Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

All Quiet On The Digital Front: The Unseen Psychological Impacts On Cybersecurity First Responders, Tammie R. Hollis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Driven by the increasing frequency of cyberattacks and the existing talent gap between industry needs and skilled professionals, this research study focused on the crucial human element in the domain of cybersecurity incident response. The objective of this dissertation was to offer a meaningful exploration of the lived experiences encountered by cybersecurity incident responders and an assessment of the subsequent impacts on their well-being. Additionally, this study sought to draw comparisons between the experiences of cybersecurity incident responders and their counterparts in traditional emergency response roles. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a cohort of 22 individuals with first-hand experience working …

Human Vs Machine: Hyper-Realistic Avatars And Their Efficacy As A Communication Channel, Jill S. Schiefelbein

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hyper-realistic avatars (HRAs), a form of synthetic media, are custom-created digital embodiments of a human, created by capturing and combining that person’s video and vocal likeness. This is the first known study of the efficacy of videos delivered by hyper-realistic avatars as a communication channel in comparison to videos delivered by their human counterparts. An experiment testing how information retention, engagement, and trust vary between viewers of videos delivered by a real human, videos delivered by the HRA representing that same human, and videos delivered by the HRA that discloses to viewers that it is a hyper-realistic avatar is presented. …

An Enterprise Risk Management Framework To Design Pro-Ethical Ai Solutions, Quintin P. Mcgrath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effective use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has immediate business benefits for an organization and its stakeholders through efficiency and quality gains, and the potential to explore and implement new business models. However, there are risks of unintended ethical consequences. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) focuses on managing risk while maximizing business value from exploiting opportunities. Using applied ethics as a basis and the perspective that ethics includes both enabling human flourishing and not violating accepted norms, I argue that greater business value is achieved when an organization simultaneously targets the maximization of benefits and the minimization of harms for the …

Managing Incomplete Data In The Patient Discharge Summary To Support Correct Hospital Reimbursements, Fadi Naser Eddin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The patient discharge summary is a document that conveys the patient's story to other healthcare practitioners, external users, and, most importantly from a financial perspective, health insurers. A defect or incompleteness in the patient's discharge summary will result in delays in the collection process through denial of the entire or partial reimbursement claim or, in the best-case scenario, delay until the discharge summary issue is resolved. The purpose of this project is to address the issue of the incompleteness of discharge summary from the perspective of healthcare providers, with the goal of understanding, diagnosing, and intervening in the research problem. …

Fighting Mass Diffusion Of Fake News On Social Media, Abdallah Musmar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fake news has been considered one of the most challenging problems in the last few years. The effects of spreading fake news over social media platforms are widely observed across the globe as the depth and velocity of fake news reach far more than real news (Vosoughi et al., 2018). The plan for the following dissertation is to investigate the mass spread of fake news across social media and propose a framework to fight the spread of fake news by mixing preventive methods that could hinder the overall percentage of fake news sharing. We plan to create a study on …

Informing Complexity: The Business Case For Managing Digital Twins Of Complex Process Facilities As A Valuable Asset, William Randell Mcnair

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Digital Twins of complex facilities, specifically 3D models created during their design, is a potentially valuable information asset. This three- article dissertation explores the business case for firms in the petrochemical process industry to manage throughout the facility lifecycle. A maturity model is provided to illustrate the stages of digital twin evolution and serves as a tool to help communicate each of the five levels of digital twin maturity achievable in various use cases. An industry analysis reviews existing literature and proposes a model to assess informing or insight value of digital twins from three perspectives. Next, an empirical …

Residential Curbside Recycle Context Analysis, Ntchanang Mpafe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Curbside recycling as a preferred mode of residential and municipal sustainability goals seems to have an overwhelming acceptance and adoption in the US. About 69.8 million out of 97.3 million (72%) single-family households in the United States have access to curbside recycling services (State of Curbside Recycling Report, 2020). Collectively, the programs divert about nine million tons of recyclables from landfill disposal each year (Cottom, 2019).

