Digital Commons Network^™

Synthetic Data Generation For Accurate, Fair, And Private Recommender Systems, Derek B. Lilienthal

Master's Theses

A notorious challenge for recommender systems on online platforms is to accurately and fairly recommend items that align with users’ preferences while retaining user privacy. These systems often rely on historical data that is partially labeled and includes incomplete user information, leading to the over-representation of majority groups and disproportionately favoring popular items. Substituting user data with synthetic data can address these concerns, but accurately replicating real-world datasets has been a challenging problem. Recent advancements in generative AI have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of diffusion models in generating realistic data across several domains. In this work, we introduce two variations …

Reinforcement Learning Based Planning And Control For Robotic Source Seeking Inspired By Fruit Flies, Gauravkumar Koradiya

Master's Theses

In the exploration of mobile sensing agents such as robots equipped with sensors, these agents have the potential to measure unknown scalar fields, ranging from chemical concentrations to temperature fluctuations. One of the primary interests is the robots’ ability to gravitate towards the peaks or troughs of these fields, a phenomenon termed as “source seeking”. This behavior is invaluable in practical scenarios, like detecting chemical leaks or locating survivors after catastrophes. However, the challenge becomes significantly more pronounced when operating in turbulent flow fields, where the erratic nature of odorant plumes makes predictions and simulations highly unreliable. Interestingly, fruit flies …

Controllable Physics-Informed Latent Space For Acoustic Wave Manipulation, Tristan Shah

Master's Theses

Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are foundational descriptive tools in scientific and engineering disciplines, enabling the exploration of phenomena from material design to climate dynamics and the propagation of pandemics and wildfires. Establishing control of PDEs, especially when the underlying phenomena are only partially observable, holds great potential for fostering technological innovations. This ambition faces considerable obstacles, as a robust sample-based solution remains elusive. Addressing this challenge, this thesis introduces a framework leveraging physics-informed machine learning (ML) to enable control of PDEs. Central to this framework is an agent, equipped with sensors to perceive its environment, that generates a low-dimensional physics-informed …

Structure Of The South-Central Skagit Gneiss Complex: Implications For Rheological Response To Magmatic Flare-Ups, Jeffery Wegener

Master's Theses

The Skagit Gneiss Complex in the North Cascades magmatic arc consists of Late Cretaceous to Eocene orthogneiss and partially migmatitic paragneiss. Orthogneiss protoliths intruded during two magmatic flare-ups, making the Skagit Gneiss an ideal location to study the relationship between flare-ups and deformation. Geologic mapping, microstructural analysis, and U-Pb dating of zircon were used to construct a timeline of magmatism, metamorphism and deformation in a portion of the Skagit Gneiss. A tonalitic gneiss intruded between ~79-73 at the beginning of the older flare-up and an ~60 Ma, tonalitic to granodioritic, leucocratic orthogneiss intruded at the end of this flare-up. NW-SE …

History Education: Learning History From Community College Students’ Perspectives, Mylinh V. Pham

Dissertations

Given the current political climate of division, the study of history is important now more than ever, but the value of the study of history has been marginalized. This study used student focus groups to understand ways in which history could be taught in such a way that its importance is emphasized through relevance and connection to current social and political issues and through student-centered learning. This study also determined how history could help students evaluate and think critically about historical content. This study drew on the experiences of community college students who have taken a higher education history course …

Con Respeto Y Dignidad: Transforming Educational Experiences For Students Of Color By Addressing Disproportionate Discipline Practices, Selene Munoz

Dissertations

Discipline practices wield significant influence over the social dynamics within educational settings and profoundly impact students’ ability to attain academic and social gains crucial for their success. The racialization of school discipline has been linked to negative effects on student’s academic trajectories and life outcomes. Consequently, school administrators can play a crucial role in effecting cultural change within their organizations to support disciplinary practices that uphold students’ educational dignity. This study looked at the strategies employed by secondary level administrators to shift their school cultures aimed at addressing disproportionate disciplinary practices. Using a mixed methods approach, this study draws upon …

