Digital Commons Network^™

Covid-19 Response In An Alternative America: Legal Tools That The Us Government Failed To Invoke, Neil Davey

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Winning The Imitation Game: Setting Safety Expectations For Automated Vehicles, William H. Widen, Philip Koopman

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Safety And Efficacy Of Ixoberogene Soroparvovec In Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration In The United States (Optic): A Prospective, Two-Year, Multicentre Phase 1 Study, Arshad M. Khanani, David S. Boyer, Charles C. Wykoff, Carl D. Regillo, Brandon G. Busbee, Dante Pieramici, Carl J. Danzig, Brian C. Joondeph, James C. Major, Adam Turpcu, Szilárd Kiss

Wills Eye Hospital Papers

Background

Gene therapy, successfully used in rare, monogenetic disorders, may prove to be a durable management approach for common, polygenetic conditions, including neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). Repeated injections, oftentimes monthly, and possibly for decades, of vascular endothelial growth factor antagonists (anti-VEGF), is the standard for nAMD. We hypothesised that an in-office, intravitreal administration of ixoberogene soroparvovec (ixo-vec, formerly ADVM-022), a single-dose gene therapy encoding for the proven anti-VEGF protein, aflibercept, would transform retinal cells to continually produce aflibercept to minimise treatment burden in nAMD.

Methods

In this two-year, open-label, prospective, multicentre phase 1 study, patients with nAMD responding to …

Regulating The Revolution: A Legal Roadmap To Optimizing Ai In Healthcare, Fazal Khan

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Search For Osme Bonds With Π Systems As Electron Donors, Xin Wang, Qingzhong Li, Steve Scheiner

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

The Osme bond is defined as pairing a Group 8 metal atom as an electron acceptor in a noncovalent interaction with a nucleophile. DFT calculations with the ωB97XD functional consider MO₄ (M = Ru, Os) as the Lewis acid, paired with a series of π electron donors C₂H₂ , C₂H₄ , C₆H₆ , C₄H₅N, C₄H₄O, and C₄H₄S. The calculations establish interaction energies in the range between 9.5 and 26.4 kJ/mol. Os engages in stronger interactions than does Ru, …

Adjuvant Pluronic F68 Is Compatible With A Plant Root-Colonizing Probiotic, Pseudomonas Chlororaphis O6, Amanda R. Streeter, Anthony Cartwright, Mohammad Zargaran, Anagha Wankhade, Anne J. Anderson, David W. Britt

Biological Engineering Faculty Publications

Plant probiotic bacteria are being increasingly used to maximize both the productivity and quality of field crops. Pseudomonas chlororaphis O6 (PcO6) is a plant root colonizer with probiotic activities. This bacterium produces an array of metabolites, including a group of phenazines that are functional in plant protection. The paper reports responses of PcO6 to a nonionic triblock copolymer surfactant, Pluronic F68. This Pluronic exhibits membrane "healing" activity and improves cryopreservation recovery in eukaryotic cells. The product is FDA-approved and is applied as an adjuvant in formulations used in agriculture, medicine, and biotechnology. Growth of PcO6 on …

Artificial Intelligence And The Administrative State: Regulating The Government Use Of Decision-Making Technology, Gordon Unzen

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

“Storm Of Insanity”: The Chaotic Nature Of Relief Work And Financial Compensation Following The Johnstown Flood Of 1889, Carly N. Marze

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork dam ruptured, and the resulting wall of water pummeled through the small town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing over 2,000 people. The cause was negligence by the dam’s proprietors at the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club. As bodies lay scattered throughout the Conemaugh Valley and Johnstown sat nearly twenty-feet deep in mud and debris, two questions arose: What relief work should be done to restore Johnstown? And how should this relief be financed? Lack of resources and the urgency of the work created a chaotic atmosphere in which constantly shifting procedures and disputes …

First Destination Survey 2023: For Degrees Awarded December 2022-August 2023, Hart Career Center, Illinois Wesleyan University

First Destination Survey

No abstract provided.

