Digital Commons Network^™

Identifying Occupational Stressors: A Storyboard Challenge, Marlene Goldstein

Open Educational Resources

Students analyze four illustrated workplace scenarios to distinguish among occupational stressors—role conflict, role ambiguity, role overload, and role insufficiency—with explanatory feedback and an optional scenario-writing activity to reinforce understanding.

An Investigation Of The Motivations And Experiences Of Adults With Communication Disorders Attending A Student-Led Speech Pathology Clinic, Alana Filing

Theses : Honours

Introduction: Student-led clinics (SLCs) are recognised as a valuable initiative for developing student clinical competencies, expanding placement capacity, and delivering targeted health intervention within the community. Despite the recognised benefits of SLCs, there is a notable lack of research investigating adult clients’ motivations for engaging with these services and their experiences of attending SLCs, particularly within speech pathology (SP) contexts.

Objective: This study investigated factors influencing adult clients’ initial engagement with a SP SLC and explored their experience with the service.

Method: A qualitative descriptive design was employed to capture clients’ experiences. Data were collected through semi-structured, face-to-face (F2F) interviews …

Performing Speculations: Rehearsing Futures Through Speculative F(R)Ictions, Rumen Rachev

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

I call myself a performance-scholar. By this I mean that I research within the field of performance studies and enact performances as a creative practice. Often, when people hear the term ‘performance studies,’ they think that I study theatre on stage. Performance studies includes theatre but is a transdisciplinary field with roots in anthropology, cultural studies and ethnography to name a few. Emerging in the twentieth century from the intersections of these disciplines, it refused the rigidity of traditional academic boundaries and instead cultivated a dynamic, open-ended mode of engagement. Performance studies treats performance not only as an object of …

Media And Democracy, Claire Fitzpatrick, Kurt Sengul

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The relationship between media and democracy has become increasingly fractured in Australia. Foundational democratic ideals, once mutually reinforcing, such as freedom of information, transparency and accountability, pluralism and diversity of opinion, and public trust are showing signs of strain. Under mounting pressure from media commercialisation, information pollution, populism and polarisation, democracy faces what André Bächtiger and John Dryzek (2024) describe as ‘diabolical times.’ They argue that the current crisis of democracy is, at its core, a crisis of public communication.

Compendia: Automated Visual Storytelling Generation From Online Article Collection, Manusha Imesh Karunathilaka Gamage Vidana, Litian Lei, Yiming Gao, Yong Wang, Jiannan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and humancentred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user’s query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user’s informational needs. Compendia addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; …

Evaluating Large Language Models For Line-Level Vulnerability Localization, Jian Zhang, Chong Wang, Anran Li, Weisong Sun, Cen Zhang, Wei Ma, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, Automated Vulnerability Localization (AVL) has attracted growing attention, aiming to facilitate diagnosis by pinpointing the specific lines of code responsible for vulnerabilities. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in various domains, yet their effectiveness in line-level vulnerability localization remains underexplored. In this work, we present the first comprehensive empirical evaluation of LLMs for AVL. Our study examines 19 leading LLMs suitable for code analysis, including ChatGPT and multiple open-source models, spanning encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only architectures, with model sizes from 60M to 70B parameters. We evaluate three paradigms including few-shot prompting, discriminative fine-tuning, and generative fine-tuning with and …

From Circuits To Hardware: Benchmarking Standard And Qubit-Efficient Quantum Optimization On Real Hardware, Monit Sharma, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite rapid progress in quantum optimization, the field lacks broad real-hardware benchmarks comparing multiple algorithmic families across diverse classically hard combinatorial problems under one protocol. We present a hardware-aware benchmark of gate-based quantum optimization across four NP-hard problems: the multi-dimensional knapsack problem (MDKP), maximum independent set (MIS), quadratic assignment problem (QAP), and market-share problem, spanning variational methods (VQE, CVaR-VQE), standard, multi-angle, and warm-start QAOA, and qubit-efficient encodings (Pauli correlation encoding (PCE), QRAO), executed on IBM Heron r1/r2 processors under resilience-level-2 mitigation. To our knowledge this includes the first real-hardware QRAO results and the first multi-problem PCE hardware benchmark. Across 247 …

Scale-Net: A Hierarchical U-Net Framework For Cross-Scale Generalization In Multi-Task Vehicle Routing, Suyu Liu, Zhiguang Cao, Nan Yin, Yew-Soon Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Neural solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) have shown great advantages in solving various kinds of problem types. However, they also face critical challenges in generalizing from small-scale training to large-scale problems and in identifying the most salient topological information for decision-making. To mitigate these gaps, we introduce ScaleNet, a novel hierarchical framework that integrates a U-Net architecture into a unified, multi-task VRP solver. Scale-Net explicitly captures multi-scale structural patterns by processing a nested hierarchy of input graph instances. This enriched, coarse-to-fine representation is extracted by the encoder and fed directly into the decoder, empowering decoder module with superior topological …

Instance Generation For Meta-Black-Box Optimization Through Latent Space Reverse Engineering, Chen Wang, Yue-Jiao Gong, Zhiguang Cao, Zeyuan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To relieve intensive human-expertise required to design optimization algorithms, recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) researches leverage generalization strength of meta-learning to train neural network-based algorithm design policies over a predefined training problem set, which automates the adaptability of the low-level optimizers on unseen problem instances. Currently, a common training problem set choice in existing MetaBBOs is well-known benchmark suites CoCo-BBOB. Although such choice facilitates the MetaBBO's development, problem instances in CoCo-BBOB are more or less limited in diversity, raising the risk of overfitting of MetaBBOs, which might further results in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose an instance generation approach, …

