Digital Commons Network^™

Rooted In Ogdensburg: A Creative Exhibition From Classroom To Gallery, Finn Bishop-Duford

Theses

Picture this: you are an elementary student- wandering around an art exhibition. On the wall hangs artwork you dedicated your time to. How does it make you feel? Art exhibitions of student work are a display practice implemented at the James F. Montpelier Gallery located at Ogdensburg Free Academy in Ogdensburg, New York. Such student-focused art exhibitions, historically, create a wonderful, inspirational, and impactful environment for students to display their finest works. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world by storm in 2020, the thematic shows shifted to assemblages of students’ best work. This is due to the limited time …

Criminal Activity Monitoring System: Targeting Africans And East Asian Communities In Dubai, Hamdan Kalantar

Theses

This dissertation investigates crime patterns among African and East Asian communities in Dubai, focusing on geographic hotspots, temporal trends, victim demographics, and the use of machine learning for predictive crime modeling. The research addresses the challenges faced by these communities, including labor exploitation, financial fraud, and human trafficking, within the socio-economic context of a rapidly growing urban city. Building on existing studies of urban crime, this research aimed to explore the spatial, temporal, and demographic dynamics of crimes and assess the potential of predictive models to assist law enforcement in crime prevention and resource allocation. A mixed-methods approach was employed, …

Through Legitimate Dissent, The Supreme Court Repairs Itself, Afnaan A. Qureshi

Theses

The decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, along with its reasoning, influence the direction and scope of historical events. Through an analysis of landmark dissents from four of the worst Supreme Court decisions, Curtis’ dissent in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Holmes’ dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), and Murphy’s dissent in Korematsu v. United States (1944), we can take steps towards catalyzing its self repair by stepping away from digital echo chambers and engaging in legitimate dissent. The four cases marked turning points in the efforts to protect …

Uvm Based Verification Of Ee621 Risc Processor Module, Collin Neidel

Theses

In the process of digital design, the majority of efforts are focused on verification. This is because a proper verification environment can help engineers discover bugs that otherwise would have flown under the radar. On the other hand, a poorly designed verification environment could fail to fully confirm the device’s functionality and leave the customer with a buggy mess. For obvious reasons, this should be avoided at all costs, hence the emphasis on functional verification and validation efforts. Throughout time, the complexity of the average design under test (DUT) has increased dramatically, making verification a significant challenge for today’s verification …

A Bert-Resnet Cross-Attention Fusion Network And Modality Utilization Assessment For Multimodal Sentiment Classification, Ronen G. Gold

Theses

This study explores the growing field of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), focusing on understanding how advanced fusion techniques can improve sentiment prediction in social media contexts. As platforms like X and TikTok continue to expand and facilitate sharing sentiment through digital media, there is an increasing need for neural network architectures that can accurately interpret sentiment across modalities. We implement a model using BERT for textual features and ResNet for visual features. A cross-attention fusion module aligns the modalities for joint representation. We conduct experiments on the MVSA-Single and MVSA-Multiple datasets, which contain over 5,000 and 17,000 labeled text-image pairs. …

Investigating The Relationship Between Cellular Senescence And Pulmonary Fibrosis, Crystal Lee

Theses

This study investigates the complex relationship between cellular senescence, aging, and pulmonary fibrosis through a comprehensive analysis of bulk RNA-seq data from patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and scleroderma. Using differential expression (DE) and age-associated differential expression (AADE) analyses, we revealed a paradoxical pattern: senescence-related gene sets were significantly downregulated in disease comparisons but progressively upregulated with aging within these same diseases. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) revealed that gene sets associated with DNA damage/telomere stress and oxidative stress were among the most enriched senescence inducers in fibrotic disease states, while cellular senescence and …

Beyond The Badge: Predicting Military Employee Attrition In The Police Force, Alia Abdulla Alhajji

Theses

This study explores the issue of employee attrition within the military police force, with a focus on predicting which employees are at risk of leaving. Attrition in law enforcement is costly and disruptive, especially in roles that require long training periods and operational readiness. The research specifically targets the internal organizational factors influencing turnover in military police environments and aims to leverage machine learning models to support the early identification of high-risk individuals. Guided by the CRISP-DM framework, the study followed a structured process across six stages: business understanding, data exploration, preparation, modeling, evaluation, and insight generation. A simulated dataset …

Under The Mask: Labeling And Self-Perception In Augmented Reality, Ruiyuan Guo

Theses

Under the Mask is a speculative AR experience that critically explores how social labels shape both perception and self-perception in everyday life. The project reimagines augmented reality not as a technological novelty, but as a conceptual mirror—a way to visualize how identity is continuously negotiated in social space. Users interact with two distinct labeling functions: when they assign a tag to themselves, it becomes visible to everyone, symbolizing the ways in which self-identification enters public discourse. In contrast, when users label others, those tags remain private—visible only to the individual user—highlighting how our assumptions primarily influence our own vision, not …

