Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Effective Strategies For Using Telecommuting By Owners Of Small Businesses, Thomas Law

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small business owners who lack effective strategies to incorporate telecommuting may be unable to retain teleworking employees, create a flexible working environment, or improve workforce morale, negatively impacting company productivity and profitability. Grounded in transformational leadership theory and sociotechnical systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies small business owners use to incorporate telecommuting to retain teleworking employees. Data were collected from five small business owners in Texas with at least 1 year of management experience and created and maintained remote working strategies. Data collection included semistructured interviews and company documents. Three themes emerged …

Perceptions And Knowledge Of Information Security Policy Compliance In Organizational Personnel, Jesus M. Mosqueda

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

All internet connected organizations are becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to information security policy noncompliance of personnel. The problem is important to information technology (IT) firms, organizations with IT integration, and any consumer who has shared personal information online, because noncompliance is the single greatest threat to cybersecurity, which leads to expensive breaches that put private information in danger. Grounded in the protection motivation theory, the purpose of this quantitative study was to use multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between perceived importance, organizational compliance, management involvement, seeking guidance, and rate of cybersecurity attack. The research question for …

A Sociotechnical Systems View Of Computer Self-Efficacy And Usability Determinants Of Technical Readiness, Stefani L. Tucker

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The specific research problem was that it is unknown whether computer self-efficacy and usability determine technical readiness in hourly and exempt information technology support employees in the United States. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between computer self-efficacy and technical readiness, usability and technical readiness, and computer self-efficacy, usability, and technical readiness in hourly and exempt information technology support employees in the United States. Sociotechnical system theory suggests that every transaction has a human and technical aspect; thus, the theoretical framework. The convenience sample included 136 information technology support employees aged 18-70. The regression results …

Analyzing Small Business Strategies To Prevent External Cybersecurity Threats, Dr. Kevin E. Moore

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Some small businesses’ cybersecurity analysts lack strategies to prevent their organizations from compromising personally identifiable information (PII) via external cybersecurity threats. Small business leaders are concerned, as they are the most targeted critical infrastructures in the United States and are a vital part of the economic system as data breaches threaten the viability of these organizations. Grounded in routine activity theory, the purpose of this pragmatic qualitative inquiry was to explore strategies small business organizations utilize to prevent external cybersecurity threats. The participants were nine cybersecurity analysts who utilized strategies to defend small businesses from external threats. Data were collected …

Analyzing Small Business Strategies To Prevent External Cybersecurity Threats, Dr. Kevin E. Moore

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Some small businesses’ cybersecurity analysts lack strategies to prevent their organizations from compromising personally identifiable information (PII) via external cybersecurity threats. Small business leaders are concerned, as they are the most targeted critical infrastructures in the United States and are a vital part of the economic system as data breaches threaten the viability of these organizations. Grounded in routine activity theory, the purpose of this pragmatic qualitative inquiry was to explore strategies small business organizations utilize to prevent external cybersecurity threats. The participants were nine cybersecurity analysts who utilized strategies to defend small businesses from external threats. Data were collected …

Perceptions And Knowledge Of Information Security Policy Compliance In Organizational Personnel, Jesus M. Mosqueda

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

All internet connected organizations are becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks due to information security policy noncompliance of personnel. The problem is important to information technology (IT) firms, organizations with IT integration, and any consumer who has shared personal information online, because noncompliance is the single greatest threat to cybersecurity, which leads to expensive breaches that put private information in danger. Grounded in the protection motivation theory, the purpose of this quantitative study was to use multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between perceived importance, organizational compliance, management involvement, seeking guidance, and rate of cybersecurity attack. The research question for …

Leadership Strategies Supply Chain Managers Use In Adopting Innovative Technology, Bukola Loveth Olowo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Supply chain managers face challenges when adopting new technologies to remain competitive and satisfy consumer demands involving expedited delivery of food and services. Supply chain managers who fail to adopt new technology have a decreased propensity to stay competitive. Grounded in the transformation leadership theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore leadership strategies supply chain managers use in adopting innovative technology. Participants were six supply chain managers who successfully used leadership strategies to adopt new innovative technology. Sources for data collection were semistructured interviews, company archival documents, and field notes. Research data were analyzed via thematic …

Fridge Tracker And Recipe Provider : Fridgechamp, Matt Dudek

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

FridgeChamp is a website to allow people to track their fridge/pantry contents while providing them recipes they can make with said ingredients. Currently there are few ingredient trackers and recipe matchers that exist as websites, and of those many lack simplistic recipes that a home chef would use. In addition to lacking some recipes, many tracker/recipe apps do not have a function to remove from your stock what a recipe requires, making you tediously update the stock every time you cook/use something.

