Digital Commons Network^™

South Africa's Inclusive Six-Dimensional Generative Ai Readiness Framework, Keegan Steyn, Ojelanki Ngwenyama, Sibongiseni Tunzelana

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is transforming governance, knowledge systems, and economic activity, but current preparedness measures pay little attention to the socio-technical, institutional, and postcolonial contexts that shape country trajectories. To address this gap, the study employs a design science methodology to create the National Generative AI Readiness Assessment Framework (N-GAIRF), a six-dimensional diagnostic tool theoretically based on Sen's capability approach to development and incorporating Institutional Theory, Socio-Technical Systems Theory, National Innovation Systems Theory, and Postcolonial Information Systems critique. An example application to South Africa, compared to Zimbabwe and an indicative Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reference …

Rockin’ Rover On The Rainbow Road, Michael Kolta, Lawrence Burgee, Ying Yuan

Transformations

This paper presents a progressive series of age-appropriate lesson plans for grades K-12 that all use the same interdisciplinary activity to educate students about Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) simultaneously. Technology from Texas Instruments (TI) was employed including a TI Nspire graphing calculator that can run Python programs, a TI Innovator Hub, and a TI Rover. The TI Rover is a small, robotic car that has sensors and is controlled by the calculator via the Hub hardware interface. A Python program was developed that uses the color sensor in the Rover to detect the color on colored paper …

A Granularity-Centered Taxonomy Of Personalized Federated Learning, Ei Ei Nyein Chan, Sergei Chuprov, Pretom Roy Ovi, Kamrul Hasan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has emerged as a key approach to address performance degradation in FL systems under heterogeneous client data. While existing surveys typically categorize PFL methods based on optimization strategies or system-level mechanisms, they often overlook a fundamental question: where is personalization embedded within the model architecture? In this survey, we bridge this knowledge gap and introduce a granularity-centered taxonomy that organizes PFL approaches according to the structural depth of personalization, ranging from head-layer and layer-wise adaptation to model-wise and parameter-wise customization. This novel perspective helps practitioners select appropriate personalization strategies based on model architecture, data heterogeneity, and …

Real Bullets, Plastic Guns: Evaluating The Strength Of 3-D Printed Gun Parts, Maria Latenia Mayol

Student Theses

Privately made firearms (PMFs), often referred to as “ghost guns,” are firearms manufactured or assembled by individuals rather than federally licensed manufacturers. Although the terms are frequently used interchangeably, “ghost gun” more specifically describes an unserialized firearm, whereas PMFs include a broader range of firearms produced through nontraditional manufacturing methods. PMFs may be entirely 3-D printed, assembled from partially completed firearm kits, or constructed by integrating additively manufactured components with commercially manufactured firearm parts. The increasing accessibility of additive manufacturing and widespread dissemination of computer-aided design files have raised concerns about concealment, regulation, and forensic evasion, particularly when factory-manufactured components …

Closing The Awareness–Behavior Gap: A Role-Based Phishing Training Framework For Higher Education, Ranylene O. Olaybal, Ryan A. Olaybal

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Phishing remains one of the most persistent cybersecurity threats facing higher education institutions, where diverse user populations and highly connected digital environments increase exposure to social engineering attacks. Although cybersecurity awareness initiatives are widely implemented, high awareness does not always translate into secure behavior. This study examined phishing awareness, phishing-related practices, phishing susceptibility, and phishing experiences among college students, teaching faculty, and administrative staff in a private higher education institution in the Philippines. Using a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected from 553 respondents through a validated survey instrument and analyzed using descriptive statistics, one-way analysis of variance, Tukey's honestly …

Ai And The Music Industry: Its Current Status And A Speculative Projection Of Its Evolutionary Trajectory, Rhett D. Morris, Clayton Rosati, Stefan Fritsch

Honors Projects

Music serves as one of society's biggest cultural outlets, allowing millions to share in what used to be a uniquely human form of expression. The commodification of music has built a huge industry full of companies and platforms that have used technology and property laws to shape music's relationship with the public. This study aims to look into the future to see how AI and its implementation could affect the structure of the music industry. To look into the future, this piece establishes two of the most pressing kinds of AI technology for the music industry and looks to contextualize …

Dbssnet: Dual-Branch Spectral-Spatial Network With Data-Driven And Knowledge-Guided Band Selection For Uav Hyperspectral Wheat Rust Detection, Subin Kim

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Wheat rust is a serious plant disease that can reduce crop yield and quality. In practice, the disease is often noticed only after visible symptoms appear, when some damage may already be difficult to reverse. This thesis studies whether drone-based imaging can help detect wheat rust earlier and more reliably in field environments. 

