Digital Commons Network^™

First-Year College Transition: The Role Of Psychosocial Resources In Student Motivation, Hayley Weatherill

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

First-year students transitioning to college culture have various areas of concern during this developmental period. Adolescents and young adults focus on creating and maintaining social connections while navigating a new environment and keeping up with their academics. With rising tuition costs, economic uncertainty, and pressing social challenges, many students enter college under significant stress. Navigating these challenges successfully requires motivation and support to persist through the first year and beyond. This project explored how college institutions support first-year students’ transition to higher education by helping students fulfill the three basic psychological needs of self-determination theory: autonomy, competency, and relatedness. When …

From Spark To Wildfire: Predicting Wildfire Origins And The Efficacy Of “Fire Safe” Cigarettes In California Grasslands, Trevor Blackwell Haltermann

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

As wildfires in North America increase in size and frequency, the societal impacts become greater as well. With greater risk and high fire suppression costs it is pertinent to improve fire investigation methods and limit the potential for human caused ignitions. Two distinct studies were carried out to assess the accuracy of fire pattern indicators and the efficacy of “fire safe” cigarette technology in lowland grass fuel types in California. The first study utilized 24 experimental small-scale fires within a wind tunnel to examine the accuracy of microscale fire pattern indicators and the factors that influence the accuracy of predictions …

Engaging The Plus-Size Community Through Social Media And Public Relations, Esperanza Chavez

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores which platform, TikTok or Instagram, best supports engagement andcommunity building for the plus-size audience. Grounded in theories by Goffman, Berger & Luckmann, and David Meerman Scott’s 85-10-5 Rule, the study combines strategic PR methods with digital media tools to elevate plus-size voices. The campaign included 30 Instagram posts, 35 TikToks, street interviews, and a podcast series, all designed and executed for this project. Engagement was measured through likes, comments, shares, saves, follower growth, and qualitative audience feedback.

Assessing Residents' Water Knowledge, Communication Preferences, And Risk Perceptions: Insights For Practice And Future Communication, Ashleigh M. Day, Eric S. Cerino, Zoe Zidzik, Laura Umphrey

Iowa Journal of Communication

The purpose of this research was to better understand Flagstaff, Arizona (AZ) residents’ water knowledge, media uses, information sources, and water-related risk perceptions. After collecting survey responses from residents (n=476), results highlighted that most residents know their water supplier, but their risk perceptions varied as related to waterborne diseases and water scarcity. Particularly, participants felt more susceptible to water scarcity issues than waterborne diseases and felt that water scarcity was more severe than waterborne diseases. Further, when considering getting water-related information, many participants preferred receiving information via digital devices. Regarding social media use, participants held the strongest preference for receiving …

Toxic Sweetness And Abstinence: The Citationality Of Robert Lustig's Anti-Sugar Rhetoric, Tyler J. Snelling

Iowa Journal of Communication

Robert Lustig’s (2009) lecture on YouTube “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” animated a widespread conversation about whether sugar poisons bodies. Discourse following the lecture warrants analysis to gage how the meaning of the lecture transformed from a critique of food systems into individual actions. I argue that citationality of “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” fosters healthism by grounding sugar’s toxicity in scientific and affective reasoning that compels individual actions like abstinence from sugar. The pediatrician's lecture enabled the construction of a supposedly "moral eater" who removes sugar from consumption to avoid the poison's consequences. This paper offers tools for examining the spread …

Moldy Whoppers And Vitamin Donuts: Health Halos In Food Advertisements, Debbie Danowski

Iowa Journal of Communication

Health Halos have been used in food advertisements since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the advent of mass-produced consumer goods took hold and manufactures began advertising their products. It wasn’t until nearly eight decades later, however, that theoretical framework specifically involving health halos was recognized in advertising research. Though subsequent research suggests the effectiveness of health halos in making unhealthy food appear healthier, there has been little, if any, attention given to identification of the health halos used in food advertising. This study aims to fill the gap by identifying two of the health halo techniques used …

