Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Making Data Meaningful: Stakeholder Perceptions On Data Visualization And Data Management Practices Within A Multi-Tiered System Of Supports (Mtss), Domenick Saia

Dissertations

Data-driven decision-making and collaboration are core pillars of a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS); however, timely and accessible data use, as well as data literacy and visualization literacy skills, are challenges school leaders and educators face related to implementing such frameworks. I hypothesized efficient data management systems and data visualization tools enable school teams to predict student learning outcomes, readily communicate, and better understand student data. The purpose of this study design was to highlight a need for more efficient data structures that allow school stakeholders to balance their roles within an MTSS framework more effectively. The context of this …

Ai Approaches To Understand Human Deceptions, Perceptions, And Perspectives In Social Media, Chih-Yuan Li

Dissertations

Social media platforms have created virtual space for sharing user generated information, connecting, and interacting among users. However, there are research and societal challenges: 1) The users are generating and sharing the disinformation 2) It is difficult to understand citizens' perceptions or opinions expressed on wide variety of topics; and 3) There are overloaded information and echo chamber problems without overall understanding of the different perspectives taken by different people or groups.

This dissertation addresses these three research challenges with advanced AI and Machine Learning approaches. To address the fake news, as deceptions on the facts, this dissertation presents Machine …

Special Education: Inclusion And Exclusion In The K-12 U.S. Educational System, Erik Brault

Dissertations

The U.S. Department of Education defines students with disabilities as those having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more life activities. Previous research has found that students with disabilities placed in inclusive environments perform better academically and socially compared to students with disabilities who are placed in segregated environments. Yet, we know that inclusion in K-12 general education classrooms across the country is not consistently implemented.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the effects, if any, of general education high school teachers’ personal and professional experiences and knowledge on their attitudes toward educating …

Utilizing New Technologies To Measure Therapy Effectiveness For Mental And Physical Health, Jonathan Ossie

Dissertations

Mental health is quickly becoming a major policy concern, with recent data reporting increasing and disproportionately worse mental health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, increased substance abuse, and elevated suicidal ideation. One specific population that is especially high risk for these issues is the military community because military conflict, deployment stressors, and combat exposure contribute to the risk of mental health problems.

Although several pharmacological approaches have been employed to combat this epidemic, their efficacy is mixed at best, which has led to novel nonpharmacological approaches. One such approach is Operation Surf, a nonprofit that provides nature-based programs advocating the restorative …

Analyzing Fluctuation Of Topics And Public Sentiment Through Social Media Data, Haoyue Liu

Dissertations

Over the past decade years, Internet users were expending rapidly in the world. They form various online social networks through such Internet platforms as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These platforms provide a fast way that helps their users receive and disseminate information and express personal opinions in virtual space. When dealing with massive and chaotic social media data, how to accurately determine what events or concepts users are discussing is an interesting and important problem.

This dissertation work mainly consists of two parts. First, this research pays attention to mining the hidden topics and user interest trend by analyzing real-world …

Representation Learning In Finance, Ajim Uddin

Dissertations

Finance studies often employ heterogeneous datasets from different sources with different structures and frequencies. Some data are noisy, sparse, and unbalanced with missing values; some are unstructured, containing text or networks. Traditional techniques often struggle to combine and effectively extract information from these datasets. This work explores representation learning as a proven machine learning technique in learning informative embedding from complex, noisy, and dynamic financial data. This dissertation proposes novel factorization algorithms and network modeling techniques to learn the local and global representation of data in two specific financial applications: analysts’ earnings forecasts and asset pricing.

Financial analysts’ earnings forecast …

Private And Federated Deep Learning: System, Theory, And Applications For Social Good, Han Hu

Dissertations

During the past decade, drug abuse continues to accelerate towards becoming the most severe public health problem in the United States. The ability to detect drug­abuse risk behavior at a population scale, such as among the population of Twitter users, can help to monitor the trend of drug­abuse incidents. However, traditional methods do not effectively detect drug­abuse risk behavior in tweets, mainly due to the sparsity of such tweets and the noisy nature of tweets. In the first part of this dissertation work, the task of classifying tweets as containing drug­abuse risk behavior or not, is studied. Millions of public …