Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Complexities Of Open Data, Hector Dominguez

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Hector Dominguez is the current Open Data Coordinator at the City of Portland, and there are several lessons learned and strategies developed in the several months of work in this position. Hector will share some challenges on creating trusted and reliable data and information services, as well as the opportunities to work with Urban Data to resolve city challenges and to support achieving the City's goals in the coming years.

In this talk, Hector will share how modeling and defining the right metrics are not the only factors to implementing a citywide program, but rather, how ethics, communications and strategy …

A Semester Long Classroom Course Mimicking A Software Company And A New Hire Experience For Computer Science Students Preparing To Enter The Software Industry, David A. Chamberlain

Master’s Theses and Projects

Students in a Computer Science degree programs must learn to code before they can be taught Software Engineering skills. This core skill set is how to program and consists of the constructs of various languages, how to create short programs or applications, independent assignments, and arrive at solutions that utilize the skills being covered in the language for that course (Chatley & Field, 2017). As an upperclassman, students will often be allowed to apply these skills in newer ways and have the opportunity to work on longer, more involved assignments although frequently still independent or in small groups of two …

[Accepted Article Manuscript Version (Postprint)] Identification And Parasocial Relationships With Characters From Star Wars: The Force Awakens., Alice Hall

Communication and Media Faculty Works

This study investigated identification and parasocial relationships (PSRs) with media characters by examining viewers’ responses to the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens through an online survey of 113 audience members who saw the film in a theater within a month of its release. Participants reported stronger PSR and identification with the more familiar characters from the first trilogy than with the new characters introduced in the film, although the association with identification was limited to older participants. Star Wars fanship was associated with identification and PSR for old and new characters. Familiarity with the earlier films was associated with …

Automatic Identification Of Individual Drugs In Death Certificates, Soon Jye Kho, Amit Sheth, Olivier Bodenreider

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background:

Establishing trends of drug overdoses requires the identification of individual drugs in death certificates, not supported by coding with the International Classification of Diseases. However, identifying drug mentions from the literal portion of death certificates remains challenging due to the variability of drug names.

Objectives:

To automatically identify individual drugs in death certificates.

Methods:

We use RxNorm to collect variants for drug names (generic names, synonyms, brand names) and we algorithmically generate common misspellings. We use this automatically compiled list to identify drug mentions from 703,106 death certificates and compare the performance of our automated approach to that of …

Kidled: A Colorful Approach To Children's Activity Awareness, Ankita Samariya, Anud Sharma, Margiawan Fitriani, Tucker Ferguson, Jerry Alan Fails

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Obesity in children is a growing cause of concern as it affects more than 18% of children in the United States. Sedentary behaviour is one of the contributors to childhood obesity. Technological interventions like activity trackers and fitness games have been introduced to motivate both children and adults to be physically active. Most of these technologies encourage activity by making them aware of their activity levels. While awareness of current activity levels may help motivating adults, it can be difficult for children to understand their activity levels in terms of number of steps (the most common method used by adults). …

Data Driven Approach To Characterize And Forecast The Impact Of Freeway Work Zones On Mobility Using Probe Vehicle Data, Mohsen Kamyab

Wayne State University Dissertations

The presence of work zones on freeways causes traffic congestion and creates hazardous conditions for commuters and construction workers. Traffic congestion resulting from work zones causes negative impacts on traffic mobility (delay), the environment (vehicle emissions), and safety when stopped or slowed vehicles become vulnerable to rear-end collisions. Addressing these concerns, a data-driven approach was utilized to develop methodologies to measure, predict, and characterize the impact work zones have on Michigan interstates. This study used probe vehicle data, collected from GPS devices in vehicles, as the primary source for mobility data. This data was used to fulfill three objectives: develop …

Empathi: An Ontology For Emergency Managing And Planning About Hazard Crisis, Manas Gaur, Kaeedeh Shekarpour, Amelia Gyrard, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people.
A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts describing the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises.
Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary …

Work-In-Progress Reports Submitted To The Library Of Congress As Part Of Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description, Chulwoo Pack, Yi Liu, Leen-Kiat Soh, Elizabeth Lorang

School of Computing: Technical Reports

This document includes work-in-progress reports submitted to the Library of Congress as part of the Aida digital libraries research team's work on Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description: A Demonstration Project. These work-in-progress reports provide a snapshot glimpse, as well as underlying rationale and decision-making, at various points in the development of the project and its machine learning explorations. Reports cover explorations on historic newspapers, minimally-processed manuscript collections, materials digitized from physical originals and those digitized from microform surrogates, and investigate challenges related to image segmentation and document zoning, classification, document image quality analysis, metadata generation, and more.

