Digital Commons Network^™

The Emerging Statutory Proximate Cause Doctrine, Sandra F. Sperino

Nebraska Law Review

The year 2011 marked the birth of a new idea. The United States Supreme Court decided Staub v. Proctor Hospital and for the first time invoked common law proximate cause in the context of federal employment discrimination law.1 It is rare in jurisprudence to be present at the birth of an idea and then see that idea develop over its first decade. This Article charts the emerging proximate cause doctrine from its early days as a baby doctrine. Now, the doctrine is pre-adolescent, with all of the changes and turmoil that phase entails. Charting the first decade of this new …

Suspects Use Cell Phones, But So Do We: State V. Goynes And The Constitutional Dangers Of Boilerplate Search Warrants, Shayna Bartow

Nebraska Law Review

In Riley v. California, the United States Supreme Court held that a warrant is generally required for law enforcement to search a cell phone seized incident to a suspect’s arrest.1 Although this mandate seems clear,2 the Court did not outline what law enforcement must include in a cell phone search warrant to comport with the probable cause and particularity requirements of the Fourth Amendment.3 As a result, state courts are left to determine when cell phone search warrants satisfy the Fourth Amendment.4 In applying Riley and analyzing the validity of cell phone search warrants, the Nebraska Supreme Court has tried …

The Homesteading Rights Of Deserted Wives: A History, Hannah Haksgaard

Nebraska Law Review

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government of the United States distributed 270 million acres of land to homesteaders. The federal land-grant legislation allowed single women, but not married women, to partake in homesteading. Existing in a “legal netherworld” between single and married, deserted wives did not have clear rights under the federal legislation, much like deserted wives did not have clear rights in American marital law. During the homesteading period, many deserted wives litigated claims in front of the Department of the Interior, arguing they had the right to homestead. This is the first article …

Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality In Special Education Services, Saili Kulkarni

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Women’S Perspectives On Human Security: Violence, Environment, And Sustainability, Richard Matthew, Patricia A, Weitsman, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Nora Davis, Tera Dornfeld

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Violent conflict, climate change, and poverty present distinct threats to women worldwide. Importantly, women are leading the way creating and sharing sustainable solutions.

Women’s security is a valuable analytical tool as well as a political agenda insofar as it addresses the specific problems affecting women’s ability to live dignified, free, and secure lives. First, this collection focuses on how conflict impacts women’s lives and well-being, including rape and gendered constructions of ethnicity, race, and religion. The book’s second section looks beyond the scope of large-scale violence to examine human security in terms of environmental policy, food, water, health, and economics. …

Cultural Influence And The Effective Use Of Security Awareness In Congolese Organizations, Arnold Nzailu, Insu Park

Research & Publications

In today’s global economy, there is a growing need to apply technological advancements as well as training and awareness materials from western countries on information security programs in developing nations. To understand the underlying drivers of employees’ effective use behaviors in relation to security awareness programs in organizations, this study examines the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation factors that influence employees located in developing nations. The results indicate that influencing employees’ attitudes toward security is a better predictor of employees’ effective use of security awareness programs than their intention to comply. Cultural effects has also proven to have an influence on …

A Meta-Analysis Of Evolution Of Deep Learning Research In Medical Image Analysis, David Zeng, Cherie Noteboom, Kruttika Sutrave, Rajesh Godasu

Research & Publications

With a text mining and bibliometrics approach, we review the literature on the evolution of deep learning in medical image literature from 2012 – 2020 in order to understand the current state of the research and to identify the major research themes in image analysis to answer our research questions: RQ1: What are the learning modes that are evident in the literature? RQ2: What are the emerging learning modes in the literature? RQ3: What are the major themes in medical imaging literature? The analysis of 8704 resulting from a data collection process from peer-reviewed databases, our analysis discovered the six …

Early Public Outlook On The Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): A Social Media Study, Jun Liu, Giridhar Reddy Bojja, Martinson Ofori, Loknath Sai Ambati

Research & Publications

The recent outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) brought with its public concerns and fears about a global epidemic. With the increase in the popularity, usage, and reach of social media, this research examined the early public outlook on COVID-19 using SM-Platform, Twitter.com. The current study employed a mixed-method approach in collecting and analyzing public tweets by combining quantitative sentiment analysis with a qualitative thematic analysis. Our results revealed positive sentiment prior to the spread of the disease. The sentiment then turned negative as the disease spread, accompanied by a large amount of fear as rumors. In a thematic analysis we …

