Digital Commons Network^™

Perspectives Of Trauma Among Licensed Trauma Therapists: A Concept Mapping Study, Sean W. Bullock

Master's Theses

To address gaps between research and psychotherapeutic intervention for trauma and trauma-related issues, the current study elicited and analyzed the perspectives of licensed trauma therapists via a concept mapping process. A literature review was conducted to explore the history and limitations of trauma’s current medical use as outlined by Criterion A of posttraumatic stress disorder in the DSM-5-TR. To answer the research question regarding how practitioners understand trauma, the researcher recruited licensed trauma therapists (n = 17) to participate in concept mapping. Participants generated 126 unique statements, which they then sorted based on similarity and rated individually on importance. Hierarchical …

Mental Health, Personality, Identity, And Adjusting To Life After Sports, Jovana Babic

Master's Theses

This study looked at how athletes adapt to life after competitive sports in relation to psychological issues. In publicly accessible podcast interviews, 95 former athletes, most competing at the collegiate or professional level, were examined using their own words. Claude and Gemini, two large multimodal models, independently coded each interview for four mental health outcomes: depression, anxiety, dependency, and identity confusion, as well as for a set of predictor variables, such as neuroticism, emotion regulation, athletic identity, identity foreclosure, intrinsic motivation, grit, social support, and retirement planning. A binary present or absence coding system was employed, and Gwet's AC1 was …

Enso-Induced Oceanographic Anomalies And Their Potential Impacts On Coral Species In The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, Jason T. Gonsalves

Master's Theses

The 2015/16 El Niño event is one of the strongest El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on record. Coral reefs in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) were exposed to the effects of the 2015/16 El Niño event and experienced moderate to severe coral bleaching and mortality. This study examines the variability in three key oceanographic variables before, during, and after the 2015/16 El Niño event within PIPA: sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS), and estimated chlorophyll-a (chl-a) as a proxy for regional productivity. I used remote sensing data for SST, SSS, and estimated chl-a coupled with in-situ …

Powers' Conjecture On The Third Largest Eigenvalue Of A Graph, Kevin Schmidt

Master's Theses

In 1989, David Powers conjectured that for any connected graph G on n vertices, the k-th largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix satisfies λk(G) ≤ ⌊n/k⌋ for every 1 ≤ k ≤ n/2. The conjecture has since been resolved case by case, in the sharper form λk(G) ≤ n/k − 1: the case k = 1 is classical, k = 2 was settled independently by Hong and by Powers in 1988, and k ≥ 4 was shown to fail by Nikiforov and Linz. This thesis surveys the resolution of the remaining case, k = 3, achieved in March 2026 by …

Knowledge-Enhanced Feature Store For Operational Ml And Llm Workflows, Saurabh Suman

Master's Theses

Modern machine learning (ML) organizations rely on feature stores to manage training and production data, yet as catalogs grow to thousands of features, semantic management becomes the bottleneck: discovery, governance, and metric selection remain largely manual. This thesis proposes and evaluates a knowledge-enhanced feature store that augments a dual-plane store with a hybrid knowledge layer—relational provenance, a lineage graph, semantic vector retrieval, and an online cache—and an LLM-driven multi-agent layer for profiling, matching, grounded metric recommendation, and pipeline generation. A working prototype was evaluated across three task families—semantic profiling, feature-matching retrieval, and discovery—using classification, ranking, and operational metrics computed by …

The Caged Canary: Compounded Discrimination And The Female Jazz Vocalist, Isabella Eaton

Master's Theses

While women have historically represented the overwhelming majority of jazz vocalists, they have also experienced a unique legitimacy gap in a culture that traditionally grants the status of authenticity to the masculine instrumentalist. This study explores the experiences of mid-twentieth century female jazz vocalists, arguing that they faced compounded discrimination within American jazz culture as a result of gender marginalization and the devaluation of their vocal instrument. The intricacies of this phenomenon necessitate a multipronged qualitative approach by employing historiographical analysis, synthesis of existing scholarship, and qualitative case study research methods. Beginning with the dichotomy between the jazz “cat” and …

Sentinel: Evaluating Occlusion-Centered Next-Best-View Selection Using Rgb-Derived Pseudo-Geometry, Paul Nassar

