Digital Commons Network^™

An Integrated Framework For Establishing Long-Term Transportation Management Strategies Promoting Sustainable Urban Growth, M Imtiaz Rahman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Urban land areas are experiencing a more rapid expansion compared to their population growth on a global scale. This phenomenon, known as urban sprawl, is characterized by low-density development in the outskirts of cities. This unplanned urban growth leads to changing urban transportation patterns, posing a threat to sustainable development. In response, government agencies implement growth management practices, with transportation management strategies playing a crucial role in achieving sustainable urban growth. However, developing effective growth management strategies is difficult because of several challenges, including limited understanding of the key influencing factors, the complex interdependencies among these factors, and the uncertainties …

Defining Success For An Introductory Mathematics Non-Stem Pathway Course, Clark D. Metz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The enduring debate surrounding college algebra, traditionally a gateway for STEM pathways, underscores the necessity for curricular evolution in response to the rising popularity of non-STEM majors. This dissertation explores the success of an applied college algebra course designed for non-STEM students. The study aimed to determine whether this alternative course could meet diverse student needs while promoting academic achievement and fostering positive attitudes towards mathematics. Findings revealed through a novel approach of a difference-in-differences analysis that students enrolled in the applied college algebra course exhibited higher pass rates due to the introduction of the new course. The lower failure …

Reconceptualizing South Asia: Bangladeshi Literature And The Politics Of Representation, Qazi Arka Rahman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

I explore Bangladeshi literature’s specificity and contributions in the context South Asia. This project expands the existing oeuvre of South Asian literary and postcolonial studies by bringing Bangladeshi literature into current debates on nation, nationality, and identity. I investigate the role of literary texts in developing a national ethos by doing analysis of twentieth to twenty-first-century Bangladeshi novels – in English and Bangla – to argue the necessity of developing a temporal understanding of South Asia rather than a spatial one. The dissertation demonstrates how Bangladeshi novels have contributed to and subverted the idea of “imagined community” following Bangladesh’s independence …

Ethnic-Racial Socialization Experiences Of Mexican American Youth, Katherine J. Bingham, Elizabeth A. Cutrer-Párraga, Timothy B. Smith

Faculty Publications

Research has shown that ethnic–racial socialization (ERS) predicts education and mental health outcomes for adolescents. However, limited research has evaluated the ERS experiences of Latinx students. The current study examined ERS experiences of Mexican American youth in four focus group interviews that were transcribed and analyzed at both the individual and group level using interpretive phenomenological analysis. Main themes included feeling like an outsider, navigating discrimination, encountering social/emotional difficulties, and achieving a positive identity. Each theme contained two to three subcategories that provide further insight into the Mexican Americans' ERS experiences. Participants reported within-group discrimination, motivation to disprove stereotypes, and …

Effects Of Cognitive And Social Demands On Linguistic Production For People With Moderate, Mild, Or No Aphasia, Tyson G. Harmon, Emily Mcdonald, Kyle Steele

Faculty Publications

Background

Most everyday communication occurs in situations where cognitive and social demands are present. These types of situations may compound language deficits for people with aphasia (PWA). An understanding of the language interference that may occur from cognitive and social demands is an important precursor for assessment and intervention that addresses everyday communication situations.

Aims

To determine how cognitively and socially demanding conditions affect micro- and macrolinguistic production for people with moderate, mild, or no aphasia during narrative discourse and to compare effects among groups.