Regulation Of Artificial Intelligence In Selected Jurisdictions, Jenny Gesley, Tariq Ahmad, Edouardo Soares, Ruth Levush, Gustavo Guerra, James Martin, Kelly Buchanan, Laney Zhang, Sayuri Umeda, Astghik Grigoryan, Nicolas Boring, Elin Hofverberg, Clare Feikhert-Ahalt, Graciela Rodriguez-Ferrand, George Sadek, Hanibal Goitom

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Comparative Summary

This report examines the emerging regulatory and policy landscape surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in jurisdictions around the world and in the European Union (EU). In addition, a survey of international organizations describes the approach that United Nations (UN) agencies and regional organizations have taken towards AI. As the regulation of AI is still in its infancy, guidelines, ethics codes, and actions by and statements from governments and their agencies on AI are also addressed. While the country surveys look at various legal issues, including data protection and privacy, transparency, human oversight, surveillance, public administration and services, autonomous vehicles, …

A Comprehensive Cybersecurity Defense Framework For Large Organizations, Willarvis Smith

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

There is a growing need to understand and identify overarching organizational requirements for cybersecurity defense in large organizations. Applying proper cybersecurity defense will ensure that the right capabilities are fielded at the right locations to safeguard critical assets while minimizing duplication of effort and taking advantage of efficiencies. Exercising cybersecurity defense without an understanding of comprehensive foundational requirements instills an ad hoc and in many cases conservative approach to network security. Organizations must be synchronized across federal and civil agencies to achieve adequate cybersecurity defense. Understanding what constitutes comprehensive cybersecurity defense will ensure organizations are better protected and more efficient. …

A Review Of Reasons For Failure In Applying Machine Learning To Financial Trading And An Experiment Investigating Combinatorial Purged Cross Validation’S Merit In Preventing The Most Prominent Of These Reasons, Multiple Testing Bias, Colin Fritz

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The interest in applying machine learning to financial trading in the hedge fund industry has exploded in the last five years due to the massive success of a handful of ‘quantitative’ investment firms like Renaissance Technologies who has pioneered the use of machine learning techniques in investment since the 1980s. The failure rate of such firms attempting to deploy financial machine learning strategies is very high. This thesis reviews many of the causes for failure such as harmful correlations between examples in the dataset, redundant observations, improper data sampling paradigm, and multiple testing bias. Of these, multiple testing bias is …

Cybersecurity Policy Development At The State Level: A Case Study Of Middle Tennessee, Daniel Leslie Scherr

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Cybersecurity is a growing threat not only to nations, critical infrastructure, and major entities, but also to smaller organizations and individuals. The growing number of successful attacks on all manner of U.S. targets highlights the need for effective and comprehensive policy from the local to federal level, though most research focuses on federal policy issues, not state issues. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the decision-making process within the current cybersecurity policy environment in a southern state of the United States. Sabatier's advocacy coalition framework served as the theoretical framework for the study. Data were …

Relationship Between Perceived Usefulness, Ease Of Use, And Acceptance Of Business Intelligence Systems, Christina Ndiwa Sandema-Sombe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In retail, the explosion of data sources and data has provided incentive to invest in information systems (IS), which enable leaders to understand the market and make timely decisions to improve performance. Given that users’ perceptions of IS affects their use of IS, understanding the factors influencing user acceptance is critical to acquiring an effective business intelligence system (BIS) for an organization. Grounded in the technology acceptance model theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), and user acceptance of business intelligence systems (BIS) in retail organizations. …

Analyzing Small Businesses' Adoption Of Big Data Security Analytics, Henry Mathias

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite the increased cost of data breaches due to advanced, persistent threats from malicious sources, the adoption of big data security analytics among U.S. small businesses has been slow. Anchored in a diffusion of innovation theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine ways to increase the adoption of big data security analytics among small businesses in the United States by examining the relationship between small business leaders' perceptions of big data security analytics and their adoption. The research questions were developed to determine how to increase the adoption of big data security analytics, which can be measured …

