Digital Commons Network^™

Mental Health Perceptions Among Caribbean Adults In The United States, Ambika Ramjawam

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate mental health literacy (MHL) among Caribbean American adults and to assess the extent to which mental health perceptions (MHP) and acculturative stress contribute to variations in MHL. A cross-sectional, quantitative survey design was utilized to examine MHL, MHP, and acculturative stress among a sample of 138 participants. Pearson correlation analyses were conducted to assess associations among MHL, MHP, acculturation, and age. Independent samples t-tests and one-way ANOVAs were performed to examine demographics across key variables. Findings revealed moderate levels of MHL (M = 4.7, SD = .99) and a weak, positive correlation …

Comparing Interactive Versus Static Educational Images On Student Learning Outcomes, Noah Schwartz

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Static images routinely accompany text in educational sources such as textbooks, articles, and websites to convey complex, educational information. These are generally effective; however, current technology allows for interactive images that seem to enhance engagement. How effective are these interactive images? The present study investigated whether an interactive image produced better learning outcomes compared to a static image using the same text. Specifically, this study examined whether interactive images affected comprehension, memory, engagement, and cognitive load differently than static images. In this study, data from 153 college student participants were analyzed. First, participants were assigned to read about the neuropsychology …

123 Studies Use In The Review, Abdul-Akeem Sadiq

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Main Street: Themed Experience Design As A Tool For Small Town Revitalization, Carrie L. Schweiger

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

The idea of the American main street is deeply embedded in popular culture, often seen through layers of nostalgia that can obscure the real-world conditions of today. While an idealized nostalgia may benefit some towns, decades of change have left many struggling to fit the mold. This thesis explores how core principles of themed experience design can be integrated into existing American main streets, reimagining the way residents interact and identify with these spaces.

Examining historical upheavals alongside decades of media portrayals brings insight into the different stories embedded in America’s small towns, many of which remain focused on the …

University Of Central Florida Libraries 2023-2024 Annual Report, Cynthia S. Dancel

Libraries' Documents

No abstract provided.

Minority Representation In Athletic Leadership, Brooke D. Johnson

LEAD Scholars Academy Showcase

The purpose of the research project was to identify an issue in our world related to racial, social, or ethnic injustices as well as leadership. I chose to relate my project to the sports world because it is an area that I am also very passionate about. Through my research I learned that that have been many changes and advancements over the years to promote women and people of racial minorities into leadership positions, however there is still a lot of work to be done.

The Underrepresentation Of Latinx Leaders In U.S. Politics, Yailin Rodriguez Ojeda

LEAD Scholars Academy Showcase

No abstract provided.

The Lack Of Mental Health Support In Caribbean Households, Arnoudly Bossicot

LEAD Scholars Academy Showcase

Growing up in a Caribbean household, mental health, amongst other topics, was something no one dared to speak about. Seeking therapy or talking to a trusted family member is not an option since you will look weak. When mental health issues are left untreated, long-term adverse effects on the emotional, social, physical, and behavioral aspects of life. In some instances, it may result in suicide. This research will explore the different elements that affect a person’s willingness to receive mental health treatment in Caribbean households. Would teenagers and young adults seek mental help if given the right resources and support? …

Its Not A “Conflict” When Its Colonization; The Continued Oppression Of The Palestinians, Safia K. Alkhub, Safia K. Alkhub

LEAD Scholars Academy Showcase

This project aims to educate and shed light into the colonization and oppression of Palestinians that has been happening long before October 7th of 2023 as something more than a conflict. What Palestine is facing is injustice, ongoing settler colonialism and systemic oppression under a military occupation. Since the Nakba of 1948, the displacement, land theft, and violence that the Palestinians face continues while the world continue to be silent and complacent because of the aid of western forces like the United States to the Israeli military both by arms deals and monetary aid to the Israeli military. Many human …

Unmasking The Global Crisis Of Misinformation: Its Devastating Impact On Leadership And Public Health, Kazi S. Salsabil

LEAD Scholars Academy Showcase

With the advancement of information access, the global community faces the growing dilemma of misinformation. The sources we rely on such as news, social media, and other media platforms play a critical role in our daily decisions, particularly in health and politics. Moreover, research has shown that misinformation has contributed to significant events such as election crises and the global pandemic. The purpose of this project is to address the global crisis of misinformation on leadership and Public health. The aim is to understand the causes and effects of this dilemma while determining more effective solutions that can create a …