Unlike an ordinary color photograph, a hyperspectral image records reflected light at many narrow wavelengths. These measurements can reveal useful information about plant condition, but they are also high dimensional, noisy, and difficult to analyze when only a limited number of labeled field samples are available. To …

Viability Assessment Of Bovine Embryos: A Public Dataset And Deep Learning Baselines, Erfan Khayyati

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Improving the success rates of cattle breeding is essential for sustainable agriculture, global food security, and high-quality livestock production. Currently, determining whether a lab-grown bovine embryo is healthy enough for a successful pregnancy requires highly trained experts to manually evaluate days of continuous time-lapse video footage. This process is not only incredibly time-consuming but also highly subjective; human reviewers often suffer from visual fatigue when tracking subtle, microscopic cellular changes over a seven-day period, leading to significant disagreement among even top experts on an embryo’s true potential. Furthermore, assessing bovine embryos is notoriously difficult due to their dark, lipid-dense cellular …

Causal Discovery In Photospheric Magnetic Field Time Series For Interpretable Solar Flare Prediction, Nathan W. Nelson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Solar flares are capable of damaging many valuable resources, including satellites, power grids, and even human lives. Being able to predict solar flares can allow for proactive measures to be taken that can prevent that damage. Many new deep learning methods for predicting solar flares have shown promise in this task, but the decisions they make are harder to explain to humans. This makes understanding why these models make mistakes difficult, which in turn makes fixing and maintaining them more challenging. We test a recent deep learning method that helps discover relationships between different measurements of the Sun as they …

Unsupervised Learning For Minimum Error Adaptive Sampling Of Atmospheric Vertical Temperature Profiles, Alejandro Medina

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) collect atmospheric data on fixed schedules, and endurance limits make blind searching costly. This thesis develops an unsupervised representation that summarizes a multi-decade radiosonde archive into a compact library of atmospheric states, giving a UAS an expectation of the column before it flies. The method standardizes both axes of a profile against the sounding's own surface conditions, which makes the representation independent of season and of station elevation. Applied to 27,270 soundings from Norman, Oklahoma, over the lowest 1.5 km of the atmosphere, 12 representative profiles reconstruct the record to within 1.0 °C of mean absolute …

Sentinel: Evaluating Occlusion-Centered Next-Best-View Selection Using Rgb-Derived Pseudo-Geometry, Paul Nassar

Master's Theses

Three-dimensional cameras provide direct geometric measurements, but their cost, weight, power requirements, and calibration constraints can limit their use in various lightweight or large-scale sensing systems. A potential alternative is to use conventional two-dimensional RGB cameras together with geometric reconstruction models that infer a partial three-dimensional representation from images. This thesis evaluates that possibility for next-best-view (NBV) selection through Sentinel, an occlusion-centered system for static, object-centric scenes with known camera poses and intrinsics. Sentinel converts source RGB observations into pseudo-geometry using monocular depth or point-map predictions, combines those predictions with camera-ray evidence, identifies occluded unknown regions, and selects a candidate …

Enabling Multi-Task Neural Network Inference On Heterogeneous Edge Devices, Redwanul Islam Arif

Master's Theses

Deep neural networks are increasingly required to run on the devices that generate the data. If such a device must perform more than one task, the standard practice is deploying one model per task, which makes memory grow linearly with task count, which is unacceptable when the entire budget is kilobytes. This thesis asks one question in three settings: how much capability can a network acquire without incurring deployment cost?

