Digital Commons Network^™

How Developers Use Type-System Related Programming Language Features, Samuel W. Flint

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Optional type annotations are a popular feature of programming languages that allow developers to omit explicit type information in code while, in some cases, retaining many of the benefits of static typing, such as in-code documentation, improved detection of type errors, or enforcement of code properties. However, how developers use and understand optional type annotations is not clear. The focus of this dissertation is to understand the use and comprehension of optional type annotations.

Optional type annotations are examined through four lenses: first, by examining the evolution of usage in a statically typed programming language (Kotlin, the default language for …

The Earliest University Of Nebraska Graduate Degrees, 1886-1909, Mark A. Griep

Mark A. Griep Publications

This list of the earliest graduate degrees awarded by the University of Nebraska (NU) in Lincoln was assembled to learn about the university’s research activity that preceded its admission to the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU) in 1909.

Development Of A Machine Learning Framework For An Irrigation Decision Support System, Eric Wilkening, Derek M. Heeren, Yeyin Shi, Laila A. Puntel, Guillermo R. Balboa, Abia Katimbo, Kuan Zhang, Precious Nneka Amori, Bruno Lena

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Currently used irrigation scheduling techniques often require significant human intervention and are time consuming, particularly for variable rate irrigation. This research aimed to develop a conceptual framework that incorporates disparate data sources leveraging both mechanistic and machine learning (ML) approaches. The overarching objective is to utilize the growing availability of data and technology to manage irrigation more precisely, which will minimize negative impacts of irrigation on our water resources. An initial irrigation machine learning model was proposed and tested in this study as a key component of an edge-cloud computing and federated learning decision-making framework. The specific objectives were (1) …

Improved Rumen Microbiome Interpretation Via Empirical Filtration Derived From Known Mock Microbiomes, Wesley A. Tom

School of Biological Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The rumen microbiome plays a critical role in ruminant health and performance. As a consequence, many studies investigate microbial community composition using 16S rDNA based sequencing. As such, data quality and data filtering are critical to accurately identify microbial community composition. In this study we use mock communities to empirically select data filtering parameters to reduce artifact populations and compared the effect of filtering using different bioinformatic pipelines using rumen bacterial community data. The filtering parameters identified provides consistent estimates of rumen microbial diversity, regardless of bioinformatic pipeline utilized and provides a more accurate view of microbiome structure and composition. …

The Effect Of Diet Formulations Containing Different Protein Sources On Energy And Nitrogen Utilization In Lactating Jersey Cows, Kortney Ann Harpestad

Department of Animal Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is well understood that lactating dairy cows require metabolizable protein (MP) for milk yield and milk protein synthesis. Diets with conventional feed sources like corn and soybean meal (SBM) may not sufficiently meet all MP and amino acid (AA) requirements so supplementation with more rumen undegradable protein (RUP) rich feeds or rumen-protected AA can be fed to support animal performance. The growth trajectory of biofuels has resulted in dramatic increases in the production of feeds like heat treated soybean meal (HTSBM). While the chemical composition of this product is understood, there is a need to better understand how HTSBM …

Drift Dynamics Of Early Life-Stage Invasive Carps, Saurav Karki

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Asian carp species pose significant ecological threats to North American freshwater systems due to their invasive nature and prolific reproduction. Their semi buoyant eggs develop while drifting downstream with the river current. Understanding early life-stage transport is therefore critical for predicting recruitment potential and guiding management efforts. Existing fluvial egg drift models, including those relying on 1-D hydraulics and fully 3-D CFD-based models, are either inadequate for complex braided rivers or too computationally demanding for large-scale application. The Platte River in Nebraska, characterized by wide, shallow, multi-threaded channels, is dominated by two-dimensional flow conditions, making a depth-averaged 2-D modeling approach …

Non-Blackbox Robust Design Of Machine Learning In Networks, Venkat Sai Suman Lamba Karanam