Method

Thirty participants with mild (n = 9), moderate (n = 9), or no (n …

Infusing Machine Learning And Computational Linguistics Into Clinical Notes, Funke V. Alabi, Onyeka Omose, Omotomilola Jegede

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Entering free-form text notes into Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems takes a lot of time from clinicians. A large portion of this paper work is viewed as a burden, which cuts into the amount of time doctors spend with patients and increases the risk of burnout. We will see how machine learning and computational linguistics can be infused in the processing of taking clinical notes. We are presenting a new language modeling task that predicts the content of notes conditioned on historical data from a patient's medical record, such as patient demographics, lab results, medications, and previous notes, with the …

Active Uncertainty Representation Learning: Toward More Label Efficiency In Deep Learning, Salman Mohamadi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The primary goal of this dissertation is to investigate and improve the efficiency of deep learning algorithms, especially within computer vision problem domains, from the perspective of label-efficiency. This investigation showed that deep learning algorithms are mostly notorious for the lack of uncertainty representation. Accordingly, we aimed to develop an array of deep learning frameworks rich with uncertainty representation. These frameworks are mainly within two current pillars of machine learning, deep active learning and self-supervised learning. These frameworks include deep active ensemble sampling for efficient sample selection within deep active learning, a two-stage ensemble-based general self-training approach for existing visual …

Self-Efficacy And Parental Miscarried Helping In Adherence And Transition Readiness Among Adolescents And Young Adults With Epilepsy, Kirby-Estar G. Laguerre

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Background: Given the complex regimen associated with epilepsy, ensuring that adolescents and young adults (AYAs) adhere to their medications, and are ready to transition from pediatric to adult care, is crucial to optimizing their health outcomes. Several social and ecological factors such as self-efficacy and parental miscarried helping can strengthen or weaken an adolescent’s medication adherence and readiness to shift from pediatric to adult care. Intending to contribute to informing and improving clinical care, this study sought to understand the relationships between self-efficacy, parental miscarried helping, medication adherence, and transition readiness. Methods: Using a cross-sectional observational design, 46 AYAs with …

The Relationship Between Social Justice Attitudes And Compassion In Preservice Teachers: A Critically Compassionate Intellectualism Framework, Megan Hut

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation aims to gain further knowledge about the implementation of the Critically Compassionate Intellectualism (CCI; Cammarota & Romero, 2003) framework in teacher education. This framework, originally developed to provide a better education for Latine students who were being silenced in their original schools, emphasizes authentic caring, critical pedagogy, and social justice content. CCI aims to provide students with an education that better equips them to be part of our democratic society and is supposed to lead to an increase in students’ critical consciousness through developing compassionate relationships and making content related to students’ experiences. Based on the success of …

Reimagining The Refugee Figure: Survival Migration And Its After-Affects, Gabriella Pishotti

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

As the refugee crisis continues to worsen, so too will the field of refugee literature continue to expand into new directions to account for shifts in the refugee figure and developing concerns of survival migrant writers. Drawing from the foundational work of scholars such as Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed, I use affect theory as an intervention into these contemporary refugee texts to posit a rethinking of how we analyze refugee stories as narratives of crisis. I employ an affective approach to demonstrate how the emergency of forced migration can be narratively depicted in an embodied way that fosters connection …

Nasals And Nasalization In Yoruba-Ijebu Dialect, Khadijat Olakintan Abdulrazaq

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis focuses on how nasals behave in Yoruba-Ijebu Dialect (YID); YID is one of the dialects of the Yoruba language spoken in Nigeria. The main findings of the thesis are in two parts. The first part discusses local nasalization spreading in a YID CV syllable (sequence of a consonant and a vowel). Three local nasalization spreading rules (simplified to two), which are (i) Nasal spreading from an inherent nasal consonant to an adjacent oral vowel, (ii) Nasal spreading from an inherent nasal vowel to an adjacent sonorant consonant, (iii) Oral (-Nas) spreading from an obstruent to adjacent nasal vowels …

Encouraging Equity Through Rural Elementary Professional Learning, Jana K. Stone

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This study employed design-based research to explore the efficacy of professional learning materials and approaches in developing social justice advocacy with rural elementary teachers in Appalachia. Bronfenbrenner’s (2005) bioecological theory and Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort formed the theoretical framework for the design, implementation, and analysis. Mid-way through the study, Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis was included to inform the revision of intervention approaches. Four elementary teachers attended seven in-person informational discussion meetings over five months. During this time, these teachers also read two books and completed journal responses and surveys. The qualitative data was analyzed using Braun and Clark’s (2006) …

