Digital Commons Network^™

A Qualitative Examination Of Peer Navigation For Smoking Cessation In People With Hiv, Garrett S. Stang, Bianca Camacho, Megan Pinkston, Karen Tashima, Christopher W. Kahler, Patricia A. Cioe

Psychological Science Faculty Publications

Introduction: People with HIV (PWH) are disproportionately affected by cigarette use, with a 40-60% prevalence rate. They achieve relatively low cessation rates following traditional interventions and often confront compounded challenges related to social factors. HIV care services have integrated Peer Navigators (PNs) into clinical care for many years, but not in the context of smoking cessation. The purpose of this study was to describe the experiences of PWH on a novel smoking cessation intervention that integrated PNs as part of a pilot randomized controlled trial.

Methods: This qualitative examination was conducted among PWH who smoke cigarettes and who participated in …

Antipsychotic Misuse: A Silent But Growing Public Health Hazard, Sumeet Bhardwaj, Karisma Pathak, Myra Mclenon, Steven Spector, Kevin Tu

Student Publications

Antipsychotic drugs are essential in the management of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric illnesses, but their use is closely linked to cardiometabolic side effects. Cardiometabolic side effects include weight gain, dyslipidemia, glucose intolerance, and increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Mechanisms of cardiometabolic side effects involve disruption of the central nervous system’s ability to regulate appetite, peripheral metabolic effects, which are changes in metabolism outside the CNS, and receptor-level interactions, with second-generation antipsychotics generally posing a greater risk than first-generation agents. This review addresses current evidence on the cardiometabolic consequences of antipsychotic therapy, increasing inappropriate off-label use of antipsychotic drugs, …

Faculty List

MC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lidar And Radar Investigations Of Gravity Wave Activity In The Middle Atmosphere At Pfrr, Chatanika, Alaska, Satyaki Das

Atmospheric Sciences

The middle atmosphere, spanning the stratosphere and mesosphere, plays a critical role in global atmospheric circulation, particularly in the Arctic, where phenomena like Sudden Stratospheric Warmings (SSW) significantly perturb the circulation patterns. This dissertation investigates the dynamics of the polar middle atmosphere using four-year (20218-2022) temperature and wave activity measurements collected by the three-channel Rayleigh Density Temperature Lidar, Sodium Resonance Wind-Temperature Lidar, and Poker Flat Meteor Wind Radar at Poker Flat Research Range, Chatanika, Alaska (650N,1470W). The primary contributions are the development of a new lidar signal retrieval technique to combine the signal from three-channels and improve the lidar signal …

Exploring The Experiences And Needs Of Chinese Older Adults And Their Family Caregivers, Yu Huang

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This multi-generational research project represents an academic partnership between Edith Cowan University (ECU) and Chung Wah Community Care (CWCC), conducted from February to August 2025. Through CWCC's established community participation programs, this collaboration provided both a rich platform for community engagement and an accessible entry point for an ECU Research Internship to collect and analyse in-depth data on the "homing" experiences of Chinese elderly immigrants in Australia.

The study employed a mixed-methods design, engaging 162 survey participants and 15 interview participants across CWCC's two service locations (Balcatta Hub and Willetton Hub) and one well-aged group of name as Evergreen College. …

Rising From Ashes: Generalized Federated Learning Via Dynamic Parameter Reset, Jiahao Wu, Ming Hu, Yanxin Yang, Xiaofei Xie, Zekai Chen, Chenyu Song, Mingsong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although Federated Learning (FL) is promising for privacy-preserving collaborative model training, it suffers from low inference performance due to heterogeneous client data. Due to heterogeneous data across clients, FL training easily learns client-specific overfitting features. Existing FL methods adopt coarsegrained averaging, which can easily cause the global model to get stuck in local optima, leading to poor generalization. Specifically, this paper presents a novel FL framework, FedPhoenix, to address this issue. It stochastically resets partial parameters in each round to destroy some features of the global model, guiding FL training to learn multiple generalized features for inference rather than specific …

