Digital Commons Network^™

A Longitudinal Analysis Of Hospital Consumer Evaluation In Virginia, Tulay Akmandor Inac

Health Services Research Dissertations

Suboptimal patient experience signals a need to improve clinical efficacy, patient safety, and healthcare quality. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified hospital resource and staffing demands, reducing hospitals’ capacity to invest in patient experience improvement. Prior studies remain limited because many lack longitudinal structure and organized theoretical models, making temporal inference difficult and weakening analyses of patient experience disparities. To address these limitations, this dissertation incorporates three studies examining patient experience and pandemic-related effects.

In state-level markets comparable to Virginia, limited research has examined longitudinal patient experience trends across regional hospital systems using HCAHPS scores. The first study uses descriptive trend analysis …

Proxy Interfaces For Enhancing Non-Visual Web Usability, Md Javedul Ferdous

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

People with blindness or visual impairments (BVI) face significant barriers when navigating the web, even when digital content is technically accessible. These challenges arise not from a lack of access, but from a mismatch between vision-centric user interfaces and the linear, audio-based interaction paradigms of screen readers. Sighted users rely on spatial layout, grouping, and visual cues to interpret structure quickly, while blind users must explore elements sequentially, often without sufficient context. As a result, they expend greater cognitive effort, become disoriented more easily, and struggle with tasks that are usually trivial for sighted users. Although accessibility initiatives have focused …

A Finite Element Model To Analyze Crack-Tip Fields In A Transversely Isotropic Strain-Limiting Elastic Solid, Saugata Ghosh, Dambaru Bhatta, S. M. Mallikarjunaiah

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper presents a finite element model for the analysis of crack-tip fields in a transversely isotropic strain-limiting elastic body. A nonlinear constitutive relationship between stress and linearized strain characterizes the material response. This algebraically nonlinear relationship is critical as it mitigates the physically inconsistent strain singularities that arise at crack tips. These strain-limiting relationships ensure that strains remain bounded near the crack tip, representing a significant advancement in the formulation of boundary value problems (BVPs) within the context of first-order approximate constitutive models. For a transversely isotropic elastic material containing a crack, the equilibrium equation, derived from the balance …

Modeling The Psychological And Technical Factors Influencing The Use Of Artificial Intelligence Tools Among Non-Native Arabic Learners: A Comparative Study In Egypt, Saudi Arabia, And Jordan., Mohammad Odeh, Alaa Al Din Musa, Ahmed Ragab Ali Ghalish, Montaser Adel Sayed Ahmed

All Works

This study aimed to develop a predictive longitudinal model of the psychological and technical factors influencing the use of artificial intelligence tools among non-native Arabic learners (international students) in three Arab countries: Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The study adopted an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) incorporating two psychological variables: trust in artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence anxiety. A quantitative longitudinal design with two time waves (T1 and T2) over a full academic semester was employed using Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analysis and PROCESS Macro for mediation. The sample consisted of 812 international students from public universities in …

Automated Testing And Enhancement For Autonomous Driving Systems, Mingfei Cheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) rely on Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) to perceive their surroundings, predict the behavior of traffic participants, plan driving actions, and control vehicle motion in complex traffic environments. As AVs move toward large-scale real-world deployment, ADSs are expected not only to avoid collisions and traffic-rule violations, but also to make robust decisions, cooperate effectively with other AVs, and maintain high-quality driving behavior. However, the open, dynamic, and uncertain nature of driving environments makes the systematic testing and enhancement of ADSs a challenging problem.

Although scenario-based testing has made substantial progress in discovering safety-critical violations, several important limitations remain. …

Macroscopic Classical And Quantum Models Of Inverse Compton Scattering, Emerson Penn Rogers

Physics Theses & Dissertations

Inverse Compton sources — in which a relativistic electron beam scatters a laser pulse to produce tunable, collimated, high-energy radiation—have emerged as among the most promising compact radiation sources, with applications ranging from nuclear photonics to medical and nanoscale imaging and metrology. The most viable current tabletop configuration couples laser-wakefield acceleration with inverse Compton scattering, producing GeV-scale electron beams over millimeter distances. As laser intensities increase and electron energies grow, the interaction enters the radiation reaction regime, where the energy radiated by the electron becomes a significant fraction of its kinetic energy. Predicting the scattered electron energy spectrum — the …

