Shoeprints are a common type of evidence found at crime scenes and are regularly used in forensic investigations. However, their utility is limited by the lack of reference footwear databases that cover the large and growing number of distinct shoe models. Additionally, existing methods for matching crime-scene shoeprints to reference databases…

Beginning on July 1, 2022, in the state of Connecticut, all new Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for special education began to be written in the new Connecticut Special Education Data System commonly known as CT-SEDS. This investigation sought to understand to what extent Connecticut's implementation of CT-SEDS had impacted parents'…

Electronic health records (EHRs) are essential databases that digitally collect, store, and exchange patient health information. Over 95% of hospitals have EHRs, yet healthcare professionals often struggle with EHR navigation, jeopardizing patient safety and care--consider a physician struggling to order blood for a hypovolemic patient. This…

Colleges and universities across the United States face novel perils that include a decline in enrollment trends, questions about the value of a college degree, and increased scrutiny of institutional practices and policies. Due to the spotlight shined on all aspects of the higher education industry, presidents of colleges and universities have…

Public institutions of higher education have seen mandatory state budget cuts for more than 20years, with each year's cut being larger than the previous. These statewide education cuts have affected academic libraries in a major way, resulting in purchasing cutbacks, decreased subscription renewals and cancellations. These drastic cuts in library…

Academic music libraries in the US collect resources to support music students and faculty in their performance and research needs. These resources include non-text items such as musical scores and recordings that are difficult to represent in standard library information systems that were built for text items. The advent of web scale discovery…

Neisseria meningitides serogroup B, commonly referred to as Meningococcal B or Meningitis B, is a highly contagious bacterial infection primarily afflicting the college-aged population with disease contraction resulting in death or severe debilitation if not expediently diagnosed and treated. Currently, there are two vaccines, Bexsero and…

Online literacy learning is still a relatively new field, however, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, online learning became the primary mode of instruction for millions of students in public, charter, and private schools. This descriptive content analysis seeks to identify trends within the field of online literacy instruction from…

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant ("good") and task-relevant ("bad") parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token…

The exponential growth of digital libraries and the proliferation of scholarly content in electronic formats have made data mining and information retrieval essential tools for effectively managing, organizing, and disseminating knowledge. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the advancements and challenges in these fields, with a…

Abstract databases are essential for literature reviews, and in turn for the scientific process. Research into user interface designs and their impact on scientific article discovery is limited. The following study details the process of building a new abstract database and explores several user interface design elements that should be tested in…

Introduction: For the past decade, many educational institutions have launched initiatives to provide services and funding for professors to adopt, adapt, and create OER for enhancing student success. The initiatives could initially encourage faculty to use OER in their courses, but the continued effort to sustain proved difficult. Goal: The…

Bag-of-words is a commonly used text representation method for many text classification applications. However, bag-of-words representation fails to consider the context of the text because it only examines text documents based on the presence of individual words and explores relationships between texts with similar word choices (Bengfort, 2018).…

Graph representations underlie many modern computer applications, capturing the structure of such diverse networks as the Internet, personal associations, roads, sensors, and metabolic pathways. While the static structure of graphs is a well-explored field, a new emphasis is being placed on understanding and representing the way these networks…

Teaching and learning in introductory programming courses is an overwhelming task for many course instructors and learners. Given the rise of digital and technological advancements, it is only wise to use these affordances for education. Microlearning is a successful technology-enhanced learning format with many features that might help…