Master's Theses

Three-dimensional cameras provide direct geometric measurements, but their cost, weight, power requirements, and calibration constraints can limit their use in various lightweight or large-scale sensing systems. A potential alternative is to use conventional two-dimensional RGB cameras together with geometric reconstruction models that infer a partial three-dimensional representation from images. This thesis evaluates that possibility for next-best-view (NBV) selection through Sentinel, an occlusion-centered system for static, object-centric scenes with known camera poses and intrinsics. Sentinel converts source RGB observations into pseudo-geometry using monocular depth or point-map predictions, combines those predictions with camera-ray evidence, identifies occluded unknown regions, and selects a candidate …

A Maintainable Extensible And Performant Compiler Toolchain For The Trustguard Architecture, Ethan N. Emery

Master's Theses

TrustGuard is a hardware architecture implementing a CAVO (Containment Architecture with Verified Output) model, which provides security guarantees by bootstrapping trust of a system to a hardware component known as the Sentry. Rather than verifying an entire system, TrustGuard re-executes trusted computation on the Sentry and validates the host system's execution before allowing values to pass to the outside world, thereby containing the effects of erroneous computation. Implementing this architecture in practice without hardware modifications to a host CPU requires a compiler toolchain capable of automatically generating instrumented binaries for both the untrusted host and the trusted Sentry from C …

Enabling Multi-Task Neural Network Inference On Heterogeneous Edge Devices, Redwanul Islam Arif

Master's Theses

Deep neural networks are increasingly required to run on the devices that generate the data. If such a device must perform more than one task, the standard practice is deploying one model per task, which makes memory grow linearly with task count, which is unacceptable when the entire budget is kilobytes. This thesis asks one question in three settings: how much capability can a network acquire without incurring deployment cost?

The first study takes an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-18, sweeps the branch point across every residual stage and the classification-head depth across one, ten, and twenty layers, and deploys the resulting multi-head …

Spatial And Hydrologic Effects Of Climate Change And Urbanization On Freshwater Fish Communities In North Georgia Watersheds, Mayuko Mizutani

Master's Theses

Urbanization and climate change are altering streamflow and land cover across the southeastern United States, threatening freshwater biodiversity in rivers already burdened by impoundments and habitat loss. I investigated how changes in streamflow and land cover might affect fish community biodiversity in the Etowah River watershed of North Georgia. By combining a dataset of fish collections from 1999 through 2019 with contemporaneous land use and daily streamflow, I was able to model fish community responses to urbanization and climate-driven hydrologic changes and then forecast fish community structure under multiple CMIP6 global climate models and greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (SSP2-4.5 and …

Federated Learning For Early Medical Diagnosis: Enhanced Diabetic Retinopathy Detection In Smart Healthcare, Mohammad Nasajpour Esfahani

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates the role of federated learning as a privacy-preserving solution for modern healthcare challenges. In traditional machine learning, sensitive medical data must be centralized for model training, raising concerns about privacy, security, and regulatory compliance. Federated learning offers an alternative by allowing hospitals, clinics, and personal health devices to collaboratively train shared models without exchanging raw patient data. The study first explores how federated learning is being used across various healthcare domains, including cancer detection, medical imaging, and disease prediction— highlighting its potential to support secure collaboration across institutions. It addresses key benefits such as data privacy, scalability, …

Development And Testing Of A Computer Vision Pose Estimation System For Planar Mobile Robots, Andrew Jones

Master's Theses

This thesis details the development and testing of a computer vision-based real-time pose estimation system for differential drive robots. A single camera with a fisheye lens is used to locate ArUco markers placed at fixed locations and attached to robots. Using the OpenCV library, the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem is solved to facilitate the transformation of 2-D robot positions in an image to world-frame coordinates. An analytical solution is presented to estimate robot poses based on a single PnP solution, rather than solving the PnP problem for each pose estimate. Pose information is relayed to individual robots using a multi-microcontroller architecture …

State Medicaid Expansion And Mental Health In The Poorest States: Examining Differences In States That Expanded Medicaid Compared To Those Which Did Not, Steven Kyle Yates

