Digital Commons Network^™

Negotiating Digital Identities With Ai Companions: Motivations, Strategies, And Emotional Outcomes, Renkai Ma, Shuo Niu, Lingyao Li, Alexander Hirth, Ava Brehm, Rowajana Behterin Barbie

Computer Science

AI companions enable deep emotional relationships by engaging a user's sense of identity, but they also pose risks like unhealthy emotional dependence. Mitigating these risks requires first understanding the underlying process of identity construction and negotiation with AI companions. Focusing on Character.AI (C.AI), a popular AI companion, we conducted an LLM-assisted thematic analysis of 22,374 online discussions on its subreddit. Using Identity Negotiation Theory as an analytical lens, we identified a three-stage process: 1) five user motivations; 2) an identity negotiation process involving three communication expectations and four identity co-construction strategies; and 3) three emotional outcomes. Our findings surface the …

Creating Disability Story Videos With Generative Ai: Motivation, Expression, And Sharing, Shuo Niu, Dylan Clements, Hyungsin Kim

Computer Science

Generative AI (GenAI) is both promising and challenging in supporting people with disabilities (PwDs) in creating stories about disability. GenAI can reduce barriers to media production and inspire the creativity of PwDs, but it may also introduce biases and imperfections that hinder its adoption for personal expression. In this research, we examine how nine PwD from a disability advocacy group used GenAI to create videos sharing their disability experiences. Grounded in digital storytelling theory, we explore the motivations, expression, and sharing of PwD-created GenAI story videos. We conclude with a framework of momentous depiction, which highlights four core affordances of …

When Generative Ai Is Intimate, Sexy, And Violent: Examining Not-Safe-For-Work (Nsfw) Chatbots On Flowgpt, Xian Li, Yuanning Han, Di Liu, Pengcheng An, Shuo Niu

Computer Science

Content Warning: This paper contains sexually explicit and violent images and text. User-created chatbots powered by generative AI offer new ways to share and interact with Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. However, little is known about the characteristics of these GenAI-based chatbots and their user interactions. Drawing on the functional theory of NSFW on social media, this study analyzes 376 NSFW chatbots and 307 public conversation sessions on FlowGPT. Findings identify four chatbot types: roleplay characters, story generators, image generators, and do-anything-now bots. AI Characters portraying fantasy personas and enabling hangout-style interactions are most common, often using explicit avatar images to invite …

The Promises And Perils Of Using Llms For Effective Public Services, Erina Seh-Young Moon, Matthew Tamura, Angelina Zhai, Nuzaira Habib, Behnaz Shirazi, Altaf Kassam, Devansh Saxena, Shion Guha

Health Services and Informatics Research

Governments are the primary providers of essential public services and are responsible for delivering them effectively. In high-stakes decision-making domains such as child welfare (CW), agencies must protect children without unnecessarily prolonging a family’s engagement with the system. With growing optimism around AI, governments are pushing for its integration but concerns regarding feasibility and harms remain. Through collaborations with a large Canadian CW agency, we examined how LocalLLM and BERTopic models can track CW case progress. We demonstrate how the tools can potentially assist workers in opportunistically addressing gaps in their work by signaling case progress/deviations. And yet, we also …

From Oversight To Insight: Transforming Cybersecurity Governance In Boardrooms, Tooba Aamir, Georgia Psaroulis, Marthie Grobler, Helge Janicke

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Cybersecurity governance is increasingly critical in a digital economy, with board directors playing a central role in shaping organisational resilience. Directors are pivotal in setting cybersecurity strategies and carrying fiduciary obligations that extend to digital risk oversight. This study examines the cybersecurity literacy and governance practices of Australian board directors through a qualitative interview study with 13 participants. Findings reveal a substantial gap in directors' knowledge and confidence, undermining effective oversight and informed decision-making. This deficit limits their ability to interrogate risk reports, challenge assumptions, and steer investment in line with organisational resilience goals. In response, we propose a Board …

Ai’S Role In Searching For Evidence: Friend And Foe, Barbara (Basia) Delawska-Elliott, Brandon Wilkinson

Publications 2026-present

No abstract provided.

