Digital Commons Network^™

A Web-Based Wizard-Of-Oz Platform For Collaborative And Reproducible Human-Robot Interaction Research, Sean O'Connor

Honors Theses

The Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique is widely used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research, but two persistent problems limit its effectiveness: existing tools impose technical barriers that exclude non-engineering domain experts (the Accessibility Problem), and the fragmented landscape of robot-specific implementations makes interaction scripts difficult to port across platforms (the Reproducibility Problem- concerning execution consistency and portability, not third-party replication). Through a literature review, I identified three design principles to address both: a hierarchical specification model, an event-driven execution model, and a plugin architecture that decouples experiment logic from robot-specific implementations. I realized these principles in HRIStudio, an open-source, web-based platform providing …

Law Librarianship And Legal Information Science In The Age Of Genai, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

This article examines the relationship between law librarianship and legal information science in the age of generative AI (GenAI), arguing that closer integration between the two is essential to navigating a rapidly evolving legal information landscape. It contends that law librarianship—long grounded in stable classification systems and cognitive authority—must adopt the analytical methods of legal information science to remain effective in the digital era. Together, these fields can reinforce the rule of law by improving the organization, retrieval, and stability of legal information. The article identifies emerging subfields of legal information science that support this integration and develops several concepts …

Rockyou2024: What’S Your Password?, Yixuan Zhang

Honors Theses

Passwords remain a critical part of almost every account security system. As a result, password guessing attacks remain one of the most widespread yet profitable attacks possible. Setting a password resistant to attacks is thus an important task for account holders. In this paper, we use the RockYou2024 database, a collection of approximately 10 billion real-world passwords collected from data breaches, to analyze the characteristics of passwords found in real life. We start with basic statistical property analysis, such as length, distribution of digits and symbols, and proceed onto more complicated properties such as frequencies of combinations of characters, entropy …

Clinical Subtypes Of Co-Morbid Insomnia And Obstructive Sleep Apnea (Comisa): Results Of A Cluster Analysis, Yuan Shi, Xujun Feng, Fengyi Hao, Yuru Nie, Yihui Zhang, Zhaohua Chen, Siqi Guan, Larry D. Sanford, Michael V. Vitiello, Xiangdong Tang

Department of Pathology & Anatomy Faculty Publications

Background

Variations in the bidirectional relationship between obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and insomnia in co-morbid insomnia and OSA (COMISA) may form distinct subtypes of COMISA, which have not been previously characterized. This study aims to identify and characterize subtypes of COMISA.

Methods

From a community-recruited COMISA cohort 256 individuals who met diagnosis for COMISA were used to identify subtypes using a two-step clustering methodology. Demographics and multidimension clinical characteristics were collected and compared among obtained subtypes. Logistic models were used to evaluate whether these subtypes were associated with cardiometabolic and mental disorders. A clinical cohort of 1816 COMISA patients was …

Inside Out: Improving Large Model Safety, Wei Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are at the frontier of current advancements in artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable capabilities across diverse applications, there are growing concerns about their reliability and security. LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks through carefully crafted prompts that circumvent safety mechanisms, while MLLMs face additional security challenges stemming from their multimodal nature. Despite considerable efforts in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and supervised fine-tuning, existing safeguards have proven inadequate in addressing these critical vulnerabilities. This inadequacy stems from the fact that these models are inherently blackboxes that do not provide …

Eeg And Imu Gait Signal Processing: A Comparative Assessment Of The "Reza" Exponential Filter And Classic Filters, Reza Pousti, Daniel M. Russell, Derek C. Monroe, Christopher K. Rhea

Rehabilitation Sciences Faculty Publications

Noise degrades both EEG and gait signals, and classical IIR filters (Butterworth, Chebyshev, elliptic) involve trade-offs between passband flatness, ripple, and roll-off. This study compared a novel exponential "Reza" filter with these designs for neural and locomotor data. We analyzed an open-source mobile brain-body imaging dataset with EEG and gait data from 49 healthy adults (EEG: 256-channel, 512 Hz; IMUs: six APDM Opals, 128 Hz). EEG channels were grand-averaged and band-pass filtered at 0.5-50 Hz, while IMU axes were averaged and band-pass filtered at 0.5-5 Hz. The outcomes were signal-to-noise ratio SNR (dB) and band-integrated Welch PSD (EEG:0.5-50 Hz; IMU:0.5-5 …

