Digital Commons Network^™

Parkinson’S Disease Phenotype Stratification Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, Kelly Astudillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, with over 12 million people projected to be affected by 2040 (Dorsey et al., 2018). Deep phenotyping and stratification can provide useful information regarding PD pathogenesis and can aid in the  development of disease modifying therapies that aim to delay the progression or prevent the onset of neurodegeneration (Blandini et al., 2019; Smith & Schapira, 2022). Utilizing multivariate methods such as multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) permits for the simultaneous analysis of distinct data modalities. To the best of our knowledge, MCA has not been previously used to explore phenotype patterns …

A Predictive Coding Account Of Spatial Working Memory Following Prophylactic Levetiracetam Administration Prior To Traumatic Brain Injury, Omeima Mutwali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptom prevention and remediation is an important area of research that would benefit vulnerable groups, including active-duty and veteran soldiers. These patients can sustain penetrative forces in fields of combat or in training, which result in focal lesions that trigger inflammatory and degenerative processes in the brain. Both primary and secondary injuries are associated with changes to cognition, behavior and affective state. This disease poses increased risk of epileptogenesis, as well. Given these outcomes, prior research has evaluated levetiracetam (LEV) as a prophylactic treatment for seizures, cognitive deficits and negative emotionality. LEV acts as a presynaptic …

1d Crust-Magnetosphere Coupling Model For Magnetars, Kennedy M. Jeter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Magnetars are the most extremely magnetized objects in the universe. Their strong magnetic fields generate high-energy magnetic flares with instantaneous luminosity that can outshine their host galaxy. Previous works have explored how Hall drift in the crust affects the dynamics of magnetic field lines in the magnetosphere. This work investigates how a change in the magnetosphere, such as a flare or an outburst, can excite Hall evolution in the crust. We investigate how the twisting and untwisting of magnetic field lines in a magnetar’s magnetosphere launches Hall waves through its crust using a one-dimensional numerical model. We use the Dedalus …

Whitney Extension Problem For Fractional Sobolev Spaces And Besov Spaces, Han Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the dissertation, we go through the development of the Whitney extension problem and prove a type of results for the Whitney extension problem for homogeneous fractional Sobolev spaces and homogeneous Besov spaces.

This dissertation consists of four chapters:

Chapter 1: We recall the history of the Whitney extension problem and talk about some early works which have been done for the Whitney extension problem. We also mention our new results.

Chapter 2: We introduce some basic notations, definitions and preliminary results.

Chapter 3: We show the existence of a bounded linear extension operator for homogeneous fractional Sobolev space L …

Supramolecular Assembly In Short Peptide Systems For Selective Metabolite Recognition And Drug Nanoencapsulation, Maithreyi Ramakrishnan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Short peptides can form adaptive supramolecular assemblies, and understanding how minimal sequences organize around neurometabolites or hydrophobic cancer drugs enables the rational design of functional materials. This thesis combines molecular dynamics with experimental validation to establish design rules linking peptide sequence to emergent structure and function. Chapter 1 outlines the molecular determinants governing peptide assembly. Chapter 2 reviews computational workflows that reveal sequence-dependent conformations and supramolecular organization. Chapter 3 applies these principles to Dynamic Peptide Libraries which identify tetrapeptides that selectively interact with neurometabolites. Chapter 4 extends the same interaction-driven framework to design tryptophan-rich pentapeptides that co-assemble with kinase inhibitors …

Quiver Of Affine Monoid Of A Vector Space Over Finite Field, James Junie Chen Cleary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this paper, we study the quiver of the complex monoid algebra CAFF(n, q). There are n + 1 maximal subgroups of AFF(n, q), each isomorphic to AGL(k, q) for some 0 ≤ k ≤ n. Every irreducible representation of CAFF(n, q) arises from a character of CAGL(k, q) for a suitable k. Thus, we study two different approaches to classifying the characters of CAGL(k, q). Next, we compute the full quiver Q(CAFF(n, q)). Finally, we show that this quiver is a disjoint union of straight-line paths and that its basic algebra has radical square zero. Hence, it has finite …

