Digital Commons Network^™

Geographical Pattern Analysis Of Gis Images With Deep Learning And Voronoi Network, Nidaa Kareem, Tawfiq A. Al-Assadi

Journal of Intelligent Informatics, Networking, and Cybersecurity

Localization is not enough for the analysis of spatial patterns; a principled geometric and statistical framework is required. This paper proposes an integrated spatial intelligence system combining deep learning, computational geometry, and spatial statistics, which is a unified and interpretable system. It is based on segmentation localization that accurately localizes the centroid of each object without the disadvantages of the bounding box. These centroids form a natural Voronoi tessellation of regions of spatial influence intrinsic to the data instead of imposing any artificial restrictions. A geometry-based density formulation is used to improve representation, which includes Voronoi cell areas and neighborhood …

Epistemic Resilience In Ai-Driven Innovation, James C. Ryan, Massimiliano Cappuccio, Effrosyni Georgiadou, Alessandro Lanteri

All Works

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral component of innovation infrastructure, facilitating information retrieval, knowledge recombination, and decision support. While these applications accelerate innovation cycles, they simultaneously obscure evidential provenance, compromise output reliability, and diffuse accountability when algorithmic insights fail. To address these vulnerabilities, this paper introduces the concept of epistemic resilience, defined as an organizational and ecosystem capability to preserve, adapt, and restore trustworthy knowledge processes amid technological disruption, uncertainty, and epistemic risk. Synthesizing literature across innovation management, organizational learning, knowledge management, social epistemology, research integrity, and human–AI collaboration, this study conceptualizes AI-driven innovation as a sociotechnical knowledge process …

Agentic Ai For Autonomous Marketing: Taxonomy, Benchmark, And An Open-Source Agent, Prashidda Thapa, Shraddha Khadka, Pragyan Sharma, Ana Rai

Student Publications

Marketing automation is moving beyond rule-based systems and prompt-driven generative tools toward agentic AI: large language model (LLM) based agents that plan, act, and adapt under high-level objectives. Existing analyses are largely conceptual and commercial platforms are proprietary, leaving the community without reproducible baselines. We contribute three artifacts. First, a compact taxonomy organized around an augmentation–automation-autonomization continuum and a Perceive–Reason–Act(PRA)cycle that distinguishes autonomous agents from rule-based automation. Second, MarketingAgent, an open-source ReAct agent with six tools spanning SQL access, RFM segmentation, XGBoost churn prediction, campaign and email generation, and budget allocation. Third, the Marketing Agent Benchmark (MAB), a 15-task suite …

Do Ensemble Models Always Win? A Comparative Machine Learning Evaluation For Financial Time-Series Prediction, Shraddha Khadka, Prashidda Thapa, Pragyan Sharma, Shreya Silwal

Student Publications

Equal-weighted ensembling is often treated as a default upgrade over individual machine learning models. We test this assumption on one-day-ahead stock-price prediction across five sector diversified U.S. assets (2015–2024) by comparing Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and their equal-weighted average under identical features, preprocessing, and chronological splits. Pooled across assets, LSTM attains the lowest test-set RMSE (17.70), SVR is statistically tied with LSTM under the Diebold and Mariano test (𝑝 = 0.494), the equal-weighted ensemble is third (18.13), and RF is last (20.33); SVR beats the ensemble at 𝑝 = 0.001 (Bonferroni-significant) while LSTMbeats …

Enhancing Programming Productivity For Individuals With Adhd Through Generative Artificial Intelligence: An Inductive Analysis, Lionel Mew

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) significantly impacts computer programmers through challenges in sustained attention, executive functioning, and organizational skills. While traditional intervention strategies have shown varying degrees of success, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents novel opportunities to address ADHD-related programming challenges. This paper presents an inductive analysis synthesizing current research on ADHD's effects on programming, traditional productivity enhancement techniques, and the potential of generative AI tools. Through examination of recent literature and field studies, we propose that generative AI can serve as a transformative intervention by providing personalized cognitive support, reducing executive function demands, and enhancing code generation efficiency. …