For a design that started in the 1980s in the US, its rapid universal adoption seems to have precluded a concerted effort in examining the coproduced nature (Households: service receptors and Municipalities: service providers) …

The Is Social Continuance Model: Using Conversational Agents To Support Co-Creation, Naif Alawi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rise of Agentic IS Artifact and the increasing integration of this technology within organizations, our understanding of the impact of this technology on individuals remains limited. Although IS use literature provides important guidance for organization to increase employees’ willingness to work with new technology implementations, the utilitarian view of prior IS use limits its application in light of the new evolving social interaction between humans and Agentic IS Artifacts. To that end, we contribute to the IS use literature by implementing a social view to understand the impact of Agentic IS Artifacts on an individual’s perception and behavior. …

Designing A Health Coach-Augmented Mhealth System For The Secondary Prevention Of Coronary Heart Disease, Avijit Sengupta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents research that employs design science research (DSR) methodology to develop and evaluate a high-fidelity prototype of a home-based cardiac rehabilitation (HBCR) system to support self-management of chronic cardiovascular diseases like coronary heart disease (CHD) and to offer secondary prevention against other chronic diseases with similar risk factors. While the population of coronary heart disease (CHD) patients requiring cardiac rehabilitation (CR) continues to expand, lack of access and other barriers to center based cardiac rehabilitation (CBCR) presents a huge challenge. A mobile phone and wearable device based technological system can offer an HBCR program for CHD. By following …

Designing Targeted Mobile Advertising Campaigns, Kimia Keshanian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of smart, handheld devices, there has been a multifold increase in the ability of firms to target and engage with customers through mobile advertising. Therefore, not surprisingly, mobile advertising campaigns have become an integral aspect of firms’ brand building activities, such as improving the awareness and overall visibility of firms' brands. In addition, retailers are increasingly using mobile advertising for targeted promotional activities that increase in-store visits and eventual sales conversions. However, in recent years, mobile or in general online advertising campaigns have been facing one major challenge and one major threat that can negatively impact the …

Improving Environmental Protection: One Imagined Touch At A Time, Luke Ingalls Liska

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Can imagined touch of flora and fauna (i.e., the plants and animals of the natural world) make you more willing to support environmental protection efforts? Across seven studies, I demonstrate that by asking consumers to imagine touching fauna, marketers can encourage consumers to become more engaged in environmental protection efforts. This effect occurs because imagined touch generates haptic imagery, which enhances a consumer’s emotional attachment to fauna. I demonstrate that emotional attachment to fauna induced via imagined touch enhances individual’s willingness to share Facebook posts, improves their willingness to support increased fines for environment-related offenses, and increases the number of …

Combination Of Time Series Analysis And Sentiment Analysis For Stock Market Forecasting, Hsiao-Chuan Chou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research is to build a model to predict trend of financial asset price using sentiment from news headlines and financial indicators of the asset. Objective of the model is to conclude good results but also to minimize the difference between predicted values and actual values. Unlike previous approaches where the sentiments are usually calculated into score, we focus on combination of word embedding of news and financial indicators due to nonavailability of sentiment lexicon.

One idea is that the sentiment of news headline should have impact on financial asset val- ues. In other words, it would …

Development Of Next-Generation, Fast, Accurate, Transferable, And Polarizable Force-Fields For Heterogenous Material Simulations, Adam E. Hogan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theoretical modeling is extremely useful in guiding to experiment; however quantitatively accurate modeling of energy-relevant small molecule sorption at the heterogeneous interfaces present in metal-organic materials (MOMs) is currently challenging. MOMs are an emerging class of materials consisting of inorganic clusters and organic linkers that offer great potential in the areas of gas storage, gas separation, and catalysis due to the possibility of large surface areas, complex heterogeneous surfaces, and rational designability. Efficient chemical separations involving these materials could reduce the US’s total energy consumption by approximately 10 to 15%. In this dissertation, the parameterization of small molecules and metal …

Digital Identity: A Human-Centered Risk Awareness Study, Toufic N. Chebib

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity threats and compromises have been at the epicenter of media attention; their risk and effect on people’s digital identity is something not to be taken lightly. Though cyber threats have affected a great number of people in all age groups, this study focuses on 55 to 75-year-olds, as this age group is close to retirement or already retired. Therefore, a notable compromise impacting their digital identity can have a major impact on their life.