Data-Driven Approaches To System Analysis And Control Design, Minh Vu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In this thesis, we study the integration of data and computational methods in nonlinear system analysis and control design. In the first part of this thesis, we develop a constructive framework for designing a set of candidate functions from data such that desired control-theoretic conditions are satisfied. This new design framework is aimed at offering a general data-driven approach to a number of problems in systems and control, including stability analysis, stabilization, and safety-critical control designs. The second half of the thesis focuses on the specific problem of designing a point-to-point steering, which is often considered in many practical control …

Divergent Self-Assembly Of Block Heterochiral Stereoisomer Arrays, Conor Louis O'Neill

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The autonomous organization of parts into ordered architectures, or biomolecular self-assembly, is an elementary natural process that defines and guides the construction and function of living organisms. This phenomenon has emerged as a potent tool for the creation of novel biomaterials, with peptide-based instances benefitting from intrinsic modularity, ease of de novo design and synthesis, biocompatibility, and chemical versatility. These properties enable methodical modifications that generate suprastructures with a wide variety of morphologies and functionalities, supporting a broad range of biomedical applications. Further, the chiral nature of amino acids permits synthesis of either left- or right-handed peptides; in recent years, …

The Development And Validation Of Novel Imaging Biomarkers For Uterine Contraction, Cervix And Placenta In Pregnancy, Wenjie Wu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Annually, nearly half a million neonates in the United States and 15 million globally are born preterm, defined as prior to 37 completed weeks of gestation. These births present elevated risks of neonatal mortality and long-term neurological deficits. The predominant obstetric precursors of preterm birth (PTB) include spontaneous preterm labor (45%), medically-indicated deliveries (30%), and preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM, 25%). Each precursor is associated with distinct physiological or structural alterations such as uterine contractions, placental dysfunction, or cervical insufficiency. Current methodologies for monitoring uterine contractions, such as intrauterine pressure catheters and electrohysterography, possess limitations in spatial resolution, coverage, …

Mechanisms And Prevention Of Antibiotic Resistant Organism Spread In Hospitals, Erin P. Newcomer

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Our quest as a species to treat and prevent disease has led us to develop medical care that would have been inconceivable even one century ago. However, as we learn to overcome previous roadblocks, new hurdles that we hadn’t even considered continue to present themselves. Once we learned to understand the germ theory of disease, we sought treatments for infectious diseases, which led us to the development of antibiotics. Antibiotics are responsible for saving countless lives and have ushered in the advances in other fields of medicine like cancer treatment and surgery. Now, antibiotic resistance threatens our ability to treat …

Interpretable Deep Learning Via Sparse Representation For Protein-Dna Interactions, Shane Kuei-Hsien Chu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

A central theme in modeling in regulatory genomics is to consider what representation is suited for DNA sequences that give the most helpful information. Traditionally, there are k-mers, position-weight-matrices, parametric statistical models like Hidden Markov models, and, more recently, deep neural network. In this work, we introduce sparse representations as a principled framework for problems in regulatory genomics. We show that sparse representation is a framework that allows us to build techniques to answer challenging inferential questions in regulatory genomics. Leveraging sparse representations, we reveal that gapped and long motifs are prevalent in in-vivo datasets like ChIP-Seq, often corresponding to …

Improving And Integrating Quantitative Single Cell Spatial Biology For Theranostic Medicine, Peng Lu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Disease states are the result of a complex interplay of many different cell types interacting in close proximity in the context of often heterogeneous tissues. Alpha particles are drawing intense research and clinical interest because of their potent cytotoxic effects and their short path lengths. Analyzing the dose distribution and tissue micro-environment for alpha therapy plays a key role in predicting the efficacy of this targeted radiotherapy. However, to date there have been no direct on-tissue analytical methods for alpha dose distributions and the corresponding tissue microenvironments. Therefore, we have developed a pipeline to overcome this limitation by utilizing quantitative …

The Mechanobiology Of Cell Plasticity, Yuan Hong

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The cell is a sophisticated machine, integrating chemical and physical inputs to decide upon the mechanobiological outputs that the body requires every second, in cardiomyocytes that make heartbeats, in fibroblasts that heal wounds, and in sarcomeres that contract muscles. Malfunction of mechanotransduction or mechanical inputs is implicated in diseases such as fibrosis, cancers, and cardiomyopathies, and a pressing quest is underway to unravel the intricacies of how mechanical force orchestrates the activation of cells. This dissertation explores these fundamental mechanisms of cell activation using integrated mathematical and engineered cell culture models. The work begins with the discovery that the directionality …

