Carol J. Romanowski

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology

As data science is an evolving field, existing definitions reflect this uncertainty with overloaded terms and inconsistency. As a result of the field's fluidity, there is often a mismatch between what data-related programs teach, what employers expect, and the actual tasks data scientists are performing. In addition, the tools available to data sci...

Over the past two decades, data science or data analytics degree programs have begun to emerge, reflecting the world's demand for data specialists to make sense of the vast amounts of collected data in the sciences, engineering, business, and other domains. As degree creation has occurred mainly due to demand, ACM and other professional bodies have...

Protecting critical infrastructure data is challenging because it typically includes sensitive information that is often needed by analysts to answer crucial questions about the critical infrastructure. For example, in the healthcare sector, epidemiologists need to analyze personally identifiable information to track the spread of diseases or regio...

The United States Department of Homeland Security has identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors that employ computing, technology and engineering students. However, most undergraduate curricula in these disciplines do not incorporate the fundamentals of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) into their curricula in a meaningful way. This pape...

System standards have been implemented in many contexts over the last few decades. Using closely aligned standards such as the emerging ISO 37120 typology for sustainable and resilient communities, and by drawing from various recognized capability models and indices, this paper develops a structure for operationalization of a community resilience m...

The last decade has shown a compelling need for a model to measure effectively how communities fare in overcoming unexpected hazards. Many entities, including the UN, have made relevant contributions in this area. However, a majority of these organizations have proposed and implemented mechanisms that only assess qualitative aspects (such as the pr...

When communities are subjected to disruptive events, their response structure is composed of two interconnected systems: (i) a formal professional system that includes emergency services and auxiliary services professionals; and (ii) an ad hoc system formed by community members when the professional response is delayed or is inadequate. The communi...

A widespread emergency event in the United States triggers the activation of a regional emergency operations center that manages a coordinated response to the disaster. Historically, the time-critical decisions made by emergency managers in the face of incomplete information and inadequate historical emergency event data have been guided primarily...

Cybersecurity professionals need training in critical infrastructure protection (CIP) to prepare them for solving problems in design, implementation, and maintenance of infrastructure assets. However, two major roadblocks exist: (1) the lack of necessary skills sets and (2) the frequent need for updates due to rapid changes in computing disciplines...

In a critical infrastructure disaster incident, emergency managers are often compelled to make time-critical decisions based on incomplete information streaming in at disparate times from multiple data sources. As the incident progresses, the ability to predict where additional resources will be needed is crucial to both response and recovery. Deci...

Effective emergency management depends upon accurate information, especially in the case of disaster scale preparation, recovery, and response. As recent experience demonstrates, leveraging situational information is critical to community recovery. Critical incident management involves the fusion of variant informational sources leveraged through c...

Many diverse domains-in the sciences, engineering, healthcare, and homeland security-have been grappling with the analysis of “Big Data,” which has become shorthand to represent extremely large amounts of diverse types of data. A recent Gartner report predicts that around 4.4 million IT jobs globally will be created by 2015 to support Big Data, wit...

The 16 critical infrastructure sectors identified by the US Department of Homeland Security employ many engineering, technology and computing graduates who increasingly face critical infrastructure protection (CIP) issues. However, most undergraduate curricula in these disciplines do not incorporate CIP in any meaningful way. This paper proposes a...

In 2010, high tech industries including computer makers, peripherals manufacturers, and medical equipment manufacturers spent a total of $8 billion on warranty. Reducing warranty costs improves the manufacturer’s profit and helps to reduce the overall cost of the product. An often cited principle is that approximately 80% of the eventual product co...

In this work, we frame a methodology for performing risk analysis for mid-size cities and their metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) that addresses infrastructure vulnerabilities impacting far beyond the MSA boundaries. We address the challenges and pitfalls in assessing critical infrastructure in these MSAs, discuss inter- and intra-sector depend...

Arm movement times were measured to targets with independent constraints (target sizes) in one, two or three directions (width, height and depth). In each case, modified forms of Fitts' law give a good fit to the data, with the best form being dependent on all constraints in the 'Weighted Euclidean' model of Accot, J. and Zhai, S., 2003. (Refining...

In the modern world of computing, diverse mobile devices connect to the internet and typically share data stored within the cloud. To live and succeed in this world, it is imperative that all majors, especially engineering majors, have an in-depth, not introductory, understanding of topics in mobile web computing. This paper explores the design and...

Distance learning has been one vehicle of course delivery at the Rochester Institute of Technology since the early 1990s. Building on the authors' experience in teaching completely online and blended (partly on-campus and partly online) courses to both undergraduate and graduate students, in diverse areas of computing, engineering, and technology,...

The issue of accelerating faculty scholarship is a key item especially for new/untenured faculty. New faculty future career success depends on developing scholarship productivity quickly. Previous research has shown how mentoring new faculty at the early stages of their career has had significant impact on new faculty success. Mentorship is especia...

Schema matching, which establishes whether two objects are semantically related, has been a focus of data management research due to its critical role in enterprise information integration. Current schema matching techniques typically tend to exploit only a single method selected from matching schema structure, or syntax, or semantics, or data and...

AbstractData mining has been making inroads into the engineering design environment—an area that generates large amounts of heterogeneous data for which suitable mining methods are not readily available. For instance, an unsupervised data mining task (clustering) requires an accurate measure of distance or similarity. This paper focuses on the deve...

Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is a maintenance philosophy wherein equipment repair or replacement decisions are based on the current and projected future health of the equipment. The constituents and sub-processes within CBM include sensors and signal processing techniques that provide the mechanism for condition monitoring, and decision suppor...

Many enterprise areas, such as marketing, variant design, group technology, and cellular manufacturing, require their wide variety of products to be organized into families, which are clusters of similar products. In this paper, we propose a similarity metric for finding the distance between existing products based on bills of materials (BOMs), a c...

In variant design, the proliferation of bills of materials makes it difficult for designers to find previous designs that would aid in completing a new design task. This research presents a novel, data mining approach to forming generic bills of materials (GBOMs), entities that represent the different variants in a product family and facilitate the...

Industry demands, crowded curricula, tight budgets, new educational technologies, and accreditation directives are relentlessly pushing engineering educators into unfamiliar - sometimes threatening - new frontiers. Frequently, the guide most qualified to guarantee safe passage across this daunting terrain is the technical communication professional...

Already burdened with overloaded curricula and diminishing budgets, many engineering schools are struggling to implement recent accreditation directives to (1) ensure alt their graduates have the ability to communicate effectively; (2) demonstrate these capabilities via student outcomes; and (3) develop processes for continual improvement while few...

Generic bills of materials (GBOMs) are useful as con figurators and aid in suggesting new product variants. However, current GBOM research does not address the many problems inherent in building GBOMs from legacy data. This research proposes a data mining and graph theoretic approach that partially automates the process. The resulting GBOMs are rep...

Currently, designers do not have access to product life cycle information and other feedback, causing costly design iterations and increased time-to-market. Our research proposes using data mining to incorporate this heterogeneous and distributed information into the beginning stages of design — thereby reducing iterations and lowering the cost of...

Preventive maintenance activities generate information that can help determine the causes of downtime and assist in setting maintenance schedules or alarm limits. When the amount of generated data becomes large, humans have difficulty understanding relationships between variables. In this paper, we explore the applicability of data mining, a method...

Survey results reveal the impact of engineers' communication skills in adjusting to jobs and achieving career goals. A direct correlation emerges between the amount of technical communication (TC) instruction and career advancement. Former students then spell out recommendations for providing relevant TC instruction within the engineering curriculu...