Digital Commons Network^™

3d Mapping Robot, Konnor Andrews, Ryan Jacobson

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Problem: Current 3D interior mapping methods are cumbersome, complicated, and costly. A consumer typically cannot purchase or operate the existing tools.

However, 3D mapping has a myriad of practical applications, such as interior design, virtual reality environment creation, and robotics research. This project aims to make 3D mapping tools more accessible for consumers.

Solution: This project combines modern control theory and signal processing to create an autonomous robot that can traverse and map unknown indoor areas. This robot can be managed using a simple interface on any device with a web browser. The scan that the robot generates can then …

Autonomous Delivery Robot, Sam Petersen, Nathan Haws

Electrical and Computer Engineering

We designed and assembled a self-driving delivery vehicle.

• People and companies spend a lot of time delivering food, packages, and other items.
• A self-driving delivery vehicle could save these people time and money.
• We set out to design and assemble an autonomous vehicle that could safely and securely navigate around its environment to deliver a package to a user-defined destination.

Microwaving Dreams? Why There Is No Point In Reheating The Hart-Dworkin Debate For International Law, Jason A. Beckett

Faculty Book Chapters

A critique of attempts to transpose Hart and Dworkin's legal theories to international law. I demonstrate why neither approach can provide insights into international law. Hart and Dworkin are institutional theorists, their methodologies are anchored by the need to justify the exercise of socially centralised violence. International law lacks both institutions and centralised violence, and the stabilising force these bring; it is radically indeterminate. Attempts to suppress this indeterminacy have resulted in international lawyers fragmenting into communities of practice, united by their eschatological faith in the international community. I challenge this faith.

Post Covid-19 Tourism: Promoting The Holy Family Trail As A Niche Religious Tourism Destination/ الترويج ل مسار العائلة :Covid- السياحة بعد 19 المقدسة كوجهة للسياحة الدينية, Hend Elbehary, Mona Elsayed, Nada Abdelghany, Yasmine Mandour

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

The tourism sector constitutes significant importance for the Egyptian economy, with a contribution of 11.9% to the GDP and total employment of 2.49 million in 2018. The sector has different segments including both mass and niche tourism, where Egypt is heavily dependent on the former. Over the past 10 years, the sector was hammered by several internal and external intermittent hits, resulting in instability in the sector and fluctuations in its revenues that have consequently pulled down the foreign currency reserves. The current challenge of COVID-19 has introduced a new global norm that hurdled the mobility of mass tourist groups …

Water Security In Egypt Issues And Perspectives/ الأمن المائي في مصر: المشاكل والآفاق, Kareem Mostafa, Mariam Allam, Sarah El-Fiky, Seba Issa, Sherif Mohyeldeen

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

Under the looming threat of water scarcity, the government of Egypt (GoE) must impose effective policies that promote water conservation to ensure water security for the future of its population. This policy paper seeks to define, survey, evaluate, and recommend prospective policies that can address the problem of current water scarcity and achieve water security. This paper focuses on two research sub-questions: 1) How can the government implement policies that can help Egypt's water conservation? 2) How can Egypt create alternative water sources?

Startups And Human Capital Management In Egypt: In Search Of Decent Jobs, Maryham Abdel Malak, Ibrahem El Sayed Hassan, Fayrouz El Dabbagh, Laila M. El Baradei

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

While startups are considered an important potential contributor to Egypt’s economic growth, they encounter myriad challenges that hinder their ability to reach their potential, sustain their market presence, and their capacity to provide decent job opportunities. Challenges include the difficulty of locating and sustaining funding, the complicated legal and regulatory framework that governs them, the conservative social norms and culture, and the lack of data and information regarding market dynamics and existing opportunities. The research findings revealed that many startups face challenges with their Human Capital Management (HCM), in the planning, acquisition, development, or sanction functions. This policy paper examines …

The Social Dimension In Transportation Planning/ البعد الاجتماعي في نظام تخطيط النقل العام في مصر, Ahmed Hamdy, Fatma Rashad, Lama Atef

Papers, Posters, and Presentations

Public transportation is a main player in Egyptians’ daily lives. It links production and consumption areas in many vital aspects, including economy, construction, and social development. Accordingly, the accessibility of citizens to public transportation and its services has been adopted as a social dimension for it in this paper, as it affects the lives of many segments of Egyptians.