Lrtm Left-Right Transition Matrices For Molecular Interaction Prediction, Kaitlin Zheng, Guihua Duan, Mengyun Yang, Wei Wu, Yao-Hang Li, Jianxin Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Molecular interactions are central to most biological processes. The discovery and identification of potential associations between molecules can provide insights into biological exploration, diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, and drug development. So far many relevant computational methods have been proposed, but most of them are usually limited to specific domains and rely on complex preprocessing procedures, which restricts the models’ ability to be applied to other tasks. Therefore, it remains a challenge to explore a generalized approach to accurately predicting potential associations. In this study, We propose Left-Right Transition Matrices (LRTM) for molecular interaction prediction. From the perspective on the diffusion …

Vaim-Cff: A Variational Autoencoder Inverse Mapper Solution To Compton Form Factor Extraction From Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering, Manal Almaeen, Tareq Alghamdi, Brandon Kriesten, Douglas Adams, Yaohang Li, Huey-Wen Lin, Simonetta Liuti

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We develop a new methodology for extracting Compton form factors (CFFs) from deeply virtual exclusive reactions such as the unpolarized DVCS cross section using a specialized inverse problem solver, a variational autoencoder inverse mapper (VAIM). The VAIM-CFF framework not only allows us access to a fitted solution set possibly containing multiple solutions in the extraction of all 8 CFFs from a single cross section measurement, but also accesses the lost information contained in the forward mapping from CFFs to cross section. We investigate various assumptions and their effects on the predicted CFFs such as cross section organization, number of extracted …

From Philosophy To Nlu: Evolving Definitions With Research Hypotheses, Jian Wu, Sarah Rajtmajer

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Over the past decades, alongside advancements in natural language processing, significant attention has been paid to training models to automatically extract, understand, test, and generate hypotheses in open and scientific domains. However, interpretations of the term hypothesis for various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks have migrated from traditional definitions in the natural, social, and formal sciences. Even within NLU, we observe differences defining hypotheses across literature. In this paper, we overview and delineate various definitions of hypothesis. Especially, we discern the nuances of definitions across recently published NLU tasks. We highlight the importance of well-structured and well-defined hypotheses, particularly as …

Energy-Based Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering, Ziyu Wang, Yiming Du, Rui Ning, Lusi Li

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) deals with real-world scenarios where certain views are partially missing, posing significant challenges to effective clustering. Most existing IMVC approaches face a trade-off: imputation-free methods suffer from information bias and imbalance, while full-imputation methods risk introducing and propagating noise. To overcome these limitations, we propose Energy-Based Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering (Energy-DIMC), a novel selective-imputation framework that leverages energy-based models (EBMs) to guide reliable imputations and robust clustering. EBMs assess data compatibility by assigning lower energy to more coherent structures, effectively modeling complex inter-view and inter-sample dependencies. Inspired by EBMs, Energy-DIMC integrates four key components: 1) a …

Humans Vs. Llms On Open Domain Scientific Claim Verification: A Baseline Study, Benjamin Curtis, Stefania Dzhaman, Matthew Maisonave, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Verifying scientific claims is challenging for the general public because most people lack domain knowledge. Manual verification by subject domain experts is accurate, but it is obviously not scalable to meet the rising number of scientific claims on the Web. Whether the emerging large language models and large reasoning models can be used for scientific claim verification, and how their performances compare to humans, are still research questions. To this end, we developed a new benchmark MSVEC2 that consists of 138 claims from credible fact verification websites and science news outlets. Two tasks were given to both human and LLM …

Privshap: A Finer-Granularity Network Linearization Method For Private Inference, Xiangrui Xu, Zhenzhen Wang, Rui Ning, Chunsheng Xiu, Hongyi Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Private inference applies cryptographic techniques like homomorphic encryption, garble circuit and secret sharing to keep both sides privacy in a client-server setting during inference. It is often hindered by the high communication overheads, especially at non-linear activation layers such as ReLU. Hence ReLU pruning has been widely recognized as an efficient way to accelerate private inference. Existing approaches to ReLU pruning typically rely on coarse hypothesis, which assume an inverse correlation between the importance of ReLU and linear layers or shallow activation layers have less importance for universal models, to assign the budgets according to the layer while preserving the …