Bodies Unseen: Hysteria’S Stain On Women’S Healthcare, Layla Dehrab

Theses

Bodies Unseen is a 5-minute motion graphics piece accompanied by a 12-page zine that explores the historical and ongoing dismissal of women’s pain within the medical system, rooted in the legacy of hysteria. Through the fictionalized stories of Ada, Rosa, and Mabel-women from different time periods who face misdiagnosis and neglect, the project illustrates the persistent gender bias in healthcare. Drawing from historical records, feminist theory, and contemporary research on medical inequity, this work connects past injustices to modern-day disparities in diagnosis and treatment. The animation and zine work in tandem to educate viewers and encourage dialogue about the systemic …

What’S Coco Eating Today: Using Fragmented Time To Reduce Stress, Yaxuan Wang

Theses

In modern society, electronic mobile devices have become an integral part of life and entertainment. From a developmental perspective, the abundance of virtual content has brought significant changes in emotional, cognitive, and social aspects. On this background, the rise of the gaming industry has made 'digital games' a common form of entertainment. As games become a normalized part of daily life, the variety of game types has expanded greatly. This led me to consider: through interaction design and using games as a medium, is it possible to reduce users' stress in a short time and provide positive emotional feedback? Based …

Ai Emotional Companion App, Ruyi Liu

Theses

"Lumi" is an AI emotional companion app designed to provide personalized, immersive, and emotionally supportive experiences. The project explores how customizable virtual characters can fulfill the growing emotional and social needs of users through multimodal interaction, intimacy-building systems, and gamified engagement. By combining user interviews, competitive analysis, and iterative prototyping, this thesis investigates how design strategies can strengthen the user’s emotional bond with an AI character. The final product presents a flexible platform where users can create unique AI companions, interact in diverse ways, and develop lasting emotional connections. This work contributes to the field of emotional UX and digital …

Instrapix – An Image-Based Digital Audio Workstation Design, Dan Qiao

Theses

InstraPix, a UI project designed by Dan Qiao, is groundbreaking image-and-audio conversion software and a digital audio workstation (DAW). enables bidirectional conversion between images and sound, opening new creative possibilities. With powerful image processing tools, it allows users to directly use pictures as audio sources, shaping unique sonic compositions. InstraPix also supports sound presets, VST plugins, and note editing, allowing seamless integration with other instruments. This all-in-one audio workstation could mark the beginning of a new era where music can be created entirely from images. Assigning images significant importance in audio production and minimizing the middle steps, it breaks the …

Sales Opportunities Lead Qualification In B2b Market, Hajar Hussain Ahli

Theses

This thesis addresses the challenge of inefficient lead qualification in the business-to-business (B2B) market by applying machine learning techniques to predict the likelihood of winning a sales opportunity. Using a real-world dataset of over 78,000 records and 17 variables, the study aims to improve how sales teams identify and prioritize high-conversion leads. A thorough data preparation process was conducted, including handling of missing values, outlier detection, and under-sampling to resolve class imbalance between won and lost opportunities. After thorough data cleaning, preprocessing, and under-sampling to address class imbalance, five machine learning models were developed: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Neural Network, …

Intellimad: A Framework For Secure Machine Learning Models Evaluation And Fine-Tuning In Federated Setting, Dmitrii Korobeinikov

Theses

In contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) appli- cations, Machine Learning (ML) models are core components enabling AI-driven functionalities, yet selecting and fine-tuning a model and its hyperparameters remains challenging. ML model architecture, as well as key model training parameters, such as the number of training epochs, batch size, and learning rate, are highly dependent on both the dataset modalities and the specific task resolved in a particular application. More sophisticated execution setups may require determination of additional environment-related parameters, such as identifica- tion of computational capabilities required for execution of a particular AI-driven task, or discovery and establishment of desired security-related …

Predicting The Probability Of Crime Related Danger In Los Angeles, Joshua Oghenetega Okpako

Theses

This thesis examines the use of advanced machine learning to predict crime danger in Los Angeles, where 2023 violent crime rates (503 per 100,000) surpass the national average (363.8 per 100,000). Rooted in theories like social disorganization and victim vulnerability, it addresses the lack of combined victim-centric modeling by focusing on three questions: (1) Do blended ensemble models outperform individual models in predicting crime danger? (2) Can unsupervised learning techniques enhance supervised models’ accuracy through label generation or augmentation? (3) How can we interpret accurate machine learning models' decision-making processes? Using historical crime data from Los Angeles (2020–2025) and various …

Ai-Driven Prediction Of Flight Cancellations: A Machine Learning Approach In Minimizing Airline Disruption, Hind Nasser