The Challenge Of Deterring Bad Police Behavior: Implementing Reforms That Hold Police Accountable, Robert M. Bloom, Nina Labovich

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Most Ingenious Paradox: Competition Vs. Coordination In Mutual Fund Policy, Ann M. Lipton

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Remembering And Appreciating Judge Robert A. Katzmann, Joseph White

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Producing Possibilities: Envisioning And Mediating Youth, Identities, And Futures In Central Appalachia, Tammy Lynn Clemons

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

This dissertation, based on anthropological research between 2015 and 2020, focuses on young people in different yet interconnected social contexts in Central Appalachia and how they envision, construct, and act upon possibilities for themselves and the region through multimodal cultural production processes like visual art, performance, and multisensory media. The research question focusing this project was: How do the social contexts of young Appalachians’ engagement in media consumption and production practices shape the possibilities they envision for themselves, others, and their region? I found that the specific contexts were less important than the interconnected mentoring conversations across sites and generations …

"Roses Remind Me Of Aleppo": Ironic Home, Beckoning States, And Memories Of Syrian Armenian Women In Yerevan, Armenia, Anahid Matossian

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

This project contributes to anthropologies of the state, (diasporic return) migration, belonging, home, and conflict, including genocide and war. It intervenes in the anthropology of home by focusing on both the social and physical aspects of home, its pain, joys, and ironies, and it speaks to the anthropology of genocide by showing how a population a century removed from a genocide uses it to interpret their experience. This dissertation also deals with state constructions of ideal citizen formation--one of obligation and devotion to the socially constructed ancestral homeland, where descendants who share an ethnic identity have a role to play …

Photoperiod Decelerates The Advance Of Spring Phenology Of Six Deciduous Tree Species Under Climate Warming, Lin Meng, Yuyu Zhou, Lianhong Gu, Andrew D. Richardson, Josep Peñuelas, Yongshuo Fu, Yeqiao Wang, Ghasserm R. Asrar, Hans G. De Boeck, Jiafu Mao, Yongguang Zhang, Zhousen Wang

Natural Resources Science Faculty Publications

Vegetation phenology in spring has substantially advanced under climate warming, consequently shifting the seasonality of ecosystem process and altering biosphere–atmosphere feedbacks. However, whether and to what extent photoperiod (i.e., daylength) affects the phenological advancement is unclear, leading to large uncertainties in projecting future phenological changes. Here we examined the photoperiod effect on spring phenology at a regional scale using in situ observation of six deciduous tree species from the Pan European Phenological Network during 1980–2016. We disentangled the photoperiod effect from the temperature effect (i.e., forcing and chilling) by utilizing the unique topography of the northern Alps of Europe (i.e., …

Student-Faculty Partnerships In Curricula, Kari Goin Kono, Sophia Ryker

Office of Academic Innovation Publications

This is a peer reviewed blog article offering ideas about student engagement with curriculum development.

Making The Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Mindset Indispensable In The Lis Classroom Through Design, Content, Communication, And Assessment, Kim M. Thompson, Clayton A. Copeland

Faculty Publications

When we incorporate diversity and inclusion into Library and Information Science course design and content and build communication and learning frameworks in the classroom on inclusive principles, we build a cohort of students who cannot “unsee” these basic principles as they engage in practice. By designing lecture and activity materials that allow students to read and engage with different perspectives about professional values and content, we create opportunities for awareness building and prepare students to engage with the same practices as they join the profession. This chapter provides insights for and examples of how to create courses that bring diversity, …

Analysis Of Social Media Discussions On (#)Diet By Blue, Red, And Swing States In The U.S, Amir Karami, A. A. Dahl, J. G. Shaw, S. P. Valappil, G. Turner-Mcgrievy, H. Kharrazi, P. Bozorgi

Faculty Publications

The relationship between political affiliations and diet-related discussions on social media has not been studied on a population level. This study used a cost- and -time effective framework to leverage, aggregate, and analyze data from social media. This paper enhances our understanding of diet-related discussions with respect to political orientations in U.S. states. This mixed methods study used computational methods to collect tweets containing “diet” or “#diet” shared in a year, identified tweets posted by U.S. Twitter users, disclosed topics of tweets, and compared democratic, republican, and swing states based on the weight of topics. A qualitative method was employed …

Automatic Categorization Of Lgbt User Profiles On Twitter With Machine Learning, Amir Karami, M. Lundy, F. Webb, H. R. Boyajieff, M. Zhu, D. Lee

Faculty Publications

Privacy needs and stigma pose significant barriers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people sharing information related to their identities in traditional settings and research methods such as surveys and interviews. Fortunately, social media facilitates people’s belonging to and exchanging information within online LGBT communities. Compared to heterosexual respondents, LGBT users are also more likely to have accounts on social media websites and access social media daily. However, the current relevant LGBT studies on social media are not efficient or assume that any accounts that utilize LGBT-related words in their profile belong to individuals who identify as LGBT. Our …

A Systematic Literature Review Of Sexual Harassment Studies With Text Mining, Amir Karami, Melek Yildiz Spinel, C. Nicole White, Kayla Ford, Suzanne Swan