Bridging Synthetic And Real Routing Problems Via Llm-Guided Instance Generation And Progressive Adaptation, Jianghan Zhu, Yaoxin Wu, Zhuoyi Lin, Zhengyuan Zhang, Haiyan Yin, Zhiguang Cao, Senthilnath Jayavelu, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advances in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) methods have significantly improved the capability of neural solvers to handle synthetic routing instances. Nonetheless, existing neural solvers typically struggle to generalize effectively from synthetic, uniformly-distributed training data to real-world VRP scenarios, including widely recognized benchmark instances from TSPLib and CVRPLib. To bridge this generalization gap, we present Evolutionary Realistic Instance Synthesis (EvoReal), which leverages an evolutionary module guided by large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic instances characterized by diverse and realistic structural patterns. Specifically, the evolutionary module produces synthetic instances whose structural attributes statistically mimics those observed in authentic real-world instances. …

Securing The Flow: Strategic Storage And Corridor Design For Maritime Energy Security Under Chokepoint Disruptions, Monit Sharma, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maritime disruption planning requires joint strategic storage and transport capacity decisions under uncertainty. We develop a two-stage stochastic multi-commodity network-design model for national energy security that integrates corridor commitments, port--commodity inventories, storage expansion, and scenario-dependent routing for crude oil, LNG, LPG, and fertilizer. The formulation incorporates decision-dependent probabilities, corridor concentration limits, and mean--CVaR risk, admitting an exact MILP reformulation. In a data-anchored India-inspired case study, stochastic modeling outperforms the expected-value policy by 1.35%, with decision-dependent probabilities worth 0.67%. Service levels are heterogeneous: crude and fertilizer maintain full coverage, while LNG and LPG drop to 34.6% and 33.3% under worst-case scenarios. …

Knowing The User: Representation, Contextualization, And Predictive Internalization In Personalized Models, Zhongyu Ouyang

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Intelligent systems increasingly anticipate which items a person will prefer, adapt generated text to a familiar style, and carry relevant information across interactions. These capabilities invite the impression that a model knows its user. In the technical sense studied here, a model knows a user when it carries information specific to that user, uses that information in the relevant context, and generalizes beyond the observations used to build the user state. Knowing is thus a measurable relation among user evidence, model state, context, and held-out user-specific behavior. The research community generally studies this family of systems under the term personalization, …

Navigating School Re-Entry For Teen Mothers In Arua District, Uganda, Flavia Mane Eriku, Mweru Mwingi

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

Uganda's 2020 Education Re-entry Policy supports teenage mothers to resume schooling after pregnancy, yet re-enrollment remains low. In a qualitative case study in two public secondary schools in Arua District, we identified key barriers to be inadequate guidance, stigma, discrimination, irregular attendance, limited knowledge and resources, and forced marriage. We recommend boosting teen mothers’ self-esteem through personalized counseling, mental health support, and community awareness of the value of education. Strengthening these areas can enhance policy implementation and help policymakers and practitioners improve monitoring and educational reintegration for teenage mothers.

The Holistic Healing Source Scholarly Anthology Volume 1 (2026), Kimberly Johnson

Psychology: Faculty Publications

• Breaking Generational Curses: The Struggle of Achieving Peace and Prosperity Coming from an Under-Resourced Family: Explores the biological and systemic barriers marginalized families face, offering strength-based frameworks for breaking cycles of poverty and trauma.

First Generation College Students And The Factors That Impact Their Degree Completion, Kimberly Johnson

Psychology: Faculty Presentations

The phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of seven first-generation college graduates to identify the key factors driving their undergraduate degree completion. Using Tinto’s (1975) dropout theory as a framework, the research highlights the critical roles of institutional belonging and external support systems. Academic Factors: High-school preparatory classes significantly aided in the transition to higher education. Social Factors: Supportive faculty and having a strong sense of belonging to the institution were vital for retention. Cultural Factors: Robust encouragement from family, friends, and community members directly impacted success.

Brief For Jonathan H. Adler As Amicus Curiae Supporting Respondents And Affirmance, Jonathan Adler

Briefs

Global climate change presents many complex and intractable legal and policy questions. Assuming this Court has jurisdiction, the legal questions in this case are comparatively simple and straightforward. Nothing in federal law, let alone the Constitution, preempts state-law claims seeking relief from injuries allegedly caused or exacerbated by petitioners’ conduct.

At issue in this case is whether allegedly aggrieved parties, including subnational governments, may seek redress under state law from defendants otherwise subject to state court jurisdiction for harms allegedly caused or contributed to by petitioners’ conduct. In order to succeed, respondents will ultimately need to show that the damages …

Patenty W Polskim Systemie Innowacji, Krzysztof Klincewicz

Monografie/Monographs

Monografia prezentuje kompleksową analizę aktywności patentowej w Polsce, skoncentrowaną na badaniach dotyczących doświadczeń ostatnich lat, ale osadzoną w szerszym kontekście historycznym i geograficznym. Autor podejmuje próbę zrozumienia dynamiki polskiego systemu innowacji, uwarunkowań powstawania i ochrony własności przemysłowej, a opierając się na danych empirycznych analizuje specyfikę patentowania w Polsce oraz eksploruje zmienne, które mogą mieć związek z aktywnością patentową.

Patents in the Polish Innovation System

This monograph presents a comprehensive analysis of patent activity in Poland, focusing on research into recent years' experiences while embedding them within a broader historical and geographical context. The author seeks to understand the dynamics of …