Digital Commons Network^™

Cultivating A Data Literate Workforce: Considerations For Librarians, Wendy G. Pothier, Patricia Condon

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Rising Tide: Oyster Aquaculture Survey Results, Natalie Lord, Catherine M. Ashcraft, Lindsey Williams, Julia Novak-Colwell

Faculty Publications

This document provides the results from a survey conducted August-October 2021 on the Maine and New Hampshire oyster aquaculture industry. The purpose of the survey was to gain a food system-wide perspective on gender dynamics in the region’s aquaculture industry, inclusive of different genders and identify potential gender-based barriers and opportunities to participation for men, women, and non-binary/third gender oyster aquaculturists. The published survey results include qualitative responses and demographic data for a subset of farmers in the oyster aquaculture industry of Maine and New Hampshire.

The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence In Legal Advocacy, Elissa Germaine

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The use of AI in our personal and professional lives has entered the public consciousness over the past several months. The legal profession and the securities industry are no exception. This article begins to explore the use of open source generative AI in legal advocacy, and the related ethical implications for securities arbitration practitioners.

Studies have corroborated the impact of AI on the legal profession that many of us have been seeing in practice or hearing and reading about. A Goldman Sachs study predicted that the legal profession will be one of the most likely areas to be impacted …

Humanizing Virtual Dispute Resolution, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

How might neutrals and advocates foster interpersonal dynamics when conducting arbitrations and mediations virtually, consistent with the ethical obligations of each profession and the ethical underpinnings of each process?

Virtual dispute resolution for commercial dispute resolution has become the new normal. Yet, the dispute resolution listserves are still peppered with posts from mediators and arbitrators who, although publicly extolling their own commitments to their impartiality and neutrality, are also simultaneously voicing their strong preferences for conducting their dispute resolution processes in person. According to these neutrals, they are unable to attain the same results when the process is conducted …

Copyright’S Capacity Gap, Andrew Gilden, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Publications

Most areas of law require that individuals meet a certain threshold of capacity before their decisions — e.g., to marry, to enter into a contract, or to execute an estate plan — are given legal effect. Copyright law, by contrast, gives legal effect to creative decisions by granting the decisionmaker many decades of exclusive rights so long as they are a human being and have demonstrated a “creative spark.” This Article examines the overlooked consequences of this gap in capacity standards between copyright and other areas of law. It shows that this gap has produced numerous opportunities for vulnerable creators …

Four Essential Tips For New Attorneys Working With Children And Families, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Congratulations! You’ve started your first legal job working with children and families. Perhaps you work for an institutional provider of legal services for children or as a prosecutor of dependency cases, or perhaps you are defending such cases on behalf of parents and guardians. Or maybe you are in private practice, and this is your first pro bono experience working on a family, immigration, or juvenile court matter. Whatever your role, your job is the same: to represent your client and seek as favorable an outcome as possible.

But you are new, or new to this area of the …

Investing In Abolition, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

This Article situates the prison within a broader macro-financial trend, what I call “community capture.” As private equity firms have consolidated the market for carceral services, they have also gained control over other essential social infrastructure, like housing and healthcare. By layering debt, fees, and aggressive profit expectations over companies or assets that provide for basic needs, their strategies intensify the economic pressures communities face. These strategies rely on various forms of coordination and legal protection from contestation. To demonstrate this process in the context of mass incarceration, this Article tells the story of Securus, a dominant carceral service company …

Integrating An Oral Presentation Assignment Into A Course On Drafting Contracts, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Law schools have a critical responsibility to train students in effective oral communication skills. Indeed, the American Bar Association’s Standard 302 requires that law schools establish learning outcomes that include student “competency” in, among other things, “[l]egal analysis and reasoning, legal research, problem-solving, and written and oral communication in the legal context.” Yet, apart from clinical and externship offerings, where students can regularly interact with clients, lawyers, judges, and others, and courses like trial or appellate advocacy, which focus on essential courtroom communications, students generally have limited opportunities to practice oral communication skills in a traditional law school classroom. …

