Digital Commons Network^™

Final Report: California Tribal Nations Transportation Planning Needs Assessment Study, Seetha Reddy, Ashley Parker, David Reinke, Kaely Colligan

Mineta Transportation Institute

The Tribal Transportation Planning Needs Assessment Study was a collaborative project conducted by Caltrans and the Mineta Transportation Institute, San Jose State University. The primary goal of the project was to identify the current state of transportation planning activities and partnerships within Tribal governments in California, so that Caltrans can meaningfully engage more actively with Tribal governments early in the planning process and better meet the transportation needs of Tribal communities. The study focused on the 109 federally recognized Tribal Nations in California, and collected data through a survey questionnaire. The key task undertaken by the study team was to …

Exploring Facilitators, Barriers And Concerns Of Police Using Social Media When Investigating Missing Children, Eleanor Howlings, Reka Solymosi

International Journal of Missing Persons

Missing person investigations involve the collection of information to ensure the person is located as fast as possible, minimising their exposure to harms. Social media is a valuable source of information in police investigations both to learn about the missing person, and to appeal for information to the public. To ensure social media is used safely and effectively, we must understand the concerns and experiences of investigating officers. In this pilot study, we analysed interviews from 8 experts who investigate missing children to identify the facilitators and barriers of using social media. We also identified concerns raised by officers around …

Indigenous Spaces, Kerri J. Malloy

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In this chapter, the use of memory by Indigenous activists and movements in North America to unsettle the status quo by bringing attention to a contested past is reviewed to demonstrate how memory activism has become an integral component of the Indigenous rights movement of the twenty-first century. Centered on awaking the memory of settler-colonial society to unsettle the dominant narrative that pervades the understanding of Indigenous peoples as something of the past serves to spark the settler-colonial state's remembrance that Indigenous people are of the present. Acknowledging the past by honoring the promises that were made undermines the historical …

Spartan Daily, February 14, 2023, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2023

Volume 160, Issue 8

Social Support And Technology Use And Their Association With Mental And Physical Health During The Covid-19 Pandemic Among Asian Americans: The Compass Cross-Sectional Study, Linda G. Park, Oanh L. Meyer, Marcelle M. Dougan, Bethany Golden, Kevin Ta, Bora Nam, Janice Y. Tsoh, Marian Tzuang, Van M.Ta Park

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

BACKGROUND: The global COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) and revealed significant health disparities with reports of increased discrimination and xenophobia. Among AAPIs, the pandemic exacerbated their social, linguistic, and geographic isolation. Social support may be especially important for AAPIs given the salience of collectivism as a cultural value. Another mechanism for support among AAPIs was technology use, as it is generally widespread among this population. However, older adults may not perceive the same benefits. OBJECTIVE: We examined social support and technology use and their relationships with mental and physical health outcomes through the COVID-19 pandemic …

Utilization Of Electronic Resources In University Of Abuja Library By Undergraduate Students Of University Of Abuja, Nigeria, Rose Lade Mommoh Dr., Hadiza Eneze Gomina Mrs

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study investigated the utilization of electronic resources in University of Abuja library by Undergraduate students of University of Abuja. The descriptive survey research was adopted for the study. The study was guided by three research questions. The population of the study comprised of 3520 and 3750 undergraduate students from faculties of Science and Arts respectively. The sample size of for the study comprised of 352 and 375 undergraduate students from faculties of Science and Arts respectively. The study adopted a structured questionnaire for data collection. The study revealed moderate use of electronic resources by undergraduate students in faculties of …

Zero, Śūnya And Pūrṇa: A Comparative Analysis, Animisha Tewari

Comparative Philosophy

Due to apparent duality in this world, one has to face a lot of difficulties while searching for the Truth. Our ego is the root cause for perception of duality and this in turn leads to suffering. This suffering can only be extinguished by attainment of the Truth, i.e, non-duality. However, in order to enable the finite intellect to comprehend the incomprehensible non-duality, this undifferentiated whole is sometimes denoted by nothingness (śūnya) or fullness (pūrṇa). Non-duality is usually understood by the numeral ‘1’ which stands for unity or oneness. The main aim of this paper is …

How Al-Farabi’S Interpretative Method Can Engage With Aristotle’S Method In Cognition And Practical Philosophy, Meysam Shirvani