Deep Representation Learning For Clinical Predictive Models, Bing Xue

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In the era of digital health, Electronic Health Records (EHR) integrate clinical data from various sources, presenting a wealth of information across multiple modalities. While this abundance allows for comprehensive patient characterization, the intricate nature and high dimensionality of EHR data pose challenges for clinicians, particularly in the dynamic landscape of clinical decision-making. This dissertation delves into the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate risk identification and provide decision support in clinical settings. The research unfolds in three key contributions. First, we investigate ML's potential in constructing a multi-modal framework for generating informative risk assessments. …

Decentralized Computing For Reliable Home Automation, Rahav Dor

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Smart homes are distributed systems that should provide reliable home automation services. Distributed controllers have been used to improve the reliability of smart homes. However, despite the redundancy in controllers, the reliability of smart homes is hindered by the unreliable network infrastructure comprising home Wi-Fi and low-power wireless networks. As a result, smart homes cannot be trusted with much more than casual automation to date. This dissertation identifies the limitations of traditional fault-tolerant approaches that require inter-controller coordination over an unreliable network infrastructure. A new class of decentralized control paradigm named Banyan, with fully autonomous controllers, is introduced by this …

Desmoglein-2 As A Cancer Modulator: Friend Or Foe?, Kay Myo Min, Charlie Ffrench, Barbara Mcclure, Michael Ortiz, Emma Dorward, Michael Samuel, Lisa Ebert, Mỹ Mahoney, Claudine Bonder

Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Cancer Biology Faculty Papers

Desmoglein-2 (DSG2) is a calcium-binding single pass transmembrane glycoprotein and a member of the large cadherin family. Until recently, DSG2 was thought to only function as a cell adhesion protein embedded within desmosome junctions designed to enable cells to better tolerate mechanical stress. However, additional roles for DSG2 outside of desmosomes are continuing to emerge, particularly in cancer. Herein, we review the current literature on DSG2 in cancer and detail its impact on biological functions such as cell adhesion, proliferation, migration, invasion, intracellular signaling, extracellular vesicle release and vasculogenic mimicry. An increased understanding of the diverse repertoire of the biological …

Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Computational Thinking: Enactment In Elementary Classrooms, Victoria Macann, Aman Yadav

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Technology has increasingly permeated many aspects of everyday life and this evolution raises the need for individuals to understand how the digital world works and what opportunities and risks it brings (Nouri, Zhang, Mannila & Norén, 2019). For this to be an experience for everyone, we need to rethink how we integrate computational thinking (CT) and provide teachers with tools to center their students’ identities, experiences, and cultures in the classroom. In this paper, we present two case studies of primary (elementary) teachers from a full primary (student ages 5–13) semi-rural school in the North Island of New Zealand that …

A Method And A System Of Providing Data Visualization In A Server, Faiz Ahmed, Sudharshan Krishnakumar Gaddam, Thousif Ahmed, Aparajit Lal Kumar Thirukonda Jeyakumar

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides a method and a system for providing data visualization in a server. In the present disclosure, the server initiates an application of a plurality of applications based on a command provided by a user. Upon execution of the command, the server initiates three actions, namely, creates a web server section, a clean-up section, and a job section. The server may perform jobs based on the command of the user in the job section. The server monitors metrics of the jobs and stores collected metrics. Parallelly, the server may operate a user interface for receiving user request …

Generating Geospatial Scene Summaries Using A Large Language Model, Jim Shuma, Ohan Oda

Defensive Publications Series

Digital map services offer a live view feature that provides users an augmented view of their surroundings. However, these features are only accessible to users who can view a display screen. While screen reader technology can provide voice output of on-screen content, such techniques are not particularly suitable for the type of information displayed in a live view. This disclosure leverages the summarization capabilities of a large language model (LLM) to provide a scene description to a user that is using a live map view. Per the techniques, in response to a user request from a user device, a digital …

