Digital Commons Network^™

Immigration Offenses Throughout Federal Sentencing: An Analysis Of The Impact Of Political Affiliation Among Districts, Robin Hood

All Master's Theses

Immigration has remained one of the most controversial political debates throughout the United States. Research has yet to fully examine the effects of political affiliation of federal districts on sentencing outcomes for specific immigration offenses. To fill the gaps in research, this study compares political affiliation of federal districts among immigration offenses to determine variations in sentencing outcomes. Data included Presidential and House of Representative votes for the 2016 election and Monitoring of Federal Sentencing for the fiscal years of 2015-2016. Analysis includes case processing/legal variables, defendant characteristics, and political affiliation. To analyze political affiliation, a binary logistic regression was …

Full Interpretable Machine Learning Method With In-Line Coordinates, Hoang Phan

All Master's Theses

This thesis explores a new approach for machine learning classification task in 2-dimensional space (2-D ML) with In-line Coordinates. This is a full machine learning approach that does not require to deal with n-dimensional data in n-dimensional space. In-line coordinates method allows discovering n-D patterns in 2-D space without loss of n-D information using graph representation of n-D data in 2-D. Specifically, this thesis shows that it can be done with In-line Based Coordinates in different modifications, which are defined, including static and dynamic ones. Some classification and regression algorithms based on these In-line Coordinates were explored. Two successful cases …

Machine Learning Model Optimization With Hyper Parameter Tuning Approach, Md. Riyad Hossain, Douglas Timmer

Manufacturing & Industrial Engineering Faculty Publications

Hyper-parameters tuning is a key step to find the optimal machine learning parameters. Determining the best hyper-parameters takes a good deal of time, especially when the objective functions are costly to determine, or a large number of parameters are required to be tuned. In contrast to the conventional machine learning algorithms, Neural Network requires tuning hyperparameters more because it has to process a lot of parameters together, and depending on the fine tuning, the accuracy of the model can be varied in between 25%-90%. A few of the most effective techniques for tuning hyper-parameters in the Deep learning methods are: …

Job Motivation And Personal Characteristics Of Library And Information Professionals In Universities, Dr. Naseer A

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Abstract

The present study attempts to find the relationship between personal characteristics and job motivation among Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals working in university libraries. The factors analyzed for studying job motivation are interest in work, co-workers, promotion and growth, good pay, opportunities for higher studies and training, qualification and advancement. Personal characteristics such as gender, age, qualifications, experience, the scale of pay, and membership in the professional bodies are analyzed with job motivation. The primary data for the study was collected through designing a structured questionnaire. The respondents of the study are two hundred and sixty-six LIS professionals …

Research Trend Of The Malaysian Journal Of Library And Information Science: A Bibliometrics Analysis Through Scopus Database, Shailesh Kumar Singh, Dr.Akhilesh Kumar Varma, Tanuja Bisht

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this research is to look at the literature published in the Malaysian Journal of Library and Information Science (MJLIS) from 1996 and 2021. The data for this study was taken from the Scopus Database. During the research study, 448 publications were identified. Bibliometric indices such as annual growth rate (AGR), relative growth rate (RGR), and doubling time (Dt), authorship pattern, degree of collaboration (DC), collaborative index (CI), most productive Institutes, and so on were used by the researchers. The study's findings suggest that the maximum number of papers (28.25%) were published in 2011, while the lowest number …

Indicators And Perspectives Of Bibliodiversity In The Spanish Publishing Sector, Jesús I. Rivas-García, Marta Magadán-Díaz

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

In the absence of research aimed to measure the bibliodiversity of the Spanish publishing sector through indicators, the general objective of this work is to determine quantitatively whether the Spanish publishing sector is bibliodiverse. The specific goals are the following: a) analyze those necessary conditions to promote bibliodiversity, b) identify the main variables that conform bibliodiversity, and c) measure the degree of bibliodiversity. From the study of the contributions of the academic literature, this research forms an analysis model with the main necessary conditions of the bibliodiversity of the Spanish publishing sector: deconcentration, digital transformation, and glocalization. After reflecting on …