Comparative Philosophy

Following Aristotle, al-Farabi divides philosophy into theoretical and practical each of which requires some specific methodology both in interpretation and cognition. Based on this division, there may arguably be four methodologies for four parts: 1) cognition of theoretical philosophy 2) interpretation of practical philosophy 3) cognition of practical philosophy 4) interpretation of practical philosophy. This paper focuses on the last one: the methodology of interpreting practical philosophy. Al-Farabi has an undeniably significant contribution to practical philosophy as a commentator on Greek philosophy and as a founder. In this paper, I investigate how al-Farabi (870-950 AD) read classical practical philosophy to …

Ubuntu’S Ontological Account In African Philosophy And Its Cross-Tradition Engagement On The Issue Of Being Versus Becoming, Anthony Chimankpam Ojimba

Comparative Philosophy

This paper x-rays Ramose’s ubuntu ontological account in African philosophy and its cross-tradition engagement on the issue of being versus becoming (such as the Yin-Yang, Heraclitean, Nietzschean, Whiteheadean and the Buddhists’ accounts) with a view to showing how convergence and divergence of thoughts in the African, European, and Asian philosophy contexts can advance cross-cultural philosophizing or cross-tradition approach to doing philosophy. Ramose’s ubuntu ontology designates a reconstruction of reality within the framework of motion, as captured in his concept of be-ing-becoming, while the Heraclitean, Nietzschean, Whiteheadean and the Buddhists’ ontological accounts also conceive reality within the confines of endless …

E-Skills Scarcity And The Digital Records Management Landscape In Zimbabwe, Samson Mutsagondo, Njabulo Bruce Khumalo

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

With the adoption of electronic government in Zimbabwe in 2011, more and more government records are now generated, received, used, maintained, preserved and disposed in electronic form. Use of electronic mail records, word-processed documents, audio-visual records and social media records as official government records is now commonplace. This calls for the mobilisation and hiring of records and information managers with requisite electronic skills to manage such records. This article used the theoretical frameworks of the innovation diffusion theory and the skills theory to show the unprecedent rise in use of digital records as well as the importance in acquisition of …

Evolution Of Research On Prison Library: A Bibliometric Study, Andreu Sulé, Jordi Ardanuy

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The primary objective of the article is to present the historical evolution and current state of research in the field of prison libraries: what has been published, when, where, how and by whom it was published, the topic covered, etc. The study is based on the results obtained from the bibliographic databases LISA (ProQuest) and LISTA (EBSCO Publishing) up to early 2023. Entries were manually checked for irrelevant publications, and filters and specific tools, such as OpenRefine, followed by a final manual check, were used to remove duplicate entries. The same mechanisms were used for detecting duplicated entries regarding author, …

Professionalism In Lis: A Blend Of Theory And Practical Application, Amber Passey

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Ischool Student Research Journal, Vol. 12, Iss. 2

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Sjsu Erfa News, Winter 2023, San Jose State University, Emeritus And Retired Faculty Association

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Association (ERFA) Newsletter

Volume 37, No 2

Cultivating Parental Participation And Community Engagement Through Building A Culinary Garden And Teaching Kitchen: Latinx Perspectives On Parental Participation In A Community School, Jaclynne Michelle Medina

Dissertations

This study researched how a school could increase parental participation and community engagement while building a new Culinary Garden and Teaching Kitchen project. This engagement was foundational for expanding parental participation opportunities and further developing the community school. The study explored ways to balance power relationships between the home and school to develop an implementation plan that better reflects the community being served. Theoretical lenses such as CRT and LatCrit were the basis for centering the voices of Latinx families and valuing their various forms of capital consistent with the Community Cultural Model. Participants influenced the design of the garden …

Graphical User Interface For Evidential Reasoning Models, Rohin Gopalakrishnan

Master's Projects

The Capri system is an evidential reasoning system based on the belief function calculus to support automated reasoning and decision making in uncertain environments. Example domains of application include, medical diagnosis, as well as identifying biological biomarkers. The purpose of this project is to build a Python web-based and app-based Graphical User Interface (GUI), called PyGrapher, that facilitates building graphical evidential reasoning models. The graphical models built using PyGrapher will then be converted to a form that is suitable for input to the Capri system. The PyGrapher system provides an intuitive means to build and manipulate evidential reasoning models as …