Defending A Soho Network Against Mitm Attacks, Braeden J. Wise

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Cybersecurity is a vast domain that consists of many threats that target sensitive information found on wired and wireless networks. One of those threats is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, which involves an attacker situating themselves between a sender and a receiver to intercept or redirect network traffic. These kinds of attacks can run rampant on a small office home office (SOHO) network due to the vulnerabilities and lack of enterprise level tools. The intent of this project is to perform and defend against MITM attacks for a SOHO network. In the context of the project, three MITM attacks will be …

Analyzing Network Traffic And Data Exfiltration Via Smb In Post-Vm Escape Scenarios, Noah M. Disanza

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Virtual machines (VMs) play a crucial role in modern IT infrastructure environments by providing isolation and enhanced security, among other things, for both personal and corporate systems. VMs are heavily rely upon to safely test malware, manage infrastructure, and reduce risk to host systems. This reliance is so substantial that the idea of reducing risk to the host system is believed to be erasing risk entirely. However, this mindset has shown to be challenged time and time again by the emergence of exploits known as virtual machine escapes. These exploits allow malicious actors to break out of the virtualized environment …

A Decade Of Programming Languages: Trends In Popularity And Influence, Jonathan C. Erb

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Programming languages play a central role in open-source software ecosystems, yet their adoption, visibility, and influence shift over time as technologies, developer communities, and industry practices evolve. The study aims to investigate long-term trends in programming-language usage on GitHub from 2014 through 2024, focusing on ten major languages that represent diverse domains and ecosystems. Using repository metadata, engagement metrics such as stars and forks, and language-level code statistics measured with cloc, the analysis will examine changes in repository creation, code contribution volume, and popularity. Since popularity remains an unsettled and multidimensional concept, part of this research involves determining how it …

Reconstructing Lost Voices, Lana Tamim

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project uses digital text mining tools (OCR, NLP, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling) to analyze 19th–20th-century newspaper archives, focusing on how marginalized groups (women, immigrants, or labor workers) were historically portrayed. Many historical newspapers were dominated by elite voices, so this project aims to recover silenced or misrepresented perspectives by identifying hidden patterns in language, frequency of coverage, sentiment, and shifts in public perception over time. Using machine learning and visualization tools, the project will create interactive maps and timelines showing how representation evolved across regions.

Codezip: A University-Based Coding Practice And Collaboration Platform, Manoj Khatri

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project proposes the development of CodeZip, a university-exclusive web platform designed to help University of Akron students practice coding problems, prepare for technical interviews, and engage in collaborative learning. CodeZip ensures a secure environment by restricting access to users with @uakron.edu email addresses via Clerk API authentication.

The goal of this honors project is to expand CodeZip into an intelligent, interactive system. Planned enhancements include AI-generated problem hints, automated grading with performance analytics, and a visual dashboard to track learning progress. These features will provide personalized guidance, encourage collaboration between students and alumni, and create a dynamic platform that …

Secure The Database: A Red Team, Blue Team Analysis Of Sql Injection, Andrew N. Miller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

SQL injection (SQLi) attacks are a type of cyberattack that seeks to bypass website logins and gain entry to sensitive information. These pose a significant danger to organizations holding confidential user information. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like physical addresses, emails, phone numbers, social security numbers are at risk of theft. Login credentials like usernames, passwords, and other sensitive information like financial details and social security numbers are also exposed through SQLi attacks. SQLi attacks harm the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of people’s identity. Additionally, data breaches that reach public battention harm the reputation and trust of organizations. SQLi attacks rank …

Parametric Study Of Yields And Properties Of Corn Stover-Derived Hydrothermal Liquefaction Products By Using Statistical Approaches, Isamu Umeda, Meicen Liu, Jiefu Wang, Yi Zheng, Zhiwu Wang, Jaya Shankar Tumuluru, Sandeep Kumar

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of lignocellulosic biomass produces multiple product fractions, including solid residue (SR), heavy bio-oil (HBO), aqueous phase (AP), and light bio-oil (LBO). This study mainly applied principal component analysis (PCA) and regression modeling to predict AP solution weight, LBO weight and fuel characteristics, and HTL wastewater biodegradability, as well as to improve prediction accuracy for SR and HBO under various operating conditions (temperature: 250–350 °C, residence time: 5–60 min, and the combined solid loading of three batches: 15–45 g). A complementary relationship between SR and AP weights found in PCA enabled the estimation of AP weight based on …