Library And Information Science Entrepreneurship Education And Empowerment Of Post Universal Basic Education Students’ For Self-Reliance And Job Creation, Edith C. Edikpa Phd, Eucharia A. Onu Phd, Patricia U. Agu Phd, Honorius Chibuko, Chidumebi N. Oguejiofor

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study adopted descriptive survey research design using a sample of 600 students sampled from Awgu and Udi Education Zones of Enugu State as sample. The instrument for data collection was a researcher developed instrument titled Empowering Senior Secondary Students for Self-Reliance and job creation through Library and Information Science Entrepreneurship Education in the pandemic era. It was validated by three experts from the Faculty of Education, two from educational foundations and one from measurement and evaluation. The instrument was trial tested in Onitsha Education zone and the reliability co-efficient obtained was 0.8, 0.76, and 0.79 for the three clusters. …

Conservation And Preservation Of Manuscripts At National Library Of India And Rampur Raza Library: A Study, Nida Khan

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Manuscripts are the major source of information to know about the historical facts, cultural and old traditions of the past. They are scattered all over the world and in India about six million manuscripts are present in different languages and scripts. Therefore, steps have been taken to conserve and preserve the available manuscripts by every possible technique in the libraries. The present study examined the process of conservation and preservation of manuscripts adopted at National Library of India (NL) and Rampur Raza Library (RRL) along with the present conditions of manuscripts using the questionnaire and personal visit as the sources …

Library And Information Science Integrated Language Teaching Approach And Students’ Achievement In English Grammar, Cajethan I. Egbe Phd, Grace C. Offorma Prof, Goodluck Kadiri Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Different studies have shown that students perform poorly in English grammar. Thus, the study investigated the effect of Library and Information Science Integrated Language Teaching Approach on students’ achievement in English grammar. The achievement of students taught with ILTA were compared with those of students taught with the Form Based Approach (FAB). A quasi-experimental design was adopted. A total of 296 senior secondary school two students (83 males and 73 females) constituted the sample. They were assigned into experimental and control groups using a multi-stage sampling technique. The English Grammar Achievement Test (EGAT) was used for data collection. Treatment lasted …

Estimating The Background Error For Variational Data Assimilation Of An Ocean Model Using A Binless Analysis Of Innovations, Lewis William Lloyd Sampson

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

In order to create the cost function for variational data assimilation one needs to compute the background error covariance matrix, and this in turn requires information on the true state of the physical variables being modelled. This introduces a large difficulty which is often overcome by estimating the background error and then using this behaviour of the error to model the entire covariance during assimilation. A common approach for the estimation is the Hollingsworth and Lonnberg method, whereby the model forecasts subtracted from the observational data, known as the innovations, are manipulated using assumptions of correlation. This method requires the …

Food/Non-Food Classification Of Real-Life Egocentric Images In Low- And Middle-Income Countries Based On Image Tagging Features, Guangzong Chen, Wenyan Jia, Yifan Zhao, Zhi-Hong Mao, Benny Lo, Alex K Anderson, Gary Frost, Modou L Jobarteh, Megan A Mccrory, Edward Sazonov, Matilda Steiner-Asiedu, Richard S Ansong, Thomas Baranowski, Lora Burke, Mingui Sun

Children’s Nutrition Research Center Staff Publications

Malnutrition, including both undernutrition and obesity, is a significant problem in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In order to study malnutrition and develop effective intervention strategies, it is crucial to evaluate nutritional status in LMICs at the individual, household, and community levels. In a multinational research project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have been using a wearable technology to conduct objective dietary assessment in sub-Saharan Africa. Our assessment includes multiple diet-related activities in urban and rural families, including food sources (e.g., shopping, harvesting, and gathering), preservation/storage, preparation, cooking, and consumption (e.g., portion size and nutrition analysis). …

The Power Of Words In Crowdfunding, Yuanqing Li, Sibin Wu

Management Faculty Publications

In this chapter, the authors first provide an overview of the crowdfunding phenomenon. Through the literature review of crowdfunding success factors in the four models, the authors then summarize that the current entrepreneurial research focused on success factors has failed to sufficiently examine how the power of words would affect crowdfunding. Therefore, the authors propose that non-verbal and verbal cues are crucial to entrepreneurial financing success. Based on the insufficient research related with those cues, especially the non-verbal ones, the authors open an area of study on non-verbal and verbal cues in the entrepreneurial financing process by conducting and writing …

