Digital Commons Network^™

Artificial Intelligence (Ai) For Social Innovation In Health Education: Promoting Health Literacy Through Personalized Ai-Driven Learning Tools – A Systematic Review, Dina Mansour Tbaishat, Maha Waleed Elfadel

All Works

Background: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming health education by enabling personalized, adaptive, and scalable approaches that may enhance aspects of health literacy. Despite rapid adoption, comprehensive synthesis of AI tools’ impact on health literacy as social innovation is limited. Understanding these effects guides educators, developers, and policymakers in designing potentially effective, inclusive, and ethical AI interventions. This review examines generative AI models, chatbots, and adaptive learning systems in supporting health literacy globally. Methods: A systematic review was conducted following PRISMA guidelines. Literature was identified primarily through PubMed/Medline, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. Connectedpapers.com was used exclusively as a citation chasing tool, performing …

Radio Frequency Tagging–Enabled Patient Monitoring: Integrating Mobility Tracking With Early Warning Systems For Enhanced Safety, Ahed Abugabah, Prashant Kumar Shukla, Piyush Kumar Shukla, Abhishek Dwivedi

All Works

Ensuring patient safety in healthcare environments requires continuous monitoring systems capable of identifying early warning signs of clinical risk. Traditional surveillance methods often fail to capture meaningful patterns in patient movement, limiting their ability to prevent incidents such as falls, prolonged immobility, or unnoticed health deterioration. Radio Frequency Tagging technology has been increasingly adopted for real-time patient tracking; however, existing systems are generally limited to location detection and lack predictive insights into patient behaviour. To overcome these limitations, this study presents a Radio Frequency Tagging-based patient monitoring framework that integrates mobility tracking with an early warning mechanism to enable proactive …

The Association Between Cyber Behaviors And Hedonic And Eudaimonic Well-Being: The Moderating Role Of Personality Traits, Areej Elsayary, Juan Calmaestra, Mercedes Gómez-López

All Works

The increasing integration of digital technologies into everyday life has intensified engagement in various cyber behaviors, raising important questions about their relationship with individuals' well-being. This study examined the associations between online moral disengagement, problematic internet use (compulsive internet use), benign and toxic disinhibition, cyberaggression, and cybervictimization with both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being among emerging adults in the United Arab Emirates. Furthermore, it explores the moderating role of personality traits in these associations. Data were collected from 671 emerging adults (46.8% women) aged 18–29 years (M = 22.56; SD = 3.04). Results showed that cybervictimization and cyberaggression exhibited the strongest …

Understanding Chatbot-Assisted Collaborative Learning Among Female Undergraduate Students, Mohammad Amin Kuhail, Ahmed Shuhaiber, Sinan Salman, Nazik Alturki

All Works

Computer programming can be daunting for beginners due to complex concepts and syntax. Traditional teaching methods, while engaging through gamification and active learning, often lack personalized approaches. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), present new possibilities for personalized and interactive learning environments. This study introduces a chatbot-assisted collaborative learning environment (CCLE) that leverages an LLM (GPT-4) to enhance collaborative programming education. The CCLE enables real-time guidance and collaboration through natural language interactions, allowing students to work together on programming tasks, edit code collaboratively, and engage with both peers and the educational chatbot. We conducted an …

Engineering Sulfur Concrete Mixes: A Data-Driven Approach To Aggregate Packing And Binder Efficiency, Vasilia Al Khaldi, Abdel Hamid I. Mourad, Maisa El Gamal

All Works

Processing window (mass loss < 3%). A first-order, order-of-magnitude carbon-footprint estimate—presented with explicit caveats rather than as a full life-cycle assessment—indicates that replacing Portland cement with by-product sulfur is the dominant contributor to a substantial reduction in embodied CO₂ per cubic metre relative to equivalent-strength Portland cement concrete. The valorization of steelmaking by-products aligns with circular economy principles, enabling high-performance, recyclable, and low-carbon construction materials without chemical binder modification.

