Untenured Faculty Research Initiative (UFRI)

Clinical Intelligence System for PLCO Cancer Data
Canan Eren, Ph.D., School of Computer Science

The goal of this project is to research the mechanisms to develop a data warehouse and clinical intelligence system for Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian cancer data that received from American National Cancer Institute [NCI]. The cancer data will bring into certain formats, cleaned from mistakes and repetitions as a first step. The cancer data warehouse to integrate between the operational data base and medical files and therefore the analysis on data makes easy by using OLAP cubes and viewing multilevel of details from the data. When considering the size and complexity of cancer data, a clinical intelligence system created with both data warehouse and data mining can illuminate the treatment process for physicians. A web-based prototype system will be developed to provide support for physicians in the decision-making process using the decision tree model.

Ex-post travel information: A Novel Approach to Support Route Choice Decision
Daehan Kwak, Ph.D., School of Computer Science

At present, physical sensor devices are used to monitor all aspects of transportation networks. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) uses these devices to gather data about roads and the speed and position of vehicles. After analyzing these data, ITS shares public safety notifications regarding traffic or hazards with travelers or notifies the highway department regarding road conditions. However, ITSs may not be able to collect precise traffic information from these sensors. Thus, in this project we integrate sentiment from social media services to road networks.

Social media can play a key role in providing a new approach to collecting information regarding mobility and transportation services. In social media, information about transportation networks, such as traffic jams and accidents, appear regularly with unexpected texts, and it would be a challenging task to extract these data and transform them into valuable information for analysis.

To study this information, sentiment analysis can make decent observations to support Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) in examining traffic control and management systems. However, sentiment analysis faces technical challenges: extracting meaningful information from social network platforms, and the transformation of extracted data into valuable information. In addition, accurate topic modeling and document representation are other challenging tasks in sentiment analysis.

An architecture will be proposed to automatically compute the sentiment analysis of transportation-related social media data to assist travelers. It contains six stages: user queries, pre-processing of social media data, filtering, ontology-based feature extraction, sentiment analysis, and feature polarity summary.

Analyzing the Effects of Clinical Supervision on Levels of Burnout
Adrienne D. White, Ph.D., Department of Counselor Education

This study will explore the relationship between clinical burnout among novice practicing counselors and developmentally sensitive suprvision. The purpose of study is to close the gap in research that excludes the significance of clinical supervision on novice counselors with less than five years of post-graduate experience in the United States. This research will explore the relationship between perceptions of supervision and symptoms of burnout amongst post-graduate counseling professionals. More specifically this research proposes to show decreases in symptoms of counselor burnout for counselors with positive perceptions of supervision.

The purpose of this research is to analyze ways to integrate three different supervisory styles to decrease levels of clinical burnout. The proposed project seeks to identify the unique problems new counselors face during internship and pre-licensure.

Public Perception toward Sports Gambling in New Jersey: Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Data
Kyoung Kim, Ph.D., School of Health and Human Performance

Although there is much research examining gambling that ranges from legal issues in sports gambling (Rodenberg & Kaburakis, 2013), to consumer attitudes towards online gambling (Gainsbury, Parke, & Suhonen, 2013), and from point shaving in college sports, which is the illegal act of intentionally holding down the score of sport games (Wolfers, 2006), to the efficiency of the gambling market for professional sports (Zuber, Gandar, & Bowers, 1985), little attention has been given to public perceptions on sports betting after wagering on professional sports became legal in New Jersey. Due to an immense rise in sports betting activity in New Jersey, this study will explore who participates in sports gambling, as well as how and why they do so. We will also compare opinions between people living in states where sports betting has been legalized and where sports betting is still banned, in order to systematically investigate whether gambling is still perceived as a socially divisive issue, according to different geographical areas. Finally, we will look further into whether people perceive gambling as an acceptable form of leisure activity.

Impacts of the MPA Program’s Mission and Curriculum Change on Students’ Global Awareness
Bok Jeong, Ph.D., School of Criminal Justice and Public Administration

This study examines if the mission and curriculum changes of a higher education program affect students’ global awareness. The Kean MPA program incorporated global awareness as part of its program mission in fall 2015.  To support the mission revision and its implementation, Kean's MPA Program has introduced a globalization focused curriculum into its programs such as programs and events associated with a global development period and the program has partnered with international organizations including United Nations agencies to provide global awareness and engagement activities for students. The question remains is whether this mission revision actually affects the learning outcome of students in terms of higher education pedagogy perspectives.This study utilizes a quasi-experimental comparative case study to assess and compare the learning outcomes in higher education institutions.