Digital Commons Network^™

Urban Spatial Development Control In Tanzania: Analysis Of Factors Influencing Gis Application Using Structural Equation Modelling (Sem)., Happiness Protas Mmanda, Nestory Yamungu

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Rapid urbanization in developing countries has intensified urban expansion, creating challenges for sustainable development. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) enhance spatial planning, but empirical evidence on factors influencing their effectiveness remains limited. This study examines determinants of GIS application in Urban Spatial Development Control (USDC). The objectives are to (1) identify and categorize factors affecting GIS use, (2) assess relative strength, and (3) develop a validated structural model explaining GIS adoption in USDC. Data were collected from 103 LGAs by a mixed sampling method. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis classified influencing factors into technology-related (α = 0.869, CR = 0.881), process-related …

Decision Support Tool For The Maintenance Of Meter Gauge Railway Permanent-Way Infrastructures: A Concept Paper, Hamisi J. Maulid, Beatus A.T Kundi, Juma M. Matindana, Ismail W. R. Taifa Dr

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

A Decision Support Tool (DST) represents a transformative way of modernising maintenance practice on the permanent-way infrastructure of Meter Gauge Railway (MGR). Maintenance practice remains largely reactive, as the MGR plays a strategic role in transporting both freight and passengers, resulting in inefficient resource allocation, high operational risk, and growing Lifecycle expenses. This concept paper explores the potential and the design challenges for a DST that combines fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) modelling, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and predictive machine learning (ML) analytics for evidence-based, future-oriented maintenance management. The paper draws on peer-reviewed studies from …

When Does Global Search Pay For Itself? A Measured Exploration Cost And Energy Break-Even Analysis Of A Metaheuristic Search Controller In Solar Energy Systems, Mohamed Ali Muammar Ezgour

Communications of the IIMA

Autonomous energy systems increasingly delegate the choice of operating point to embedded search algorithms, trading a fast local optimizer that can settle on a wrong point against a slower global search that guarantees the right one at a measurable cost. This paper reframes maximum power point tracking under partial shading as that decision and measures its economics on a fixed photovoltaic plant in MATLAB/Simulink. A Hippopotamus Optimization global search handed over to incremental conductance is compared with incremental conductance alone across seventeen initial duty cycles and thirty random seeds. The hybrid reached the global peak in all thirty seeds, whereas …

From Data To Victory: The Race For Analytic Superiority In Warfare, Robert Grossman, Emily Goldman

Joint Force Quarterly

Artificial intelligence technologies have reached a tipping point after decades of development. They are diffusing widely across defense and national security applications. Twenty-first century warfighters rely on analytic models in all systems, at all echelons, and in all domains. As more powerful models built on ever larger data sets become ubiquitous, militaries are in a new competition to deploy artificial intelligence. Operational art must embrace “analytic superiority.” This is the operational advantage from collecting and ingesting data, building robust models and computing infrastructure, deploying the models into operational systems, and denying adversaries' ability to do the same

This article explains …

Bitseat: Reimagining The Financing For Airliners Using Nonfungible Tokens (Blockchain Technology), Edwin S. Ongola

Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering

This essay describes how blockchain technology, particularly nonfungible tokens, can be used to raise funding for airliners. The essay begins with a brief overview on the costs, categories, and acquisition methods of airliners. After that, the essay introduces concepts on blockchain technology, tokens, and smart contracts. The essay then touches on how nonfungible tokens can be used to facilitate fractional ownership of airliners. From there, the essay discusses Bitseat, a conceptual nonfungible token for fractional ownership of airliners, covering its overall design, appeal, marketplace alternatives, and challenges. Finally, in the discussion, the essay summarizes the overall concept and outlines its …

Toxicity Ahead: Forecasting Conversational Derailment On Github, Mia Mohammad Imran, Robert Zita, Rahat Rizvi Rahman, Preetha Chatterjee, Kostadin Damevski

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Toxic interactions in Open Source Software (OSS) communities reduce contributor engagement and threaten project sustainability. Preventing such toxicity before it emerges requires a clear understanding of how harmful conversations unfold. However, most proactive moderation strategies are manual, requiring significant time and effort from community maintainers. To support more scalable approaches, we curate a dataset of 159 derailed toxic threads and 207 non-toxic threads from GitHub discussions. Our analysis reveals that toxicity can be forecast by tension triggers, sentiment shifts, and specific conversational patterns.We present a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework for predicting conversational derailment on GitHub using a two-step …

From Data To Decision-Making: The Role Of Local Digital Twins In Cross-Domain Management Within Municipalities – A Research-In-Progress Study In Veenendaal, Diana M.E. Boekman, Koen Smit, Guido Ongena, Rob Peters

Communications of the IIMA

Municipalities are facing increasingly complex, interconnected challenges in areas like housing, climate adaptation, mobility, and social policy. Local Digital Twins (LDTs) are seen as a promising tool to make this complexity more understandable and support decision-making. At the same time, both literature and practice show that few initiatives get past the pilot phase, even though getting through that phase is essential for successful long-term adoption.