Efskip: A New Error Feedback With Linear Speedup For Compressed Federated Learning With Arbitrary Data Heterogeneity, Hongyan Bao, Pengwen Chen, Ying Sun, Zhize Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the communication bottleneck in distributed and decentralized federated learning applications, algorithms using compressed communication have attracted significant attention. The Error Feedback (EF) is a widely-studied compression framework for convergence with biased compressors such as top-k sparsification. Although various improvements have been obtained in recent years, the theoretical guarantee for EF-type framework is still limited. Previous works either 1) rely on strong assumptions such as bounded gradient/dissimilarity assumptions, thus can not deal with arbitrary data heterogeneity and also slow the convergence speed, or 2) can not enjoy linear speedup in the number of clients. In this work, we propose …

Design Principles For Customer‑Engaging Digital Service Systems: An Action Research Study, Keng Siau, Xiaofeng Chen, Xin Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital services represent a business approach employed by organizations to operate in the digital environment. However, systematic development guidelines for developing quality digital service systems are lacking in the literature. The authors identified four general challenges for developing and implementing customer-engaging digital service systems (CEDSS). By employing the method of canonical action research in a digital service system project, they derived 10 design principles for developing high-quality CEDSS. They empirically evaluated the design principles in the development project and through follow-up focus group sessions. The design principles provide applicable and actionable guidelines for the development of CEDSS.

Genscore: Agent-Based Short-Answer Question Generation And Scoring In Software Engineering Courses, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Short-answer questions are commonly used in educational assessments, as they are often viewed as a more effective way than multiple-choice questions to determine whether students have achieved the intended learning outcomes. However, manually creating appropriate questions targeting different cognitive levels such as those defined by the Bloom’s Taxonomy, and grading text answers from students are not trivial tasks for instructors. Existing work on auto-question generation and scoring in computing education typically targets coding-based questions. However, in software engineering courses, assessments can extend beyond coding to understanding of processes, DevOps methodologies, system design, etc. This work aims to address the dual …

Moving Beyond The Php500 Noche Buena Illusion, Marites M. Tiongco, Francine Ysabel D. Gañgan

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

The recently promoted Php500 Noche Buena package by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has sparked public debate. For some, it is a welcome, “budget-friendly” option. For many, especially low-income households, it feels unrealistic and even dismissive of the sharp increase in food prices in recent years. Retailers and supermarkets have long used similar Php500 holiday baskets as marketing tools.  It is widely used to signal affordability during the holiday season. Yet its persistence masks the cumulative effects of rising prices, stagnant wages, and reduced product quantities. The issue is no longer whether ₱500 can buy a “complete” basket, …

Determining Timeframes To Death For Imminently Dying Patients: A Retrospective Cohort Study, Tricia O’Connor, Wai Man Liu, Juliane Samara, Joanne Lewis, Karen Strickland, Catherine Paterson

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Background: Clinicians are frequently asked ‘how long’ questions at end-of-life by patients and those important to them, yet predicting timeframes to death remains uncertain, even in the last weeks and days of life. Patients and families wish to know so they can ask questions, plan, make decisions, have time to visit and say their goodbyes, and have holistic care needs met. Consequently, this necessitates a more accurate assessment of empirical data to better inform prognostication and reduce uncertainty around time until death. The aims of this study were to determine the timeframes for palliative care patients (a) between becoming comatose …

Perception Of School Climate And Its Impact On The Language Acquisition Of El Students, John A. Starr Iii

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Educators are grappling with the best way to support the influx of English Learners enrolling in schools. As the numbers of EL students continues to rise, school administrators are seeking the best approaches to address the needs of this subset of students. Additionally, research has shown the impact that school bonding has on the academic performance of native language students. Specifically, research has shown that students with a positive emotional connection to the teachers, peers, and the institution outperform those with less attachment to the school. The purpose of this study is to see if school climate and school bonding …

Australian Teen Voices On Age Verification And Age Assurance Measures, Giselle Woodley, Harrison W. See, Brian O'Neill, Lelia Green, Elisabeth Staksrud, Paul Haskell-Dowland

