Digital Commons Network^™

Quantile Normalisation Enables Interpretable Spatial Prioritisation Of Persistence-Related Mechanistic Suitability Under Uncertainty For Tomato Red Spider Mite (Tetranychus Evansi) In Africa, Komi Mensah Agboka, Luca Rossini, Quinto Juma Meltus, Bonoukpoè Mawuko Sokame, Abdulmutallab G.A. Azrag, Thomas Dubois, Elfatih M. Abdel-Rahman

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Mechanistic trait models are increasingly considered to estimate persistence-related suitability for invasive species, although translating reproduction metrics into operational indicators for spatial decision-making remains challenging. Branching-process transformations are widely applied to convert mechanistic reproduction numbers into probabilities of establishment; however, such transformations may compress spatial gradients when persistence is broadly feasible. Using tomato red spider mite (Tetranychus evansi) as a case study across Africa, this study developed an uncertainty-aware, physiologically-based model and generated spatially explicit estimates of expected reproduction (R0). We compared three representations: raw mechanistic suitability, branching-process persistence probability, and quantile-normalised suitability. Although all representations preserved rank ordering, branching …

Learning 1-Bit Lidar-Based Localization With Auxiliary Objective, Kaijie Yin, Zhiyuan Zhang, Tian Gao, Wentao Zhu, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Hui Kong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

6-DoF LiDAR-based localization is a fundamental capability for autonomous systems operating in large-scale outdoor environments. Many deep-learning-based localization methods have achieved promising performance so far. However, as one of the always-on modules competing for limited on-board computational resources, the localization module is expected to consume only a small portion of the overall compute budget. Most existing learning-based methods are still too heavy for this purpose. In contrast, binary neural networks (BNNs) offer an appealing solution, but the 1-bit compression causes severe information loss and performance drop. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Binarized LiDAR-based Localization (BiLoc), the …

Revised Draft Final Quarterly Operations And Maintenance Report: Butte Treatment Lagoon System – First Quarter 2026, Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Re: Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit (Bpsou) Final Bpsou Unreclaimed Sites Anderson Shaft Remedial Action Work Plan (Rawp) Request For Change Ur-2026-Ra-01, Mike Mcanulty

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Metrological Characterization Of Pavement Friction Measurements For High-Friction Surface Treatments: Si Traceability, Uncertainty Evaluation, And Adhesion–Hysteresis Separation Via Water–Soap Bpt Protocol, Alireza Roshan, Magdy Abdelrahman

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Laboratory friction measurements are central to material screening for High-Friction Surface Treatments (HFST), yet metrological aspects including a proposed metrological traceability framework or uncertainty, and reproducibility are consistently underreported. This study applies a metrology-aligned framework to British Pendulum Tester (BPT) measurements performed in three states: dry, wet (water), and water–soap to assess operational adhesion and hysteresis components, document traceability to the International System of Units (SI), and report GUM-style uncertainty with covariance for the adhesion difference. Measurements were obtained for calcined bauxite (CB) and rhyolite (Rhy) in HFST and Coarse gradations across seven polishing protocols (baseline; LAA-1000/2000; MDA-105/180; PSV-10 h/20 …

Flexural Performance Of Deficient Rc Beams Repaired With Gfrp Composite, Zena Aljazaeri, Hayder Alghazali, Zuhair Al-Jaberi, John J. Myers

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials have been improved for use in repairing and strengthening existing infrastructure over the past few decades. This case study focuses on the effect of confinement with GFRP strips on the structural performance of out-of-service beams in bridge applications due to the impact of over-height vehicles or inadequate lap-spliced reinforcements. In this study, beams with inadequate lap splices in the tension zone were utilized to mimic the damaged area in out-of-service RC beams. The proposed repair technique is a glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite in the form of longitudinal sheets and U-wrapped strips. The experimental study determined …

Editorial For The Special Issue “Advances And Applications Of Polymer Gels For Subsurface Energy And Storage”, Baojun Bai, Jingyang Pu

