To my parents, for their years of support and encouragement. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without help and support of many people. I would to thank my advisor Dr. Xenofon Koutsoukos, whose guidance and advice was infinitely valuable in allowing me to complete this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Mitchell Wilkes for graciously agreeing to be the second reader...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Research on children's use of mobile media devices lags behind its adoption. The objective of this study was to examine young children's exposure to and use of mobile media devices. METHODS Cross-sectional study of 350 children aged 6 months to 4 years seen October to November 2014 at a pediatric clinic in an urban, low-income, minority community. The survey was adap...

Information technology had a great impact in all aspects of life and the global economy is currently undergoing fundamental transformation. Information technology has very real impact in most of industries and in all aspects of economy, while businesses and enterprises continue to undergo considerable changes. Usage of these technologies is revolutionizing the rules of business, resulting in st...

For most non-trivial programs it is not satisfactory just to terminate the program with an error message. Consider the situation where the program is a word processor. An error message saying e.g. that some internal register has overflowed is in general not meaningful to a user of such a word processor. Another example is a flight reservation system. Such a system runs over a very long period o...

Exception handling is a fundamental functionality of workflow management systems (WfMS). User involvement in exception handling is recognized as critical in various situations due to the unpredictability nature of the exceptions that can occur in a running workflow (WF) engine. The problem however is how to orchestrate human ad hoc interventions with a minimum impact on system integrity. The co...