Digital Commons Network^™

Yumiko Ōshima’S The Star Of Cottonland: A Translation, Sheena Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is a translation of Volume 1 of Yumiko Ōshima’s The Star of Cottonland.

Adapting Animals: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Science, And Media, Kristen Layne Figgins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theory provided a theoretical framework for discussing the question of humanity’s place in the world. These nascent theories emphasized the shared animal nature of humans and the nonhuman creatures who had once occupied a distinctly lower place on the chain of being. My dissertation addresses the question of how nineteenth-century scientific attitudes about animals were reflected in the literature of the period. By examining culture-texts from the nineteenth century, it is clear that literature was an active participant in extending scientific knowledge, often by playing with the blending categorical …

The Gig Economy’S Short Reach: An Analysis Of The Scope Of The Federal Arbitration Act’S “Transportation Worker” Exemption, Emina Sadic Herzberger

Georgia Law Review

The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) governs arbitration agreements in the United States. Section 1 of the FAA provides an exemption from arbitration for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” In a 2001 decision, Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the residual phrase “any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” includes transportation workers. But, such language is ambiguous, and the Supreme Court did not expound upon what it means to be a transportation worker or to be engaged …

Socially Distant Signing: Why Georgia Should Adopt Remote Will Execution In The Post-Covid World, Jessie Daniel Rankin

Georgia Law Review

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and other state governors issued emergency executive orders authorizing the attestation and execution of wills, trusts, and other testamentary documents through the use of audio-video technology. Most states have traditionally required that such testamentary documents be signed in the physical presence of two or more witnesses to be valid. Georgia’s executive order permits these witnesses to instead observe the signing via video-conferencing software, alleviating the requirement that the witnesses be physically present with the testator. This authorization, however, only exists through this executive order and could lapse or be …

Structural Analysis And Vaccine Efficacy Of Hla Mutants, Kelly Tomaszewski

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Staphylococcus aureus is a commensal of the human skin and also a major human pathogen. Currently, there has been no successful vaccine despite many approaches over the last two decades. S. aureus α-hemolysin (Hla), a potent cytotoxin, plays an important role in the pathogenesis of S. aureus diseases, through the activation of its receptor, ADAM10. We utilized three distinct Hla mutants with differing structural and ADAM10 binding properties to examine for vaccine efficacy. Our studies have demonstrated immunization with each vaccine candidate antigens provided significant protection against S. aureus skin infection yet elicited distinguishable immune responses. We have also generated …

The Role Of Fear Of Evaluation In Individuals' Perceptions Of Groups, Jin Shin

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with interpersonal impairment. One possible reason for this dysfunction is that people with SAD evaluate others differently on dimensions of warmth and dominance compared to individuals without the disorder. In the current study, we examined whether two core constructs of SAD, fear of negative evaluation and fear of positive evaluation, affect the judgments that people make about groups based on warmth and dominance. We also investigated whether racial similarity (i.e., whether someone is the same race as those they’re interacting with) and ethnic identity (i.e., one’s sense of belonging to a particular social group) …

Order And Harmony: Kepler’S Guiding Forces, Dan Broadbent

Faculty Publications

Adapted from the article “Order and Harmony: Kepler’s Guiding Forces” included in “Towards Mysteries of the Cosmos with Johannes Kepler – on the 450th Anniversary of His Birth,” a commemorative volume published by the Obserwatorium Atronommiczne Krolowej Jadwigi Rzepienniku Biskupim (Queen Jadwiga Observatory of Rzepiennik Biskupi Poland) December 2021. Adapted with permission.