An Advanced Healthcare System With An Automated Vit Model For Dermoscopic Skin Cancer Identification, Ahed Abugabah, Prashant Kumar Shukla, Suchi Mishra, Abhishek Dwivedi

All Works

Early and reliable diagnosis of skin cancer from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to class imbalance, subtle inter-class variations, lesion boundary ambiguity, and illumination inconsistency, which can degrade the robustness of conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To address these limitations, this study proposes an automated smart healthcare framework for dermoscopic skin cancer diagnosis using an Enhanced Vision Transformer (E-ViT) that improves global-context modeling through self-attention while strengthening fine-grained lesion representation learning. Unlike standard ViT configurations, the proposed architecture integrates multi-scale patch embedding and attention refinement to better capture border irregularities and color–texture heterogeneity that are critical for melanoma discrimination. Furthermore, …

Fair And Explainable Educational Recommendations With A Hybrid Graph-Gru Framework, Edmund Evangelista, Syed M.Salman Bukhari

All Works

Artificial Intelligence (AI) recommender systems are increasingly used in education to personalize learning and help students navigate large collections of digital learning resources. However, many existing approaches emphasize predictive accuracy over fairness, robustness, diversity, and transparency. This creates an important educational challenge. The students with limited participation histories may receive less reliable support, while highly popular resources may dominate recommendation lists and limit access to other useful learning materials. To address this challenge, this study aims to develop and evaluate a responsible educational recommender framework that supports personalized learning resource navigation while making recommendation behavior more fair, stable, diverse, and …

Large Language Models In Nlp: Evolution, Architectural Trends, And Open Challenges, Haseeb Javed, Babar Shah, Farman Ali, Daehan Kwak

All Works

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its subdomains are approached. Recent technological advancements have driven this transformation. This study offers researchers a detailed overview of LLMs, comparing them with traditional rule-based systems, statistical techniques, machine learning, neural networks, and the rise of transformer-based architectures. From a wider perspective, language models such as GPT, BERT, T5, PaLM, and LLaMA have facilitated the transformation of entire sectors, including healthcare and business, due to their highly scalable nature. Despite their wide range of applications, LLMs face numerous challenges, such as output biases, limited interpretability, …

Anticipatory Governance And Leadership For Ai Implementation In Higher Education: A Scoping Review, Sandra Baroudi

All Works

As the education sector attempts to address rapid changes caused by Artificial Intelligence (AI), it becomes crucial to examine approaches to leadership at the organizational and system levels. This scoping review explores how anticipatory models of governance are conceptualised and operationalised globally within higher education settings in the context of AI-related transformations. Using a scoping review design, academic and grey literature published between 2020 and 2025 was searched across Scopus, EBSCOhost, ERIC, Google Scholar, and ProQuest. Nineteen sources were selected based on clear inclusion and exclusion criteria and analysed thematically. Findings revealed that while AI offers promising opportunities to transform …

Leveraging Mammal Mycophagy To Determine Environmental Drivers Of Truffle Diversity, Brittany Hartsock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many mycorrhizal fungi are hypogeous (truffle-forming), producing underground fruiting bodies. Studying truffles is inherently challenging due to their hidden nature. However, mycophagous mammals provide a unique opportunity to study hypogeous fungi because they rely on truffles as a food source. Although several truffle species have recently been described in the southern Appalachian region, their fruiting patterns remain poorly understood. To address this, we quantified truffle richness and spore loads from 670 Peromyscus scat samples collected across 42 sites spanning an environmental gradient during 2024 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of East Tennessee. We found that truffle richness and spore abundance …

An Assessment Of Accessibility And Affordability Of Inpatient Psychiatric Care In Tennessee, Kailee Havrda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Access to mental health has seen changes over the past decade, but little research and attention have been given to access to inpatient psychiatric facilities. Inpatient psychiatric care is crucial for patients experiencing mental health emergencies who need immediate access to care. Gaps in spatial accessibility, affordability, and the access and assessment process were identified due to a lack of available information in the field.

Methods: Secondary data from the Tennessee Department of Health were used to assess financial accessibility through payer source charges and patient encounters, as well as through mapping of inpatient psychiatric facilities and conducting drive …

Efficacy And Engagement In Digital Acceptance And Commitment Therapy: A Meta-Analysis And Investigation Of Mechanisms, Korena S. Klimczak

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Digital mental health interventions offer a more accessible, affordable, and flexible option for mental health support. These apps and websites draw from the same therapeutic models as face-to-face therapy, but are available on demand at a fraction of the cost. In exchange, digital formats give up the personal relationship, accountability, and scheduled structure that keep people connected to treatment. This places a greater burden on users to stay involved on their own, and as a result, engagement is widely believed to be the main bottleneck limiting the impact of digital mental health care.

