Digital Commons Network^™

A Dynamic Hierarchical Attention Framework For Multimodal Malware Detection, Tamanna Nazmin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The increasing use of Android in the worldwide mobile ecosystem has come along with a significant increase in advanced malware, highlighting the critical necessity for efficient, scalable, and adaptable detection systems. Despite recent advancements in machine learning improving malware detection, the majority of current solutions are limited to one, two, or three data modalities, hence neglecting the comprehensive behavioral spectrum of contemporary multi-vector threats. This thesis presents the first comprehensive multimodal framework for Android malware detection, which combines textual, time-series (temporal), graph-based (structural), and visual information using an innovative hierarchical attention mechanism and Dynamic Fusion Controller(DFC). Our methodology consistently classifies …

Uncovering The Works By Early Modern Women Printers: An Experiment With Generative Ai, Tang (Cindy) Tian, Daniela Rovida

Journal Articles

The contributions of women to the printing trade during the hand press era have long been under- documented, leaving significant historical gaps in our understanding of early print culture. This article presents a project that uses ChatGPT-4o, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, to help bridge those gaps by identifying, analyzing, and contextualizing the work of women printers represented in the University of Notre Dame’s rare book collections.

Ling 471.01: Phonetics And Phonology, Mizuki Miyashita

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 571.01: Phonetics And Phonology, Mizuki Miyashita

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Does Writing Have A Future?, David J. Gunkel

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

Professor David J. Gunkel is the Chair of the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University – but that is his latest achievement in an extensive list of accomplishments. He is an award-winning educator, researcher, and the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and thirteen books. And it is his latest book, AI for Communication, and his latest thinking about what we have called artificial intelligence and writing that brought him to our 82^nd annual conference.

In his keynote address on Saturday, October 9^th, 2024, Dr. Gunkel argues that AI does not signal the “end …

Exploring The Use And Misuse Of Large Language Models, Hezekiah Paul D. Valdez, Faranak Abri, Jade Webb, Thomas H. Austin

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Language modeling has evolved from simple rule-based systems into complex assistants capable of tackling a multitude of tasks. State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are capable of scoring highly on proficiency benchmarks, and as a result have been deployed across industries to increase productivity and convenience. However, the prolific nature of such tools has provided threat actors with the ability to leverage them for attack development. Our paper describes the current state of LLMs, their availability, and their role in benevolent and malicious applications. In addition, we propose how an LLM can be combined with text-to-speech (TTS) voice cloning to create …

¡Iniciando! La Adultez (Launching! To Adulthood): A Cultural And Linguistic Adaptation Of A Group Therapy Program For Young Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder Transitioning To Adulthood, Antonio F Pagán, Katherine A Loveland, Ron Acierno

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Objectives: The transition to adulthood is a formative period of development for young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as they work towards independence and managing adult responsibilities. While evidence-based interventions have been developed for young adults with ASD, they have rarely been culturally and linguistically adapted for the Latino, Spanish-speaking community. The present study provided initial feasibility and acceptability data for a therapy program for Latino young adults with ASD transitioning to adulthood and their Spanish-speaking parents.

Methods: The culturally adapted and translated intervention, called ¡Iniciando! la Adultez, is a 10-week therapy program based on an evidence-based treatment ( …

Interspecies Responsivity In Early Modern Drama And Animal Performances, Taylor C. Culbert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an expansive, interspecies definition of performance that uses behavior rather than cognition as the decisive feature and illustrates how such a definition can reshape our approach to theatre and performance history. Using the concept of responsivity, which refers to the embodied and affective ways that humans and non-human animals acknowledge and react to one another, I trace human–animal interactions across a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance genres, from the aristocratic stag hunt and entertainments involving trained animals to the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Drawing on my experience training animals, I offer a new perspective on …

The Georgian Of Heritage Speaker Children, Cass Lowry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents three research articles united in the goal of describing the Georgian language as it is spoken by heritage speakers in the Brooklyn diaspora. The Georgian heritage speaker subjects recruited for these studies were children due to immigration patterns at the time when experimental data was collected. Their production of morphosyntactic inflection and pronouns is compared to adult and child homeland speakers.