An Exploration Of Dimensionality Reduction Of Dynamics On Lie Groups Via Structure-Aware Canonical Correlation Analysis, Wooyoung Chung

Master's Theses

Incorporating prior knowledge into a data-driven modeling problem can drastically improve performance, reliability, and generalization outside of the training sample. The stronger the structural properties, the more effective these improvements become. Manifolds are a powerful nonlinear generalization of Euclidean space for modeling finite dimensions. When additionally assuming that the manifold carries (Lie) group structure, this imposes a drastically stricter global constraint. The range of their applications is very wide and includes the important case of robotic tasks. We apply this idea to Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). In traditional CCA one constructs a hierarchical sequence of maximal correlations of up to …

Assessing The Role Of Steam Explosivity In Shallow And Deep Marine Environments, Frederick Ede

Master's Theses

Volcaniclastic deposits formed in shallow and deep marine environments show strikingly different characteristics resulting from the ability of steam to assist in lava fragmentation. Deep marine deposits come from recent lava flows at Axial Seamount, formed around 1,500 m water depth, while shallow marine samples come from Miocene Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG) lava flows that were emplaced in a shallow marine to subaerial environment and are now exposed on the Oregon coast. Volcaniclastic material from these two environments was compared using granulometry, componentry, and mapping. Lithofacies from the CRBG contained abundant ash and lapilli sized clasts with a high …

Whaley, George L., San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

University of Colorado, Boulder, Organizational Behavior, Finance, and Management Science, 1974 Ph.D.

University of Arizona, 1966 M.B.A.

University of Arizona, Engineering Mathematics, 1964 B.S.

Lindholm-Leary, Kathryn J., San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

University of California, Los Angeles ,Psychology, Ph.D. 1981

University of California, Los Angeles, Psychology, M.A. 1977

University of California, Santa Barbara, Psychology, B.A, 1976

Kritisamhita: A Machine Learning Dataset Of South Indian Classical Music Audio Clips With Tonic Classification, Samhita Konduri, Kriti V. Pendyala, Vishnu S. Pendyala

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

There are currently a limited number of Indian classical music datasets, especially those large enough and with useful annotations, particularly the subtler ones, such as the tonic, for training classification or prediction models. The dataset described in this paper is created with useful tonic annotations, to fill this gap. The tonic pitch, or base pitch, plays an important role in music, so much so that it is sometimes called the keynote. The vocalists and the accompanying instrumental ensemble are fine-tuned to this keynote to render the composition. The first and second authors of this paper, who are vocalists themselves, recorded …

Forecasting Commercial Vehicle Miles Traveled (Vmt) In Urban California Areas, Steve Chung, Jaymin Kwon, Yushin Ahn

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study investigates commercial truck vehicle miles traveled (VMT) across six diverse California counties from 2000 to 2020. The counties—Imperial, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and San Francisco—represent a broad spectrum of California’s demographics, economies, and landscapes. Using a rich dataset spanning demographics, economics, and pollution variables, we aim to understand the factors influencing commercial VMT. We first visually represent the geographic distribution of the counties, highlighting their unique characteristics. Linear regression models, particularly the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and elastic net regressions are employed to identify key predictors of total commercial VMT. LASSO regression …

Assessing Gtfs Accuracy, Gregory L. Newmark

Mineta Transportation Institute

The promised benefits of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Schedule and Realtime standards are dependent on the underlying quality of the data. Despite this fundamental reliance, there has been relatively little research on techniques and strategies to assess GTFS accuracy. The need for such assessment is growing as federal and state governments increasingly require transit agencies to make these data available to the public. This research fills this gap by presenting a suite of methods and metrics to assess the temporal accuracy of GTFS Realtime and the spatial accuracy of GTFS Schedule feeds. The temporal assessment demonstrates an approach …