Theses

This thesis investigates the use of machine learning to predict flight cancellations, aiming to reduce operational disruption and improve airline decision-making. The research is motivated by the need for more proactive strategies in aviation, where flight cancellations often result in financial losses and customer dissatisfaction. The study is framed within the CRISP-DM methodology and demonstrates how historical flight data can be transformed into actionable insights using structured analytics. The research addresses three core questions: how effectively machine learning can predict cancellations, which evaluation metrics are most suitable in an imbalanced context, and how model outputs can support airline operations. A …

Personalized Nutrition Recommendations For Arab Communities: Transforming Diet And Health Through Machine Learning, Khalfan Aldoobi

Theses

A lack of cultural understanding in traditional nutrition approaches prevents proper adherence to healthy dietary patterns among individuals. The Arab population faces unique challenges due to cultural dietary customs and lifestyle changes that have made obesity and diet illnesses major global public health challenges. The rapid shift to high-calorie but undernourished foods and less physical activity has resulted in alarming rate increases of obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and type 2 diabetes. The lack of cultural understanding in traditional nutrition approaches prevents proper adherence to healthy dietary patterns among individuals. This study focuses to fills the existing gap by applying Artificial Intelligence …

Modelling And Load Frequency Control (Lfc) Design Of Microgrid Frame-Worked As Technological Norm To Multi Energy System (Mes), Mekonnen Shewarega Worku

Theses

In today's world, the trend of using renewable energy sources as an alternative energy source is becoming more and more common due to various driving factors, such as energy scarcity (fossil fuel depletion, etc.) and environmental issues (carbon footprint). This trend is leading to a steady increase in the penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) through microgrid (MG), which is formed from combination of various distribution energy sources (DERs). The inherent intermittent nature of RESs coupled with abrupt load changes can instigate sustained frequency fluctuations and can keep the frequency deviation out of the allowable range that leads to an …

A Review Of Smart Public Transport Systems: Challenges, Technological Innovations, And Future Directions, Ahmed Masam Alfalasi

Theses

Urbanization has created greater demand for effective and sustainable public transport systems in smart cities. Yet, overcrowding, congestion, and old infrastructure remain the main challenges to the effectiveness of these systems. This literature review discusses the major issues affecting smart public transport, such as reliability issues, environmental sustainability, and improved integration and coordination between modes of transport. Technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and big data analytics are being applied to enhance public transportation efficiency, alleviate congestion, and improve passenger experience. Qualitative research methods were used, relying on secondary data from academic journals, government reports, and …

Future Unleashed: Reimagining Marketing Strategies With Future Foresight, Afra Sultan Al Suwaidi

Theses

In today’s fast-paced and dynamic business landscape, marketing plays a crucial role in influencing business strategy and decision-making in an organisation. Marketing not only helps organisations identify and anticipate trends, threats, and opportunities, but also enables them to formulate and implement effective strategies to capitalise on these insights and achieve the organisation’s vision and goals. Future Foresight in marketing empowers organisations to stay ahead of the curve and gain a deeper understanding of the target audience and industry landscape. The evolving nature of marketing driven by advancements in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital marketing channels, makes it …

Investigating The Performance Variation For Graphene-Based Field-Effect Transistor, Tzu-Jung William Huang

Theses

As silicon CMOS technology approaches its scaling limits, two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene offer promising alternatives due to its atomically thin material property and high carrier mobility. Graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs) are especially suited for high-frequency and RF applications; however, large-scale integration is hindered by substantial device-to-device variability. Primary contributors include inconsistent graphene transfer, contact resistance, poor dielectric interfaces, and underlying substrate topography. This work presents a comparative study of three GFET architectures to address variability: (a) raised Al gate with 15 nm Al2O3, (b) raised Al gate with monolayer hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), and (c) recessed Al gate …

Whole Grains And Ancient Wheats: Knowledge, Attitudes, Consumption Behavior And Sensory Liking Of Breads Among Participants In The United States, Caroline Morey, Jamie Kubota, Sulekha Anand, Xi Feng

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Consumer interest in ancient grains has been growing in the United States over the last 10 years. Whole grain ancient wheats incorporation into breads may be a way to increase whole grain consumption among Americans, but there is no research evaluating sensory liking of whole ancient wheat breads among American consumers. The objective of this study was to explore the sensory liking of whole ancient wheat bread types and to explore factors that may be associated with sensory preferences. The study recruited 104 untrained participants of diverse ethnicities affiliated with San José State University (San José, CA 95192, USA). Participants …

Applying Dynamic Dyadic Systems To Explore Features Of Relationship-Centered Care Among Spanish And Non-Spanish Speaking Patients, Marie C. Haverfield, Yuwei Li, Rachyl Pines, Tyler Kyte, Daria Titova, Jennifer A. Theiss

