UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Crowdsourcing decision support: frugal human computation for efficient decision input acquisition
    (2014) Quinn, Alexander James; Bederson, Benjamin B; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    When faced with data-intensive decision problems, individuals, businesses, and governmental decision-makers must balance trade-offs between optimality and the high cost of conducting a thorough decision process. The unprecedented availability of information online has created opportunities to make well-informed, near-optimal decisions more efficiently. A key challenge that remains is the difficulty of efficiently gathering the requisite details in a form suitable for making the decision. Human computation and social media have opened new avenues for gathering relevant information or opinions in support of a decision-making process. It is now possible to coordinate paid web workers from online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and others in a distributed search party for the needed information. However, the strategies that individuals employ when confronted with too much information--satisficing, information foraging, etc.--are more difficult to apply with a large, distributed group. Consequently, current distributed approaches are inherently wasteful of human time and effort. This dissertation offers a method for coordinating workers to efficiently enter the inputs for spreadsheet decision models. As a basis for developing and understanding the idea, I developed AskSheet, a system that uses decision models represented as spreadsheets. The user provides a spreadsheet model of a decision, the formulas of which are analyzed to calculate the value of information for each of the decision inputs. With that, it is able to prioritize the inputs and make the decision input acquisition process more frugal. In doing so, it trades machine capacity for analyzing the model for a reduction in the cost and burden to the humans providing the needed information.
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    A DATA ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR IMPROVING REAL-TIME, DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN HEALTHCARE
    (2010) Yahav, Inbal; Shmeuli, Galit; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation we develop a framework that combines data mining, statistics and operations research methods for improving real-time decision support systems in healthcare. Our approach consists of three main concepts: data gathering and preprocessing, modeling, and deployment. We introduce the notion of offline and semi-offline modeling to differentiate between models that are based on known baseline behavior and those based on a baseline with missing information. We apply and illustrate the framework in the context of two important healthcare contexts: biosurveillance and kidney allocation. In the biosurveillance context, we address the problem of early detection of disease outbreaks. We discuss integer programming-based univariate monitoring and statistical and operations research-based multivariate monitoring approaches. We assess method performance on authentic biosurveillance data. In the kidney allocation context, we present a two-phase model that combines an integer programming-based learning phase and a data-analytical based real-time phase. We examine and evaluate our method on the current Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) waiting list. In both contexts, we show that our framework produces significant improvements over existing methods.