The late Paul Gray was a pioneer in the research tradition of IS education and curriculum (Gorgone and Gray 1999). Recently, the joint ACM/AIS IS2020 Task force published a new "Competency Model" to improve and update the IS curriculum (Leidig and Anderson 2020). This dissertation contributes to this research tradition by introducing a…

With the advent of virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the broader scientific computing community is considering the use of clouds for their scientific computing needs. This is due to the relative scalability, ease of use, advanced user environment customization abilities, and the many novel computing paradigms available for…

Retrieving files from one's computer is done daily and is an essential part of completing most tasks at work, yet surprisingly little research has examined the ways that people structure and organize their files. Management of personal digital information is a challenging task that users approach idiosyncratically. Large individual differences…

Cloud computing may provide cost benefits for organizations by eliminating the overhead costs of software, hardware, and maintenance (e.g., license renewals, upgrading software, servers and their physical storage space, administration along with funding a large IT department). In addition to the promised savings, the organization may require…

Information dispersal algorithms (IDA) are used for distributed data storage because they simultaneously provide security, reliability and space efficiency, constituting a trustworthy computing framework for many critical applications, such as cloud computing, in the information society. In the most general sense, this is achieved by dividing data…

Organizations are finding it difficult in today's economy to implement the vast information technology infrastructure required to effectively conduct their business operations. Despite the fact that some of these organizations are leveraging on the computational powers and the cost-saving benefits of computing on the Internet cloud, others…

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and client-server type storage and computation outsourcing constitute some of the major applications that the next generation cloud schemes will address. Since these applications are just emerging, it is the perfect time to design them with security and privacy in mind. Furthermore, considering the high-churn…

Collective communication allows efficient communication and synchronization among a collection of processes, unlike point-to-point communication that only involves a pair of communicating processes. Achieving high performance for both kernels and full-scale applications running on a distributed memory system requires an efficient implementation of…

In today's world, information is increasingly created, processed, transmitted, and stored digitally. While the digital nature of information has brought enormous benefits, it has also created new vulnerabilities and attacks against data. Unlike physical documents, digitally stored information can be rapidly copied, erased, or modified. The…