Digital Commons Network^™

A Dataset-Centric Analysis Of Evaluation Protocols In Face Morph Attack Detection, Sheerko R. Hmasalah, Abdulbasit K. Al-Talabani, Aras T. Asaad

Polytechnic Journal

Face morph attack detection (MAD) is often evaluated using datasets collected from diverse sources, created for different purposes, and acquired under varying conditions. This heterogeneity raises questions about how evaluation protocols and dataset characteristics influence reported performance. This work adopts a dataset-centric perspective to analyze the effects of evaluation protocol and dataset composition, including visual quality and morph-to-genuine imbalance, on MAD performance. Experiments are conducted on eight datasets and four morphing techniques using a fixed pipeline evaluated across six backbones, including Vision Transformer (ViT) and five CNN architectures, and ten evaluation scenarios covering homogeneous and heterogeneous cross-morph generalization. Performance is …

Data Defines Success: Algorithm For Dataset Quality Assessment In Deep Learning For Malware Detection, Matei Ionescu

Theses and Dissertations

The field of artificial intelligence is based upon the premise of constructing architectures through which to propagate training data. However, the majority of existing research literature is focused on architecture. While necessary, the attention devoted to the architecture should not so precipitously exceed that of the data. It should be noted that this disparity is not without reasonable cause. Data quality is often exceedingly difficult to verify due to particularities of the field or subfield; LLM repositories of text are distinct from image recognition pictures of dog breeds which are distinct from EEG waveforms of human brains which are distinct …

A Comprehensive Review Of Cyber Security And Current Practices In Global Mining Critical Infrastructure, Abu Barkat Ullah, Wanli Ma, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Bazlur Rashid, Munir Ahmad Saeed, Omer Arshad, Utkarsh Raghav

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The purpose of the study is to explore the reasons behind the low uptake of Information Security Management Standards (ISMS), Asset Management, and Business Continuity Plans despite increasing cyber threats to the mining sector. Mining companies need to modernize and automate to keep up with the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, driven by disruptive technology, forcing systems and technologies to become more integrated, increasing cyber attack threats. To address this, we conducted a literature review analyzing the mining industry across various regions. The research is based on a qualitative analysis of diversified literature. The results highlighted factors behind the low uptake of …

Rrto: A High-Performance Transparent Offloading System For Model Inference In Mobile Edge Computing, Zekai Sun, Xiuxian Guan, Zheng Lin, Yuhao Qing, Haoze Song, Zihan Fang, Zhe Chen, Fangming Liu, Heming Cui, Wei Ni, Jun Luo

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Deploying Machine Learning (ML) applications on resource-constrained mobile devices remains challenging due to limited computational resources and poor platform compatibility. While Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) offers an offloading-based inference paradigm using GPU servers, existing approaches can be divided into non-transparent and transparent methods, with the former necessitating source-code modifications. Non-transparent offloading achieves high performance but requires intrusive code changes, limiting compatibility with diverse applications. Transparent offloading, in contrast, offers wide compatibility but introduces two challenges: performance degradation under MEC's low and fluctuating bandwidth, where per-operator remote procedure calls (RPCs) inflate end-to-end latency and energy consumption; and black-box logic reconstruction, which …

Making Unsafe Sequences Unexecutable: Formal Protocol Enforcement For Cyber-Physical Systems, Arthur Amorim

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Cyber-physical systems execute physical actions in response to software commands, making their communication protocols a primary attack surface. A stealthy attack is a sequence of individually valid messages that violates a required ordering, driving the system into an unsafe state without malware or protocol violation. Existing defenses examine messages or physical state in isolation, not protocol level sequences, and cannot prevent them. Preventing them requires enforcement that makes unsafe sequences unexecutable at the communication boundary.

Formal methods offer a principled path to enforcement, but no tool spans specification to safe deployed hardware. Model checking automates proofs but has no certified …

Visual Cues Of Human-Likeness, Not Salience, Impact Trust-Related Human-Computer Interaction, Jordan Schotz

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

As interactions with digital agents become increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding how visual representations influence social decision-making is critical. Previous research in human-computer interaction has frequently confounded the psychological effects of an agent's perceived human-likeness with the underlying visual salience of the stimuli. To address these persistent gaps, the present study systematically isolated the effects of human-likeness and visual cue trustworthiness on trust behavior while controlling for objective image properties. The present study expanded on and normed the Virtual Avatar Facial Stimuli Set (VAFSS), a comprehensive database comprising hundreds of identity-matched photographs and computer-generated avatars varying across a spectrum …

