Digital Commons Network^™

Zephyr Rtos On Nxp Mcxn947 For Oresat Protocards: Bring-Up, Drivers, And Debug, Las Meman

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

OreSat Project: Oregon’s first student-built satellite, designed as a CubeSat (10×10×10 cm) to make space research more accessible and affordable. Why it matters: CubeSats let students and researchers test new technology in space at a fraction of the cost of traditional satellites. Our challenge: To prepare OreSat for future missions, we need reliable software and hardware that can run on small, low-power computers. Our solution: Use Zephyr RTOS (an open-source operating system for microcontrollers) with the new NXP MCXN947 board to test and build satellite applications. (Transitioning from the STM32F091 that has ChibiOS) Goal: Bring up and test the Zephyr …

Modeling Residential Water Heater Usage With Ochre, Josephine Deline

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Energy Demand and Flexible Loads U.S. electricity use is projected to rise in 2025–2026 after years of little growth, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Residential water heaters (WHs) can serve as flexible loads by shifting use to off-peak times. CTA-2045 The CTA-2045 protocol allows utilities to coordinate with WHs, signaling optimal operation without sacrificing comfort or performance. The OCHRE model, developed by NREL, simulates household energy use and appliance behavior. OCHRE shows how flexible WH loads can improve grid stability and lower consumer costs. The goal is to compare simulated results with field test data to validate …

Developing A Microcapillary Electrochemical Apparatus For Corrosion Resistance Testing On Graphene Coated Steel Surfaces, Angela Pham

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Graphene coating was chosen because of its chemical inertness and high corrosion resistance, which help prevent rust and surface damage from accumulating on the steel. The graphene was coated on 8620 steel using chemical vapor deposition (CVD), a method that grows thin uniform layers of graphene on the surface. A microcapillary system was designed and assembled to test corrosion resistance, allowing measurements on multiple isolated areas of a sample for greater accuracy. An inexpensive, easily replaceable 800μm diameter pipette tip was used as the microcapillary tip to seal off each area for testing. Both graphene coated and uncoated 8620 steel …

Portable Low-Cost Spectrophotometer, Ian Bozovich

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

The goal of this project was to build a spectrophotometer that is: Inexpensive (~$300 USD), portable (4” L x 4” W x 2.5” H), capable of producing replicable results, and capable of producing results that are comparable to a higher cost spectrophotometer (~$3000+ USD). Six samples and a blank were prepared by making solutions containing various concentrations of vitamin B12. Measurements of light intensity across the visible spectrum were taken for each sample and used with the Beer-Lambert Law to obtain an absorbance spectrum for the various concentrations of vitamin B12. Results indicate that this device could be an excellent …

Microbially-Induced Desaturation (Mid) For Mitigating Liquefaction, Iman Ahmad

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Earthquake liquefaction is the process of soil drastically losing strength, causing immense damage and settlement to buildings. De-saturated soil is less susceptible to liquefaction compared to saturated soil. MID introduces nitrogen gas to de-saturate the soil and is less disruptive compared to other soil-mixing methods. The site we are looking at successfully de-saturated in 2019. Since then, it has re-saturated. The objective of this research is to understand if re-treatment is still applicable. Over 5 weeks, a total of 1266.16 gallons of injection solution was injected. Vp monitoring indicates soil has successfully de-saturated and chemical strip tests and electrical conductivity …

Leveraging Fractional Dynamics In Reinforcement Learning For Efficient And Robust Control, Matthew Tubbin

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Brain-inspired neuromorphic hardware offers a path to energy-efficient computing. This research explores the Fractional-Order Spiking Neural Network (FOSNN), an architecture where a tunable parameter, α, introduces a ‘memory’ of past events into the neuron’s dynamics. The goal is to determine how memory affects a model’s computational efficiency and its resilience to both environmental noise and network damage, in comparison to simpler models. Central finding: A trade-off exists between the MLP’s structural resilience and the FOSNN’s noise tolerance. FOSNN: Best for noise and real-world data due to its memory-based filtering. MLP: Best for stable conditions, showing superior resilience to network damage. …

Comparing Two Fast-Response Air Pollution Dispersion Modeling Tools For Emergency Management Scenarios, John Abed