Credibility Analysis Of Customer Reviews On Amazon: A Design Science Approach, Jun Liu, Piyush Vyas

Research & Publications

This research examines the problem of identification and elimination of malicious customer reviews on Amazon.com. Online customer reviews are increasingly considered crowd-sourced consumer opinions that significantly influence online purchasing decisions (Hu, 2012). However, most current approaches to detecting fake reviews rely on either manual assessment of the reviews or the use of the mechanical Amazon Turks service (Mukherjee, 2014; Munzel, 2015). Manual assessment of customer reviews is not scalable in practice, leaving the quality of the current approaches to detect fake reviews questionable. The primary goal of our research is to develop a model of credibility analysis that automatically classifies …

A Gamification Technique To Increase Engagement In Asynchronous Online Discussions, Brian Bovee, Thomas Jernejcic, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

Engaging students in online discussions is difficult. This paper presents a method for gamifying asynchronous online discussions in order to increase student engagement. The method was evaluated in two sections of an online, graduate business information systems course which were identical with the exception that one course added a game element to the discussion board. Two forms of engagement were evaluated using different methods. Overall, the result of the gamified discussion board was an improvement in both the behavioral and cognitive engagement of students participating with the discussion. Our findings yield important theoretical and practical implications on how to successfully …

The Use Of Embedded Interaction Mechanisms For Low-Level Analysis Tasks, Kari Sandouka, Cherie Noteboom

Research & Publications

The use of information visualization is a strategy to reduce information overload and cognitive efforts. Interaction mechanisms aid the exploration of data when it is not practical to display all data points in one visual display. This study reports the results of a pilot study. The purpose of the study is to determine what interactive mechanisms are used and how they support a task or set of tasks.

Matching Possible Mitigations To Cyber Threats: A Document-Driven Decision Support Systems Approach, Martha Wagner Mcneil, Cherie Noteboom, Jun Liu, Omar El-Gayar, Thomas H. Llansó

Research & Publications

Despite more than a decade of heightened focus on cybersecurity, the threat continues. To address possible impacts, cyber threats must be addressed. Mitigation catalogs exist in practice today, but these do not map mitigations to the specific threats they counter. Currently, mitigations are manually selected by cybersecurity experts (CSE) who are in short supply. To reduce labor and improve repeatability, an automated approach is needed for matching mitigations to cyber threats. This research explores the application of supervised machine learning and text retrieval techniques to automate matching of relevant mitigations to cyber threats where both are expressed as text, resulting …

Designing Decision-Support Systems For Secondary School Counselors, Kodey S. Crandall, Cherie Noteboom, Dave Bishop

Research & Publications

In the current era of accountability, school counselors are expected to use data to drive program decisionmaking, implement evidence-based interventions to create systemic change, and utilize emerging technology. Research shows it is difficult for school counselors to meet any of these expectations. A decision-support system is a technology that takes minimal effort to learn and can assist in decision-making processes. In an attempt to solve the problems facing school counselors, this design science research focuses on building such a system using the design principles of Information Quality, Interface Quality, and Customization and measuring their influence on user satisfaction.

Factors Influencing The Adoption Of Artificial Intelligence In Organizations - From An Employee's Perspective, Loknath Sai Ambati, Kanthi Narukonda, Giridhar Reddy Bojja, Dave Bishop

Research & Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to take over the world in the next decade. Our current innovations and inventions are gearing up to clear the path for this to happen. While folks are excited and curious about this shift, it remains unclear how organizations and their employees feel about it. The goal of this research is to understand the factors that influence the adoption of AI techniques and technologies in organizations from an employee's perspective. To achieve this goal, the authors make use of grounded theory and semi-structured interviews. Discovering the positive or negative emergent factors that affect the adoption …

Citizen Trust In The United States Government: Twitter Analytics Measuring Trust In Government Sentiments, Glenn Papp, Omar F. El-Gayar, Petter Lovaas

Research & Publications

Recent tensions and widening division in the United States (U.S.) political arena have sewn doubt in the U.S. government and democracy itself, at a time when rapid technology advances clearly ought to aid the spread of democracy. However, there has been little progress in the use of technology to increase democratic participation in the U.S. The purpose of this research is the exploratory study of how social media analytics can inform, predict, or alter trust in government sentiments which thereby inform democratic participation by studying 49,964,168 Twitter posts (tweets) from January 1, 2014 – June 13, 2019. Extant literature pertaining …

