Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Retrieval Augmented Generation And Large Language Model Complexity On Undergraduate Exams Created And Taken By Ai Agents, Erick S. Tyndall, Colleen Gayheart, Alexandre Some, Joseph Genz, Torrey J. Wagner, Brent T. Langhals

Faculty Publications

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced to the point where entire textbooks can be queried using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enabling AI to integrate external, up-to-date information into its responses. This study evaluates the ability of two OpenAI models, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 Turbo, to create and answer exam questions based on an undergraduate textbook. 14 exams were created with four true-false, four multiple-choice, and two short-answer questions derived from an open-source Pacific Studies textbook. Model performance was evaluated with and without access to the source material using text-similarity metrics such as ROUGE-1, cosine similarity, and word embeddings. …

Mathematics And Mental Health: An Interdisciplinary Analysis Of Ai In Counselor Education, Jennifer M. Hightower, Catrina A. May

Journal of Counselor Preparation and Supervision

Although use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mental health care has become increasingly common, many professional counselors remain under informed about foundational components of AI. Fundamental issues associated with AI, including model bias and the Black Box Problem, must be considered as these tools become integrated into the counseling profession. This manuscript provides an interdisciplinary, theoretical analysis of AI use in counseling and counselor education grounded in foundational knowledge of AI and the American Counseling Association’s recommendations for the ethical integration of AI (Butler et al., 2023). The paper summarizes these recommendations, establishes accessible definitions of AI terms, explains the …

Modeling The Importance Of Life Exposure Factors On Memory Performance In Diverse Older Adults: A Machine Learning Approach, Evan Fletcher, Marianne Chanti-Ketterl, Emily Hokett, Yi Lor, Umesh Venkatesan, Ruijia Chen, Omonigho M. Bubu, Rachel Whitmer, Paola Gilsanz, Zvinka Z. Zlatar

Moss-Magee Rehabilitation Papers

INTRODUCTION: Many health life exposure factors (LEFs) influence cognitive decline and dementia incidence, but their relative importance to episodic memory (an early indicator of cognitive decline) among diverse older adults is unclear. We used machine learning to rank LEFs for memory performance in a large and diverse US cohort.

METHODS: Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences (KHANDLE) and Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans (STAR), participants underwent neuropsychological testing and answered questionnaires about multiple LEFs. XGBoost and Shapley Additive exPlanation values ranked the importance of factors influencing cross-sectional episodic memory in the full sample and by sex and …

Research On 3d Visualization Of Safety Monitoring And Early Warning For Steel Continuous Casting Scenarios, Wei Zhang, Wei Sheng, Yidan Cao, Tingsheng Zhao

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In order to improve the visualization and integration of production safety monitoring and fault warning, a three-dimensional (3D) visualization model architecture for whole-process industrial production safety monitoring and early warning for steel continuous casting scenarios was designed. By using 3ds Max and Unity3D, a multi-dimensional and multi-scale model was built, and functional modules such as visualization display and multi-level early warning for safety monitoring data were developed. By combining WebGL technology and Node. js runtime environment, the visualization of whole-process industrial production safety monitoring based on Web terminal was realized. The alarm threshold determination method for whole-process industrial production …

Evaluating Adjustment And Proficiency Disparities In Virtual Reality, Mohammad Jahed Murad Sunny

Theses and Dissertations

The rapid integration of VR in various application domains necessitates a deeper understanding of how levels of user experience impact user performance and task efficiency. This study investigates the relationship between experience with VR, expertise in 3d computer gaming, and physiological skills across multiple performance metrics, such as task-completion time, task load, accuracy, manipulation speed, and related spatial requirements. In a comprehensive analysis of multiple levels of VR experience and 3d computer-game expertise, we identified key trends that indicate increased experience in both domains significantly enhances task efficiency while at the same time reduces perceived workload and improves task accuracy. …

Machine Learning Research On Time Series Data, Zeyi Fan

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Time series generated by complex systems, such as industrial IoT and user behavior systems, confront two core challenges: structured missingness (e.g., continuous or periodic gaps) that disrupt temporal dependencies, and the difficulty in effectively modeling dynamic long- and short-term temporal dependencies inherent in evolving patterns (e.g., user interests). Traditional approaches struggle to balance the preservation of local dependency continuity and the rational association of global long-range dependencies in structured missing scenarios, often incurring high computational costs. In temporal pattern modeling, the lack of adaptive mechanisms to fuse evolving long- and recent behavior trends (e.g., stable interest inertia vs. short-term preference …