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

The oversight of the research is conducted by the Healthy Buildings Research Lab (HBRL), which utilizes two dispersion modeling tools for emergency management, namely ALOHA and QUIC Plume/URB. This experiment aims to explore the key differences between the two and to gain a deeper understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. For this project, using 2 different software programs to show the true dangers of what could happen if an Earthquake were to strike. We’re focused on comparing emissions from a single tank and comparing across ALOHA and QUIC. QUIC gave a better representation of what would happen if a leak …

Drta: Dynamic Reward Scaling For Reinforcement Learning In Time Series Anomaly Detection, Bahareh Golchin, Banafsheh Rekabdar, Kunpeng Liu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Anomaly detection in time series data is important for applications in finance, healthcare, sensor networks, and industrial monitoring. Traditional methods usually struggle with limited labeled data, high false-positive rates, and difficulty generalizing to novel anomaly types. To overcome these challenges, we propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that integrates dynamic reward shaping, Variational Autoencoder (VAE), and active learning, called DRTA. Our method uses an adaptive reward mechanism that balances exploration and exploitation by dynamically scaling the effect of VAE-based reconstruction error and classification rewards. This approach enables the agent to detect anomalies effectively in low-label systems while maintaining high precision and …

Scitopic: Enhancing Topic Discovery In Scientific Literature Through Advanced Llm, Pengjiang Li, Zaitian Wang, Xinhao Zhang, Ran Zhang, Lu Jiang, Pengfei Wang, Yuanchun Zhou

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Topic discovery in scientific literature provides valuable insights for researchers to identify emerging trends and explore new avenues for investigation, facilitating easier scientific information retrieval. Many machine learning methods, particularly deep embedding techniques, have been applied to discover research topics. However, most existing topic discovery methods rely on word embedding to capture the semantics and lack a comprehensive understanding of scientific publications, struggling with complex, high-dimensional text relationships. Inspired by the exceptional comprehension of textual information by large language models (LLMs), we propose an advanced topic discovery method enhanced by LLMs to improve scientific topic identification, namely SciTopic. Specifically, we …

Schools Apart: Curricular Stratification Across School Socioeconomic Compositions And Implications For Educational Inequality In The Us, Daniel Mackin Freeman

Dissertations and Theses

Motivated by longstanding sociological theories and utilizing the most current, large, and nationally representative data, this dissertation aims to describe and add nuance to our understanding of how the curriculum US youth are exposed to is stratified by the socioeconomic composition of the schools they attend. All three empirical chapters suggest that school SES contributes to substantial differences in school structure, as evidenced by differences in course-taking patterns and how course-taking relates to academic achievement in high school and beyond. The first study suggests that the relationship between curricular intensity in secondary school and postsecondary achievement is variable depending on …

Efficient Visual Data Processing Approaches To Improve Resource Utilization, Yeganeh Jalalpour

Dissertations and Theses

With continuous advancements in technology, the volume of visual data being captured, distributed, and consumed across various applications is rapidly increasing. Enhancing the efficiency of visual data processing can improve resource consumption, making the storage, transmission, and use of this growing visual content more effective.

Image and video data constitute a significant share of internet traffic, making video compression a critical factor in enhancing overall data throughput by improving the video compression ratio. Capturing, transferring, and storing raw video data is challenging due to the substantial resources required for both storage and computation. Video compression, however, can significantly mitigate these …

A Mechanistic Study Of Silicon Nanocrystal Formation Via Solid State Synthesis, Katherine Mccarthy Weinfurter

Dissertations and Theses

Silicon nanocrystals (SiNCs) show promising physiochemical properties that could be used in industrial applications. The production of SiNCs through solid-state synthesis is ideal due to relatively low cost of equipment and chemical reagents, as well as the ability to scale-up production. A widely known and commonly used precursor previously used in solid-state synthesis for SiNCs, hydrogen silsesquioxane (HSiO_1.5), was discontinued in chemical manufacturing, which has led to researching alternative precursors (or starting materials). We have identified that there is a gap of knowledge related to producing these precursors, as well as the mechanistic understanding of the chemical reactions …