Border Decriminalization As A State Project: Lessons From Marijuana And Assisted Suicide Legalization Across The United States, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

My prior work argued for the decriminalization of border crossings without proof of specific intent to violate another law (like drug trafficking), which is even less likely to happen now than it was when the piece was published, given the current presidential administration’s zealous deportation strategy and Congress’s seeming acquiescence. As such, I advocate for a second-best solution involving federal-state cooperative agreements wherein border states abutting both Mexico and Canada are given the option by the federal government to pass local legislation decriminalizing border crossings into their states as their communities desire. To the extent that the current presidential administration …

Integrated Roadside Vegetation Management Technical Manual [2025], Kristine Nemec, Josh Brandt, Kirk Henderson, Jim Uthe

Faculty Book Gallery

The objective of this publication is to provide basic technical support for new and existing Iowa county roadside programs. This manual is also intended to provide guidance to policymakers and engineers interested in adopting or expanding integrated roadside vegetation management in county rights-of-way.

Position: Benchmarking Is Broken - Don't Let Ai Be Its Own Judge, Zerui Cheng, Stella Wohnig, Ruchika Gupta, Samiul Alam, Tassallah Abdullahi, João Alves Ribeiro, Christian Nielsen-Garcia, Saif Mir, Siran Li, Jason Orender, Seyed Ali Bahrainian, Daniel Kirste, Aaron Gokaslan, Carsten Eickhoff, Pramod Viswanath, Ruben Wolff

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its rapidly expanding market capitalization, presents both transformative opportunities and critical challenges. Chief among these is the urgent need for a new, unified paradigm for trustworthy evaluation, as current benchmarks increasingly reveal critical vulnerabilities. Issues like data contamination and selective reporting by model developers fuel hype, while inadequate data quality control can lead to biased evaluations that, even if unintentionally, may favor specific approaches. As a flood of participants enters the AI space, this "Wild West" of assessment makes distinguishing genuine progress from exaggerated claims exceptionally difficult. Such ambiguity blurs scientific signals …

Human Perception Of Ai Capabilities At Classifying Perturbed Roadway Signs, Katherine R. Garcia, Jing Chen, Yanru Xiao, Scott Mishler, Cong Wang, Bin Hu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is crucial to numerous functions required for driving automation systems, including the computer vision techniques used to detect the roadway environment and make real-time decisions. However, the images used as inputs to the AI system may be maliciously perturbed, or manipulated, causing the AI system to make an incorrect classification. In this study, we examined humans’ perception of the AI’s computer vision capability of classifying various road sign images, including the original images, images with two different types of malicious attacks, and images that are scrambled randomly at the pixel level. Our results showed that participants rated …

A Real-Time Approach To Capture Ambient And Focal Attention In Visual Search, Gavindya Jayawardena, Yasith Jayawardana, Yasasi Abeysinghe, Bhanuka Mahanama, Sampath Jayarathna, Jacek Gwizdka

Computer Science Faculty Publications

During visual search, individuals’ attention shifts between ambient and focal states in response to task demands and stimuli. The ambient/focal coefficient K is a statistically validated measure of these states, computed offline from fixation duration and saccade amplitude data. While current methods compute K offline, real-time computation could enable applications such as monitoring user attention, creating attention-adaptive user interfaces, and optimizing graphics rendering. However, real-time computation of K requires stable estimates for the parameters of fixation duration and saccade amplitude distributions. Since these distributions are heavy-tailed, the real-time estimates exhibit high variance and slow convergence. To overcome this, we propose …

Research News, Publications, 2025, Volume 4, Soumyajit Majumdar

Publications (2015-)

Publications that appeared during the period of October 1 - December 31, 2025.