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Age verification and age assurance technologies, including biometrics, facial recognition software and digital identification, have been explored as potential measures to restrict access of young people to social media and sexually explicit media (SEM), including pornography. However, there is limited data regarding how teens targeted by such restrictions feel about such strategies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Australian teens and pre-teens (aged 11–17), this paper presents their views of age verification technologies, particularly in relation to restricting access to SEM. The participants in this study welcomed improved online protections but were ambivalent about proposed solutions. Age assurance and age verification …

A Decade Of Knowledge Without Borders: Open Access And Global Reach Of School Social Work Research, Leticia Villarreal Sosa

School of Social Work Faculty Publications

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the International Journal for School Social Work (IJSSW), this article provides a reflection on a decade the last decade of breaking barriers and building bridges across practitioners, researchers, communities, and continents and looks forward to our responsibility for the future. This article discusses the benefits and challenges related to Open Access publishing, and addresses how Open Access is a public good—ensuring that practitioners, researchers, students, and policymakers can engage the best evidence regardless of geography, resources, or institutional affiliation. The impact of IJSSW is reviewed, including a summary of accomplishments, most downloaded …

Developing American Indian/Alaska Native Children As Leaders In The Climate Movement, Joseph Burns, Alessandra Angelino, Danielle Heims-Waldron, Allison Empey, Jason Deen

Journal of Youth Development

American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) voices are critical in the climate movement, as numerous social drivers have rendered these communities particularly vulnerable to the consequences of environmental change. In recent years, specific events, including the Dakota Access Pipeline, have galvanized AI/AN youth, who have been increasingly involved as leaders in the climate movement both in the United States and internationally. This yields a significant opportunity to promote leadership development for Indigenous youth, both through local, national, and international organizing and through curricular development to spark interests in environmental science. This review aims to discuss the role of AI/AN youth leadership in …

A Narrative Review On Artificial Intelligence In Neurosurgery: Ethical Challenges And Implementation Considerations, Tirath Patel, Hamza Yousuf Ibrahim, Fathimathul Henna, Fatima Nasir, Abbas Hussain, Rahma Naveed, Aziz Ur Rehman, Syeda Ramish Zehra Kazmi, Bhum Daishik Patel, Nikhilesh Anand

School of Medicine Publications

Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing neurosurgery by enhancing diagnostic precision, surgical planning, and postoperative management. However, its integration raises ethical concerns related to bias, privacy, accountability, and the potential dehumanization of healthcare. This review focuses on navigating these challenges while maximizing AI's potential in improving patient care.

Methodology: A narrative review was conducted by identifying studies from PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar databases. The search utilized the following keywords: "artificial intelligence," "neurosurgery," "machine learning," "data privacy," "robotic surgery," "ethics," and "bias." The review primarily focused on issues of dataset bias, data privacy, and the need for transparency and …

Signaling Through National Security Lawmaking, Weijia Rao

Faculty Scholarship

An often-overlooked element of the ongoing TikTok saga is China’s export control law, which prohibits the sale of TikTok’s core content recommendation algorithm without prior approval from the Chinese government. This law is just one example of the extensive national security lawmaking China has undertaken in recent years. Closely paralleling similar institutions in the U.S., China has established a comprehensive national security legal framework that authorizes the government to restrict exports, sanction foreign entities, screen foreign investments, and block transactions involving cyber infrastructure.

Why turn towards legality when China has the ability to employ these actions without a formal legal …

Genocidal Accusation, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

To accuse of genocide — what does it mean? Genocidal accusation is ubiquitous today, evident more in the public square than in any courtroom. At first glance, such accusation seemingly relies on a central assumption: genocidal accusation is critical to preventing atrocity. This Article argues that this widespread assumption is incomplete, obscuring genocidal accusation’s dual nature. In fact, genocidal accusation encompasses not only laudable atrocity prevention (for example, the Rwandan genocide), but also problematic punitive, carceral discourse that brands the “other” as morally polluted (such as President Putin’s Ukraine invasion). It is thus challenging to evaluate such accusation in the …

