Digital Commons Network^™

Edge-Native Multi-Agent System For Latency-Critical Anomaly Detection And Qos Optimization In 6g Smart Manufacturing, Ndidi Nzeako Anyakora

All Dissertations

The increasing reliance on wireless connectivity in smart manufacturing places stringent demands on network latency, reliability, and adaptability that exceed the capabilities of static or threshold-based quality-of-service (QoS) control mechanisms. While 5G standalone networks support industrial deployments, emerging 6G environments are expected to introduce greater variability, tighter latency constraints, and increased performance degradation, necessitating autonomous, learning-driven control strategies.

This dissertation proposed an intelligent multi-agent framework for real-time anomaly detection and QoS optimization in industrial wireless networks by integrating edge-based monitoring, unsupervised anomaly detection, and reinforcement learning-driven control. Network telemetry collected from a Firecell 5G standalone testbed served as an empirical …

Effective Traffic Routing Under Disastrous Events Through Machine Learning, Eric Itemuagbor

All Theses

Disastrous events such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods routinely disrupt transportation networks, preventing emergency response, evacuation, and the delivery of critical supplies. Conventional optimization-based routing methods offer strong theoretical guarantees but cannot scale and are often too slow to support time-sensitive decision-making during a disaster, while prior machine learning approaches to disaster routing have largely prioritized prediction accuracy over inference speed and data efficiency. This thesis investigated whether lightweight machine learning models can deliver both competitive routing accuracy and superior inference speed when trained on limited data, addressing a practical gap between existing research and real-world deployment needs.

The road …

Distributed Coordination And Optimization Of Utility-Scale Battery Energy Storage Systems Via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Parthiv Debnath

All Theses

The increasing integration of renewable energies into modern power systems has created significant operational challenges, including transmission congestion, renewable energy curtailment, and increased real-time supply-demand variability, which makes effective coordination and optimization of multiple distributed Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) across power systems a critical problem, a useful solution, yet an unresolved challenge. Existing centralized optimization methods require perfect future information and are incompatible with the confidentiality constraints of deregulated electricity markets, while rule-based approaches fail to capture the multi-objective complexity of real-world power grid operations. This thesis proposed a Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) framework with Centralized Training and …

Making Sense Of The Iep: Teacher Perspectives In Implementation In Suburban Schools, Siranda J. Patchel

All NMU Master's Theses

The Individualized Education Program (IEP) is a legal requirement and instructional framework to support students with disabilities. However, inconsistency among IEP classroom implementation is a challenge. The purpose of this study was to explore the implementation of IEPs for students with disabilities as reported by general and special educators in suburban settings, in addition to examining educators’ perceptions of their preparedness and comprehension of IEP-related responsibilities.

The qualitative research design incorporated a survey and follow-up interview response analysis of educators who worked in suburban schools. The responses were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach that consisted of open coding and …

Land And Language At St. Joseph’S Indian Industrial School And Beyond, Ciera R. Tucker

All NMU Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the impacts of the Indian boarding school era on Menominee people through using St. Joseph’s Indian Industrial School in Keshena, Wisconsin, as a focal point of study. Through analyzing the social and political contexts of the school, oral texts from St. Joseph’s survivors, and contemporary popular culture texts, this thesis examines the intergenerational impacts of the boarding school era on Menominee people and Indigenous people in general. I employ Indigenous methodologies from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Anishinaabe), Kathleen Absolon (Anishinaabe), and Shawn Wilson (Cree) to ground my approach to research and engagement with survivor testimonies. Further, I draw …

The Stories We Tell About Wolves, Olivia Lubig

All NMU Master's Theses

This study investigated the connections between wolf stories, wolf history, and educational theories: critical literacy, schema theory, reader response theory/transactional theory, and the use of intertextual approaches in the classroom. In this study, I used a mix of transactional theory as the theoretical framework, self-study methodology, and living educational theory research methods to study myself as an educator, methods of teaching in a classroom, and children’s literature. My first finding, detailed in Chapter One, was discovering the connection between wolf stories and wolf history. I argue that the relationship between wolves and humans is represented in literature, and the representation …

Investigation Of A Novel Behavioral Assessment Of Challenging Behavior In The Context Of Medical Necessity And Disability Theory, Madison S. Walker

All NMU Master's Theses

Individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities often engage in challenging behaviors that interfere with daily functioning and community participation. Many standardized assessments focus on indirect, descriptive measurements that emphasize frequency, while providing limited information about medical severity, ongoing management strategies, and functional outcomes. This misalignment may limit the clinical utility of assessments, as scores may not consistently align with medical necessity criteria or arguments supporting the maintenance of current treatments. The first study extends on Reyes-Martín et al. (2022), which reviewed 24 assessments of challenging behaviors, by further evaluating assessment characteristics relevant to clinical decision-making and treatment justification. Findings highlight variability across …

Facilitating Occupational Participation In Older Adults With Chronic Pain, Emily K. Ruesch