Research News, Publications, 2025, Volume 3, Soumyajit Majumdar

Publications (2015-)

Publications that appeared during the period of July 1 - September 30, 2025.

Research News, Publications, 2025, Volume 2, Soumyajit Majumdar

Publications (2015-)

Publications that appeared during the period of April 1 - June 30, 2025.

Social Support Networks’ Influence On First-Generation Professionals’ Career Success, Melissa-Ann M. Lagunas

Clinical Psychology Dissertations

This dissertation examines how perceived social support influences career success among first-generation professionals (FGPs)—individuals who are first in their families to pursue white- collar careers. Drawing on Seibert et al.'s (2001) Social Capital Theory of Career Success, I investigate direct and indirect pathways through which social support affects three dimensions of career success: sense of belonging, professional flourishing, and career satisfaction, while exploring mediating roles of perceived support network quality and resilience. A sample of 230 FGPs (Mage = 31.9 years, SD = 5.32) completed a 62-item online survey hosted on Qualtrics. Participants represented diverse professional disciplines classified into five …

Douglas K. Newell Oral History, Douglas K. Newell, Katherine O'Neil

50 Years of Douglas K. Newell

The following is the written transcript of the oral history of Edmund O. Belsheim Professor of Law Emeritus Douglas K. Newell. This transcript has been slightly edited by Professor Newell for accuracy.

The interviews capturing the oral history were conducted by Katherine O'Neil '77 during 2023-2024, transcribed and then edited by Professor Newell in 2025.

The history chronicles Professor Newell's life from his early humble beginnings in Glendale, California, attending Pomona College, being accepted into Harvard Law School, his Clerkship with U.S. District Judge for Los Angeles' Central District William M. Byrne, his brief foray into private practice, and his …

Ieee 802.11n And Ieee 802.11ax Networks Under Various Propagation Models, Jun Peng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

IEEE 802.11n networks are the first generation of Wi-Fi networks to reach data rates of hundreds of megabits per second. They are also the first to use MIMO technologies in Wi-Fi networks. They can operate in both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands and use 20 or 40 MHz channel width. Similarly, IEEE 802.11ax networks can operate in both 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz frequency bands and use 20, 40, 80, or 160 MHz channel width. For channel access, IEEE 802.11ax networks use CSMA/CA, multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), and OFDMA. They can reach data rates of multiple gigabits per second. …

Safe Space: A Novel And Accompanying Critical Study Into The Participatory Culture In Fandom And A Historiographic Approach To The Fragmentation Of Popular Culture In Select Novels By Kurt Vonnegut And Thomas Pynchon., Edward Whitfield

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences Theses

This research is submitted as both a novel and supplementary critical study. It explores the dynamic interplay between media consumers and content creators within the context of contemporary online critical discourse. The study is anchored by the novel Safe Space, a metamodern science fiction novel that explores the tension between progressive and orthodox ideologies within Anglo-American science fiction fandom – a symbolic battle in the Culture Wars.The investigation uses a historiographic, long durée (or long term) approach to test the hypothesis that periods of cultural anxiety are related to a loss of confidence in great hegemons. The research interrogates the …

The Comparison Of Human And Machine Performance In Object Recognition, Gokcek Kul

School of Psychology Theses

Deep learning algorithms have advanced significantly due to better hardware and large training sets, with some claiming they now match or exceed human performance. Recent findings indicate improvements in robustness against Out-Of-Distribution benchmark sets and alignment with human categorisation behaviour. This thesis evaluates various machine learning models to ensure a fair comparison with human performance using principles from comparative psychology. Chapter 2 introduces a psychologically grounded framework for comparing human and machine object categorisation performance, focusing on different presentation times and task complexities. The results indicate that while recent machine learning models have reached or exceeded human performance under optimised …

Shooting For The Stars: The Place Of International Economic Law In The International Legal Order, Valentina Vadi

Indian Journal of International Economic Law

In the universe of international law, the galaxy of international economic law (IEL) consists of various legal instruments, institutions, and experts that – like stars, planets, and vast clouds of dust – are all bound together by gravity. Like cosmonauts, international economic courts ‘must look for reliable reference points in the known legal cosmology.’2 This article aims to contextualise the galaxy of international economic law within the universe of international law, discuss its role within the same, and identify some reference points that can help adjudicators navigate by the stars.