Qualifying Quantifiers: A Usage-Based, Diachronic Analysis Of Quantifier Constructions, Danielle Miles Angier

Master's Theses

Adnominal quantifiers have been a source of contention in existing research, owing to their unique distributional patterns that do not match those of adjectives or determiners. Traditional accounts have typically focused on one aspect of quantifier behavior without looking at the group as a whole, and existing theories are disparate and inconsistent. This study tackles the problem of quantifier variation from a diachronic, usage-based, constructionist perspective. The goal of this paper is to identify patterns of change that can explain the variation exhibited by quantifiers today, focused on whether they are best classified as adjectives, determiners, or both; why every …

Sustainable Roots: The Environmental Genealogies Of Chicanas And Latinas, Marlene Andrade

Master's Theses

Ingenuity and tending to the land are anything but contemporary to Communities of Color (COC). Even when our communities become targets of environmental racism and experience the brunt of institution-based degradation, COC resist in a multitude of ways. While there is a plethora of documented social movements led by the Chicanx community for civil, educational, and labor rights, there is a paucity of Chicanx presence in environmental discourse. Thus, my scholar-activist commitments are to highlight Chicana/Latina herstories, epistemologies, and praxes that debunk the narrow white-heteropatriarchal male narrative in mainstream environmentalism. This dominant narrative fails to: (a) address the historical and …

Thinking Styles, Conspiracist Belief, And The Mediating Role Of The Dunning-Kruger Effect In Modeling Belief Change, Lucas C. Cusano

Master's Theses

Why can a person believe something for which there is no evidence and yet also fail to believe something for which there is overwhelming evidence? This study develops a structural model of belief change using the latent constructs of thinking styles and conspiracist belief while accounting for the Dunning-Kruger effect (i.e., overconfidence in one’s knowledge the less one knows about a topic) as a mediator. A combined two-hundred and twenty-six participants from both Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the introductory psychology SONA subject pool were given two knowledge measures on topics of genetic modification and vaccination before and after reading refutational …

Automatic Presentation Slide Generation Using Llms, Tanya Gupta

Master's Theses

Presentation slides are widely used for conveying information in academic and professional contexts. However, manual slide creation can be time-consuming. Our research focuses on automated slide generation, specifically for scientific research papers. Automating the creation of presentation slides for scientific documents is a rather novel task and hence, there’s limited training data available and there also exists the token constraints of language models like BERT, with a maximum sequence length of 512 tokens. In this study, we fine-tune large language models, including Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (supporting sequences up to 16,834 tokens) and BIGBIRD-Pegasus (supporting sequences up to 4,096 tokens). We tackle this …

Prediction Of 2024 Indian Pm Election Results Using Sentiment Analysis On Twitter Data, Surabhi Gupta

Master's Projects

This sentiments analysis study presents a methodical approach to predict the 2024 Indian Prime Minister Election. Data collected spanning from 2020 to 2023 from Twitter using hashtags such as IndianPMElection2024 and on topics such as the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, the Farm Bill, and the Digital India initiative, form the core of this research. We utilized a combination of sentiment extraction tools-namely, the NLP Town's Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based multilingual uncased sentiment model, Valance Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning (VADER), and TextBlob. Additionally, we used a well-established machine learning model Naive Bayes, deep …

Context Aware Neural Machine Translation Using Graph Encoders, Saurabh Kale

Master's Projects

Machine translation presents its root in the domain of textual processing that focuses on the usage of computer software for the purpose of translation of sentences. Neural machine translation follows the same idea and integrates machine learning with the help of neural networks.Various techniques are being explored by researchers and are famously used by Google Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, Deep Translator, etc. However, these neural machine translation techniques do not incorporate the context of the sentences and are only determined by the phrasesor sentence structure. This report explores the neural machine translation technique dedicated to context-aware translations. It also provides …

Ml-Based User Authentication Through Mouse Dynamics, Sai Kiran Davuluri

Master's Projects

Increasing reliance on digital services and the limitations of traditional authentication methods have necessitated the development of more advanced and secure user authentication methods. For user authentication and intrusion detection, mouse dynamics, a form of behavioral biometrics, offers a promising and non-invasive method. This paper presents a comprehensive study on ML-Based User Authentication Through Mouse Dynamics.