Advancing Multi-Modal Learning, Swetha Sirnam

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Multimodal learning aims to develop systems that understand and reason across multiple sources of information such as images, videos, audio, and text. These capabilities are central to applications including visual search, digital assistants, robotics, and visual question answering. Despite recent progress in multimodal large language models, current approaches struggle to capture the structured complexity of real-world visual data. Fine-grained visual details are often lost during multimodal alignment, models frequently fail to capture nuanced human intent, and existing methods remain limited in understanding long-form videos with complex temporal dynamics. Furthermore, many evaluation benchmarks rely heavily on explicit visual cues, which can …

Federated Learning In The Era Of Foundation Models, Guangyu Sun

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

The emergence of large-scale foundation models has reshaped computer vision and multi-modal learning, but their substantial computational and communication demands pose significant challenges for deployment in federated learning (FL) systems. Federated learning enables collaborative model training across decentralized clients without sharing raw data, offering strong privacy guarantees. However, adapting foundation models in FL remains difficult due to communication bottlenecks, heterogeneous data distributions, limited device resources, and scarce labeled data. This dissertation presents a unified line of research that addresses these challenges through four complementary frameworks, progressively advancing the efficiency, personalization, and practicality of foundation model adaptation in federated settings.

First, …

Watch Your Step, Mind The Crowd: Socially Compliant Navigation In Unstructured Environments, Jack Vice

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Autonomous mobile robots increasingly operate in complex real-world environments characterized by uneven terrain, dynamic obstacles, and human presence. This dissertation addresses the fundamental challenge of developing adaptive navigation strategies that enable robots to safely and effectively traverse unstructured outdoor environments including construction sites, agricultural fields, and disaster areas while maintaining social compliance around people. We advance this capability through five complementary contributions that collectively target dynamic, unstructured, human-occupied environments. First, we demonstrate evolutionary optimization of legged mobility for uneven terrain. Second, we propose using a spatiotemporal autoencoder to learn the temporal dynamics of moving people and objects. Third, we introduce …

Patterns Of Llm Weaponization: A Comparative Analysis Of Exploitation Incidents Across Commercial Ai Systems, George Antoniou

Faculty and Staff Publications & Presentations

This comparative study examines patterns of Large Language Model (LLM) weaponization through systematic analysis of four major exploitation incidents spanning from 2023-2025. While existing research focuses on isolated incidents or theoretical vulnerabilities, this study provides one of the first comprehensive comparative frameworks analyzing exploitation patterns across state-sponsored cyber-espionage (Anthropic Claude incident), academic security research (GPT- 4 autonomous privilege escalation), social engineering platforms (SpearBot phishing framework), and underground criminal commoditization (WormGPT/FraudGPT ecosystem). Through comparative analysis across eight dimensions: Adversary sophistication, target selection, exploitation techniques, autonomy levels, detection evasion, attribution challenges, defensive gaps, and capability democratization, this research identifies critical cross-case patterns …

From Enhancement To Substitution: A Strategic Provocation On Simulation-Based Sport, Grant B. Morgan, Andreas Stamatis

Journal of Applied Sport Management

Advances in artificial intelligence, large-scale machine learning, and simulation technologies are rapidly transforming how sport is played, analyzed, and consumed. To date, most scholarly and industry discussions frame these technologies as tools that enhance embodied sport by improving performance, officiating, media production, and fan engagement. This paper extends that conversation by posing a more provocative strategic question: under what conditions might simulation move from enhancement to substitution? Focusing explicitly on sport as a business and entertainment enterprise, we argue that many of sport’s core sources of cultural and economic value—uncertainty of outcome, narrative continuity, legitimacy, and collective meaning—are structurally …

Real-Time Likelihood Map Generation To Localize Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Transients, Jeremy Buhler, Marion Sudvarg

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

High-energy transient astrophysical phenomena, such as supernovae and binary neutron star mergers, benefit from a multi-wavelength investigation in which a space- or balloon-based omnidirectional telescope detects and localizes early high-energy emissions (such as a gamma-ray burst), then alerts a narrow-field follow-up instrument to observe the source. The high-energy telescope must provide a map that assigns to each sky location a likelihood that the source appears there. To issue prompt alerts despite limits on communication bandwidth and latency, it is desirable to compute this map aboard the high-energy telescope, but doing so requires rapid response while computing under stringent size, weight, …