Heritage speakers of Georgian demonstrate the following divergences from homeland and standard language comparisons. Nominal case inflection is most affected in heritage production, as heritage speakers use a default case or collapse Georgian's split-ergative and inverse …

Imagined Empires: Roman And Chinese Constructions Of One Another In Antiquity, Elizabeth S. Tsang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the Roman and Han Chinese empires conceptualized one another during the first centuries CE, despite never establishing sustained direct contact. It argues that mutual perceptions were shaped less by firsthand experience than by mediated reports, commodities, and the political interests of intermediaries. The study proceeds in four parts. The first explores how Roman authors employed the ethnonym Seres to frame China as a land of wonder, wealth, and alterity. The second analyzes the Chinese designation Da Qin, showing how it projected Han imperial ideals outward by casting Rome as a mirror-image polity. The third turns to …

Low-Resource Ecoacoustic Audio Classification, Enis Berk Coban

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecoacoustic monitoring via machine learning enables scalable analysis but is often constrained by labeled data scarcity, particularly in remote regions like the Arctic. This thesis confronts low-resource ecoacoustic audio classification by developing and evaluating complementary machine learning methodologies. We introduce EDANSA, the first publicly available, expert- labeled Arctic dataset of its kind, curated via novel active learning, alongside a baseline CNN. We systematically evaluate transfer learning, showing general audio embeddings effectively bootstrap classifiers for challenging Arctic sounds, significantly outperforming direct label mapping. Optimizing label utility, we investigate standard data augmentation and introduce novel audio data valuation via Shapley values, revealing …

Giving Voice To The Frames Of War: A Digital Humanities Framework For Evaluating War Crimes Databases, Leila Markosian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Developments in digital technologies have complicated existing debates around the ethics of cataloging war crimes and human rights violations. Digital humanities methods of evaluating digital scholarship can help to construct a framework for evaluating war crimes databases, a process which requires a fine-tuned critical analysis aimed towards understanding the purpose of compiling the database, the platform or media template through which the database is presented, and the communicative potentials of the database. The following paper presents a survey of the existing literature on war crime databases and the politics of memory; a model of how war crimes database analyses may …

The Interaction Of Multilingualism And Depressed Mood On Cognitive Set-Shifting, Annalise Caviasco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although findings are mixed, many researchers believe there are cognitive benefits to multilingualism, a phenomenon dubbed the “bilingual advantage”. Of these apparent benefits, cognitive flexibility, or the ability to shift thinking styles based on the context or specific demands of a certain situation, is thought to be highly relevant. Current literature suggests that one aspect of multilingualism, the practice of “code-switching” between languages throughout their daily lives, is related to increased general cognitive flexibility compared to monolinguals. Another branch of research on cognitive flexibility investigating the role of affect in cognition demonstrates that clinical depression as well as transient negative …

Teaching And Technology: "You Can't Just Do The Same Thing Online", Sakina Laksimi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how faculty at the City University of New York navigated the abrupt transition to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing how pedagogy is shaped by technological, institutional, and social conditions. Drawing on twenty-two interviews with twelve faculty across eight disciplines, I use a grounded theory approach to analyze how instructors adapted courses, reimagined assessment, and sustained connection with students amid crisis. Three overlapping pedagogical orientations emerged: improvisational, relational, and design-based teaching. These approaches highlight how faculty balanced responsiveness, care, and intentional course design in environments mediated by digital platforms and marked by inequity. The study situates …

Text-Based Propaganda Detection, Vivek Sharma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the digital age, the swift consumption of news and the widespread dissemination of propaganda significantly threaten democratic principles and informed decision-making. News organizations, often aligned politically, tailor their content to appeal to specific audiences, thereby perpetuating biases. Despite advancements in detecting propaganda through various computational techniques, including Large Language Models(LLM) and BERT-based approaches, significant challenges persist concerning data availability and the effectiveness of detection tools. This thesis explores the landscape of text-based propaganda and reviews related research in textual analysis. It introduces a novel method for collecting a social-media based dataset, which includes analysis of journalists' tweets to discern …

Online Resources For Oral Communication Courses, Sean P. Palmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Online resources focusing on oral communication skills are lacking, even as online education itself expands. While I was aware of this lack, I didn’t realize its severity until LaGuardia Community College went fully remote during the 2020 global pandemic, and I was looking for online tutoring aids for oral communication. Furthermore, the information presented online is frequently unsuitable for the purposes of online pedagogy due to its specialized and jargony mode of presentation. Also, many existing assignments involving oral communication assume public speaking as the default model, despite the growing importance of emergent digital modes of oral performance, like podcasting …

Some Puzzles Concerning Gujarati Nominalized Verbs In Before And After Sentences, Priya P. Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aspect, which relates events to time periods, interacts in complex ways with temporal operators. This complexity is exemplified in the Gujarati language, where certain imperfective nominalized verbal forms are considered unacceptable with the temporal operator pachi (after) but not with pehlaa (before). This paper aims to shed light on this semantic unacceptability by combining insights from prior studies relating to aspect in other Indo-Aryan langauages with previous work done on English before and after.