Faculty Publications

Sexual harassment has been the topic of thousands of research articles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Several review papers have been developed to synthesize the literature about sexual harassment. While traditional literature review studies provide valuable insights, these studies have some limitations including analyzing a limited number of papers, being time-consuming and labor-intensive, focusing on a few topics, and lacking temporal trend analysis. To address these limitations, this paper employs both computational and qualitative approaches to identify major research topics, explore temporal trends of sexual harassment topics over the past few decades, and point to future possible directions in …

Covid-19 Vaccine And Social Media In The U.S.: Exploring Emotions And Discussions On Twitter, Amir Karami, Michael Zhu, Bailey Goldschmidt, Hannah R. Boyajieff, Mahdi M. Najafabadi

Faculty Publications

The understanding of the public response to COVID-19 vaccines is the key success factor to control the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the public response, there is a need to explore public opinion. Traditional surveys are expensive and time-consuming, address limited health topics, and obtain small-scale data. Twitter can provide a great opportunity to understand public opinion regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The current study proposes an approach using computational and human coding methods to collect and analyze a large number of tweets to provide a wider perspective on the COVID-19 vaccine. This study identifies the sentiment of tweets using a machine learning …

Planning And Evaluating Policy To Address Information Inequalities: An Information Worlds Matrix Approach, Kim M. Thompson

Faculty Publications

One objective of public policy is to solve social problems and often it is through policy that digital inclusion efforts enter our information society. Digital technologies can help accelerate progress in fighting poverty, hunger and ill-health, in improving educational outcomes and in reducing gender and other inequalities. Digital inclusion is a means to empower underserved and marginalized populations. Policy related to digital inclusion often starts with building infrastructure and providing affordable access to information and communication technologies such as through phone connections, broadband, computers in classrooms or a computer (i.e., smartphone) in every pocket. But how can we know whether …

Process Mining Analytics For Industry 4.0 With Graph Signal Processing, Georgios Drakopoulos, Eleanna Kafeza, Phivos Mylonas, Spyros Sioutas

All Works

Process mining is the art and science of (semi)automatically generating business processes from a large number of logs coming from potentially heterogeneous systems. With the recent advent of Industry 4.0 analog enterprise environments such as floor shops and long supply chains are bound to full digitization. In this context interest in process mining has been invigorated. Multilayer graphs constitute a broad class of combinatorial objects for representing, among others, business processes in a natural and intuitive way. Specifically the concepts of state and transition, central to the majority of existing approaches, are inherent in these graphs and coupled with both …

Infant Earmuff System, Beth Powell

Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Infant Earmuff System allows caretakers to prevent hearing damage in infants when wearing the device.

• Infants have smaller ear canals and are therefore more susceptible to hearing damage than adults
• Hearing damage in infants is permanent but infants are bad at communicating if the noise level is too loud.
• The Infant Earmuff System allows caretakers to understand the level of noise an infant is hearing and whether that level is dangerous.

Mahanoy Area School District V. B.L.: The Court Protects Student Social Media But Leaves Unanswered Questions, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

In Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L.: The Court Protects Student Social Media but Leaves Unanswered Questions, published in the Cato Supreme Court Review, David L. Hudson Jr. analyzes the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision addressing the scope of public schools’ authority over off-campus student speech on social media. Situating Mahanoy within the Court’s broader K–12 student speech jurisprudence—from Barnette and Tinker to Fraser, Hazelwood, and Morse—the Article explains how the Court declined to adopt a categorical rule excluding off-campus speech from regulation while nevertheless ruling in favor of the student. The majority recognized diminished school …

ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างการเปิดรับข่าวสาร การรับรู้ ทัศนคติ และพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์ของนักเรียนมัธยมศึกษาตอนปลาย, นรกมล กองสุข