Analysis Of Mutations In Protein Kinase Ck2 Linked To Okur-Chung’S Neuropathy, Shivani Maan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The studies described here focus on mutations in protein kinase CK2 linked to ‘Okur-Chung’s Neuropathy’ (OCN), a neurodevelopmental disorder that involves 10 distinct mutations in the catalytic subunit CK2α. It has, however, remained unresolved if these mutations impair CK2α activity or if they also impair association with the regulatory CK2β subunit, which is necessary for assembly of the α2β2 holoenzyme. I describe efforts to resolve these questions for two mutations, Y50S and D175G. The former is thought to reside at the CK2α-CK2β interface, whereas the latter is located proximal to the active site. I therefore hypothesized that Y50S should perturb …

Conceptthread: Visualizing Threaded Concepts In Mooc Videos, Zhiguang Zhou, Li Ye, Lihong Cai, Lei Wang, Yigang Wang, Yongheng Wang, Wei Chen, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. Online learners need to watch the whole course video on MOOC platforms to learn the underlying new knowledge, which is often tedious and time-consuming due to the lack of a quick overview of the covered knowledge and their structures. In this paper, we propose ConceptThread , a visual analytics approach to effectively show the concepts and the relations among them to facilitate effective online learning. Specifically, given that the majority of MOOC videos contain slides, we first leverage video processing and speech analysis techniques, including shot recognition, …

Neurosymbolic Value-Inspired Ai (Why, What, And How), Amit Sheth, Kaushik Roy

Publications

The rapid progression of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, facilitated by the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), has resulted in their widespread application to provide human assistance across diverse industries. This trend has sparked significant discourse centered around the ever-increasing need for LLM-based AI systems to function among humans as part of human society, sharing human values, especially as these systems are deployed in high-stakes settings (e.g., healthcare, autonomous driving, etc.). Towards this end, neurosymbolic AI systems are attractive due to their potential to enable easy-tounderstand and interpretable interfaces for facilitating valuebased decision-making, by leveraging explicit representations of shared values. …

Ontolog Summit 2024 Talk Report: Healthcare Assistance Challenges-Driven Neurosymbolic Ai, Kaushik Roy

Publications

Although Artificial Intelligence technology has proven effective in providing healthcare assistance by analyzing health data, it still falls short in supporting decision-making. This deficiency largely stems from the predominance of opaque neural networks, particularly in mental health care AI applications, which raise concerns about their unpredictable and unverifiable nature. This skepticism hinders the transition from information support to decision support. This presentation will explore neurosymbolic approaches that combine neural networks with symbolic control and verification mechanisms. These approaches aim to unlock AI’s full potential by enhancing information analysis and decision-making support for healthcare assistance1.

The Challenges Of Pilot Language Training For Effective Aeronautical Communications In Multicultural Contexts, Aline Pacheco, Tales Figueiredo Silva

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This paper discusses the main elements that account for effective aeronautical communication in multicultural contexts and identifies the approaches that can offer support to these elements. Most exchanges are performed by people from different linguacultural backgrounds and, although Aviation English is the language to be used in operations, communication dynamics are supposed to require skills that go beyond language proficiency. Data were collected from a questionnaire answered by experienced pilots flying in international airspace and results were analyzed both from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The main findings show some of the challenges faced by pilots who are non-native …

Chatgpt In The Classroom: A Practical Guide For Educators, Sang-A Lee, Jacob Welch, Ryan J. Wallace, David Cross, Jon M. Loffi

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This paper explores the potential applications of ChatGPT, a powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI, for aviation education applications. The authors provide an overview of ChatGPT and its unique features, such as accessibility, conversational abilities, and personalized learning capabilities. The scalability of ChatGPT allows individualized and personalized instruction, a revolutionary aspect that can potentially enhance the student learning experience. This applied research employed an exploratory design to investigate ChatGPT's potential applications to enhance learning at varied levels of learning. The study investigated four research questions: (1) How can ChatGPT be used by students to support …