Integrated Compliant Structure For A Hand Exoskeleton, Tristan R. Koopman

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis presents the design and prototyping of a wearable hand exoskeleton that integrates a flexible structural framework to assist with hand movement while maintaining comfort and anatomical conformity. The goal was to create a device that supports tendon-driven actuation through a compliant structure, combining elements of rigidity and flexibility to match the natural geometry and motion of the human hand. Traditional hand exoskeletons often trade off motion for structure or vice versa. This project aims to bridge that gap with a hybrid compliant design that balances flexibility and support. The design process followed an iterative approach involving rapid prototyping …

Development Of Generalizable Data-Driven Traffic State Prediction Solutions: A Comprehensive Approach, Md Mobasshir Rashid

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Increased urbanization and population growth lead to more traffic in the transportation system, causing severe congestion. Particularly during disruptive events such as hurricanes or traffic incidents, the traffic flow in the network worsens significantly. As a result, there is a need for data-driven traffic prediction models to reduce congestion in real-time, and the prediction model should be generalizable to be applicable across different dynamic scenarios. Additionally, a robust and adaptable traffic prediction model can help traffic managers to take proactive actions to optimize traffic flow. However, the majority of data-driven traffic prediction models suffer from limited applicability as they are …

Novel Nanomaterial-Based Platforms For Bio-Electrochemical Sensing And Photocatalytic Treatment Of Contaminants Of Emerging Concern In Water, Jonghyun Baik

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This dissertation presents the development of novel nanomaterial-based platforms for bio-electrochemical sensing and photocatalytic treatment of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in water, including heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and microcystin toxins. Conventional detection and remediation methods are often costly, time-consuming, and impractical for field use. To overcome these limitations, in this dissertation, five distinct platforms were designed, developed, and evaluated under various water conditions.

First, a microbial fuel cell (MFC)-based biosensor was developed for detecting heavy metals (Cu²⁺ and Hg²⁺) and PAHs (benzene and xylene). The system exhibited rapid, linear …

Small Ripple, Big Waves: Individual Political Attitudes, Populism, Illiberalism And Democratic Resilience, Paulo Ricardo Valle

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Why do individuals who support democracy also endorse populist and illiberal attitudes? Current literature focuses efforts on exploring the role that institutions and political actors have in democracy resilience (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019; Merkel & Lührmann, 2021). However, relatively few academic works have examined this phenomenon at the individual level. With the aim to exploring the causal effect between individual political attitudes, anti-democratic threats, and democratic resilience at the individual level, this study applies a micro-level theoretical approach to assess how individuals’ political attitudes toward populism and illiberalism affect their support for democratic values. To test the hypotheses, this study …

Determining Essential Attributes For Experience And Satisfaction In The Customer 4.0 Era: A Kano Model Approach, Cintia Z. Buffon

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

The world is constantly changing, with rapid technological advancements and increased digital connectivity shaping daily activities. In this evolving landscape, customers have transformed into what is known as Customer 4.0—a new generation of consumers who expect high levels of personalization, digital engagement, and greater transparency from organizations. These expectations extend to higher education, where students demand more customized learning experiences, interactive content, and digital accessibility. This research investigates engineering students' preferences regarding educational attributes aligned with Customer 4.0 characteristics using the Kano model. While the Kano model has been widely applied across industries, its use in higher education remains limited. …

Investigating The Impacts Of Peer Support And Online Information Seeking In Chronic Pain Online Health Communities, Aaron Necaise

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Chronic pain is a highly prevalent medical condition that contributes to intense emotional distress and social isolation in patients. With the growth of social media, online health communities (OHCs) have become a popular resource for patients to learn about their pain and establish social connections with peers. Although there is some evidence suggesting that curated online resources can benefit patient well-being, social media interactions have the potential to propagate medical misinformation and negativity. This dissertation expands upon the Social Communication Model of Pain to examine how interactions within social media-based OHCs impact chronic pain and uncover practical insights into OHC …

Towards Safe And Reliable Ai Models, Zihang Zou

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, its applications have become indispensable in our daily lives. Emerging advanced AI models, from general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Deepseek to domain-specific systems such as autopilot for autonomous vehicles, are changing the way we work and live by increasing efficiency and fostering innovation. However, these advancements also bring significant risks, as they may compromise data ownership or yield unreliable outcomes. In response, we focus on two critical areas: data safety and model reliability. To ensure data safety and promote lawful data processing, we investigate anti-neural watermarking techniques designed to …