Performance Modeling And Improvements On The Grb Source Localization Streaming Pipeline Aboard The Antarctic Demonstrator For The Advanced Particle-Astrophysics Telescope (Adapt), Ye Htet, Ye Htet, Marion Sudvarg, Marion Sudvarg, Honghao Yang, Jeremy Buhler, Roger Chamberlain, Wenlei Chen, Wenlei Chen, James Buckley, Matthew Andrew, Blake Bal, Elisabetta E. Bissaldi, Richard G. Bose, Dana Braun, James H. Buckley, Jeremy Buhler, Eric Burns

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT) is a mission concept for a space-based gamma-ray telescope whose capabilities include prompt localization of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to support multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astrophysics. ADAPT — APT's balloon-borne prototype — can localize GRBs in well under a second using on-board computing hardware. ADAPT will partner with ground-based, fast-slewing optical telescopes, rapidly providing alerts that enable the partner to observe a short-duration burst within a few seconds of detection. In this work, we investigate the utility of having ADAPT issue progressively more accurate location estimates for a GRB as detected Compton events from the burst accumulate …

Fpga-Based Data Processing Using High-Level Synthesis On The Antarctic Demonstrator For The Advanced Particle-Astrophysics Telescope (Adapt), Marion Sudvarg, Marion Sudvarg, Longhao Huang, Boran Yang, Blake Bal, Roger Chamberlain, Jeremy Buhler, Leonardo Di Venere, Leonardo Di Venere, Davide Serini, James Buckley, Matthew Andrew, Blake Bal, Elisabetta E. Bissaldi, Richard G. Bose, Dana Braun, James H. Buckley, Jeremy Buhler

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

FPGAs are widely deployed on high-energy astrophysics telescopes to read out sensor data from front-end electronics. To support continuous data streams or high trigger rates, FPGA logic may be employed to process raw sensor readout values, reducing the volume of data transmitted, processed, and stored by downstream CPU-based computational platforms. Across instruments, these FPGA-based processing pipelines often have similar semantics and share common stages. However, diverse telescope designs require unique implementations of the constituent algorithms, and the logic is often rewritten from scratch for a new instrument. Writing, simulating, and debugging firmware is difficult and time consuming. However, High-Level Synthesis …

Supply Chain Network Based On Blockchain And Intelligent Agent, Hiba Hamdi Hassan, Rana Fareed Ghani

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

In agricultural supply chains, the complexity and indeterminacy pose serious challenges to traceability, reliability and confidence today. This challenge is especially acute in the olive oil industry where adulteration, wrong labeling, and uneven chemical quality threaten the actual well-being of producers and consumers. The project aims to design a blockchain-based hybrid architecture with intelligent agents (FNNs) to enhance transparency, reliability and responsiveness in the olive oil supply chain. The Blockchain component enables a completely open, tamper-proof ledger to be built in a very decentralized way and preserved as an archive of every account of its transactions. The intelligent agents contribute …

Intelligent Extensible Markup Language Encryption Using Type-2 Fuzzy Logic, Faiez Musa Lahmood Alrufaye, Seham Ahmed Hashem

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

Financial and commercial institutions increasingly rely on Extensible Markup Language (XML) files as a standard means of exchanging data. However, this extensive use has created serious security challenges due to the fact that these files contain sensitive information such as bank card numbers and expiration dates. Relying on traditional full file encryption methods achieves a high degree of security, but it causes problems related to the large file sizes that consume memory and the long encryption and decryption times, which reduces the efficiency of systems when dealing with a large number of daily transactions. Methods based on Type-1 Fuzzy Logic …

Enhanced Generative Convolutional Networks: A Hybrid Algorithm For Refinement Video Classification, Dalal Thair Mahjoub, Hala Bahjat Abdulwahab, Kesra Nermend

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

Video classification is a vital area of research due to the growing volume of video content in various applications. Accurate category across various resolutions poses challenges, which include adapting to scaling, resizing, and compression. Therefore, this paper introduces an innovative Generative Convolutional Network (GCN) set of rules tailored for multi-resolution video classes. The proposed GCN model utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) combined with generative modeling to enhance the extraction of functions across varying video resolutions, which is crucial for maintaining class robustness in the face of common video adjustments, such as scaling, resizing, and compression. In contrast, traditional fashions frequently …

Review Of Video Steganography By Using Deep Learning Methods: Datasets, Techniques, And Evaluations, Noor Fahem Sahib, Soukaena Hassan Hashem, Ekhlas Falih Naser

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

The growing prevalence of cyber threats, including fraud and attacks, has intensified the demand for secure methods of safeguarding confidential information exchanged between users. As telecommunications increasingly rely on multimedia data, video steganography has become a prominent technique to address these concerns. By embedding sensitive data within video files, this approach enhances protection against unauthorized access and common internet-based attacks, offering a robust layer of security in an era of escalating digital risks. With the introduction of Deep Learning (DL) steganography methods recently, video steganography can be defined as a rapidly developing subject within information security. This study provides a …

Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition System For Abductees Rescue Using Deep Learning Techniques, Aws Saood Mohamed, Nidaa Flaih Hassan, Abeer Salim Jamil

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

Hand gesture recognition is a challenging problem in computer vision, particularly in terms of security surveillance applications. This study presents the first efficient system for abduction-related hand gesture real-time detection based on deep learning. The most critical problem is to detect and recognize hand gestures in real surveillance conditions and to be computationally effective for real-time multi-hand tracking in various lighting situations while allowing reliable surveillance beyond the 1–4 meters limitation. The proposed system consists of three main parts: The adaptive hand tracking algorithm, which has been used to create the Abductees-Rescue dataset. Introduced pose estimation You Only Look Once …

Hate Speech Detection Using Optimized Feature Representation Via Spiral-Grey Wolf Optimizer-Based Machine Learning Approaches, Noor S. Farhan, Matheel E. Abdulmunim, Hasanen S. Abdullah

Journal of Soft Computing and Computer Applications

Hate speech detection is crucial as social media diversifies. This research present a lightweight, scalable system using traditional machine learning methods along with a new approach called Spiral-Grey Wolf Optimizer (S-GWO).

S-GWO effectively selects key features that consider both meaning and content from the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) space, leading to high-quality representation without excessive computing power.

The propoused system was tested on Arabic and another English datasets using six machine learning methods: SVM, RF, LR, KNN, NB, and SGD. It achieved 92% accuracy and F1 score on the Arabic dataset, while reaching 100% accuracy on the English …

(R2141) Analysis Of Map^I_1 , Ph^(Oa)_2 / Ph^I_1 , Ph^O_2 / 1 Retrial Inventory Queue With Two Way Communication, (S, S) Replenishment Policy, Feedback, Bernoulli Vacation And Impatient Customers, G. Ayyappan, V. Ganesan

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

This work discusses about the topic as the two-way communication retrial inventory queue model, the (s, S) replenishment policy, immediate feedback, Bernoulli vacations, and impatient customers. The assumption we make is that arrivals follow a Markovian arrival process, and the server provides phase type services. When the server is idle and there is a positive inventory, an arriving customer immediately receives service. If not, arriving customers goes to orbit with infinite capacity. Only in the account of positive inventory the server renders rapid feedback for incoming call arrivals, otherwise customer departs. Outgoing calls will only be made by the server …

Numerical Simulations Of Ship Liquid Tank Sloshing Based On Graph Neural Networks, Wenkang Zhang, Xiaofeng Sun, Yiping Zhong, Yong Yin

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To address the high consumption of computational resources in simulating ship liquid tank sloshing using computational fluid dynamics simulation methods, a data-driven numerical simulation model was proposed based on graph neural networks. An encoder-processor-decoder framework was employed in the proposed model. The encoder extracted features of fluid particles from the first five time steps. The processor learnt latent motion patterns of fluid and updated features, and the decoder predicted features of particles at subsequent time steps. The processor incorporated a self-attention mechanism to enable dynamic adjacency weight allocation and emphasize the influence of irregular tank wall regions. Training …

Robust Security Assurance In Cyber-Physical Systems: From Attack Diagnosis To Attack Resilience, Zifan Wang

Dissertations - ALL

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have become integral to critical infrastructure, from autonomous vehicles to industrial control systems. However, their increased connectivity and sophistication introduce new vulnerabilities, making security a paramount concern. This dissertation presents a comprehensive pipeline for enhancing CPS security, focusing on accurate diagnosis of trustworthy time frames and subsystems, followed by system resilience measures to restore safe states. The foundation of system resilience lies in an advanced checkpointing protocol for real-time multi-process systems. A novel three-step approach uniquely addresses both logical and timing correctness, which are crucial for modern CPS applications. By partitioning processes into directed acyclic graphs, implementing …

Optimized Beamforming And Network Slicing For Dense Urban 5g Deployments, Kwame S. Ibwe

Tanzania Journal of Science

Optimizing beamforming and network slicing is critical for enhancing spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and resource distribution fairness in dense urban 5G networks. This paper proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm particle swarm optimization (GA-PSO) method to jointly optimize beamforming weights, bandwidth allocation, and power distribution, balancing computational efficiency with near optimal performance. The hybrid approach uses GA for global exploration and PSO for fast convergence, overcoming the limitations of standalone heuristic and exact optimization methods. Simulation experiments in a dense urban 5G network with massive MIMO base stations show that proposed method achieves up to 15% higher spectral efficiency and 18% …

