Digital Commons Network^™

Simulated Effects Of Postpartum Depression On Maternal-Infant Bonding: Mediated By Reward-Related Responses To Infant Facial Cuteness, Caitlin Harp

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Infant cuteness (facial cuteness in particular) is linked to evolutionary adaptations to motivate caretaking and protective behaviors (Kringelbach et al., 2008). Previous neuroimaging work has demonstrated that infant cuteness activates reward-related regions in the brain (Glocker et al., 2009) and behavioral work suggests that the reward value of cuteness is linked to maternal tendencies (Hahn et al., 2015). It is estimated that 15% of new mothers experience postpartum depression (PPD) (Wisner et al., 2013), which impacts the mesolimbic system and is linked to anhedonia (i.e., reduced ability to experience pleasure). Based on the above literature, this study used a simulated …

“Bad At Reading”: Narratives Of Boys With Negative Reading Self-Concept, Aimee Talmadge

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

There is a clear and consistent gender gap between students who view themselves as readers and those who do not (Love & Hamston, 2003). Overwhelmingly, young men report a lower self-perception of their ability and interest in reading and literacy, and this in turn impacts their growth and motivation in literacy learning. Through this study, I interviewed six students, specifically male high school students who self-identified as bad at reading or disliking reading. Through one-on-one interviews and focus groups, I explored how they viewed themselves as “non-readers” and why their reading self-perception is negative. The findings show how the lack …

Evaluating The Trojan Y Chromosome Strategy For The Removal Of Invasive Sacramento Pikeminnow From The Eel River, Ca, Alexander W. Juan

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The recent introduction and spread of Sacramento Pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus grandis) in Northern California’s Eel River Basin represents a significant threat and impediment to the recovery of several threatened native fish species. This study was undertaken to evaluate the Trojan Y Chromosome Strategy (TYC) for the extirpation of pikeminnow from the basin. TYC is a genetic biocontrol method that relies on the production and stocking of fish with YY sex chromosomes, which may be phenotypically male (YY male) or female (YY female). These YY fish produce all-male offspring when mating with their wild conspecifics and TYC can lead to …

The Potential For Competency-Based Teaching Methodologies To Increase Intervention Procedural Fidelity And Reduce Self-Reported Verbal Behavior Associated With Turnover In Behavior Technicians, Dean I. Shearer

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Within the field of applied behavior analysis, behavior technicians (staff who are supervised by behavioral analysists and provide direct services to clients) experience relatively high rates of turnover. It is possible that improved teaching methodologies which boost the efficacy of these staff may help reduce this turnover by reducing verbal behavior associated with burnout and improve perceptions of training and supervision. We compared intervention procedural fidelity and staff ratings of burnout, supervision, and satisfaction with training following a didactic training, a behavioral skills training, and after a month-long follow up. We found that when mastery criteria were set sufficiently high …

Interactions Between New Zealand Mud Snails (Potamopyrgus Antipodarum) And Toxic Cyanoabacteria (Anabaena) In Baduwa’T (Mad River), Humboldt County, California, Cecilia F. Kennelly

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Invasive species in freshwater systems are circulated around the globe, wreaking havoc on natural communities. The New Zealand mud snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum) is a very successful aquatic invader that has established populations in freshwater streams, lakes, and rivers around the globe. The goal of this project was to evaluate the interactions of invasive New Zealand mud snails (NZMS) and toxic cyanobacteria Anabaena in the Mad River in Humboldt County, California. These two species of concern are found in similar habitats along the river, but their whether NZMS consume Anabaena or affect toxin production is unknown. First, I conducted …

Finding Connection: Teaching With Culturally Responsive Texts, Chloe N. Pounds

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Deciding which texts to teach in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms poses challenges for educators. Traditionally, many teachers rely on established curricula, however, the increasing diversity of student populations highlights the need for texts that reflect student interests and backgrounds, as well as the need for culturally responsive pedagogical practices. To investigate student perceptions and benefits of culturally diverse texts, I created a short story unit and collected student reflections and teacher observations.