This paper presents a research-in-progress study on the development and application of an implementation method for LDT technology within the municipality of Veenendaal, based on human values rather than driven by technological possibilities. Based on …

A Novel Entropy Based Maintainability Measurement Algorithm For Java Source Code., Remi M. Yusuf Mr, Md Shadab Mashuk, Julian Bass

Communications of the IIMA

Software metrics play a central role in assessing and managing the quality of software systems providing quantitative insights into attributes such as complexity, reliability, rigidity, modifiability and maintainability. Among these, maintainability is particularly critical, as it directly influences the ease of system evolution, long-term sustainability, and overall cost effectiveness. Despite the widespread use of metric-based maintainability measurement algorithms, capturing a value that reflects the maintainability situation of software source code remains a challenging task, especially in the presence of design deficiencies such as code smells. To measure changes in maintainability, this study experimentaly characterises the relationship between code smells and …

A Transformer-Based Approach With Data Augmentation For Multilabel Emotional Context Detection, Mohsin Hasan Hussein, Marem H. Abdulabas, Azha Talal Mohammed Ali, Homam Aziz Ghazi

Al-Bahir

Emotion identification in texts is becoming increasingly difficult because of the wide variety of ways emotions are represented. This study uses a fine-tuned Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Approach

(RoBERTa) to offer a Transformer-based model for identifying multilabel emotional context in textual data. To balance emotion categories and enhance the model's capacity for generalization, data augmentation is applied on two different datasets: Semantic Evaluation and Cross-lingual Emotion Dataset (SemEval and XED) English corpus. This stage is considered one of the most important steps in preprocessing as it greatly helps to improve the results. The RoBERTa model was then …

From Dissertation To Deployment: A Unified Software Platform Operationalizing Clinical-Prediction And Sequential-Security Ai For Healthcare, Olsi Shehu, Damiana Teliti, Jasmin Kevrić, Bekir Karlik

Communications of the IIMA

Advances in machine learning for healthcare are abundant, yet most validated models remain confined to research notebooks and never reach secure, usable clinical software. This paper addresses that deployment gap by presenting a unified, security-hardened software platform that operationalizes two complementary streams of doctoral research inside a single, role-based hospital information system. The first stream contributes a clinical-prediction capability: an ultra-hybrid ensemble that couples a quantum-inspired feature transformation, particle-swarm feature selection, and calibrated soft voting for cancer-outcome prediction (96.41% accuracy, AUC-ROC 0.983 on TCGA-BRCA), survival stratification, multi-cancer generalization, and pharmacogenomic drug-response classification (89.31% mean accuracy across 25 compounds). The second …

A Hybrid Rule-Based And Large Language Model Framework For Extracting Acronym–Definition Pairs From Scientific Literature, Petro Skrypnyk

Theses and Dissertations

Authors of scientific papers rely heavily on acronyms and often use them without defining them, making the literature harder to read and index. This thesis develops and evaluates a hybrid rule-based and large language model (LLM) framework that extracts acronym–definition pairs from scientific PDF documents. It extends an earlier Rowan University system that combined a regular-expression parser with a single LLM on 200 papers. That system showed that neither the parser nor the LLM alone is sufficient for accurate extraction of the pairs. The framework is a fully automated pipeline from PDF input to scored results. It compares four LLM …

A Neutrosophic Event-Graph Legal Ai System For Detecting Contradictions In Witness Testimonies Under Egyptian Law, Shimaa Abdelghany Attalla, Alaa Elmor, Nada Hesham, Abduallah Gamal

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Witness testimony is an important source of evidence in criminal proceedings, but it may contain contradictions, incomplete details, or conflicts with other case-file materials. This paper proposes a neutrosophic event-graph legal AI framework for detecting materially contested claims in witness testimonies under the Egyptian criminal-procedure context. The framework converts testimony and related records into structured claims containing actor, action, object, time, location, source, and modality. These claims are then connected through an event graph and evaluated using neutrosophic components of support, indeterminacy, and opposition. The system produces source-grounded legal-review alerts when a claim has sufficient opposition from other claims or …

An Interval-Valued Spherical Fuzzy Critic–Waspas Framework For Prioritizing Healthcare Delivery Models To Enhance Patient Satisfaction Under Uncertainty, Mariam Hamada, Ahmed Samy, Mohamed M. Abdelhafeez, Shrouk El-Amir