This project proposes a novel framework integrating sophisticated techniques such as embeddings extraction using Transformer models with cutting-edge machine learning algorithms such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The project aims to accurately identify users based on their distinct mouse behavior and detect unauthorized access …

Spam Comments Detection In Youtube Videos, Priyusha Kotta

Master's Projects

This paper suggests an innovative way for finding spam or ham comments on the video- sharing website YouTube. Comments that are contextually irrelevant for a particular video or have a commercial motive constitute as spam. In the past few years, with the advent of advertisements spreading to new arenas such as the social media has created a lucrative platform for many. Today, it is being widely used by everyone. But this innovation comes with its own impediments. We can see how malicious users have taken over these platforms with the aid of automated bots that can deploy a well-coordinated spam …

Hate Speech Detection In Hindi, Pranjali Prakash Bansod

Master's Projects

Social media is a great place to share one’s thoughts and to express oneself. Very often the same social media platforms become a means for spewing hatred.The large amount of data being shared on these platforms make it difficult to moderate the content shared by users. In a diverse country like India hate is present on social media in all regional languages, making it even more difficult to detect hate because of a lack of enough data to train deep/ machine learning models to make them understand regional languages.This work is our attempt at tackling hate speech in Hindi. We …

Personalized Tweet Recommendation Using Users’ Image Preferences, Shashwat Avinash Kadam

Master's Projects

In the era of information explosion, the vast amount of data on social media platforms can overwhelm users. Not only does this information explosion contain irrelevant content, but also intentionally fabricated articles and images. As a result, personalized recommendation systems have become increasingly important to help users navigate and make sense of this data. We propose a novel technique to use users’ image preferences to recommend tweets. We extract vital information by analyzing images liked by users and use it to recommend tweets from Twitter. As many images online have no descriptive metadata associated with them, in this framework, we …

Image Captioning Using Reinforcement Learning, Venkat Teja Golamaru

Master's Projects

Image captioning is a crucial technology with numerous applications, including enhancing accessibility for the visually impaired, developing automated image indexing and retrieval systems, and enriching social media experiences. However, accurately describing the content of an image in natural language remains a challenge, particularly in low-resource settings where data and computational power are limited. The most advanced image captioning architectures currently use encoder-decoder structures that incorporate a sequential recurrent prediction model. This study adopts a typical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) encoder Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) decoder structure for image captioning, but it has framed the problem as a sequential decision-making task. …

Application Of Knowledge Graph Techniques On Textbooks, Yutong Yao

Master's Projects

Textbooks are written and organized in a way that facilitates learning and understanding. Sections like glossary terms at the end of a textbook provide guidance on the topic of interest. However, it takes manual effort to create the index terms in the glossary that highlight the key referenced terminologies and related terms. Knowledge graphs, which have been used to represent and even reason over data and knowledge, can potentially capture textbook’s important terms, concepts, and their relations. Popular since the initial introduction by Google Knowledge Graphs (KGs), they combine graph and data to capture and model enormous amounts of relational …

Relationalnet Using Graph Neural Networks For Social Recommendations, Dharahas Tallapally

Master's Projects

Traditional recommender systems create models that can predict user interests based on the user-item relationships. However, these systems often have limited performance due to sparse user behavior data. To address this challenge, researchers are now exploring models for social recommendation that can account for both user- user and user-item relationships based on social networks, and user past behavior, respectively. These models aim to understand each user’s behavior by considering their trusted neighbors and their influence on each other. Specifically, the potential embedding of each user is influenced by their trusted neighbors, who are, in turn, influenced by their own trusted …

Comparative Analysis Of Transformer-Based Models For Text-To-Speech Normalization, Pankti Dholakia

Master's Projects

Text-to-Speech (TTS) normalization is an essential component of natural language processing (NLP) that plays a crucial role in the production of natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, there are limitations to the TTS normalization procedure. Lengthy input sequences and variations in spoken language can present difficulties. The motivation behind this research is to address the challenges associated with TTS normalization by evaluating and comparing the performance of various models. The aim is to determine their effectiveness in handling language variations. The models include LSTM-GRU, Transformer, GCN-Transformer, GCNN-Transformer, Reformer, and a BERT language model that has been pre-trained. The research evaluates the performance …