Time-To-Failure Prediction Of Fine-Grained Soil Slopes Subject To Weather-Driven Deterioration, Arm M. Morsy

Mineta Transportation Institute

Embankments have been widely used in the construction of transportation and flood defense infrastructure. Embankments constructed from clays experience a suite of weather-driven deterioration processes that lead to a progressive loss of hydromechanical performance, causing potentially severe and costly consequences. This study aimed to predict the time to failure of aging, deteriorating clay embankments supporting transportation infrastructure. A multi-phase numerical modeling approach was developed to replicate the long-term, weather-driven, hydromechanical behavior of clay embankments. This model simulated the behavior of a number of well-documented embankment failure case studies that had sufficient data to derive the necessary soil properties and climate …

Comparison Of Transport Models In Dense Plasmas, Zachary A. Johnson, Luciano G. Silvestri, George M. Petrov, Liam G. Stanton, Michael S. Murillo

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

We compare a variety of models used for the calculation of transport coefficients in dense plasmas, including average-atom models, models based on kinetic theory, structure matching effective potentials, and pair-potential molecular dynamics. In particular, we focus on the parameter space investigated in the second charged-particle transport coefficient code comparison workshop [Stanek et al., Phys. Plasmas 31, 052104 (2024)]. Each model is based on the self-consistent output of our average-atom calculations. Ionic transport properties are generated from implicit electron pair matched molecular dynamics simulations, bypassing the need for either dynamical electron simulations or on-the-fly electronic structure calculations. These matched pair potentials …

Regrounding The Unworldly: Carnap’S Politically Engaged Logical Pluralism, Noah Friedman-Biglin

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Recent discussions of logical pluralism trace its origins to Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance; indeed, the principle is seen as one of Carnap’s lasting philosophical contributions. In this paper, I will argue that Carnap’s reasons for adopting this principle are not purely logical, but are rather founded in the Vienna Circle’s manifesto—a programmatic document that brings the Circle’s philosophical work together with a program of social change. Building on work by Uebel, Romizi, and others, I argue that we must understand the principle in light of Carnap’s role in writing the manifesto, and thus as integrated into the larger philosophical …

Comparison Between Ribosomal Assembly And Machine Learning Tools For Microbial Identification Of Organisms With Different Characteristics, Stephanie Chau, Carlos Rojas, Jorjeta G. Jetcheva, Mary Markart, Sudha Vijayakumar, Sophia Yuan, Vincent Stowbunenko, Amanda N. Shelton, William B. Andreopoulos

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background: Genome assembly tools are used to reconstruct genomic sequences from raw sequencing data, which are then used for identifying the organisms present in a metagenomic sample. Methodology: More recently, machine learning approaches have been applied to a variety of bioinformatics problems, and in this paper, we explore their use for organism identification. We start by evaluating several commonly used metagenomic assembly tools, including PhyloFlash, MEGAHIT, MetaSPAdes, Kraken2, Mothur, UniCycler, and PathRacer, and compare them against state-of-the-art deep learning-based machine learning classification approaches represented by DNABERT and DeLUCS, in the context of two synthetic mock community datasets. Results: Our analysis …

Library Services And Resource Provision To Prison Inmates In Enugu Maximum Prison Library, Enugu State, Nigeria, Andrew Ifeanyi Ifeabor, Godwin Sunday Ezeh, Comfort Ometere Alabi, Margaret N. Ngwuchukwu

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study focused on library services and resource provision to prison inmates in Enugu Maximum Prison Library Enugu State Nigeria. Four (4) research questions were formulated to guide the study. The objectives of the study were to find out the extent of library services provision to the prison inmates, extent of provision of library resources to the inmates, agencies that provide resources and services to the Prison Library, and the problems associated with the provision of library services and resources to meet the inmates’ information needs. Eighty-three (83) respondents comprising eighty prison inmates and three library staff were used as …

