Digital Commons Network^™

Bayesian Network: An Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Xai) Approach To Human Performance Modelling For Control Room Operations, Houda Briwa

Theses

Alarm systems in process industry control rooms routinely exceed the performance targets set by standards such as EEMUA 191, placing operators under conditions where reliable performance is most difficult to achieve. Predicting how operators respond under such conditions is central to risk management, yet current Human Reliability Assessment (HRA) methods depend on expert judgement that is rarely tested against operational evidence, assume independence among factors known to interact, and do not explicitly represent the cognitive processes through which performance emerges. In Resilience Engineering terms, these methods encode Work-as-Imagined with limited means to assess how far expectations hold when work is …

Predictive Modeling For Traffic Accident Severity Using Machine Learning, Ahmad Bin Eid

Theses

Road traffic accidents remain a persistent public safety challenge, responsible for over 1.3 million deaths annually according to the World Health Organization. While considerable effort has gone into understanding accident patterns, predicting the severity of an accident before or immediately after it occurs remains a difficult problem — particularly when the underlying data is messy, imbalanced, and largely categorical in nature. This study applies three supervised machine learning classification algorithms — Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting — to predict the severity of road traffic accidents using a dataset of 12,316 records collected by the Addis Ababa Sub-city Police …

Women Entrepreneurs In Kosovo: Family And Institutional Implications, Lona Arifi

Theses

Women’s entrepreneurship represents an important source of economic participation, job creation, and local development in Kosovo. Despite gradual progress, women entrepreneurs continue to face structural constraints linked to family responsibilities, unequal care burdens, and uneven institutional support. This study examines how family-related responsibilities and institutional support mechanisms interact to shape the entrepreneurial experiences of women entrepreneurs in Kosovo. The analysis is guided by the 5M framework of women’s entrepreneurship developed by Brush et al. (2009) and applies a mixed-methods research design combining survey data from 145 women-owned businesses, semi-structured interviews, and secondary evidence. The findings show that women entrepreneurs in …

Workload-Aware Performance Prediction And Data Movement For Data-Intensive Computing, Kevin Assogba

Theses

Data-intensive workloads in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence move massive volumes of data across deep memory and storage hierarchies, often spending more time moving data than computing on it. Their access patterns, data-sharing relationships, and computational graph properties are largely determined by descriptors known to the application before execution. However, general-purpose runtimes treat this structure as opaque, and the resulting gap between workload behavior and runtime decisions accounts for a substantial fraction of their execution time. Despite advances in performance modeling and data-movement systems, this structure remains underexploited. Schedulers, caches, and I/O paths provision resources conservatively, prediction models are rarely …

Beyond The Binary: Strengthening Nursing Students’ Proficiency Of Equitable Health Promotion, Martha K. Findley

Theses

Background: Sexual and gender diverse (SGD) populations continue to experience significant health inequities, yet prelicensure nursing curricula often lack structured, evidence‑based training to prepare students for equitable care.

Purpose: This study evaluated whether a targeted, transgender‑focused simulation could improve nursing students’ clinical knowledge and preparedness for providing equitable health promotion to SGD populations.

Methods: A pre‑/post‑intervention design was used with senior‑level nursing students who completed a transgender patient simulation emphasizing communication, assessment, and equitable health promotion. Students completed a validated survey measuring knowledge and preparedness in caring for SGD patients.

Results: Significant improvements across most survey items demonstrated that the …

Zineth, Colin Wilcox

Theses

This thesis asks whether a brand can generate real engagement without surrendering to an algorithm, and whether web design can recover the color, mystery, and sense of discovery it traded away as the internet corporatized. Daily internet use has risen every year on record, yet the spaces users inhabit have flattened into grey buttons and endless feeds. This question is answered through Zineth, a hybrid brand universe told across three coordinated forms: a Risograph-printed zine, a dense and layered website, and limited clothing drops. The zine operates as a key. Codes printed in its pages unlock gated areas of the …

A Large-Scale Annotated Flight Time-Series Dataset And Geospatial Post-Flight Analysis Tools For Ngafid, Roman Kozulia