Multi-Particle Reactions In Lattice Field Theories: From Euclidean To Quantum Computations, Marco Antonio Carrillo Bernal

Physics Theses & Dissertations

Amplitudes of multi-particle processes provide a probe of the dynamics described by relativistic quantum field theories. In the context of quantum chromodynamics, these amplitudes encode the way in which quarks and gluons are bound together by the strong nuclear force to form hadrons and govern their interactions. The non-perturbative nature of the strong interactions complicates the study of hadronic amplitudes from first principles. The most effective way of studying hadronic reactions non-perturbatively is the numerical framework known as lattice quantum chromodynamics. This method relies on theoretical formalisms that establish relations between numerical observables, such as finite-volume energy levels and matrix …

Computational And Ai Tools For Understanding Telomere-Associated Cancer Mechanisms, Eleni Adam

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Telomeres are the protective caps of the human chromosomes and are critical for genome stability. Dysfunctional telomeres caused by their erosion with age and cell proliferation as well as by defects in their maintenance is a major early event leading to genome changes and cancer. Subtelomeres possess the critical role of regulating adjacent telomeres. Due to their complex repeat structure and high variance from one person to another, these areas have not been analyzed in detail. We present a set of computational and machine learning tools to aid in the understanding of subtelomere structure and its rearrangements in cancer.

Initially, …

Too Hot To Work? Exploring The Average And Seasonal Effects Of Temperature Variability In The Philippine Labour Market, Paolo R. Magnata, Maire Carroline Magante

Economics Department Faculty Publications

Using temperature and employment data covering 16 regions from Q3 2003 to Q1 2022, this study examined the average and seasonal effects of temperature on year-on-year employment growth in the Philippines. Average effects are insignificant while seasonal effects are heterogeneous. During the dry and cool season (Q1), higher temperatures are associated with a temporary 0.0397% increase in employment growth. In contrast, higher temperatures in the dry and hot season (Q2) are associated with a persistent decrease of 0.1361% while higher temperatures during the wet and hot season (Q3) are associated with a persistent increase of 0.1450%, which is primarily driven …

Efficient And Universal Watermarking For Llm-Generated Code Detection, Boquan Li, Zirui Fu, Mengdi Zhang, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun, Xingmei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the usability of AI-generated code, providing effective assistance to programmers. This advancement also raises ethical and legal concerns, such as academic dishonesty and the generation of malicious code. For accountability, it is imperative to detect whether a piece of code is AI-generated. Watermarking is broadly considered a promising solution and has been successfully applied to identify LLM-generated text. However, existing efforts on code are far from ideal, suffering from limited universality and excessive time and memory consumption. In this work, we propose a plugand- play watermarking approach for AI-generated code detection, named ACW …

Audeter: A Large-Scale Dataset For Deepfake Audio Detection In Open Worlds, Qizhou Wang, Hanxun Huang, Guansong Pang, Sarah Erfani, Christopher Leckie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Speech synthesis systems can now produce highly realistic vocalisations that pose significant authenticity challenges. Despite substantial progress in deepfake detection models, their real-world effectiveness is often undermined by evolving distribution shifts between training and test data, driven by the complexity of human speech and the rapid evolution of synthesis systems. Existing datasets suffer from limited real speech diversity, insufficient coverage of recent synthesis systems, and heterogeneous mixtures of deepfake sources, which hinder systematic evaluation and open-world model training. To address these issues, we introduce AUDETER (AUdio DEepfake TEst Range), a large-scale and highly diverse deepfake audio dataset comprising over 4,500 …

Parameterized Approximation Schemes For Fair Clustering In Doubling Metrics, Xiaoliang Wu, Ting Liang, Zhize Li, Qilong Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fair clustering has garnered considerable attention, with various fairness notions proposed to ensure equitable representation across demographic groups. In this paper, we focus on the k-center problem in bounded doubling metrics under two popular fairness requirements: group fairness and data summarization fairness, referred to Group Fair k-Center (Gf-k-Cen) and Data Summarization Fair k-Center (Dsf-k-Cen), respectively. Both fairness notions extend classical clustering formulation by associating each data point with a demographic label. Motivated by recent advances in parameterized approximation results for fair clustering, we investigate whether these problems admit Fixed-Parameter Tractable (FPT) approximation schemes in bounded doubling metrics. The previous algorithms …

