The size and dynamism of the Web poses challenges for all its stakeholders, which include producers/consumers of content, and advertisers who want to place advertisements next to relevant content. A critical piece of information for the stakeholders is the demographics of the consumers who are likely to visit a given web site. However, predicting…

Complex and expensive systems' development suffers from a lack of method for making good system-architecture-selection decisions early in the development process. Failure to make a good system-architecture-selection decision increases the risk that a development effort will not meet cost, performance and schedule goals. This research provides a…

Against the backdrop of new economic realities, one of the larger forces that is affecting businesses worldwide is cloud computing, whose benefits include agility, time to market, time to capability, reduced cost, renewed focus on the core and strategic partnership with the business. Cloud computing can potentially transform a majority of the…

Server virtualization enables a physical computer to support multiple applications logically by decoupling the application from the hardware layer, thereby reducing operational costs and competitive in delivering IT services to their enterprise organizations. IT organizations continually examine the efficiency of their internal IT systems and…

Recommender systems aim to support users in their decision-making process while interacting with large information spaces and recommend items of interest to users based on preferences they have expressed, either explicitly or implicitly. Recommender systems are increasingly used with product and service selection over the Internet. Although…

During the last decade, global optimization has attracted a lot of attention due to the increased practical need for obtaining global solutions and the success in solving many global optimization problems that were previously considered intractable. In general, the central question of global optimization is to find an optimal solution to a given…

The creation, maintenance, and management of Information Product (IP) systems that are used by organizations for complex decisions represent a unique set of challenges. These challenges are compounded when the purpose of such a systems is also for knowledge creation and dissemination. Information quality research to date has focused mainly upon…

Much of our critical infrastructure is controlled by large software systems whose participants are distributed across the Internet. As our dependence on these critical systems continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important that they meet strict availability and performance requirements, even in the face of malicious attacks, including those…

PubMed® is an on-line literature database hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Containing over 21 million citations for biomedical literature--both abstracts and full text--in the areas of the life sciences, behavioral studies, chemistry, and bioengineering, PubMed® represents an important tool for researchers. PubMed® searches return…

Geotechnical data are one of the most prevalent data types in civil engineering projects. The majority of the civil engineering projects that are in use today are designed using site-specific geotechnical data. The usage of geotechnical data is not limited to construction projects. This data is used in a wide range of applications, including…

The development of telerobotic systems has evolved from Single Operator Single Robot (SOSR) systems to Multiple Operator Multiple Robot (MOMR) systems. The relationship between human operators and robots follows the master-slave control architecture and the requests for controlling robot actuation are completely generated by human operators. …

The variety and complexity of potentially-related data resources available for querying--webpages, databases, data warehouses--has been growing ever more rapidly. There is a growing need to pose integrative queries "across" multiple such sources, exploiting foreign keys and other means of interlinking data to merge information from diverse…

The deep semantic understanding necessary for complex natural language processing tasks, such as automatic question-answering or text summarization, would benefit from highly accurate word sense disambiguation (WSD). This dissertation investigates what makes an appropriate and effective sense inventory for WSD. Drawing on theories and…

Historically, managing access to information systems (ISs) required direct interaction with a limited number of users. Increasingly, managing access involves handling an increased numbers of internal and external students, faculty, and staff as well as partners such as workforce development centers, the U.S. Department of Education, and the…

The use of Service Oriented Architectures, namely web services, has become a widely adopted method for transfer of data between systems across the Internet as well as the Enterprise. Adopting a similar approach to embedded devices is also starting to emerge as personal devices and sensor networks are becoming more common in the industry. This…