A large body of literature exists on evolutionary computing, genetic algorithms, decision trees, codified knowledge, and knowledge management systems; however, the intersection of these computing topics has not been widely researched. Moving through the set of all possible solutions--or traversing the search space--at random exhibits no control…

In my dissertation, I will present my research which contributes to solve the following three open problems from biomedical informatics: (1) Multi-task approaches for microarray classification; (2) Multi-label classification of gene and protein prediction from multi-source biological data; (3) Spatial scan for movement data. In microarray…

This work covers topics in event coreference and event classification from spoken conversation. Event coreference is the process of identifying descriptions of the same event across sentences, documents, or structured databases. Existing event coreference work focuses on sentence similarity models or feature based similarity models requiring slot…

When the members of a group work collaboratively using a group support system (GSS), they often "brainstorm" a list of ideas in response to a question or challenge that faces the group. The satisfaction levels of group members are usually high following this activity. However, satisfaction levels with the process almost always drop…

Online discussion forums have become popular in recent times. They provide a platform for people from different parts of the world sharing a common interest to come together and topics of mutual interest and seek solutions to their problems. There are hundreds of thousands of internet forums containing tens of millions of discussion threads and…

Ensemble approaches have been shown to enhance classification by combining the outputs from a set of voting classifiers. Diversity in error patterns among base classifiers promotes ensemble performance. Multi-task learning is an important characteristic for Neural Network classifiers. Introducing a secondary output unit that receives different…

The Internet Age has seen the emergence of richly annotated image data collections numbering in the billions of items. This work makes contributions in three primary areas which aid the management of this data: image representation, efficient retrieval, and annotation based on content and metadata. The contributions are as follows. First,…

The modern military command center is a hybrid system of computer automated surveillance and human oriented decision making. In these distributed cognition systems, data overload refers simultaneously to the glut of raw data processed by information technology systems and the dearth of actionable knowledge useful to human decision makers.…

Using data from a nationwide, large-scale experimental study of the effects of a connected classroom technology on student learning in algebra (Owens et al., 2004), this dissertation focuses on challenges that can arise in estimating treatment effects in educational field experiments when samples are highly heterogeneous in terms of various…