Assessment Of Teachers’ Level Of Information And Communication Technology Skills And Their Attitude To Virtual Teaching: Implication For Library And Information Science Teaching, Ifeoma Clementina Metu Phd, Ngozi Nwabugo Agu Phd, Lydia Ijeoma Eleje Phd, Mercy Ifunanya Ani Phd, Nneka Chinyere Ezeugo Phd, Christian Sunday Ugwuanyi Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

To ensure effective teaching and learning of Library and information science in schools, adequate information, and communication technology skills of teachers are sacrosanct. Thus, this study assessed the level of information and communication technology abilities among secondary school teachers, as well as their attitudes about virtual teaching. In addition, the investigation was intended to see if there is a link between respondents' attitudes about virtual teaching and their ability to use virtual technologies and whether there is a location gap between the study variables. The study's participants are all secondary school teachers in Nigeria's Anambra state public schools. Multi-stage sampling …

A Survey Of Open Source Statistical Software (Osss) And Their Data Processing Functionalities, Gao Niu, Richard S. Segall, Zichen Zhao, Zhijian Wu

Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the definitions of open source software, free software and freeware, and the concept of big data. The authors then introduce R and Python as the two most popular open source statistical software (OSSS). Additional OSSS, such as JASP, PSPP, GRETL, SOFA Statistics, Octave, KNIME, and Scilab, are also introduced in this paper with function descriptions and modeling examples. They further discuss OSSS's capability in artificial intelligence application and modeling and Popular OSSS-based machine learning libraries and systems. The paper intends to provide a reference for readers to make proper selections of open source software when statistical analysis …

A Bibiliometric Analysis Of The Journal Of Computers In Human Behavior: 1985–2019, Mohsen Jalali

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Background: The Journal of Computers in Human Behavior published its first issue in 1985. This study presents a general overview of the journal from 1985 until 2019 using bibliometric indicators to assess its performance.

Methods: The data for this study, dating between 1985 and 2019, was extracted from Scopus database. All the information was exported in CSV format for data analysis. Additionally, Visualization was done by VOS viewer software and applying techniques such as Co-occurrence of keywords, Co-citation of journals, and bibliographic coupling of countries.

Results: The results show that the Journal of Computers in Human Behavior has experienced a …

Bibliometric Analysis Of Research Trends On Role Of Dispute Resolution Mechanisms In Family Law Conflicts, Himanshi Parekh, Yogesh Dharangutti

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This paper is a bibliometric analysis of research publications in the field of dispute resolution of family matters. The paper analyses the frequency of publications in this arena and identifying the research gaps. The paper utilizes literature published on this subject available at the Scopus database from 2011 to 2020. A total of 59 documents varying from books, chapters, articles, and journals have been extracted and analyzed for the purpose of this study. This data is further analyzed and presented in the forms of tables, maps, graphs, etc using VOSviewer and IMAPBuilder software. The study shows that even though there …

National Policy Framework For Building Etds In India: With Special Reference Of Ugc Regulations And Open Doar Institutional Repositories, Dattatraya Trayambak Kalbande

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

To create awareness about responsible conduct of research, thesis, dissertation, promotion of academic integrity and prevention of misconduct including plagiarism in academic writing among student, faculty, researcher and staff is the main challenge behind higher educational institutions in India. Up to the 2005 theses, dissertations, research papers and rare collection in most of the Indian libraries, are kept in closed access and it is very difficult to the researchers to access them as a reference source for the further study as well as to avoid duplication, to avoid plagiarism to maintain research ethics in the research, but after that in …

General Brochure, University Of North Dakota. Energy And Environmental Research Center

EERC Brochures and Fact Sheets

Highlights the Energy & Environmental Research Center’s employment, various resources for energy, fuel testing, technology development, and facilities. [This item is an outdated or superseded version and retained for historical purposes only. It may no longer reflect current information, policies, or practices.]