Master's Theses

Medicaid expansion is a contentious issue in U. S. political debates, especially regarding its impact on public health outcomes. The Republican Party often shows hesitation to support government funding initiatives, citing concerns about creating dependency on entitlement programs like Medicaid. As a result, state legislatures have significant authority to shape their Medicaid programs, including setting eligibility requirements and defining the scope of benefits and services. In this study, I examine disparities in mental health indicators between economically disadvantaged states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not expand Medicaid. The dependent variables include medical costs, measured by how often individuals …

The Acute Effect Of A Single Dose Of Berberine On Blood Glucose Response Following A Standardized Meal And 2-Mile Walk Performance In Healthy Adults, Victor Emmanuel Obaro

Master's Theses

It is clear that exercise improves overall health status, and it is possible that berberine (BR) may work through some similar mechanisms to improve health status as well.  Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the acute effects of a single dose of BR on health status following a standardized meal and a 2 mile walk treadmill protocol with outcomes including blood glucose (BG), blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), rate of perceived exertion (RPE), and a two-mile walk time trial performance. Methods: This study used a cross-over design where 14 healthy, young adults were given berberine (BBR) …

Differences In Music Course Offerings In Secondary Schools Within Three School Districts In Colorado, Deirdre Flanagan Slaman

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore variants in current music course offerings and instructional time for music for public school students in grades six through 12 across three school districts in Colorado. Students’ opportunity to access specific music courses and the amount of instructional time they receive varies across public middle and high schools. By studying three school districts with similar demographics in Colorado, the researcher sought to answer the following questions:

Q1 How much variety in music course offering is usual across schools in a single district?

Q2 How much difference in instructional time is usual across …

Evaluation Of General Voronoi Diagram Decomposition For Harmonic Fields In Navigation Of Dynamic Environments, Franco Abullarade

Master's Theses

Harmonic potential fields provide provably minimum-free navigation, but any change to the workspace geometry invalidates the field and forces a costly global recomputation, typically restricting them to static environments. This thesis extends the harmonic map framework of Vlantis et al., which maps the free workspace onto a unit disk and uses an atlas of per-region transformations, to dynamic indoor settings. First, we replace their manually annotated room partition with an automatic decomposition based on the Generalized Voronoi Diagram, allowing the atlas to be built from an arbitrary occupancy grid in an automated way. Second, we introduce a localized repair procedure …

Multidimensional Determinants Of Gait, Balance, And Softball Performance In Female Youth: Biomechanics, Resource Access, And Psychosocial Factors, Allie G. Mcauliffe

Master's Theses

Movement quality is a fundamental indicator of healthy childhood development and supports physical, emotional, psychosocial, and cognitive well-being. Movement quality is influenced by multiple biomechanical, environmental, and psychosocial factors, yet the relationships among them remain poorly understood in underrepresented populations such as female youth, particularly in softball. Previous studies have largely examined biomechanics, resource access, and psychosocial experience independently, and few have investigated how these factors interact in female youth softball players. To address this gap, this study compared gait and balance characteristics between softball (N = 34) and non-softball (N = 7) female youth, examined associations between resource access, …

Id-More Vision: Real-Data Machine-Learning Assessment For A Digital-Twin-Inspired, Xr-Ready Rehabilitation Prototype, Rickey L. Clark

Master's Theses

Rehabilitation assessment often relies on periodic observation, while many XR prototypes show scripted rather than recorded-motion evidence. iD-MORE Vision is an offline pipeline trained on KIMORE and IRDS and linked through JSON packets to a two-mode Unity desktop prototype. Both datasets include controls and rehabilitation participants with neurologic, musculoskeletal, or mobility impairments. This improves relevance but does not clinically validate the system.

Under fixed subject-wise splits, the primary five-seed Random Forest predicted KIMORE clinician scores with MAE 6.087 ± 0.044 cTS and R² 0.568 ± 0.006; the subject-level R² interval crossed zero. The primary IRDS five-run CUDA GRU averaged 0.877 …

A Comparison Of Survival, Growth, And Stress Resilience In Three Different Lineages Of The Pacific Oyster (Crassostrea Gigas) Farmed On The California Central Coast, Victoria F. Hanshaw

Master's Theses

Aquaculture of Pacific oysters on the US West Coast is routinely impacted by seasonal unexplained mortality events. To better understand these large-scale mortality events in oyster aquaculture, shellfish growers and scientists in California have partnered together to conduct comparative, multi-estuary farm trials of discrete Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) lineages. In this thesis we investigate how the more recently imported Midori lineage performs compared to the historically used Miyagi lineage, as well as a Hybrid (Midori x Miyagi) lineage. As part of a 7-month long field study from April-November of 2024 in Morro Bay and Tomales Bay, California, we evaluated …

Electromagnetic Enhancement Of A Potassium-Seeded Rotating Detonation Engine, Anthony Joseph Presto Jr.