Dnaforge: A Design Tool For Nucleic Acid Wireframe Nanostructures, Antti Elonen, Leon Wimbes, Abdulmelik Mohammed, Pekka Orponen

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

DNAforge is an online tool that provides a unified, user-friendly interface to several recent design methods for DNA and RNA wireframe nanostructures, with the possibility of integrating additional methods into the same framework. Currently, DNAforge supports three design methods for DNA nanostructures and two for RNA nanostructures. The tool enables the design, visualisation and sequence generation for highly complex wireframe nanostructures with a simple fully automated process. DNAforge is freely accessible at https://dnaforge.org/.

Sjsu Erfa News, Summer 2024, San Jose State University, Emeritus And Retired Faculty Association

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Association (ERFA) Newsletter

Volume 37, No 4

Malware Classification Using Dynamically Extracted Api Call Embeddings, Sahil Aggarwal, Fabio Di Troia

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Malware classification stands as a crucial element in establishing robust computer security protocols, encompassing the segmentation of malware into discrete groupings. Recently, the emergence of machine learning has presented itself as an apt approach for addressing this challenge. Models can undergo training employing diverse malware attributes, such as opcodes and API calls, to distill valuable insights for effective classification. Within the realm of natural language processing, word embeddings assume a pivotal role by representing text in a manner that aligns closely with the proximity of similar words. These embeddings facilitate the quantification of word resemblances. This research embarks on a …

Development Of The Roadway Pothole Management Program, Dingxin Cheng

Mineta Transportation Institute

Addressing the issue of potholes is a primary concern for maintaining urban infrastructure. The research team has developed a prototype pothole management program. The program includes a mobile application and two machine learning models. The mobile app enables users to upload images of potholes, report relevant information, and provide driving directions to the pothole location. With the help of this application, the user can seamlessly capture images of the potholes, record pertinent information, and submit the data for necessary action. The mobile application is an essential tool in the Pothole Management Program (PMP), as it enhances the program's efficiency, effectiveness, …

Mapping Of Pavement Conditions Using Smartphone/Tablet Lidar Case Study: Sensor Performance Comparison, Calvin Beavers, Chad Day, Austin Krietemeyer, Scott M. Peterson, Yushin Ahn, Xiaojun Li

Mineta Transportation Institute

Poor road conditions affect millions of drivers, and assessing the condition of paved surfaces is a critical step towards repairing them. This project explores the feasibility of using the Apple iPad Pro LiDAR sensor as a cost-effective tool for assessing the damage and condition of paved surfaces. Our research aims to provide accurate and precise measurements using readily available consumer devices and compare the results to state-of-the-art equipment. This investigation involved visual inspection, identification, and classification of pavement distresses, followed by a comparison of the iPad and iPhone LiDAR data with a survey-grade terrestrial laser scanner. The project revealed several …

Battery Management System Development For Electric Vehicles And Fast Charging Infrastructure Improvement, Yu Yang, Hen-Geul Yeh, Cesar Ortiz

Mineta Transportation Institute

The electric vehicle (EV) has become increasingly popular due to its being zero-emission. However, a significant challenge faced by EV drivers is the range anxiety associated with battery usage. Addressing this concern, this project develops a more efficient battery management system (BMS) for electric vehicles based on a real-time, state-of-charge (SOC) estimation. The proposed study delivers three modules: (1) a new equivalent circuit model (ECM) for lithium-ion batteries, (2) a new SOC estimator based on the moving horizon method, and (3) an on-board FPGA implementation of the classical Coulomb counting method for SOC estimation. The research team extends the traditional …

Spatio-Temporal Analysis Of The Roadside Transportation-Related Air Quality (Startraq 2022): Data-Driven Exposure Analysis By Transportation Modes, Jaymin Kwon, Yushin Ahn, Steve Chung