Medical Firms’ Online Q&A Interactions: Effect Of Language Style On Investor Engagement, Runyu Wang, Keng Siau, Zili Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

PurposeThis study aims to investigate how language styles used by medical firms on digital question and answer (Q&A) platforms influence investor engagement. It examines the linguistic characteristics of managerial responses and compares their effects across industries, with a focus on the distinctive demands of medical communication.Design/methodology/approachWe analyze a panel dataset of 1,223 firm-month observations, constructed from 13,549 individual responses provided by 70 medical firms on a major Chinese web-based firm-investor Q&A platform over a 24-month period (2020–2021). Content analysis is used to assess linguistic features, such as first-person usage, uncertainty, understandability and concreteness. A two-way fixed effects model with clustered …

Dynamics, Characteristics, And Sinking Velocities Of Small, Gel-Like Ocean Particles (24–1000 Μm): Insights From Shadowgraph Imaging And Turbulence Modeling, Huanqing Huang

OES Theses and Dissertations

Particle concentration and sinking velocity control the export flux and transfer efficiency of the biological carbon pump, and are therefore key parameters in ocean biogeochemical models. Gel-like particles form an important part of the particulate organic carbon pool, but their contribution is difficult to quantify because they are fragile and nearly transparent to conventional optical instruments. Here, a focused shadowgraph imaging system (FoSI) was applied to marine gel research to examine the ecological significance, distribution, and transport of gel-like particles along a transect from the Azores to the upwelling region off northwest Africa.

A new image processing protocol was developed …

Sem-Pdpl: Semantic Exposure Graphs For Privacy-Law-Informed Risk Assessment Of Public Social-Media Data, Heba Ismail

All Works

Public social-media content often contains self-disclosed personal attributes that appear low-risk in isolation but become privacy-relevant when linked across posts, platform accounts, or user-level traces. Existing research has advanced privacy-sensitive content detection, de-anonymization analysis, social-media research ethics, and privacy-compliance workflows; however, limited work operationalizes how personal-data disclosures combine structurally and how these structures can be translated into auditable governance actions. This paper proposes SEM-PDPL, a computational, privacy-law-informed risk-assessment framework for modeling public social-media exposure as semantic exposure graphs and mapping graph patterns to controls aligned with the United Arab Emirates Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) and compatible with GDPR principles. …

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 …

From Screening To Risk: Assessment Of Potentially Toxic Elements In Children's Toys Along The El Paso, Tx, U.S.A.-Ciudad Juarez, Chih, Mex Border Region, Jesus Rodriguez-Loya

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Children are uniquely vulnerable to potentially toxic elements (PTEs), absorbing them more readily than adults and encountering them through the hand-to-mouth behaviors of early childhood. Exposure carries element-specific consequences: lead (Pb) impairs cognitive development with no established safe threshold; cadmium (Cd) damages the kidneys and reduces bone mineralization; arsenic (As) is a recognized carcinogen and developmental neurotoxicant; hexavalent chromium (Cr) is carcinogenic and induces allergic dermatitis; nickel (Ni) is the leading cause of allergic contact dermatitis in children; and excess zinc (Zn) disrupts copper absorption and causes gastrointestinal distress. Toys are a distinctive source of such exposure, yet none had …

Attenuation Of Redox Interference In Ruo2 Ph Sensor Using A Ta2o5/Nafion Multilayer Architecture, Wade Lonsdale, Magdalena Wajrak, Md Mahamudul Hassan, James Jin Kang

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Despite the growing preference for solid-state pH sensors due to their advantages over glass pH electrodes, their practical application is still limited by challenges, particularly in metal-oxide based systems. The main issue is their susceptibility to redox-active species such as dissolved oxygen, ascorbic acid, sulfides, and transition-metal ions. In this work, the effects of representative redox interferents, with particular emphasis on ascorbic acid, together with dissolved oxygen and potassium permanganate, were investigated and mitigated through the application of Ta2O5/Nafion overlayers. The solid-state metal-oxide pH-sensitive electrodes were fabricated with laser micro-etching of radio-frequency (RF) sputtered RuO2 thin films deposited on ceramic …