Processing Of Diphthongs By Turkish English Bilinguals: An Erp Study, Ecem Kopuz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines how native phonological experience influences the brain’s response to speech sounds in Turkish-English late bilinguals and English monolinguals. We asked whether neural responses reflecting encoding of auditory information would be sensitive to language specific experience. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), and specifically, the Acoustic Change Complex (ACC) we measured neural responses to four stimuli, /u/, /ua/, /iu/, and /ia/, where vowel quality changes for three of these. A change from /u/ to /a/ or /i/ to /a/ within a syllable (as in [ua] and [ia]) represents a clear vowel quality shift. All participants were expected to show sensitivity …

Old Frames On New Media: Health Misinformation In Black Digital Communities, Merriah Croston

Brown School Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Growing evidence suggests that health misinformation has the potential to proliferate on social media. However, our understanding of the problem’s magnitude continues to evolve. Despite several studies on health misinformation and Black communities in the United States (U.S.), few of these studies characterize misinformation within digital settings. This dissertation seeks to address this gap by: 1) synthesizing the literature on health misinformation and Black communities to identify prevalent misinformation topics and claims, characteristics of exposure to and belief in these topics and claims, and successful intervention strategies; 2) quantifying and characterizing the volume of COVID-19 misinformation on Black Twitter during …

Democratizing Community Discourse Analysis In Computational Social Science, Md Towhidul Absar Chowdhury

Theses

Community resource inequities and undetected infrastructure vulnerabilities cost municipalities billions annually, with disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities. Current computational approaches to community needs assessment suffer from two critical limitations: they rely on aggregate-level analysis that obscures granular community expressions, and they implement sophisticated computational tools that remain inaccessible to stakeholders without technical expertise. This creates what we term the Community-Computational Gap—a persistent divide where domain experts with vital contextual knowledge cannot access the analytical tools they need, while computational experts develop models without sufficient community context. This dissertation addresses these challenges through a novel methodological framework for fine-grained utterance-level classification …

The Luminos Project: Co-Designing A Short-Stay Suicide Support Model For Young People, Aims Hansen, Samantha Speirs, Kirsten Panton, Jacinta Freeman, Zrinka Highfield, Kieren Marshall, Eleanor Tighe, Laura Hemming, Bep Uink, Francis Mitrou, Vu Vuong, Ashleigh Lin

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Background: Suicide was the leading cause of death among young Australians aged 15–24 years old in 2023, with 392 lives lost. The continued high numbers of youth suicide demand urgent exploration of alternative approaches to suicide intervention in this population. The United Kingdom-based suicide service Maytree offers an innovative short-term stay for people experiencing suicidal thoughts. Grounded by the Maytree model-of-care, the aim of the current study was to co-design a short-stay service responsive to the specific needs of suicidal young people. Methods: Semi-structured and focus group interviews with young people (n = 38), caregivers (n = 11) and key …

Priflex: A Secure Federated Learning Framework For Evaluating Privacy Leakage And Defense In Cross-Modal Medical Data, Mohammad Othman Nassar, Feras Fares Al-Mashagba

Mesopotamian Journal of CyberSecurity

Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized, privacy-preserving machine learning by training models across distributed data without sharing raw patient information. However, most FL frameworks focus on unimodal data and overlook critical challenges in multimodal healthcare settings, such as privacy risks, fairness disparities, and reduced model interpretability. We present PRIFLEX (Privacy-Resilient Integration Framework for Learning Exchange), a novel FL framework designed for secure integration of structured and unstructured medical data. PRIFLEX combines 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECG) from the PhysioNet PTB-XL dataset and clinical notes from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV), supporting early, late, and hybrid data fusion strategies. To …

Learning Camp, Language Of Instruction, And Education Outcomes: Evidence From A Field Experiment In Malawi, Hyuncheol Bryant. Kim, Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conducted a randomized experiment to study the impacts of a summer learning camp and the language of instruction on education outcomes. The program, covering social studies and mathematics, provided additional high-quality learning time for 4th and 5th graders in Malawi. The program significantly increased test scores in social studies and mathematics (0.24–0.36 standard deviations). We find suggestive evidence that the impact on test scores in social studies was greater for students instructed in Chichewa, the local language, than for those instructed in English. However, we find no such evidence of differential impacts on test scores in mathematics by the …