This dissertation examined engagement in digital programs …

Balancing Root-Zone Oxygenation And Rhizosphere Stability: The Impact Of Aeration And Hypoxia On Hydroponic Plant Growth, Christian D. Baker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

As the global population and food demand continue to increase, growers must look to innovative and sustainable methods for plant cultivation. Hydroponics is a popular method of sustainable plant cultivation where plant roots are suspended over a liquid nutrient solution. Hydroponics uses less water compared to traditional agriculture because there is no evaporation or solution runoff. It also maximizes land use, requires fewer pesticides and herbicides, and enables year-round cultivation in controlled environments. However, indoor hydroponic systems rely on artificial lighting, which has higher energy costs than traditional farming methods. Optimizing growing conditions is therefore critical to ensure long-term economic …

Pieces Solving A Puzzle: Emerging Roles And Cross-Field Analogies During A Distributed Epistemic Game, Jenna Matthews

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

In an effort to describe why some problems can’t be solved, a character compared them to a cubic meter of platinum - a block so dense that all the people who could squeeze around it still couldn’t lift it off the ground. In the same way, these problems simply can’t have enough people gathered around and communicating about them - and so they remain unsolved.

This research looks at the first Polymath Project (2009) as an example of a distributed epistemic game to examine how groups engage with complex problems. and without a locally omniscient individual. In this setting of …

Training General Educators To Collect Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence Data Using Behavioral Skills Training, Mckenna Larsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Many schools use a three-tiered system to meet the needs of individual students. General education teachers are often not given the training to provide the supports they are expected to provide. Evidence shows that when interventions meet the need the student is trying to communicate, these interventions are more effective. This research looked at the effects of training that involved modeling, practice, and feedback, also known as Behavior Skills Training (BST), on general education teachers’ ability to collect data on students’ behavior. It also looked at how teaching educators to collect data influenced their belief in their ability to handle …

Serotonin 1b/1a Receptor Modulation On Probabilistic Reversal Learning In The Btbr Mouse Model Of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Magdalena R. Gonzales

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is known for developmental disability that typically emerges around infancy and early childhood due to a possible combination of genetics, environment or a combination of both. A diagnosis of ASD is determined by behavioral measures due to the lack of reliable biomarkers. Such symptoms include social impairment, and restricted and repetitive behaviors. Restricted and repetitive behaviors often present as rigid behavior or behavioral inflexibility. Behavioral flexibility is often described as the ability to adapt to changing environments. Previous research has shown that serotonin (5-HT) 1B and 1A receptor upregulation may attenuate restricted, repetitive behaviors found in …

Integrating Student-Mined Data In Youth Computer Science Learning: An Investigation Of Learning Outcomes And Educational Strategies, Alex Acquah

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As data increasingly shapes participation in society, there is growing emphasis on preparing youth to engage with data through computer science education. Existing K-12 computing and data science curricula have expanded opportunities for learners to analyze and interpret data; however, many learning experiences continue to rely on datasets and inquiry structures designed by others, limiting authentic engagement, personal relevance, and learner agency. This dissertation investigates the integration of student-mined data in youth computer science learning and examines its influence on computational thinking, epistemic agency, and learning experiences among high school students. Using a qualitative approach, data collected from youths of …

Enhancing Teachers’ Intercultural Literacy: Examining The Impact Of A Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program To Indonesia, Paul R. Wallace

Journal of Global Education and Research

The Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Program offers institutional grants to support overseas experiences and curriculum development for educators. The study reported here focused on changes in the intercultural literacy of participants involved in a 4-week Fulbright-Hays GPA Program to Indonesia. Participants in this study included K-12 teachers from public schools and teacher education majors. Before and after traveling to Indonesia, eight participants completed a self-assessment of intercultural literacy, which measured competencies, understandings, attitudes, language proficiencies, participation, and identities deemed necessary for successful living and working in a cross-cultural environment. This article presents the results of the assessment survey, along …

Changing Expectations In Higher Education Post-Pandemic, Gregory R. Mackinnon, Tyler Maclean, Mohamad El Maouch, William Yuan, Zhao Kaibin, Bi Dandan, Marwa Saab

Journal of Global Education and Research

A sample of higher education students in Canada and China was surveyed and interviewed to ascertain any changes in their educational expectations given their experiences with emergency remote teaching during the pandemic. In addition, the instructors of these students were interviewed to corroborate student feedback. The research suggested that students in Canada and China expressed expectations of increased flexibility and improved pedagogy. Whereas Canadian students were overtly demanding of the instructor and the educational system, Chinese students were comparatively subtle in their expectation that the post-pandemic level of support be maintained. The primary concern of the Chinese cohort was a …

Advancing Blended Education: Caribbean Lecturers’ Reflective Narratives Of Caution, Creativity, And Change, Mia A. Jules, Donna-Maria B. Maynard, Grace A. Fayombo, Jason E. Marshall, Tanya Newton, Kamilah Hutson, Amanda Kellman, Cherise Bynoe, Mikaila Collymore, Jo-Ann Prosper-Chase, Laura Lee Foster, Adicia Clarke