Identifying Opportunities For Nature-Based Solutions With Geospatialized Life Cycle Assessments And Fine-Scale Socioecological Data, Gabriela Shirkey, Annick Anctil, Ranjeet John, Venkatesh Kolluru, Leah Mungai, Herve Kashongwe, Lauren T. Cooper, Ilke Celik, Joshua B. Fisher, Jiquan Chen

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

As we increasingly understand the impact that land management intensification has on local and global climate, the call for nature-based solutions (NbS) in agroecosystems has expanded. Moreover, the pressing need to determine when and where NbS should be used raises challenges to socioecological data integration as we overcome spatiotemporal resolutions. Natural and working lands is an effort promoting NbS, particularly emissions reduction and carbon stock maintenance in forests. To overcome the spatiotemporal limitation, we integrated life cycle assessments (LCA), an ecological carbon stock model, and a land cover land use change model to synthesize rates of global warming potential (GWP) …

Tag-Based Security In C: Writing And Specifying Flexible Protection, Sean Noble Anderson

Dissertations and Theses

The C language is ubiquitous and insecure. Tag-based security policies offer a flexible toolkit for runtime protection, including policies that mitigate the effects of undetected programming bugs and those that enforce security properties of the program logic. But tag policies can be difficult to define, and the protection that they offer can be difficult to specify and to prove.

This dissertation builds from an assembly-level specification of stack safety, encompassing the essential control-flow structure of C and other high level languages, to a C source-level policy definition framework called Tagged C. Tagged C includes a variant C semantics parameterized by …

Landslide Mapping, Characterization, And Hazard Assessment With 3d Slope Stability Modeling In White Bluffs, Washington State, Anna Tsitsivas

Dissertations and Theses

Slope failures shape the landscape by moving unstable material downslope and, in doing so, become a great hazard to all those in their path. Understanding the mechanisms that control landslide location, timing, size, type, and runout - and therefore hazards - requires a deep understanding of the local geology, stratigraphy, and groundwater conditions. Along White Bluffs, in south-central Washington, landslides of several failure styles have likely been triggered by an increased water table in recent decades, threatening both farmland behind the bluffs and habitat below. This study focuses on characterizing potential groundwater sources and determining controls on spatial and temporal …

Aquatic Plant Threats To The Columbia River, Jacob Rose, Gabriel Campbell

Center for Lakes and Reservoirs Publications and Presentations

These presentation slides provide an overview of some of the invasive aquatic plants that pose an emerging threat to Oregon waterways. It contains botanical notes and high-quality photographs of approximately nine different plant species. Additional slides emphasize the importance of early detection and rapid response, as well as existing resources for invasive species outreach. This presentation was given orally at the Oregon Department of Agriculture's Interagency Noxious Weed Symposium to an audience of natural resource practitioners.

Increased Thermal Stability And Retained Antibacterial Properties In A Sulbactam And Amantadine Salt: Towards Effective Antibacterial-Antiviral Combination Therapies, Josephine Bicknell, Ivan Bondarenko, Alice Colatrella, Elani J. Cabrera-Vega, Jesus Daniel Loya, Delbert S. Botes, Jay L. Mellies, Gonzalo Campillo-Alvarado

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

A clinically relevant multidrug solid comprising sulbactam (β-lactamase inhibitor) and amantadine (antiviral) displays enhanced thermal stability and sustained antibacterial activity compared to starting materials.

We describe the formation of a multidrug salt comprising sulbactam (SUL, β-lactamase inhibitor) and amantadine (AMNH, antiviral). Physicochemical investigation of the SUL·AMNH salt revealed enhanced thermal stability compared to pristine starting materials. In vitro studies found that salt formation in SUL·AMNH does not disrupt antibacterial activity against model organisms Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus epidermidis. To our knowledge, we show the first β-lactamase inhibitor-antiviral salt where both components have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug …

When Help Hurts: Workplace Instrumental Support And Employee Emotional Exhaustion Within-Person, Jensine Paoletti-Hatcher, Anthony T. Misisco, Eden B. King