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Polymer gels are essential functional materials for subsurface energy operations, playing a critical role in conformance control, fluid diversion, hydraulic fracturing, and leakage mitigation. As reservoirs become increasingly complex and the demand for sustainable energy grows, continued innovation in gel technologies is crucial. This editorial introduces a Special Issue titled "Advances and Applications of Polymer Gels for Subsurface Energy and Storage," which compiles seven original research articles exploring recent developments in gel synthesis, characterization, and applications. The featured studies highlight the versatility of polymer gels, including nanoparticle-reinforced composites, foam–gel hybrids, recrosslinkable preformed particle gels, and advanced fracturing fluids. The contributions …

Karhunen-Loève Modes For Coherent Arrays, Jack E. Mccrae, Santasri R. Bose-Pillai, Steven T. Fiorino

Faculty Publications

The optimal modes for correcting atmospheric turbulence on coherent arrays are determined. These Karhunen-Loève modes are eigenvectors of a covariance matrix. Creating this covariance matrix requires knowledge of the power spectrum of the turbulence, the aperture geometry, and a basis set for the matrix. The Kolmogorov power law is ordinarily chosen here for the turbulence spectrum. By choosing the phase on each array subaperture element minus the phase averaged over all subapertures as this basis, infinite values in the variances and covariances can be avoided. The piston mode of the whole array, which would otherwise also be infinite, is thus …

The Relationship Between Adverse Childhood Experiences, Protective And Compensatory Experiences, And Parenting Attitudes Among Fathers, Kylie Schmidt

Dissertations

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are defined as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood particularly between the ages of 0 and 17 years that negatively influence long-term health, relational functioning, and parenting practices (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2026; Felitti et al., 1998; Merrick et al., 2019). Conversely, protective and compensatory experiences (PACEs) have emerged as protective factors that foster resilience and possibly buffer against the adverse outcomes of ACEs (Narayan et al., 2018). As the existing research has greatly focused on mothers, little is known about how men’s early life experiences shape their parenting attitudes, particularly during the …

Offline And Thriving: Understanding The Professional And Personal Lives Of Non-Social Media Users In A Digitally Dominant Era, Bhargava Mantena

Dissertations

Existing research has treated voluntary social media abstinence as the absence of users rather than as a condition worth study. This mixed-methods study examined its psychological and occupational correlates. Adults aged 21 to 65 reporting abstinence from all major platforms for six months or more completed three validated instruments measuring mental well-being, work engagement, and perceived social isolation; a purposive subsample of 12 took part in semi-structured interviews. The analysis set comprised 120 participants, below the 128 indicated by the a priori power analysis. Research Question 1 could not be tested as approved, because no active-user comparison group was recruited; …

Constrained Multiview Contrastive Learning For Jointly Supervised Representation Learning, Siyuan Dai, Kai Ye, Kun Zhao, Yang Du, Haoteng Tang, Liang Zhan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Purpose

Materials and Methods

Catalytic Synthesis Of Protoberberine Alkaloids And Their Evaluation As Selective Dopamine Receptor Ligands, Ashok Reddy Gudipally

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine regulates motor control, cognition, reward, motivation, and neuroendocrine signaling. Disruption of dopaminergic neurotransmission is closely linked to central nervous system disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, addiction, and related neuropsychiatric conditions. Because these functions are mediated by multiple dopamine receptor subtypes with distinct roles in physiology and disease, the discovery of subtype-selective ligands remains an important goal in neuropharmacology. Within this context, protoberberine alkaloids, particularly tetrahydroprotoberberines (THPBs), are attractive molecular frameworks because they combine structural complexity with broad biological relevance, including measurable activity in CNS-related diseases. Prior work from our laboratory and others established (–)-stepholidine (1.60) as an important lead …

