Management Information Systems Commons^™

The Effects Of Digital Audio On Social Presence, Motivation And Perceived Learning In Asynchronous Learning Networks, Eunhee Kim

Dissertations

This study explores the possibilities of applying digital audio to the ALN environment, so that students can speak and listen rather than type and read. Two sets of 1x2 field experiments (text vs. digital audio) were conducted with two formats of digital audio -recorded voice messages and narrated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation - used in several NJIT courses conducted via ALN. The perceptions of communication media were measured from two different user perspectives: active use when the subjects created their assignments using prescribed communication media (audio or text) and passive use when the subjects viewed/listened to other students' work.

The perceptions …

Collaborative Examinations In Asyncronous Learning Networks : Field Experiments On Collaborative Learning Through Online Assessments, Jia Shen

Dissertations

With the proliferation of computer networks and the emergence of virtual teams, learning and knowledge sharing in the online environment has become an increasingly important topic. Applying constructivism and collaborative learning theories to assessment, the collaborative online exam is designed featuring students' active participation in various phases of the exam process through small group activities online. A participatory online exam process is designed featuring similar procedures except that students' involvement in each phase of the exam is individual. The collaborative online exam and the participatory online exam are investigated regarding student exam study strategies, group process, exam outcomes, faculty satisfaction, …

Improving Document Representation By Accumulating Relevance Feedback : The Relevance Feedback Accumulation (Rfa) Algorithm, Razvan Stefan Bot

Dissertations

Document representation (indexing) techniques are dominated by variants of the term-frequency analysis approach, based on the assumption that the more occurrences a term has throughout a document the more important the term is in that document. Inherent drawbacks associated with this approach include: poor index quality, high document representation size and the word mismatch problem. To tackle these drawbacks, a document representation improvement method called the Relevance Feedback Accumulation (RFA) algorithm is presented. The algorithm provides a mechanism to continuously accumulate relevance assessments over time and across users. It also provides a document representation modification function, or document representation learning …

Sharing The Big Apple : A Survey Study Of People, Place And Locatability, Samer Nadim Karam

Theses

Over the past half century social trends and new technologies have weakened local social ties and thus, the fabric of civil society itself. Mobile location-aware community systems offer one path to redress these problems by enhancing community cohesion and the formation of social capital by helping people to meet each other and coordinate their actions. However, little is known about the general population's desire and attitude towards these systems.

The design space described by the People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places Framework (P3-Framework), was used to guide a survey study of the impact of 'place' on people's social information needs and their willingness to share …

Negotiation Of Software Requirements In An Asynchronous Collaborative Environment, Catherine Lowry Campbell

Dissertations

The effect of task structure and negotiation sequence on collaborative software requirements negotiation is investigated. This work began with an extensive literature review that focused on current research in collaborative software engineering and, in particular, on the negotiation of software requirements and the requisite collaboration for the development of such requirements. A formal detailed experiment was then conducted to evaluate the effects of negotiation sequence and task structure in an asynchronous group meeting environment. The experiment tested the impact of these structures on groups negotiating the requirements for an emergency response information system. The results reported here show that these …

Live, Virtual, And Constructive Environments For Performance Support, John Michael Lacontora

Dissertations

As military systems become more complex, the operation and support of these systems becomes intrinsically more difficult. The U.S. Army's current procurement process relies on industry to provide embedded training and performance support tools for the systems they produce. These tools are relatively new and in the early stages of development. As yet, they have failed to meet the needs of the technicians that are required to support these complex systems. Current efforts to provide enabling technologies that enhance the capabilities of automotive maintenance technicians are concentrated in three professional communities. First is the Performance Improvement community where work is …

Digital Libraries And Middleware Technology, Muhammad Umar Qasim

Theses

Digital libraries deliver personalized knowledge directly to their users, without being restricted to the contents of a physical library. In a digital library information from any online source can be managed and shared, making more knowledge available to users than before. The information sharing is achieved by integrating many autonomous heterogeneous systems available. The challenge is to provide users with the ability to transparently access digital library contents in spite of the heterogeneity among the information sources.

Research communities have proposed several approaches to accomplish the system integration in digital libraries. In this thesis, the working of currently employed approaches …

Modeling Usage Of An Online Research Community, Yi Zhang

Dissertations

Although online communities have been thought of as a new way for collaboration across geographic boundaries in the scientific world, they have a problem attracting people to keep visiting. The main purpose of this study is to understand how people behave in such communities, and to build and evaluate tools to stimulate engagement in a research community. These tools were designed based on a research framework of factors that influence online participation and relationship development.