Analyzing Stakeholder Perceptions On Biogas Production Incentives Under California’S Low Carbon Fuel Standard, Emily Read

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Accounting for more than half of California’s methane emissions, the dairy and livestock sector has become a central focus for the state’s emission reduction efforts. As a leader in climate policy, California’s approach to addressing agricultural methane emissions has the potential to shape the future of livestock agriculture on a national and global scale. The state has prioritized anaerobic digesters as the primary strategy for addressing livestock methane, a decision that has been both widely contested and strongly supported by stakeholders. This thesis investigates stakeholder perceptions on livestock biogas under California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) using interview and survey …

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. …

K-Perm: Personalized Response Generation Using Dynamic Knowledge Retrieval And Persona-Adaptive Queries, Kanak Raj, Kaushik Roy, Vamshi Bonagiri, Priyanshul Govil, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Raxit Goswami, Manas Gaur

Publications

Personalizing conversational agents can enhance the quality of conversations and increase user engagement. However, they often lack external knowledge to tend to a user’s persona appropriately. This is particularly crucial for practical applications like mental health support, nutrition planning, culturally sensitive conversations, or reducing toxic behavior in conversational agents. To enhance the relevance and comprehensiveness of personalized responses, we propose using a two-step approach that involves (1) selectively integrating user personas and (2) contextualizing the response with supplementing information from a background knowledge source. We develop K-PERM (Knowledge-guided PErsonalization with Reward Modulation), a dynamic conversational agent that combines these elements. …

Tutorial: Knowledge-Infused Artificial Intelligence For Mental Healthcare, Kaushik Roy

Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for mental healthcare (MHCare) have been ever-growing after realizing the importance of early interventions for patients with chronic mental health (MH) conditions. Social media (SocMedia) emerged as the go-to platform for supporting patients seeking MHCare. The creation of peer-support groups without social stigma has resulted in patients transitioning from clinical settings to SocMedia supported interactions for quick help. Researchers started exploring SocMedia content in search of cues that showcase correlation or causation between different MH conditions to design better interventional strategies. User-level Classification-based AI systems were designed to leverage diverse SocMedia data from various MH conditions, …

Ai Trustworthy: Ethical Challenges And Strategies, Jian Liu, Iwan Sandjaja, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper explores the pivotal role of trust in the widespread application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across various domains. We review AI applications in sectors like energy, healthcare, and autonomous vehicles and discuss the crisis of human trust they face. This paper introduces a novel framework that delineates the relationship between AI transparency and user trust, highlighting specific industry applications. Through a systematic review of recent literature, we first delve into factors such as emotional response, acceptance, transparency, accuracy, and interpretability that shape human trust in AI. We then underscore the necessity of ethical AI practices and highlight the importance …

Shsp Dean's Newsletter, Winter 2024, Robert W. Amler

SHSP Dean’s Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Designing High-Performance Identity-Based Quantum Signature Protocol With Strong Security, Sunil Prajapat, Pankaj Kumar, Sandeep Kumar, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, M. Shamim Hossain

VMASC Publications

Due to the rapid advancement of quantum computers, there has been a furious race for quantum technologies in academia and industry. Quantum cryptography is an important tool for achieving security services during quantum communication. Designated verifier signature, a variant of quantum cryptography, is very useful in applications like the Internet of Things (IoT) and auctions. An identity-based quantum-designated verifier signature (QDVS) scheme is suggested in this work. Our protocol features security attributes like eavesdropping, non-repudiation, designated verification, and hiding sources attacks. Additionally, it is protected from attacks on forgery, inter-resending, and impersonation. The proposed scheme benefits from the traditional designated …

Adapting And Validating A Survey To Assess Host Communities Support For Migration, Jhon G. Botello, Katherine Palacio, Erika Frydenlund, Humberto Llinás, Jose Padilla

VMASC Publications

Migration presents challenges to receiving communities, as it tests their ability to respond to unexpected expenditures and social stresses. Evaluating the local impact of rapid and substantial migration flows is difficult due to the absence of a validated instrument for assessing community support for migration. Our study adapted and validated a Support for Migration Assessment survey (SMA) based on Social Exchange Theory (SET). The validation of the SMA contributes in two significant ways. First, it establishes an instrument that enables the assessment of support for migration (SFM) by considering community-level factors: trust in institutions (TII), overall community satisfaction (OCS), and …