Do Patient-Important Outcomes Differ By Care Setting? Findings From Semi-Structured Interviews With Individuals With Diabetes, Amy Cunningham, Alexzandra Gentsch, Pouya Arefi, Judd E. Hollander, Marianna D Lanoue, Amanda M. B. Doty, Geoffrey Mills, Brendan Carr, Kristin L. Rising

Department of Emergency Medicine Faculty Papers

Background: Patient-important outcomes (PIOs) reflect patient values and preferences. Prior studies have elicited a variety of PIOs for diabetes. However, no studies have examined whether, or how, PIOs differ across diabetes care settings. The purpose of this study was to compare the frequencies of PIOs derived from patients with diabetes in primary care (PC), acute care (emergency department (ED)), and post-acute care (post-hospital discharge (PHD)) settings within a large delivery system. Methods: This study was an analysis of 89 interviews with patients in PC, ED, and PHD settings. Participants had moderately to poorly controlled diabetes, defined as follows: presented to …

Why The Triple Bottom Line Fails: Advancing The Jesuit Vision For Sustainability Education In Business, Trevor Zink, Melissa Fitzpatrick, Justin Nordin, Jeffrey S. Thies

Journal of Management for Global Sustainability

This paper critiques the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework as conceptually flawed and ethically insufficient for sustainability education in business. While the TBL aims to balance profit, people, and planet, its logic prioritizes profitability, rendering social and environmental goals conditional and marginal. We argue that this framing undermines critical thinking, moral imagination, and ecological literacy in business students—especially within Jesuit institutions, which are called to form conscientious leaders. Drawing on Jesuit educational tradition, we propose a reorientation of business purpose around economic sufficiency rather than profit maximization, guided by integral ecology and the common good. This shift invites a more …

Constitutional Obiter Dicta On Male-Male Sex And Fundamental Rights In Singapore, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Singapore Court of Appeal held a law prohibiting male–male sexual intercourse (s 377A of the Penal Code) unenforceable on non-rights-based grounds. The court's remarks about the rights to life and liberty (including whether sexual orientation is mutable), freedom of expression, and equality are obiter. But they are significant, since in Singapore, there are few constitutional rights cases and the courts focus on spelling out the limits to executive and legislative power without necessarily striking down exercises of such power on rights grounds. Indeed, the obiter dicta prompted the Legislature to repeal s 377A. Given the repeal, the obiter dicta …

Building A Restructuring Hub: Lessons From Singapore, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article seeks to analyze the legal, market, and institutional features needed to become an international hub for debt restructuring. To that end, it examines the strategy adopted by Singapore as well as the market and institutional factors generally found in other leading legal and financial centers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. It is argued that in jurisdictions that have traditionally had creditor-oriented insolvency systems, such as Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong, one of the primary challenges when enhancing the restructuring framework for debtors is ensuring that the insolvency system remains protective …

The Post-Chevron Law Of Deference For Investor-State Arbitration, Won L. Kidane

Faculty Publications

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the United States Supreme Court clarified the “law of deference” built “on the foundation laid in Chevron.” The American conception of the law of deference, long solidified as the Chevron doctrine, has had extraordinary resonance, having been cited in at least 18,000 cases and 22,000 publications over a period of forty years.

The Court’s overruling of the two-step Chevron analysis for the resolution of statutory ambiguity is the most obvious outcome and is likely to attract the most attention. There is, however, an obscure aspect of the Court’s overruling of Chevron: the clarification of …

Sexual Assault, Fault And The Charter, Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

All Faculty Publications

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the criminal law of sexual assault have in many ways grown up together over the last four decades. In this article we examine the impact of the Charter on the fault requirement for sexual assault and sexual offences against children. We argue that the Charter has been used repeatedly to undermine the early gains of feminist law reform and that courts have gone out of their way to avoid the reasonable steps provisions of the Criminal Code. Courts are consistently reluctant to expect men to desist from sexual activity until they have …

A Model For Training Management System Implementation In Higher Education, David J. Rowe