Slm With Swarm Intelligence For Efficient Representation Of Medical Claims, Mohamed Ahmed Abo El-Enen, Ravi S. Sharma, Mustafa Abdulrazek, Amril Nazir, Reem Muhammad, Ahmed Talat Sahlol

All Works

Healthcare industry faces significant challenges due to fraudulent medical insurance claims, which result in substantial financial losses. We propose an automated system using domain-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) with a narrower scope and smaller parameter count than general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), combined with optimization algorithms to improve fraud detection. Our approach integrates numerical features, such as age and claim amount, with textual descriptions, including diagnoses and procedures, into a unified textual representation for each medical activity. This representation captures complex patterns, enhancing the model’s predictive ability. SLMs fine-tuned on medical corpora transform these textual inputs into fixed-dimensional numerical embeddings, …

The Deepfake Litmus Test: A Multimedia Authenticity Mechanism, Amna Alzaabi, Hessa Alqubaisi, Fatima Alzaabi, Richard Ikuesan

All Works

Deepfake technologies have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic video content from manipulated media. This paper presents a forensic detection framework, referred to as the Litmus Test, which focuses on structural analysis of MP4 container files to detect signs of tampering. Unlike conventional AI-based approaches that operate as black boxes, this method examines the atomic composition of video containers to identify anomalies. The proposed method performs atom-level inspection of MP4 file hierarchies and structural markers to uncover anomalies indicative of synthetic manipulation. Evaluations using datasets such as CelebDF, UADFV, and DeeperForensics reveal that the framework can identify inconsistencies common …

Modelling Route-Level Interzonal Travel Time Using Gps Trajectories, Muhammad Faiq Ahmed, Tom Bellemans, Fatma Outay, Muhammad Ahmed, Afzal Ahmed, Feng Liu, Muhammad Adnan

All Works

Activity-based models (ABMs) require accurate travel-time estimates for accessibility calculations, yet many implementations rely on static routing outputs that fail to capture temporal congestion dynamics due to limited high-resolution data. This paper develops route-level travel-speed prediction models using GPS trajectory data from 48 vehicles in Flanders, Belgium. GPS trajectories are integrated with OpenStreetMap and land-use data through destination-based segmentation, in which trips from fixed origins are cumulatively segmented at zone crossings. To capture behavioural differences by trip length, separate Gamma regression models are estimated for short (≤5 km) and long (>5 km) trips using temporal, network, and spatial variables. …

Smart Health Care Application For Predicting Complications Risk In Type 2 Diabetes Management Using Personalized Digital Twins: A Focus On Early Intervention And Prevention Strategies, Haifaa Alkaabi, Ahed Abugabah

All Works

The study examined the application of Personalized Digital Twins (PDTs) to prevent complications during the management of Type 2 Diabetes, especially in early intervention and prevention plans. Based on a high-quality dataset related to the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, we tested multiple predictive models such as the Random Forest, Gradient Boosting machines (GBM), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). We developed a composite risk indicator from established clinical risk factors (hypertension, dyslipidemia, elevated BMI) to stratify complication risk. The Random Forest model achieved 99% accuracy (AUC: 0.98) at the population-level risk classification. The GBM model was optimized …

Adaptive Multi-Agent Learning For Infrastructure-Aware Its: The Imer Data-Processing Approach, Mayssa Hamdani, Nafaa Jabeur, Ansar Yasar, Fatma Outay, Li Li

All Works

The performance of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) critically depends on accurate and efficient road-condition monitoring. This paper presents IMER (Inspect–Map–Eliminate–Reduce), a novel AI-driven data-processing framework that extends the traditional Map-Reduce paradigm for infrastructure maintenance. IMER integrates confidence-based validation, redundancy elimination, and severity prioritization to enhance data quality and decision efficiency. Implemented within a multi-agent architecture, IMER enables autonomous agents to inspect, classify, and fuse multi-source road data in real time, supporting predictive and adaptive maintenance planning. Simulation results using augmented pothole datasets demonstrate a 39.9 % reduction in redundant reports and 39.8 % fewer false positives. These findings highlight IMER’s …

A Design Science Research Architecture For Xr-Based Pre-Visit Cultural Heritage Learning Applications, Mousa Al-Kfairy, Omar Alfandi, Saed Alrabaee