As the subject librarian for physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University, the author has had the privilege of handling some of Johannes Kepler’s original books preserved in the university’s archives. One of the most impressive materials in the archive is a large page from Mysterium Cosmographicum that …

Burden Of Mycoplasma Genitalium And Bacterial Coinfections In A Population-Based Sample In New Mexico, Anne Hammer, Patti E. Gravitt, Rachael Adcock, Nicole Patterson, Jack Cuzick, Cosette M. Wheeler

Pathology Research and Scholarship

In this population-based US study, the overall prevalence of Mycoplasma genitalium was 1.95% (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.62%-2.34%), declining from 6.12% (95% CI, 4.72%-7.92%) in women aged 21 to 24 years to 0.48% (95% CI, 0.25%-0.94%) in women aged 40 to 64 years. The prevalence of coinfections with Chlamydia trachomatis and Trichomonas vaginalis was low.

The Influence Of Library Orientation On The Library Utilization Of Students At Central Luzon State University, Philippines, Camia Abergos Lasig

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study determines the influence of library orientation on Central Luzon State University students’ utilization of information resources in the university library. A descriptive research method was used in this study, using the survey questionnaire technique. A Slovin’s formula was used to select the number of respondents. A total of 177 respondents were identified in this study. Percentage, mean, Pearson r, and regression were used to analyze and interpret the data. Findings show that students are very aware of the majority of the print resources. However, students are moderately aware of the electronic resources. It also reveals a direct relationship …

Access To E-Resources By Librarians In University Libraries In Niger Delta Region, Nigeria, Vincent Osamuyimen Ekhaguosa, Mary Irughe, Efosa Egharevba

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study investigated Access to Electronic Resources by Librarians in University Libraries in Niger Delta Region, Nigeria. The descriptive research design was adopted for this study using 73 items self-structured questionnaire to collect data. In selecting the university libraries, the researcher applied the stratified random sampling technique to select the universities. One hundred and fifty (150) librarians were selected from three (3) centrally located states which include Delta, Bayelsa, and Edo from the nine (9) Niger Delta States from a target population of four hundred and thirty-two (432) librarians. seven research questions were formulated to guide the study. A reliability …

Supply Chain In Library: A Bibliometric Analysis, Ria Arifianti, Abdurrahman Rahim Thaha, Taharuddin Taharuddin

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The research objective of this paper is to identify and map supply chain research in a library. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis using the Scopus electronic database. The article search is done by filtering search results in the system and manual exploration to get relevant articles. The collected articles are processed with the VOSviewer application to obtain research mapping results. A total of 81 articles were obtained from 1999 to 2021, with an increasing trend in the number of articles each year. The United States and China are the most productive countries in this field. Three cluster topics were …

Video Snapshot: Single Image Motion Expansion Via Invertible Motion Embedding, Qianshu Zhu, Chu Han, Guoqiang Han, Tien-Tsin Wong, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unlike images, finding the desired video content in a large pool of videos is not easy due to the time cost of loading and watching. Most video streaming and sharing services provide the video preview function for a better browsing experience. In this paper, we aim to generate a video preview from a single image. To this end, we propose two cascaded networks, the motion embedding network and the motion expansion network. The motion embedding network aims to embed the spatio-temporal information into an embedded image, called video snapshot. On the other end, the motion expansion network is proposed to …

Learning Large Neighborhood Search Policy For Integer Programming, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a deep reinforcement learning (RL) method to learn large neighborhood search (LNS) policy for integer programming (IP). The RL policy is trained as the destroy operator to select a subset of variables at each step, which is reoptimized by an IP solver as the repair operator. However, the combinatorial number of variable subsets prevents direct application of typical RL algorithms. To tackle this challenge, we represent all subsets by factorizing them into binary decisions on each variable. We then design a neural network to learn policies for each variable in parallel, trained by a customized actor-critic algorithm. We …

Neurolkh: Combining Deep Learning Model With Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun Heuristic For Solving The Traveling Salesman Problem, Liang Xin, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present NeuroLKH, a novel algorithm that combines deep learning with the strong traditional heuristic Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) for solving Traveling Salesman Problem. Specifically, we train a Sparse Graph Network (SGN) with supervised learning for edge scores and unsupervised learning for node penalties, both of which are critical for improving the performance of LKH. Based on the output of SGN, NeuroLKH creates the edge candidate set and transforms edge distances to guide the searching process of LKH. Extensive experiments firmly demonstrate that, by training one model on a wide range of problem sizes, NeuroLKH significantly outperforms LKH and generalizes well to …