Improving School Readiness In Home-Based Care Settings, Malea Peters, Shelby Wittenberg

Occupational Therapy Capstones

Introduction: The purpose of this project was to create a resource guide for home-based daycare providers to promote school readiness skills in preschool-age children. Several national and local policies promote children’s school readiness in early childhood years (NEGP, 1995). Children in home-based daycares may be at-risk for lower school readiness skills upon school entry compared to similar-age children in other childcare arrangements (Bassok, Greenberg, Fitzpatrick, & Loeb, 2016). Occupational therapists can play a role in supporting home-based daycare providers to implement school readiness activities for preschool-age children into their daily routines.

Investigation Of Anomalous Data Trends During Coal Dust Explosibilty Testing, Jacob Lee Miller

Doctoral Dissertations

Coal dust explosibility is a health and safety concern that has been a recognized hazard for over 100 years. Initial testing by the Author using a Siwek 20L apparatus recorded a secondary maximum pressure at higher dust concentrations (1,000-7,000g/m³) with Pulverized Pittsburgh Coal (PCC). Higher dust concentrations are beyond the typical ASTM E1226 testing procedure but are possible in mining and processing scenarios. No reference documents have been discovered that show a secondary maximum pressure at higher dust concentrations. Literature reviewed identified that once a coal dust concertation generates a peak pressure, the pressure remains constant or decreases …

Efficient Route Selection For Drone-Based Delivery Under Time-Varying Dynamics, Arindam Khanda, Federico Coro, Francesco Betti Sorbelli, Cristina M. Pinotti, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The use of drones can be a valuable solution for the problem of delivering goods for many reasons. In fact, they can be efficiently employed in time-critical situations when there is a traffic jam on the roads, to serve customers in hard-to-reach places, or simply to expand the business. However, due to limited battery capacities and the fact that drones can serve a single customer at a time, a drone-based delivery system (DBDS) aims to minimize the drones' energy usage for completing a route from the depot to the customer and go back to the depot for new deliveries. In …

Connectionless Edge-Cache Servers For Reducing Cellular Bandwidth Usage In Vehicular Networks, Rui Wang, Jayanthi Rao, Ce Zhou, Subir Biswas

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a novel caching mechanism based on Connectionless Edge Cache Servers in vehicular networks. The goal is to intelligently cache content within the vehicles and the edge servers so that majority of the vehiclerequested content can be obtained from those caches, thus minimizing the amount of cellular network usage needed for fetching content from a central server. A notable feature of the cache servers in this work is that they do not have backhaul connectivity. This makes the connectionless servers to be relatively less expensive compared to the usual Roadside Service Units (RSUs), and potentially moveable in response …

Visualization As A Service For Scientific Data, David Pugmire, James Kress, Jieyang Chen, Hank Childs, Jong Choi, Dmitry Ganyushin, Berk Geveci, Mark Kim, Scott Klasky, Xin Liang, For Full List Of Authors, See Publisher's Website.

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

One of the primary challenges facing scientists is extracting understanding from the large amounts of data produced by simulations, experiments, and observational facilities. The use of data across the entire lifetime ranging from real-time to post-hoc analysis is complex and varied, typically requiring a collaborative effort across multiple teams of scientists. Over time, three sets of tools have emerged: One set for analysis, another for visualization, and a final set for orchestrating the tasks. This trifurcated tool set often results in the manual assembly of analysis and visualization workflows, which are one-off solutions that are often fragile and difficult to …

Multimodal Learning For Hateful Memes Detection, Yi Zhou, Zhenhao Chen, Huiyuan Yang

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Memes are used for spreading ideas through social networks. Although most memes are created for humor, some memes become hateful under the combination of pictures and text. Automatically detecting hateful memes can help reduce their harmful social impact. Compared to the conventional multimodal tasks, where the visual and textual information is semantically aligned, hateful memes detection is a more challenging task since the image and text in memes are weakly aligned or even irrelevant. Thus, it requires the model to have a deep understanding of the content and perform reasoning over multiple modalities. This paper focuses on multimodal hateful memes …

