The ability to efficiently optimize or re-optimize an algorithm for high performance on a particular processor architecture is crucial in a wide spectrum of engineering and scientific applications. To help bridge the gap between fully automated optimization, which does not reliably produce optimal code, and fully manual optimization, which is…

Recent advances and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the opportunities for students to interact with AI in their learning tasks. Although various fields of scholarly research have investigated human-AI collaboration, the underlying processes of how students collaborate with AI in a student-AI teaming scenario have been…

Coprocessor architectures in High Performance Computing are prevalent in today's scientific computing clusters and require specialized knowledge for proper utilization. Various alternative paradigms for parallel and offload computation exist, but little is known about the human factors impacts of using the different paradigms. With computer…

The touch mouse is a new type of computer mouse that provides users with a new way of touch-based environment to interact with computers. For more than a decade, user experience (UX) has grown into a core concept of human-computer interaction (HCI), describing a user's perceptions and responses that result from the use of a product in a particular…

Developing technology to help people teach and learn is an important topic in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In this thesis we present three studies on this topic. In the first study, we demonstrate new games for learning mathematics and discuss the evidence for key design decisions from user studies. In the second study, we develop a real-time…

This paper presents a review of literature that introduces major concepts and issues in using avatars and pedagogical agents in first- and second-person virtual environments (VEs) for learning online. In these VEs, avatars and pedagogical agents represent self and other learners/participants or serve as personal learning "guides". The…

We introduce an effective computer aided learning visual tool (CALVT) to teach graph-based applications. We present the robot motion planning problem as an example of such applications. The proposed tool can be used to simulate and/or further to implement practical systems in different areas of computer science such as graphics, computational…