Credibility Analysis Of News On Twitter Using Lstm: An Exploratory Study, Piyush Vyas, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

The popularity and pervasiveness of social media platforms as mechanisms for the rapid dissemination and propagation of news and the ease by which such information can be created and shared, makes it increasingly important to verify its credibility. This work focuses on the automatic credibility analysis of news on microblogging platforms such as Twitter. Using the publicly available PHEME twitter dataset, we perform classification using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) technique. Our dataset was divided into two parts, 80% for training and validation, and 20% for testing. The preliminary results show the potential of our proposed model to classify news …

Byod-Insure Vs Existing Modalities For Byod Security Assessment: A Comparison Study, Melva Ratchford, Yong Wang, Cherie Noteboom, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

Often, organizations allow employees the use of their personally owned devices to access corporate data. This phenomenon is identified as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and organizations are adopting it without taking into consideration the inherent security risks introduced via BYODs. There are several approaches that organizations can consider for BYOD security. This paper addresses research questions related to the protection of BYOD environments. In general, how can organizations protect against the inherent risks posed by BYODs? What are existing modalities to do so? With this in mind, this research reviews existing BYOD security approaches, such as frameworks, checklists, best …

A Systematic Review Of Web Usage Mining Techniques And Future Research Options, Brent Van Aartsen, Omar F. El-Gayar, Cherie Noteboom

Research & Publications

Through this systematic review, we review the research of web usage mining (WUM) techniques from 2014 - 2019 in order to understand the current state of WUM research and answer our research questions; (RQ1) what data sources are used in web usage mining, (RQ2) what data analysis methods are used to extract the knowledge, (RQ3) what are the applications of Web usage mining, and (RQ4) what future research can be done in the web usage mining area? Using a PRISMA approach to narrow the initial 778 search results, we completed a full analysis of 74 unique articles from four prominent …

A Comparative Study Of Machine Learning Approaches For Human Activity Recognition, Loknath Sai Ambati, Omar El-Gayar

Research & Publications

The goal of this project is to study the performance of Machine Learning (ML) techniques used in Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Specifically, we aim to 1) evaluate and benchmark the performance of various ML techniques used for HAR against established ML performance metrics using multiple datasets, and 2) map the characteristics of various HAR datasets to appropriate ML techniques. From a theoretical perspective, the research will shed light into the strengths and weaknesses of various ML techniques that can provide insights into future research aimed at improving these techniques for HAR. From a practical perspective, the research provides guidance into …

Introduction To The Minitrack On Analytics And Decision Support For Green Is And Sustainability Applications, Omar F. El-Gayar, Pingsun Leung, Arno Scharl

Research & Publications

No abstract provided.

Multi-Stage Transfer Learning System With Light-Weight Architectures In Medical Image Classification, Rajesh Godasu, Omar F. El-Gayar, Kruttika Sutrave

Research & Publications

Transfer Learning methods are extensively applied with standard CNN architectures for various medical diagnoses. However, these architectures are computationally expensive, tend to be over parameterized, and requires a relatively large labeled datasets which are often not available in the medical image domain. Accordingly, this paper proposes a Multi-Stage Transfer Learning System using lightweight architectures to address problems with limited data and to improve training time. Preliminary results suggest that our model performed well on CT Head images over traditional single-stage transfer learning.

Mining Physicians’ Opinions On Social Media To Obtain Insights Into Covid-19: Mixed Methods Analysis, Abdullah Wahbeh, Tareq Nasralah, Mohammad Al-Ramahi, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

Background: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is considered to be the most daunting public health challenge in decades. With no effective treatments and with time needed to develop a vaccine, alternative approaches are being used to control this pandemic. Objective: The objective of this paper was to identify topics, opinions, and recommendations about the COVID-19 pandemic discussed by medical professionals on the Twitter social medial platform. Methods: Using a mixed methods approach blending the capabilities of social media analytics and qualitative analysis, we analyzed COVID-19–related tweets posted by medical professionals and examined their content. We used qualitative analysis to explore …