In Pursuit Of Sustainable Educational Development: The Philippines And The English Dilemma, Rosemary C. Salomone

Faculty Publications

The English language poses a dilemma in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially for education in countries with high multilingualism, high poverty and unequal schooling, such as the Philippines. This chapter considers Goal 1 (reducing poverty), Goal 4 (promoting educational quality) and Goal 10 (reducing inequalities) in relation to what has become an array of executive orders, regulations and laws that have shifted in the political winds, even as the judiciary has tried to navigate a measured course. It underscores how the primacy of English in the national consciousness, tied to global markets, undercuts multilingual policies based in …

Of Systems Thinking And Straw Men, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In Content Moderation as Systems Thinking, Professor Evelyn Douek, as the title suggests, endorses an approach to the people, rules, and processes governing online speech as one not of anecdote and doctrine but of systems thinking. She constructs this concept as a novel and superior understanding of the problems of online-speech governance as compared to those existent in what she calls the “standard [scholarly] picture of content moderation.” This standard picture of content moderation — which is roughly five years old — is “outdated and incomplete,” she argues. It is preoccupied with anecdotal, high-profile adjudications in which platforms …

Justice Lazansky On “Repose” At Chief Judge Cardozo’S New York Court Of Appeals, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In 1948, Edward Lazansky of Brooklyn wrote a long letter to his friend Jacob Billikopf of Philadelphia. It included an amusing story that Lazansky had heard at some point about his friend Benjamin N. Cardozo, who had died ten years earlier. Billikopf liked the story. He retyped it and mailed it to prominent people who had known Cardozo.

Lazansky and Billikopf had it right. The story, which generally checks out, should be shared. It gives a glimpse of Cardozo’s talents and virtues, including his judicial sense of humor.

Crt Forward: Tracking The Attack On Critical Race Theory, Taifha Natalee Alexander, Latoya Baldwin Clark, Kyle Reinhard, Noah Zatz

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary practice and approach to understanding the foundations and maintenance of race and racial subordination in the legal system throughout history. Since its genesis in United States law schools in the mid-1980s, CRT has explored how racial, and other, hierarchies have persisted despite advancements in racial justice made during times like the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. CRT contests many of the standard assumptions underlying traditional civil rights discourse, including that the legal system is a neutral apparatus disconnected from the legacy of racial subordination in the United States. Since its inception, CRT …

Study On Soft Robotic Pinniped Locomotion, Dimuthu D.K. Arachchige, Tanmay Varshney, Umer Huzaifa, Iyad Kanj, Thrishantha Nanayakkara, Yue Chen, Hunter B. Gilbert, Isuru S. Godage

Faculty Publications

Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and navigate through tight spaces. These robots have the potential to be used for various applications, such as search and rescue, inspection, surveillance, and more. The state-of-the-art still faces many challenges, including limited degrees of freedom, a lack of diversity in gait trajectories, insufficient limb dexterity, and limited payload capabilities. To address these challenges, we develop a modular soft-limbed robot that can mimic the locomotion of pinnipeds. By …

Dynamic Modeling And Validation Of Soft Robotic Snake Locomotion, Dimuthu D.K. Arachchige, Sanjaya Mallikarachchi, Iyad Kanj, Dulanjana M. Perera, Yue Chen, Hunter B. Gilbert, Isuru S. Godage

Faculty Publications

Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to date, soft robotic snakes are limited to emulating planar locomotion gaits, which are derived via kinematic modeling and tested on robotic prototypes. Given that the snake locomotion results from the reaction forces due to the distributed contact between their skin and the ground, it is essential to investigate the locomotion gaits through efficient dynamic models capable of accommodating distributed contact forces. We present a complete spatial dynamic model …

The Potential Benefit Of Pseudo High Thermal Conductivity For Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing, Huan Ding, Selami Emanet, Yehong Chen, Shengmin Guo

Faculty Publications

This study examined the impact of transient pseudo high thermal conductivity to the fabrication of crack-free parts with Laser Powder-Bed-Fusion (L-PBF) based additive manufacturing (AM) method. Thermal diffusivity and thermal conductivity of L-PBF samples made by mixtures of IN939 alloy and Si powders were investigated. At temperatures above 800°C, the as-fabricated Si-doped IN939 was observed to exhibit an exceptionally high thermal conductivity, which can be attributed to the occurrence of endothermic reactions. This pseudo high thermal conductivity can effectively minimize the thermal stress and offers a potential solution to produce crack-free L-PBF parts for nonweldable alloys.