Restoring Linguistic Grounding In Vla Models Via Train-Free Attention Recalibration, Ninghao Zhang, Bin Zhu, Shijie Zhou, Jingjing Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to perform manipulation tasks directly from natural language instructions and are increasingly viewed as a foundation for generalist robotic policies. However, their reliability under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) instructions remains underexplored. In this paper, we reveal a critical failure mode in which VLA policies continue executing visually plausible actions even when the language instruction contradicts the scene. We refer to this phenomenon as linguistic blindness, where VLA policies prioritize visual priors over instruction semantics during action generation. To systematically analyze this issue, we introduce ICBench, a diagnostic benchmark constructed from the LIBERO dataset that probes language–action coupling …

Facevalue: Exploring Real-Time Self-View Overlays To Prompt Meaning-Oriented Self-Awareness In Remote Meetings, Gun Woo (Warren) Park, Anthony Tang, Fanny Chevalier

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In remote video meetings, visual non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions or head movements, are seen continuously but often only partially. This increases ambiguity compared to in-person settings and can cause misinterpretation or misalignment between intended and perceived meaning. Motivated by communication theories, we designed FaceValue, a technology probe that augments the self-view with private, real-time overlays. These overlays are subtle, suggestive prompts intended to help attendees reflect on how their cues might be interpreted by others. To invite personal interpretation, FaceValue avoids behavioral labeling and instead aims to support meaning-oriented self-awareness: recognizing when visible cues may unintentionally (mis)communicate intent. …

Ecu-Malnett V2, Matthew G. Gaber, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Michael N. Johnstone

Research Datasets

ECU-MALNETT (ECU MALware NETwork Traffic) is a real world, reproducible dataset of labeled benign and malicious network flows built from the Peekaboo execution corpus. Peekaboo runs evasive malware with dynamic binary instrumentation and records raw host-level PCAPs while granting full Internet access, yielding noisy, real-world captures with background OS activity and concurrent processes. To derive trustworthy labels from these traces, we apply Construct, a baseline aware, zero-trust labeling framework. Construct first ingests a baseline capture to establish reference sets (DNS qnames, HTTP hosts, TLS SNIs, and socket endpoints) and grows a conservative benign IP pool only via whitelisted DNS resolutions. …

Governing Agentic Ai: The Human Values Alignment Framework (Hvaf-A) As A Policy Tool, Mousa Al-Kfairy

All Works

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems—software that plans, acts, and decides without step-by-step human approval—are already deployed in finance, healthcare, recruitment, and public services. They differ from earlier AI in one critical way. They do not produce outputs for a human to accept or reject. They take actions. Those actions may be irreversible. They may affect people who never used the system. Existing governance frameworks were not designed for this. Current alignment approaches—including reinforcement learning from human feedback, constitutional AI, and preference aggregation—assume that a well-aligned system satisfies what users ask for. This paper argues that the assumption fails in agentic …

Individualized Bayesian Inference Identifies Novel Genetic Variants For Parkinson's Disease, Jin Ren, Yasaman J. Soofi, Md Asad Rahman, Qing Lu, Jinling Liu

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder with a significant genetic component. While genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been instrumental in identifying genetic variants associated with PD, the reliance on large sample sizes and population-level analyses may overlook variants with lower minor allele frequencies or individual-specific relevance. Individualized Bayesian Inference (IBI) offers a promising method to complement GWAS by identifying and prioritizing candidate genetic markers at both the individual and patients-like-me subgroup levels. This study evaluates the application of IBI to PD genetics, using GWAS as a baseline for comparison. We analyzed genetic data from the Fox Insight online …

Learning 1-Bit Lidar-Based Localization With Auxiliary Objective, Kaijie Yin, Zhiyuan Zhang, Tian Gao, Wentao Zhu, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Hui Kong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

6-DoF LiDAR-based localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems operating in large-scale outdoor environments. Many deep-learning-based localization methods have achieved promising performance so far. However, as one of the always-on modules competing for limited on-board computational resources, the localization module is expected to consume only a small portion of the overall compute budget. Most existing learning-based methods are still too heavy for this purpose. In contrast, binary neural networks (BNNs) offer an appealing solution, but the 1-bit compression causes severe information loss and performance drop. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Binarized LiDAR-based Localization (BiLoc), the …

Trustworthy And Explainable Malware Threat Intelligence Through Social Media Analytics And Nature-Inspired Optimization, Feras Al-Obeidat, Muhammad Saad Rashad, Muhammad Amin, Waqas Ali, Bilal Khan, Sajid Anwar