Beyond A Boundary Of Systemic Anti-Black Racism In The Workplace In Canada, Adelle Blackett

Dalhousie Law Journal

In this lecture, I will, however, focus on one of the legacies of slavery, that is, the largely untold story of racial segregation in the world of work in Canada. We have come so effectively, and rightly, to focus on the effects of discrimination, that we may have inadvertently walked past the history. Reclaiming this history will comprise the first part of my talk.

The second part of my talk will reference the emergence of the duty of fair representation. I will seek to illustrate the weight of the erasure of anti-Black racism through this duty. In other words, far …

Bridging Movement Lawyering & International Human Rights Advocacy, Citlalli Ochoa

Scholarly Works

The human rights field is often criticized for its lack of enforcement and implementation, lawyering methodologies, and its roots in imperialism, exceptionalism, and Eurocentric values. In response to some of these critiques, human rights scholars and advocates have embraced more grassroots approaches that in many instances resemble the movement lawyering methodologies employed in social justice advocacy in the United States. In the same way that movement lawyers have centered impacted communities and engaged in long term, coordinated legal and political advocacy to achieve normative change, human rights advocates have used the international human rights framework to exert political pressure, facilitate …

Artificial Intelligence In Science And Society: The Vision Of Usern, Tommaso Dorigo, Gary D. Brown, Carlo Casonato, Artemi Cerda, Joseph Ciarrochi, Mauro Da Lio, Nicole D'Souza, Nicolas R. Gauger, Steven C. Hayes, Stefan G. Hofmann, Robert Johansson, Marcus Liwicki, Fabien Lotte, Juan J. Nieto, Giulia Olivato, Peter Parnes, George Perry, Alice Plebe, Idupulapati M. Rao, Nima Rezaei, Fredrik Sandin, Andrey Ustyuzhanin, Giorgio Vallortigara, Pietro Vischia, Niloufar Yazdanpanah

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

The recent rise in relevance and diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems and the increasing number and power of applications of AI methods invites a profound reflection on the impact of these innovative systems on scientific research and society at large. The Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN), an organization that promotes initiatives to support interdisciplinary science and education across borders and actively works to improve science policy, collects here the vision of its Advisory Board members, together with a selection of AI experts, to summarize how we see developments in this exciting technology impacting science and society in …

Global Strategies To Manage Huanglongbing (Hlb) And Its Vectors: Insights And Implications For The Mediterranean Region, Meritxell Pérez-Hedo, Mark S. Hoddle, Fernando Alferez, Lochy Batista, George A.C. Beattie, Shourish Chakravarty, Paul Holford, Fathiya Mbarak Khamis, Inusa Jacob Ajene, Aruna Manrakhan, Paul H. Fourie, Maritza Luis, Eduardo Osorio-Hernández, Mamoudou Sétamou, Alejandro Tena, Pedro Takao Yamamoto, Tara Wade, Changyong Zhou, Nian Wang, Lukasz L. Stelinski, Alberto Urbaneja

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Huanglongbing (HLB), also known as citrus greening disease, poses a severe threat to the global citrus industry. This disease is caused by three species of bacteria, ‘Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus’, ‘C. L. africanus’, and ‘C. L. ameri-canus’. The primary pathogen vectors are the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri Kuwayama, Hemiptera: Psyllidae) and the African citrus psyllid (Trioza erytreae Del Guercio, Hemiptera: Triozidae). The disease is incurable, and its management relies on reducing vector densities and the adverse effects of bacterial infections on host trees. Managing psyllid vec-tors, especially D. citri, has proven exceptionally challenging due to its rapid spread and subsequent …