

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 …

Evaluation Of Supervised Machine Learning For Classifying Video Traffic, Farrell R. Taylor

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Operational deployment of machine learning based classifiers in real-world networks has become an important area of research to support automated real-time quality of service decisions by Internet service providers (ISPs) and more generally, network administrators. As the Internet has evolved, multimedia applications, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), gaming, and video streaming, have become commonplace. These traffic types are sensitive to network perturbations, e.g. jitter and delay. Automated quality of service (QoS) capabilities offer a degree of relief by prioritizing network traffic without human intervention; however, they rely on the integration of real-time traffic classification to identify applications. Accordingly, …

An Empirical Investigation Of Factors Affecting Resistance To Using Multi-Method Authentication Systems In Public-Access Environments, Joseph Marnell

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of history, different means of object and person identification as well as verification have evolved for user authentication. In recent years, a new concern has emerged regarding the accuracy of verifiable authentication and protection of personal identifying information (PII), because previous misuses have resulted in significant financial loss. Such losses have escalated more noticeably because of human identity-theft incidents due to breaches of PII within multiple public-access environments. Although the use of various biometric and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is expanding, resistance to using these technologies for user authentication remains an issue. This study addressed the …

Evaluating The Enterprise Resource Planning (Erp) Systems’ Success At The Individual Level Of Analysis In The Middle East, Mohammad Alzoubi

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Although ERP systems have been depicted as a solution in many organizations, there are many negative reports on ERP success, benefits, and effect on user’s performance. Previous research noted that there is a lack of knowledge and awareness of ERP systems and their overall value to ERP organizations. ERP systems have been widely studied during the past decade, yet they often fail to deliver the intended benefits originally expected. One notable reason for their failures is the lack of understanding in users’ requirements. This dissertation study was designed to understand the relative importance of system quality (SQ), IQ (IQ), service …

Understanding The Impact Of Hacker Innovation Upon Is Security Countermeasures, Sean M. Zadig

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Hackers external to the organization continue to wreak havoc upon the information systems infrastructure of firms through breaches of security defenses, despite constant development of and continual investment in new IS security countermeasures by security professionals and vendors. These breaches are exceedingly costly and damaging to the affected organizations. The continued success of hackers in the face of massive amounts of security investments suggests that the defenders are losing and that the hackers can innovate at a much faster pace.

Underground hacker communities have been shown to be an environment where attackers can learn new techniques and share tools pertaining …

Examining Consumers’ Selective Information Privacy Disclosure Behaviors In An Organization’S Secure E-Commerce Systems, Patrick I. Offor

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The study is an examination of the antecedents to the paradoxical changes in the consumers’ intended and actual personal information disclosure behaviors in online transactions or in e-commerce environments. The argument is that a consumer’s information privacy paradox is based on the consumer’s cognitive predisposition. The study adopted the conceptual underpinning inherent in the Privacy Regulation Theory (PRT) and translated them into information privacy context, as the consumer’s desired state of information privacy, information privacy self-interest, information privacy permeability, and information privacy equipoise constructs, to examine the causal relationship among the constructs and between a consumer’s selective personal information disclosure …

Teaching Presence And Intellectual Climate In A Structured Online Learning Environment, Janice Marie Orcutt

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Teaching presence and its implications for the intellectual climate of an online classroom cannot be fully understood unless explored from the perspective of the instructors who experience it. Framed in the theoretical perspective of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, this collective case study investigated the actions, intentions and perceptions of instructors with the intent of developing an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon of teaching presence as it was established in a structured online learning environment.

The experiences of selected successful instructors in this specific online context were explored to gain insight on how pedagogical choices influenced the establishment of …

Factors That Affect Faculty Use Of Course Management Systems In Traditional Courses At Private 4-Year Historically Black Colleges And Universities: An Empirical Approach, Hyacinth L. Burton

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The use of information technology to supplement and enhance teaching is prevalent in many higher education institutions (HEIs). HEIs throughout the United States have invested in course management systems (CMS); however, despite heavy investments, faculty use of such systems is limited. Many studies were conducted on the use of CMS in HEIs, but they concentrated on faculty use of such systems at non-Historically Black Colleges and Universities (non-HBCUs). Little has been done on the use of CMS in HBCUs. The goal of this study was to examine factors that affect faculty use of CMS in traditional courses at HBCUs. Facilitating …

Development Of A Cybersecurity Skills Index: A Scenarios-Based, Hands-On Measure Of Non-It Professionals' Cybersecurity Skills, Melissa Carlton

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Completing activities online are a part of everyday life, both professionally and personally. But, conducting daily operations, interacting, and sharing information on the Internet does not come without its risks as well as a potential for harm. Substantial financial and information losses for individuals, organizations, and governments are reported regularly due to vulnerabilities as well as breaches caused by insiders. Although advances in Information Technology (IT) have been significant over the past several decades when it comes to protection of corporate information systems (IS), human errors and social engineering appear to prevail in circumventing such IT protections. While most employees …