This dissertation, titled "Investigating Music Information Objects," is a study of the nature, description, representations, and ideas related to music information objects (MIOs). This research study investigates how music practitioners from various traditions describe and conceptualize MIOs, using a theoretical framework to classify…

The development in information science has enabled an explosive growth of data, which attracts more and more researchers to engage in the field of big data analytics. Noticeably, in many real-world applications, large amounts of data are imbalanced data since the events of interests occur infrequently. Classification of imbalanced data is an…

The ontology approach has been accepted as a very promising approach to semantic integration today. However, because of the diversity of focuses and its various connections to other research domains, the core concepts, theoretical and technical approaches, and research areas of this domain still remain unclear. Such ambiguity makes it difficult to…

This dissertation makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with an eye toward creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The aim of the present dissertation is to create a grammar library of information structure for the…

Probabilistic topic models have been developed for applications in various domains such as text mining, information retrieval and computer vision and bioinformatics domain. In this thesis, we focus on developing novel probabilistic topic models for image mining and bioinformatics studies. Specifically, a probabilistic topic-connection (PTC) model…

Current "one disease, one target and one drug" drug development paradigm is under question as relatively few drugs have reached the market in the last two decades. Increasingly research focus is being placed on the study of drug action against biological systems as a whole rather than against a single component (called "Systems…

The adage, "old habits die hard", is especially relevant when humans learn new protective behaviors (i.e., dental flossing, IS security behaviors). The foundation that underlies many social-cognitive theories used in IS research is that intention to change predicts actual behavior change. Despite intentions to change, humans do not…

In this dissertation research, we argue that spatial alarms and activity-based social networks are two fundamentally new types of information and influence diffusion channels. Such new channels have the potential of enriching our professional experiences and our personal life quality in many unprecedented ways. First, we develop an activity driven…

Researchers in the medical domain consider the double-blind placebo controlled clinical trial the gold standard. The data for these clinical trials are collected for a specifically defined hypothesis and there is very little in the realm of secondary data analyses conducted. The underlying purpose of this work is to demonstrate the value and…

This thesis reports on three empirical studies that focus on questions concerning knowledge sharing and construction in communities of practice and global knowledge exchange platforms. The first essay presents an exploratory case study on a particular academic community of practice--AISNET and its central knowledge exchange platform, the ISWorld…

In the last two decades, emotion has emerged as an important theme in discussions of design. However, there is no framework to date that encompasses both emotion and information design in a single theory. This dissertation was motivated by a lack of substantive theory that would allow design researchers and educators to model the relationships…

Background: The U.S. health care system has been under immense scrutiny for ever-increasing costs and poor health outcomes for its patients. Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) has emerged as a generally accepted practice by providers, policy makers, and scientists as an approach to identify the most clinical- and cost-effective interventions…

WSNs are susceptible to a variety of attacks. These attacks vary in the way they are performed and executed; they include but not limited to node capture, physical tampering, denial of service, and message alteration. It is of paramount importance to protect gathered data by WSNs and defend the network against illegal access and malicious…

Biosimulation models are valuable, versatile tools used for hypothesis generation and testing, codification of biological theory, education, and patient-specific modeling. Driven by recent advances in computational power and the accumulation of systems-level experimental data, modelers today are creating models with an unprecedented level of…

Clinical and Translational Science (CTS) rests largely on information flowing smoothly at multiple levels, in multiple directions, across multiple locations. Biomedical Informatics (BI) is seen as a backbone that helps to manage information flows for the translation of knowledge generated and stored in silos of basic science into bedside…