Characterizing User-Reported Risks Across Llm Chatbots, Lingyao Li, Renkai Ma, Zhaoqian Xue, Junjie Xiong

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integral to daily life, users are engaging with multiple LLM chatbots for various needs; however, prior research on LLM risks often remains lab-based or focuses on single LLMs like ChatGPT or singular risks like privacy. To gain a multi-risk, cross-chatbot understanding of user experiences, we analyze Reddit discussions around seven major LLM chatbots using the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. We find that user-reported risks are unevenly distributed and chatbot-specific: ChatGPT is associated with safety and fairness concerns, Gemini with privacy, and Claude with security and resilience. Less frequent risks, such as explainability …

Older Adults And Emerging Technology Fraud In The Ai Deepfake Era, Thiago Neves

Research Days

Artificial intelligence has accelerated faster than society's ability to adapt, leaving older adults extremely vulnerable to AI-generated fraud. Americans over age 60 lost $4.9 billion to scams in 2024, 43% more than the previous year. In this research, I investigate how digital illiteracy, combined with AI-generated deepfakes, creates this crisis. Older adults struggle with three principal vulnerabilities: distinguishing legitimate sites from scams, judging whether online information is truthful, and understanding how algorithms use their data. AI weaponizes these gaps through voice clones, synthetic video calls, and personalized phishing emails that avoid the trust cues seniors tend to rely on. I …

Ai's Double Edged Sword: Fighting Against Synthetic Csam, Shekhinah Adra Green

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The rapid advancements in generative artificial intelligence has introduced new challenges in the production and distribution of synthetic child sexual abuse material (CSAM). AI has the capabilities of creating highly realistic imagery and videos, which  raises serious legal and ethical concerns, increasing the risk of harm, exploitation, and revictimization.

This paper discusses the legal improvements needed in order to lower the change of legal loopholes, how digital forensic analyst use advanced tools to identify and investigate synthetic material, and different methods to start the reduction of synthetic CSAM.

Advice For Incorporating Ai Tools Into Your Legal Practice, Celia Bigoness, Robert A. Mackenzie, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We have been speaking with many lawyers and law students about using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their legal practice. We are struck by the fact that many of them have not been experimenting much, if at all, with the tools that are available to them - although many acknowledge that their clients are increasingly integrating generative AI into their businesses. We have been integrating a lot of these tools into our own professional lives, and here are some tips to help lawyers and law students get comfortable with AI tools that can help them, in big ways and …

Simple D&D: A Web-Based Character Creation System For Dungeons & Dragons, Brennan M. Bondio, Dalton N. Tate, Landon F. Boyd

ATU Scholars Symposium

Dungeons & Dragons, published by Wizards of the Coast, is a widely played tabletop role-playing game that requires players to create detailed characters governed by structured rule systems. Character creation involves managing interdependent attributes, calculations, and constraints that can be difficult for new players and time-consuming even for experienced participants. These complexities create a barrier to entry and reduce efficiency during gameplay preparation.

This project addresses that challenge through the development of Simple D&D, a web-based character creation system designed to streamline and automate rule-driven character configuration. The system aims to reduce manual calculation errors and setup time while maintaining …

Llm-Based Stock Sentiment And Market Intelligence Platform, Joshua Thrower, Andrew Pinkerton, Ian Duggan, Wyatt Lester

ATU Scholars Symposium

Financial markets increasingly react to social media discourse, yet investors lack tools to translate this unstructured commentary into measurable indicators. Platforms such as YouTube host extensive discussions about publicly traded equities, but extracting reliable sentiment trends from high-volume, noisy comment streams remains technically challenging. This project develops a stock sentiment and market intelligence platform that transforms YouTube comment data into aggregated sentiment indicators aligned to specific equities. Comments are mapped to equities using ticker specific keyword identification combined with contextual filtering to reduce false associations from ambiguous or off-topic mentions. The system assigns numerical sentiment scores to individual comments and …

Romance Scam Reporting And Support: Help-Seeking Timing, Trust, And Escalation, Ld Herrera

Research & Publications

Built on social engineering and identity deception, romance scams often create financial loss and distress. For victims, it can be difficult to know where to go, what information is needed, and what outcomes are realistic. This paper reports results from an anonymous survey of people who were targeted by or experienced a romance scam (completed surveys: n=386), focusing on (1) when and whether victims first reach out for help, (2) perceived difficulty and confidence in navigating support, (3) how trust relates to expectations of assistance, and (4) how loss severity relates to transfer-method complexity. When help was sought, it was …

Department Portfolio Web App*, Phillip Suvacarov, Tommy Aitchison

Campus Research Month

Southern Adventist University’s School of Computing produces numerous course projects, capstones, and research papers each year, yet there is no centralized, public showcase for this work. Our system provides a structured submission workflow for current and former students, faculty approval to ensure academic quality, and moderated commenting and likes to encourage constructive engagement. We outline the content model, role-based access control, and review queue, and describe search, tagging, and media support (including PDFs, images, and code links). By making student work visible beyond the classroom, the portfolio supports recruitment, alumni relations, and employer outreach while strengthening the School’s scholarly community.