The Nature And Validity Of Implicit Bias Training For Health Care Providers And Trainees: A Systematic Review, Nao Hagiwara, Conor Duffy, John Cyrus, Nadia Harika, Ginger S. Watson, Tiffany L. Green

VMASC Publications

The number of health care educational institutions/organizations adopting implicit bias training is growing. Our systematic review of 77 studies (published 1 January 2003 through 21 September 2022) investigated how implicit bias training in health care is designed/delivered and whether gaps in knowledge translation compromised the reliability and validity of the training. The primary training target was race/ethnicity (49.3%); trainings commonly lack specificity on addressing implicit prejudice or stereotyping (67.5%). They involved a combination of hands-on and didactic approaches, lasting an average of 343.15 min, often delivered in a single day (53.2%). Trainings also exhibit translational gaps, diverging from current literature …

Embedding Software Engineering In Mixed Methods: Computationally Enhanced Risk Communication, Ann Marie Reinhold, Madison H. Munro, Elizabeth A. Shanahan, Ross J. Gore, Barry C. Ezell, Clemente I. Izurieta

VMASC Publications

Mixed methods research ameliorates many convergent research challenges within the contemporary sociotechnical landscape. We suggest the integration of software engineering in mixed methods studies is a critical step to address some of the remaining and persistent challenges. One such research challenge where software engineering is particularly well suited is in hazard preparedness—in particular, the creation of risk communication messages to mitigate or prevent harm. Computationally enhanced risk communication is convergent research that integrates software engineering and social science research for the benefit of protecting humans and infrastructure. To this end, we developed a mixed methods framework for the efficient construction …

Cyclegan-Gradient Penalty For Enhancing Android Adversarial Malware Detection In Gray Box Setting, Fabrice Setephin Atedjio, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Frederica F. Nelson, Sachin S. Shetty, Charles A. Kamhoua

VMASC Publications

Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to Android malware detection by undermining the effectiveness of machine learning-based systems. The rapid increase in Android apps complicates the management of malicious software that can compromise user defense solutions. Many current Android defense techniques rely on deep learning methods. Malicious users exploit GAN-based attacks to achieve adversarial attack transferability and deceive target models by crafting adversarial examples based on known models. We propose a new model based on a Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) to detect GAN-based attacks. This model incorporates a gradient penalty to enhance the detection rate of the target model. Our …

A Defensive Strategy Against Android Adversarial Malware Attacks, Fabrice Setephin Atedjio, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Frederica F. Nelson, Sachin S. Shetty, Charles A. Kamhoua

VMASC Publications

Due to the popularity of Android mobile devices over the past ten years, malicious Android applications have significantly increased. Systems utilizing machine learning techniques have been successfully applied for Android malware detection to counter the constantly changing Android malware threats. However, attackers have developed new strategies to circumvent these systems by using adversarial attacks. An attacker can carefully craft a malicious sample to deceive a classifier. Among the evasion attacks, there is the more potent one, which is based on solid optimization constraints: the Carlini-Wagner attack. Carlini-Wagner is an attack that uses margin loss, which is more efficient than cross-entropy …

Designing A Blockchain-Empowered Telehealth Artifact For Decentralized Identity Management And Trustworthy Communication: Interdisciplinary Approach, Xueping Liang, Nabid Alam, Tahmina Sultana, Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

Background: Telehealth played a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to function as an essential component of health care. Existing platforms cannot ensure privacy and prevent cyberattacks.

Objective: The main objectives of this study are to understand existing cybersecurity issues in identity management and trustworthy communication processes in telehealth platforms and to design a software architecture integrated with blockchain to improve security and trustworthiness with acceptable performance.

