Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Overcoming Foreign Language Anxiety In An Emotionally Intelligent Tutoring System, Daneih Ismail

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Learning a foreign language entails cognitive and emotional obstacles. It involves complicated mental processes that affect learning and emotions. Positive emotions such as motivation, encouragement, and satisfaction increase learning achievement, while negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, and confusion may reduce performance. Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) is a specific type of anxiety accompanying learning a foreign language. It is considered a main impediment that hinders learning, reduces achievements, and diminishes interest in learning.

Detecting FLA is the first step toward reducing and eventually overcoming it. Previously, researchers have been detecting FLA using physical measurements and self-reports. Using physical measures is direct …

Interposition Based Container Optimization For Data Intensive Applications, Rohan Tikmany

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Reproducibility of applications is paramount in several scenarios such as collaborative work and software testing. Containers provide an easy way of addressing reproducibility by packaging the application's software and data dependencies into one executable unit, which can be executed multiple times in different environments. With the increased use of containers in industry as well as academia, current research has examined the provisioning and storage cost of containers and has shown that container deployments often include unnecessary software packages. Current methods to optimize the container size prune unnecessary data at the granularity of files and thus make binary decisions. We show …

Attention Visual, Baris Dingil

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This research presents an innovative approach to improving visual-spatial attention using a research tool based on the web. Recognizing the significant role visual-spatial attention plays in everyday life and cognitive function for humans, this research was undertaken with the aim of developing a user-friendly, accessible web-based tool called Attention Visual (attentionvisual.com) to enhance this crucial cognitive skill. This tool also facilitates data collection, potentially accelerating the pace and enhancing the quality of related research. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were utilized for data collection and analysis. In order to stimulate improvements in visual-spatial attention, the tool’s algorithm was structured to …

Hacker, Influencer, Counter-Culture Spy: Cyberspace Actors’ Models Of Misinformation And Counter-Operations, Benjamin Kessell

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

As misinformation continues to spread on social media, its residents have begun to fight back, independent of any platform. This organic resistance to the diffusion of misinformation is a clearly observable phenomenon with roots in Anonymous’ distributed campaigns from the 2010s outwards. Hacker and information security communities are acting in defense of some of their favorite spaces, most notably, Twitter. Security researchers of all stripes use it for sharing indicators of compromise but, as the diffusion of misinformation becomes more problematic it becomes more difficult to find signals in the noise.

These actors’ response to the issues at hand is …

Code Generation Based On Inference And Controlled Natural Language Input, Howard R. Dittmer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Over time the level of abstraction embodied in programming languages has continued to grow. Paradoxically, most programming languages still require programmers to conform to the language's rigid constructs. These constructs have been implemented in the name of efficiency for the computer. However, the continual increase in computing power allows us to consider techniques not so limited. To this end, we have created CABERNET, a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) based approach to program creation. CABERNET allows programmers to use a simple outline-based syntax. This syntax enables increased programmer efficiency.

CNLs have previously been used to document requirements. We have taken this …

Predicting Code Refactoring Via Analyzing The History Of Quality Metrics And Code Anti-Patterns, Sarah Alanqari

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Code refactoring is the process of improving the internal structure of existing code without altering its functionality. Refactoring can help to reduce technical debt, enhance the quality of the code and make the code easy to evolve. However, the manual identification of the proper code refactoring operations to apply can be time-consuming and not scalable. In this thesis, we propose an approach based on data mining and machine learning techniques to analyze historical data and predict refactoring operations that may occur in a future release of a project. The approach uses a combination of techniques to identify patterns in the …