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Networked systems have become increasingly complex, with newer communication technologies and standards being added every day. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigms have been adopted in networks to not only solve many fundamental problems, but also to allow seamless integration of components comprising them. The saying “let’s not reinvent the wheel” in ML/AI adoption implies that model architecture design be left for pure ML/AI researchers, while network researchers focus on input preprocessing (e.g. formatting the packet data to be fed to a model), hyperparameter fine-tuning and a trial-and-error approach to find the “best” result. …

Don't Settle For Less: Incorporating Postcolonial And Settler Colonial Perspectives Into The Sociological Canon, Eli Xavier Ornelas

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

For decades now, post-/de-/settler-/ and anticolonial scholars have advanced the argument that sociology has largely failed to incorporate critical insights from theories of empire into the sociological canon. In this dissertation, I argue that introduction to sociology textbooks offer an important vantage point from which to assess conventional sociological knowledge as textbooks are often thought to be “reflections of the discipline.” I analyze the social theory and race chapters of 21 of the most often used introduction to sociology textbooks in the United States to investigate two chapters where insights from theories of empire would be present if indeed incorporated: …

Authentication And Message Integrity Verification For Emerging Wireless Networks, Ebuka Philip Oguchi

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation presents a comprehensive body of research on authentication and message integrity verification for emerging wireless networks, focusing on secret-free and physical layer security techniques across diverse, challenging, and unconventional environments.

It comprises four first-author contributions that span underground wireless systems, over-the-air (OTA) channels, vehicular communications, and nanoscale molecular networks.

The first contribution, Soil-Assisted Trust Establishment for Underground Wireless Networks (STUN), introduces a physical-layer trust bootstrapping protocol that achieves authentication and message integrity without pre-shared secrets. Leveraging underground-to-air propagation laws and trusted relay nodes, STUN resists active signal injection attacks and demonstrates security comparable to the unbalanced oil and …

The Significance Of Snow In Hydrometeorological Extremes, Sinan Rasiya Koya

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Snow is the largest natural reservoir on Earth. It accumulates water during the cold and dry months and releases it during warm and dry months. Societies, especially in the extratropical zone, heavily depend on snow as their freshwater resources, resulting in the massive economic value of snow. The recent changes in snowpacks and associated processes are concerning. We are susceptible to disruptions in snow processes, which can have disastrous implications. Yet the importance of snow is often not realized by a wider population. There are limited studies quantifying snow-related extremes, partly stemming from the limitations of existing methodologies.

This dissertation …

Rhetorics Of Encounter: Toward A Biocentric Theory Of Discourse, Matthew D. Whitaker

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Encounters with more-than-human identities are transformative moments that stand to affect dispositional and bodily change in individuals. From close brushes with wild animals in National Parks to everyday interactions with local ecologies, encounters invite us to feel and think differently about the nature of our realities. In Rhetorics of Encounter: Toward a Biocentric Theory of Discourse, I draw from interdisciplinary perspectives to disrupt the idea of rhetoric as a representational medium, arguing that rhetoric occurs not just through textual exchanges of words and symbols, but through embodied moments of contact with other responsive beings. Invoking George Kennedy’s theory …

Multivariate Mixture Regression Models With Known Group Membership And Informative Priors, Pahalapathirage Dona Kalani Hasanthika

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

We introduced couple different novel approaches to incorporate latent variable information to multivariate mixture regression models with both Gaussian and count data. We also evaluated the performance of these models with existing best approaches with simulated data from various sampling structures and also evaluated one of the models performance with rice metabolite data that provided some novel insights as well as validating existing literature about performance and behavior of these metabolites. We validated the method using extensive simulations and a real-world application. In both quantitative covariate designs and complex treatment design simulations, our method consistently outperformed established tools like limma, …

How Beliefs Shape What We Consider When Choosing What To Eat, Christopher Gustafson

Cornhusker Economics

What determines which foods we consider? One factor, certainly, is what we like to eat, and if liking what we eat were the sole relevant outcome of food consumption, there would be little to say about incomplete consideration. However, diet quality has important, well-documented effects on health outcomes (as well as other important considerations, such as differential environmental impact). Close to 75 percent of American adults are overweight or obese, which increases the likelihood that the individual will experience one or more serious non-communicable diseases. A food’s healthiness is an important consideration for many people when making food choices, but, …