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Objective: Relationship-centered care (RCC) positions the exchange between patient and provider as central to patient care. Due to limitations in analytical approach, how the relational exchange develops throughout the clinical visit remains unclear. Dynamic dyadic systems (DDS) perspectives overcome these limitations to reveal interdependencies and evolving patterns in turn-taking sequences within dyads. We applied DDS analyses to examine how features of RCC manifest during clinical visits with Spanish-speaking Latinx and English-speaking non-Latinx patients. Methods: We analyzed transcripts from 13 primary care visits (5 with Latinx patients, 8 with non-Latinx patients). Interaction turns totaled N = 2394 units of analysis. Dyadic …

Top-Of-License Practice For Registered Nurses: A Scoping Review, Jeanne Hlebichuk, Rachelle J. Lancaster, Vida Vizgirda, Sharon Quinlan

Nursing

Background:Registered nurses are vital to healthcare delivery, yet often perform non-nursing tasks, contributing to inefficiencies, dissatisfaction, and turnover. The concept "top-of-license" (TOL) nursing practice, introduced in 2013, remains inconsistently defined and applied.

Purpose:To explore how TOL nursing practice is defined and applied in existing literature.

Methods:A scoping review was conducted using Arksey and O'Malley's framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Searches of 15 databases and gray literature (no start date-May 4, 2024) yielded 1,377 articles. Following screening, 45 articles met inclusion criteria.

Findings:Definitions and applications of TOL varied. Three themes emerged: (a) work-workforce efficiency, (b) benefits to patients-improving …

A Radiologist's Guide To Hepatobiliary Tumor Board Imaging, Elliot Berger

Aurora GME

No abstract provided.

Managing Software Dependency Risks In Web Applications, Christopher Alan Scott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Web applications commonly rely on third-party software dependencies to reduce development time. This thesis examines how vulnerabilities in a dependency chain propagate to compromise an application. It analyzes two vulnerable Markdown libraries from the npm and Composer dependency ecosystems, both of which are used for managing packages in applications developed with JavaScript and PHP. The analysis demonstrates how each library’s sanitizing functions—intended for removing unsafe user input when transforming Markdown text to HTML—are defeated to achieve a cross-site scripting exploit and take control of the application. The paper discusses potential business impacts of a compromise, underscoring the need for security …

A Descriptive Study Exploring The Role Church Leaders Have In Maintaining Liberty Within A Free Republic, Rashad R. Gibson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study explored the assumptions, perceptions, and understood responsibility of church leaders in New England to maintain liberty and virtue in a free republic. The theory that guided this study is transformational leadership, as it emphasizes morality in both the leader and the follower (Burns, 1978; Northouse, 2015). Within the last six decades, the United States Supreme Court has made rulings to remove from public schools, prayer, general Bible reading, and the Ten Commandments (Abington School District V. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Facts and Case Summary - Engel V. Vitale, 1962; Stone V. Graham, …

The Ties That Bind: Co-Twin Influences On Psychopathology In A Sample Of Twins, Anjoli E. R. Cero

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Research has begun to better describe twinship and twin identity development, the potential advantages and disadvantages of twinship, and factors related to twins’ shared psychological symptomatology. Research also supports the concept of emotional contagion, in which one person’s emotional state can be transmitted to another person. This phenomenon may be more common among twins due to factors such as closeness, dependence, and general similarity. The current study proposed a series of regression models to investigate how predictive pathways toward anxiety among a sample of twins could be impacted by the psychological traits and functioning of their co-twins. The current sample …

A Phenomenological Study On Teachers' Lived Experiences With Digital Learning And Students With Disabilities During And Post-Covid-19 Pandemic, Angie R. Tyson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to describe the experiences of educators with digital learning and students with disabilities during and post-pandemic in various areas in the Satellite Central Regional Area of eastern Georgia. The central research question of the study, "How do teachers describe their experiences with digital learning and students with disabilities during and post-pandemic?" was addressed by considering Bandura's perspectives on the theoretical framework of self-efficacy. Participants were 11 educators with lived experiences of self-efficacy working with students with disabilities and achievement gaps during and post-pandemic. The participants described their experiences in detail through focus …

Using Technology Responsibly To Align Church Ministry With God's Plan, Sandra Rolon-Rodriguez

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The proliferation of digital technologies, including live-streaming services, online community platforms, and virtual events, is revolutionizing the operational dynamics of church ministries. Churches of all sizes are embracing these changes to expand their influence, engage with members in new ways, and enhance the impact of digital technology on their ministry. Implementing digital transformation has led to innovative approaches in worship services, outreach programs, and community engagement, enabling churches to meet the evolving needs of their congregation and the broader community.

This dissertation-in-praxis explores the broader biblical and theological significance to gain a deeper understanding and demonstrate the practical application of …