Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

A Methodology For Evaluating Relational And Nosql Databases For Small-Scale Storage And Retrieval, Ryan D. Engle

Theses and Dissertations

Modern systems record large quantities of electronic data capturing time-ordered events, system state information, and behavior. Subsequent analysis enables historic and current system status reporting, supports fault investigations, and may provide insight for emerging system trends. Unfortunately, the management of log data requires ever more efficient and complex storage tools to access, manipulate, and retrieve these records. Truly effective solutions also require a well-planned architecture supporting the needs of multiple stakeholders. Historically, database requirements were well-served by relational data models, however modern, non-relational databases, i.e. NoSQL, solutions, initially intended for “big data” distributed system may also provide value for smaller-scale …

Online Social Networks’ Investigations Of Individuals’ Healthy And Unhealthy Lifestyle Behaviors And Social Factors Influencing Them —Three Essays, Mahyar Sharif Vaghefi

Theses and Dissertations

More than half of U.S. adults suffer from one or more chronic diseases, which account for 86% of total U.S. healthcare costs. Major contributors to chronic diseases are unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, which include lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, tobacco use, and drinking too much alcohol. A reduction in the prevalence of health-risk behaviors could improve individuals’ longevity and quality of life and may halt the exponential growth of healthcare costs. Prior studies in the field have acknowledged that a comprehensive understanding of health behaviors requires the examination of individual’ behaviors in supra-dyadic social networks. In recent years, the growth …

Three Essays On Trust Mining In Online Social Networks, Gelareh Towhidi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research consists of three essays on studying trust in online social networks. Trust plays a critical role in online social relationships, because of the high levels of risk and uncertainty involved. Guided by relevant social science and computational graph theories, I develop conceptual and predictive models to gain insights into trusting behaviors in online social relationships.

In the first essay, I propose a conceptual model of trust formation in online social networks. This is the first study that integrates the existing graph-based view of trust formation in social networks with socio-psychological theories of trust to provide a richer …

Quantitative Phenotype Analysis To Identify, Validate And Compare Rat Disease Models, Yiqing Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction

The laboratory rat has been widely used as an animal model in biomedical research. There are many strains exhibiting a wide variety of phenotypes. Capturing these phenotypes in a centralized database provides researchers with an easy method for choosing the appropriate strains for their studies. Current resources such as NBRP and PhysGen provided some preliminary work in rat phenotype databases. However, there are drawbacks in both projects: (1) small number of animals (6 rats) used by NBRP; (2) NBRP project is a one-time effort for each strain; (3) PhysGen web interface only enables queries within a single study – …

The Application Of Text Mining And Data Visualization Techniques To Textual Corpus Exploration, Jeffrey R. Smith Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

Unstructured data in the digital universe is growing rapidly and shows no evidence of slowing anytime soon. With the acceleration of growth in digital data being generated and stored on the World Wide Web, the prospect of information overload is much more prevalent now than it has been in the past. As a preemptive analytic measure, organizations across many industries have begun implementing text mining techniques to analyze such large sources of unstructured data. Utilizing various text mining techniques such as n -gram analysis, document and term frequency analysis, correlation analysis, and topic modeling methodologies, this research seeks to develop …

Developing A Cyberterrorism Policy: Incorporating Individual Values, Osama Bassam J. Rabie

Theses and Dissertations

Preventing cyberterrorism is becoming a necessity for individuals, organizations, and governments. However, current policies focus on technical and managerial aspects without asking for experts and non-experts values and preferences for preventing cyberterrorism. This study employs value focused thinking and public value forum to bare strategic measures and alternatives for complex policy decisions for preventing cyberterrorism. The strategic measures and alternatives are per socio-technical process.