For the past decade, mobile health applications are seeing greater acceptance due to their potential to remotely monitor and increase patient engagement, particularly for chronic disease. Sickle Cell Disease is an inherited chronic disorder of red blood cells requiring careful pain management. A significant number of mHealth applications have been developed in the market to help clinicians collect and monitor information of SCD patients. Surveys are the most common way to self-report patient conditions. These are non-engaging and suffer from poor compliance. The quality of data gathered from survey instruments while using technology can be questioned as patients may be motivated to complete a task but not motivated to do it well. A compromise in quality and quantity of the collected patient data hinders the clinicians' effort to be able to monitor patient's health on a regular basis and derive effective treatment measures. This research study has two goals. The first is to monitor user compliance and data quality in mHealth apps with long and repetitive surveys delivered. The second is to identify possible motivational interventions to help improve compliance and data quality. As a form of intervention, will introduce intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors within the application and test it on a small target population. I will validate the impact of these motivational factors by performing a comparative analysis on the test results to determine improvements in user performance. This study is relevant, as it will help analyze user behavior in long and repetitive self-reporting tasks and derive measures to improve user performance. The results will assist software engineers working with doctors in designing and developing improved self-reporting mHealth applications for collecting better quality data and enhance user compliance.

Keyword search provides a simple and user-friendly mechanism for information search, and has become increasingly popular for accessing structured or semi-structured data. However, there are two open issues of keyword search on semi/structured data which are not well addressed by existing work yet.

First, while an increasing amount of investigation has been done in this important area, most existing work concentrates on efficiency instead of search quality and may fail to deliver high quality results from semantic perspectives. Majority of the existing work generates minimal sub-graph results that are oblivious to the entity and relationship semantics embedded in the data and in the user query. There are also studies that define results to be subtrees or subgraphs that contain all query keywords but are not necessarily ``minimal''. However, such result construction method suffers from the same problem of semantic mis-alignment between data and user query. In this work the semantics of how to {\em define} results that can capture users' search intention and then the generation of search intention aware results is studied.

Second, most existing research is incapable of handling large-scale structured data. However, as data volume has seen rapid growth in recent years, the problem of how to efficiently process keyword queries on large-scale structured data becomes important. MapReduce is widely acknowledged as an effective programming model to process big data. For keyword query processing on data graph, first graph algorithms which can efficiently return query results that are consistent with users' search intention are proposed. Then these algorithms are migrated to MapReduce to support big data. For keyword query processing on schema graph, it first transforms a keyword query into multiple SQL queries, then all generated SQL queries are run on the structured data. Therefore it is crucial to find the optimal way to execute a SQL query using MapReduce, which can minimize the processing time. In this work, a system called SOSQL is developed which generates the optimal query execution plan using MapReduce for a SQL query $Q$ with time complexity $O(n^2)$, where $n$ is the number of input tables of $Q$.

Semantic web is the web of data that provides a common framework and technologies for sharing and reusing data in various applications. In semantic web terminology, linked data is the term used to describe a method of exposing and connecting data on the web from different sources. The purpose of linked data and semantic web is to publish data in an open and standard format and to link this data with existing data on the Linked Open Data Cloud. The goal of this thesis to come up with a semantic framework for integrating and publishing linked data on the web. Traditionally integrating data from multiple sources usually involves an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) framework to generate datasets for analytics and visualization. The thesis proposes introducing a semantic component in the ETL framework to semi-automate the generation and publishing of linked data. In this thesis, various existing ETL tools and data integration techniques have been analyzed and deficiencies have been identified. This thesis proposes a set of requirements for the semantic ETL framework by conducting a manual process to integrate data from various sources such as weather, holidays, airports, flight arrival, departure and delays. The research questions that are addressed are: (i) to what extent can the integration, generation, and publishing of linked data to the cloud using a semantic ETL framework be automated; (ii) does use of semantic technologies produce a richer data model and integrated data. Details of the methodology, data collection, and application that uses the linked data generated are presented. Evaluation is done by comparing traditional data integration approach with semantic ETL approach in terms of effort involved in integration, data model generated and querying the data generated.

With the inception of World Wide Web, the amount of data present on the internet is tremendous. This makes the task of navigating through this enormous amount of data quite difficult for the user. As users struggle to navigate through this wealth of information, the need for the development of an automated system that can extract the required information becomes urgent. The aim of this thesis is to develop a Question Answering system to ease the process of information retrieval.

Question Answering systems have been around for quite some time and are a sub-field of information retrieval and natural language processing. The task of any Question Answering system is to seek an answer to a free form factual question. The difficulty of pinpointing and verifying the precise answer makes question answering more challenging than simple information retrieval done by search engines. Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is a yearly conference which provides large - scale infrastructure and resources to support research in information retrieval domain. TREC has a question answering track since 1999 where the questions dataset contains a list of factual questions (Vorhees & Tice, 1999). DBpedia (Bizer et al., 2009) is a community driven effort to extract and structure the data present in Wikipedia.

The research objective of this thesis is to develop a novel approach to Question Answering based on a composition of conventional approaches of Information Retrieval and Natural Language processing. The focus is also on exploring the use of a structured and annotated knowledge base as opposed to an unstructured knowledge base. The knowledge base used here is DBpedia and the final system is evaluated on the TREC 2004 questions dataset.

The concept of Linked Data is gaining widespread popularity and importance. The method of publishing and linking structured data on the web is called Linked Data. Emergence of Linked Data has made it possible to make sense of huge data, which is scattered all over the web, and link multiple heterogeneous sources. This leads to the challenge of maintaining the quality of Linked Data, i.e., ensuring outdated data is removed and new data is included. The focus of this thesis is devising strategies to effectively integrate data from multiple sources, publish it as Linked Data, and maintain the quality of Linked Data. The domain used in the study is online education. With so many online courses offered by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), it is becoming increasingly difficult for an end user to gauge which course best fits his/her needs.