To help guide this study, the following research question was formulated, “What are the risk perceptions of individuals, between the ages of 55 and 75 …

Understanding The Complex Ethical Landscape Of Artificial Intelligence Adoptions, Chrissann R. Ruehle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed since the 1950’s, it has experienced a series of expansions and declines over the years. Currently, AI is on an upward trajectory and has prompted the fourth industrial revolution as many scientists have noted. Some firms have rapidly embraced this technology and experienced growth while others have been slow to adopt. Naturally, this expansion often has societal impacts. The aim of this study is to explore ethical considerations that arise during the adoption of this technology. This research addressed three questions: 1. How do market and regulatory forces reportedly shape Artificial Intelligence adoptions? 2. …

Introducing A Mobile Health Care Platform In An Underserved Rural Population: Reducing Assimilations Gaps On Adoption And Use Via Nudges, Joseph Hodges

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rural communities are often overlooked when it comes to offering cutting edge consumer healthcare technologies. Mobile applications usually exclude populations in rural demographics due to the infrastructure requirements and available technology in the region. The population studied is a low income rural health plan in southwest Georgia. They are uniquely considered as they have the highest healthcare costs in the U.S. and are compared to healthcare costs among higher income populations like Vail, Colorado. Innovations, such as mobile healthcare applications, have the capacity to offset some of these costs, but even if adoption occurs, this does not guarantee use will …

Detecting Digitally Forged Faces In Online Videos, Neilesh Sambhu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We use Rossler’s FaceForensics dataset of 1004 online videos and their corresponding forged counterparts [1] to investigate the ability to distinguish digitally forged facial images from original images automatically with deep learning. The proposed convolutional neural network is much smaller than the current state-of-the-art solutions. Nevertheless, the network maintains a high level of accuracy (99.6%), all while using the entire FaceForensics dataset and not including any temporal information. We implement majority voting and show the impact on accuracy (99.67%), where only 1 video of 300 is misclassified. We examine why the model misclassified this one video. In terms of tuning …

Cooperation In Community Colleges, Frederic S. Gore

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the mounting pressures on institutions of higher education to do more with limited resources, the opportunity to collaborate with other colleges has emerged as a viable tool to create efficiencies and obtain valuable knowledge otherwise unattainable by an institution, even if that collaboration takes place with a competing institution. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are critical to managing student information and college operations, but can be challenging for colleges to implement. Consortia present a unique solution to colleges to address gaps in their expertise and skills needed to achieve a successful ERP implementation. This study explores the factors that …

Essays On Time Series And Machine Learning Techniques For Risk Management, Michael Kotarinos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Capital Asset Pricing Model combined with the Sharpe ratio is a standard method for choosing assets for selection in a portfolio. However, this method has many structural issues and was designed for a time when high dimensional computing was in its infancy. An alternative to these methods using a mix of Multi-Level Time Series Clustering, the MACBETH algorithm and traditional time series techniques was constructed that minimized data loss and allow for customized portfolio construction for investors with different risk profiles and specialized investment needs. It was shown that these methods are adaptable to cloud computing environments and allow …

Enhancing The Design Of A Cybersecurity Risk Management Solution For Communities Of Trust, James E. Fulford Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research into cybersecurity risks and various methods of evaluating those threats has become an increasingly important area of academic and practitioner investigations. Of particular interest in this field is enhancing the designs and informing capabilities of cybersecurity risk management solutions for users who desire to understand how organizations are impacted when such risks are exploited. Many of the cybersecurity risk management solutions are extremely technical and require their users to have a commensurate level of technical acumen. In the situation evaluated during this research project, the founders of the company being researched had created a highly technical risk management solution …

Analytics For Novel Consumer Insights (A Three Essay Dissertation), Utkarsh Shrivastava

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both literature and practice have investigated how the vast amount of ever increasing customer information can inform marketing strategy and decision making. However, the customer data is often susceptible to modeling bias and misleading findings due to various factors including sample selection and unobservable variables. The available analytics toolkit has continued to develop but in the age of nearly perfect information, the customer decision making has also evolved. The dissertation addresses some of the challenges in deriving valid and useful consumer insights from customer data in the digital age. The first study addresses the limitations of traditional customer purchase measures …

Multi-Step Tokenization Of Automated Clearing House Payment Transactions, Privin Alexander

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since its beginnings in 1974, the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network has grown into one of the largest, safest, and most efficient payment systems in the world. An ACH transaction is an electronic funds transfer between bank accounts using a batch processing system.

Currently, the ACH Network moves almost $43 trillion and 25 billion electronic financial transactions each year. With the increasing movement toward an electronic, interconnected and mobile infrastructure, it is critical that electronic payments work safely and efficiently for all users. ACH transactions carry sensitive data, such as a consumer's name, account number, tax identification number, account holder …

Enhancing The Internet Of Things Architecture With Flow Semantics, Allen Ronald Deserranno

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (‘IoT’) systems are complex, asynchronous solutions often comprised of various software and hardware components developed in isolation of each other. These components function with different degrees of reliability and performance over an inherently unreliable network, the Internet. Many IoT systems are developed within silos that do not provide the ability to communicate or be interoperable with other systems and platforms. Literature exists on how these systems should be designed, how they should interoperate, and how they could be improved, but practice does not always consult literature.