Methods: We improved personal information security in existing telehealth platforms by adopting an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining design science, social science, and computer science in the health care domain, with prototype …

Enhancing Cyber Resilience Through Traffic Generation Patterns In Complex Networks: A Study On Cascading Failures, Aymar Le Père Tchimwa Bouom, Jean-Pierre Lienou, Wilson Ejuh Geh, Frederica Nelson, Sachin Shetty, Charles Kamhoua

VMASC Publications

Network resilience is the capacity of a network to maintain and restore its fundamental operations during or after a failure. This paper investigates the resilience of communication networks with heterogeneous nodes, with host nodes that generate and receive packets and routers that only forward packets. We focus on how traffic generation patterns, defined as the distribution of data packet creation across hosts, affect network resilience. While previous studies identified optimal host placements that balance traffic loads and enhance network performance, this research explores how traffic generation patterns influence network resilience, particularly during cascading failures, where the failure of one node …

Automated Classification Of Elementary Instructional Activities: Analyzing The Consistency Of Human Annotations, Jonathan K. Foster, Peter Youngs, Rachel Van Aswegen, Samarth Singh, Ginger S. Watson, Scott T. Acton

VMASC Publications

Despite a tremendous increase in the use of video for conducting research in classrooms as well as preparing and evaluating teachers, there remain notable challenges to using classroom videos at scale, including time and financial costs. Recent advances in artificial intelligence could make the process of analyzing, scoring, and cataloguing videos more efficient. These advances include natural language processing, automated speech recognition, and deep neural networks. To train artificial intelligence to accurately classify activities in classroom videos, humans must first annotate a set of videos in a consistent way. This paper describes our investigation of the degree of inter-annotator reliability …

L∞ Bounds For Transient Growth In Repetitive And Iterative Learning Control Systems, Douglas A. Bristow, John R. Singler

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper revisits the problem of large transient growth in Iterative Learning Control (ILC) and Repetitive Process Control (RPC) systems. In ILC and RPC problems a process is repeated iteratively, with new control calculations occurring in between each iteration. Large transient growth refers to the propensity of some control algorithms to grow error exponentially before eventually converging. While robust monotonic convergence algorithms (in which monotonic convergence is guaranteed usually in exchange for a small loss in performance) have largely eliminated the concern for large transient growth in ILC, similar results cannot always be obtained in RPC. The emergence of additive …

Msw Portfolio - 2024, Jocelyn E. Olsen

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Msw Portfolio, Courtney R. Nucito

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This portfolio encapsulates my transformative journey through the realm of social work, detailing experiences, reflections, and insights gained throughout my academic and professional endeavors. Rooted in a commitment to social justice and ethical practice, my narrative unfolds through various roles and settings, each contributing to my growth as a compassionate and effective social work practitioner.

Master Of Social Work Portfolio: Practicing Idealism, Ana Maria Palacios Figueroa

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Ana Maria Palacios Figueroa's Master of Social Work Portfolio, including narrative and appendices.

Development Of Digital Twin For Fdm Printer With Preventive Cyber-Attack And Control Algorithms, Md Hazrat Ali, Asad Malik, Nursultan Jyeniskhan, Muhammad Arif Mahmood, Essam Shehab, Frank Liou

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a developed model of a Digital Twin (DT) for a fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer, real-time defect detection, and proposed frameworks for preventing cyber-attacks in real-time. It also highlights a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for controlling the material feed based on a real-time feedback system. The system is designed and developed based on DT, and MPC with integrated machine learning (ML) algorithms to establish real-time process control and enhance the safety and reliability of the physical plant. ML algorithm is used for anomaly detection based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The developed system can …

Becoming An Advanced, Integrated Social Work Practitioner, Lindsay Klug

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This portfolio reflects the author's journey of self-discovery and gaining real-world experience in the field of social work. It describes how the author has demonstrated mastery over the social work competencies outlined by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the University of Montana.

Master Of Social Work Portfolio, Amber Thornton

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This reflection on my journey through the Master of Social Work (MSW) program highlights the transformative influence of critical self-reflection, research, policy analysis, and leadership in shaping my development as a social worker. The program has equipped me with key competencies to engage effectively with individuals, families, groups, and communities, promoting empowerment and advancing social justice. Through hands-on experiences in individual engagement, family assessment, group intervention, and organizational evaluation, I have gained a holistic understanding of social work that emphasizes empathy, tailored interventions, and systemic change. My involvement in policy practice and advocacy has underscored the importance of evidence-based research …

Msw Portfolio, Rachel Elizabeth Andrade

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

My MSW portfolio consists of my detailed journey throughout the coursework through U of M and practicum experiences.

Where Social Work And Schools Collide, Anna Siderius

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.