All Works

The convergence of media analytics, Cyber threat Intelligence (CTI) and trustworthy artificial intelligence has become essential for modern cybersecurity systems operating over large-scale, heterogenous data sources. In particular, Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) provide high-volume, real-time signals that complement structured CTI frameworks for early-stage malware and adversarial threat detection. However, integrating these unstructured and dynamic sources with Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) remains challenging due to its hierarchical complexity, semantic redundancy, and computational overhead in resource-constrained environments. This paper proposes an explainable and optimized intelligence pipeline (BERT-STIX) that unifies SOCMINT, OSINT, and STIX-based CTI using deep …

Braids On The Stranded Cellular Automata Model, Alexa Renner

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

The Stranded Cellular Automata (SCA) model is a grid of cells such that each cell can contain 0, 1, or 2 strands, together with two cellular automata that control when and how strands turn and cross. It was developed to study patterns occurring in fiber arts. We define a notion of what it means for a braid, in the sense of an element of a braid group, to be represented by an SCA pattern, and provide several algorithms to determine when a braid has an SCA representation with certain additional properties.

Bayesian And Multi-Objective Decision Support For Incident Mitigation In Cyber-Physical Systems, Shaofei Huang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems increasingly rely on interconnected physical and digital systems whose security incidents can escalate rapidly into safety and operational failures. Existing decision-support approaches struggle to support incident response because they rely on static assumptions, incomplete vulnerability data, and single-objective risk models that do not adequately capture trade-offs between attack success likelihood, impact severity, and system availability. This paper proposes an adaptive decision-support framework for incident mitigation in cyber-physical systems that integrates hierarchical Bayesian Network modelling, confidence-calibrated exposure estimation, and multi-objective optimisation into a unified, adaptive pipeline. The framework constructs probabilistic models from system architecture and vulnerability data, incorporating complementary …

Bayesian Network: An Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Xai) Approach To Human Performance Modelling For Control Room Operations, Houda Briwa

Theses

Alarm systems in process industry control rooms routinely exceed the performance targets set by standards such as EEMUA 191, placing operators under conditions where reliable performance is most difficult to achieve. Predicting how operators respond under such conditions is central to risk management, yet current Human Reliability Assessment (HRA) methods depend on expert judgement that is rarely tested against operational evidence, assume independence among factors known to interact, and do not explicitly represent the cognitive processes through which performance emerges. In Resilience Engineering terms, these methods encode Work-as-Imagined with limited means to assess how far expectations hold when work is …

Towards More Inclusive Ai Systems In Cities, Siew Ying Shee, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in urban infrastructures and governance, shaping how people, spaces, and futures are classified, prioritised, and managed. Yet, most AI systems are developed within a narrow set of linguistic and geopolitical contexts and exported globally, embedding particular epistemic assumptions into diverse urban environments. Even where formal inclusion metrics are met, such asymmetries can render certain populations and realities less legible within algorithmic systems. Prevailing approaches in digital inclusion—centred on fairness metrics, representation, or access—presume technologies as politically inert and bounded. Yet, the adaptive and probabilistic behaviour of contemporary AI disrupts this premise, challenging the idea …

Investigating The Impact Of Outreach Programmes On Second Level Students In Formal And Informal Computer Science Education In Ireland, Karen Nolan

Doctoral

Computer Science (CS) education at second-level in Ireland has undergone significant development, including the introduction of the Leaving Certificate Computer Science (LCCS). However, the existing literature examined demonstrated that access to and participation in CS education is uneven, resulting in many students having limited exposure CS at second-level before making educational choices. At the same time, students who elect to study LCCS require appropriate support as they engage with programming and other aspects of a relatively new formal curriculum. This thesis investigates the function of school-based CS outreach in helping students at these various phases of their second-level CS education …

Constrained Multiview Contrastive Learning For Jointly Supervised Representation Learning, Siyuan Dai, Kai Ye, Kun Zhao, Yang Du, Haoteng Tang, Liang Zhan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Purpose

Materials and Methods

The Application Of Machine Learning And Deep Learning On Demand Forecasting Across Time-Critical Industries: A Systematic Review, Asmaa Seyam, Sujith Samuel Mathew, May El Barachi, Cheng Zhang, Jun Shen