Model-Theoretic Arguments In Philosophy, Peter Susanszky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on model-theoretic arguments in philosophy, especially those of Quine, Davidson, and Putnam. In the first part, to ground the debate, I give a rigorous introduction to the salient parts of first-order model theory. I start the second part by giving an introduction to Quine's philosophy, and how the model-theoretic arguments fit into it. After considering how Donald Davidson adopted the Quinean lesson, I move on to Putnam's model-theoretic arguments. Putnam's spin on these model-theoretic considerations significantly departs from Quine and Davidson, while retaining many of the core ideas. Most importantly, I argue that the target of Putnam's …

Shifting To Using Desmos Or Geogebra Graphing Calculators In High School Mathematics Classrooms, Nancy Lin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most high school math classrooms in Long Island use the Texas Instruments TI-84+ CE graphing calculator in the three Regents math courses. Texas Instruments holds approximately 80% of the market share of the international graphing calculator market. At a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $150 per TI-84+ CE, an inequitable situation exists for math learning, as underfunded schools and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds cannot afford to purchase one for home use. Such students have less experience using the handheld graphing calculator when they take high-stakes math exams. Through case studies of four suburban school districts in New York that …

Potential Energy Landscape Formalism For Quantum Liquids, Yang Zhou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Atomic delocalization due to nuclear quantum effects (NQE) remains poorly understood in low-temperature liquids near the glass state and during vitrification. Many liquids can be described accurately by treating their nuclei as classical particles, but this approximation fails for light elements such as He and H₂, small hydrogen-containing molecules such as water, and systems in which zero-point motion or isotope-substitution effects are important. Developing a general thermodynamic and statistical-mechanical description of such liquids has been challenging. This dissertation extends the potential energy landscape (PEL) formalism, originally developed for classical liquids and glasses, to liquids that obey quantum mechanics and exhibit …

Rethinking Road Racing Standards: Comparing New York Road Runners Race Results To Running Industry Standards, Jennie Coughlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Running has undergone a third boom in participation since 2020, driven largely by people seeking fitness options that were outside and socially distanced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media has also allowed runners from groups that did not traditionally participate to find community. As the road racing population has expanded to include more people, some road racing industry standards have not kept up. This project assesses what the road racing community looks like and measures industry standards against the community of participants to see what changes in those standards would be needed to make them inclusive for all participants.

To …

Investigating The Role Of Striatal Cholinergic Interneuron D2 Receptors In Behavioral Flexibility, Janyn J. Alfred

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine (ACh) interact within the striatum to shape reward-based learning and choice behavior. DA D2 receptors on cholinergic interneurons (CIN D2Rs) were genetically knocked out to investigate their role in choice allocation using a two-lever matching paradigm. Behaviorally, both knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) mice learned the initial task equally well. When shifted to asymmetric matching schedules (VI-90 vs. VI-180), ideal matching predicts that mice should allocate exactly 67% of their total responses to the rich lever. Neither group matched as predicted by the matching law. Instead, the KO mice showed a pattern where the higher rate …

The Role Of External Factors In Shaping Carbohydrate Conformational Landscapes, Murat Yaman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Carbohydrates (glycans) are among the most structurally diverse biomolecules and participate in a wide range of biological processes, including molecular recognition, cell adhesion, immune response, host-pathogen interactions, and cellular signaling. Their biological functions are governed by a complex interplay between sequence, stereochemistry, conformational flexibility, and environmental factors. However, the structural heterogeneity and dynamic nature of glycans present significant challenges for both experimental characterization and theoretical modeling. In particular, the relationships between glycan structure, conformational dynamics, and the resulting potential energy surfaces remain incomplete.

This dissertation investigates how external factors modulate the potential energy surfaces of carbohydrates through a combination of …

Mesoscopic Scaling Of Microwave Transmittance And Disorder-Induced Alignment, Israel Kurtz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents microwave measurements and numerical simulations of wave propagation and transmission through random mesoscopic waveguides. We analyze the scaling of mesoscopic microwave conductance, including departures from Ohm’s law near channel openings, which are frequencies at which new propagating modes enter the system, and the evolution of modal phase alignment within the medium, which leads to the observed diversity of transmission eigenvalues. We extend the transmission matrix formalism to all sample depths using the flux matrix, which relates the flux amplitude within the sample to the incident flux, and decompose the flux at each sample depth into forward- and …

