Finding Earth science data has been a challenging problem given both the quantity of data available and the heterogeneity of the data across a wide variety of domains. Current search engines in most geospatial data portals tend to induce end users to focus on one single data attribute. This approach largely fails to take account of users' multiple…

When a new student comes to play an educational game, how can we determine what content to give them such that they learn as much as possible? When a frustrated customer calls in to a helpline, how can we determine what to say to best assist them? When an ill patient comes in to the clinic, how do we determine what tests to run and treatments to…

Numerous organizations collect and distribute non-aggregate personal data for a variety of different purposes, including demographic and public health research. In these situations, the data distributor is responsible with the protection of the anonymity and personal information of individuals. Microaggregation is one of the most commonly used…

Interdisciplinary research in computer science requires the development of computational techniques for practical application in different domains. This usually requires careful integration of different areas of technical expertise. This dissertation presents image and time series analysis algorithms, with practical interdisciplinary applications…

The perspectives of special education teachers on the strategies used to teach mathematics to special education students were examined in this dissertation. Three central research questions that guided the study are: (a) What were New York special education teachers' opinions about the methods they use to teach mathematics to special education…

A problem that has been the focus of much recent research in privacy preserving data-mining is the frequent itemset hiding (FIH) problem. Identifying itemsets that appear together frequently in customer transactions is a common task in association rule mining. Organizations that share data with business partners may consider some of the frequent…

We live in an era of information overload. From online news to online shopping to scholarly research, we are inundated with a torrent of information on a daily basis. With our limited time, money and attention, we often struggle to extract actionable knowledge from this deluge of data. A common approach for addressing this challenge is…

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…

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging signal acquisition framework that goes against the traditional Nyquist sampling paradigm. CS demonstrates that a sparse, or compressible, signal can be acquired using a low rate acquisition process. Since noise is always present in practical data acquisition systems, sensing and reconstruction methods are…

This dissertation presents a novel effort to develop ITS technologies that adapt by observing student behavior. In particular, we define an evolving expert knowledge base (EEKB) that structures a domain's information as a set of nodes and the relationships that exist between those nodes. The structure of this model is not the particularly novel…

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.…

Self-regulated learning is an elaborate metacognitive process consisting of an individual's awareness of the thought process, flexibility in one's approach to problem solving, and motivation to persist through obstacles until a goal has been met. Strategies and instructional practices used to develop mathematically proficient thinkers also develop…

Subject selection is essential and has become the rate-limiting step for harvesting knowledge to advance healthcare through clinical research. Present manual approaches inhibit researchers from conducting deep and broad studies and drawing confident conclusions. High-throughput clinical phenotyping (HTCP), a recently proposed approach, leverages…

This mixed method study explored and analyzed instructional strategies utilized by algebra teachers whose students' coursework culminated in the New York State Regents Examination in Integrated Algebra and for whom 50% of the tested cohort earned mastery level (85 or higher) on the examination. The targeted populations were eighth or ninth grade…

In recent years, the concerns about the privacy for the electronic data collected by government agencies, organizations, and industries are increasing. They include individual privacy and knowledge privacy. Privacy-preserving data publishing is a research branch that preserves the privacy while, at the same time, withholding useful information in…