There are two main objectives for people to join an online community, information sharing and interpersonal relationship development, such as friends or colleagues. The tools …

Relationship Analysis : Improving The Systems Analysis Process, Joseph Thomas Catanio

Dissertations

A significant aspect of systems analysis involves discovering and representing entities and their inter-relationships. Guidelines exist to identify entities but do not provide a rigorous and comprehensive process to explicitly capture the relationship structure of the problem domain. Whereas, other analysis techniques lightly address the relationship discovery process, Relationship Analysis is the only systematic, domain-independent analysis technique focusing exclusively on a domain's relationship structure.

The quality of design artifacts, such as class diagrams, and development time necessary to generate these artifacts can be improved by first representing the complete relationship structure of the problem domain. The Relationship Analysis Model is …

A Discovery And Analysis Of Influencing Factors Of Pair Programming, Kyungsub Steve Choi

Dissertations

The exploration into the underlying psychosocial links of pair programming. a new and unorthodox programming paradigm in which two programmers share one keyboard and monitor during real-time programming sessions, is undertaken. These complex psychosocial relationships, along with cognitive process exchanges, ultimately mold the programming output as well as determine the level of communication, satisfaction. confidence and compatibility. Laying the framework for this research, a through review of traditional and contemporary paradigms with a special focus on their limitations and a list of current software development problems are presented. Next, a detailed summary of pair programming and related agile software paradigms, …

Participatory Learning Environment : Requirements And Design Analysis, Vikas Manohar Achhpiliya

Theses

The primary purpose of this thesis is to develop the requirements and model preliminary database and class designs for the Participatory Learning Approach Environment (PLAE). The requirements and the designs will be presented for version 1.0 and 2.0 with version 2.0 supporting an enhanced requirements set.

Participatory Learning Approach Environment (PLAE) is an exercise management tool for the Participatory Learning Approach (PLA) - a pedagogy approach based on the theory of constructivism. The PLAE facilitates and enhances learning among students while easing the administrative burden of the instructor and cognitive overload of the students. The theory and concepts on which …

Electronic Marketplaces And Their Roles In The Staffing Industry : An Explorative Analysis, Vishal Khubani

Theses

This thesis will explore and analyze the role of electronic marketplaces in the staffing industry from the viewpoint of hiring executives, human resources personnel, staffing organizations, and candidates. Using analyses of popular electronic job marketplaces, this paper will establish the efficiency and effectiveness of electronic marketplaces as compared to traditional staffing methods. It will also provide a detailed view of various electronic marketplaces, their financial structure and analysis of their performance. This information will also result in a return on investment estimate for the average hiring organization using electronic marketplaces.

Virtual Teams Combining Mobile Devices With Web-Based Communication On Group Decision Making, Hyo-Joo Han

Dissertations

Organizations have moved from a face-to-face team environment to a virtual team environment using communication technology during the last decade. More and more workers use asynchronous tools (including email, discussion groups, information sharing tools, and group calendaring systems), and synchronous tools, such as instant messaging and web-based chatting features, to coordinate and share information with people within and outside of organizations. This empirical study on how virtual teams work, integrating mobile devices with web-based group communication for decision-making tasks, examines which technologies and communication modes are the best for distributed group teamwork, and, mainly, what are the predictive characteristics making …

The Impacts Of Delphi Communication Structure On Small And Medium Sized Asynchronous Virtual Teams, Hee-Kyung Cho

Dissertations

The improvement of Internet technology has motivated distributed work groups to collaborate without meeting face to face. Although asynchronous meetings through Web-based group communications systems enable groups dispersed temporarily and geographically to collaborate more flexibly, parallel and non-linear communication among dispersed members also challenge effective and efficient group coordination. Moreover, the Web-based asynchronous meeting is distinguished not only from the face-to-face meeting but also from the synchronous computer-supported meeting in terms of coordination process. However, previous asynchronous group communications or virtual team research focused more on the comparison of this new type of meeting with the face-to-face meeting. Not many …

Design And Evaluation Of A List Gathering Tool In A Web-Based Collaborative Environment, Yuanqiong Wang

Dissertations

This research focuses on how to build a "list" structure to combine individual items of information into some sort of structure that converts the individual items of information into a structure of knowledge relative to the problem. Software was designed to provide relationships among and comparisons of the contributions in a "list" structure, so that individual members of a group process will be able to understand the contributions of information made by the group as a whole.

