Practical work involving laboratory experiments is agreed upon to be an essential component of secondary science education. Practical work encompasses a broad range of activity types. The different forms of practical work are not equal in terms of cognitive demand and learning benefit. Inquiry-based investigations provide experience of cognitive…

The large flood of data flowing from observatories presents significant challenges to astronomy and cosmology--challenges that will only be magnified by projects currently under development. Growth in both volume and velocity of astrophysics data is accelerating: whereas the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has produced 60 terabytes of data in the…

With increasing Internet connectivity and traffic volume, recent intrusion incidents have reemphasized the importance of network intrusion detection systems for combating increasingly sophisticated network attacks. Techniques such as pattern recognition and the data mining of network events are often used by intrusion detection systems to classify…

In many evolving systems, inputs can be derived from both human observations and physical sensors. Additionally, many computation and analysis tasks can be performed by either human beings or artificial intelligence (AI) applications. For example, weather prediction, emergency event response, assistive technology for various human sensory and…

This dissertation focuses on developing and evaluating hybrid approaches for analyzing free-form text in the medical domain. This research draws on natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to parse and extract concepts based on a controlled vocabulary. Once important concepts are extracted, additional machine learning algorithms,…

Due to the rapid advances in computing and sensing technologies, enormous amounts of data are being generated everyday in various applications. The integration of data mining and data visualization has been widely used to analyze these massive and complex data sets to discover hidden patterns. For both data mining and visualization to be…

The phenomenological study explored the lived experiences and perceptions of a purposive sample of 20 IT professionals (managers, engineers, administrators, and analysts) in the state of Virginia, Texas, and Washington DC. The focus of this research study was to learn the perceptions of IT professionals who are or once were in a decision-making…

The fields of pattern recognition and machine learning are on a fundamental quest to design systems that can learn the way humans do. One important aspect of human intelligence that has so far not been given sufficient attention is the capability of humans to express when they are certain about a decision, or when they are not. Machine learning…

The study of this dissertation provides a solution to a very specific problem instance in the area of data mining, data warehousing, and service-oriented architecture in publishing and newspaper industries. The research question focuses on the integration of data mining and data warehousing. The research problem focuses on the development of…

The amount of online information has grown exponentially over the past few decades, and users become more and more dependent on ranking and recommendation systems to address their information seeking needs. The advance in information technologies has enabled users to provide feedback on the utilities of the underlying ranking and recommendation…

A literature review revealed a lack of academic research related to cultural dynamics within organizations that influence information technology investments. The goal of this single descriptive case study of a for profit international company was to examine one area of cultural influence on investments. The aim was to gain an understanding of…