Optimizing Error-Bounded Lossy Compression For Scientific Data On Gpus, Jiannan Tian, Sheng Di, Xiaodong Yu, Cody Rivera, Kai Zhao, Sian Jin, Yunhe Feng, Xin Liang, Dingwen Tao, Franck Cappello

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Error-bounded lossy compression is a critical technique for significantly reducing scientific data volumes. With ever-emerging heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) architecture, GPU-accelerated error-bounded compressors (such as CUSZ and cuZFP) have been developed. However, they suffer from either low performance or low compression ratios. To this end, we propose CUSZ+ to target both high compression ratios and throughputs. We identify that data sparsity and data smoothness are key factors for high compression throughputs. Our key contributions in this work are fourfold: (1) We propose an efficient compression workflow to adaptively perform run-length encoding and/or variable-length encoding. (2) We derive Lorenzo reconstruction in …

Scalable Online Vetting Of Android Apps For Measuring Declared Sdk Versions And Their Consistency With Api Calls, Daoyuan Wu, Debin Gao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android has been the most popular smartphone system with multiple platform versions active in the market. To manage the application’s compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform SDK versions in their manifest files. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of this modern software mechanism. Our objective is to measure the current practice of declared SDK versions (which we term as DSDK versions afterwards) in real apps, and the (in)consistency between DSDK versions and their host apps’ API calls. To successfully analyze a modern dataset of 22,687 popular apps (with an …

Understanding The Inter-Domain Presence Of Research Topics In The Computing Discipline, Subhajit Datta, Rumana Lakdawala, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The very nature of scientific inquiry encourages the flow of ideas across research domains in a discipline. Research topics with higher inter-domain presence tend to attract higher attention at individual and organizational levels. This is more pronounced in a discipline like computing, with its deeply intertwined ideas and strong connections with technology. In this paper, we study corpora of research publications across four domains of the computing discipline – covering more than 150,000 papers, involving more than 200,000 authors over 55 years and 175 publication venues – to examine the influences on inter-domain presence of research topics. We find statistically …

Who Am I?: Towards Social Self-Awareness For Intelligent Agents, Budhitama Subagdja, Han Yi Tay, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most of today’s AI technologies are geared towards mastering specific tasks performance through learning from a huge volume of data. However, less attention has still been given to make the AI understand its own purposes or be responsible socially. In this paper, a new model of agent is presented with the capacity to represent itself as a distinct individual with identity, a mind of its own, unique experiences, and social lives. In this way, the agent can interact with its surroundings and other agents seamlessly and meaningfully. A practical framework for developing an agent architecture with this model of self …

Assessing Solvent Viscosity Impact On The Physical Characteristics Of Polymeric Organogels, Cameron Hong

Honors Theses

Traditionally, studies of polymeric organogels focus on the impact of polymer factors (e.g., molecular weight and polymer concentration) on the gels’ mechanical and transport properties. Alternatively, this study seeks to assess the impact of altering solvent viscosity, while holding polymer factors constant. The gels in this study were composed of different viscosity mineral oils, styrene-ethylene-butylene-styrene (SEBS) triblock copolymer as a gelator, and oleic acid (OA) as a model drug. Samples were formulated to have 6.5, 11.2, and 15.7 wt% SEBS copolymer for each mineral oil, varying in viscosity from ≈30 mPa*s to ≈500 mPa*s. Uniaxial mechanical testing was performed to …

Assessing The Impact Of Block-Selective Homopolymers On The Diffusion Of Payload Through Polymeric Organogels, Ian Coates

Honors Theses

Styrenic polymer gels have received recent attention for their application in transdermal patches due to their unique properties. Previous research in the pharmaceutical industry has identified that polymeric gels, specifically styrenic gels, have the potential to encompass multiple functions of the transdermal delivery patch including controlling mechanical and delivery properties. To tailor styrenic gels either the gel nanostructure or the drug complex can be controlled. Specifically, this thesis investigated the effect of gel nanostructure in an attempt to control the gel diffusivity and mechanical properties. To control gel nanostructure a phase selective styrene homopolymer was used at varying concentrations. It …