A List Gathering Tool was designed and implemented, which is one component in a Web-based Social Decision Support System (SDSS) Toolkit. Then, a …

Design And Evaluation Of A Voting Tool In A Collaborative Environment, Zheng Li

Dissertations

This dissertation researchdesigned, implemented, and evaluated a Web-based Dynamic Voting Toolfor small group decision-making in a collaborative environment.

In this dissertation, theliterature on voting tools in current GDSS research is presented. Variousvoting theories and methods are analyzed, and the advantages and weaknessesare compared, so as to gain a better understanding of how to apply thesedifferent voting methods to diverse decision-making situations. A briefoverview of scaling theories is also given, with an emphasis on Thurstone'sLaw.

The basic features of someweb-based voting tool implementations are reviewed along with a discussionof the pros and cons of Intemet voting. A discussion of Human DynamicVoting …

Knowledge Discovery And Modeling In Genomic Databases, Michael M. Yin

Dissertations

This dissertation research is targeted toward developing effective and accurate methods for identifying gene structures in the genomes of high eukaryotes, such as vertebrate organisms. Several effective hidden Markov models (HMMs) are developed to represent the consensus and degeneracy features of the functional sites including protein-translation start sites, mRNA splicing junction donor and acceptor sites in vertebrate genes. The HMM system based on the developed models is fully trained using an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and the system performance is evaluated using a 10-way cross-validation method. Experimental results show that the proposed HMM system achieves high sensitivity and specificity in …

Intramural, Collaborative Learning Systems, Robert S. Friedman

Theses

This thesis focuses on three related concepts: problem-based collaborative learning; the use of multimedia tools in learning systems; and participatory design as a software engineering methodology to create multimedia tools to be used in learning systems. A literature review of the three areas is followed by an overview of the pedagogical, technological, and business trends that affect the direction of innovation in education, including problem-based learning. A discussion of a software engineering project to develop a multimedia application that enhances the learning of geography skills and puts the programming, interface design and multimedia systems capabilities of college students into action …

Development And Characterization Of Methodology And Technology For The Alignment Of Fmri Time Series, Carlo Ciulla

Dissertations

This dissertation has developed, implemented and tested a novel computer based system (AUTOALIGN) that incorporates an algorithm for the alignment of functional Magnetic Resonance Image (fMRI) time series. The algorithm assumes the human brain to be a rigid body and computes a head coordinate system on the basis of three reference points that lie on the directions correspondent to two of the eigenvectors of inertia of the volume, at the intersections with the head boundary. The eigenvectors are found weighting the inertia components with the voxel's intensity values assumed as mass. The three reference points are found in the same …

Collaborative Problem Solving And Program Development Model, Joanna Defranco-Tommarello

Dissertations

A model to enhance collaborative problem solving and program development is presented. The collaborative model is a detailed cognitive model that takes into consideration the cognitive and social activities that occur during collaborative problem solving and program development. The cognitive activities required for collaborative problem solving and program development are identified and integrated into a six-stage model. An extensive literature review in the associated fields is presented to show the need for the model described in this dissertation. In addition, a comprehensive study of tools to support collaboration during problem solving and program development was also performed as well as …

E-Docspros : Exploring Texpros Into E-Business Era, Zhenfu Cheng

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. TEXPROS (TEXt PROcessing System) is a knowledge-based system designed to manage personal documents. However, as the Internet and e-Business changed the way offices operate, there is a need to re-envision document processing, storage, retrieval, and sharing. In the current environment, people must be able to access documents remotely and to share those documents with others. e-DOCPROS (e-DOCument PROcessing System) is a new document processing system that takes advantage of many of TEXPROS's structures but adapts the system to this new environment. The new system is built to serve e-businesses, takes advantage …

Waqs : A Web-Based Approximate Query System, George Jyh-Shian Chang

Dissertations

The Web is often viewed as a gigantic database holding vast stores of information and provides ubiquitous accessibility to end-users. Since its inception, the Internet has experienced explosive growth both in the number of users and the amount of content available on it. However, searching for information on the Web has become increasingly difficult. Although query languages have long been part of database management systems, the standard query language being the Structural Query Language is not suitable for the Web content retrieval.