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The social support paradox describes mixed findings on the effects of social support on well-being. An application of the person-environment fit perspective can address the paradox by reasoning that similar quantities of social support needs and social support supplies should result in optimal well-being outcomes. We integrate a person-environment fit perspective with self-determination theory in an examination of the relationship between workplace instrumental support and emotional exhaustion through a two-week experience sampling method study. Fifty-nine participants responded to questions about desired quantities of work-related help from their colleagues (coworkers and supervisors) and their perceived quantities of work-related help after work …

Sustainability Assessment Of Photovoltaic Cells In Cross-Functional Applications, Achyuth Ravilla

Dissertations and Theses

Achieving the G7 countries' net-zero emissions target by 2050 requires integrating photovoltaic (PV) systems into diverse cross-functional applications that support sustainable energy transitions across multiple sectors. This dissertation explores the economic and environmental sustainability of three such applications: agrivoltaics, lower-dimensional materials in perovskite solar cells, and PV-electrochemical water-splitting technologies for hydrogen production. Employing life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA), we address the knowledge gap in comprehensive evaluations of PV-integrated solutions.

The first chapter assesses agrivoltaic systems (AVS), which combine PV systems with agriculture to mitigate land-use conflicts while enhancing food and energy production. Findings indicate that AVS designs, …

'T-W-O': External Challenges And Coping Strategies Of Chinese Social Work Service Organisations During The Epidemic, Bin Xu, Bowen Mcbeath, Haobo Xi

School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations

During the peak years of COVID-19, Chinese social work service organisations actively participated in the preventing and controlling of the pandemic. These organisations also faced external challenges that reflected changing public health policies, contractual and fiscal changes, and immense service needs. This paper describes the specific external challenges that a purposive sample of 11 Beijing-based social work service organisations experienced because of the pandemic, as well as the strategies they used to address them. We find that project and fiscal precarity were the greatest external risks faced by social service organisations. In order to mitigate these concerns, the organisations actively …

Propagation Modeling Of Terahertz Reflections And Reflector Design For Mimo Channel, Thanh Ngoc Dan Le

Dissertations and Theses

Wireless communication has transformed connectivity, enabling seamless access across devices without physical constraints. Terahertz (THz) frequencies, ranging from 100 GHz to 10 THz, promise high-bandwidth channels crucial for applications like IoT and virtual reality. However, deploying THz communication faces challenges due to significant propagation limitations such as high attenuation and environmental absorption. The motivation behind this research is to develop a comprehensive understanding of THz propagation dynamics and utilize reflective surfaces to create multipath environments for an improvement in the capacity performance of MIMO channels.

This research investigates the potential of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) channels at THz frequencies to overcome …

Applying Positive Unlabeled Learning Techniques And Using The Kullback-Leibler Divergence To Improve Geothermal Surveying Assessments, Martín Thomas Rodriguez

Dissertations and Theses

As we face the current climate crisis, the discovery of geothermal energy resources has the potential to greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels worldwide. However, the development of any new energy infrastructure is expensive and depends on the willingness of energy agencies and developers to make initial investments based on calculated risk measures. One such measure, called geothermal favorability, is the likelihood that a site has conditions favorable for geothermal systems containing recoverable energy potential. Its prediction from existing geophysical datasets proves to be a nontrivial task. The prediction of geothermal favorability can be framed as a binary classification …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet December 2024, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The December 2, 2024 monthly packet includes the December agenda, appendices, and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held December 2, 2024.

Organizational Factors Enabling Augmented Analytic And Bi 4.0 Implementation Success, Randy A. Williams, Gazi Murat Duman, Elif Kongar, Nasir J. Sheikh

Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The implementation of modern Business Intelligence (BI) 4.0 and Augmented Analytics solutions is drastically influenced by organizational factors, which are widely recognized as significant drivers of success. Many researchers endeavor to understand critical success factors of BI implementation using various models, most all of which include Organizational components, along with others. Earlier studies have suggested components within the Organizational perspective play a critical role in driving overall BI implementation success. However, the research on organizational factors that focus on the advanced version of BI and augmented analytics is not well established. Addressing this need, the current work focuses on filling …

Synthesis Of Binary-Input Multi-Valued Output Optical Cascades For Reversible And Quantum Technologies, Ishani Agarwal, Miroslav Saraivanov, Marek Perkowski