Self-Organized Criticality In Biased Activated Random Walk, Joshua Meisel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We demonstrate many of the conjectured universality and self-organized criticality (SOC) properties of the interacting particle system Activated Random Walk (ARW) in the setting of one-dimensional biased walks, as formulated for instance in Levine and Silvestri’s 2024 survey. Namely, there exists the same limiting critical state for two finite ARW models, as well as for the infinite model as the density approaches its critical value from below. Many of the desired properties hold, including heavy-tailed avalanches, but spatial correlations decay exponentially fast, a deviation from the SOC paradigm. Nonetheless, the obtained decay rate vanishes with the bias. Since the critical …

Pda (Privacy-Preserving Distributed Algorithms) In Action: Ten Principles For High-Quality Multi-Site Clinical Evidence Generation, Yong Chen, Chongliang Luo, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: Distributed Research Networks (DRNs) offer significant opportunities for collaborative multi-site research and have significantly advanced healthcare research based on clinical observational data. However, generating high-quality real-world evidence using fit-for-use data from multi-site studies faces important challenges, including biases associated with various types of heterogeneity within and across sites and data sharing difficulties. Over the last 10 years, Privacy-Preserving Distributed Algorithms (PDA) have been developed and utilized in numerous national and international real-world studies spanning diverse domains, from comparative effectiveness research, target trial emulation, to healthcare delivery, policy evaluation, and system performance assessment. Despite these advances, there remains a lack …

Harkness Seminars In The Humanities, Sarah S. Novlan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This participatory action research study explored the effects of Harkness seminars on students’ cognitive, affective, and metacognitive learning in secondary humanities classes. Educators need an effective, flexible, and adaptive method to promote student learning beyond superficial content acquisition. With the decoupling of virtue formation from knowledge acquisition, knowledge gaps from COVID-19 lockdowns, and the rise of artificial intelligence in student plagiarism, a proven method to address all aspects of student formation is needed. Using a participatory action research framework for this qualitative study, conducted at an independent K–12 school site in Texas, the researcher interviewed six secondary humanities teachers over …

September 2026, Office Of Research

Research Update

No abstract provided.

Spatial Dependence Of Technical Efficiency Of Rice Farms In Camagong San Vicente Farmers Irrigators Association Inc., Cabusao, Camarines Sur, Philippines, Anthony James C. Albis, Julieta A. Delos Reyes, Antonio Jesus A. Quilloy, Jaine C. Reyes, Valerien O. Pede

The Philippine Agricultural Scientist

This study assessed the technical efficiency of rice farms and examined how neighboring farms influence productivity among members of the Camagong San Vicente Farmers Irrigators’ Association Inc. in Cabusao, Camarines Sur, Philippines. Employing Stochastic frontier analysis and spatial econometric models, the research identified key determinants of productivity and technical efficiency. Moran’s Index and visual geospatial analysis revealed significant clustering of technical efficiency, confirming spatial dependence among farm locations. The spatial lag model was selected after robust diagnostic tests, including Lagrange multiplier tests, to capture the influence of neighboring farms on individual efficiency levels. Results indicate substantial variability in technical efficiency …

Physical Soil Health Indicators In Paired Certified Organic And Conventional Farms: A Multi-Case Study In The Philippines, Victorino A. Bato, Gina Villegas Pangga

The Philippine Agricultural Scientist

There is a common perception that organic products and practices are good for the health of consumers, plants, the environment, and particularly the soil. In the Philippines, organic agriculture was enacted into law (i.e., Republic Act No. 10068) in order to encourage farmers to shift to organic farming and reap its benefits, including better soil health through improved soil physical properties. This study compared certain soil physical properties of certified organic farms in the Philippines with those of a conventional cropping system. Results showed significantly higher soil aggregate stability (high values of percent water-stable aggregates and mean weight diameter, both …