Mathematics As Creative Structure: A Review Of Marcus Du Sautoy’S Blueprints, Sangeetha Balakrishnan, Latha R

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Marcus du Sautoy’s Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity (2025) makes a provocative claim that creativity emerges not in opposition to constraint, but through it. Working through nine mathematical “blueprints” — symmetry, randomness, the Fibonacci sequence, among others — du Sautoy traces recurring structural patterns across artistic practice, natural phenomena, and mathematical thought. The argument is ambitious and persuasive. In this review we consider what the book adds to longstanding conversations about the relationship between scientific and humanistic ways of knowing, and reflect on what it means to reframe mathematics as an imaginative and exploratory enterprise rather than a purely technical …

The Urysohn Lemma: Munkres Variation, Irida Altman

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

There is a tradition of Mathematics contributing to the understanding of Music. This article sets out to contribute in the other direction. It uses musical sensibilities to feel its way through a piece of mathematics called the Urysohn Lemma, suggesting the presence of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic elements within standard proving practices of contemporary Western mathematics. This article employs a literary-philosophical technique of viewing a text in one discipline (mathematics) through the conceptual lens of another (music). As such, this article reports on no experiments—reading the article is the experiment. Each reader performs it for themselves.

Prime Numbers Are Written On Your Hand: You Simply Have Not Been Counting Correctly, Nona Servais Kamdem Simo, Awa Traore

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Prime numbers have resisted systematic description for over two millennia. We propose that part of the difficulty may lie in an insufficiently attentive examination of one’s own hands. In particular, we assign the natural numbers to the joints of the human hand according to a cyclic traversal protocol, and make a handful of observations which can naturally be translated into number-theoretic properties of prime numbers. We show that these properties lead us to natural activation thresholds of a unified three-phase sieve algorithm — the resulting framework provides, for the first time, a zone-based partition of the admissible space with explicit …

Front Matter

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Effectiveness Of Irrigated Pastures, Nikolai Gavrilovich Andreev

IGC Proceedings (1977-2023)

Irrigated pastures are of greatest relevance to stabilizing the general fodder situation, for reasons of the high yield and low cost of pasture forage. If irrigation and fertilization are pro­vided, best yields may be expected from forage plant mixtures which consist of five species: three grasses and two legumes. Fertilizer appli­cation must be quantified, depending on the soil nutrient status and in conformity with agrochemical test results and soil maps. The use of slurry obtained from livestock farms is useful not only for higher pasture forage yields but also for better protection of ground water and surface water. Irrigated pastures …

Public Responses About Air Quality In The World’S Ten Most Populous Countries, Noah Lim, Alessandro Del Ponte, Lina Ang, Wei Jie Seow

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

Understanding how people view and react to outdoor air quality is crucial to effectively managing and responding to air pollution, which is a major threat to global public health. Using a quota sample of 10,618 respondents from 1,372 localities across the world’s ten most populous countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States), we assessed the association between exposure to fine particulate matter with diameter ≤ 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) and people’s knowledge, attitudes, perceptions, practices, and concern about air quality. Overall, we find an inverse association between air pollution exposure and knowledge about air …

Emergent De Sitter Expansion And Closed Topology From The Cosmic Fabric Model As An Open Thermodynamic System: Resolving The Negative Bulk Modulus Paradox, T G. Tenev, C B. Ward, T F. Tenev, M F. Horstemeyer

Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Cosmic Fabric Model establishes a continuum-mechanics isomorphism to General Relativity by representing physical space as an elastic three-dimensional hyperplate embedded in a four-dimensional spatial bulk. Reproducing vacuum kinematics requires a vanishing P-wave modulus, which in turn implies a negative bulk modulus—an apparent thermodynamic instability in a closed system. This paradox is resolved by recasting the framework as an open system: the instability is not pathological but instead drives cosmic expansion. In this interpretation, the observable universe is a lower-energy solid formed through continuous solidification from a higher-dimensional precursor fluid. Using multiplicative kinematics from finite-growth mechanics, the model shows that …