All Works

Pre-Visit preparation plays a critical role in shaping visitors’ learning and engagement in cultural heritage sites; however, existing approaches largely rely on static and passive materials that fail to foster meaningful understanding before the physical visit. Extended Reality (XR) technologies offer new opportunities to address this gap by enabling immersive, narrative-driven pre-visit learning experiences. This paper proposes a conceptual architecture for XR-based pre-visit cultural heritage learning applications, grounded in Design Science Research (DSR). Drawing on museum pedagogy, experiential learning, and XR interaction design, the study identifies key educational and technical requirements and translates them into a layered, modular system architecture. …

Mapping Llm Misuse In Computing Education: A Survey-Based Risk Analysis Of Faculty And Student Contexts, Noura Alzaabi, Mohamed El-Attar, Sarah Kohail, Mahmood Niazi

All Works

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become deeply embedded in computing higher education, yet the misuse risks they introduce for faculty and students remain insufficiently understood from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective. This paper presents an empirical study in which a structured survey of 105 participants at a computing college was used to identify and systematically risk-score thirteen LLM misuse cases across faculty and student contexts. Using a Likelihood × Impact scoring model, the resulting taxonomy classifies misuse cases as Critical, High, or Medium severity, with over-reliance and skill atrophy, academic integrity violations, and research integrity risks emerging as the …

Evaluating Chatgpt-5 For Misuse Case Diagram Generation: An Empirical Evaluation, Alia Alzarooni, Yasser Khan, Hassan Alsayegh, Mohamed El-Attar, Rima Grati

All Works

Misuse case diagrams are a widely adopted technique in security requirements engineering, enabling analysts to model adversarial threats and derive countermeasures early in the software development lifecycle. However, manual construction of these diagrams is prone to incompleteness and subjectivity, requiring significant security expertise. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT present a promising opportunity to automate this process, yet their effectiveness for generating structured security modeling artifacts remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an exploratory study evaluating ChatGPT-5's ability to generate misuse case diagrams directly from textual security requirements, using 12 case studies of varying complexity spanning small, medium, and …

Aoi-Aware Agentic Federated Mixture-Of-Digital-Twin Experts For 6g Vehicular Edge Intelligence, Asadullah Tariq, Mohamed Adel Serhani, Ikbal Taleb, Shayma Alkobaisi, Tariq Qayyum, Irfan Ud Din

All Works

Digital twin-enabled vehicular edge intelligence is expected to become a fundamental service paradigm for sixth-generation (6G) intelligent transportation systems. However, the performance of such systems depends not only on model accuracy, but also on the freshness of digital twin states, timeliness of inference, privacy-preserving model training, and efficient use of heterogeneous edge resources. Existing DT-assisted federated learning and edge mixture-of-experts solutions optimize digital twin synchronization, distributed learning, and sparse inference largely independently, without allowing digital twin states to actively govern expert specialization, expert refreshing, and distributed orchestration. Nevertheless, the joint problem of how digital twins should guide federated expert specialization, …

Drone Authentication System Using Radio Frequency Fingerprinting, Jamila Muhsen Alnuaimi, Shamma Ghaleb Almansoori, Noura Ahmed Alrumeithi, Richard Ikuesan

All Works

The widespread integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across domains such as logistics, surveillance, and emergency response has introduced critical security challenges, particularly unauthorized access, identity spoofing, and drone cloning. Traditional software-based authentication methods, including GPS tracking and encryption, have proven inadequate against advanced cyber-physical threats. This paper proposes a secure and automated drone authentication framework based on Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting, leveraging intrinsic hardware-level signal imperfections to generate unique and unclonable drone identities. Using Random Forest classifiers, the system captures, preprocesses, and analyses RF features to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized UAVs. Validation with real-world RF datasets demonstrates high …

Blockchain-Based Nostrification: A Privacy-Preserving Framework For Documents Verification, Mohamad Badra, Rouba Borghol

All Works

Many employers and institutions will not complete a hire until they verify a candidate's foreign qualifications. This nostrification step exists for a simple reason: they need to know that certificates, medical records, financial papers, and other official documents are real and not forged. For years, signatures and stamps were enough. But the shift to online applications changed the game. Today, anyone can upload a polished PDF, and with basic editing tools, fake documents can be created in minutes. The old system no longer protects anyone. On the other hand, the blockchain offers a stronger and more practical solution. Instead of …

Human Factors In Visual Attention: Gender Differences In Engagement With Male-Oriented Ads, Mohamed Basel Almourad, Emad Bataineh, Zelal Wattar, Mohammed Hussain