Knowledge Transfer Strategy Implementation In Contract Organizations, Delano Clyde Hudson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite economic perils of government shutdowns, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and employee layoffs, some contract leaders consistently fail to implement knowledge transfer strategies that could improve production and profitability and maintain operational readiness when employees transition in and out of the organization. The conceptual framework for this descriptive research study was Nonaka and Takeuchi's socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization model for knowledge creation. A purposive sample of 20 leaders from 2 contract organizations within the south central United States with at least 10 years of experience in contracting were interviewed. Member checking was used for reliability of the synthesized interviews, and triangulation …

Leveraging Nlp And Social Network Analytic Techniques To Detect Censored Keywords: System Design And Experiments, Christopher S. Leberknight, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Internet regulation in the form of online censorship and Internet shutdowns have been increasing over recent years. This paper presents a natural language processing (NLP) application for performing cross country probing that conceals the exact location of the originating request. A detailed discussion of the application aims to stimulate further investigation into new methods for measuring and quantifying Internet censorship practices around the world. In addition, results from two experiments involving search engine queries of banned keywords demonstrates censorship practices vary across different search engines. These results suggest opportunities for developing circumvention technologies that enable open and free access to …

Ua66/15/2 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Mathematics & Computer Science Publications, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Publications created by and about Mathematics & Computer Science.

An Investigation Into The Impact Of Social Networking On Knowledge Sharing, James Harold Gorham

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Today we are experiencing a rapidly increasing trend to use social networking in ways that dramatically affect both our personal and our public lives. This is a global phenomenon being experienced around the world. Exactly how this technology is being used and by whom is of great interest. The problem is that not a lot of research has been conducted to investigate the role social networking sites play to influence a person’s attitude toward sharing knowledge at work. In light of the marked increase in the use of social networking sites and how it is changing the way we live, …

Citationally Enhanced Semantic Literature Based Discovery, John David Fleig

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

We are living within the age of information. The ever increasing flow of data and publications poses a monumental bottleneck to scientific progress as despite the amazing abilities of the human mind, it is woefully inadequate in processing such a vast quantity of multidimensional information. The small bits of flotsam and jetsam that we leverage belies the amount of useful information beneath the surface. It is imperative that automated tools exist to better search, retrieve, and summarize this content. Combinations of document indexing and search engines can quickly find you a document whose content best matches your query - if …

An Instructional Designer Competency Framework For Complex Learning Designs, David Alan Schubert

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Learning design competency frameworks published by professional organizations, exist for typical instructional design efforts. However, a review of literature revealed a lack of frameworks available for the creation of complex learning designs (CLDs). The goal of this research was to develop a competency framework for the creation of CLDs. Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed in the four phases of the design and development research approach In phase one, a survey based on the Educational Technology Multimedia Competency Survey (ETMCS) was sent to instructional designers who self-reported as having experience creating CLDs. The purpose of phase one was to identify …

Examining Shared Understanding And Team Performance In Global Virtual Teams, Alva Bullard

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. These competitive demands have forced many organizations to increase levels of flexibility and adaptability through the use of virtual environments, and global teams are prevalent in business organizations. Although significant research has been conducted on virtual teams, the development of shared understanding among the members of these teams has not been studied adequately. Time/space barriers, communication complexities, and team diversity hinder the development of shared understanding in these teams.

Based on the Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), a new theoretical model was created that used the …

Examining Task Conflict And Team Atmosphere In Virtual Teams Engaged In Outsourced Project Work, Harold Carr Osborn

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Global teams have become commonplace. As teams have become more dispersed, leveraging outsourced resources has gained popularity. Outsourcing can be a prudent move financially; however, when it is inappropriately applied, the damage it produces can easily overshadow any financial gains. Such ill effects can include impaired employee performance and morale caused by decreased job security. Moreover, it can lead to a less favorable team atmosphere and increased task conflict.