Show Us The Data: Global Covid-19 Wastewater Monitoring Efforts, Equity, And Gaps, Colleen C. Naughton, Fernando A. Roman, Ana Grace F. Alvarado, Arianna Q. Tariqi, Matthew A. Deeming, Krystin F. Kadonsky, Kyle Bibby, Aaron Bivins, Gertjan Medema, Warish Ahmed, Panagis Katsivelis, Vajra Allan, Ryan Sinclair, Joan B. Rose

Faculty Publications

A year since the declaration of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there were over 110 million cases and 2.5 million deaths. Learning from methods to track community spread of other viruses such as poliovirus, environmental virologists and those in the wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) field quickly adapted their existing methods to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Unlike COVID-19 case and mortality data, there was not a global dashboard to track wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA worldwide. This study provides a 1-year review of the “COVIDPoops19” global dashboard of universities, sites, and countries monitoring SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Methods to …

Semi-Parametric Control Architecture For Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Subject To Time Delays, Ignacio Carlucho, Dylan Stephens, William Ard, Corina Barbalata

Faculty Publications

This paper presents a data-driven model-based control system for autonomous underwater vehicles (or AUVs) subject to input delays. This work is motivated by the input time delays that can arise in underwater robotics due to communication restrictions and sensor malfunctions. Such delays can highly degrade the performance of classical control structures resulting in unpredictable system behaviours. The proposed control architecture addresses such limitations. The approach incorporates a linear dynamic representation of the system obtained using the Koopman operator in an observer/state prediction formulation. The proposed control architecture is designed based on discrepancies between the data-driven estimation of the system's behaviour …

Event-Triggered Control Under Unknown Input And Unknown Measurement Delays Using Interval Observers, Michael Malisoff, Frederic Mazenc, Corina Barbalata

Faculty Publications

We provide a new input-to-state stabilizing event-triggered feedback design for linear systems with unknown input delays, unknown measurement delays, and unknown additive disturbances. Our trigger times are computed using only the matrices defining the system and time-lagged sampled state values. We use the theory of positive systems, interval observers, and a vector version of Halanay's inequality. We illustrate our method using a marine robotic model.

Personalized Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Trajectory Optimization For Multi-Uav Assisted Edge Computing, Zhengrong Song, Chuan Ma, Ming Ding, Howard H. Yang, Yuwen Qian, Xiangwei Zhou

Faculty Publications

In the era of 5G mobile communication, there has been a significant surge in research focused on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and mobile edge computing technology. UAVs can serve as intelligent servers in edge computing environments, optimizing their flight trajectories to maximize communication system throughput. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based trajectory optimization algorithms may suffer from poor training performance due to intricate terrain features and inadequate training data. To overcome this limitation, some studies have proposed leveraging federated learning (FL) to mitigate the data isolation problem and expedite convergence. Nevertheless, the efficacy of global FL models can be negatively impacted by …

Ransomware Detection Using Federated Learning With Imbalanced Datasets, A. Vehabovic, H. Zanddizari, N. Ghani, G. Javidi, S. Uluagac, M. Rahouti, E. Bou-Harb, M. Safaei Pour

Faculty Publications

Ransomware is a type of malware which encrypts user data and extorts payments in return for the decryption keys. This cyberthreat is one of the most serious challenges facing organizations today and has already caused immense financial damage. As a result, many researchers have been developing techniques to counter ransomware. Recently, the federated learning (FL) approach has also been applied for ransomware analysis, allowing corporations to achieve scalable, effective detection and attribution without having to share their private data. However, in reality there is much variation in the quantity and composition of ransomware data collected across multiple FL client sites/regions. …