Theses

This work presents three contributions to the National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID): a maintenance-linked flight dataset forpredictivemaintenanceresearch, anaviationchartprocessingservice, and an interactive geospatial heat map for post-flight event analysis. The first contribution is a maintenance-linked flight dataset for predic- tive maintenance and prognostics research in general aviation. The dataset contains approximately 100,000 non-simulated maintenance work orders and more than a million multivariate flight recordings extracted from NGAFID. Eachflightisassociatedwithmaintenancerecordsandlabeledaspre-maintenance, day-of-maintenance, or post-maintenance. Flights are exported as one-hertz sensor time series with flight-phase annotations, while a clustering pipeline groups technician-written maintenance records into event categories. To our knowledge, thisisthelargestpubliclyavailablegeneralaviationflightdataset linked to …

Lost In Translation: Quantifying Political Sociolect Divergence And Testing Llm Reliability As Political Interpreters, Daniel J. Corcoran

Theses

In the United States political sphere, growing polarization between Democrats and Republicans, particularly their more ideologically extreme wings, has given rise to distinct English-adjacent languages, shaped by social tendencies and referred to as “sociolects”. These sociolects offer a new avenue to analyze and further quantify growing polarization, and as Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in political and social analysis, understanding their depth of political reasoning, biases, and classification behavior has become imperative. In this study, we sourced comment data from the CNN, Fox, and MSNBC YouTube channels, spanning from 2020 through 2024, trained …

Understanding The Long-Term Patterns Of Change Of A Tidal Marsh In Mission Bay, San Diego, California, Carrie A. Shuster, Theresa Sinicrope Talley Ph.D., Drew Talley Ph.D., Zhi-Yong Yin Ph.D., Kellie Uyeda Ph.D.

Theses

Coastal marshes are among California’s most productive ecosystems and the most impacted, having been extensively modified by dredging, filling, and urban development. This thesis investigates over a century of change for a marsh in Northern Mission Bay, San Diego, California using ecological and spatial analyses.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the environmental history and current land use of the Northern Mission Bay marsh, tracing changes from pre-contact Indigenous stewardship through colonial and modern urban development. It also introduces a restoration plant palette derived from historical and contemporary species occurrences, ecological functions, and documented cultural uses. By integrating ethnobotanical knowledge …

The Measured Toll: Visualizing The Hidden Impact Of Chronic Painkiller Use, Yun Chia (Lisa) Song

Theses

The Measured Toll: Visualizing the Hidden Impact of Chronic Painkiller Use investigates how clinical data can be reinterpreted through the lens of information design to reveal long-term effects on heart and liver health that are often overlooked or invisible. This project translates complex medical information into a visual language that prioritizes clarity, emotional resonance, and user engagement. Through a series of printed posters and a motion-based introduction, the work employs abstract design strategies—including subtle distortion, radial line structures, and restrained typography—to evoke a sense of internal tension and gradual change. By structuring the visuals to unfold as a narrative, the …

Rebranding Architecture: Understanding Perception To Reinforce Professional Jurisdiction, Amber L. Whitaker

Theses

What is the current perception of the architecture profession, and what is the perception that architects want others to have? In the marketing and communications profession, one might ask, what is the profession’s current brand, and how does that differ from the desired brand? From inconsistent state laws regarding architectural titles, to the potential federal reclassification of the profession, to non-architects’ common misconception that architects merely draw floorplans, the architecture profession is misunderstood, causing an image problem. Although architecture is one of the world’s oldest professions, this image problem often translates into deep misunderstanding of what architects do, ultimately affecting …

Consumer Behavior In End-Of-Current-Use Electronics: A Multi-Method Approach To Improving Sustainability Outcomes, Payam Saeedi

Theses

The proliferation of network-connected consumer electronics has created a sustained challenge for sustainability and data security at the End-of-Current-Use (EoCU) stage. In the United States, devices accumulate in storage rather than entering reuse or recycling pathways, and a substantial share of devices change hands without proper data sanitization. This dissertation characterizes and quantifies consumer behavior at EoCU of consumer electronics in the U.S., with the goal of supporting the design of interventions that improve sustainability and data security outcomes. A survey of 4,000 U.S. respondents (3,747 after data cleaning) was developed and deployed across 10 categories of network-connected devices, capturing …

Archaeal Signal Peptide Prediction Through Integration Of Proteomics And Machine Learning, Anjali Kaur

