Accepted for the Council:

Dr. Mike Langston and Dr. Arnold Saxton for their encouragement, ideas and constant support. Dr. Elissa Chesler and Dr. Brynn Voy for their insight and ideas when things blurred out for me. John Eblen, Andy Perkins, Gary Rogers, Yun Zhang and all the wonderful students under Dr. Langston. For assisting me around and making me feel at home. Especially John, a wonderful friend and colleague. For helping me out with Perl and UNIX programming. And giving me sufficient insight in graph theory so as to be able to write about it. Dr. Bing Zhang and Dr. Roumyana Yordanova for their help on certain topics of the study. The GST program and its current and former Directors, Dr. Peterson and Dr. Becker, for giving me an opportunity to study at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The thresholding problem is important in today’s data-rich research scenario.