Strategies Information Technology Leaders Used In Implementing Remote Work During The Covid-19, Jouliana Kamal Barghouth

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

With the imposed lockdown in many countries due to the spread of COVID-19, many leaders were forced to adopt online technologies in transitioning employees to remote work. Leaders not adopting online technologies or remote work during a pandemic are highly susceptible to business closure. Grounded in the technology acceptance model, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore strategies information technology (IT) leaders in Kuwait used to successfully transition employees to remote work during the pandemic. The participants were six IT leaders from a single multinational IT organization who contributed to strategy development during the pandemic to …

Diversification Strategies Business Managers Use To Improve Profitability, Kayode Itiola

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A lack of diversification strategies can negatively impact business profitability. Business managers of small and medium-sized enterprises who implement appropriate diversification strategies can improve business profitability, ensuring the firm’s sustainability. Grounded in the modern portfolio theory, the purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore diversification strategies business managers use to improve profitability. The participants were five business managers who successfully used diversification strategies to enhance business profitability. Sources for data collection were semi-structured interviews, company archival documents, and field notes. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Four themes emerged: concentric diversification strategy, horizontal diversification strategy, customer needs …

Effective Strategies For Using Telecommuting By Owners Of Small Businesses, Thomas Law

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small business owners who lack effective strategies to incorporate telecommuting may be unable to retain teleworking employees, create a flexible working environment, or improve workforce morale, negatively impacting company productivity and profitability. Grounded in transformational leadership theory and sociotechnical systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies small business owners use to incorporate telecommuting to retain teleworking employees. Data were collected from five small business owners in Texas with at least 1 year of management experience and created and maintained remote working strategies. Data collection included semistructured interviews and company documents. Three themes emerged …

Knowledge-Sharing Practice As A Tool In Organizational Development In Nigerian Higher Educational Institutions, Emmanuel Ajiri Ojo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractUnderstanding knowledge management is key to understanding organizational development and innovations. Inadequate knowledge-sharing practices in Nigerian educational institutions has impeded innovation and management development. The purpose of this qualitative modified Delphi study was to seek consensus among administrators from Nigerian educational institutions and scholars from Nigerian universities regarding knowledge-sharing practices that nourish innovation in Nigerian higher educational institutions. The organizational development framework was used to guide the study. Data collection included a nonprobability purposive sampling of 25 participants and three rounds of surveys administered online. A consensus was reached on eight factors after coding and thematic analysis: setting knowledge-sharing expectations, …

Developing Consensus On The Use Of Emotional Intelligence Training In Small Utility Companies, Nathaniel E. Holloway

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Park and Shaw shared the impact on organizations from unmotivated and unsatisfied employees link to higher turnover ratios. The use of emotional intelligence in manager training lowered employee turnover by 13%. The problem address in this Delphi study was that small utility companies do not have an emotional intelligence plan in place for managerial training. Goleman and Mayer’s framework was used as the theorical lens for examining response of participants to the Delphi study. A panel of experts submitted data in the form of responses to three rounds of questions regarding the use of emotional intelligence training in small businesses. …

Governing Smart Cities As Knowledge Commons - Introduction, Chapter 1 & Conclusion, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, Madelyn Sanfilippo

Book Chapters

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges and opportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds …

Campus Safety Data Gathering, Classification, And Ranking Based On Clery-Act Reports, Walaa F. Abo Elenin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Most existing campus safety rankings are based on criminal incident history with minimal or no consideration of campus security conditions and standard safety measures. Campus safety information published by universities/colleges is usually conceptual/qualitative and not quantitative and are based-on criminal records of these campuses. Thus, no explicit and trusted ranking method for these campuses considers the level of compliance with the standard safety measures. A quantitative safety measure is important to compare different campuses easily and to learn about specific campus safety conditions.