Investigating The Impact Of Agent Openness On Planning In Multi-Agent Systems, Bala Subramanyam Duggirala

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Multi-agent systems (MAS) possess significant potential for modeling real-world scenarios requiring coordinated actions (like wildfire fighting or ridesharing) among autonomous entities or agents (e.g., wildfire fighting agents) in complex, dynamic environments. Effective decision-theoretic planning (where each agent must carefully consider both the immediate and the future situations or states, and coordinate with the other agents (neighbors) to evaluate what needs to be done at present) within MAS, especially multiagent planning, where the planning agent directly models its neighbors in order to estimate their optimal actions, is critical, yet challenged by factors like partial observability, openness, and diverse agent types with …

Update To: Advancing Butterfly Systematics Through Genomic Analysis, Jing Zhang, Qian Cong, Jinhui Shen, Leina Song, Nick Grishin

The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey

In this update, we propose (type species or type localities in parentheses): Lochris Grishin, nom. nov. (Lasaia oileus Godman, 1903; Lepidoptera: Riodinidae) as a new substitute name for Locris Grishin, 2025 preoccupied by Locris Stål, 1866 (Cercopis rubra Fabricius, 1794; Hemiptera: Cercopidae), 5 new species, and 5 new subspecies: Emesis (Mandania) mandarina Grishin, sp. n. (Brazil: Santa Catarina) and Emesis (Mandania) mandela Grishin, sp. n. (Venezuela, Carabobo) in Riodinidae Grote, 1895 (1827); others in Hesperiidae Latreille, 1809: Telegonus (Rhabdoides) flavifimbro Grishin, sp. n. (Colombia), Urbanus (Urbanoides) dolus Grishin, sp. n. (Colombia: …

Kusamakura And Bunchō, Natsume Sōseki, Umeji Sasaki, Hyakusui Hirafuku, Paul Royster

Zea E-Books Collection

Kusamakura—literally “grass pillow”—is a Japanese expression for being “on the road,” away from home, relying on the hospitality of others. Natsume Sōseki’s novel concerns a painter-artist on holiday at a hot springs hotel where he is the lone guest. His encounters with the locals—including a tea-shop matron, a drunken barber, a wood-gatherer, an abbot of a Zen monastery, the hotel proprietor, and, most intriguingly, his lovely enigmatic divorced daughter—prompt reflections and musings on the nature of art and its relation to real life. How can one experience life and still represent it in literature or art? Doesn’t art require …

Larger Price Limits For Cattle Futures Contracts: Should We Pay Attention To That?, Fabio Mattos

Cornhusker Economics

The CME Group has recently announced an increase in price limits for its cattle futures contracts. This means that cattle futures prices now have a wider range to fluctuate on any given day, and the possibility of larger price fluctuations implies that traders may find larger gains as well as larger losses in their trading accounts at the end of the day. This is certainly something that people trading in futures markets should be aware of, but the change in price limits itself is just a regular update that happens every year. Let's take a closer look at this.

Groundwater Flooding On Highways In The Nebraska Sandhills: Applying Remote Sensing, Precipitation And Groundwater Modeling To Determine Depth, Cause And Frequency, Aaron R. Mittelstet

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

Climate change significantly impacts infrastructure sustainability, particularly through shifts in precipitation patterns, intensity, and duration. These precipitation dynamics may increase the occurrence of surface water and groundwater flooding. Groundwater in the Nebraska Sand Hills (NSH), including the thickest portions of the High Plains Aquifer, extends close to the land surface in interdunal areas, making the NSH vulnerable to groundwater flooding. Recent events involving heavy precipitation, snow melt, and rising groundwater levels have caused prolonged highway flooding, disrupting transportation networks. This study estimates groundwater flood inundation depth, duration and frequency in the highways of NSH using remote sensing techniques and groundwater …

Geophysical Tools For Agricultural Management: Trends, Challenges, And Opportunities, Sophia Becker, Trenton Franz, Yufeng Ge, Joe Luck, Derek M. Heeren