Simulating Stellar Merger Using Hpx/Kokkos On A64fx On Supercomputer Fugaku, Patrick Diehl, Gregor Dais, Kevin Huck, Dominic Marcello, Sagiv Shiber, Hartmut Kaiser, Dirk Pfluger

Faculty Publications

The increasing availability of machines relying on non-GPU architectures, such as ARM A64FX in high-performance computing, provides a set of interesting challenges to application developers. In addition to requiring code portability across different parallelization schemes, programs targeting these architectures have to be highly adaptable in terms of compute kernel sizes to accommodate different execution characteristics for various heterogeneous workloads. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to code and performance portability that is based entirely on established standards in the industry. In addition to applying Kokkos as an abstraction over the execution of compute kernels on different heterogeneous execution environments, …

Traveler: Navigating Task Parallel Traces For Performance Analysis, Sayef Azad Sakin, Alex Bigelow, R. Tohid, Connor Scully-Allison, Carlos Scheidegger, Steven R. Brandt, Christopher Taylor, Kevin A. Huck, Hartmut Kaiser, Katherine E. Isaacs

Faculty Publications

Understanding the behavior of software in execution is a key step in identifying and fixing performance issues. This is especially important in high performance computing contexts where even minor performance tweaks can translate into large savings in terms of computational resource use. To aid performance analysis, developers may collect an execution trace - a chronological log of program activity during execution. As traces represent the full history, developers can discover a wide array of possibly previously unknown performance issues, making them an important artifact for exploratory performance analysis. However, interactive trace visualization is difficult due to issues of data size …

Improving Social Media Use For Disaster Resilience: Challenges And Strategies, Nina S.N. Lam, Michelle Meyer, Margaret Reams, Seungwon Yang, Kisung Lee, Lei Zou, Volodymyr Mihunov, Kejin Wang, Ryan Kirby, Heng Cai

Faculty Publications

This paper develops a social media-disaster resilience analysis framework by categorizing types of social media use and their challenges to better understand and assess its role in disaster resilience research and management. The framework is derived primarily from several case studies of Twitter use in three hurricane events in the United States–Hurricanes Isaac, Sandy, and Harvey. The paper first outlines four major contributions of social media data for disaster resilience research and management, which include serving as an effective communication platform, providing ground truth information for emergency response and rescue operations, providing information on people’s sentiments, and allowing predictive modeling. …

Achieving Online And Scalable Information Integrity By Harnessing Social Spam Correlations, Hailu Xu, Pinchao Liu, Boyuan Guan, Qingyang Wang, Dilma Da Silva, Liting Hu

Faculty Publications

Malicious web links, social rumors, fraudulent advertisements, faked comments, and biased propaganda are overwhelmingly influencing online social networks. Enabling information integrity is a hot topic in both academia and industry. Traditional social spam detection techniques rely on centralized processing, focusing only on one specific set of data sources, thereby ignoring the social spam correlations between distributed data sources. In this paper, we propose an online and scalable misinformation detection system, named Spiral, to uncover social spam by leveraging the correlations between different social data sources in geo-distributed sites. The key insight in our approach is to amplify the effectiveness of …

Analytical Advances In Homeowner Flood Risk Quantification Considering Insurance, Building Replacement Value, And Freeboard, Md Adilur Rahim, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz, Carol J. Friedland, Robert V. Rohli, Nazla Bushra

Faculty Publications

An accurate economic loss assessment for natural hazards is vital for planning, mitigation, and actuarial purposes. The widespread and costly nature of flood hazards, with the economically disadvantaged disproportionately victimized population, makes flood risk assessment particularly important. Here, flood risk is assessed as incurred by the homeowner vs. the flood insurer for insured U.S. properties through the derivation of average annual loss (AAL). AAL is estimated and partitioned using Monte Carlo simulation at the individual home scale, considering insurance coverage and deductible, and the first-floor height (i.e., height of the first floor above the ground), to determine the AAL proportion …