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In an era where innovation and adaptability are critical to institutional success, the practical training and development of employees in higher education organizations have become essential. This study examined stakeholders’ perceptions of cloud-based Training Management System (TMS) implementation within California Higher Education systems, including both the California Community College (CCC) and the California State University (CSU). Although a TMS offers substantial benefits for administering training programs, large systems face challenges due to uneven adoption across campuses, leading to inefficiencies, regulatory non-compliance, and hindered workforce development. This research identified and evaluated technology, organizational, and environmental critical success factors influencing TMS implementation …

Machine Learning Approaches For Predicting And Preventing Vehicle Theft, Hamad Almutawa

Theses

This study develops a data-driven framework for predicting vehicle theft using machine-learning techniques applied to a comprehensive crime dataset containing demographic, spatial ,and operational policing variables. The dataset, sourced from publicly available crime records, included 9,712 cases and 30 variables, with minimal missing data and balanced class distribution. After performing extensive preprocessing—including outlier analysis, missing-value imputation, categorical encoding, feature selection, and correlation testing—four supervised classification models were implemented: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and a Neural Network. Bivariate statistical tests, including Chi-square and Mann–Whitney U, revealed significant relationships between theft occurrence and factors such as crime area, luxury …

Advancements In Ml Via Efficient Generative Modeling, Robust Domain Adaptation, And Explainable Multimodal Retrieval, Prasanna Reddy Pulakurthi

Theses

The rapid evolution of AI heightens the need for learning systems that are efficient, robust, and explainable. This dissertation advances these three pillars through innovations in classification, generative modeling, domain adaptation under data-scarce conditions, and multimodal retrieval. Collectively, the methods reduce dependence on large, labeled datasets, improve adaptability under distribution shifts, enable deployment on resource-constrained platforms, and enhance interpretability. For classification, the Iterative Maximum Likelihood Classifier (IMLC) recasts regularized maximum likelihood training as a fixed-point contraction with convergence guarantees, enabling faster and more stable optimization. Results on synthetic data and MNIST validate its efficiency. For generative models, we introduce Parametric …

Assessing The Impact Of Gis Data Inaccuracies On Urban Infrastructure, Majid Aldashti

Theses

Urban infrastructure delivery is a complex process influenced by project type, spatial distribution, stakeholder coordination, and data quality. This thesis examines the application of Microsoft Power BI, a no-code visual analytics tool, as a means to analyze performance patterns in urban projects and inform decision-making in smart city governance. The study uses a structured secondary dataset simulating over 600 infrastructure projects across various departments and neighborhoods. By transforming raw data into an interactive dashboard, the research explores relationships between delay rates, customer satisfaction, budget compliance, and technology adoption. The analysis revealed that project categories such as metal furniture and police …

Rise Of Social Media Hacking: Ai-Based Ip Tracking For Uae Law Enforcement, Mounikha Naarrayen Chakravarthula

Theses

Social media has evolved into a critical channel for communication, expression, and public influence, but it has also become a prevalent avenue for cybercrime, particularly in digitally advanced nations such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The rising complexity of online offences, coupled with anonymisation tools and cross-border digital behaviour, has made the attribution of social-media-based cyber incidents increasingly challenging for law enforcement. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) offers the potential to strengthen digital investigations by providing intelligent, scalable, and evidence-driven attribution capabilities. This research develops an AI-assisted Internet Protocol (IP) attribution framework tailored specifically for UAE law enforcement …

Predicting Mental Health Risk In Remote Workers: A Machine Learning Approach, Majed Al Mheiri

Theses

This dissertation explores the application of machine learning in mental health risk prediction of remote workers, which is increasingly becoming a significant issue, with the practise of flexible working reshaping organisational practises. It is based on the theoretical framework that has been used previously such as Job Demands Resources model and Stress-Strain model which emphasise the role of workload, support systems and personal resources in determining the well-being of employees. The context of the study indicates the growing rate of remote and hybrid employment, and the associated increase in the number of issues associated with stress and isolation, as well …