Master's Theses

Rotating detonation engines offer a route to pressure-gain combustion by sustaining one or more detonation waves in an annular chamber supplied by continuous propellant injection. This thesis evaluates whether potassium seeding can make the high-temperature product flow of a hydrogen–air rotating detonation engine conductive enough to serve as the working fluid for magnetohydrodynamic acceleration. To the author’s best knowledge, the complete configuration modeled here has not been reported previously in open literature. This configuration consists of a hydrogen–air RDE with KOH-based potassium seeding, local conductivity estimates, and imposed Lorentz-force acceleration. The thesis therefore develops an initial computational model for this …

Prompt-Driven Tabletop Robotic Manipulation With A Structured Llm Interface And Visual Verification, Tomas Franco

Master's Theses

Creating a tabletop robotic manipulation system that connects language goals to robot actions is a challenging problem. Large language models can interpret mission objectives and reason through actions, but when placed directly in control of hardware they can produce hallucinated commands that result in unsafe behavior without the proper safeguards.

This thesis presents a constrained LLM-guided manipulation system built around the Quanser Qarm, a four degree of freedom manipulator with a mounted Realsense RGB-D camera and a gripper with readable current. Every decision made by the LLM planner is routed through a gated command interface that restricts the model to …

The Effect Of Specialty Malt On Dry-Hopping, Alexander Kivela

Master's Theses

Dry-Hopping is a modern and ever-increasing method to add hoppy flavors to beer. This is typically seen in pale ales and India Pale Ales (IPA’s). Most research has investigated the effect of dry-hopping only using pale malt, whereas most breweries used specialty malts to create a malty backbone to their beer.

The objectives of this research were to analyze the impact of specialty malts and their concentration on the efficacy of hop flavor and extraction, determined via gas chromatography and sensory analysis. Gas chromatography analysis was modeled after the ASBC Method Beer-48. Sensory analysis was performed via the 15cm line …

Hardware-In-The-Loop Evaluation Of Sensor-Source Selection For Prosthetic Locomotion Intent Recognition, Victoria Asencio-Clemens

Master's Theses

Active lower-limb prostheses use intent-recognition systems to identify a user’s locomotion mode and select an appropriate control strategy, but sensor configurations that perform well offline may be unsuitable for resource-constrained embedded hardware. Existing sensor-selection methods generally prioritize classification accuracy without directly accounting for processing latency, memory usage, or other hardware-dependent requirements. To address this limitation, this thesis develops a hardware-in-the-loop source-selection framework for embedded classification of level walking, ramp ascent, ramp descent, stair ascent, and stair descent using multimodal biomechanical data from transtibial amputee participants. Subject-specific linear support vector machine classifiers were evaluated using trial-held-out validation, and candidate configurations from …

Predicting Student Belonging In Computing Education: A Multimodal Machine Learning Approach Using Eeg And Survey Data, Hannah Moshtaghi

Master's Theses

Measuring students’ sense of belonging, characterized by feelings of acceptance, inclusion, and encouragement from teachers, remains a significant challenge in computing education. Prior research has associated this multidimensional construct with positive academic outcomes and has identified instructors’ growth- and fixed-mindset messaging as a potential influence. However, belonging is a complex and deeply personal experience that is difficult to capture through direct observation alone. Current measurement methods rely on self-report surveys, which may not capture every aspect of an experience that can also involve emotional and cognitive responses.