Mineta Transportation Institute

Particulate matter (PM) pollution poses significant health risks, influenced by various meteorological factors and seasonal variations. This study investigates the impact of temperature and other meteorological variables on PM10 and PM2.5 levels in Fresno County, known for high air pollution. Multiple linear regression (MLR) and generalized additive models (GAMs) assess the significance of these relationships. Analyzing data from Fresno County, we examine PM10 and PM2.5 levels across "hot" (June to August) and "cool" (September to May) seasons. Findings indicate PM10, both MLR and GAM models identify statistically significant variables, excluding temperature and wind direction in each season. However, during the …

Multi-Link Prediction For Mmwave Wireless Communication Systems Using Liquid Time-Constant Networks, Long Short- Term Memory, And Interpretation Using Symbolic Regression, Vishnu S. Pendyala, Milind Patil

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

A significant challenge encountered in mmWave and sub-terahertz systems used in 5G and the upcoming 6G networks is the rapid fluctuation in signal quality across various beam directions. Extremely high-frequency waves are highly vulnerable to obstruction, making even slight adjustments in device orientation or the presence of blockers capable of causing substantial fluctuations in link quality along a designated path. This issue poses a major obstacle because numerous applications with low-latency requirements necessitate the precise forecasting of network quality from many directions and cells. The method proposed in this research demonstrates an avant-garde approach for assessing the quality of multi-directional …

Demographic Characteristics As Determinants Of Awareness Level Of E-Resources Among Postgraduate Students In Public Universities In Nigeria, Oluwatosin Olubunmi Okunoye Ph.D

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study investigated demographic characteristics as determinants of awareness level of e-resources among postgraduate students in public universities in Nigeria. The descriptive survey research method was used for the study. The population of this study comprised 23,070 postgraduate students enrolled in six public universities in southwest Nigeria. A convenience sampling technique was used to select 2,310 postgraduate students in the six public universities. A structured questionnaire was adapted for the study. Data collected were analyzed using frequency counts, percentages, mean, standard deviation, graphs, and chi square to test for relationship. The results showed that the level of awareness of …

Kallenbach, W. Warren, San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

Stanford University, Educational Psych/Guidance, 1959 Ed.D

Stanford University, Educational Psychology, 1953 MA.

Drury College, Psychology and Education, 1949 AB magna cum laude

Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 1946-1947

Jefferson City Junior College, 1943-1944

Overcoming Barriers To Improved Decision-Making For Battery Deployment In The Clean Energy Transition, Brian Tarroja, Julie M. Schoenung, Oladele Ogunseitan, Alissa Kendall, Yang Qiu, Timothy Malloy, Jens Peters, J. Mijin Cha, Dustin Mulvaney, Oliver Heidrich, Manuel Baumann

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Decarbonization plans depend on the rapid, large-scale deployment of batteries to sufficiently decarbonize the electricity system and on-road transport. This can take many forms, shaped by technology, materials, and supply chain selection, which will have local and global environmental and social impacts. Current knowledge gaps limit the ability of decision-makers to make choices in facilitating battery deployment that minimizes or avoids unintended environmental and social consequences. These gaps include a lack of harmonized, accessible, and up-to-date data on manufacturing and supply chains and shortcomings within sustainability and social impact assessment methods, resulting in uncertainty that limits incorporation of research into …

Effect Of Inclusiveness And Contemporary Teaching And Learning Environments On Students With Learning Disability, Emmanuel Chidiadi Onwubiko

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This work is an overview of the effect of inclusiveness and contemporary teaching and learning environments on students with learning disability. The paper looked at learning disability, inclusiveness in education and contemporary teaching and learning environment from the conceptual perspective as well as the effect of both inclusiveness and contemporary teaching and learning environments on students with learning disability. It was ascertained based on reviewed literature that inclusive education is in tandem with the United Nations Sustainable Developmental Goal (UN-SDG) 4 which stipulates that no child should be left behind in education with special reference to students with learning disability. …