Human-Ai Teams In Aviation: Considerations From Human Factors And Team Science, Jenna Korentsides, Joseph R. Keebler, Crystal M. Fausett, Sabina M. Patel, Elizabeth H. Lazzara

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the way human-computer interaction (HCI) teams can collaborate and coordinate in various domains, including aviation and crew resource management (CRM). AI's transformative capabilities enhance teamwork, efficiency, and safety, particularly in risk management. AI's ability to process vast amounts of data and provide real-time insights enables informed decision-making and automation of repetitive tasks in aviation. By combining the strengths of AI and humans, outlined in our modified version of the ‘HABA-MABA’ framework, a dynamic teamwork relationship emerges, provided roles are successfully allocated. AI systems are able to act as intelligent assistants, offering timely recommendations, fostering effective …

Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition Domain Adaptation – A Case-Study In Aviation Maintenance, Nadine Amin, Tracy L. Yother, Julia Rayz

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

With timeliness and efficiency being critical in the aviation maintenance industry, the need has been growing for smart technological solutions that optimize and streamline the different underlying tasks (Bergkvist & Sabbagh, 2021). One such task is the technical documentation of the performed maintenance operations (Chandola et al., 2022). Instead of manual documentation, voice tools that transcribe spoken logbook entries allow technicians to document their work right away in a hands-free and time efficient manner. However, an accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) model requires large training corpora (Siyaev & Jo, 2021a), which are lacking in the domain of aviation maintenance. In …

Water Challenges At The U.S.-Mexico Border: Learning From Community And Expert Voices, Kyle Haines, Owen Temby, Josiah Heyman, Mya J. Brown, Fonna Forman, Christopher Fuller, Dongkyu Kim, Alex S. Mayer, Alexis Racelis

Political Science Faculty Publications

We discuss the results of a multi-dimensional learning process (expert surveys, community workshops) addressing water challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border. The grand institutional and political framework of the international border, and the tensions and gaps in it, dominates the water literature and expert concerns. However, social inequality and spatial and temporal diversity on both sides of the border emerge as important considerations from community input. Our goal is to make planning for regional water sustainability more comprehensive, both spatially and temporally, and more community responsive in a context of important divisions and inequalities. This is because the “sustainability” frame, as …

Elective Corporate Governance: Does Board Choice Matter?, Martin Gelter, Mathias M. Siems

Faculty Scholarship

Recent literature discusses how “menu laws” allow corporations to opt into one of multiple competing statutory regimes. This paper contributes to this literature by presenting original empirical research on the choice between corporate board models. Today, many countries not only allow modifications of a particular board structure, but they provide separate legal templates, giving firms a choice between a one-tier and a two-tier board model (and sometimes a third hybrid model). However, how companies actually use these rules is largely underexplored. Based on data from 14 European countries that permit a choice between two models, this paper examines the use …

Tracking Social Media Conversations On Extreme Weather Discussion: A Longitudinal Analysis, James Chen, Suhong Li

Information Systems and Analytics Department Faculty Journal Articles

With the increasing number of extreme weather events and various disasters, people are paying more attention to environmental issues than ever, particularly global warming. Public debate on it has grown on various platforms, including newspapers and social media. This study examines emotions of the general public on global warming in the context of extreme weather events, how emotions differ by location and the change of emotion on those topics over the time. Topic modeling is used to reveal dominant topics for each type of extreme weather. The results show that discussions on Twitter predominantly focus on floods and drought/heatwaves. There …

The Power Of Brotherhood: Saab's Role In Promoting School Belonging And Cultural Capital Wealth For Black Male Students, Terrence Jerome Hinson