Boeing Co: Ethical Failures And Business Scandals, Bahia Benabbad Touirs

Journal of Global Awareness

Recent advances in technology have completely changed people’s outlook on the world. Instant access to limitless information has revamped consumer behavior and expectations from the companies they interact with; therefore, social responsibility has become a crucial talking point in the business world as customers increasingly monitor their actions. A recent study showed that 70% of consumers want to know how brands are addressing social and environmental issues, and 46% of consumers believe it plays a decisive factor in their purchasing decision process (Duan, Hofer, & Aloysius, 2021). Even though this has its effects in every industry, this paper will focus …

Social Engineering Cyber Threats, Young B. Choi, Josh Rubin

Journal of Global Awareness

The article explores the pervasive threat of social engineering in cybersecurity, emphasizing its success in infiltrating information systems by manipulating individuals rather than employing traditional hacking methods. The author underscores the vulnerability arising from human trust, as individuals, especially those lacking technology education, tend to be targets. While cryptography offers partial security, social engineering complicates overall system security. Mitigation strategies include educating employees on threats, risks, and security policies, coupled with enforcing penalties for noncompliance. Additionally, employing two-factor authentication and physical token-based access adds layers of protection. The article delves into semantic attacks, classifying various exploitation methods and emphasizing the …

Apple: Global Ethics And Transformational Leadership, Bisma Ahmed

Journal of Global Awareness

Apple Inc. is an American technological company that designs, manufactures, and sells various products such as laptops, phones, accessories, streaming services, licensing services, and so much more. The paper explores the corporate responsibility and unethical business practices that arise from the global sourcing of Apple’s products. The company established many relationships with suppliers in East Asia to meet the rigorous demands of consumers, promising high-quality products at the expense of factory workers. However, global sourcing comes with unethical business practices. There have been various cases against Apple’s suppliers. This research highlights unfair working conditions, overworking employees, and environmental pollution that …

The Coming Transformative Impact Of Large Language Models And Artificial Intelligence On Global Business And Education, Eva K. Jermakowicz

Journal of Global Awareness

Rapid advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) as a basis for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, and their sudden wide accessibility, have garnered significant attention recently. These technologies (e.g., ChatGPT, BARD), which have the ability to predict and generate human language, have led to excitement and concerns regarding their use in various industries. This paper explores the history of LLM, examines their applications in business and education, and delves into the critical ethical concerns and challenges of these emerging technologies to ensure that their uses are not only effective, but also responsible and equitable.

Notes From The Editor, Jay Nathan

Journal of Global Awareness

No abstract provided.

Postmodern Philosophy And Its Influence On Modern Museum Theory And Development, Mauri Liljenquist

The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing

History legitimizes its role in society through the benefits it provides for the public. The idea of history in the ivory tower, while it appeals to some historians and scholars, can never be sufficient to justify the field. Instead it is what emerges from the ivory tower and how that product influences and affects the outside world that determines the value of historical endeavors. The dissemination of history to the public is one of the most significant aspects of the profession. Accuracy and integrity in research and writing are the primary responsibilities of the historian. Following these, the next most …

Re-Visions: Examining Narratives Of Asian American Mental Health, Kenji Aoki

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This paper examines the intersection between Asian American mental health and resilience tropes. While research has acknowledged that Asian Americans have disparate mental health gaps regarding mental health stigma and how Asian American young adults are the only racial group in which suicide is their leading cause of death, there has been limited study that attempts to directly convey Asian American voices beyond broad statistical or cultural generalizations. To supplement ongoing research and Asian American livelihoods, this essay conjectures and attempts to illuminate the histories, mental illness, and health narratives of Asian Americans, the good, the bad, the ugly, the …

The Modular Fiction Of Ken Liu, Elizabeth Lawrence

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Ken Liu is an influential translator of Chinese-language science fiction and an award winning author of original speculative fiction as well. His readers routinely observe that Liu draws on his Chinese heritage for world building and plot development. Less remarked upon are parallels between Liu’s creative process and modular production within Chinese literary and material culture. In this article, I explore these parallels through Liu’s wide-ranging fiction. The intent is not to pigeonhole Liu as a distinctly Chinese or Chinese American author – he has rejected such labels himself – but to universalize models of Chinese creative expression.