Learning To Iteratively Solve Routing Problems With Dual-Aspect Collaborative Transformer, Yining Ma, Jingwen Li, Zhiguang Cao, Wen Song, Le Zhang, Zhenghua Chen, Jing Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, Transformer has become a prevailing deep architecture for solving vehicle routing problems (VRPs). However, it is less effective in learning improvement models for VRP because its positional encoding (PE) method is not suitable in representing VRP solutions. This paper presents a novel Dual-Aspect Collaborative Transformer (DACT) to learn embeddings for the node and positional features separately, instead of fusing them together as done in existing ones, so as to avoid potential noises and incompatible correlations. Moreover, the positional features are embedded through a novel cyclic positional encoding (CPE) method to allow Transformer to effectively capture the circularity and symmetry …

Canita: Faster Rates For Distributed Convex Optimization With Communication Compression, Zhize Li, Peter Richtarik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, methods relying on compressed communication are becoming increasingly popular. Besides, the best theoretically and practically performing gradient-type methods invariably rely on some form of acceleration/momentum to reduce the number of communications (faster convergence), e.g., Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (Nesterov, 1983, 2004) and Adam (Kingma and Ba, 2014). In order to combine the benefits of communication compression and convergence acceleration, we propose a \emph{compressed and accelerated} gradient method based on ANITA (Li, 2021) for distributed optimization, which we call CANITA. Our CANITA achieves the \emph{first accelerated rate} $O\bigg(\sqrt{\Big(1+\sqrt{\frac{\omega^3}{n}}\Big)\frac{L}{\epsilon}} + \omega\big(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\big)^{\frac{1}{3}}\bigg)$, …

Infinite Time Horizon Safety Of Bayesian Neural Networks, Mathias Lechner, Dorde Zikelic, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Thomas A. Henzinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) place distributions over the weights of a neural network to model uncertainty in the data and the network’s prediction. We consider the problem of verifying safety when running a Bayesian neural network policy in a feedback loop with infinite time horizon systems. Compared to the existing sampling-based approaches, which are inapplicable to the infinite time horizon setting, we train a separate deterministic neural network that serves as an infinite time horizon safety certificate. In particular, we show that the certificate network guarantees the safety of the system over a subset of the BNN weight posterior’s support. …

Rmix: Learning Risk-Sensitive Policies For Cooperative Reinforcement Learning Agents, Wei Qiu, Xinrun Wang, Runsheng Yu, Xu He, Rundong Wang, Bo An, Svetlana Obraztsova, Zinovi Rabinovich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning methods optimize individual Q values to guide individuals' behaviours via centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE). However, such expected, i.e., risk-neutral, Q value is not sufficient even with CTDE due to the randomness of rewards and the uncertainty in environments, which causes the failure of these methods to train coordinating agents in complex environments. To address these issues, we propose RMIX, a novel cooperative MARL method with the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) measure over the learned distributions of individuals' Q values. Specifically, we first learn the return distributions of individuals to analytically calculate CVaR …

Towards Non-Intrusive Camera-Based Heart Rate Variability Estimation In The Car Under Naturalistic Condition, Shu Liu, Kevin Koch, Zimu Zhou, Martin Maritsch, Xiaoxi He, Elgar Fleisch, Felix Wortmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Driver status monitoring systems are a vital component of smart cars in the future, especially in the era when an increasing amount of time is spent in the vehicle. The heart rate (HR) is one of the most important physiological signals of driver status. To infer HR of drivers, the mainstream of existing research focused on capturing subtle heartbeat-induced vibration of the torso or leveraged photoplethysmography (PPG) that detects cardiac cycle-related blood volume changes in the microvascular. However, existing approaches rely on dedicated sensors that are expensive and cumbersome to be integrated or are vulnerable to ambient noise. Moreover, their …

