Machine learning (ML) techniques have been successfully applied to a wide array of applications. This dissertation aims to take application data handling into account when developing ML-based solutions for real-world problems through a holistic framework. To demonstrate the generality of our framework, we consider two real-world applications: spam…

Although there have been numerous technological advancements in the last several years, there continues to be a real threat as it pertains to social engineering, especially phishing, spear-phishing, and Business Email Compromise (BEC). While the technologies to protect corporate employees and network borders have gotten better, there are still…

The patient portal is an electronic repository of health information, including doctor's notes, laboratory test results, and diagnostic imaging reports. There are limited studies that explore how individuals make sense of their health information, and use that understanding to increase health literacy. Education leaders should consider the ways…

Current networking architectures and communication protocols used for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been designed to be energy efficient, low latency, and long network lifetime. One major issue that must be addressed is the security in data communication. Due to the limited capabilities of low cost and small sized sensor nodes, designing…

In current Peer-to-Peer networks, distributed and semantic free indexing is widely used by systems adopting "Distributed Hash Table" ("DHT") mechanisms. Although such systems typically solve a. user query rather fast in a deterministic way, they only support a very narrow search scheme, namely the exact hash key match. Furthermore, DHT systems put…

Ethnographic and interview data from a long-term study of "NetU," a wired community and college, are used to investigate the effects of computer-mediated communication on social relationships. During the course of this research "LAN" residents of NetU are compared with a similar group of non-LAN residents who lived in the same neighborhood, but…

This study examines perceptions of human "trustworthiness" as a key component in countering insider threats. The term "insider threat" refers to situations where a critical member of an organization behaves against the interests of the organization, in an illegal and/or unethical manner. Identifying and detecting how an individual's behavior…

Targeted email attacks to enable computer network exploitation have become more prevalent, more insidious, and more widely documented in recent years. Beyond nuisance spam or phishing designed to trick users into revealing personal information, targeted malicious email (TME) facilitates computer network exploitation and the gathering of sensitive…