Computational Insights Into Nucleosome Dynamics In Epigenetics Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations, Rutika Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nucleosome core particles (NCP) are the building blocks that form a highly organized and compact chromatin structure. Nucleosomes package DNA in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells. The NCP consists of about 147 base pairs of DNA wrapped around the histone octamer, with 1.65 superhelical turns in a left-handed manner. The histone octamer is composed of two copies of H3, H4, H2A, and H2B. Together with histone H1 and linker DNA, they further assemble into a higher-order chromatin structure. The nucleosome complex is stabilized by electrostatic interactions between positively charged histone residues and the negatively charged DNA backbone. To effectively access …

Scaling Limits Of Critical Observables Through The High Dimensional Incipient Infinite Cluster, Pranav Chinmay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We give a general construction of the incipient infinite cluster in high dimensional percolation, and use it as a decoupling tool to rigorize geometric heuristics for analyzing the asymptotics of observables at criticality. Examples include demonstrating the limiting distribution of the chemical distance and full-strength asymptotics for k-point functions, which constitute foundational inputs for scaling limit results associated to critical clusters.

Navigating Oer Support Without Drowning In Ai, Lydia Burrage-Goodwin, Christine Moynihan

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

This was a presentation at the June 2026 Boston Library Consortium at Connecticut College.

UMB Healey Librarians Lydia Burrage-Goodwin and Christine Moynihan talk about what experiences they have had with faculty using OER and AI, which led them to develop ethics guidelines to support librarians who work with faculty authors. Attendees learned about creating AI use statements for OERs, using AI transparency logos, and applying open licenses to fully AI generated content as well as OER adaptations.

Modeling Turbulent Accretion Flows Around Black Holes: Azimuthal Flux Derivative Density Curves In 3d Mhd Simulations, Sasmitha Purushothaman, Matthew D. Duez, Pavan Chawhan

University Honors Theses

When modeling two-dimensional axisymmetric accretion disks around Kerr black holes, setting the azimuthal terms of the MHD equations to zero causes the loss of turbulence and dynamo effects. In this paper, we use three-dimensional models to identify the turbulence that arises from azimuthal flux derivatives (AFDs) and create probability density functions to characterize them. We establish a pipeline for calculating the AFDs, creating a distribution, and normalizing it. Then, we plot the dependence of the conditional probability of the AFDs on density, magnetic field strength, and velocity for the continuity and magnetic induction equations. Future research can take this information …

Comparing The Sensitivity And Degree Of Boolean Functions Via The Hypercube, Anne-Caroline Rupp

University Honors Theses

This thesis studies three complexity measures of total Boolean functions f:{0,1}ⁿ → {0,1}: maximum sensitivity s(f), polynomial degree deg(f), and spectral sensitivity λ(f), where λ(f) is defined as the spectral norm of the adjacency matrix of the sensitivity graph. Building on the results of Aaronson et al., we examine the inequality chain √s(f) ≤ λ(f) ≤ deg(f) and investigate whether all three quantities can be simultaneously equal.

The first part of the thesis reverse engineers the equality cases of the two known inequalities to isolate necessary extremal conditions on both the Fourier structure of f and the local geometry …

Not Everyone Gets A Tree: Housing Values, Street Trees, And Equity In Portland, Matthew Moller

University Honors Theses

Street trees are positively associated with Portland home sale prices, but exposure and capitalization are uneven by race/ethnic neighborhood context. Urban trees are ecological assets, but their economic and equity implications remain uneven. This thesis examines street-tree exposure and 2023 residential sale prices in Portland, Oregon (n = 6,414) using a mixed-methodology hedonic design. Ordinary least squares models measure inventoried street-tree counts within 20m, 50m, and 100m buffers together with structural controls and census-block racial and ethnic context. Trees are positively and significantly associated with logged prices at all radii, with scale-sensitive magnitudes and modestly better fit as wider buffers. …

The Security Of Llm-Generated Code, Christopher Brian Gonzalez Ayala

Student Theses

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has transformed coding practices by enabling automated code generation, completion, and optimization. Despite these advantages, concerns persist regarding the security and reliability of LLM-generated code. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of both the functional correctness and security of code produced by three prominent LLMs as of early 2026. A total of 4,800 code snippets were generated using 100 security-focused programming prompts derived from the OWASP Top 10:2025, translated across eight natural languages and two phrasing styles (literal and natural developer-oriented prompts). To assess performance, a multi-stage experimental framework …