Journal of Global Education and Research

Blended teaching requires lecturers to constantly self-reflect on their pedagogical practice to enhance student learning. However, there is yet to be a significant corpus of literature that highlights the cognitive resources that lecturers in higher education should possess to effectively use blended learning strategies. It is important to understand the intellectual resources required for blended pedagogy so that such capabilities can be fostered during faculty-training programs; ultimately resulting in innovative strategies to ensure quality learning outcomes and the advancement of university-level blended teaching mandates. This qualitative case study explored how twelve Caribbean lecturers experienced and navigated the teaching process in …

Evaluation Of A No-Code Ai Model For Detecting Periapical Radiolucencies: Impact Of Anatomical Region On Diagnostic Performance, Manal Hamdan, Kevin W. Yu, Marguerite Miller, Stephanie J. Sidow, Zaid Badr, Sergio E. Uribe

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Background

To develop a no-code artificial intelligence (AI) model for the detection of apical radiolucent lesions and to assess how lesion location influences the model’s diagnostic performance.

Methods

312 periapical radiographs were retrospectively collected, each accompanied by a corresponding cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scan obtained within six months and a radiology report authored by board-certified oral and maxillofacial radiologists. These reports served as the reference standard, and all findings were cross-verified by the primary investigator through CBCT review. The dataset included 181 images with at least one apical radiolucent lesion and 131 lesion-free controls. Using the no-code AI platform LandingLens …

In-Hospital Mortality Patterns And Readmissions In Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: An Analysis Of The Role Of Pulmonary Hypertension, Saad Afzal Khan, Trishna Parikh, Adishwar Rao, Akriti Agrawal, Aarohi Parikh, Farah Kazzaz, Sarah Shin, Harry Karmouty-Quintana, Maulin Patel, Kha Dinh, Bela Patel, Bindu Akkanti

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may be complicated by pulmonary hypertension (PH). We aimed to understand the impact of PH on in-hospital mortality and quantify the 30-day readmission rate among patients with COPD. For this cross-sectional study, we used the Nationwide Readmissions Database from 2017-2020 to identify adults ≥18 years with COPD. Patients were stratified according to PH diagnosis. Baseline characteristics between groups were compared using the Pearson chi-square test and two-sample t-test. Predictors of in-hospital mortality were determined using multivariate logistic regression analysis adjusted for demographics and confounders. The 30-day readmission rate and prevalence of PH subgroups by baseline …

Exploring Burnout Among Ncaa Collegiate Athletes: The Impact Of Gender, Sport, Seasonal Demands, And Other Contributing Factors, Anneliese Wong

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine burnout among NCAA Division I student-athletes at one mid-sized University in the Rocky Mountains region of the United States and determine whether differences existed based on gender, sport type, competitive season stage, and burnout dimension. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was used and data was collected from 76 student-athletes across 11 varsity sports. Burnout was assessed using items adapted from the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ; Raedeke & Smith, 2001), along with additional items assessing fatigue and seasonal experiences.

Descriptive results showed the student-athletes reported the highest mean level of physical burnout, followed …

Gender Gap In Returns To Publications, Piotr Śpiewanowski, Ivan Stetsyuk, Oleksandr Talavera

All Works

Gender equity in science depends not only on who participates in research, but also on how their work is rewarded. We examine gender gaps in monetary returns to research productivity, pay, and credit attribution using a novel dataset linking salary and publication records for professors at U.S. public universities. While our main contribution shows that there is no robust evidence of a significant gender gap in monetary returns to publications, we uncover substantial heterogeneity across disciplines and authorship structures. Women in medical and health sciences experience a negative gap in returns of 10.7% relative to men for equivalent research output. …

How Leaders Build Employee Trust In Artificial Intelligence: Voice Opportunities, Humility, And Trust Transfer, Jack Mcguire, David De Cremer, Devesh Narayanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Artificial intelligence is increasingly central to organizational work, yet employee trust in AI remains fragile. Although prior research has primarily explained trust in AI through technological characteristics such as transparency, reliability, and accuracy, we argue that trust in AI is also shaped by the social context in which employees encounter these systems. Drawing on affect-as-information theory and social information processing theory, we develop and test a model in which leader-provided voice opportunities reduce employees’ negative affect about AI-related work experiences, thereby enhancing perceptions of leader trustworthiness and, in turn, trust in AI. We further propose that this indirect effect depends …

Improving Nurse Confidence And Perceived Readiness For Early Code Blue Response: A Quality Improvement Project, Elexia Butler, Annette Sotelo Rodriguez, Paulene Rones, Evangelyne Vue

ELMSN E-Portfolio. A collection of Scholarly and Creative Works

Improving Nurse Confidence and Perceived Readiness for Early Code Blue Response

Purpose

In many acute care units that are predominately dealing with chronic conditions, cardiac arrest is a low frequency, high stakes event. The purpose of this project is to improve early cardiac arrest response by increasing nurse confidence and perceived readiness to initiate high-quality CPR prior to Rapid Response Team (RRT) arrival.