Redesigning A Fitness App Interface For Physiological Constrained Users*, Joseph E. Manzanillo

Campus Research Month

As fitness tracking converges with medical monitoring, inclusive design becomes a matter of health equity. This research utilizes a Polar Beat redesign to address exclusionary "sporty" aesthetics that can exclude 300 million colorblind users. Based in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the study implements WCAG AA standards and color-blind-verified filters to mitigate data loss during Situational Induced Impairment (SIID), when high-intensity exercise compromises cognitive and visual processing. By optimizing user journeys for Paralympic and geriatric archetypes, this work demonstrates that accessibility is the essential bridge transitioning mobile fitness apps into viable, inclusive instruments for clinical medical use.

Innovations And Applications Of Virtual Private Networks And Sustainable Security In Society 5.0 Libraries, Stella Chinnaya Nduka Dr., Adeyinka Tella Prof, Petros Dlamini Dr

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In order to improve digital resilience, privacy, and access equity in contemporary library environments, this study investigates the role of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in fostering sustainable cybersecurity within the framework of Society 5.0 libraries. It does this by looking at the latest developments, applications, difficulties, moral dilemmas, and tactical methods associated with VPN deployment. Using peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, white papers, and policy documents published between 2010 and 2024, a methodical approach to literature review was used. The literature that bridges the fields of cybersecurity, library science, and Society 5.0 concepts was the main focus of the review. …

Spatial Future Ahead! Augmented Reality And Anticipated Life Consequences, Sergio Barta, Reto Felix, Chris Hinsch, Mahdokht Kalantari, Nina Krey, Philipp A. Rauschnabel

Marketing Faculty Publications

Purpose: This study explores how initial exposure to immersive spatial computing experiences using AR headsets generates lasting inspiration and shapes consumers expected long-term life consequences (i.e., enhancement of reality, perceived substitutability and social impact).

Design/methodology/approach: The study uses a time-lagged research design based on 148 first-time users of spatial computing devices (AR headsets). Respondents were interviewed once shortly after being exposed to AR and a few days later. Data is analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

Findings: Users' immediate “inspired-by” experiences predict increased “inspired-to” intentions days later. Such inspiration translates into anticipated consequences such as virtually customizing …

Adopting Artificial Intelligence: Cross-Sector Analysis Of Ai Adoption Risks, Brandon Saari, Yona Berger, Yanett Munoz, Alex Agnick, Paul Wagner, Robert J. Honomichl

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly being adopted across public and private sectors. This offers significant gains in efficiency, decision making, and access to information. At the same time, AI introduces complex risks related to cybersecurity, privacy, bias, transparency, accountability, and equity that existing governance and security frameworks do not fully address. This paper presents a cross-sector literature review and comparative analysis of AI adoption risks and mitigation strategies across four critical domains: the federal government, libraries, K–12 education, and healthcare. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, institutional frameworks, and policy guidance, the study identifies sector-specific challenges alongside shared systemic gaps, including insufficient …

Eco-Assisted Ultrasonic Synthesis, Characterization, And Electrical Conductivity Study Of Polyaniline/ Silica@Fe3o4 Q1 Nanocomposites, Ali Salim Shaway, Kholoud Dham Khamkheem, Jawad Kadhim Abaies, Athra G. Sager

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

وفي هذه الدراسة الصوتية، أصبحت السيليكا المُنتجة بأكسيد الحديد (Fe₃O₄) ومركبات نانوية قائمة على البولي أنيلين مُطعّم بنسبة 5-15% من السيليكا المُعزز للحديد (Fe₃O₄). وأكملت نهائيا ماء أنيلين والمركبات العلمية المتنوعة الارتباط باستخدام تقنيات FT-IR وUV-Vis وXRD وSEM وTEM. وأحدثت نتائج XRD أن حجم جسيمات البولينج أنيلين الناي (PANI) يبلغ 55.5. مكثف هذا الحجم إلى 45.2 عند تطعيم بولي أنيلين بنسبة 15% وزناً من السيليكا المُغلفة بأكسيد الحديد (Fe₃O₄) مُحضّرة بطريقة جيدة بشكل جيد، مما يميل إلى التمدد بشكل ثابت في تشكيل المركب المتباين المنظم. ضاقت النطاق البصري من 3.2 إلى 2.5 إلكترون فولت مع زيادة نسبة المطعّم، مما يشير …