Towards Scalable Schema Mapping Using Large Language Models, Christopher Buss, Mahdis Safari, Arash Termehchy, David Maier, Stefan Lee

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The growing need to integrate information from many diverse sources poses significant scalability challenges for data integration systems. These systems often rely on manually written schema mappings, which are complex and costly to maintain. While recent advances suggest that large language models (LLMs) can assist in automating schema mapping, key challenges remain. We motivate future research in schema mapping generation by highlighting key challenges, presenting a competitive bidirectional schema matching pipeline, and exploring the limitations of current methods for generating more complex mappings.

Multimodal Representation Learning For Geospatial Soundscape Mapping, Subash Khanal

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Sound is one of the fundamental senses that helps us reason about our environment. There exists an intricate relationship between the visual appearance of a location and the distribution of sounds present there. We propose leveraging this relationship to formulate the task of soundscape mapping—predicting the most probable distribution of sounds that could be perceived at a given geographic location, as observed in its overhead imagery. To support research on this task, we curated a comprehensive dataset, GeoSound, which consists of geotagged audio recordings from various sources, paired with both low- and high-resolution overhead imagery. We approach the soundscape mapping …

The Implications Of Insecure Use Of Fonts Against Pdf Documents And Web Pages, Junjie Xiong, Mingkui Wei, Xiao Han, Zhuo Lu, Yao Liu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper identifies the importance of the safe use of fonts in web and document security. We find multiple attack surfaces that can be exploited by an adversary using malicious fonts. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents collected from the real world to investigate how an attacker can bypass PDF signatures. We further evaluate the potential security threats that an attacker can bring to web-based emails. Our study shows that various security issues may be caused by the inappropriate use of fonts, which are nevertheless overlooked in the past years. As such, guidelines promoting the …

Introduction: Symposium ‒ Ai Disrupting Law, Edward Lee

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Anatomy Of An Ai Arms Race: U.S. And China Technological Dispute For Ai Leadership, Denisse I. Rojas Maldonado

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

The history of societies and the emergence of powerful states have been marked by cycles of conflict and war, followed by periods of cooperation that foster international stability. Similarly, the Cold War era saw a significant rise in military and economic capabilities, which highlighted a security dilemma as the former USSR and the United States sought to protect their national interests. Currently, artificial intelligence has expanded the scope of invisible warfare beyond the atomic bomb. Some scholars like Paul Scharre advocate that there is no arms race in place, and others support the idea of a healthy competition and collaboration …

Investigating Information Extraction And Language Models In Medical Domain Text Processing, Pouyan Nahed

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation demonstrates that carefully adapted language-model pipelines can transform unstructured clinical-trial and pharmacological prose into reliable, low-latency structured data. Four interconnected studies support this claim.Tri-AL platform. An open-source dashboard ingests all 440 k+ ClinicalTrials.gov records—including every historical revision—into a normalized schema and parses the 20 GB XML archive over 10x faster than a BeautifulSoup baseline, while exposing hooks for demographic analytics and supporting integration of user-defined modules. Clinical trial summarization. An encoder–decoder model is trained on 57k description–summary pairs to condense clinical trials into a few sentences. ROUGE evaluation shows a 20% improvement over the baseline, while graph-based evaluation …

Cybersecurity: Digital Stewardship In A Violent World, Rocky K. C. Chang

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This paper defines cybersecurity based on the principle of biblical stewardship. The focus of this principle is God, not the technologies, who is the creator and owner of cyberspace and everything in it. Humankind is called by God to steward them by protecting the digital property of our neighbors in cyberspace from malicious attacks. In the context of cybersecurity, a neighbor can be any individual cyber user, practitioner, educator, organization, tech company, or even hacker. However, as argued from the perspectives of human sin and human finitude, the defending stewards can never win over evil in this spiritual battle. Instead, …

Note For Quadripartitioned Neutrosophic Offset, Pentapartitioned Neutrosophic Offset, And Heptapartitioned Neutrosophic Offset, Takaaki Fujita

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Neutrosophic sets assign each element three independent membership values—truth, indeterminacy, and falsity—and their partitioned extensions introduce additional components subject to sum-bounded constraints. Notable examples include quadripartitioned, pentapartitioned, and heptapartitioned neutrosophic sets. The O set concept further extends this framework by allowing membership values outside the standard [0, 1] interval, including negative values and values exceeding one. In this paper, we introduce and analyze the Quadripartitioned Neutrosophic O set, Pentapartitioned Neutrosophic O set, and Heptapartitioned Neutrosophic O set. These extensions are intended to enhance the expressiveness of neutrosophic theory and to stimulate further research in neutrosophic and fuzzy uncertainty.