Forensic Analysis Of Temporary Tattoo Markers And Inks, Daniel J. G. Chasse Jr

Student Theses

As tattoos rise in popularity, some marker manufacturers have created temporary tattoo markers so that children and adults can experience tattoos without the permanence of a regular tattoo. These new products are marketed explicitly as ‘temporary tattoo markers’ and intended for direct application to the skin. This research aims to scientifically evaluate the inks from these temporary tattoo markers to elucidate their physical and chemical properties using wet chemistry, visual examination, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV/Vis), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), attenuated total reflectance infrared spectroscopy (ATR-IR), thin layer chromatography (TLC), and diffuse reflectance infrared spectroscopy (DRIFTS) to analyze temporary tattoo markers and …

Adversarial Robustness Of Perceptual Hashing Systems: A Unified Security Evaluation Framework, Avijit Roy

Student Theses

Social network platforms, child safety organizations, and image provenance systems use perceptual hashing to identify known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), support content moderation and reverse image search, and verify image integrity. Perceptual hashing works by producing similar fingerprints for visually similar images, even after common transformations such as compression, resizing, or minor brightness changes. This useful similarity-preserving property also creates an adversarial attack surface, as attackers can use AI-assisted or conventional image manipulation techniques to move a hash across a matching threshold while maintaining visual similarity, often without access to specialized hardware.

The security failures produced by adversarial attacks …

The Comparative Chemical Analysis Of Colored Henna, Vani D. Bhagwandeen

Student Theses

Henna, a natural dye derived from Lawsonia inermis, is widely used for temporary body art, hair coloring, and cultural decorative practices such as Mehendi. Traditional henna produces a reddish-brown stain through lawsone, a naphthoquinone chromophore that binds to keratin in skin, hair, and nails (Badoni Semwal et al., 2014; de Groot, 2013; Kumar Singh et al., 2015). Commercial henna products have increasingly incorporated synthetic dyes, pigments, and glitter additives to produce a broader range of colors and effects (Blair et al., 2004; Manso et al., 2017; Blackledge & Jones, 2007). Despite their prevalence, limited forensic research has examined the …

Investigating The Detection Ability Of Presumptive Bloodstain Testing Through Concealment Obstacles, Skye E. Lehr

Student Theses

Bloodstain detection can provide valuable information on the ability of presumptive tests. When perpetrators seek to alter the scene of violent crimes to interfere with investigations or flee from justice, crime scene investigation becomes more complex. In this analysis, scenarios where bloodstain evidence is attempted to be removed by household cleaners and covered up by acrylic or oil-based paint, are tested using luminol and Kastle-Meyer direct testing. These bloodstains have been altered by bleach, dish soap or all-purpose cleaner and covered under multiple layers of acrylic or oil-based paint. Evidence is documented both photographically and visually to simulate crime scene …

Trace: Temporal Rhetorical Analysis And Consistency Evaluation For Legislative Speech, David Hernandez

Master's Theses

Legislators frequently discuss the same policy issues across multiple hearings and legislative sessions, sometimes maintaining consistent positions and other times modifying or reframing their stance over time. Understanding how these positions evolve is important for analyzing political discourse and democratic accountability, yet identifying such shifts at scale remains difficult.

We introduce TRACE (Temporal Rhetorical Analysis and Consistency Evaluation), a system built on the Digital Democracy Database (DDDB) for detecting rhetorical inconsistency in California legislative hearing testimony. TRACE organizes utterances into speaker-anchored timelines indexed by bill and session, then applies hybrid semantic retrieval — combining dense BGE embeddings with BM25 lexical …

Identifying Helium Emission-Line Stars With The Condor Array Telescope, Julia Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Helium emission-line stars, including cataclysmic variables (CVs), AM Canum Venaticorum (AM CVn) binaries, symbiotic stars, and X-ray binaries, are tracers of compact object binary populations in the Milky Way, and may be viable progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovae. Their space densities are not well constrained - just over 100 AM CVn stars are known out of a Galactic population that may be closer to 100,000. Identifying such systems in large numbers requires wide-field, narrow-band photometric surveys capable of detecting faint emission-line sources across significant sky areas.