The first study takes an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-18, sweeps the branch point across every residual stage and the classification-head depth across one, ten, and twenty layers, and deploys the resulting multi-head …

Federated Learning For Early Medical Diagnosis: Enhanced Diabetic Retinopathy Detection In Smart Healthcare, Mohammad Nasajpour Esfahani

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates the role of federated learning as a privacy-preserving solution for modern healthcare challenges. In traditional machine learning, sensitive medical data must be centralized for model training, raising concerns about privacy, security, and regulatory compliance. Federated learning offers an alternative by allowing hospitals, clinics, and personal health devices to collaboratively train shared models without exchanging raw patient data. The study first explores how federated learning is being used across various healthcare domains, including cancer detection, medical imaging, and disease prediction— highlighting its potential to support secure collaboration across institutions. It addresses key benefits such as data privacy, scalability, …

Llm-As-A-Judge For Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision, And The Road Ahead, Junda He, Jieke Shi, Terry Yue Zhuo, Christoph Treude, Jiamou Sun, Zhenchang Xing, Xiaoning Du, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering (SE) has revolutionized tasks from code generation to program repair, producing a massive volume of software artifacts. This surge in automated creation has exposed a critical bottleneck: the lack of scalable and reliable methods to evaluate the quality of these outputs. Human evaluation, while effective, is very costly and time-consuming. Traditional automated metrics like BLEU rely on high-quality references and struggle to capture nuanced aspects of software quality, such as readability and usefulness. In response, the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, which employs LLMs for automated evaluation, has emerged. This approach leverages …

Left: Learnable Fusion Of Tri-View Tokens For Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection, Dezheng Wang, Tong Chen, Guansong Pang, Congyan Chen, Shihua Li, Hongzhi Yin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a fundamental data mining task, unsupervised time series anomaly detection (TSAD) aims to build a model for identifying abnormal timestamps without assuming the availability of annotations. A key challenge in unsupervised TSAD is that many anomalies are too subtle to exhibit detectable deviation in any single view (e.g., time domain), and instead manifest as inconsistencies across multiple views like time, frequency, and a mixture of resolutions. However, most cross-view methods rely on feature or score fusion and do not enforce analysis–synthesis consistency, meaning the frequency branch is not required to reconstruct the time signal through an inverse transform, and …

Graph Perturbation Analysis For Subgraph Counting, Hanhua Xiao, Yuchen Li, Kyriakos Mouratidis

PhD Student’s Publications Collection

Subgraph counting, which involves determining the frequency of a query graph within a data graph, has numerous applications such as query optimization, fraud detection, and evaluating the expressiveness of graph neural networks. Despite its importance, there has been no systematic study on the impact of adversarial graph perturbations on subgraph counts. In this work, we examine the kSub problem, which aims to identify k edge additions that maximize the count of a query graph. We prove that kSub is intractable due to its NP-hardness, even for constant approximation. To address this, we relax the problem into a top-k selection, termed …

Emergency Risk Dispatch For Integrated Electricity-Heat Systems Under Typhoon Disasters, Tongchui Liu, Lian Tan, Dongxuan Bao, Lanting Zeng, Pengfei Hou, Ronghua Ling

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: The spatiotemporal randomness of typhoon movement paths leads to uncertain operational risks for integrated electricity-heat systems (IEHS), making it difficult to balance system risk controllability and dispatch economy. To tackle this problem, an emergency risk dispatch (ERD) method for IEHS under typhoon disasters is proposed. An ERD model for IEHS under typhoon disasters is established within the model predictive control framework. Based on the uncertainty of typhoon wind speed prediction, a moment-based ambiguity set for uncertain equipment component failures is constructed, and a distributionally robust chance-constrained ERD model is formulated. An approximation method based on worst-case conditional value-at-risk (WC-CVaR) …

Bi-Level Coordinated Scheduling And Optimization Of Power Systems Based On Stackelberg-Gmo, Yuanxing Zhang, Jianfeng Li, Taoyong Li, Linjuan Zhang, Jincheng Liu, Bin Li

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: , To balance the interests of the power grid and the demand side, and achieve coordinated improvements in system economic efficiency, environmental friendliness, and renewable energy accommodation capacity, this paper proposes a bi-level coordinated scheduling model based on the Stackelberg game and the GMO. A leader-follower game model incorporating carbon emission constraints and multi-scenario stochastic constraints for photovoltaic generation is constructed, with the grid operator as the leader and EVs/V2G and energy storage as the followers, resolving the core contradiction between global optimization and individual rationality. The spatio-temporal stochastic characteristics of EV travel, the cycle life of energy storage …

Energy Management Method For Integrated Energy Driven By Users’ Social Attributes, Yankai Zhu, Yujing Huang, Qinghua Wang, Xiaoning Zhang, Fang Fang, Yuguang Niu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To explore a new interaction mechanism between an energy service provider (ESP) and multiple users, this paper proposes a complex modeling and energy management method for integrated energy systems driven by users' social attributes. A multi-agent interaction framework comprising an ESP and user clusters is established. To maximize the ESP's operational benefit and minimize users' energy costs, a leader-follower game-based energy management model is established within a reinforcement learning framework, and a distributed collaborative solution algorithm combining Q-learning and quadratic programming is proposed. Simulation results show that, compared with the traditional integrated demand response method, consideration of users' social …

Missing-Data-Tolerant Diffusion-Based Wind Power Scenario Forecasting Method, Yingying Shi, Xiaochong Dong, Guobin Fu, Miaomiao Ma, Yanhe Li, Xuebin Wang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To address the issue of error accumulation in traditional "imputation-then-forecasting" approaches, a missing data tolerant diffusion framework (MDTDF) is proposed. An XGBoost regression model is employed to map numerical weather prediction data into deterministic power forecasts. The encoder in the denoising network extracts temporal features, which are fused with the deterministic forecasts and fed into the decoder through a cross-attention mechanism to guide the denoising process. A historical constraint mechanism is introduced to directly utilize incomplete historical data and dynamically correct the denoising result at each step through sample gradient updates and noise injection guided by historical information. The …

Time-Step Relaxation Method For Simulation With Time-Sensitive Interactions, Zhaopeng Liu, Kaidi Jin, Xunyun Liu, Dongao Zhou, Xinhai Xu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In time-driven military simulation, time-step setting is a key technology for balancing operational efficiency and simulation accuracy. Based on the current research on time-step setting in military simulation, a trajectory spatiotemporal intersection calculation model is designed to address the performance bottleneck caused by the minimum time step, thus removing the constraints imposed on the minimum time step by interactions such as high-speed target detection and jamming. Experiments involving detection interaction scenarios are designed to verify the effectiveness of the model in preventing missed interactions and improving simulation efficiency.

A Review Of Spatial Indexing Technologies For Large-Scale Combat Simulation, Kaidi Jin, Xunyun Liu, Dongao Zhou, Yang Wang, Zhaopeng Liu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: The real-time performance and scalability of large-scale combat simulations are constrained by performance bottlenecks in spatial queries caused by massive numbers of dynamic entities. Spatial indexing technology becomes the key to solving this problem by establishing an efficient mapping between locations and entities. This paper reviews spatial indexing technologies in large-scale combat simulations. Based on an analysis of the core requirements for index structures in combat simulations, various indexing technologies along three main lines are examined: static indexing, dynamic optimization, and distributed parallelism. The principles, evolution, and applicability boundaries of these technologies are also examined, and their query and …

Learning Evolution Modeling Of Multi-Cycle Nested Cloud Manufacturing Service Ecosystem, Fang Li, Deyu Zhou, Gang Wang, Guangjun Liu, Qi Hu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In view of the lack of comprehensive consideration of the individual adaptability changes of enterprises caused by the collaborative governance mechanism among multiple manufacturing units and the overall evolution trend of the system in existing learning evolution models, this proposed a learning evolution model of multi-cycle nested cloud manufacturing service ecosystem. At the micro level, the adaptive linkage decision-making among multiple manufacturing units within the enterprise was achieved in the individual layer through the nesting of planning-readiness-execution-assessment (PREA) loops and OODA loops; at the macro level, the closed-loop simulation of the individual layer, organizational layer, and social layer was …

Study On Transient Electric Field Of Insulated Rail Joints In High-Speed Railway Stations Based On Dissado-Hill Model, Junli Li, Youpeng Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: The transient electric field distribution of insulated rail joints in high-speed railway stations under lightning impulse voltages is critical to their normal operation. Under lightning impulse voltages, considering the relaxation polarization of the insulated rail joint material, a frequency-domain mathematical model of its transient electric field was established. Based on Dissado-Hill model, the measured frequency-domain dielectric spectra were fitted and analyzed to reveal the microstructural characteristics of insulated rail joints and the interaction characteristics between microscopic particles during the polarization process. The results indicate that the relative permittivity of insulated rail joints decreases with the increasing harmonic frequency of …

Intelligent Evaluation Method For Regional Air Superiority Based On Graph Convolutional Neural Network, Peng He, Yubo Tang, Jingde Liu, Yujia Tian

