Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluating Surgical Approaches For Hemimandibular Hyperplasia Associated With Osteochondroma: A Systematic Literature Review, Luis Eduardo Almeida, Samuel Zammuto, Diego Fernando Lopez

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Background/Objectives: Hemimandibular hyperplasia (HH) associated with osteochondroma presents complex challenges in maxillofacial surgery, including facial asymmetry, occlusal instability, and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunction. Surgical interventions vary widely in approach and outcomes, underscoring the need for a systematic evaluation of effectiveness. This systematic review assesses the effectiveness of surgical approaches for managing HH associated with osteochondroma, focusing on techniques including condylectomy, orthognathic surgery, distraction osteogenesis, total joint replacement (TJR), and genioplasty. Methods: Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, a comprehensive search was conducted in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science for studies published from 2000 to 2023. Eligibility criteria were based on the …

Association Between Periodontal Health Status And Quality Of Life: A Cross-Sectional Study, Kinan M. Al-Bitar, Jeffery M. Garcia, Shengtong Han, Arndt Guentsch

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Introduction: Attachment loss due to periodontal diseases is associated with functional limitations as well as physical pain and psychological discomfort, which may lead to a reduced quality of life. The purpose of this study is to determine if the oral health status, specifically the periodontal status, influences oral health–related quality of life.

Materials and methods: Survey data were collected in a US dental school clinical setting in a cross-sectional study. Quality of life related to oral health was assessed with the Oral Health Impact Profile-49 (OHIP-49). In addition, DMFT index, periodontal status, and health literacy scores (dental and medical health …

Social Media News Consumption By College Students Using The Elaboration Likelihood Model, Colin Horning

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Social media usage has become a cornerstone of the everyday lives of Americans. From the years 2012 through 2021, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they use the social media platforms of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, X/Twitter and Snapchat have grown exponentially, according to data from the Pew Research Center (Auxier & Anderson, 2021). Primarily among young people (those age 18-29) social media growth share has been the most prevalent, with this age range being mostly made up of Millennials and Generation Z (or Gen Z). The same Pew Research study found stark differences in the social media …

How Pizza And Stickers Drove My Kids To Read And Kept Them Reading, Tiya Montaño

Graduate Research Papers

Walk into any English/Language Arts (ELA) classroom across the country and you will find books on bookshelves, students on computers or cellphones, and a teacher struggling to garner the attention of their students long enough to make it through the short story, poem, or novel they are reading. This has become an all too familiar image that ELA teachers struggle with. Why won’t the students engage? Are the readings too difficult? Are the readings too boring? Am I teaching them all wrong? All these questions and more fly through our brains as they work towards trying to get the students …

Fostering Multiliteracies And Engagement With Multimodal Texts In The Secondary English Language Arts Classroom, Amanda J. Hargis

Graduate Research Papers

This study underscores the potential of multimodal texts to enhance student engagement and understanding in high school English Language Arts classrooms. While student preferences for different text formats varied, challenges remain in how to connect classic literature to contemporary students. However, the integration of multimodal resources can offer valuable opportunities for enriching the learning experience. Future research and continued adoption of culturally sustaining pedagogies in instructional practices will be key to maximizing the benefits of multimodal texts in diverse educational settings.

Exploring Post Quantum Cryptography With Quantum Key Distribution For Sustainable Mobile Network Architecture Design, Sanzida Hoque, Abdullah Aydeger, Engin Zeydan

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The proliferation of mobile networks and their increasing importance to modern life, combined with the emerging threat of quantum computing, present new challenges and opportunities for cybersecurity. This paper addresses the complexity of protecting these critical infrastructures against future quantum attacks while considering operational sustainability. We begin with an overview of the current landscape, identify the main vulnerabilities in mobile networks, and evaluate existing security solutions with new post-quantum cryptography (PQC) methods. We then present a quantum-secure architecture with PQC and Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) tailored explicitly for sustainable mobile networks and illustrate its applicability with several use cases that …

Image Interpretation Confusion Resolution By Collaboration, Ben Mathew, Akram Alghanmi, Marius Silaghi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Visual scene understanding can benefit from inputs provided by multiple participants with their different perspectives, and a distributed version of a modified Waltz filtering enriched with modern AI inferences can potentially help accuracy and speed trade-offs by exploiting the simultaneous perspectives and logic. Speed is improved by the contribution of the implicit parallelisation in processing. Accuracy improvements are expected from updating constraints with novel and more powerful inferences that the participants can apply. Automatically understanding scenes is a highly relevant problem. Multiple robots communicate with one another to classify shapes of edges of an object. Local reasoning can reduce communication …

Informed Traffic Signal Preemption For Emergency Vehicles, Ioana Silaghi, Zobaida Alssadi, Marius Silaghi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Emergency vehicle traffic light preemption systems are extended by using more detailed predicted trajectories to provide favorable changes of signals. The location of the emergency vehicle is tracked and traffic signals on the requested travel route are contacted and switched to become green in time, before the emergency vehicle reaches the selected intersection. The resulting time to destination obtained by our simulation is compared to a control simulation without preemption. In simulations, when an emergency vehicle reaches a red light, a delay of five seconds is considered to happen naturally to the vehicle’s journey due to preventive driving. The switching …

Game Theoretic Analysis Of The Feedback Loop Caused By Widely Available Computer Estimation On Market Values, Viorel Silaghi, Zobaida Alssadi, Ben Mathew, Majed Alotaibi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Public availability of computer generated predictions can change the markets and its impact is here investigated with a game theoretic approach. Real estate inflation is not a new phenomenon but its consistent and almost monotonous persistence over unusually many years, coinciding with new prominence of public estimation information from successful Mass Real Estate Estimators (MREE) already caused various independent research organizations to investigate potential links. What we model is a repetitive theoretical game between the MREEs and the home owners, where each player has secret information and expertise. In contrast to competing results, for our model and simulations a restriction …