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Selecting an appropriate healthcare delivery model is important for improving the quality of healthcare services and enhancing patient satisfaction. However, this decision is complex because it involves several criteria, uncertainty, and different expert opinions. To handle this uncertainty, this paper uses Interval-Valued Spherical Fuzzy Sets (IVSFSs), which allow experts to express their evaluations more flexibly. This paper proposes an integrated interval-valued spherical fuzzy CRITIC-WASPAS approach to prioritize healthcare delivery models. The CRITIC method is used to determine the objective weights of the evaluation criteria, while the WASPAS method is used to rank the healthcare delivery models. Expert evaluations are expressed …

Hyperlattice-Valued And Superhyperlattice-Valued Uncertain Sets With Decision Applications, Takaaki Fujita, Ajoy Kanti Das, Sankar Prasad Mondal, Arif Mehmood, Arkan Ghaib

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Fuzzy set theory enriches classical sets by assigning to each element a graded membership in [0,1], thereby capturing partial inclusion and uncertainty. The notion of an Uncertain Set further abstracts this idea by allowing membership to take values in a general degree-domain, providing a unified language that subsumes fuzzy, intuitionistic fuzzy, neutrosophic, plithogenic, and related models. On the algebraic side, a hyperlattice replaces one lattice operation by a multivalued hyperoperation, enabling the representation of ambiguous or non-deterministic combinations, while a superhyperlattice iterates this structure through powerset lifting to obtain higher-order layers of interaction. Motivated by these developments, we introduce HyperLattice-valued …

20 Years Of Neutrosophic Statistics: A Bibliometric Analysis, Hammad Khalid, Arshad Hameed

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Florentin Smarandache introduced neutrosophic statistics (NS), a formalism for representing uncertainty and indeterminacy in observations, parameters and statistics in an extension to classical and interval statistics. Although widespread in various contexts, such as statistical quality control, hypothesis testing, medical diagnosis, and decision science, and increasingly used and developed, the scientific evolution and conceptual framework of the science of decision making remain largely unexamined. To fill this gap, the present study has been conducted with a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of NS research articles published between 2003 to 2025 from Scopus which has been conducted following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol. In all, 501 …

A Unified Framework For Neutrosophic Estimation Using Fractional Power, Exponential, And Logarithmic Functions With Bivariate Auxiliary Information, Anchal Yadav, Anuj Yadav

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

This study develops a generalized neutrosophic ratio-type estimator for estimating the population mean by incorporating information from two auxiliary variables under Simple Random Sampling Without Replacement (SRSWOR). The proposed methodology extends the conventional single-auxiliary-variable approach by jointly incorporating bivariate auxiliary information within the neutrosophic framework, thereby accounting for uncertainty, indeterminacy, and inconsistency in the available information. The bias and mean squared error of the proposed estimator are derived using first-order approximations, and the corresponding efficiency conditions are established through theoretical comparisons with existing neutrosophic estimators. The performance of the proposed estimator is further examined using a real medical dataset represented …

Learning-Based Entanglement Generation For Quantum Routing, Tasdiqul Islam, Rasman Mubtasim Swargo, Md Arifuzzaman

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Entanglement generation in long-distance quantum networks is challenging because resources are limited and entanglement swapping is probabilistic. To maximize the rate of successful requests, existing quantum routing algorithms often rely on computationally expensive methods such as Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to determine which links to entangle and use for end-To-end entanglement generation. However, these approaches fail to meet the latency requirements of real-world quantum networks. In this study, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based model that determines which links to entangle in each time slot, replacing the slow ILP-based link-selection phase used in prior algorithms. The proposed Deep Q-learning model …

Artificial Intelligence Models For Automated And Semiautomated Analysis And Interpretation Of Clinical Electroencephalography, Sándor Beniczky, Birgit Frauscher, Fábio Nascimento, Shobi Sivathamboo, Catalina Rojas, Michael Sperling, Samden Lhatoo, Philippe Ryvlin, Levin Kuhlmann

Department of Neurology Faculty Papers

Electroencephalography is the most commonly used diagnostic tool for epilepsy. However, interpreting electroencephalograms (EEGs) requires expertise that is not widely available. Advances in digital technology and wearables have enabled large-scale EEG recording, generating vast amounts of data that cannot be managed through traditional visual interpretation by experts. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to augment human expertise and reduce workloads. The application of artificial neural networks in analysing clinical EEG recordings has led to major breakthroughs, bringing AI-based EEG interpretation closer to clinical implementation. In this Review, we summarise the most important research and development results in this field from …

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 …

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, …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …