Digital Commons Network^™

Data Science In The Utah Draft K-12 Standards Of Mathematics, Kate Webster Green

Theses and Dissertations

In today's data-driven world, the field of data science is becoming increasingly important. Research has shown that more job listings in Utah require applicants to have data science skills than ever before. Due to this growing demand, there is a push to begin data science instruction in grades K-12; however, what data science instruction is in grades K-12 is not yet clearly defined. Previous research has identified the skills and processes that make up data science in grades K-12, and several states and research groups have begun developing and implementing data science standards and learning progressions. This study analyzes the …

Design Of Precise Hinges For Optical Space Arrays, Jacob Sutton

Theses and Dissertations

Deployable origami-based arrays offer significant advantages for space optical systems due to their ability to stow compactly and deploy to a large surface area. However, achieving the panel alignment precision required for optical applications remains an open challenge, particularly for non-rigid-foldable patterns such as the flasher, where large relative motion during deployment and geometric constraints at panel interfaces limit the effectiveness of traditional hinge designs. This thesis addresses the precision alignment challenge through the design, prototyping, and experimental testing of novel passive precision hinges for rigid-panel origami-based deployable space arrays. A compact kinematic coupling hinge incorporating Lamina Emergent Torsional (LET) …

How Quickly Do Eastern Floodplains Store Carbon? Quantifying Reference Carbon Flux On The Dead Diamond River, Jacob Schnell

Earth Sciences Undergraduate Senior Theses

Terrestrial Earth systems sequester an estimated 30% of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The largest share is stored in global soils which collectively store more than 3 times the amount of carbon as the atmosphere. Floodplains and river systems, while covering only 5–8% of land area, store 20–30% of the global soil organic carbon (SOC), yet, the rate at which floodplains sequester carbon remains highly uncertain. Here I constrain floodplain carbon sequestration rates for a model northeastern river that has not been impacted by development or significant human activity. I calculate carbon stock using total organic carbon and derive carbon flux …

Investigating Broadband Plasma Waves As A Driver Of Radiation Belt Energetic Electron Loss To Earth's Atmosphere, Lauren Zanarini

Physics and Astronomy Undergraduate Senior Theses

Wave-particle interactions play a central role in transferring energy between different particle populations in space plasmas. In the radiation belts, these interactions govern the acceleration, scattering, and loss of energetic particles to Earth’s atmosphere. Understanding the drivers of these energetic particle losses is essential, as these particles can collide with satellites and contribute to ozone depletion as they enter the atmosphere. Developing a clearer picture of these processes will improve our ability to predict radiation belt variability and quantify the impacts, ultimately allowing us to mitigate the adverse effects.

Previous research has identified wave modes important for scattering electrons into …

Pedersen By Proxy: Neutral Wind Drivers Of The Magnetosphere, Shreya Gandhi

Physics and Astronomy Undergraduate Senior Theses

Measurements of Saturn’s radio and magnetic periodicities suggest that atmospheric forcing influences the magnetosphere-coupled current systems on the planet (Gurnett et al., 2007). A proposed mechanism for this phenomenon is that thermospheric heating drives strong neutral winds which drag ionospheric plasma and generate currents that close along magnetic field lines (Smith, 2011). However, the local current-closure physics of these processes is di!cult to isolate in global Saturn models even if they suggest neutral wind forcing is a plausible driver for these changes (Jia et al., 2012). This thesis uses the Earth-based auroral GEMINI (Geospace Environment Model of Ion-Neutral Interactions) model …

Tracing The Seam: Machine Learning Models Of The Open–Closed Boundary From Upstream Solar Wind Drivers, Arnav Singh

Physics and Astronomy Undergraduate Senior Theses

The open–closed magnetic field line boundary (OCB) demarcates closed terrestrial field lines from those threaded into the interplanetary medium, and its latitude encodes the instantaneous balance between dayside and nightside reconnection that governs much of the high-latitude space-weather hazard. No single instrument resolves it globally in real time. In this thesis I close that gap empirically. Pairing nearly three decades (1983–2012) of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program particle-precipitation boundaries with the 5-minute OMNI solar-wind and geomagnetic-index record yields ∼9.1×10⁵ causally matched crossings, partitioned into six hemispheric/MLT sectors after a |MLat| ≥ 40° physics cut.

On this corpus I train three …

Strategies To Implement Safe And Ethical Adoption Of Artificial Intelligence, Vini Ehsan

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Egypt Under Construction: Spectacle, Surprise, And The Politics Of Megaprojects, Grace E. Payne

Geography Undergraduate Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Assessment Of The Readiness Of Architectural Design Companies To Adopt Eco-Friendly Nanotechnologies In Sustainable Building Design, Ashwaq Essa Al Khalil

Dissertations and Theses

Nanotechnology is emerging as a promising innovation in sustainable architectural design, although its adoption remains slow. Research highlights the advantages of incorporating nanotechnologies in architecture, including improved material performance, enhanced thermal efficiency, reduced energy consumption, improved durability, and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These advantages make nanomaterials a promising solution for sustainable building design, particularly in hot-climate regions where energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with conventional building design practices remain major concerns.

Despite this potential, nanotechnology adoption in architecture faces several challenges, including limited real-world applications, slow diffusion in practice, and persistent organizational, economic, and regulatory barriers. …

Shifting Perspectives In Mathematics: Examining Preservice Elementary Teachers' Evolving Conceptions Of Mathematics, Identity, And Social Inequality Through Course Design, Autumn Thu Pham

Dissertations and Theses

Mathematics is often viewed, taught, and learned as an abstract, stand-alone subject, with an emphasis on procedures that are frequently disconnected from learners' lived experiences. Within this framing, limited attention is given to students' affect and identities in relation to mathematics. As a result, opportunities to engage with mathematics as a social, sociopolitical, and empowering tool remain rare. These patterns highlight an important implication for teacher education programs: when mathematics is framed primarily as abstract and procedural, preservice elementary teachers (PTs) may enter the profession lacking strong conceptual understanding, pedagogical flexibility, and the social and political awareness needed to effectively …

Late Pleistocene-Holocene Environmental Change From May Pond Sediment Cores And Upland 10be Ages, Adrianna Drindak

Earth Sciences Undergraduate Senior Theses

The goal of this project is to reconstruct the deglaciation and post-glacial environmental conditions of northern Vermont that occurred during the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, ~15,000 to 11,000 years ago. This transition marks a major climatic shift, from a glacial period to an interglacial period, and regionally involved the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS). The retreat of the LIS influenced the surficial geology of North America, exposing the Earth’s surface, leaving glacial deposits, and carving out proglacial lakes. The timing of ice retreat in the region provides information about past climate conditions, which may inform …

Constraints On Crystallization Conditions From Pseudosection Thermobarometry Of The New World Mining District Porphyries Near Cooke City, Montana, Jacob Jared Gordon

Earth Sciences Undergraduate Senior Theses

The New World Mining District (NWMD), located two miles northeast of Cooke City, Montana, is host to a series of epithermal sills, dikes, and plutons, the intrusion of which is responsible for significant Au-Ag-Cu mineralization. These intrusive bodies were emplaced in the Eocene, potentially contemporaneously with the Heart Mountain Detachment - Earth’s largest subaerial landslide, and have been proposed as a potential trigger for the event. The pre-emplacement crys- tallization conditions for the porphyritic dikes in the region, however, remain unknown and have previously been limited to surface observations. Constraining the magmatic conditions of the in- trusives in the region …

Exploring The Impact Of Self-Compassion And Mindfulness Interventions On Teacher Stress, Feedback Delivery, And Student Behavior In Elementary Classrooms, Coral Lynn Koller

Theses and Dissertations

Teacher stress is a persistent challenge that negatively affects educator well-being, classroom climate, and student outcomes. Although the prevalence and impact of teacher stress are well-documented. This single-case multiple baseline study investigated the effects of a structured self-compassion and mindfulness intervention on teacher stress, delivery of positive feedback, and student on-task behavior in three general education elementary teachers. Over a 6- week period, participants engaged in mindfulness and self-compassion practices, tracked through a combination of self-report scales (Daily Stress Response Scale, Perceived Stress Scale, SelfCompassion Scale, and Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire) and pre- and post-classroom observations. Results indicated reductions in …

Development Of A Low-Cost Roadside Monitoring System For Identifying High-Emitting Heavy-Duty Trucks, Spencer Larson

Theses and Dissertations

This project investigated the feasibility of using low-cost sensors to identify high-emitting heavy-duty diesel trucks through roadside emissions monitoring. A sampling system was designed and tested in both laboratory and field environments to evaluate sensor performance and measurement reliability. In the laboratory, controlled engine testing enabled direct comparison between low-cost sensors and research-grade instruments to establish baseline accuracy, response time, and sources of uncertainty. These tests demonstrated that while low-cost sensors exhibit greater bias and slower response, several are capable of detecting transient emission events. Field deployments revealed that real-world conditions, such as plume dilution, spatial variability, and short exposure …

Towards Efficient Continual Deep Learning, Md Yousuf Harun

Theses

Modern AI systems can achieve remarkable performance on tasks such as image recognition, object detection, and language understanding, but they often struggle with a basic ability that humans rely on every day: learning continuously. When deep neural networks (DNNs) are updated with new information, they can unexpectedly forget what they previously learned, making them difficult to deploy in changing real-world environments. This dissertation explores how to build AI systems that can learn more like humans: adapting to new data, preserving past knowledge, and using prior experience to learn future tasks more efficiently. Rather than focusing only on preventing forgetting, this …

Dynamic Cable Machine For Shoulder Rehabilitation, Mostafa Elshenawy, Avery Minter, Jarrett Powell-Odden, Shepard Dow, Cole Llana, Margaret Hughes

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Physical therapy is a branch of modern healthcare that holds crucial importance across multiple demographics, ranging from injured athletes to seniors. However, the recovery process often suffers due to a lack of quantitative progress tracking and the use of static equipment that does not adapt to the user. Furthermore, there are noticeable communication faults between the therapist and client, especially between sessions. Our dynamic rehabilitation cable machine addresses a lot of these limitations in a compact integrated system that provides adjustable motor-driven resistance, real time force measurements, and computer-vision-based exercise feedback. The main device is composed of two subsystems that …

Gunk - Genetic Underwater Nucleic-Acid Collector, Kay Hall, Harumy Miura, Isaac Carlos Hernandez-Nguyen, Oscar Emilio Alvarado Flores

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Environmental DNA sampling is a powerful and minimally invasive tool for biodiversity assessment and species monitoring. However, existing environmental DNA collection systems are costly, difficult to deploy at depth at low cost and with small teams, non-standardized, and inaccessible to non-technical users. This report presents GUNK, the Georeferenced Underwater Nucleic-acid Kollector, a submersible environmental DNA sampler developed in collaboration with ConservationXLabs and the Santa Clara University Robotics Systems Laboratory. GUNK is designed to address three primary goals: reaching sampling depths unachievable by existing low-cost solutions, reducing the financial barrier associated with environmental DNA research, and ensuring the system is easily …

Reasoning In The Network: Large Language Models For Congestion Control And Agent-Defined Networking, Shanaya Anna Varkey

Computer Science and Engineering Master's Theses

Despite decades of progress in network protocols and control algorithms, many network-control mechanisms continue to rely on fixed heuristics, manually written rules, or static controller logic. This thesis explores the use of large language models as reasoning-based decision-making components within networked systems.

The thesis presents two case studies. The first, RLVR-CC, investigates whether a large language model can be trained to make congestion-control decisions using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. In this system, the model observes network state, reasons about current conditions, and selects a rate-control action. The second, Agent-Defined Networking, studies whether a large language model can participate in …

The Method Of Periodic Averaging Applied To Reduced Coupled Mode Theory Models For Fiber Laser Amplifiers, Rebecca Nicole Bryant

Dissertations and Theses

Fiber laser amplifier (FLA) models are often implemented without rigorous mathematical justification or thorough numerical validation. Without a proper theoretical basis for assumptions and approximations, or a technical analysis of model performance, there is significant uncertainty about the limitations of any given reduced model and its suitability for an application. This research aims to address the lack of comprehensive assessment of FLA models by directly comparing distinct models and recommending a mathematical alternative to replace heuristic model-reduction techniques. The work in this dissertation is divided into two projects: a comparative study that uses existing FLA models to assess the validity …

Digital (In)Justice? Evaluating Procedural Justice In Online Crime Reporting, Nazmy Natia

Dissertations and Theses

Online Crime Reporting portals (OCR) have become a routine entry point for non-emergency police services, fundamentally redefining how the public initiates contact with law enforcement. Although these portals are presented as efficient and accessible, little attention has been paid to whether their design and communication serve the people who use them. Prior research on procedural justice (PJ) has largely examined face-to-face police encounters, while latest studies of OCR systems emphasize victim experience and usability. However, the existing literature offers limited guidance on how PJ principles translate from in-person encounters to digital reporting platforms. This prompted the current study, drawing on …

Aid And Assist Cases In Multnomah County: An Exploration Of Ors 161.370, Savannah Jurasek

Dissertations and Theses

Individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) are highly overrepresented in jails. In Oregon, these individuals can be eligible for what is referred to as the aid and assist process (ORS 161.370) which is designed to facilitate restorative care in efforts to ensure that vulnerable individuals can rationally participate in their criminal proceedings. However, continuous escalation in aid and assist orders (109.3% between 2011-2025) has led to strain on the Oregon State Hospital, the primary care facility for this population. As a consequence, defendants with SMI are spending unnecessary time in custody, despite hospitalization admission guidelines governed by previously decided case …

Transmission Of Firm-Level Demand Shocks To Stock Returns: Evidence From 10-K Text Analysis, Dylan Gunjan Parikh

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

Industrial organization and corporate finance papers that measure firm-level demand characteristics employ price, quantity, and product characteristic data that is unavailable in public financial disclosures. As a result, cross-sectional asset pricing literature attention to demand-side factors is limited. This paper constructs a demand shock measure from natural language processing of 28,263 publicly disclosed 10-K filings from 2001 to 2020. I find that a 1SD demand shock increases contemporaneously predicts a 1.8% increase (SE = 0.4%) in returns. Long-short portfolio sorted on demand shock generates 8.5% alpha (SE = 1.9%) against combined Fama-French and Q-factor models and a 0.91 sharpe ratio …

Identifying Active Layer Dynamics Across Geomorphic Landforms In Longyeardalen, Central Svalbard, Madeline Kim Koelbel

Earth Sciences Undergraduate Senior Theses

The thermal state of the active layer and analysis of meteorological conditions provides a greater understanding of where active layer detachment slides can occur. This study provides an overview of the active layer ground thermal regime for 2024 and 2025 in Longyeardalen, Svalbard, where the largest settlement in Svalbard, Longyearbyen is located. Ground temperature data was extracted from 8 boreholes in Longyeardalen and meteorological data was extracted from one weather station in central Longyeardalen. Overall, the ALT thickness and the thawing period increased from 2024 to 2025 while the thaw rate remained the same or decreased. The zero-curtain effect was …

Fisheye Camera Object Detection For Traffic Surveillance, Hugo Yang, Robert Luo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Effective traffic management is hampered by the physical limitations of traditional pinhole cameras, whose narrow fields of view create blind spots that require costly multi-camera infrastructure to overcome. Fisheye cameras offer a wide-angle alternative capable of single-camera intersection coverage, but the radial distortion inherent in their optics renders standard object detection algorithms unreliable, limiting their practical deployment in traffic surveillance.

This thesis investigates specialized object detection pipelines for fisheye traffic imagery by reproducing and building upon two top-ranked submissions from the 2025 AI City Challenge Track 4: the VNPT and SKKU-AutoLab pipelines. Both were successfully reconstructed outside their original containerized …

Toward An Account Of Visual Aesthetic Experience In Multimodal Large Language Models, Batuhan Saridede

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly mediate visual culture, far less is known about how MLLMs themselves evaluate aesthetic value and how those evaluations shift under different beliefs about authorship. This thesis investigates how three commercial MLLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) appraise visual artworks across six dimensions: liking, beauty, profundity, worth, narrativity, and intentionality. Using a balanced dataset of 100 artworks, half human-generated and half AI-generated, with representational and abstract works equally represented, each model evaluated every image under four provenance conditions: unspecified origin, inferred origin, assumed AI origin, and assumed human origin. Results show that representationalism in visual …

Political, Legal & Ethical Implications Of The United Nations Resolution 1441 & Its Resulting Iraq War, Anika Elyse Segall

Honors Projects

This paper analyzes the political, legal, & ethical implications of the United Nations Resolution 1441 & its resulting Iraq War. The central question of this paper is answered in these sections: 1. Politics: Is it politically convincing (whom did it convince and not convince) to invade Iraq?  2. Law: Is it legally convincing (which body of law) to invade Iraq? 3. Political Ethics: How has this informed how the US has conducted foreign policy and war-making in the Middle East since 2003?

Viewing Machines, Janos Cseh

Theses and Dissertations

By sifting through personal memories, the contemporary media landscape, and seeing the world through the lens of painting, Cseh asks what it means to understand information through images.  The artist unpacks the interwoven relationships between images and memory, feeling and seeing, and the difficulty of seeking truth through an analysis of his paintings.

Ml Models For Child-Parent Speech Diarization, Kenneth Kang

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This senior design thesis presents a machine learning research pipeline for child-parent and child-directed speech diarization. Speech diarization is the task of determining who spoke and when in an audio recording. Although this problem is well studied in adult meeting, broadcast, and conversational speech, child-parent audio is a more uneven setting. Children may speak in short turns, change pitch quickly, vocalize without producing clear words, interrupt adults, overlap with adult speech, cry, laugh, or code switch. These behaviors are normal in real family interaction, but they can confuse diarization systems that were mostly designed and evaluated on adult speech.

The …

Quiet Hills, Restless Hearts: An Intersectional Exploration Of Lgbtq+ Religious Journeys In Appalachia, Allison S. Monroe, Stacey L. Williams

McNair Culminating Research Projects

Many researchers have utilized Meyer’s (2003) minority stress model to examine the social factors influencing the daily lives of LGBTQ+ individuals. Previous research has looked at negative mental health outcomes for LGBTQ+ individuals (McGraw et al., 2023), the presence of religious stress for this community (Page et al., 2013), and religious journeys of these individuals (Halkitis et al, 2009).  However, few studies have examined the intersection of religion, LGBTQ+ identity, social support, and the overarching values of Appalachian culture. The proposed study seeks to add to the literature and understand the breadth of these experiences by employing qualitative semi-structured interviews. …

Antigone And Oedipus In The Early American Theater, Lauren Mceldowney

McNair Culminating Research Projects

The first production of a Greek drama in North America has been a subject of scholarly debate for at least the last century. Some reference late eighteenth-century theater productions of Medea as the origin of the trend, some the Bowery’s 1834 Oedipus, some the 1845 Philadelphia Antigone, and many Harvard University’s 1881 Oedipus Tyrannus. Due to the large number of sources claiming Harvard’s Oedipus as the kickoff production, likely in part because of its massive success and subsequent inspired productions and news articles, there lacks sufficient discussion on what earlier North American stagings of Greek plays can …