Threat-Analysis Oriented Digital Twinning Of Ml-Powered Future Autonomous Weapon Systems, Thomas Neubert

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Warfare is undergoing a rapid transformation with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into autonomous weapon systems (AWS) for perception, decision support, and control. As these systems become more software-defined, their cyber attack surface expands across sensing, communications, autonomy logic, and human-machine interfaces. As human oversight diminishes, ensuring the cybersecurity, resilience, and reliability of these systems becomes critical to mission success. This thesis investigates how a digital twin-driven threat modeling framework that integrates system-centric analysis with adversary-informed methodologies can support structured cybersecurity vulnerability evaluation and defensive strategy development associated with ML-powered AWS. First, the study analyzes …

The Expanding Digital Border: Ai, Surveillance, And The Fight For Justice, James Chesser

Immigration and Human Rights Law Review

As artificial intelligence transforms the mechanisms of immigration control, the modern border has become a digital filter—one governed less by geography and more by code. This Article examines the legal, technical, and ethical implications of AI-driven systems now central to global border enforcement, including biometric surveillance, algorithmic risk scoring, and predictive profiling. It explores how states use these technologies not only to manage irregular migration, but to compete for global talent—constructing migration regimes that reward capital and compliance while eroding transparency, due process, and equality.

Through an international and comparative lens, the piece highlights the expansion of algorithmic decision-making across …

Analysis Of Autonomous Vehicle Survivability To 5g Communication Errors, Sydney Clark

Miners Solving for Tomorrow Research Conference

Autonomous vehicles rely on low-latency, high-reliability data exchange for real-time perception and control. Disruptions such as packet loss, latency variation, protocol-level errors, and malicious interference can pose significant safety risks to both passengers and surrounding environments. This project aims to evaluate, quantify, and predict the survivability of autonomous vehicle systems to communication errors, with focus on 5G network environments. The impact of these communication impairments on vehicle stability and control will be investigated through high-fidelity cyber-physical simulation of the vehicle and its surrounding environment. Experiments designed to capture varying network conditions will be used to assess a broad range of …

A View Under The Hood: Duquesne Kline's Law And Computing Program, Wesley M. Oliver, Katherine L.W. Norton, Martin Mckown, David Horrigan

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Energy And Environmental Footprint Of Ai, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Ethan I. Thorpe, Jonathan M. Gilligan

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to create major economic and social benefits, but also to rapidly escalate electricity demand and its associated environmental impacts. Information availability has been a cornerstone of environmental law for half a century, and this Article argues that providing information to individual, corporate, and other users about the electricity demand and environmental impacts of AI can reduce those impacts without delaying development of the technology. Little is known about how different large language models (LLMs) compare on these metrics, though. To address whether users have access to the information necessary to address this shortcoming, the …

Lego®-Based Cubesats For Space Outreach, Stefan Brandle, Joshua Brown, Evan Smith, Drew Nye, Sydney Reddy, Twidy Kwae, Kaiya Grzesiak, Matthew Roderer, John Hetz

Faculty-Led Student Projects in CSE

Taylor University Computer Science and Engineering, in collaboration with NearSpace Education, has initiated a multi-year effort to enhance space-awareness by offering K-12 students career-impacting opportunities to build and fly satellites that have a LEGO®-robotics-based payload. This effort is intended as an outreach in the spirit of the ThinSat project (2017-2021) supported by Virginia Space, Twiggs Space Lab, Orbital ATK, NearSpace Launch, and the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, among others. We hope to receive permission to name the satellite LEGO-SAT-0.

Next-Generation Democratic Cyber Statecraft - Balancing The Signal: Shutdown Shocks And Democratic Digital Governance, Scott M. Di Panni