This thesis investigates whether combining EEG data recorded during a belonging questionnaire with …

Baseline Nutrition Knowledge And Feasibility Of A Whatsapp-Delivered Nutrition Education Intervention Among California Wildland-Urban Interface Firefighters, Lauren E. Anderson

Master's Theses

Wildland firefighters perform physically demanding work under challenging environmental conditions that place substantial demands on nutritional health and occupational performance. Despite the importance of nutrition in supporting physical performance, recovery, and long-term health, limited research has examined nutrition knowledge and dietary behaviors among California wildland firefighters or evaluated the feasibility of remotely delivered nutrition education interventions within this occupational population. Therefore, the purpose of this pilot study was to assess baseline nutrition knowledge, nutrition self-efficacy, and dietary behaviors while evaluating the feasibility of a 12-week WhatsApp-delivered nutrition education intervention among California wildland firefighters.

Twenty-four firefighters completed the baseline assessment and …

Beyond Beliefs: Factors That Shape Agricultural Plastic End-Of-Life Management Among California Strawberry Growers, Kyle Y. Cahitas

Master's Theses

The practice of using plastics in agriculture is so prevalent it has earned its own name: plasticulture. One key plasticulture tool is polyethylene (PE) mulch film, a thin plastic sheet laid over the field for a single growing season and pulled out before the next. Because PE film is hard to recycle, most of it ends up in a landfill, yet how growers decide what happens to used plastic mulch has rarely been studied. To identify what shapes that decision, this study draws on a survey of California strawberry growers (n = 126). Twenty variables, spanning grower attitudes, farm characteristics, …

Expected Structural Damage, Residual Capacity, And Repairability Of Light-Frame Timber Houses, Mikayla Caruthers

Master's Theses

Earthquake damage in light-frame timber structures is commonly evaluated using peak inter-story drift. However, drift alone does not fully represent the remaining structural capacity of a building or its ability to be repaired following a seismic event. Although expected structural damage, residual capacity, and repairability have each been studied extensively, these concepts are often considered independently, leaving limited guidance that links them within a unified post-earthquake assessment methodology.

This thesis establishes an integrated framework that relates expected structural damage, residual capacity, and repairability for light-frame timber residential structures. Existing literature was synthesized to develop drift-based damage-state classifications, identify methods for …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Carbon Quantum Dots And Gold Nanoparticles For Norovirus Biosensing Applications In Water Systems, Breanne Evans

Master's Theses

Rapid, reliable detection of viral pathogens remains a significant challenge across water-treatment and environmental monitoring systems, including drinking-water, wastewater, water reuse, and environmental surveillance applications. Waterborne viral contamination can pose substantial public-health risks, making early detection essential for protecting water quality and responding quickly to treatment failures or contamination events. Direct potable reuse (DPR) is one particularly demanding example because it requires continuous verification of treatment performance and the broader need for rapid virus monitoring extends across many water-treatment and environmental surveillance applications. Norovirus is a priority target because of its widespread occurrence in wastewater, environmental persistence, and exceptionally low …

A Technoeconomic And Lifecycle Analysis Of Catalytic Non-Thermal Plasma Steam Methane Reforming For Renewable Hydrogen Production, Gustav M. King

Master's Theses

When produced with sufficiently low life-cycle emissions, hydrogen may support low-carbon, dispatchable electricity generation to realize statewide renewable energy regulatory objectives. This thesis develops a screening-level electrothermochemical process model of catalytic non-thermal plasma steam methane reforming (CNTP-SMR) and integrates it with techno-economic and life-cycle assessments. Biogas and natural gas fed CNTP-SMR scenarios are compared with conventional steam methane reforming to evaluate hydrogen production cost, global warming potential, and the effects of key operating parameters. Under the baseline assumptions, CNTP-SMR generated hydrogen at a higher levelized cost (baseline of $3.86/kg H₂ and a range of $3.68 to $4.11) when compared …

Developing A Rapid Urban Forest Assessment System For Sustainable City Greenification, Daniel Gonzalez

Master's Theses

This thesis presents the Rapid Urban Forest Assessment (RUFA) system, a web-based platform that integrates urban tree inventories and aerial tree detection to assess forest health across California’s census-designated places. RUFA combines inventoried tree records with coordinates detected from high-resolution multispectral imagery using convolutional neural networks, then computes a composite RUFA Score from four metrics: canopy cover percentage, trees per capita, tree diversity (TD-50), and tree evenness. The thesis addresses two engineering challenges in building the dashboard: querying and aggregating over seven million tree records in real time, and rendering spatial summaries at multiple zoom levels without recomputing cluster assignments …