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

การวิจัยครั้งนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์ 1) เพื่อศึกษาระดับการเปิดรับข่าวสาร การรับรู้ ทัศนคติ และพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์ของนักเรียนมัธยมศึกษาตอนปลาย 2) เพื่อศึกษาความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างปัจจัยลักษณะทั่วไปของประชากรกับระดับการเปิดรับข่าวสาร การรับรู้ ทัศนคติ และพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์ของนักเรียนมัธยมศึกษาตอนปลาย และ 3) เพื่อศึกษาความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างการเปิดรับข่าวสาร การรับรู้ และทัศนคติกับพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์ของนักเรียนมัธยมศึกษาตอนปลาย กลุ่มตัวอย่างเป็นนักเรียนมัธยมศึกษาปีที่ 4-6 จำนวน 450 คน ที่ได้จากการสุ่มหลายขั้นตอน เครื่องมือที่ใช้ในการวิจัย คือ แบบสอบถามออนไลน์ วิเคราะห์ข้อมูลโดยใช้การแจกแจงความถี่ ร้อยละ ค่าเฉลี่ย และส่วนเบี่ยงเบนมาตรฐาน การทดสอบไคสแควร์ และสถิติสัมประสิทธิ์สหสัมพันธ์เพียร์สัน ผลการวิจัยพบว่า 1)กลุ่มตัวอย่างมีการเปิดรับข่าวสารและการรับรู้อยู่ในระดับน้อย ส่วนทัศนคติและพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์อยู่ในมาก 2) ความสัมพันธ์กับปัจจัยลักษณะทั่วไป การเปิดรับข่าวสารมีความสัมพันธ์กับปัจจัยด้านระดับชั้นและปัจจัยด้านอายุ การรับรู้มีความสัมพันธ์กับปัจจัยด้านเพศและปัจจัยด้านอายุ ทัศนคติมีความสัมพันธ์กับปัจจัยด้านเพศและปัจจัยด้านอายุ และพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์มีความสัมพันธ์กับปัจจัยด้านระดับชั้นและปัจจัยด้านอายุ 3) ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างพฤติกรรมทางเพศที่พึงประสงค์ พบว่า การเปิดรับข่าวสารมีระดับความสัมพันธ์ทางลบอยู่ในระดับต่ำ (r = -0.16) การรับรู้ไม่มีความสัมพันธ์ และทัศนคติมีระดับความสัมพันธ์ทางบวกอยู่ในระดับต่ำ (r = 0.31)

Business Week Program, March 22-25, 2021, Illinois State University, College Of Business

Business Week

No abstract provided.

Electric Roller Blades, Nathan Burk, Joshua Hatch

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Electric Roller Blades are designed to allow for fast and convenient transportation!

• The hope for the electric roller blades is to give college students and others walking through their city a way to quickly get from point A to B. Electric Skateboards and One Wheels are heavy and bulky. The Electric Roller Blades are meant to be a less cumbersome electric vehicle. As the majority of the time users will not be commuting, the electric roller blades are more convenient then One Wheels as they can be attached to a backpack.
• People traveling from one destination to another frequently, as …

Public Library-Based Social Work Field Placements: Guidance For Public Libraries Planning To Become A Social Work Practicum Site, Elizabeth A. Wahler, Jacob D. Ressler, Sarah C. Johnson, Colleen Rortvedt, Tasha Saecker, John Helling, Michael A. Williams, Danielle Hoover

Publications and Research

Public libraries are increasingly faced with patron psychosocial needs, including mental health problems, substance use, homelessness, or poverty-related needs. Since library staff are often not trained to address these needs, many are choosing to host on-site social work practicum students to provide information and referrals for patrons presenting with psychosocial needs. However, little existing guidance is available about initiating a social work practicum placement, which can leave libraries unprepared and often “reinventing the wheel”. This manuscript provides guidance on the steps that should be considered by libraries intending to host their first social work practicum student.

The Effect Of Support Systems On Delinquency, Elizabeth S. Bohrer

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

There are many reasons why adolescents and young adults turn to delinquent behaviors, much of which result from the environment they are residing in. Copious research has been done on the effects that parent, teacher, peer, and partner relationships have on delinquency, but very little focuses on support systems as a whole. Support systems create positive or negative modeling behaviors for people to follow and individuals will allow these models to influence their own personal behavior patterns. The goal of this study is to assess how a possible change in support systems affects delinquent tendencies in a study group of …

Tracking The Racial Validity Of Placement By Probability, Annie M. Del Principe, Lesley Broder, Lauren Levesque

Publications and Research

Any placement decision is a gamble on the validity of the mech- anism used. The better the placement mechanism matches the actual pro- ficiencies required for success in a future, real-life context, the more accu- rately it will place students into the best classes for them and the more valid it will prove to be. But what happens if the most obvious, commonsensical approaches to placement that would appear to have the strongest validity— writing tests for placement into writing classes—prove unreliable? Rather than accurately placing students into the “right” class for them, we now know that writing placement tests …

Stress And Coping Among Surgery Residents In A Developing Country, Qamar Riaz, Syeda Kausar Ali, Muhammad Rizwan Khan, Abdul Rehman Alvi

Department for Educational Development

Objective: Stress during residency training in surgical disciplines not only hampers professional development but can also compromise patient care and personal health. The purpose of this study was to measure the stress level among the surgical residents, identify factors within the learning and work environment that cause stress, and identify different strategies that the residents use habitually to cope with these stresses.
Methodology: This mix method study was conducted in the department of Surgery at Aga Khan University, Pakistan. Residents' stress level was measured using Perceived Stress Scale (PSS); focus group discussions (FGDs) with faculty and residents explored stressors during …