Users are spoilt for choices. It would be very helpful for them to make a choice if there is a single place where they can visually compare the offerings of various MOOC providers for the course they are interested in. Previous work has been done in this area through the MOOCLink project that involved integrating data from Coursera, EdX, and Udacity and generation of linked data, i.e. Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples.

The research objective of this thesis is to determine a methodology by which the quality

of data available through the MOOCLink application is maintained, as there are lots of new courses being constantly added and old courses being removed by data providers. This thesis presents the integration of data from various MOOC providers and algorithms for incrementally updating linked data to maintain their quality and compare it against a naïve approach in order to constantly keep the users engaged with up-to-date data. A master threshold value was determined through experiments and analysis that quantifies one algorithm being better than the other in terms of time efficiency. An evaluation of the tool shows the effectiveness of the algorithms presented in this thesis.

Text Classification is a rapidly evolving area of Data Mining while Requirements Engineering is a less-explored area of Software Engineering which deals the process of defining, documenting and maintaining a software system's requirements. When researchers decided to blend these two streams in, there was research on automating the process of classification of software requirements statements into categories easily comprehensible for developers for faster development and delivery, which till now was mostly done manually by software engineers - indeed a tedious job. However, most of the research was focused on classification of Non-functional requirements pertaining to intangible features such as security, reliability, quality and so on. It is indeed a challenging task to automatically classify functional requirements, those pertaining to how the system will function, especially those belonging to different and large enterprise systems. This requires exploitation of text mining capabilities. This thesis aims to investigate results of text classification applied on functional software requirements by creating a framework in R and making use of algorithms and techniques like k-nearest neighbors, support vector machine, and many others like boosting, bagging, maximum entropy, neural networks and random forests in an ensemble approach. The study was conducted by collecting and visualizing relevant enterprise data manually classified previously and subsequently used for training the model. Key components for training included frequency of terms in the documents and the level of cleanliness of data. The model was applied on test data and validated for analysis, by studying and comparing parameters like precision, recall and accuracy.

This reports investigates the general day to day problems faced by small businesses, particularly small vendors, in areas of marketing and general management. Due to lack of man power, internet availability and properly documented data, small business cannot optimize their business. The aim of the research is to address and find a solution to these problems faced, in the form of a tool which utilizes data science. The tool will have features which will aid the vendor to mine their data which they record themselves and find useful information which will benefit their businesses. Since there is lack of properly documented data, One Class Classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to build a classifying model that can return positive values for audience that is likely to respond to a marketing strategy. Market basket analysis is used to choose products from the inventory in a way that patterns are found amongst them and therefore there is a higher chance of a marketing strategy to attract audience. Also, higher selling products can be used to the vendors' advantage and lesser selling products can be paired with them to have an overall profit to the business. The tool, as envisioned, meets all the requirements that it was set out to have and can be used as a stand alone application to bring the power of data mining into the hands of a small vendor.

Mobile data collection (MDC) applications have been growing in the last decade

especially in the field of education and research. Although many MDC applications are

available, almost all of them are tailor-made for a very specific task in a very specific

field (i.e. health, traffic, weather forecasts, …etc.). Since the main users of these apps are

researchers, physicians or generally data collectors, it can be extremely challenging for

them to make adjustments or modifications to these applications given that they have

limited or no technical background in coding. Another common issue with MDC

applications is that its functionalities are limited only to data collection and storing. Other

functionalities such as data visualizations, data sharing, data synchronization and/or data updating are rarely found in MDC apps.

This thesis tries to solve the problems mentioned above by adding the following

two enhancements: (a) the ability for data collectors to customize their own applications

based on the project they’re working on, (b) and introducing new tools that would help

manage the collected data. This will be achieved by creating a Java standalone

application where data collectors can use to design their own mobile apps in a userfriendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). Once the app has been completely designed

using the Java tool, a new iOS mobile application would be automatically generated

based on the user’s input. By using this tool, researchers now are able to create mobile

applications that are completely tailored to their needs, in addition to enjoying new

features such as visualize and analyze data, synchronize data to the remote database,

share data with other data collectors and update existing data.

The processing of large volumes of RDF data require an efficient storage and query processing engine that can scale well with the volume of data. The initial attempts to address this issue focused on optimizing native RDF stores as well as conventional relational databases management systems. But as the volume of RDF data grew to exponential proportions, the limitations of these systems became apparent and researchers began to focus on using big data analysis tools, most notably Hadoop, to process RDF data. Various studies and benchmarks that evaluate these tools for RDF data processing have been published. In the past two and half years, however, heavy users of big data systems, like Facebook, noted limitations with the query performance of these big data systems and began to develop new distributed query engines for big data that do not rely on map-reduce. Facebook's Presto is one such example.

This thesis deals with evaluating the performance of Presto in processing big RDF data against Apache Hive. A comparative analysis was also conducted against 4store, a native RDF store. To evaluate the performance Presto for big RDF data processing, a map-reduce program and a compiler, based on Flex and Bison, were implemented. The map-reduce program loads RDF data into HDFS while the compiler translates SPARQL queries into a subset of SQL that Presto (and Hive) can understand. The evaluation was done on four and eight node Linux clusters installed on Microsoft Windows Azure platform with RDF datasets of size 10, 20, and 30 million triples. The results of the experiment show that Presto has a much higher performance than Hive can be used to process big RDF data. The thesis also proposes an architecture based on Presto, Presto-RDF, that can be used to process big RDF data.