In this thesis, we utilize Clery-Act reports of campuses to automatically analyze their safety conditions and generate …

A Sociotechnical Systems View Of Computer Self-Efficacy And Usability Determinants Of Technical Readiness, Stefani L. Tucker

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The specific research problem was that it is unknown whether computer self-efficacy and usability determine technical readiness in hourly and exempt information technology support employees in the United States. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between computer self-efficacy and technical readiness, usability and technical readiness, and computer self-efficacy, usability, and technical readiness in hourly and exempt information technology support employees in the United States. Sociotechnical system theory suggests that every transaction has a human and technical aspect; thus, the theoretical framework. The convenience sample included 136 information technology support employees aged 18-70. The regression results …

Secure Strategies For Internet Of Things Implementation In Warehouse Environments, Oladapo Opegbemi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The internet of things (IoT) in warehouse environments may present security issues and challenges. These issues and challenges may impact information technology (IT) leadership in warehouse environments because a lack of security strategy adoption may lead to increased network breaches. Grounded in the technology acceptance model, the purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between IT leaderships’ perceived ease-of-use, perceived usefulness of IoT devices, and their intent to adopt security strategies for IoT implementation in warehouse environments. Data were collected from IT leaders in North Texas warehouse environments using a peer-reviewed adoption survey from PsycTESTS.org. The …

Invasive Buckthorn Mapping: A Uav-Based Approach Utilizing Machine Learning, Gis, And Remote Sensing Techniques In The Upper Peninsula Of Michigan, Vikranth Madeppa

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

An Invasive species is a species that is alien or non-native to the ecosystem which causes harm to economic, environmental, or human health (E.O. 13112 of Feb 3, 1999). Invasive species have posed a serious threat to ecosystems across the globe. These invasive species have impacts on the biodiversity and productivity of invaded forests. Remotely sensed data is a valuable resource for understanding and addressing issues related to invasive species. This study presents a novel approach for mapping the distribution of two invasive plant species, Common and Glossy Buckthorn, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), machine learning algorithms, geographic information systems …

Taurus: Towards A Unified Force Representation And Universal Solver For Graph Layout, Mingliang Xue, Zhi Wang, Fahai Zhong, Yong Wang, Mingliang Xu, Oliver Deussen, Yunhai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past few decades, a large number of graph layout techniques have been proposed for visualizing graphs from various domains. In this paper, we present a general framework, Taurus, for unifying popular techniques such as the spring-electrical model, stress model, and maxent-stress model. It is based on a unified force representation, which formulates most existing techniques as a combination of quotient-based forces that combine power functions of graph-theoretical and Euclidean distances. This representation enables us to compare the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, while facilitating the development of new methods. Based on this, we propose a new balanced …

Understanding U.S. Customers' Intention To Adopt Robo-Advisor Technology, Deborah Wall

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Finance and information technology scholars wrote that there is a literature gap on what factors drive investors in Western financial markets to use a Robo-advisor to manage their investments. The purpose of this qualitative, single case study with embedded units is to understand the adoption intentions of retail investors in U.S. markets to use a Robo-advisor instead of a human advisor. A single case study design addressed the literature gap, and qualitative data from seven semi=structured interviews, reflective field notes, and archival data were triangulated to answer the research question. This study was grounded in a theoretical framework that includes …

Assessing Spurious Correlations In Big Search Data, Jesse T. Richman, Ryan J. Roberts

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Big search data offers the opportunity to identify new and potentially real-time measures and predictors of important political, geographic, social, cultural, economic, and epidemiological phenomena, measures that might serve an important role as leading indicators in forecasts and nowcasts. However, it also presents vast new risks that scientists or the public will identify meaningless and totally spurious ‘relationships’ between variables. This study is the first to quantify that risk in the context of search data. We find that spurious correlations arise at exceptionally high frequencies among probability distributions examined for random variables based upon gamma (1, 1) and Gaussian random …

Causal Interventional Training For Image Recognition, Wei Qin, Hanwang Zhang, Richang Hong, Ee-Peng Lim, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning models often fit undesired dataset bias in training. In this paper, we formulate the bias using causal inference, which helps us uncover the ever-elusive causalities among the key factors in training, and thus pursue the desired causal effect without the bias. We start from revisiting the process of building a visual recognition system, and then propose a structural causal model (SCM) for the key variables involved in dataset collection and recognition model: object, common sense, bias, context, and label prediction. Based on the SCM, one can observe that there are “good” and “bad” biases. Intuitively, in the image …

Distributed Spatial Data Sharing: A New Era In Sharing Spatial Data, Majid Hojati

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The advancements in information and communications technology, including the widespread adoption of GPS-based sensors, improvements in computational data processing, and satellite imagery, have resulted in new data sources, stakeholders, and methods of producing, using, and sharing spatial data. Daily, vast amounts of data are produced by individuals interacting with digital content and through automated and semi-automated sensors deployed across the environment. A growing portion of this information contains geographic information directly or indirectly embedded within it. The widespread use of automated smart sensors and an increased variety of georeferenced media resulted in new individual data collectors. This raises a new …