Background

Over the past three years, there has been a significant increase in Code Blue events on the Surgical Acute Telemetry Unit. Initial management observations noted that staff response lacked clear role delineation, immediate pulse identification, and …

Ambulatory Blood Pressure Variability In Prediction Of Target Organ Injury: The Ship Ahoy Study, Coral D Hanevold, Jang Dong Seo, Stephen R Daniels, Bonita E Falkner, Michael A Ferguson, Joseph T Flynn, Julie R Ingelfinger, Philip R Khoury, Marc B Lande, Kevin E Meyers, Mark Mitsnefes, Joshua Samuels, Elaine M Urbina

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: Ambulatory hypertension is associated with elevated left ventricular mass index (LVMI), cardiac dysfunction, and increased arterial stiffness in adolescents. Whether the addition of measures of BP variability improves the prediction of subclinical cardiovascular target organ damage (TOD) over mean BP measures is not known.

Methods: We assessed clinic and ambulatory BP (ABP), anthropometrics, and TOD in 397 adolescents. ABP means standard deviation (SD), BP, and heart rate (HR) dipping were calculated; coefficients of variability (CV) were calculated (SD/mean) to assess ABP variabilities. Measures of TOD included LVMI, left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), LV systolic shortening, LV diastolic function (e'/a'), and …

The Downstream Effect Of Gender Bias On Academic Performance And Career Aspirations Amongst Female Students In Stem Via Gender-Professional Identity Integration (G-Pii), Chi-Ying Cheng, Shuna Shiann Khoo, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yeow Leong Lee, Vandana Ramachandra Rao

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Background Gender imbalance in STEM, characterized by a significant underrepresentation of women, remains a significant challenge. Although gender bias is a well-known contributor to women’s attrition from STEM, the psychological mechanisms linking gender bias to departure are less well understood. Our research investigates early antecedents of attrition and the psychological processes that precede leaving the STEM pathway in tertiary education. Drawing upon identity integration research, we propose that perceived gender bias exerts undermines female STEM students’ academic performance and career aspirations by reducing their Gender-Professional Identity Integration (G-PII), a construct that captures individual differences in the perceived compatibility between a …

A Trait-Based Thermal Risk-Index Framework Integrating Stage-Structured Insect Demography, Host Resources And The Next-Generation Matrix, Komi Mensah Agboka, Luca Rossini, Bonoukpoè Mawuko Sokame, Quinto Juma Meltus, Juliet Onditi, Abdelmutalab G.A. Azrag, Elfatih M. Abdel-Rahman

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

The biology and population dynamics of terrestrial arthropods are strongly influenced by environmental conditions, particularly temperature, but thermal responses alone do not determine whether a population can establish when development depends on host resources. Here, we extend an existing physiologically based risk-index framework by explicitly coupling stage-structured insect demography with host-resource dynamics and deriving the resulting population-level invasion threshold through the Next-Generation Matrix (NGM) approach. The formulation integrates temperature-dependent development, fecundity and mortality across egg, larval, pupal and adult stages with host-resource production and depletion, yielding the basic reproduction number (R0[jls-end-space/]) as a mechanistically interpretable risk index, where (Formula presented) …

Producer Organizations, Productivity And Sustainable Intensification Practices In Oil Palm Production, Martin Paul Tabe-Ojong, Abebayehu Girma Geffersa, Kibrom T. Sibhatu

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Oil palm production is expanding in traditional farming and forested areas, especially in West and Central Africa around the Congo Forest Basin and mostly characterized by declining yields and yield gaps. Due to typically non-binding land access, independent producers tend to prioritize extensification over intensification, which has negative environmental consequences. Sustainable intensification (SI) of smallholder production is a guiding paradigm that aims to increase yields while minimizing negative environmental impacts. In this study, we examine the relationship between producer organizations (POs), sustainable intensification practices (SIPs), namely mulching and intercropping, and oil palm yields in Cameroon. We estimate actual and counterfactual …