In this thesis, I present a narrow-band photometric search for helium emission-line stars …

Spatiospectral Lobes And Radiation Modeling Of Partially Coherent Supersonic Jet Noise, Tyce Wayne Olaveson

Theses and Dissertations

Noise fields generated by high-performance military jets are known to contain acoustic structures that differ from their simulated and lab-scale counterparts. These differences may limit current noise control efforts, which are designed and tested at scale before being considered for full-scale aircraft. One such noise structure is the presence of spatiospectral lobes, which appear as multiple spectral peaks at single microphone locations and multiple radiation lobes in field reconstructions. This dissertation uses data collected from the T-7A jet noise measurement to characterize the spatial behavior of the spatiospectral lobes as well as their first time-domain description. A multiple wavepacket decomposition …

Towards Efficient Continual Learning: From Memory Optimization To Foundation Models, Zilin Luo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Continual learning, also termed lifelong learning, enables machine learning models to incrementally acquire new knowledge while mitigating the degradation of previously learned information—a capability essential for adapting to dynamic, real-world data environments. This dissertation investigates the core challenges of continual learning and extends its application to enhancing training efficiency in the era of foundation models. The first part of this dissertation addresses the constraints of few-shot exemplar storage with a novel compression framework. While leveraging class activation maps to downsample non-discriminative pixels, we introduce an adaptive masking model, optimized through bilevel optimization, to store more exemplars efficiently. The second part …

Applications Of Prior And Novel Computational Tools In Mental Health Treatment, And Their Potential To Uncover The Explanatory Gap, Ambika Vyas

University Honors Theses

The explanatory gap is a widely discussed concept in scientific and philosophical literature. In neuroscience, the solution to the explanatory gap is highly sought out, but the general consensus is that it is unsolvable. Numerous articles discuss the explanatory gap alongside computational tools and how these tools could aid neuroscientists in uncovering the mental health explanatory gap. However, significant developments in machine learning have been made since 2020, coinciding with the rise in Large Language Models (LLMs). This thesis is a literature review on computational methods, tools, and devices developed and utilized by researchers to improve how mental health disorders …

Hillslope Aspect And Other Potential Controlling Factors On The Spacing Of Periglacial Stone Stripes In Se Oregon, Blue Hansen

University Honors Theses

Stone stripes are a type of patterned landscape that can be polygenetic in origin, but in the High Lava Plains province are interpreted to be relict periglacial features based on similarities to active stone stripe formation in current periglacial settings. Periglacial stone stripes are hypothesized to form via frost process, including ice-driven cracking and soil heave which is dependent on temperature, long-term differences in temperature may contribute to differences in stone stripe patterns or density. Stone stripes in Oregon and Idaho have previously been studied using field techniques, but there is room for reexamination of temperature controls on hillslope density …

How To Save The Take-Home Essay With Oral Assessments, Matthew Hammerton, Jacqueline Ho

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, the authors opined that pairing take-home essays with oral assessments is a more effective response to AI than policing its use. Students who cannot adequately explain their work can be marked down, reducing incentives to rely on AI. They noted that oral exams help preserve key elements of university education – intellectual effort, ownership, and human relationships – while allowing take-home essays to remain relevant in an AI-driven landscape that demands greater emphasis on understanding, responsibility, and dialogue.