Verification Assisted Gas Reduction For Smart Contracts, Bo Gao, Siyuan Shen, Ling Shi, Jiaying Li, Jun Sun, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are computerized transaction protocols built on top of blockchain networks. Users are charged with fees, a.k.a. gas in Ethereum, when they create, deploy or execute smart contracts. Since smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities which may result in huge financial loss, developers and smart contract compilers often insert codes for security checks. The trouble is that those codes consume gas every time they are executed. Many of the inserted codes are however redundant. In this work, we present sOptimize, a tool that optimizes smart contract gas consumption automatically without compromising functionality or security. sOptimize works on smart contract bytecode, …

Spurring Digital Transformation In Singapore's Legal Industry, Xin Juan Chua, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

COVID-19 has transformed the way we live and work. It has caused the processes and operations of businesses and organisations to be restructured, as well as transformed business models. A 2020 McKinsey Global survey reported that companies all over the world claim they have accelerated the digitalisation of their customer and supply-chain interactions, as well as their internal operations, by three to four years. They also said they thought the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has advanced by seven years. While technology transformation is not new to the legal profession, COVID-19 has cemented the importance …

Empirical Evaluation Of Minority Oversampling Techniques In The Context Of Android Malware Detection, Lwin Khin Shar, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Android malware classification, the distribution of training data among classes is often imbalanced. This causes the learning algorithm to bias towards the dominant classes, resulting in mis-classification of minority classes. One effective way to improve the performance of classifiers is the synthetic generation of minority instances. One pioneer technique in this area is Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and since its publication in 2002, several variants of SMOTE have been proposed and evaluated on various imbalanced datasets. However, these techniques have not been evaluated in the context of Android malware detection. Studies have shown that the performance of SMOTE …

Fine-Grained Generalization Analysis Of Inductive Matrix Completion, Antoine Ledent, Rodrigo Alves, Yunwen Lei, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we bridge the gap between the state-of-the-art theoretical results for matrix completion with the nuclear norm and their equivalent in \textit{inductive matrix completion}: (1) In the distribution-free setting, we prove bounds improving the previously best scaling of \widetilde{O}(rd2) to \widetilde{O}(d3/2√r), where d is the dimension of the side information and rr is the rank. (2) We introduce the (smoothed) \textit{adjusted trace-norm minimization} strategy, an inductive analogue of the weighted trace norm, for which we show guarantees of the order \widetilde{O}(dr) under arbitrary sampling. In the inductive case, a similar rate was previously achieved only under uniform sampling …

Beyond Smoothness : Incorporating Low-Rank Analysis Into Nonparametric Density Estimation, Rob Vandermeulen, Antoine Ledent

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The construction and theoretical analysis of the most popular universally consistent nonparametric density estimators hinge on one functional property: smoothness. In this paper we investigate the theoretical implications of incorporating a multi-view latent variable model, a type of low-rank model, into nonparametric density estimation. To do this we perform extensive analysis on histogram-style estimators that integrate a multi-view model. Our analysis culminates in showing that there exists a universally consistent histogram-style estimator that converges to any multi-view model with a finite number of Lipschitz continuous components at a rate of ˜O(1/3√n) in L1 error. In contrast, the standard histogram estimator …

Functional Signatures: New Definition And Constructions, Qingwen Guo, Qiong Huang, Sha Ma, Meiyan Xiao, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Functional signatures (FS) enable a master authority to delegate its signing privilege to an assistant. Concretely, the master authority uses its secret key sk(F) to issue a signing key sk(f) for a designated function f is an element of F-FS and sends both f and sk(f) to the assistant E, which is then able to compute a signature sigma(f) with respect to pk(F) for a message y in the range of f. In this paper, we modify the syntax of FS slightly to support the application scenario where a certificate of authorization is necessary. Compared with the original FS, our …