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Agrogeophysics is a convergence of proximal soil sensing and hydrogeophysics in which geophysical methods are used to describe soil patterns and dynamics that shape agronomic management (including precision agriculture). To fully realize its potential for optimizing agricultural production, current barriers and targets for future agrogeophysics research must be identified. In this review, we compare the trajectory of agrogeophysics within peer-reviewed literature, patents, and the US university extension literature and examine the current challenges and opportunities for supporting agricultural production and sustainability with agrogeophysical tools. We conducted a repeatable search of Web of Science and Scopus for seven geophysical methods (electromagnetic …

Data-Driven Methods For Signal Analysis And Nonlinear System Identification, Cristian Felipe López Ruano

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In recent years, data-driven modeling has gained considerable attention in nonlinear system identification, offering a powerful alternative to traditional physics-based methods. This has been possible by advances in machine learning, sparse regression, and differential equations in a weak form, which allow the accurate capture of complex nonlinear dynamics, even when the measurements are in strong background noise. Moreover, integrating these models with physical knowledge further enhances their reliability and interpretability, making them suitable for a wide range of science and engineering applications.

In this dissertation, we investigate algorithms for data-driven nonlinear system identification to obtain ordinary differential equations that govern …

A Uas-Centered Investigation Of Vorticity Characteristics And Cold Pool Structure Across Forward And Left-Flank Boundaries In Supercells, Mark R. De Bruin

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Supercell internal boundaries are the locus of tornadogenesis; thus, understanding the characteristics of these boundaries, particularly in terms of vorticity, is important for identifying the role they play in tornado formation. Insight into the overall characteristics of internal boundaries and their possible role in tornadogenesis have been driven by studies reliant on numerical modeling-based experiments. Observational studies often neglect above-surface conditions or, when these observations are made, lack the spatial resolution to resolve boundary characteristics. During TORUS (Targeted Observation by Radars and UAS of Supercells) 2019 and TORUS-LItE (TORUS Left-flank Intensive Experiment) 2023, uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and mobile mesonets …

The Lived Experience Of Religious Trauma Among Transgender And Gender Diverse People: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Patrick T. Meyer

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Religion has served as a framework to support the psychological well-being of people across cultures throughout human history, yet there is growing scholarly and public interest in how religious institutions and people inflict harm on members through spiritual means. Extant literature demonstrated that transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people experience gendered microaggressions in religious spaces, and their social position within the church likely holds unique insights into the subjective experience of religious trauma. Even though research with people who have had adverse religious experiences has increased over time, little is known about TGD people who experience lasting psychological damage due …

Development And Implementation Of A Vector-Quantized Transformer Autoencoder For Monitoring Bicycle Road Conditions, Kewei Ren

Department of Construction Engineering and Management: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Adviser: Chun-Hsing Ho

The long-term, sustainable assessment of bicycle road conditions is essential for ensuring cyclist safety and promoting equitable infrastructure management. While traditional detection methods based on manual thresholds have demonstrated some effectiveness, they carry limitations due to the diversity of pavement materials, cyclist behaviors, and sensor platforms. Although recent advances in deep learning offer promising alternatives, established techniques are primarily applied to highway anomaly detection and are rarely adapted for bicycle roads. Furthermore, most related studies lack clear definitions for anomalies and transparent annotation procedures, resulting in a shortage of effective datasets and detection methods specifically for bicycle …

Extracting From The Extracurriculum: Using Extracurricular Composition Practices To Bring Purpose, Voice, And Engagement Back To The English Classroom, Grace N. Ellis

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores how principles and practices from extracurricular literacy spaces and the extracurriculum as a whole can inform and revitalize the secondary English classroom. In response to growing student disengagement, apathy, and disconnection, particularly within highly standardized and product-focused classrooms, this argument investigates how programs such as the Nebraska Writers Collective’s All Writes Reserved program and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Young Writer Camp model authentic engagement, identity exploration and development, and rhetorical agency through creative, student-centered writing practices. Drawing from composition theory, educational research, and experiential data from Nebraska-based writing initiatives, the thesis argues that incorporating choice, safe-risk taking, …