Assessing Driving Performance And Safety In Managed Lanes: A Human Factors Study On The Effects Of Buffer Separation Treatments With Delineators, Sharfuddin Ahmed

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Buffer separation with delineators is one of the commonly used separation treatments across US highways to distinguish managed lanes (ML) from general purpose lanes (GPLs). As MLs continue to be integrated into US highway system for improving traffic flow and reducing congestion, this separation method has become more popular due to its flexibility and cost efficiency over more robust physical separations. While past studies have explored the effectiveness and safety of buffer separations with delineators compared to other treatments, none have examined how specific changes within the buffer design—like separation width and delineator height—impact driver behavior. It is particularly important …

Evaluating Pedestrian Behavior In Response To Innovative Detection Messages And Wait-Time Indicators At Signalized Intersections: A Virtual Reality Study, Nada K. Ahmed

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Pedestrian safety at signalized intersections remains a growing concern in urban environments, necessitating effective communication between pedestrians and traffic control devices. Traditional approaches often prove inadequate in addressing these challenges. This study utilized virtual reality simulation to examine how innovative detection systems and wait-time indicators affect pedestrian behavior under varying environmental conditions. Ninety participants evenly distributed across three age groups experienced 18 crossing scenarios that differed by detection type, wait indication, crossing time, crossing distance, visibility, traffic density, and time of day. Key behavioral measures including start-up lost time, crossing speed, and total crossing duration were analyzed using linear mixed-effects …

Strengthening Community Resilience Towards Infrastructure Disruptions Due To Hurricanes, Tasnuba Binte Jamal

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Extreme events such as hurricanes can significantly disrupt infrastructures, leading to negative impacts on productivity, economy, and social wellbeing. Understanding community resilience against infrastructure disruptions in response to such events is crucial for effective preparedness, mitigation, and recovery efforts. The overarching problem addressed in this dissertation centers around enhancing community resilience against infrastructure disruptions due to hurricanes. Community resilience is defined as the ability of a community to return to normalcy following a disaster. One way to enhance community resilience is to strengthen its critical lifelines and infrastructure services (e.g., power, water, transportation, internet) and capital—to reduce the likelihood of …

Integration Of System Dynamics And Agent-Based Simulation To Emulate Cyberattacks In An Iot-Based Smart Grid, Francisco Valdez

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

The electric power grid is a cyber-physical system (CPS) that plays a fundamental role in modern society. With the integration of renewable energy sources and advanced communication technologies, Smart Grids (SGs) can enhance both the profitability and reliability of the electric power system. The communication network that interconnects numerous remotely distributed generators, devices, and controllers plays a vital role in grid control, and current trends favor the widespread adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, this network is inherently vulnerable to cyberattacks. This dissertation presents a hybrid methodology to model and analyze the dynamic behavior of an electrical Smart …

Critical State-Based Study On Deformations Due To Construction Activities And Blast Densification, Jorge Enrique Orozco-Herrera

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

The behavior of geo-structures and foundation systems in densely populated urban areas relies on the successful performance of the supporting soils when subjected to static (e.g., the weight of the structure or service loads) or dynamic (e.g., earthquake-induced ground motions, construction-induced vibrations, wind loads, or traffic) loading scenarios. Construction-related activities and ground improvement operations can also be responsible to alter the stress-strain-strength behavior of supporting soils by causing vibration-induced ground deformations, excessive vibrations, or mobilizing soil shear strength in relation to in situ or as-built conditions. Construction-related activities and ground improvement operations such as blast densification trigger complex dynamic input …

Additively Manufactured Engineered Transparent Ceramics For Laser Gain Media, Ross Osborne

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Transparent ceramics (TCs) offer a key advantage over single crystals as solid-state laser materials, in that their composition can be spatially varied to improve laser performance. In this work, additive manufacturing (AM) techniques were applied to TC fabrication to produce laser gain media with engineered gain and index profiles. We have used direct ink write (DIW) to fabricate laser rods and channel waveguides and introduced ink-spraying, a new technique, to realize multilayer planar waveguides. Modifications to the DIW process, including the use of sacrificial drying layers to promote uniform drying, the optimization of the drying, burnout and calcination steps all …

A Comparative Analysis Of Figurines From The Lower Rio Verde Valley From Oaxaca, Raynaliz C. Velazquez