All Works

In today's competitive market, it is increasingly important to understand how visual design shapes customer behaviour. This study examines the decision drivers influencing female customers' purchase choices when buying male-oriented products as gifts, identifying the visual components of advertisements that attract them by analysing the relationship between purchase intention and visual attention. Results show that participants with higher purchase intent focused more on product imagery and branding, indicating that visual appeal, perceived quality, and brand familiarity significantly guide their decisions, with brand awareness speeding up decision-making by reducing the need for repeated visual checks. Conversely, those with low purchase intent …

Towards A Context-Aware Driving Assistance System (Ca-Das): Advancing Intelligent Vehicular Safety Through Multimodal Context Integration, Fatma Outay, Siham Farrag, Anjum Zameer, Ansar Yassar

All Works

Driving-related behavioural factors are responsible for 90% of traffic collisions. The rapid growth of urbanization and the complexity of the traffic conditions demand a smart, efficient, and flexible transportation system. The advancement of transportation through technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI have reshaped the way that drivers interact with their vehicles and the surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive Context-Aware Driving Assistance System (CA-DAS) that employs sensor fusion, semantic context modelling, along with a machine-learning-based approach to provide personalised and proactive driving assistance across dynamic scenarios. The proposed CA-ADS was developed using a …

A Preliminary Exploratory Assessment Of Chatgpt To Generating Stride Data Flow Diagrams, Hassan Alsayegh, Mohamed El-Attar

All Works

Threat modeling is a core activity in security-by-design practices, enabling early identification of architectural weaknesses before system implementation. The drawings used during STRIDE analysis are typically Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs), referred to as “STRIDE diagrams” in this paper. STRIDE diagrams provide a visual approach for categorizing security threats; however, constructing accurate STRIDE diagrams require experience and is often time-consuming. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, raise important questions about their suitability for supporting structured security modeling tasks. This study presents a preliminary exploratory assessment of ChatGPT’s ability to generate, analyse, and iteratively refine STRIDE diagrams from …

Cliffinsight: An Educational Web Application That Visualizes The Calculation Of Effect-Sizes Using Cliff's Delta, Mohamed El-Attar, Ahmed Shuhaiber, Rima Grati, Sarah Kohail

All Works

The purpose of calculating effect sizes in statistics is to quantify the practical significance of observed differences beyond mere statistical significance. While standardized mean difference measures such as Cohen’s d are widely used, they require normally distributed data, an assumption frequently violated in educational and social science research. Non-parametric alternatives such as Cliff’s delta (δ) are more robust under these conditions yet remain underused due to perceived computational complexity and limited accessible resources. Existing web-based tools for Cliff’s delta function primarily as numerical calculators and do not expose the underlying dominance structure that gives the statistic its meaning. This paper …

From Image To Insight: Evaluating Llm Accuracy In Understanding Uml Use Case Diagrams With Claude, Mohamed El-Attar, Yasser Khan, Mahmood Niazi, Sajjad Mahmood, Mohammad Alshayeb

All Works

UML use case diagrams are a prominent artefact of requirements engineering, capturing the functional scope of a software system in terms of actors, use cases, and their stereotyped relationships. The emergence of multimodal large language models with image understanding capabilities raises the question of whether such models can reliably extract structured construct-level information from use case diagram images. This paper reports an empirical evaluation of Claude on the task of counting 14 notational construct types from a corpus of 78 computer-generated UML use case diagrams, assessed against manually verified ground truth annotations. Results reveal a strongly differentiated accuracy profile: Claude …

Pxaa: A Root-Cause Decision-Support System For Airline Passenger Complaints Using Sentiment Analysis And Complaint Classification, Adélia Acacio Da Silva, Stefani Rabelo De Campos Nunes

ICT

PXAA (Passenger Experience Analytics Assistant) is a machine learning and decision-support prototype developed to analyse airline passenger complaints using sentiment analysis and complaint classification techniques. The project follows the CRISP-DM methodology and uses airline passenger reviews collected from AirlineQuality.com through Python web scraping. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques were applied to clean and preprocess the textual data, while logistic Regression was used to classify passenger sentiment into positive, negative and neutral categories.

The project also implemented rule-based complaint classification to identify common complaint themes such as delays, baggage issues, customer service problems, comfort issues, payments/refund complaints and communication failures. These …