Dual-View Preference Learning For Adaptive Recommendation, Zhongzhou Liu, Yuan Fang, Min Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While recommendation systems have been widely deployed, most existing approaches only capture user preferences in the , i.e., the user's general interest across all kinds of items. However, in real-world scenarios, user preferences could vary with items of different natures, which we call the . Both views are crucial for fully personalized recommendation, where an underpinning macro-view governs a multitude of finer-grained preferences in the micro-view. To model the dual views, in this paper, we propose a novel model called Dual-View Adaptive Recommendation (DVAR). In DVAR, we formulate the micro-view based on item categories, and further integrate it with the …

Dashboard Design Mining And Recommendation, Yanna Lin, Haotian Li, Aoyu Wu, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dashboards, which comprise multiple views on a single display, help analyze and communicate multiple perspectives of data simultaneously. However, creating effective and elegant dashboards is challenging since it requires careful and logical arrangement and coordination of multiple visualizations. To solve the problem, we propose a data-driven approach for mining design rules from dashboards and automating dashboard organization. Specifically, we focus on two prominent aspects of the organization: , which describes the position, size, and layout of each view in the display space; and, which indicates the interaction between pairwise views. We build a new dataset containing 854 dashboards crawled online, …

Relation Preserving Triplet Mining For Stabilising The Triplet Loss In Re-Identification Systems, Adhiraj Ghosh, Kuruparan Shanmugalingam, Wen-Yan Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Object appearances change dramatically with pose variations. This creates a challenge for embedding schemes that seek to map instances with the same object ID to locations that are as close as possible. This issue becomes significantly heightened in complex computer vision tasks such as re-identification(reID). In this paper, we suggest that these dramatic appearance changes are indications that an object ID is composed of multiple natural groups, and it is counterproductive to forcefully map instances from different groups to a common location. This leads us to introduce Relation Preserving Triplet Mining (RPTM), a feature matching guided triplet mining scheme, that …

Learning Large Neighborhood Search For Vehicle Routing In Airport Ground Handling, Jianan Zhou, Yaoxin Wu, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song, Jie Zhang, Zhenghua Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dispatching vehicle fleets to serve flights is a key task in airport ground handling (AGH). Due to the notable growth of flights, it is challenging to simultaneously schedule multiple types of operations (services) for a large number of flights, where each type of operation is performed by one specific vehicle fleet. To tackle this issue, we first represent the operation scheduling as a complex vehicle routing problem and formulate it as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. Then given the graph representation of the MILP model, we propose a learning assisted large neighborhood search (LNS) method using data generated …

Locality-Aware Tail Node Embeddings On Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Networks, Zemin Liu, Yuan Fang, Wentao Zhang, Xinming Zhang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While the state-of-the-art network embedding approaches often learn high-quality embeddings for high-degree nodes with abundant structural connectivity, the quality of the embeddings for low-degree or nodes is often suboptimal due to their limited structural connectivity. While many real-world networks are long-tailed, to date little effort has been devoted to tail node embeddings. In this article, we formulate the goal of learning tail node embeddings as a problem, given the few links on each tail node. In particular, since each node resides in its own local context, we personalize the regression model for each tail node. To reduce overfitting in the …

Reks: Role-Based Encrypted Keyword Search With Enhanced Access Control For Outsourced Cloud Data, Yibin Miao, Feng Li, Xiaohua Jia, Huaxiong Wang, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Keyword-based search over encrypted data is an important technique to achieve both data confidentiality and utilization in cloud outsourcing services. While commonly used access control mechanisms, such as identity-based encryption and attribute-based encryption, do not generally scale well for hierarchical access permissions. To solve this problem, we propose a Role-based Encrypted Keyword Search (REKS) scheme by using the role-based access control and broadcast encryption. Specifically, REKS allows owners to deploy hierarchical access control by allowing users with parent roles to have access permissions from child roles. Using REKS, we further facilitate token generation preprocessing and efficient user management, thereby significantly …

T-Counter: Trustworthy And Efficient Cpu Resource Measurement Using Sgx In The Cloud, Chuntao Dong, Qingni Shen, Xuhua Ding, Daoqing Yu, Wu Luo, Pengfei Wu, Zhonghai Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As cloud services have become popular, and their adoption is growing, consumers are becoming more concerned about the cost of cloud services. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) generally use a pay-per-use billing scheme in the cloud services model: consumers use resources as they needed and are billed for their resource usage. However, CSPs are untrusted and privileged; they have full control of the entire operating system (OS) and may tamper with bills to cheat consumers. So, how to provide a trusted solution that can keep track of and verify the consumers’ resource usage has been a challenging problem. In this paper, …