Theses

Signal peptides are short N-terminal amino acid sequences that direct proteins through cellular secretion pathways and play an essential role in protein localization and function. Computational tools such as SignalP are widely used to predict signal peptides. However, prediction accuracy for archaeal proteins remains lower than for bacterial and eukaryotic proteins, likely because relatively few archaeal proteins were available for model training. The goal of this study was to determine whether expanding the archaeal training data used by SignalP 6.0 could improve archaeal signal peptide prediction. Archaeal proteomics datasets from five archaeal species were analyzed to identify proteins with experimentally …

Evaluation Of Mechanical Properties And Seal Strength Of Medical Packaging Materials Before And After Supercritical Co₂ Sterilization, Camila Madriz Pizarro

Theses

The sterilization of medical devices is critical in the prevention of infections in healthcare settings. Ethylene oxide (EtO), gamma irradiation, and steam sterilization have been the standard sterilization processes in healthcare settings, where the packaging system remains the most important barrier between the sterilized instrument/device. Safety concerns and regulatory pushback on conventional sterilization methods have pushed for further research on new sterilization techniques. Among the emerging sterilization technologies, one candidate that has garnered considerable attention is Supercritical CO2 sterilization. However, there is a lack of literature to support the compatibility between scCO2 and common medical packaging materials. The present study …

Retroverse: Enhancing Fashion Shopping Experience Through Augmented Reality, Fanghao Wang

Theses

RetroVerse is a conceptual augmented reality (AR) application that reimagines the vintage fashion shopping experience by addressing the information gaps that often make secondhand purchasing uncertain and inefficient. As the resale market continues to grow, consumers frequently struggle to identify garments, verify authenticity, evaluate condition, compare prices, and determine fit, requiring them to rely on multiple platforms and personal knowledge before making a purchase. To address these challenges, RetroVerse integrates augmented reality, image recognition, and contextual product information into a unified shopping experience. Through video and live garment scanning, users can access brand history, manufacturing information, condition assessments, marketplace price …

Impact Of Chiral Chain Conformations On The Self-Assembly Of Helical Polymers, Michael J. Grant

Theses

Polymers are a soft material with diverse applications across a spectrum of technologies including, but not limited to, packaging, drug-delivery, optics, lithography and templating. This ubiquity stems from over a century of in-depth theoretical and experimental investigations relating polymer size, stiffness and architecture to their emergent material properties. Interestingly, unlike small organic molecules where solution behavior is predominantly a function of hydrophobicity, in polymers, adjusting the aforementioned features can have a dramatic impact on their interactions with neighboring molecules. In turn, this allows for a tunable parameter space enabling the ability to achieve specific engineering goals. Yet, while the impact …

Radiometric Dating And Isotope Analysis To Determine The Source And Timing Of Rare Earth Element-Bearing Fluid Mineralization At Hicks Dome, Hardin County, Illinois, Kristina M. Kohl

Theses

The Hicks Dome structure of Hardin County, Illinois, located within the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District (IKFD), is one of the most perplexing geological features in the mid-continental U.S. Composed of uplifted Devonian strata intruded by a Ca-rich magma and ultramafic dikes, the dome is recognized as part of the Wauboukigou Igneous Province (WIP) and has been shown to host an abundance of rare earth element (REE) mineralization, particularly Dy, Y, and Sc. Despite extensive prior studies on REE concentrations and the link between fluorite mineralization in the IKFD and igneous activity at Hicks Dome, the absolute timing and relationship among REE …

Ai-Assisted, Multi-Layer Enhancement Of The Data Delivery Index (Ddi) For Fitness-For-Purpose Data Quality Assessment, Batool Abuhlaiqa

Theses

High-quality data is fundamental to the production of reliable official statistics and evidence-based decision-making. While deterministic data quality assessment frameworks provide transparent, consistent, and reproducible evaluations, they are limited in accommodating the intended statistical use of data and identifying complex quality issues beyond predefined validation rules. As administrative datasets continue to increase in volume, diversity, and complexity, there is a growing need for governance-oriented approaches that enhance existing quality assessment practices without compromising transparency, accountability, or consistency. This research proposes and evaluates an AI-assisted multi-layer enhancement of the DDI, a governance-oriented data quality assessment framework developed by SCAD. The proposed …