All Works

The applications of machine learning and deep learning in demand forecasting have attracted increasing attention, as they offer remarkable predictive capabilities that help automate forecasting processes and achieve higher accuracy. While numerous review studies have examined solutions within specific industries, there is a lack of comprehensive literature review investigating these solutions across different sectors. Therefore, this study overviews machine learning and deep learning applications in demand forecasting across time-critical industries, including power, tourism, water, transportation, and food. A two-tier classification framework is proposed to categorize demand forecasting studies by both application industry and methodological architecture. In addition, the most popular …

Prune: A Patching Based Repair Framework For Certifiable And Privacy-Robust Unlearning Of Neural Networks, Xuran Li, Jingyi Wang, Xiaohan Yuan, Peixin Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine unlearning has emerged as a key mechanism for enabling the “right to be forgotten” in neural network models, allowing the selective removal of specific training data upon request. Existing approaches typically rely on retraining models with the remaining data, which is computationally expensive and difficult to verify, especially when deployed models are distributed or resource-constrained. To address this challenge, our prior conference work introduced PRUNE, a patching-based framework that formulates unlearning as a neural network repair problem. PRUNE achieves targeted forgetting by learning lightweight patch networks that redirect model predictions on the data to be unlearned while preserving performance …

Neural Symphony Of Flow Experience: Evidence For High-Dimensional Metastable Dynamics, Abdelrahman B. M. Eldaly, Kris Zhangguang Kang, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Leanne Lai-Hang Chan, Keng Siau, Xiao Fan Liu, Richard Huskey, Langtao Chen, Tejaswini Yelamanchili, Rene Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Flow, an optimal experience characterized by deep immersion and engagement in an activity, has been extensively studied in behavioral research. However, its neural dynamic mechanism remains poorly understood. In a within-subject video gaming experiment, we captured neural activity underlying flow, boredom, and anxiety using a 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) system. Compared to boredom and anxiety, flow exhibits the highest global functional connectivity, metastability, and dimensionality of dynamic functional connectivity patterns, suggesting that flow is a highly adaptable process that is supported by high-dimensional neural dynamics. Unlike previous studies that focused on identifying static or localized brain activity, we examine the neural …

Generalized Logit Adjustment: Improved Fine-Tuning By Mitigating Label Bias In Zero-Shot Vision Models, Beier Zhu, Qianru Sun, Xun Yang, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Foundation models like CLIP allow zero-shot transfer on various tasks without additional training data. Yet, the zero-shot performance is less competitive than a fully supervised one. Thus, fine-tuning and ensembling are also commonly adopted to better fit the downstream tasks. However, we argue that such prior work has overlooked the inherent biases in foundation models. Due to the highly imbalanced Web-scale training set, foundation models are inevitably skewed toward frequent semantics, and thus the subsequent fine-tuning or ensembling is still biased. In this study, we systematically examine the biases in foundation models and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed Generalized …

Smart: When Is It Actually Worth Expanding A Speculative Tree?, Lifu Wang, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying a branching tree of draft tokens in a single targetmodel forward pass. However, existing methods prioritize maximizing token-level likelihood or the number of accepted tokens while ignoring a critical “efficiency paradox”: the computational overhead of drafting and verifying big trees can grow super-linearly, particularly at scale. This often leads to negative wall-clock speedup when batch sizes increase or hardware saturation limits are reached. To address this, we propose SMART, a System-aware Marginal Analysis framework for Runtime Tree construction. SMART reformulates tree expansion as a hardware-aware optimization problem that directly maximizes end-toend speedup. …

Light-Wdef: Lightweight Deepfake Evaluation Framework For Efficient And Reliable Visual Detection, Muhammad Yousaf, Sarwar Shah Khan, Babar Shah, Muhammad Shehzad Khan, Muhammad Awais Bacha, Mian Saeed Akbar, Ijaz Ali, Fernando Moreira

All Works

Deepfake technology synthesizes and manipulates digital content to produce artificial videos in which an individual’s identity, facial appearance, or actions are convincingly altered. These forgeries can be highly realistic, posing serious risks to trust in digital media and undermining personal reputation, dignity, and the integrity of public discourse. This paper presents the Lightweight Deepfake Evaluation Framework (Light-wDEF)– a resource-efficient, reproducible framework tailored for large-scale evaluation of visual deepfake detectors on modest hardware. Light-wDEF combines deterministic frame sampling, batched MTCNN face extraction, streaming append-only storage with lazy offset indexing, online Albumentations augmentations, stratified splits with class-aware sampling, and robust training (AdamW, …