Leviosa: Natural Language-Based Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle Trajectory Generation, Godwyll Aikins, Mawaba Pascal Dao, Koboyo Josias Moukpe, Thomas C. Eskridge

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper presents LEVIOSA, a novel framework for text- and speech-based uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectory generation. By leveraging multimodal large language models (LLMs) to interpret natural language commands, the system converts text and audio inputs into executable flight paths for UAV swarms. The approach aims to simplify the complex task of multi-UAV trajectory generation, which has significant applications in fields such as search and rescue, agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and entertainment. The framework involves two key innovations: a multi-critic consensus mechanism to evaluate trajectory quality and a hierarchical prompt structuring for improved task execution. The innovations ensure fidelity to user …

Good Apples / Bad Apples: Detection And Classification Of Damage, Angel Star, Conor Pommer, Marius Silaghi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The sorting of apples in classes of quality using vision, and the detection of bad apples using X-ray and vision have naturally been addressed frequently in the past due to the sheer significance of this fruit. Our novelty consists in going past detection of damage into measuring it and classifying damaged apples for potential usages beyond direct sale, rather than simply deciding if an apple is rotten or not. Size and color of damage stains is assessed to help deciding potential usage of the apples. One can redirect apples towards various usages outside markets for the general population, such as …

Mobile Fog Ai For Internet Of Battlefield Things (Iobt), Sheuli Paul, Marius Silaghi, Veton Këpuska, Akram Alghanmi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

New mechanisms provide soldiers automation capabilities that include interactive, mobile, fast, scalable, secured, powerful computational communication in contested environments such as battle fields. Internet of BattleField Things (IoBT) is a technology that develops integrated Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for the war of the future. The IoBT connects soldiers with smart technology in armour, radios, weapons, munitions, other objects such as health sensors, GPS, and various IoT devices. These “things”, objects, or constrained devices can communicate with each other or across existing network infrastructure such as the Internet or network meshes. They most of the time come with limited capacity …

Nudging Automated Planners With Learned User Preferences, Fusun Yaman, Thomas C. Eskridge, Ron Scott, Li Lin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Automated planning tools play a large and expanding role in the function of many parts of our lives. The complex nature of the planning problem and the increasing amount of information the human planner must synthesize indicate that assistive automation must soon become the norm. Despite this, many existing automated planners are incapable of producing plans that reflect the desires and expertise of their operators. They do not have the direct ability to consider the operators’ priorities, nor can they exploit expert operational knowledge that comes from human experience and not data systems. In this paper we present methods to …

Perception Model For Mobile Robots Assisting Humans In Decision-Making During Complex Situations, Sheuli Paul, Marius Silaghi, Veton Këpuska, Akram Alghanmi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Perception, the process of comprehending and deriving meaning from one’s surroundings, is fundamental to human decision-making. In this context, we explore the development of a robust perception model designed for mobile robots to facilitate effective human-robot communication and decision-making in dynamic and intricate scenarios. Achieving localization without GPS in a network of roads using stratified sequential importance sampling where the stratification levels are based on semantic object spaces in the map and on the running time, we articulate and describe the proposed development and experimentation environment, demonstrating the potential of our perception model. Copyright © 2024 by the authors.

Pwn Lessons Made Easy With Docker: Toward An Undergraduate Vulnerability Research Cybersecurity Class, T.J. O'Connor, Alex Schmith, Chris Stricklan, Marco Carvalho

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Developing expertise in vulnerability research is critical to closing the cybersecurity workforce shortage. However, very few institutions have adopted vulnerability research into their cybersecurity curriculum, and fewer have examined how to teach this skill to students. The recent emergence of lightweight, container-based virtualization presents a unique opportunity to address this challenge by offering reproducible environments that ease course facilitation. This paper presents an undergraduate vulnerability course design. Our approach leverages a hands-on methodology that challenges students to develop complex binary exploits over our lectures, labs, and exams. We share our detailed design, labs, experiences, lessons learned, and a lightweight virtual …

Rescape: Transforming Coral-Reefscape Images For Quantitative Analysis, Z. Ferris, E. Ribeiro, T. Nagata, R. Van Woesik

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Ever since the first image of a coral reef was captured in 1885, people worldwide have been accumulating images of coral reefscapes that document the historic conditions of reefs. However, these innumerable reefscape images suffer from perspective distortion, which reduces the apparent size of distant taxa, rendering the images unusable for quantitative analysis of reef conditions. Here we solve this century-long distortion problem by developing a novel computer-vision algorithm, ReScape, which removes the perspective distortion from reefscape images by transforming them into top-down views, making them usable for quantitative analysis of reef conditions. In doing so, we demonstrate the first-ever …

Unsafe At Any Bandwidth: Towards Understanding Risk Factors For Ransomware In Higher Education, Logan Suarez, Dakhilallah Alshubrumi, Tj O'Connor, Sneha Sudhakaran

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

United States higher education institutions host an assortment of services that are accessible via public IP addresses. The wide variety of network services and the important personal and institutional data stored on such services make higher education institutions particularly desirable targets for attackers. This study analyses the vulnerabilities found through Shodan scans on these networks, in conjunction with institutional characteristics data taken from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), to examine correlations between an institution's characteristics and the vulnerabilities found on its networks. By exploring this data, the study aims to bring awareness to the current state of higher …