The Effect Of Individual Variation On Epidemiological Dynamics: From Super-Spreaders To Landscapes Of Risk, Alexis Shannon Beagle

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Individuals that make up a population always display some level of variation between members. At the smallest scale, individuals always maintain genetic variation, but variation continues to arise at other scales of biological organization from physiological or immunological variation within individuals to variation in behavior between individuals that can be both genetically and environmentally mediated. The role of individual variation is particularly important in the context of infectious diseases because there is strong evidence that infections are highly heterogenous, indicating that patterns of individual variation drive a significant portion of the epidemiological patterns we observe. Individual variation leads to heterogeneity …

Use Of High-Throughput Phenomics With And Without Fungicide As A Wheat Breeding Tool, Gerardo Ivan Rivera Collazo

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Wheat (Triticum aestivum) is an important food staple for many countries around the world and current consumption and production data demonstrate a production deficit. Breeders are challenged to help close this gap in production by selecting better cultivars with improved yields. Several methods aim to accelerate the breeding process to reduce the time required for releasing an elite variety. One of the main breeding bottlenecks is the lack of fast and reliable phenotypic data acquisition that could dissect physiological and morphological plant data. High-throughput remote sensing could have the potential to reduce this bottleneck by streamlining data acquisition, …

A Study Of Ice And Fire: Environmental Change Impacts On Lakes Of The Nebraska Sandhills, Daniel Gschwentner

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The Nebraska Sandhills contain thousands of shallow, groundwater-fed lakes. These lakes are extremely sensitive to environmental and climatic changes due to their isolated hydrological setting and small volume. Building on previous work on the hydrology, geochemistry and long-term climate response of Sandhill lakes, my research considers how ecosystem processes such as primary production, nutrient limitation and water quality respond to short-term environmental and climatic change. In my first data chapter, I highlight that Sandhill lakes are nitrogen (N) but not phosphorus (P) limited and that N:P ratios are poor predictors of nutrient limitation status in Sandhill lakes. In my second …

A Modular Paradigm For The Directly Efficient Representation Of Kinetic Laser-Driven Plasmas, Roland D. Hesse

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

A natural inefficiency in conventional treatment of the plasma distribution arises from indiscriminate consideration of the contributions to field structure that are dynamically sourced from kinetic activity in disparate sectors of phase space. We introduce a range of techniques for model design to maximize representation efficiency without breaking key physical invariants indicative of physical reliability. An overview of varied adaptation to stable time-advance methods is given. Low-dimensional representation of a laser-driven plasma requires some creativity in differential structural modification, while direct efficiency is uncovered through the compression and rarefaction of a nonuniform momentum grid. These numerical models introduce embedded gains …

Bioenergy Crop Production: Implications For Grassland Bird Communities In Southwestern Nebraska, Grace E. Schuster

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biofuel and bioenergy systems are components of most climate stabilization pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming. Currently, corn (Zea mays) is the predominant feedstock used for bioenergy production in the United States. However, widespread production of this monoculture crop has resulted in many negative environmental impacts. The most notorious impact has been the loss of grassland habitat due to agriculture expansion which has had detrimental effects on wildlife that depend on grassland habitat. One such group, grassland birds, has faced steeper, more consistent, and more widespread declines than any other avian guild. Therefore, strategies …

Analysis Of Vision Transformers And Domain Adaptation In Long-Range Facial Recognition, Zachary Michael Swanson

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Atmospheric turbulence presents a significant barrier to long-range facial recognition, introducing severe geometric distortions and blur that degrade image quality. This thesis investigates deep learning approaches for mitigating these effects, with a focus on transformer based architectures and domain adaptation strategies.

An in-depth benchmarking study was performed using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) on the Husker BRIAR Research Collection from up to 500m (HBRC-500) face dataset. The results demonstrated that vision transformers, particularly hierarchical vision transformers like the shifted-window (Swin) transformer, outperform CNN-based models at long distances due to their ability to model global spatial relationships and …