Occupational Therapy Capstone Presentations

This capstone project developed doctoral-level clinical skills in the management of chronic pain. This capstone project also implemented a six‑week chronic pain management program for independent community‑dwelling older adults at Dow Rummel Village. Eleven adults aged 50–95 participated in weekly 45‑minute group sessions addressing adaptive equipment use, graded exercise, energy conservation, nervous system regulation, stress management, and sleep hygiene. Seven participants completed pre‑ and post‑intervention measures using the Brief Pain Inventory–Short Form and the Pain Self‑Efficacy Questionnaire. A paired samples t‑test assessed changes in pain severity, pain interference, and self‑efficacy. Results demonstrated a decrease in pain severity (t(6) = −3.96, …

Ai In Higher Education Admissions: A Strategic Framework For Future-Ready Cohort Shaping, Ahmad Aamir Siddiqui

Theses

Higher education admissions in the UAE has long been treated as an administrative process rather than a strategic one. Students are selected on the basis of past academic performance, and qualifications are conferred with limited reference to future national needs. Meanwhile, the national ambitions set out in Centennial 2071 and AI Strategy 2031 require something entirely different: a generation of graduates capable of driving a knowledge economy that barely existed when those students first sat their school exams. This thesis argues that AI-driven admissions, currently deployed mainly for speed and efficiency, can and should be redesigned to do something much …

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 …

Biochar-Derived Ethylene Scavengers For The Preservation Of Bananas, Morgan Samson

Theses

Ethylene regulates the rapid ripening of numerous climacteric fruits (e.g., banana, tomato, mango, and avocado). Minimization of ethylene formation and action in fruits during harvest or at any stage along the supply chain has become an important approach to prolong storage periods and minimize postharvest losses. Active packaging with ethylene scavengers has been proven to extend the shelf life of climacteric fruits; however, a cost-effective and sustainable solution is needed. Biochar-derived ethylene scavengers offer a promising approach to minimize postharvest losses, along with the valorization of abundant organic residues. This study produced and characterized biochars from two different feedstocks (i.e., …

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 …

A Hyperpipeline For Joint Inference Of The Equation Of State And Population Of Binary Neutron Stars, Marc Ebiri

Theses

The extreme environment within neutron stars presents the opportunity to probe the nuclear equation of state at high densities and study the nature of stellar remnants near 1 solar mass. Parameter inference for the equation of state has received abundant attention in previous studies, but only a fraction of those have employed nontrivial population models in their priors. In this work, we introduce an upgrade to the generalized version of the popular RIFT algorithm known as HyperPipe, enabling the inclusion of flexible, user-provided priors within preexisting likelihood marginalization scripts that will facilitate joint inference of the equation of state and …

Development And Characterization Of Pellet-Printable Pla/Waste Tire Rubber Composites For 4d Additive Manufacturing, Deepak Haresh Devjani

Theses

Waste tire rubber (WTR) presents a persistent environmental challenge but also offers potential as a functional filler for polymer-based additive manufacturing. This study developed and characterized pellet-printable polylactic acid (PLA)/WTR composites for conventional and 4D printing. WTR powder was treated using a nominal 6 wt% sodium hydroxide solution and incorporated into PLA at 0, 1, 3, 5, and 7 wt%. The formulations were mechanically premixed, melt-compounded, pelletized, and processed by fused granulate fabrication under constant printing conditions. Optical microscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, tensile, compression, and impact testing were conducted. Shape-memory performance was evaluated by compressing grid-infilled specimens to …

Deep Analog: Open-Set Film Emulation With Reference-Conditioned 3d Luts, Yitong Mu

Theses

Film emulation reproduces the look of an analog film stock on a new digital photograph. We target its open-set form—matching the look of any reference film frame from a single example—with a 3D lookup table (LUT) predicted from that reference. Real-time image enhancement has converged on one recipe for the color step: predict per-image weights over a fixed bank of 3D LUTs and blend them. We show this construction is a gated mixture of experts—specialist tables chosen per image by a learned gate—and it inherits the corresponding failure: trained end-to-end against reconstruction, the gate collapses onto a single expert, so …

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 …

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 …

Design And Verification Of A Reconfigurable Cryptographic Hardware Accelerator, Nicholas Merante

Theses

Cryptographic operations are used throughout computing systems to protect data confidentiality and integrity. Although software implementations provide flexibility, dedicated hardware can offer more predictable execution time and reduce the processing burden placed on a general-purpose processor. This thesis presents the design and verification of a Reconfigurable Cryptographic Hardware Accelerator (RCHA) that integrates AES-128, ChaCha20, SHA-256, and BLAKE2s within a single Verilog/SystemVerilog design. A top-level interface shared by the four cores manages algorithm selection, inputs, outputs, status, protocol errors, cycle measurement, and known-answer self-tests. Verification combined primitive-level tests, integrated UVM regressions, randomized stimulus, directed coverage tests, and OpenSSL-based C++ reference models …

Asynchronous Methods For Reducing Dynamic Power In Sparse Systems, Braley Lachner