Bridging Data Gaps In Retinal Imaging: From Structural Domain Adaptation To Topology-Aware Synthesis, Gözde Merve Demirci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Comprehensive visualization of the retina is essential for diagnosing and monitoring blinding diseases such as Diabetic Retinopathy and Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP), where pathological changes often extend beyond a single field of view. Despite significant advances in automated retinal image analysis, clinical deployment remains limited by two fundamental data gaps: a structural learning gap, arising from scarce expert annotations and poor generalization across imaging domains, and a spatial coverage gap, caused by the difficulty of acquiring multi-view retinal images in fragile populations. Although these challenges are often addressed independently, this dissertation argues that they are tightly coupled: accurate, …

Between Digital Transformation And Regulatory Vacuum: Cybersecurity Of Public Services In Mozambique, Faztudo Languisse Eng.

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The rapid expansion of digital public services in Mozambique—including e-government platforms, digital health systems, and electronic tax administration—has outpaced the development of a coherent legal framework for cybersecurity. While Law No. 3/2017 (Electronic Transactions Law) of 9 January 2017 introduced foundational data-protection principles, Mozambique long lacked a dedicated cybersecurity regulatory authority, mandatory security standards, and formal incident-notification mechanisms. This regulatory vacuum exposed critical public services to escalating cyber risks as digital transformation was actively promoted as a development priority. This article examines the legal and institutional gaps in Mozambique's cybersecurity governance framework prior to the 2026 Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Laws, …

Exposing And Addressing Machine Learning Brittleness Through Constraint Solving, Muyeed Ahmed

Dissertations

Machine Learning (ML) implementations are fundamentally brittle: nondeterministic, inconsistent, and prone to overfitting; however, constraint solving can be used to systematically expose, quantify, and address this brittleness.

This dissertation first establishes that widely-used implementations of popular ML algorithms are nondeterministic (producing different outputs on the same input, across different runs) and inconsistent (different implementations of the same algorithm producing different outputs on the same input). This is more prevalent in Unsupervised Learning (UL) implementations where, due to the lack of a ground truth, subtle execution errors can go unnoticed and are difficult to verify. Nondeterminism and inconsistency also introduce security …

Clinic-In-A-Box: A Portable, Software-Defined Cyber Range For Realistic, Scenario-Based Cybersecurity Training, Ethan Chumley, Aaron Nair, Royce Yaezenko, Joshua Payne, Veronika Kyles, Paul Wagner, Robert J. Honomichl, Ryan Straight, Shengjie Xu

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Realistic, hands-on cybersecurity training has traditionally depended on fixed infrastructure such as dedicated lab hardware, cloud subscriptions, or permanent network connectivity, limiting where and how often it can be delivered. This paper presents the design and implementation of a portable, scenario-based cybersecurity training platform housed in a single travel case and built from commodity hardware, type-1 hypervisor virtualization, containerized service orchestration, and software-defined networking. The platform clones, isolates, and resets complete lab environments on demand, allowing the same physical system to support repeated classroom, workshop, or field deployments with minimal manual reconfiguration. Training scenarios are grounded in generated organizational profiles …

A Statistical Mechanics Approach To Reinforcement Learning, Jacob Adamczyk

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Reinforcement learning (RL), the study of optimal decision-making over long timescales in stochastic systems, has recently seen remarkable advances due in large part to the efforts of the deep learning community. RL has witnessed great success in solving problems in video games, robotics, biological control, and language modeling. However, a unified statistical mechanics framework to understand and develop the corresponding algorithms is lacking. To address this issue, we begin by showing that the reinforcement learning problem can be formulated and solved using the tools of statistical mechanics. Drawing on physical principles of free energy minimization and invariance, we address important …

Guardians Of The Record: A Two-Tiered Streaming Cascade With Kafka, Flink, And A Real Llm, Ilan Goodman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students build a streaming vandalism detector for live Wikipedia edits in which a fast rule-based tier decides which few of ~1,500 edits per minute are worth escalating to a slow, rate-limited real LLM (Gemini) — confronting the cost, latency, and failure modes of putting AI inside a production data pipeline.