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This thesis investigates 618 ceramic figurines from the Lower Río Verde Valley in Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore how figurine use varied across civic-ceremonial, domestic, and outlying contexts during the Terminal Formative and Late Classic periods. The central hypothesis proposes that figurines from the Río Viejo Acropolis, a civic-ceremonial center, would be larger and exhibit greater labor investment than those from residential and peripheral sites, reflecting more labor-intensive ideologies and ceremonial practices. Through typological, spatial, and material analysis, the study examines attributes such as size, surface treatment, production method, and the presence of musical elements. The dataset includes newly analyzed figurines …

Design Tool For Ammonia Cracker Hardware, Andrew Menendez

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Ammonia is a promising carbon-free fuel for commercial aviation and represents a viable pathway toward net-zero emissions. However, direct ammonia combustion is inefficient, creating the need for onboard cracking to generate hydrogen for improved combustion characteristics. One pathway for onboard cracking is to have the hardware live around the combustor liner where heat generated from the combustion process can be used to sustain the reaction. This study aims to develop a design tool for the ammonia cracking reactor hardware. A simplified, single-step surface reaction mechanism was implemented using ANSYS FLUENT and CHEMKIN PRO R1, demonstrating strong agreement with experimental data …

Towards Achieving General Video Understanding, Rohit Gupta

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This dissertation investigates the problem of general video understanding, aiming to develop models capable of robust, adaptable, and semantically rich interpretation of video data across diverse domains and tasks. Despite significant progress in video analysis, existing methods remain limited by restricted vocabularies, inadequate fine-grained discrimination, and vulnerability to noise and adversarial perturbations. To address these challenges, the research advances four complementary directions encompassing multimodal fusion, open-vocabulary recognition, robustness enhancement, and unified video–language modeling. First, a multi-modal prototype contrastive framework is proposed for fine-grained video classification, integrating visual and auditory cues through a transformer-based architecture and supervised contrastive learning with class …

Large Language Models And Networks: Edge Proposal, Synthetic Corpora, And Adaptive Node Generation, Nathan Gonzalez

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have evolved from brittle rule-based engines through data-driven statistical models to today’s transformer architectures whose multi-head attention enables rich contextual reasoning. Against this backdrop, this dissertation unifies three complementary investigations that deepen our understanding of how large language models (LLMs) can reason over, generate, and strategically adapt language within networked settings. First, instruction-tuned LLMs are recast as latent-relationship detectors: by prompting models to hypothesize links between text-described entities, we recover edge sets that reconstruct social, thematic, and citation graphs with high precision, revealing how attention distributions encode topological cues. Recognizing the difficulty …

Advanced Large Language Model Approaches And Natural Language Processing Techniques To Improve Hate Speech Detection Using Ai, Saad Almohaimeed

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

The proliferation of hate speech on social networks can create a significant negative social effect, making the development of AI-based classifiers that can identify and characterize different types of hateful speech in messages highly important for stakeholders. While this is a highly challenging problem, recent advances in language models promise to advance the state of the art such that even subtle and indirect forms of hate speech can be detected.

In this dissertation we present a series of contributions that improve different aspects of hate speech classification. We developed THOS, a hate speech dataset consisting of 8.3k tweets. Compared to …

Integrated Performance-Based Framework For Evaluating Alternative Containment Systems In Subtitle D Landfills Managing Coal Combustion Products, Poyu Zhang

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Designing landfill containment systems that remain effective over decades to centuries poses significant challenges in geoenvironmental engineering, especially for landfills managing coal combustion products (CCPs) with complex hydraulic and chemical behaviors. This dissertation aims to develop an integrated, performance-based framework for evaluating landfill barrier systems by combining numerical modeling, experimental leaching tests, and machine learning prediction. The first component assesses the equivalency of the Florida double liner system relative to the Subtitle D composite liner mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). Using field leakage observations and COMSOL Multiphysics-based numerical simulations, results demonstrate that the Florida system, when …

Investigating The Efficacy Of A Novel Law Enforcement Use Of Force Training Simulation, Justin D. Lane

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Realistic scenario based training (SBT) is an effective method used to prepare police officers for real world use of force incidents. Many law enforcement agencies are unable to host regular SBT due to time, cost, and facility constraints. A novel simulation training approach was investigated to determine if it may be a suitable alternative or supplement to traditional SBT at reduced cost, time, and increased frequency. This novel scenario based simulation training (SBST) environment combined physical and virtual elements into a single training scenario. A physical space, designed to depict the scene of a critical incident, was equipped with immersive …