Deriving Invariant Checkers For Critical Infrastructure Using Axiomatic Design Principles, Cheah Huei Yoong, Venkata Reddy Palleti, Rajib Ranjan Maiti, Arlindo Silva, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in critical infrastructure face serious threats of attack, motivating research into a wide variety of defence mechanisms such as those that monitor for violations of invariants, i.e. logical properties over sensor and actuator states that should always be true. Many approaches for identifying invariants attempt to do so automatically, typically using data logs, but these can miss valid system properties if relevant behaviours are not well-represented in the data. Furthermore, as the CPS is already built, resolving any design flaws or weak points identified through this process is costly. In this paper, we propose a systematic …

The Investigations Of Nps Modulated Immunity And Immunometabolism, Brittney Leigh Ruedlinger

Biomedical Sciences Theses & Dissertations

Cancers remain in the top noncommunicable diseases responsible for premature mortality. The heterogeneity among cancers and within tumors makes treating them ever more challenging. Our misfortune for developing cures is mocked by cancer, with the lowest probability of success (PoS) through clinical trials and FDA approval. At the basic level, there are generally two broad gaps impeding cancer eradication: the unidentified shared mechanism(s) exploited by all cancers and the therapeutic approach to intervene. Nanosecond pulse stimulation (NPS) offers a unique approach since its broad impacts intersect those often hijacked by oncogenesis. Metabolic pathways, known for dysfunctions among cancers, share a …

Telehealth During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Survey Of Registered Dietitian Nutritionists, Mary Rozga, Deepa Handu, Kathryn Kelley, Elizabeth Yakes Jimenez, Hannah Martin, Marsha Schofield, Alison Steiber

Pediatrics Research and Scholarship

During the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, health care practices have shifted to minimize virus transmission, with unprecedented expansion of telehealth. This study describes self-reported changes in registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN) practice related to delivery of nutrition care via telehealth shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. This cross-sectional, anonymous online survey was administered from mid-April to mid-May 2020 to RDNs in the United States providing face-to-face nutrition care prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This survey included 54 questions about practitioner demographics and experience and current practices providing nutrition care via telehealth, including billing …

The Effectiveness Of Online Platforms After The Pandemic: Will Face-To-Face Classes Affect Students’ Perception Of Their Behavioural Intention (Biu) To Use Online Platforms?, Rana Saeed Al-Maroof, Noha Alnazzawi, Iman A. Akour, Kevin Ayoubi, Khadija Alhumaid, Nafla Mahdi Alahbabi, Maryam Alnnaimi, Sarah Thabit, Raghad Alfaisal, Ahmad Aburayya, Said Salloum

All Works

The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ intention to continue using online learning platforms during face-to-face traditional classes in a way that is parallel to their usage during online virtual classes (during the pandemic). This investigation of students’ intention is based on a conceptual model that uses newly used external factors in addition to the technology acceptance model (TAM) contrasts; hence, it takes into consideration users’ satisfaction, the external factor of information richness (IR) and the quality of the educational system and information disseminated. The participants were 768 university students who have experienced the teaching environments of both …

Spanish /S/ Reduction In Cíbola County, New Mexico, Brandon Martinez

Linguistics ETDs

The extent to which /s/ reduces in both onset and coda positions varies greatly across Spanish varieties, with Traditional New Mexican Spanish showing significant reduction rates in past research. However, to-date there has been no in-depth linguistic study of Spanish in Cíbola County. The current work presents an analysis of variable /s/ reduction in Cíbola Spanish, using data from the New Mexico-Colorado Spanish Survey. The results demonstrate that reduction in this dialect is conditioned primarily by linguistic rather than extralinguistic factors, which vary based on syllable position. The manuscript also briefly introduces the history of Cíbola, Hispanic identity & …