This study examined the effects of team virtuality along with the strategic alignment of outsourcing on team performance. The research utilized the intervening processes theory (IPT). The IPT posits that the …

The Influence Of Identifiable Personality Traits On Nurses’ Intention To Use Wireless Implantable Medical Devices, Vincent Molosky

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Technically-driven medical devices such as wireless implantable medical devices (WIMD) have become ubiquitous within healthcare. The use of these devices has changed the way nurses administer patient care. Consequently, the nursing workforce is large and diverse, and with it comes an expected disparity in personalities. Research involving human factors and technology acceptance in healthcare is not new. Yet due to the changing variables in the manner of which patient care is being administered, both in person and in the mechanism of treatment, recent research suggests that individual human factors such as personality traits may hold unknown implications involving more successful …

Emotion Forecasting In Dyadic Conversation : Characterizing And Predicting Future Emotion With Audio-Visual Information Using Deep Learning, Sadat Shahriar

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Emotion forecasting is the task of predicting the future emotion of a speaker, i.e., the emotion label of the future speaking turn–based on the speaker’s past and current audio-visual cues. Emotion forecasting systems require new problem formulations that differ from traditional emotion recognition systems. In this thesis, we first explore two types of forecasting windows(i.e., analysis windows for which the speaker’s emotion is being forecasted): utterance forecasting and time forecasting. Utterance forecasting is based on speaking turns and forecasts what the speaker’s emotion will be after one, two, or three speaking turns. Time forecasting forecasts what the speaker’s emotion will …

On Cluster Robust Models, José Bayoán Santiago Calderón

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Cluster robust models are a kind of statistical models that attempt to estimate parameters considering potential heterogeneity in treatment effects. Absent heterogeneity in treatment effects, the partial and average treatment effect are the same. When heterogeneity in treatment effects occurs, the average treatment effect is a function of the various partial treatment effects and the composition of the population of interest. The first chapter explores the performance of common estimators as a function of the presence of heterogeneity in treatment effects and other characteristics that may influence their performance for estimating average treatment effects. The second chapter examines various approaches …

Determining Political Inclination In Tweets Using Transfer Learning, Mehtab Iqbal

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Last few years have seen tremendous development in neural language modeling for transfer learning and downstream applications. In this research, I used Howard and Ruder’s Universal Language Model Fine Tuning (ULMFiT) pipeline to develop a classifier that can determine whether a tweet is politically left leaning or right leaning by likening the content to tweets posted by @TheDemocrats or @GOP accounts on Twitter. We achieved 87.7% accuracy in predicting political ideological inclination.

Reconciling The Dissonance Between Historic Preservation And Virtual Reality Through A Place-Based Virtual Heritage System., Danny J. Bonenberger

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This study explores a problematic disconnect associated with virtual heritage and the immersive 3D computer modeling of cultural heritage. The products of virtual heritage often fail to adhere to long-standing principles and recent international conventions associated with historic preservation, heritage recording, designation, and interpretation. By drawing upon the geographic concepts of space, landscape, and place, along with advances in Geographic Information Systems, first-person serious games, and head-mounted Virtual Reality platforms this study envisions, designs, implements, and evaluates a virtual heritage system that seeks to reconcile the dissonance between Virtual Reality and historic preservation. Finally, the dissertation examines the contributions and …

Adaptive Knowledge Networks: A Time Capsule, Swati Padhee, Anurag Illendula, Amit Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Valerie L. Shalin

Kno.e.sis Publications

❖ Real world events are dynamic in nature Periodic events e.g. US Presidential Election Non-periodic events e.g. Cyclone Idai

❖ Need for real-time predictive analysis, trend analysis, spatio-temporal decision making, public opinion analysis for events.

❖ Current state-of-the-art curates dynamic knowledge graph from structured text.

❖ We propose creating an Adaptive Knowledge Network from incoming real-time multimodal spatio-temporally evolving data.

The New Legal Landscape For Text Mining And Machine Learning, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Now that the dust has settled on the Authors Guild cases, this Article takes stock of the legal context for TDM research in the United States. This reappraisal begins in Part I with an assessment of exactly what the Authors Guild cases did and did not establish with respect to the fair use status of text mining. Those cases held unambiguously that reproducing copyrighted works as one step in the process of knowledge discovery through text data mining was transformative, and thus ultimately a fair use of those works. Part I explains why those rulings followed inexorably from copyright's most …

Virtual Hearings And Blockchain Technology Solutions In Criminal Law, Chantell Bergquist

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Technology has evolved and raided our personal and professional lives. Although the courts are not immune to the advancement and integration of technology, the courts are not keeping up with relevant technological advancements. Historically, courts have been hesitant to embrace new technologies despite the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure creates the right to a “just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” Likewise, the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct have determined attorneys must “keep abreast of …