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper extends the decomposition from the group theory based methods of Sasao and Saraivanov to design binary input multivalued output quantum cascades realized with optical NOT, SWAP, and Fredkin Gates. We present this method for 3, 5, and 7 valued outputs, but in general it can be used for odd prime valued outputs. The method can be extended to realize hybrid functions with different valued outputs. A class of local transformations is presented that can simplify the final cascade circuits. Using these simplifying transformations, we present an upper bound on the maximum number of gates in an arbitrary -variable …

A Faculty Workshop On Developing Students As Discipline-Situated Researchers, William Badke, Elizabeth Kreiter, Qinqin Zhang

Communications in Information Literacy

The reference librarians of Trinity Western University have a strong mission-driven commitment to teach information literacy, but there is a significant contrast between the amount of instruction they can provide and the demanding task of developing all students as skilled researchers. The growing teach-the-teacher model suggested an option to enlist faculty in providing a larger portion of information literacy instruction themselves. With strong support from academic administration, three librarians devised an initial faculty workshop as part of the university’s faculty professional development series, followed by four detailed weekly sessions. They based their activities on several factors: first, faculty members would …

Aars Online: A Collaborative Database On The Structure, Function, And Evolution Of The Aminoacyl-Trna Synthetases, Jordan Douglas, Haissi Cui, John J. Perona, Oscar Vargas-Rodriguez, Henna Tyynismaa, Claudia Alvarez Carreno, Jiqiang Ling, Lluis Ribas De Pouplana, Xiang-Lei Yang, Multiple Additional Authors

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

The aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS) are a large group of enzymes that implement the genetic code in all known biological systems. They attach amino acids to their cognate tRNAs, moonlight in various translational and non-translational activities beyond aminoacylation, and are linked to many genetic disorders. The aaRS have a subtle ontology characterized by structural and functional idiosyncrasies that vary from organism to organism, and protein to protein. Across the tree of life, the 22 coded amino acids are handled by 16 evolutionary families of Class I aaRS and 21 families of Class II aaRS. We introduce AARS Online, an interactive Wikipedia-like …

Cognitive Apprenticeship Strategies For The Media Literacy Classroom, Nate Floyd, Jaclyn Spraetz

Communications in Information Literacy

Inspired by the apprenticeship model of teaching and learning, two instructors report on their efforts to place current events at the center of a semester-long media and information literacy course. They discuss strategies to harness curiosity about contemporary topics (e.g., misinformation, climate change, algorithms, right-to-repair, blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc.), and create engagement-driven course content. The paper provides concrete examples of activities and assignments used to situate learning in real-world contexts and build students' confidence in navigating information independently. This case study offers insights for other educators seeking to apply cognitive apprenticeship principles to media and information literacy instruction.

Centering Relevance In Information Literacy Teaching And Learning, Anne Jumonville Graf

Communications in Information Literacy

The process of determining whether a source of information is relevant is multidimensional, dynamic, and subjective. This essay puts information science scholarship on relevance, including the process and nature of making relevance judgments, in conversation with models of teaching and learning information literacy. Teaching librarians are encouraged to recognize students’ relevance judgments as sites of reflection and instruction. This essay suggests a variety of ways librarians might do this, from re-thinking source evaluation methods to emphasizing the opportunities available at the source selection stage. The process of determining relevance is a practical site of reflective possibility and deserves greater attention …

Building On Strengths: A Collaborative, Asset-Focused Approach To Teaching Critical Information Literacy Skills, Rebecca B. Penrose, Kristi J. Chavez

Communications in Information Literacy

This article showcases an instructor–librarian collaborative model for teaching critical information literacy (CIL) skills in a higher education course by incorporating interactive workshops into a sequence of required course assignments. Using an asset-focused design, this assignment sequence allows students to first demonstrate their existing research strategies and then evaluate those strategies during workshop activities, applying the CIL principles they are learning. In this way, the approach recognizes students’ existing strengths and builds upon them, while emphasizing self-reflection opportunities and an intentional research focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and representation. Results from our one-year study are also highlighted. The suggested instructional …