Some Properties Of Neutrosophic Cubic Hypersoft Sets, Lubna Nayab, Muhammad Gulistan, Fawad Hussain

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

This study addresses the limitations of NCS in managing uncertainties associated with multiple attributes and their further bifurcation. To address this challenge, we propose a generalization of the neutrosophic cubic soft set, introducing the concept of "neutrosophic cubic hyper soft set." Within this framework, we define internal and external neutrosophic cubic hypersoft sets, along with operations such as P-intersection, P-union, P-restricted union, P-extended intersection, P-OR operator, P-AND operator, R-intersection, R-union, R-restricted union, R-extended intersection, R-OR operator, R-AND operator, complement, and relative complement of neutrosophic cubic hyper soft sets. The study explores and presents relevant results, demonstrating the enhanced capability of …

Application Of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis For Quantifying Responsibility In Ml-Based Intrusion Detection System, Mona Mohamed, Zekra Sakr

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

With the swift growth in Internet of Things (IoT), certifying secure and trustworthy networks has turned to be a critical challenge, particularly as IoT devices are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks. As a remedy, intelligent intrusion detection systems (IDS) evolved as promising solutions in recent years, but deciding on the appropriate model remains difficult because of competing performance and trustworthiness criteria. To this end, this paper explores a novel application of an ML-augmented decision-making framework to enhance security-related decision-making in IoT environments. The framework systematically evaluates and ranks ML-based IDS systems according to different evaluation criteria with distinct trade-offs, including …

Digital Trading Platform Selection Under Neutrosophic Numbers And Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methodology: An Illustrative Example, Eman Sayed, Karam M. Sallam, Ibrahim Alrashdi

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Uncertainty, vagueness, and incomplete information are pervasive in real-world decision-making scenarios, particularly in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) contexts involving expert judgments. To address these challenges, this study introduces a comprehensive decision-making framework that integrates Triangular Neutrosophic Numbers (TNNs) with the Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method. The framework begins by capturing expert evaluations using TNNs, which effectively represent the degrees of truth, indeterminacy, and falsity inherent in subjective assessments. These evaluations are then transformed into crisp values using a novel score function that preserves the embedded uncertainty. The resulting decision matrices are aggregated into a unified structure to ensure consistency …

Land8fire: A Complete Study On Wildfire Segmentation Through Comprehensive Review, Human-Annotated Multispectral Dataset, And Extensive Benchmarking, Anh Tran, Minh Tran, Esteban Marti, Jackson Cothren, Chase Rainwater, Sandra Eksioglu, Ngan Le

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Early and accurate wildfire detection is critical for minimizing environmental damage and ensuring a timely response. However, existing satellite-based wildfire datasets suffer from limitations such as coarse ground truth, poor spectral coverage, and class imbalance, which hinder progress in developing robust segmentation models. In this paper, we introduce Land8Fire, a new large-scale wildfire segmentation dataset composed of over 20,000 multispectral image patches derived from Landsat 8 and manually annotated for high-quality fire masks. Building on the ActiveFire dataset, Land8Fire improves ground truth reliability and offers predefined splits for consistent benchmarking. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art convolutional and transformer-based models, …

Autonomous Generation Of Ids Rules From Threat Intelligence, Azim Bazarov

Theses and Dissertations

Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) detect malicious activities by matching network or host activity against predefined rules. These rules are derived from Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), which includes attack signatures and behavioral patterns obtained through automated tools and manual threat analysis, such as sandboxing. The CTI is then transformed into actionable rules for the IDS engine, enabling real-time detection and prevention of threats. The constant evolution of cyber threats necessitates frequent rule updates, which delay deployment time and weaken overall security readiness. Recent advancements in autonomous agentic systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential for automatic IDS …