In this dissertation, a new technique for document retrieval on the Web is presented. This technique is designed …

Augmenting Applications With Hyper Media, Functionality And Meta-Information, Roberto Galnares

Dissertations

The Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) enhances analytical applications by adding relationships, semantics and other metadata to the application's output and user interface. DHE also provides additional hypermedia navigational, structural and annotation functionality. These features allow application developers and users to add guided tours, personal links and sharable annotations, among other features, into applications. DHE runs as a middleware between the application user interface and its business logic and processes, in a n-tier architecture, supporting the extra functionalities without altering the original systems by means of application wrappers.

DHE automatically generates links at run-time for each of those elements having relationships …

Knowledge-Based Document Retrieval With Application To Texpros, Fang Sheng

Dissertations

Document retrieval in an information system is most often accomplished through keyword search. The common technique behind keyword search is indexing. The major drawback of such a search technique is its lack of effectiveness and accuracy. It is very common in a typical keyword search over the Internet to identify hundreds or even thousands of records as the potentially desired records. However, often few of them are relevant to users' interests.

This dissertation presents knowledge-based document retrieval architecture with application to TEXPROS. The architecture is based on a dual document model that consists of a document type hierarchy and, a …

Decision Making Based On Quantitative And Qualitative Evaluations, Rohan A. Pandit

Theses

This study emphasizes mainly on the influence of evaluations, both qualitative and quantitative, on decision making for many occasions that occur in business and technically oriented settings. Decisions made with a certain fuzzy as wen as technical behavior are structured by means of computer-assisted decision-making tools. Decision support tools assist decision makers in making crucial decisions. For instance the tool that has been designed for the purpose of this research will be used for selecting capital-intensive products. It is also intended to prove that with the help of decision support systems decision makers could make decisions by reducing fuzzy decision …

A More Efficient Document Retrieval Method For Texpros, Yin Dong

Dissertations

Document processing is a critical element of office automation. Through document classification, extraction and filing, documents are automatically placed into a knowledge base according to certain rules. Document retrieval is a process to get a document back according to a user's requirements and to show the results to the user. Hence, a good user-interface and an efficient retrieval algorithm become core parts of document retrieval.

Unlike previous browsers that have been proposed for this purpose, this dissertation develops a new browser that has a user interface with more tools, and one that has a more efficient retrieval algorithm that can …

Knowledge Discovery In Biological Databases : A Neural Network Approach, Qicheng Ma

Dissertations

Knowledge discovery, in databases, also known as data mining, is aimed to find significant information from a set of data. The knowledge to be mined from the dataset may refer to patterns, association rules, classification and clustering rules, and so forth. In this dissertation, we present a neural network approach to finding knowledge in biological databases. Specifically, we propose new methods to process biological sequences in two case studies: the classification of protein sequences and the prediction of E. Coli promoters in DNA sequences. Our proposed methods, based oil neural network architectures combine techniques ranging from Bayesian inference, coding theory, …

Genetically Evolved Dynamic Control For Quadruped Walking, Giorgio Grasso

Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to show that dynamic control of quadruped locomotion is achievable through the use of genetically evolved central pattern generators. This strategy is tested both in simulation and on a walking robot. The design of the walker has been chosen to be statically unstable, so that during motion less than three supporting feet may be in contact with the ground.

The control strategy adopted is capable of propelling the artificial walker at a forward locomotion speed of ~1.5 Km/h on rugged terrain and provides for stability of motion. The learning of walking, based on simulated …

Applications Of Agent Architectures To Decision Support In Distributed Simulation And Training Systems, Plamen V. Petrov

Dissertations

This work develops the approach and presents the results of a new model for applying intelligent agents to complex distributed interactive simulation for command and control. In the framework of tactical command, control communications, computers and intelligence (C₄I), software agents provide a novel approach for efficient decision support and distributed interactive mission training. An agent-based architecture for decision support is designed, implemented and is applied in a distributed interactive simulation to significantly enhance the command and control training during simulated exercises. The architecture is based on monitoring, evaluation, and advice agents, which cooperate to provide alternatives to the …

Component-Based Software Engineering, Zhiyuan Wang

Dissertations

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers' attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together.

Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author …