Freeboard Life-Cycle Benefit-Cost Analysis Of A Rental Single-Family Residence For Landlord, Tenant, And Insurer, Ehab Gnan, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz, Md Adilur Rahim, Carol J. Friedland, Robert V. Rohli, Arash Taghinezhad, Ayat Al Assi

Faculty Publications

Flood risk to single-family rental housing remains poorly understood, leaving a large and increasing population underinformed to protect themselves, including regarding insurance. This research introduces a life-cycle benefit-cost analysis for the landlord, tenant, and insurer [i.e., (U.S.) National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)] to optimize freeboard [i.e., additional first-floor height above the base flood elevation (BFE)] selection for a rental single-family home. Flood insurance premium; apportioned flood risk among the landlord, tenant, and NFIP by insurance coverage and deductible; rental loss; moving and displacement costs; freeboard construction cost; and rent increase upon freeboard implementation are considered in estimating net benefit (NB) …

Flood Damage And Shutdown Times For Industrial Process Facilities: A Vulnerability Assessment Process Framework, Carol J. Friedland, Fatemeh Orooji, Ayat Al Assi, Matthew L. Flynn, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz

Faculty Publications

Much of the U.S. petrochemical infrastructure is heavily concentrated along the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico within the impact zone of major tropical cyclone events. Flood impacts of recent tropical disturbances have been exacerbated by an overall lack of recognition of the vulnerabilities to process systems from water intrusion, as well as insufficient disaster mitigation planning. Vulnerability assessment methods currently call for the aggregation of qualitative data to survey the susceptibility of industrial systems to floodwater damage. A means to quantify these consequences is less often employed, resulting in a poor translation of the threat of flood hazards …

International Society Of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: Energy Drinks And Energy Shots, Andrew R. Jagim, Patrick S. Harty, Grant M. Tinsley, Chad M. Kerksick, Adam M. Gonzalez, Richard B. Kreider, Shawn M. Arent Ph.D., Cscs*D, Fissn, Facsm, Fnak, Ralf Jager, Abbie E. Smith-Ryan, Jeffrey R. Stout, Bill I. Campbell, Trisha Vandusseldorp, Jose Antonio

Faculty Publications

Position Statement: The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) bases the following position stand on a critical analysis of the literature regarding the effects of energy drink (ED) or energy shot (ES) consumption on acute exercise performance, metabolism, and cognition, along with synergistic exercise-related performance outcomes and training adaptations. The following 13 points constitute the consensus of the Society and have been approved by the Research Committee of the Society: Energy drinks (ED) commonly contain caffeine, taurine, ginseng, guarana, carnitine, choline, B vitamins (vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, and B12), vitamin C, vitamin A (beta carotene), vitamin D, …

The Impact Of Weibo Features On User’S Information Comprehension: The Mediating Role Of Cognitive Load, Ying Xu, Jia-Qiong Xie, Fu-Xing Wang, Rebecca L. Monk, James Gaskin, Jin-Liang Wang

Faculty Publications

Social media, such as Microblogs, have become an important source for people to obtain information. However, we know little about how this would influence our comprehension over online information. Based on the cognitive load theory, this research explores whether and how two important features of Weibo, which are the feedback function and information fragmentation, would increase cognitive load and may in turn hinder users’ information comprehension in Weibo. A 2 (feedback or non-feedback) × 2 (strong-interference or weak-interference information) between-participants experimental design was conducted. Our results revealed that the Weibo feedback function and interference information exerted a negative impact over …

Multiple-Choice Reading Behaviors Of Esl Students: An Eye-Tracking Study, Juan Escalante, Grant Eckstein, Troy L. Cox, Steven Luke

Faculty Publications

Only recently has eye-tracking been used to investigate test-taker reading behavior, and results have been primarily used to confirm a range of cognitive tasks elicited by test items. This study explores test taker reading behavior for its own sake by describing how ESL readers of different proficiency levels behaviorally view multiple-choice passages and test items at different difficulty levels. Data were gathered from 51 students at three proficiency levels attending a university-sponsored intensive English program (IEP). Participants read eight validated reading comprehension items at varying difficulty levels while their eye movements were recorded on the passage, multiple-choice stem, correct answer, …