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To address the dual challenges of the lack of quantification standards and sparse air combat samples in the superiority evaluation of modern air combat, an intelligent evaluation method for regional air superiority based on a graph convolutional neural network was proposed. The spatial grid method was employed to encode the air situation of the entire battlefield airspace into a new data representation, namely the air superiority matrix. A novel air superiority quantification model was applied to quantify the air superiority label values of spatial grids, and four key operational capabilities closely related to air superiority contention were selected as …

Sensorless Control Of Pmsm Based On An Improved Super-Twisting Sliding-Mode Observer, Shiyu Chen, Xinmin Chen, Xionglong Hu, Heng Wang, Yepeng Han, Jiajie Chen

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To address the chattering in back electromotive force estimation and the gain mismatch across a wide speed range when using a conventional super-twisting sliding-mode observer in the sensorless control system of a permanent-magnet synchronous motor, this paper proposed an improved adaptive-gain super-twisting sliding-mode observer. A linear correction term was introduced into the super-twisting algorithm and integrated with a gain adaptation law based on speed feedback, enabling the system to achieve finite-time convergence and high-precision back electromotive force estimation over a wide speed range. A variable-gain adaptive complex-coefficient filter was constructed to effectively suppress the harmonic components in the observed …

Line Spectrum Enhancement Technology Based On Second-Order Vector Hydrophone, Zhengkai Wang, Yirong Yu, Qing Hu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In view of the problem of limited detection of line spectrum signals in low signal-to-noise ratio underwater environments, a spatial-temporal cooperative line spectrum enhancement technology based on a two-dimensional second-order vector hydrophone was proposed. A receiving signal model of the two-dimensional second-order vector hydrophone was established to clarify the spatial characteristics of its output signals. For spatial signal processing, the signals from each channel of the vector hydrophone were fused to suppress noise, and a channel combination method with high spatial directivity gain was proposed to achieve spatial processing gain. For temporal signal processing, an adaptive line spectrum enhancer …

Dodaf-Opm-Sd Cross-Layer Automated Mapping Method Based On A Unified Semantic Bridge, Lei Cheng, Gang Xiao, Binbin Wang, Siming Peng, Haozhe Liang, Xiangwu Gong

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To address the problems of the inability of DoDAF views to directly drive simulations and the insufficient cross-layer semantic alignment and consistency verification, a DoDAF-OPM-SD cross-layer semantic automated/semi-automated mapping and verification method was proposed in this paper. Targeting tactical/operational-level problems dominated by "conservation+feedback+time delay", the proposed method reduced manual mapping under expert adjudication based on a "minimal executable view set". The object-process methodology served as a semantic bridge to map architectural elements into the stock-flow-feedback structures of system dynamics; semantic embedding disambiguation, integer programming harmonization, and K-nearest neighbor parameter completion were integrated; end-to-end traceability was connected through traceability identifiers, …

Design And Implementation Of Hdrt Real-Time Simulation System, Huiji Zheng, Guangsen Wang, Qing Liu, Kang Wang, Zhiwei Wang, Zhenyu Zhang, Shuo Wang, Zhu Liu

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In view of the real-time simulation requirements of large-scale complex systems such as power electronics, a hidden dragon real-time(HDRT) simulation system was developed. The strict time constraints of simulation tasks were guaranteed based on a resource-dedicated real-time scheme, supporting fixed-step and multi-rate simulations from the second level to the hundred-nanosecond level. A hybrid CPU-field programmable gate array(FPGA) architecture was adopted to accelerate computation. The system could utilize multiple simulators for parallel simulation and realized microsecond-level real-time data interaction between simulators through a dedicated PCIe switch. A single simulator could be expanded through I/O interface equipment, supporting a maximum input …

Numerical Simulation Of Water Tank Solidification In A Firefighting Aircraft Under High-Altitude Cold-Soak Conditions, Guanmian Liu, Zhihang Cheng, Hejun Qin, Kangzhi Yang, Qing Wen, Kun Gao

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: A systematic numerical simulation study was conducted to address the issue of internal water tank solidification in firefighting aircraft under high-altitude low-temperature conditions. Based on computational fluid dynamics methods, a solidification-melting model considering fluid-structure interaction heat transfer and phase change processes was adopted. Through reasonable simplification of the complex geometric model, a quasi-three-dimensional computational model suitable for engineering analysis was developed. The influence laws of key parameters, including high-altitude cold-soak temperature, ground initial water temperature, and cold-soak time, on the freezing characteristics of the water tank were investigated. Combining with the parameter influence laws, a safety criterion using the …