Patchfuzz: Patch Fuzzing For Javascript Engines, Junjie Wang, Zhihua Xie, Xiaofei Xie, Xiaoning Du, Xiangwei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Patch fuzzing is a technique aimed at identifying vulnerabilities that arise from newly patched code. While researchers have made efforts to apply patch fuzzing to testing JavaScript (JS) engines with considerable success, these efforts have been limited to using ordinary test cases or publicly available vulnerability PoCs (Proof of Concepts) as seeds, and the sustainability of these approaches is hindered by the challenges associated with automating the PoC collection. Objective: To address these limitations, we propose an end-to-end sustainable approach for JS engine patch fuzzing, named PatchFuzz. Method: It automates the collection of PoCs of a broader range of …

Hydpn: A Hybrid Deep Reinforcement Learning, Programming, And Neighborhood Operations Framework For Integrated Scheduling On Parallel Batch Processing Machines, Yuqi Wang, He Luo, Guoqiang Wang, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Batch processing machines (BPMs) are widely used in industries such as semiconductors, metal processing, and healthcare, where jobs are processed in batches. As production, inventory, and distribution become increasingly integrated to improve efficiency, research on their joint scheduling in parallel BPM environments remains scarce. This paper addresses the integrated scheduling problem in parallel BPMs, involving production, inventory, and distribution stages, with the objective of minimizing total costs. A unified cost-based model is first formulated, applicable to both in-facility and external distribution scenarios. A hybrid algorithm framework, HyDPN, combining deep reinforcement learning, dynamic programming, and neighborhood operations is proposed. Extensive experiments …

Extensive And Intensive Margin Labor Supply On Ride-Sourcing Platforms, Hao Sun, Hai Wang, Zhixi Wan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid expansion of ride-sourcing platforms has enabled freelance drivers to flexibly determine both their participation and working hours. Understanding this flexible labor supply behavior is essential for managing platform capacity and evaluating the impacts of pricing and incentive policies on driver welfare. This study develops a labor supply model in which drivers optimally choose whether to participate (extensive margin) and how long to work (intensive margin) to maximize their utility from consumption and leisure. The model incorporates heterogeneity in drivers’ other income, idle time, and participation costs, allowing us to analytically characterize equilibrium labor supply decisions. The results show …

On-The-Fly Generation-Quality Enhancement Of Deep Code Models Via Model Collaboration, Weifeng Sun, Naiqi Huang, Meng Yan, Zhongxin Liu, Hongyan Li, Yan Lei, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The growing prominence of deep code models in automating software engineering tasks is undeniable. However, their deployment encounters significant challenges in on-the-fly performance enhancement, which refers to dynamically improving the performance of deep code models during real-time execution. Conventional techniques, such as retraining or fine-tuning, are effective in controlled pre-deployment scenarios but fall short when adapting to on-the-fly adjustments post-deployment. CodeDenoise, a notable on-the-fly performance enhancement technology, leverages uncertainty-based methods to identify misclassified inputs and applies an input modification strategy to rectify classification errors. While effective for classification tasks, this approach is inapplicable to generative tasks due to two key …

Videocreator: An Agentic System For Multi-Turn Video Production, Zhengyang Liang, Yan Shu, Cathal Gurrin, Nicu Sebe, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advances in video generation models enable visually compelling single clips. However, real-world video creation is inherently continuous and iterative: creators refine content over multiple rounds while maintaining narrative, style, and entity consistency. Existing standalone generators are largely stateless and lack memory of previously generated segments, making it difficult to produce a coherent and consistent video project. To address this gap, we present VideoCreator, a unified video agent that integrates generation and understanding with a project-level memory system. VideoCreator leverages understanding capabilities to perform fine-grained analysis of newly produced content and uses persistent memory to retain and reuse prior context …

Sam3-Litetext: An Anatomical Study Of The Sam3 Text Encoder For Efficient Vision-Language Segmentation, Chengxi Zeng, Yuxuan Jiang, Ge Gao, Shuai Wang, Duolikun Danier, Bin Zhu, Stevan Rudinac, David Bull, Fan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vision-language segmentation models such as SAM3 enable flexible, prompt-driven visual grounding, but inherit large, general-purpose text encoders originally designed for open-ended language understanding. In practice, segmentation prompts are short, structured, and semantically constrained, leading to substantial over-provisioning in text encoder capacity and persistent computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we perform a large-scale anatomical analysis of text prompting in vision–language segmentation, covering 404,796 real prompts across multiple benchmarks. Our analysis reveals severe redundancy: most context windows are underutilized, vocabulary usage is highly sparse, and text embeddings lie on a low-dimensional manifold despite high-dimensional representations. Motivated by these findings, we …