Allochthonous Particulate Organic Carbon In Blue Carbon Ecosystems: Implications For Accounting, Stability, And Policy, Anirban Akhand, Inés Mazarrasa, Stacey M. Trevathan-Tackett, K. M.G. Mostofa, Abhra Chanda, Hongbin Liu, Hiroshi Sakugawa, Si Liang Li, Cong Qiang Liu, Catherine E. Lovelock, Paul Lavery, Hilary Kennedy, Peter I. Macreadie

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs) store a significant amount of organic carbon (OC) in their soils, including OC sequestered by other ecosystems and transported into these ecosystems, referred to as allochthonous OC. This study reviews the state-of-the-art knowledge on the abundance and sources (including still unexplored ones) of allochthonous particulate organic carbon (POC) and reviews the ways allochthonous POC is managed under the current blue carbon policy frameworks for carbon benefits accounting in blue carbon restoration and conservation projects. Based on a review of 102 studies, we find that 56 ± 25% of the soil organic carbon (SOC) deposits in BCEs …

What Makes An Analogy Effective For Students’ Learning Of Mathematics? Conceptualising Analogy Effectiveness For Teaching Mathematics, Vesife Hatisaru, Steven Richardson

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Analogies are commonly used in mathematics teaching as a means to promote understanding of new potentially abstract concepts, by linking them to well-understood contexts. Despite strong intuition that analogies are helpful in supporting students’ learning of mathematics, there is a lack of agreement on how to objectively judge the utility or conceptual affordances of these analogies. In this paper, we aim to conceptualise how to assess the effectiveness of an analogy by employing Gentner’s structure-mapping theory to analogies and explore two teacher-made analogies (the ‘child-mother’ and the ‘machine’) for learning the formal definition of a function as illustrative examples. By …

Paper Wasp Species Polistes Fuscatus (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) Tracks Urban Lead (Pb) Levels More Than Polistes Dominula, Lindsey R. Kemmerling, Anna L. Lovat, Allison A. Hanka, Emilie C. Snell-Rood

The Great Lakes Entomologist

Lead (Pb) is a persistent, toxic pollutant with widespread but inequitably distributed impacts, especially for humans in urban areas. The impacts of lead pollution on other organisms is largely unknown, even as they commonly experience exposure to lead alongside humans. We tested hypotheses regarding the lead concentrations of paper wasps across a gradient of pollution relative to soil and human lead levels, and correlations with wasp body condition. We collected two species of paper wasp across an urban gradient of lead pollution: Polistes fuscatus (Fabricius) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae), native to our study location, and Polistes dominula (Christ), nonnative to our study …

Long-Term Monitoring And Response Of Papaipema Sciata Bird (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) To Prescribed Fire In Michigan (Usa), Gregory J. Norwood, Logan M. Rowe, Brett A. Degregorio, David L. Cuthrell, Aaron D. Meredith, Steven M. Gray

The Great Lakes Entomologist

The Culver’s root borer moth (Papaipema sciata) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) is a rare Noctuid that requires Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) to complete its lifecycle within remnant native grasslands and open woodlands in the midwest and northeast United States. We report on 26 years of monitoring this species’ colonization of Culver’s root stems at Algonac State Park (ASP) in Michigan, where prairies have been maintained by prescribed fire since 1990. P. sciata is considered fire sensitive because eggs spend the dormant season in the combustible prairie litter and duff near host plants. The objectives were to determine the …

Enhancing Ecg Classification Using Systematic Cubic Spline Control Points With Deep Neural Networks, Hussein Qahtan Khalaf, Abeer Tariq Maolood, Nor Shahida Mohd Shah

Engineering and Technology Journal

The healthcare industry has undergone substantial growth over the past few years. Despite the development of medical technology, the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmia is still a significant challenge for modern diagnostic methods for correct and efficient classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, especially in cases of class imbalance and the complexity of the arrhythmia. This study proposes a novel deep learning model where the class imbalance problem is addressed using the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and the effect of signal resolution on the classification is investigated using Cubic Spline (CS) interpolation and Lightweight Deep Neural Network (CSLWDNN). Both the MIT-BIH …