Theses

While a strong history of computer development has maximized architecture performance, modern computing is fundamentally constrained by thermal limits and power consumption. This is especially true in power sensitive edge applications, which often have low activity. Asynchronous architectures offer a pathway to take advantage of sparsity within hardware to drastically reduce dynamic power through fine-grain selective activation of only necessary hardware. Despite these advantages, the semiconductor industry relies heavily on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) toolchains, which have been developed with many synchronous assumptions. The traditional overhead and strict incompatibility with standard EDA toolchains have limited adoption of asynchronous technologies in …

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 …

Uvm Verification Of A 4-Stage Asynchronous Risc-V Processor, Yashaswini Suresha

Theses

Functional verification often takes more effort than designing the system itself, especially when the design departs from the synchronous, globally clocked style that verification tools assume. Asynchronous or clockless circuits are an example of this. They use local request and acknowledge handshaking instead of a global clock, which reduces dynamic power and eliminates clock-distribution and skew problems. However, this also means that standard verification methods that rely on a single periodic clock no longer apply. This thesis introduces a constrained-random, coverage-driven verification environment for a four-stage asynchronous RISC-V processor. The environment is built in SystemVerilog using the Universal Verification Methodology …

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. …

Multimodal Brain-Computer Interface For Real-Scene Object Selection And Shared Robotic Arm Control, Mohammad Keshtkar

Theses

Due to the limited bandwidth and reliability of non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain–computer interface (BCI) systems, it is difficult to control a six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) robotic arm using such a system. This thesis proposes a multimodal BCI system for controlling a robotic arm that divides control into three stages: initiating the task through right-hand motor imagery (MI), selecting an object of interest from a real scene using steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) and webcam-based eye tracking, and autonomously performing the pick-and-drop task using a WidowX 250 robotic arm. Two separate offline experiments, each involving ten participants, were performed to test the SSVEP …

A Best-Practice And Risk-Assessment Framework For Auditable Ai Integration In Uae Government Socs, Nasser Hassan Nasser Abdulrazaq Alrazooqi

Theses

The growing use of artificial intelligence and generative AI in security operations centres  have the ability to improve alert triage, investigation, threat-intelligence enrichment,  and incident response. It also introduces governance risks including explainability, data  leakage, prompt injection, model lifecycle management, human oversight, and the  traceability of AI-assisted decisions. This study has developed a best-practice and risk assessment framework for the auditable integration of AI in UAE’s governmental SOCs.  The research follows a qualitative and practitioner-informed documentary analysis.  Publicly available UAE cybersecurity policies, internationally recognised NIST and  ISO/IEC standards, academic literature, industry guidance and compliance  publications were reviewed. Moreover, they were …

Miscela Aura: An Interactive Fragrance Experience, Francesca Delaney

Theses

How can product customization lead directly to design customization? This question is explored through the lens of perfume. The concept of layering and customizing perfume is becoming more of a desired feature in the fragrance industry, opening the opportunity for how design can be used to create an interactive fragrance experience. Miscela Aura is a custom perfume line centered on an interactive brand activation. An interactive display scans your “aura” and gives you a unique color pattern. Each color represents a fragrance note, the amount of each scent controlled by the amount of each color. As the user interacts with …

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 …

Enhancing Net-Zero Strategies At Rit Dubai Campus Through Life Cycle Assessment, Razan Ali

Theses

Net-zero commitments are pushing higher education institutions to measure their environmental impact more rigorously. RIT Dubai has aligned its sustainability targets with the UAE Net Zero 2050 initiative, and earlier greenhouse gas reporting identified commuting and electricity as the campus’s dominant emission sources, with transportation modelled only from city-level estimates. This thesis develops an individual-level, use-phase Life Cycle Assessment of transportation at RIT Dubai across the entire campus community of 2,795 members in seven segments: local and international students, faculty and staff, and the contracted service staff who travel to campus daily. A transportation Life Cycle Inventory was built from …

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 …

Passive House Envelope Retrofit For Heritage Buildings In Hot Semi-Arid Climates: A Shoebox Energy Simulation Study Of The Former British Residency (Osmania University College For Women), Hyderabad, India, Hasini Kadaru

Theses

This study assesses interior-oriented envelope retrofits based on Passive House principles, applied to the British Residency of Hyderabad, now called Telangana Mahila Viswa Vidyalayam since 2022, and to Osmania University College for Women (OUCW) for the prior 70 years. This Grade 1-listed building was constructed in several phases starting in the 1790s, then remodeled and extended under Resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick from 1798 to 1805 and completed around 1808. It served as the Residency until 1947, when it was handed over to Osmania University.    Due to the conservation approach applied to the site, which does not allow any external changes, …

What Representations Preserve: Information-Theoretic And Geometric Conditions For Out-Of-Distribution And Hallucination Detection, Hong Yang

Theses

Models deployed outside controlled settings encounter inputs unlike their training data and may generate outputs unsupported by what they learned. A reliable system should recognize these cases. Out-of-distribution detection and hallucination detection are usually studied separately, but both depend on the same condition: the model's representation must retain the information that distinguishes an anomalous case from an ordinary one. If training never captures that information, or later suppresses it, no downstream detector can recover it. We study this condition from two complementary perspectives. Mutual information measures how much information about the relevant distinction remains in a representation, while feature-space geometry …