Multipacking On Graphs And Euclidean Metric Space, Sk Samim Islam

Doctoral Theses

A multipacking in an undirected graph G = (V,E) is a set M ⊆ V such that for every vertex v ∈ V and for every integer r ≥ 1, the ball of radius r around v contains at most r vertices of M, that is, there are at most r vertices in M at a distance at most r from v in G. The multipacking number of G is the maximum cardinality of a multipacking of G and is denoted by mp(G). The MULTIPACKING problem asks whether a graph contains a multipacking of size at least k. For more …

Fine-Tuning Llama2 For Summarizing Discharge Notes: Evaluating The Role Of Highlighted Information, Mahshad Koohi Habibi Dehkordi, Yehoshua Perl, Fadi P. Deek, Hao Liu

School of Computing Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study investigates whether incorporating highlighted information in discharge notes improves the quality of the summaries generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, it evaluates the effect of using highlighted versus unhighlighted inputs for fine-tuning LLaMA2-13B model for summarization tasks. We fine-tuned LlaMA2-13B in two variants using MIMIC-IV-Ext-BHC dataset: one variant fine-tuned with the highlighted discharge notes (H-LLaMA), and the other on the same set of notes without highlighting (U-LLaMA). Highlighting was performed automatically using a Cardiology Interface Terminology (CIT) presented in our previous work. H-LLaMA and U-LLaMA were evaluated on a randomly selected test set of 100 discharge notes …

Mixed Linear Equation–Inequality Systems Over The Pura Vida Neutrosophic Algebra, Muhammad Rayyanu Abdullahi, Abdulhadi Aminu

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

This paper proposes a neutrosophic extension of max-plus algebra for solving mixed systems of linear equations and inequalities.Classical max-plus algebra is a powerful tool for modeling synchronization in discrete-event systems LastNatpreClose LastNatClose, but it assumes fully deterministic data.To incorporate uncertainty and indeterminacy, we reformulate the framework so that coefficients and variables are expressed as neutrosophic numbers

γ+λI,γ,λ∈ℝ,I∈[0,1],

where I quantifies the degree of indeterminacy.

We redefine the max-plus semiring in this neutrosophic setting, extend solvability and uniqueness results, and adapt the ONEMLP-EI algorithm LastNatpreClose LastNatClose to handle neutrosophic …

Mapping Sustainability To Cybernetic-Generative Artificial Intelligence-Based Education: An Innovative Neutrosophic Orbifold-Lattice Methodology, Mona Mohamed, Ahmed A. Metwaly

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

The lightning-fast development of artificial intelligence (AI), notably generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) technologies, has intrigued multiple disciplines, particularly education. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as beneficial cognitive resources that address knowledge deficits and provide tailored educational support for learners and staff. For learners, LLMs are regarded as knowledgeable educators who offer prompt, focused responses and rationales to tricky queries. Whereby LLMs for staff, Strength enhancer, automating tedious tasks, and creating intelligent resources.Gen AI’s rapid growth offers enormous obstacles for educational systems, compelling them to discover solutions for these obstacles.

Conceptually, cybernetics is leveraged for bridging the …

Advancements In Perfect Matchings Within Neutrosophic Fuzzy Graphs: Theory And Applications, Muhammad Saeed, Fatima Razaq

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Graph theory has been widely used in exemplifying relational structure, and a greater generalization to fuzzy and neutrosophic space enables the exemplification of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and inconsistency in complex systems. Some of these extensions include the neutrosophic fuzzy graphs that provide a more detailed description of the loose relations between the vertices and the edges. However, unlike in classical graph theory, where the concepts of matching and perfect matching are well developed, very little has been studied on how the two concepts can be extended to neutrosophic fuzzy graphs. To seal this gap, the current paper develops and defines the …

Integrating Mcdm Techniques For Optimized Task Offloading In Multi-Uav- Enaled Mobile Edge Computing System, Amira Salam

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Carefully choosing a task offloading strategy is crucial for optimizing task scheduling and offloading strategies in a multi-UAV system. Regarding cost, responsiveness, scalability, and data security, each strategy has pros and cons. As a result, selecting the best offloading technique is essential to multi-UAV mobile edge computing task scheduling optimization. A methodical and well-informed decision-making process accomplishes this.

The current study introduces a new hybrid methodology for the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model, known as IVNs-DEMATEL-ANP-VIKOR. The purpose of this model is to find and choose an efficient task offloading strategy. With this method, we use IVNs-DEMATEL to show how different …