The work brings together a proposed reference architecture for the IoT …

Modeling In Finance And Insurance With Levy-It'o Driven Dynamic Processes Under Semi Markov-Type Switching Regimes And Time Domains, Patrick Armand Assonken Tonfack

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mathematical and statistical modeling have been at the forefront of many significant advances in many disciplines in both the academic and industry sectors. From behavioral sciences to hard core quantum mechanics in physics, mathematical modeling has made a compelling argument for its usefulness and its necessity in advancing the current state of knowledge in the 21rst century. In Finance and Insurance in particular, stochastic modeling has proven to be an effective approach in accomplishing a vast array of tasks: risk management, leveraging of investments, prediction, hedging, pricing, insurance, and so on. However, the magnitude of the damage incurred in recent …

Renewable Energy Investment Planning And Policy Design, Alireza Ghalebani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics to develop decision support systems to promote the use of renewable energy in society. Since electricity from renewable energy sources is still relatively expensive, there are variety of financial incentive programs available in different regions. Our research focuses on financial incentive programs and tackles two main problem: 1) how to optimally design and control hybrid renewable energy systems for residential and commercial buildings given the capacity based and performance based incentives, and 2) how to develop a model-based system for policy makers for designing optimal financial incentive programs to promote investment …

Predictive Analytics Of Organizational Decisions And The Role Of Rationality, Arash Barfar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How can we predict key decisions made by organizations in the presence of big data and on-demand information? In this dissertation we exploit a large repository of B2B real-time transactional data with service quality indicators and present evidence that organizational decision analytics apply both rational and boundedly-rational (i.e. behavioral) economic models. The dissertation’s findings demonstrate that both utility and heuristic models, respectively, play significant roles in predicting organizational decisions on churn, a key decision in this context. In the presence of a large data set the assumed rationality of organizations appears to provide accurate predictions in uncontrolled experiences and selected …

Information Technology & Sustainability: An Empirical Study Of The Value Of The Building Automation System, Daphne Marie Simmonds

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the environmental and economic effects of green information technology (IT). Green IT describes two sets of IT innovations: one set includes innovations that are implemented to reduce the environmental impact of IT services in organizations; and the other IT to reduce the environmental impact of other organizational processes. The two sets respond to the call for more environmentally friendly or “greener” organizational processes.

I developed and tested a preliminary model. The model applied the resource based view (RBV) of the firm (Wernerfelt 1984) the stakeholder theory (Freeman 1984) and included four constructs: (1) BAS implementation; environmental …

Use Of System Dynamics Modeling To Explicate The Theory-Of-Change Of A Social Marketing Innovation, Brian J. Biroscak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Community coalitions are an important part of the public health milieu and thus subject to many of the same external pressures as public health organizations--including changes in required strategic orientation. Many funding agencies have shifted their funding agenda from program development to policy change. Thus, the Florida Prevention Research Center created the Community-Based Prevention Marketing for Policy Development framework to teach community coalitions how to apply social marketing to policy change. The dissertation research reported here was designed to explicate the framework's theory-of-change. The research question was: "What are the linkages and connections between CBPM inputs, activities, immediate outcomes, intermediate …

Consumer Acceptance Of Mobile Payments In Restaurants, Anna Shatskikh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Regardless all the advantages of MPs, it has not reach the sizable customer base. In this paper, we examined the core drivers of using mobile payments (MPs) in restaurant industry from the consumers' perspective. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we developed a six factor model to reveal the determinants of consumers' intention to use MPs in restaurant. Security, subjective norm, compatibility with lifestyle, and previous experience with MPs were added to the traditional two factor TAM model (usefulness and ease of use). 300 respondents were recruited from an online survey agency and 258 valid responses were included in …

Economic Culture And Trading Behaviors In Information Markets, Khalid Nasser Alhayyan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are four main components for influencing traders' behaviors in an information market context: trader characteristics, organizational characteristics, market design, and external information. This dissertation focuses on investigating the impact of individual trader characteristics on trading behaviors. Two newly-developed constructs, highly relevant to information market contexts, were identified to increase our understanding about trading behaviors: trader's economic culture and trader independence. The theory of planned behavior is used as the theoretical basis to postulate hypotheses for empirical testing. Data collected from subjects through a series of web-based experiments shows that trader participation can be fostered through recruiting individuals who are …