Topnet R1: A Multi-Stage Ai Framework For Topic Discovery In Scientific Abstracts, Md Elias Hossain

Theses and Dissertations

Scientific abstracts are rich sources of knowledge, yet extracting meaningful topics remains challenging due to limitations in existing topic modeling techniques. Traditional methods often struggle with interpretability, scalability, and contextual understanding. To overcome these issues, we introduce TopNet R1, a multi-stage ensemble framework that integrates traditional topic models with contextual embeddings from Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) large language models (LLMs). Top- Net R1 operates in three phases: (1) topic generation using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP); (2) LLM-assisted pattern recognition …

Estimating Reliability Of Electric Vehicle Charging Ecosystem Using Principle Of Maximum Entropy, Himanshu Tripathi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the challenge of estimating electric vehicle (EV) charging system reliability against unpredictable threats like cyberattacks and extreme weather, where traditional methods fail. We utilize the Principle of Maximum Entropy (PME), a statistical tool that provides unbiased risk estimates using limited information. Applied to the EV charging ecosystem, our case study shows how PME models stress factors to predict failures and optimize maintenance. This approach extends beyond EVs to other complex systems with scarce data, such as smart grids or healthcare devices. By linking uncertainty directly to reliability, PME offers a universal method to improve decision-making under unpredictable …

Dynamic Mutational Profiling Of Binding Interactions And Allosteric Networks In Conformational Ensembles Of The Sars-Cov-2 Spike Protein Complexes With Classes Of Antibodies Targeting Cryptic Binding Sites: Confluence Of Binding And Allostery Determines Molecular Mechanisms And Hotspots Of Immune Escape, Mohammed Alshahrani, Vedant Parikh, Brandon Foley, Gennady M. Verkhivker

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2 variants has underscored the need to understand not only the structural basis of antibody recognition but also the dynamic and allosteric mechanisms that could underlie complexity of broad and escape-resistant neutralization. In this study, we employed a multi-scale approach integrating structural analysis, hierarchical molecular simulations, mutational scanning and network-based allosteric modeling to dissect how Class 4 antibodies (represented by S2X35, 25F9, and SA55) and Class 5 antibodies (represented by S2H97, WRAIR-2063 and WRAIR-2134) can modulate conformational behavior, binding energetics, allosteric interactions and immune escape patterns of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Using hierarchical simulations of the …

Bring Back The Blue-Book Exam: In An Age Of Ai, We Need To Return To Handwritten Assignments., Katie Day Good

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

When ChatGPT was released three years ago, its ability to mimic human writing unsettled me. I’m a professor of communication; what did it mean that my students now had access to a machine that could communicate for them? My initial unease led to a half-joke with my colleagues. Universities could survive this threat, I ventured, but only if we reverted back to 19th-century teaching methods like Socratic dialogue, oral defenses, and lengthy essay exams. This once-laughable scenario is now a serious consideration for many faculty, including me.

Like many professors, I’ve recently abandoned take-home essays in favor of blue-book exams. …

Development And Validation Of Venous Thromboembolism-Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers (Vte-Bert) Natural Language Processing Model, Omid Jafari, Shengling Ma, Barbara D Lam, Jun Y Jiang, Emily Zhou, Mrinal Ranjan, Justine Ryu, Raka Bandyo, Arash Maghsoudi, Bo Peng, Christopher I Amos, Abiodun Oluyomi, Nathanael R Fillmore, Jennifer La, Ang Li

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Background: Accurate and rapid phenotyping of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in longitudinal studies is important. A natural language processing (NLP) tool externally validated in representative patients is lacking.

Objectives: To train and validate an efficient NLP model to detect incident VTE event.