Theses & Dissertations

School belongingness is the belief by students that the adults in the school care about their learning and them as individuals. Students are more likely to succeed when they feel connected to their school. In this qualitative dissertation study, I investigated the impact of a mentorship program for Black male high school students and its implications for promoting school belonging and cultural capital wealth. By exploring the experiences of 12 Black male high school student members of SAAB (Student African American Brotherhood), a nationally recognized mentorship program, my research revealed what it means to be a Black male SAAB student, …

A Unified Framework For Contextual And Factoid Question Generation, Chenhe Dong, Ying Shen, Shiyang Lin, Zhenzhou Lin, Yang Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Question generation (QG) aims to automatically generate fluent and relevant questions, where the two most mainstream directions are generating questions from unstructured contextual texts (CQG), such as news articles, and generating questions from structured factoid texts (FQG), such as knowledge graphs or tables. Existing methods for these two tasks mainly face challenges of limited internal structural information as well as scarce background information, while these two tasks can benefit each other for alleviating these issues. For example, when meeting the entity mention “United Kingdom” in CQG, it can be inferred that it is a country in European continent based on …

Analyzing Trust In Automation Using Large Language Models, Derek Koehl

Theses

This thesis explores the measurement of trust in the context of human interactions with automated systems. Trust is influenced by factors like perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity which presents a measurement challenge. Given the lack of a universally accepted model for trust, there is an abundance of trust measurement methods in the literature. This research aimed to ascertain the reliability of NLP-based measurements to determine whether such methods can shed light on the dimensionality of trust as a construct and to isolate a Linguistic Fingerprint™ of trust. The results lent support to trust as a unidimensional construct. There was little …

Training Underrepresented Minority Students For Careers In Public Health Leadership – Public Health Leaders Fellowship Program, Jigsa Tola

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Background: Shortage and lack of diversity in the United States public health workforce is well documented and remains a challenge to meaningfully improving the health of the population. Although the diversity of the public health workforce has implications for access, care quality, and career opportunities in low-income communities, there is no strong mechanism by which minorities are trained to replenish the workforce. Morehouse College’s Public Health Leaders Fellowship Program (MC-PHLFP) is a cooperative program with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to train undergraduate students for careers in public health leadership.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is …

Run Boys Run: Historical Markers Of Sherman's March To The Sea, Whitley A. Gatch

Honors College Theses

Georgia's historical markers highlight significant events in Georgia's history in the location where they happened– they are meant to be understood and consumed by the general public. Due to the widespread development of the Lost Cause narrative in the post-Confederate South, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, historical markers concerning Sherman's March to the Sea contain many false notions about General Sherman and his Union soldiers. Focusing on historical markers in Georgia's Coastal Plain and Low Country, this study analyzes the memorialization of the march and the impact of an invented mythico-history on the narrative portrayed as such falsehoods perpetuate …

"Widsith Came To Talk": Preservation Of The Scop Within Old English Poetry, India M. Johnson-Mccauley

Honors College Theses

This thesis discusses the role of the Old English scop in the context of the transition from orality to written works in Old English society. Scops, the storytellers, historians, and moral authorities within Old English society, utilized oral-formulaic composition to share the Germanic poetic tradition with the largely illiterate population. When Christian missionaries arrived in England and introduced the written language of Latin, the necessity of the scop gradually dissipated; many stories were written down in Latin and the authority on moral and historical teachings fell to the church. Orality continued in many regards, but the occupation of the scop …

Bridging The Gap: An Analysis Of Elementary Literacy Instruction, And Proposed Solutions To Exponentiate Literacy Skills, Avery E. Gray

Honors College Theses

The reading achievement gap is generally identified as the increasing disparity between higher-level students and lower-level students within the same grade or school level. Student data presented in the form of secondary reading assessment scores were analyzed for the state of Georgia, as well as nationally, for student achievement regarding reading skills in public schools from grades 3-5. Interviews conducted with educational professionals were conducted to reveal anecdotal manifestations of what the presented data looks like in terms of student ability, and how the teaching practice has reacted to such manifestations. The evaluation of these consistencies and explanations given to …