Governance, Culture, And Law: The Expanding Scope Of Environmental Science And Sustainable Development Research, Ahyaudin Sodri, Herdis Herdiansyah

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

Environmental science emerged as a discipline based on physical measurements, such as soil pollutant levels (Ailijiang et al., 2022), ecological restoration (Yue et al., 2026), city surface temperature (Shafizadeh-Moghadam et al., 2025), and microbial density in air samples (Hayleeyesus & Manaye, 2014). However, its objects of study increasingly extend beyond the confines of the laboratory. Questions that were once sufficiently answered with measurement data now require answers through draft laws, Constitutional Court decisions, financial reports of mining companies, and even traditional ritual discourses governing community access to forests. In other words, environmental …

Timelines Over Tokens: Summarization, Prompting, And Explainable Fine-Tuning For User-Level Suicide Risk Detection, Aditya Tekale

Master's Theses

This research presents a two-stage pipeline for user-level suicide risk detection from Reddit: first, inference-only prompting with summarization; second, fine-tuned encoder classification with explainability and expert validation. The data are user-level: each of the 500 C-SSRS Reddit items is one user’s chronologically concatenated posts and comments (a user timeline), annotated by psychiatrists. Stage one: six prompting strategies zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought, least-to-most, and self-consistency are evaluated across six LLMs on multi-class and binary formulations; simple zero-shot achieves the highest balanced accuracy (0.53 multi-class). Error analysis shows longer inputs associate with misclassification (p = 0.002); domain-specific summarization (timelines >2,000 tokens) reduces …

Mapping And Modeling Threat-Evoked Brain States After Early Life Adversity, Taylor W. Uselman

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Early life adversity (ELA) increases lifelong neuropsychiatric vulnerability. Yet how ELA reorganizes brain-wide activity and circuit coordination across later experience remains unclear. This dissertation tests the hypothesis that ELA alters adult brain-wide activity and responses to threat through disrupted coordination among neural systems that regulate emotional experience, including prefrontal-limbic and monoaminergic systems. Longitudinal manganese-enhanced MRI of adult mice exposed to standard or fragmented early care, combined with computational processing and statistical modeling, quantified brain states before, during, and long after innate predator threat. These studies established that acute threat evokes large-scale, distributed brain activity that evolves over time. ELA potentiates …

Exploring The Nature And Role Of Local Cation Ordering In Disordered Rock Salt Cathodes For Li- And Na-Ion Batteries, You Wang

Chemistry and Chemical Biology ETDs

Cation-disordered rock-salt (DRX) cathodes provide a highly tunable platform for next-generation Li- and Na-ion batteries, but their electrochemical behavior is strongly influenced by local structural features hidden in average crystal structures. This dissertation systematically investigates local cation ordering in Li- and Na-based DRX cathodes to understand its effects on Li+/Na+ transport, redox activity, structural evolution, and electrochemical performance. In Li-based systems, Raman spectroscopy and electrochemical analysis reveal that local layered cation ordering in Mn- and Fe-based DRX cathodes is closely correlated with electrochemical behavior. Over-stoichiometric Li-based DRX oxyfluorides further demonstrate that excess Li can regulate local cation ordering, improve Li+ …

Algorithmic Sculpting Of Complex Fused Silica Surfaces For Nondestructive, Mode-Matched Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics: Adaptive Co2 Milling And Simulation-Guided Ultrafast Inscription, From Fiber Fabry-Perot Cavities To Monolithic Architectures, Meagan E. Parker

Optical Science and Engineering ETDs

Quantum sensors achieve exceptional measurement sensitivity through coherent, well-isolated quantum systems, but practical deployment is hindered by destructive readouts that require repeated state preparation and create long system dead times. Optical cavities enable continuous, nondestructive measurements with minimal back-action, yet integrating high-finesse cavities into scalable quantum devices remains limited by existing fabrication methods. To overcome these constraints, an adaptive CO₂ laser-milling platform was developed. Guided by glass thermodynamics and melt dynamics, this closed-loop system uses in-situ phase-shifting interferometry to sculpt complex fused-silica surfaces with sub-nanometer root-mean-square roughness. The platform was validated by fabricating extended-length fiber Fabry–Pérot cavities and monolithic micro-cavity …