Modeling Intercellular And Intracellular Organization And Dynamics Of The Bacteria Escherichia Coli : From Population Dynamics In The Gut Microbiome, To Condensate Formation In Starved Cells, Alberto Alonso

Theses

Escherichia coli is a predominantly non-pathogenic species of bacteria present in the gut of most healthy adults. It plays a critical role in the health of the gut microbiome and is also widely used as a model organism in microbiology and synthetic biology studies. This thesis discusses results from two ongoing projects on E. Coli organization and emergent biophysical properties at two very distinct length scales. The first project focuses on using genetically modified engineered E. coli bacteria for early detection and intervention in colorectal cancer (CRC), a significant public health issue in the US. The success of these engineered …

Ikaros: See Through Time, Aisha F. A. Alnouri

Theses

Conventional heritage interpretation often relies on static signage, creating an "information void" where physical ruins sit uncontextualized. This thesis addresses this issue by proposing an interactive spatial information system designed to dynamically display, and contextualize architectural heritage in real time. Designed as a global framework, Failaka Island in Kuwait serves as the primary case study, driven by a personal cultural connection and the need to bridge the island's post-war generational disconnect. Positioned at the intersection of information design, interactive media, and spatial visualization, the system, Ikaros, utilizes Hellenistic Temple B, a 3rd-century BCE sanctuary, as its core testbed. The touchscreen …

A Study Of Phylogenetic Relationships Of Dichanthelium Based On Plastomes, Humera Fatima

Theses

Dichanthelium (Hitchcock & Chase) Gould is a genus in the grass family (Poaceae) with a wide range of morphological diversity, exhibiting significant ecological differences. Despite this, its evolutionary relationships are not fully understood. The ambiguity surrounding the boundaries of lineages and the relationships among species has hindered the systematics of the genus. This study aimed to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships within Dichanthelium, verify the monophyly of species, and evaluate the strength of the inferred relationships across different analytical frameworks. Molecular sequence data of entire plastomes were examined using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference methods to develop phylogenetic hypotheses. Phylogenies …

Impacts Of Prescribed Burning And Midstory Thinning On The Abundance Of Eastern Whip-Poor-Will And Chuck-Will’S-Widow In Southern Illinois, Lauren Benedict

Theses

The Chuck-will’s-widow (Antrostomus carolinensis) and Eastern Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus) are nightjar species that inhabit southern Illinois during the breeding season. Both species are thought to benefit from open woodlands which are often a result of natural disturbance or active forest management. However, due to a lack of significant disturbances and active management, this forest structure has become rare. Like many disturbance-dependent species, the Chuck-will’s-widow and Eastern Whip-poor-will have experienced range-wide declines over the past 50 years. Despite this, few studies have examined the impacts of forest management and the resulting forest structure on these species. We evaluated the impacts of …

Cross-Layer Security And Responsive Evaluation Architectures For Quantum Resistance In Connected Vehicles, Geoff Twardokus

Theses

Connected vehicle (CV) technologies are emerging as a crucial technology for improving safety on future roadways. Wireless vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication allows CVs to exchange information that provides enhanced awareness and supports better driving decisions, especially in high-risk or non-line-of-sight scenarios. However, V2X also exposes new surfaces to physical layer attacks and increasingly sophisticated, potentially quantum-capable threat actors. As human or autonomous CV drivers will make split-second safety-critical decisions based on the contents of V2X messages, ensuring their authenticity, as well as their reliable and timely delivery, is crucial. Otherwise, malicious attackers may interfere with safety services or spoof messages to …

Carbon Credits, Capture And Storage Markets In The Uae, Fatema Adnan Majed

Theses

The growing urgency to address climate change has placed carbon markets and carbon capture technologies at the core of global climate strategies. This thesis looks into whether the United Arab Emirates can develop its emerging carbon credit framework into a platform that supports viable private investment and national sustainability goals. While systems that are established, such as the EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS) and voluntary schemes, such as Verra's Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), provide mature models, the UAE shows a unique case: a market still in its early stages yet backed by ambitious climate commitments and world-class hydrocarbon infrastructure. …

Radical Regionalism: Integrating Historical Vernacular Wisdom With Modern Building Science For Resilient Envelope Design, Barbara Patricia Montano

