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…

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…

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).…

Due to the large volume and exponential growth of biomedical documents (e.g., books, journal articles), it has become increasingly challenging for biomedical search engines to retrieve relevant documents based on users' search queries. Part of the challenge is the matching mechanism of free-text indexing that performs matching based on…

The World Wide Web enables an easy, instant access to a huge quantity of information. Over the last few decades, a number of improvements have been achieved that helped the web reach its current state. However, the current Internet links documents together without understanding them, and thus, makes the content of web only human-readable rather…

Graphs are widely used to model structures and relationships of objects in various scientific and commercial fields. Chemical molecules, proteins, malware system-call dependencies and three-dimensional mechanical parts are all modeled as graphs. In this dissertation, we propose to mine and index those graph data to enable fast and scalable search.…

In the context of association rule mining, the state-of-the-art in privacy preserving data mining provides solutions for categorical and Boolean association rules but not for quantitative association rules. This research fills this gap by describing a method based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to protect input data privacy while preserving…

The purpose of this research is to develop a new visual information analysis, representation, and retrieval framework for automatic discovery of salient objects of user's interest in large-scale image databases. In particular, this dissertation describes a content-based image retrieval framework which supports multiple-object retrieval. The…

The study investigated research topics of doctoral dissertations that examined issues in distance learning from 2000-2014. Twelve reviews of research on distance learning, spanning from 1997-2015, were identified. It was found that only one of these reviews of research (Davies, Howell, & Petri, 2010) looked at doctoral dissertations. The…

An inconsistent database is a database that violates one or more of its integrity constraints. In reality, violations of integrity constraints arise frequently under several different circumstances. Inconsistent databases have long posed the challenge to develop suitable tools for meaningful query answering. A principled approach for querying…

Over the past thirty years, clinical research has benefited substantially from the adoption of electronic medical record systems. As deployment has increased, so too has the number of researchers seeking to improve the overall analytical environment by way of tools and models. Although much work has been done, there are still many uninvestigated…

Annotations play an increasingly crucial role in scientific exploration and discovery, as the amount of data and the level of collaboration among scientists increases. There are many systems today focusing on annotation management, querying, and propagation. Although all such systems are implemented to take user input (i.e., the annotations…

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…

The recent technological advancements have led to the availability of a plethora of heterogenous datasets, e.g., images tagged with geo-location and descriptive keywords. An object in these datasets is described by a set of high-dimensional feature vectors. For example, a keyword-tagged image is represented by a color-histogram and a…

With the advent of the Web, the notion of "information retrieval" has acquired a completely new connotation and currently encompasses several disciplines ranging from traditional forms of text and data retrieval in unstructured and structured repositories to retrieval of static and dynamic information from the contents of the surface and deep Web.…