School of Public Policy Capstones

This paper develops Next-Generation Democratic Cyber Statecraft (NG-DCS), a unified strategic doctrine for democratic governments to contest the cognitive domain against authoritarian adversaries. Drawing on twenty-six years of cross-national panel data (1999–2024) spanning 213 countries, game-theoretic modeling, and qualitative case analysis, the paper establishes three interconnected empirical and theoretical foundations. First, cross-national OLS regression across 160+ countries demonstrates that regime type is the dominant structural determinant of internet freedom (R²=0.615, β=2.513, p< 0.001), explaining more than twice the variance attributable to per-capita wealth (R²=0.268). Democratic governance, not economic development, produces open digital environments. Second, a two-way fixed effects (TWFE) difference-in-differences study exploiting government-ordered internet shutdowns as discrete policy interventions finds that digital restrictions causally degrade V-Dem governance quality by 0.21–0.38 standard deviations (p< 0.001 across all specifications). Treatment effects are immediate (β=−0.302 at k=0) and persist through five post-treatment years (β=−0.246 at k=+5), indicating structural rather than transitory governance damage. Parallel trends validation (p=0.352) and Callaway–Sant’Anna heterogeneity-robust estimation (ATT=−0.230, SE=0.077) support causal identification. Instrumental variable triangulation (2SLS β=−0.949, p=0.005) confirms that simultaneity was attenuating, not inflating, the primary estimates. Third, formal game-theoretic analysis reveals that the current U.S.–adversary equilibrium is (Restrain, Escalate)—the risk-dominant but Pareto-inferior outcome of a Stag Hunt structure. China, Russia, North Korea, and Venezuela each occupy structurally distinct positions (Stackelberg commitment, asymmetric two-level, autarky, and reactive trigger, respectively), requiring differentiated doctrinal responses rather than a uniform strategic playbook. Generative AI and algorithmic governance are shown to accelerate cognitive vulnerability by collapsing influence operation costs and exploiting engagement-optimized platform architectures that systematically degrade deliberative capacity in democratic populations.

Watch Me Watch: Reaction Videos As A Social Form Of Online Video Engagement, Rodney Okyere, Carlos Augusto Bautista Isaza, Jaehoon Pyon, Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, Shuo Niu, Sang Wong Lee

Computer Science

Reaction videos (RVs) are surging in popularity, emerging as a distinctive facet of participatory culture on modern social video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. This study aims to explore not only the motivations and engagement patterns of viewers towards RVs, but also the underlying nature of the virality and community-building phenomena that this sub-genre of video content fosters. We conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with individuals who identified as regular viewers of reaction videos to gain a deeper understanding of how they discover reaction videos (RQ1), the values that drive their motivations for viewing RVs (RQ2), and the ways …

Semantic Entanglement In Vector-Based Retrieval: A Formal Framework And Context-Conditioned Disentanglement Pipeline For Agentic Rag Systems, Nick Loghmani

iSchool - All Scholarship

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed in agentic environments depend on the geometric properties of vector representations to retrieve contextually appropriate evidence for autonomous reasoning. When source documents conflate multiple topics within contiguous text regions, standard vectorization pipelines produce embedding spaces in which semantically distinct content occupies overlapping geometric neighborhoods — a condition we term semantic entanglement. This paper formalizes semantic entanglement as a model-relative measure of cross-topic overlap, defines an Entanglement Index (EI) as a quantitative proxy, and argues that higher EI is associated with reduced attainable Top-K retrieval precision under cosine similarity retrieval. We introduce the Semantic Disentanglement …

Discrete Diffusion For Bundle Construction, Teng Tu, Ai Li, Yunshan Ma, Shuo Xu, Xiaohao Liu, Haokai Ma, Liang Pang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a central task in product bundling, bundle construction aims to select a subset of items from large item catalogs to build an entire bundle or, more practically, complete a partial bundle. Existing methods often rely on the sequential construction paradigm that predicts items one at a time, nevertheless, this paradigm is fundamentally unsuitable for the essentially unordered bundles. In contrast, non-sequential methods model a bundle as a set, but still face two dimensionality curses: the combinatorial space grows exponentially with both bundle length and catalog size. Accordingly, we identify two technical challenges: 1) how to effectively and efficiently model …

Columnas: The Honors Program Newsletter At Bentley University, Amanda Li, Wilson Jan, Michael Raphael, Alexandra Rieckehoff, Karina Wu, Michael Shehata, Nilufar Noorian, Eloise Weintraub

Honors Program

INSIDE THE MODERN WORLD

Page 2: Stepping Out by Amanda Li

Page 3: Inside the Corporate Slop Bowl by Wilson Jan

Page 4: The Silencing: An Evaluation of the Global Attacks on the Right to Protest by Michael Raphael

THE SOUND OF CHANGE

Page 5: The Social, Cultural, and Economic Impact of Bad Bunny by Alexandra Rieckehoff

Page 6: Streaming Changed Music, But Is It Fair to Artists? by Karina Wu

Page 7: Feeling the Music: How Haptic Wearables Are Changing the Way We Experience Sound by Michael Shehata

SHIFTING SYSTEMS

Page 8: The Story Behind Davos, One of the …