Theses

This thesis investigates how vernacular environmental knowledge can be integrated with contemporary building science to inform climate-responsive residential building-envelope design. In response to the limitations of standardized construction approaches across diverse climatic regions, the research proposes Radical Regionalism, a framework that combines vernacular environmental principles, passive design strategies, sustainable material selection, building-envelope science, and resilience considerations within a performance-based design methodology. A comparative climate-based modeling methodology is applied to a representative single-family residential prototype across four contrasting United States climatic contexts: Miami, Florida (hot-humid); Phoenix, Arizona (hot-dry); Boston, Massachusetts (cold-humid); and Denver, Colorado (cold-dry). Representative conventional code-minimum wall assemblies are …

Analysis Of Gwtc-3 With Multiple Quasicircular Next-Generationwaveform Models, Noah M. Manning

Theses

The interpretation of gravitational wave sources depends on the specific choice of model used to interpret signals. For example, previous analyses of GWTC-3 event candidates using the SEOBNRv4PHM, IMRPhenomXPHM, and NRSur7dq4 models have arrived at sometimes notably di!erent conclusions about event properties. Unfortunately, subtle analysis settings and code di!erences can also produce notable di!erences in event properties. Previous work on GWTC-3 has not yet used a consistent analysis framework to reassess all events with state-of- the-art models. In this work, we revisit GWTC-3, reassessing every event using three waveform models: two state-of-the-art models (SEOBNRv5PHM and IMRPhenomTPHM) and one older waveform …

Capital Cities: The Intersection Of Power And Protest Urban Planning And Civic Design In Brasília And Washington, D.C., Noah Benjamin Gill

Theses

The physical environments of capital cities play a critical role in shaping how citizens interact with governmental power, particularly during moments of political unrest, protest, and democratic conflict. As both symbolic representations of national identity and functional centers of government, these urban landscapes influence how citizens approach, occupy, and confront civic institutions through their planning, architectural form, circulation networks, and spatial organization. Government buildings, public plazas, monumental landscapes, and civic axes do more than provide settings for political activity; they actively shape patterns of movement, visibility, accessibility, and control. The design of these spaces influences not only how democratic institutions …

Poppies In Bloom: Gathering Galaxies From Jwst Parallel Fields, Anika Kumar

Theses

A major goal of extragalactic astrophysics is connecting the Big Bang to the present by under- standing the evolution of star formation (SF) across cosmic time. The correlation between SF and the stellar mass buildup in galaxies, or the star forming main sequence relation (SFMS), highlights the various mechanisms that drive galaxy evolution. Deviations like quiescent galaxies, which have ceased forming stars, and starburst galaxies, which undergo an exceptionally high rate of SF compared to their normal star formation histories (SFH), offer key clues to the catalysts of galaxy evolution (e.g., mergers, gas accretion, supernovae feedback). Our understanding of early …

Characterizing Heavy Water Displacement In Molecular Sieve Drying Beds For Practical Trace Tritium Capture Methods, Brandon M. Massett

Theses

Tritium plays a crucial role in nuclear fusion power plant designs, and adsorption beds are essential tools for managing tritiated water vapor. A series of tests was performed to investigate whether a saturated adsorption bed preferentially adsorbs heavy water vapor. The design of passive tritium control systems could potentially rely on adsorption beds preferentially trapping heavier isotopologues of water. This work investigates the displacement phenomenon and the effects of carrier gas superficial velocity on bed performance. Significant displacement was observed when a humid stream containing heavy water was diverted through a bed pre-saturated with light water, as indicated by changes …

Predicting Rental Prices For Dubai Properties, Abdulrahman Mohammad Arab

Theses

This study explores the application of machine learning models to predict rental prices in the dynamic real estate market of Dubai. With increasing demand for data-driven valuation tools, accurate rental price estimation has become essential for tenants, landlords, investors, and property consultants. The research is grounded in the theory of supervised machine learning, focusing on the use of structured property features—such as location, size, furnishing status, and number of rooms—to forecast monthly rent values. The study employed the “Dubai Real Estate Goldmine, UAE Rental Market Data” from Kaggle as its primary dataset. This data, which reflects thousands of residential listings …