Methods: We designed a novel NLP platform, NLPMed, to assist thrombosis researchers with data preprocessing, phenotype annotation, language model finetuning, and NLP application. Using clinical notes, discharge summaries, and radiology reports from patients with cancer at 2 healthcare institutions, we finetuned Bio_Clinical Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to develop VTE-BERT. The new model was trained to detect acute …

Imputation Via Domain Adaptation: Rethinking Variable Subset Forecasting From Knowledge Transfer, Runchang Liang, Qi Hao, Yue Gao, Kunpeng Liu, Lu Jiang, Pengyang Wang, Minghao Yin

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Multivariate time series forecasting in practical deployment faces a critical challenge termed Variable Subset Forecasting (VSF), where certain variables accessible during training are entirely missing during inference. This creates a stark discrepancy between the training (source domain with full variables) and inference (target domain with partial variables) environments, disrupting cross-variable dependencies and fragmenting global temporal patterns. Existing imputation methods, limited to transferring local knowledge (e.g., temporal neighbors or pairwise correlations), fail to capture essential global dynamics, leading to severe performance degradation under distribution shifts. To address these challenges, we redefine VSF as a cross-domain knowledge transfer problem and propose VIDA, …

Exploitation For All: The Factors That Enable Pig Butchering Schemes To Weaponize Cybersecurity's Weakest Link, Melaney Freeman

Boise State Graduate Student Projects

This paper discusses pig butchering schemes and how they leverage human weaknesses through advanced social engineering and manipulation techniques that are enabled through the use of human trafficking, forced labor, and government corruption in Southeast Asia. Details regarding scammer exploitation and the formation of a victim-offender identity is presented, followed by the explanation of factors that allow organized crime groups to exist. Essential tactics used by scammers are examined to understand how they weaponize people's vulnerabilities for the duration of the scam to build a relationship with the victim and earn their trust in order to financially exhaust them through …

Gcot: Chain-Of-Thought Prompt Learning For Graphs, Xingtong Yu, Chang Zhou, Zhongwei Kuai, Xinming Zhang, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, its vast potential remains largely unexplored for graphs. This raises an interesting question: How can we design CoT prompting for graphs to guide graph models to learn step by step? On one hand, unlike natural languages, graphs are non-linear and characterized by complex topological structures. On the other hand, many graphs lack textual data, making it difficult to formulate language-based CoT prompting. %Therefore we cannot directly adopt the CoT prompting methods used in the language domain. In this work, we propose the first CoT prompt learning framework …

Akma+: Security And Privacy-Enhanced And Standard-Compatible Akma For 5g Communication, Guomin Yang, Guomin Yang, Yingjiu Li, Minming Huang, Zilin Shen, Imtiaz Karim, Ralf Sasse, David Basin, Elisa Bertino, Jian Weng, Hwee Hwa Pang, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Authentication and Key Management for Applications (AKMA) protocol is a fundamental building block for security and privacy of 5G cellular networks. Therefore, it is critical that the protocol is free of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. Unfortunately, based on a detailed analysis of AKMA, we show that AKMA has several vulnerabilities that may lead to security and privacy breaches.We define AKMA+, an enhanced protocol for 5G communication that protects against security and privacy breaches while maintaining compatibility with existing standards. AKMA+ includes countermeasures for protecting communication between the user equipment (UE) and application functions (AFs) from attackers, …

Faithfulrag: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling For Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Qinggang Zhang, Zhishang Xiang, Yilin Xiao, Le Wang, Junhui Li, Xinrun Wang, Jinsong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have demonstrated significant potential in handling knowledge-intensive tasks. However, these models often struggle with unfaithfulness issues, generating outputs that either ignore the retrieved context or inconsistently blend it with the LLM’s parametric knowledge. This issue is particularly severe in cases of knowledge conflict, where the retrieved context conflicts with the model’s parametric knowledge. While existing faithful RAG approaches enforce strict context adherence through well-designed prompts or modified decoding strategies, our analysis reveals a critical limitation: they achieve faithfulness by forcibly suppressing the model’s parametric knowledge, which undermines the model’s internal knowledge structure …

Memotune: A Measure And Moment-Driven Fine-Tuning Framework For Quantized Large Language Models, Yun Zhang, Xue Geng, Lizi Liao, Jintong Sun, Minghe Yu, Ge Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for reducing memory and computational costs in natural language processing. Existing methods combine quantization with parameter-efficient fine-tuning but often fail to meet practical performance requirements. This paper introduces MeMoTune, a novel fine-tuning framework for quantized LLMs. By employing a measure and moment approach within a low-rank approximation framework in probability measure space, MeMoTune optimizes the objective function for superior fine-tuning results. The update process is further refined through scaled gradient, enhancing convergence efficiency and noise robustness. Experiments on tasks like text generation, summarization, and understanding show MeMoTune significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, e.g. fine-tuning …