Geospatial data analysis is a multifaceted discipline encompassing the collection, processing, and visualization of diverse datasets. It models and delineates the interactions of people, objects, and phenomena within geographical spaces and predicts patterns based on the relationships between different locations. Despite significant advancements in geospatial data engineering and analytics over...
We present student perceptions of a new first-year engineering programming class that was designed by informed research practices. While the College of Engineering at Oregon State University saw a lot of major switching in the first year, there were not many students switching into computer science (CS). This could have...
Secure two-party computation (2PC) is the task of performing arbitrary calculations on secret inputs provided by two parties, while maintaining secrecy if at least one party is honest. 2PC has been applied to privacy-preserving record linkage and machine learning, in areas such as medicine where maintaining privacy is crucial. One...
Engineering education research has led to a greater understanding of the gap in preparedness of students for the engineering industry. Multiple studies comparing the workplace and academic contexts and the participants in those contexts (i.e., students, faculty, and engineering practitioners) have emphasized similarities and differences between the two contexts by...
The use of board games for teaching introductory computer science is a promising recent avenue of research. The goal is to introduce computing concepts through their use in the implementations of simple games, thereby keeping students engaged through their learning process. However, there is a gap between students' algorithmic descriptions...
University students first learning about computer science (CS) can be intimidated and frustrated by programming. In addition, the general-purpose programming languages chosen for introducing students to programming contain several features that have the potential to overwhelm and distract them from focused curriculum topics, which can lead to reduced retention of...
In computer science, learning abstract fundamental programming concepts requiring students to understand memory management can be very difficult and lead to misunderstandings that carry on into advanced topics. This is especially true in data structures with abstract data types. Understanding how novice students think and reason about data structures is...
Ph.D. candidate Qi Wei's thesis consists of two projects: Chemotherapy Project: a study based on the research paper "Predicting chemotherapy response of various cancer types using a variational auto-encoder approach" submitted to the bioRxiv preprint archive and accepted by the BMC bioinformatics; and Wound Monitor Project: implementing and assessing analytics...
Urban green space is associated with multiple physical and mental health outcomes. Several benefits of green space, such as stress reduction and attention restoration, are dependent on visual perception of green space exposures. However, traditional green space exposure measures do not capture street-level exposures. In this project, we apply deep...
Complex information environments are often organized as hierarchies. However, computational models of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) have almost entirely ignored this fact. Models and tools for predicting programmer navigations have ignored people’s foraging behavior across hierarchies —called hierarchical foraging. Without modeling hierarchical foraging, our ability to build tools to support...