Health Risks Of E-Cigarettes: Analysis Of Twitter Data Using Topic Mining, Abdullah Wahbeh, Mohammad Al-Ramahi, Omar F. El-Gayar, Tareq Nasralah

Research & Publications

The recent rise of e-cigarettes and vaping products has increased concerns that another young generation may become addicted to nicotine. Recently, it becomes evident that several health issues are related to the use of e-cigarettes and vaping products. The objective of this paper is to understand and identify such health issues by collecting and analyzing social media data. The analysis reflects the most important themes andtopics discussed by online user’s about e-cigarettes, vaping, and associated health issues. Using topic modeling techniques, we were able to identify several health issues related to the use of e-cigarettes and vaping products. These issues …

Influence Of The Digital Divide And Socio-Economic Factors On Prevalence Of Diabetes, Loknath Sai Ambati, Omar F. El-Gayar, Nevine Nawar

Research & Publications

More than 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes (29 and 84 million, respectively). Factors such as overweight, sedentary behavior, and history of diabetes in the family have been commonly associated with the onset of type 2 diabetes. Extant literature now points to the effect of socio-economic factors such as education, income, ethnicity, and physical location on the prevalence of the disease. This research aims to investigate the impact of social determinants on diabetes with a particular emphasis on the digital divide. We used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for diagnosed diabetes prevalence, obesity prevalence, …

Transformational Leadership, Transactional Leadership, Organizational Cultural Behaviors And Effectiveness Of Knowledge Management Practices In Higher Educational Institutions, Armel Djangone, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

The purpose of this emerging research paper is to examine the relationship between transactional leadership, transformational leadership, cultural behavior and knowledge management (KM) effectiveness in the context of higher education. Consequently, the research examines the moderating effect of organizational culture on the relationship between leadership and knowledge management.

Topical Mining Of Malaria Using Social Media. A Text Mining Approach, James Boit, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

Malaria is a life-threatening parasitic disease, common in subtropical and tropical climates caused by mosquitoes. Each year, several hundred thousand of people die from malaria infections. However, with the rapid growth, popularity and global reach of social media usage, a myriad of opportunities arises for extracting opinions and discourses on various topics and issues. This research examines the public discourse, trends and emergent themes surrounding malaria discussion. We query Twitter corpus leveraging text mining algorithms to extract and analyze topical themes. Further, to investigate these dynamics, we use Crimson social media analytics software to analyze topical emergent themes and monitor …

The Effect Of Privacy Policies On Information Sharing Behavior On Social Networks: A Systematic Literature Review, Damion Mitchell, Omar F. El-Gayar

Research & Publications

Online social networks (OSN) such as Facebook and Instagram have dramatically changed the way people operate. It, however, raises specific privacy concerns due to their inherent handling of personal data. The paper highlights the privacy concerns associated with OSN, strategies to protect the users’ privacy, and finally the overall effect of privacy policies on information sharing behavior on OSN. We examined a sample of 51 full papers that explore privacy concerns in OSN, strategies to protect users’ privacy, and the effects of privacy policies on the users’ information sharing behavior. The overall findings disclosed that users are concerned about their …

Using Social Media For Customer Knowledge Management In Developing Economies: A Systematic Review, Martinson Ofori, Omar El-Gayar

Research & Publications

Knowledge Management (KM) research has theorized that KM activities lead to better firm performance. The current view that there is more external knowledge than exists within organizations has resulted in a preference for customercentric approaches over traditional KM activities. Recent advances in technology has resulted in social media use as an avenue for knowledge creation from the social interaction between brands and their customers. Most research however explore social media’s impact on organizational knowledge in developed economies with little attention to developing economies where KM could be conceptualized differently. In this research, we analyze the extent to which social media …

2020 Weed Science Research Report – Tan Section, Ndsu Weed Science, Dept. Of Plant Sciences

Plant Sciences Weed Science Reports

The Weed Science team at North Dakota State University conduct field research in the State of North Dakota. This specific document reports on field research conducted in 2020. It includes work on adjuvants and the management of several weeds in North Dakota.

2020 Weed Science Research Report – Blue Section, Ndsu Weed Science, Dept. Of Plant Sciences

Plant Sciences Weed Science Reports

The Weed Science team at North Dakota State University conduct field research in the State of North Dakota. This specific document reports on field research conducted in 2020. It includes work on corn, soybean and the management of several weeds in North Dakota.