This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

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Description
Teams are increasingly indispensable to achievements in any organizations. Despite the organizations' substantial dependency on teams, fundamental knowledge about the conduct of team-enabled operations is lacking, especially at the {\it social, cognitive} and {\it information} level in relation to team performance and network dynamics. The goal of this dissertation is

Teams are increasingly indispensable to achievements in any organizations. Despite the organizations' substantial dependency on teams, fundamental knowledge about the conduct of team-enabled operations is lacking, especially at the {\it social, cognitive} and {\it information} level in relation to team performance and network dynamics. The goal of this dissertation is to create new instruments to {\it predict}, {\it optimize} and {\it explain} teams' performance in the context of composite networks (i.e., social-cognitive-information networks).

Understanding the dynamic mechanisms that drive the success of high-performing teams can provide the key insights into building the best teams and hence lift the productivity and profitability of the organizations. For this purpose, novel predictive models to forecast the long-term performance of teams ({\it point prediction}) as well as the pathway to impact ({\it trajectory prediction}) have been developed. A joint predictive model by exploring the relationship between team level and individual level performances has also been proposed.

For an existing team, it is often desirable to optimize its performance through expanding the team by bringing a new team member with certain expertise, or finding a new candidate to replace an existing under-performing member. I have developed graph kernel based performance optimization algorithms by considering both the structural matching and skill matching to solve the above enhancement scenarios. I have also worked towards real time team optimization by leveraging reinforcement learning techniques.

With the increased complexity of the machine learning models for predicting and optimizing teams, it is critical to acquire a deeper understanding of model behavior. For this purpose, I have investigated {\em explainable prediction} -- to provide explanation behind a performance prediction and {\em explainable optimization} -- to give reasons why the model recommendations are good candidates for certain enhancement scenarios.
ContributorsLi, Liangyue (Author) / Tong, Hanghang (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Buchler, Norbou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Due to vast resources brought by social media services, social data mining has

received increasing attention in recent years. The availability of sheer amounts of

user-generated data presents data scientists both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities are presented with additional data sources. The abundant link information

in social networks could provide another rich source

Due to vast resources brought by social media services, social data mining has

received increasing attention in recent years. The availability of sheer amounts of

user-generated data presents data scientists both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities are presented with additional data sources. The abundant link information

in social networks could provide another rich source in deriving implicit information

for social data mining. However, the vast majority of existing studies overwhelmingly

focus on positive links between users while negative links are also prevailing in real-

world social networks such as distrust relations in Epinions and foe links in Slashdot.

Though recent studies show that negative links have some added value over positive

links, it is dicult to directly employ them because of its distinct characteristics from

positive interactions. Another challenge is that label information is rather limited

in social media as the labeling process requires human attention and may be very

expensive. Hence, alternative criteria are needed to guide the learning process for

many tasks such as feature selection and sentiment analysis.

To address above-mentioned issues, I study two novel problems for signed social

networks mining, (1) unsupervised feature selection in signed social networks; and

(2) unsupervised sentiment analysis with signed social networks. To tackle the first problem, I propose a novel unsupervised feature selection framework SignedFS. In

particular, I model positive and negative links simultaneously for user preference

learning, and then embed the user preference learning into feature selection. To study the second problem, I incorporate explicit sentiment signals in textual terms and

implicit sentiment signals from signed social networks into a coherent model Signed-

Senti. Empirical experiments on real-world datasets corroborate the effectiveness of

these two frameworks on the tasks of feature selection and sentiment analysis.
ContributorsCheng, Kewei (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017