Guiding Multiple Remote Users In Physical Tasks With Language-Driven Robotic Telepresence, Ruyi Li, Jingfei Guo, Xinyi Zhang, Xuji Zhang, Zeqing Li, Jiannan Li, Jiangtao Gong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote assistance through robotic telepresence could involve both control and memory challenges, particularly in one expert to multiple workers situation. In this work, we proposed a novelty language-driven interface to facilitate remote collaboration through telepresence robots. Through operations and maintenance expert interviews and a scenario simulation study, we identified key pain points in executing one-expert-multiple-workers remote guidance using the telepresence robot and proposed two design goals, which together consist of five sub-design goals with corresponding features. These features were integrated into a standard telepresence robot, resulting in the development of a Collaborative LLM-based Embodied Assistant Robot, named CLEAR Robot. A …

Khaled Hosseini’S Judgment In The Kite Runner Towards Pashtun And Hazara Identities, Bilal Waziri, Dawod Mangal, Kamaldeen Kamal

Journal of Research Initiatives

This book review offers a compelling examination of Khaled Hosseini's portrayal of Pashtun and Hazara identities in his acclaimed novel, *The Kite Runner*. Through a literary-ethnographic lens, the research delves into how narrative techniques can construct, amplify, or distort ethnic representations, particularly within the tumultuous backdrop of Afghanistan. The novel is scrutinized for its stark depiction of Pashtuns as oppressors and Hazaras as perennial victims, which risks perpetuating a simplistic and problematic singular narrative. Employing a library-based qualitative approach, this paper thoughtfully interprets textual evidence within the rich sociocultural and historical landscape of Afghanistan. The findings reveal that while the …

The Brescia International Multidisciplinary Consensus Guidelines On The Optimal Pathology Assessment And Multidisciplinary Pathways Of Non-Pancreatic Neoplasms In And Around The Ampulla Of Vater (Peripan), Mohammad Abu Hilal, Bas A Uijterwijk, Daniël H L Lemmers, Boris V Janssen, Marc G Besselink, Denise Bianchi, Arantza Fariña, Noriyoshi Fukushima, Anthony J Gill, Seung-Mo Hong, Alyssa Krasinskas, Claudio Luchini, Laura Melocchi, Giulio Rossi, Aldo Scarpa, Olca Basturk, Deyali Chatterjee, Angela Chou, Irene Esposito, Roger Feakins, Bas Groot Koerkamp, Ralph H Hruban, Stefano La Rosa, Chanjuan Shi, Aatur Singhi, Joanne Verheij, Huamin Wang, Sergio Alfieri, Fabio Ausania, Adnan Alseidi, Marco J Bruno, Ugo Boggi, Claudio Bnà, Christos Dervenis, Massimo Falconi, Michele Ghidini, Jakob W Kist, Giovanni Marchegiani, Michele Milella, Roberto Salvia, Ajith Siriwardena, Hanneke Wilmink, Alberto Zaniboni, Shaimaa Al-Janabi, Maia Blomhoff Holm, Eva Roos, Naoki Sano, In Hye Song, Zeynep Tarcan, Gianpaolo Balzano, Isabella Frigerio, Alfredo Guglielmi, Giuseppe Malleo, Horacio Asbun, Volkan Adsay, Caroline Verbeke

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

IMPORTANCE: The lack of multidisciplinary workflow guidelines and clear definitions and classifications for neoplasms in and around the ampulla of Vater results in inconsistencies affecting patient care and research.

OBJECTIVE: The PERIPAN international multidisciplinary consensus group aimed to standardize the multidisciplinary diagnostic workflow and achieve consensus on definitions and classifications in order to ensure proper classification and optimal diagnostic assessment and consequently to improve patient care and future research.

DESIGN: An international team of 43 experts (pathologists, surgeons, radiologists, gastroenterologists, oncologists) from 12 countries identified knowledge gaps, reviewed 37061 articles, and proposed recommendations using the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network methodology …

Linguistic Pythagorean Hypersoft Set With Application: Decision Making In Medical Diagnosis And Treatment, B. Sathiyapriya, Dr. V.Pankajam

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

No abstract provided.

Choosing The Best Investment According To The Financial Factors In The Neutrosophic Binary Environment, S.S. Surekha

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

No abstract provided.

A Neutrosophic Framework For Nursing Education Quality Analysis Using Upside-Down Logics And Narrative Factori, Lihua Gu, Ming Le

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

No abstract provided.

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Framework For Evaluating Emerging Digital Technologies In Supply Chain Optimization, Nabil M. Abdelaziz, Dina Mohamed, Hasnaa Soliman

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

No abstract provided.