Digital Commons Network^™

Incorporating Science Into The Moderate/Severe Curriculum, Edgar Serrano

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Science education is often absent from the high school, moderate/severe special education classroom curriculum. When students in moderate/severe special education classrooms do not receive science instruction, they miss out on a key learning opportunity like the other curricular subjects and life skills. Increasing science education for students with disabilities may provide them with opportunities for critical thinking skills, problem solving, and creativity. In order to address this issue, I will create a three day lesson for 9 to 12 graders in a moderate/severe classroom setting at Soledad High School in Soledad, California.

Building Motivation And Confidence In Elementary School Students, Alyssa I. Perez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This capstone project aims to explore how growth mindset, motivation, and self-confidence are key components to student success, especially during elementary school years. My capstone results highlight that consistent encouragement, a proactive classroom environment, and self-efficiency skills significantly contribute to improved student attitudes and engagement.

Impact Of Afterschool Programs On Students; Social Development And Emotional Learning, Natalie B. Harper

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Afterschool programs are described as activities that are organized and structured outside of the regular school day where there is a time where there is no academic pressure and, therefore, is a time with the potential to enhance social-emotional skills development and learning. The capacity to genuinely implement social emotional learning (SEL) programs that are hindered by difficulties in staff training and turnover, in addition to funding. This senior capstone project explores the impact of afterschool programs on students' social and emotional learning at a Monterey Bay charter school, especially in their ability to impact peer and teacher relationships, ultimately …

Empowering College Men To Build Healthy Relationships, Aydan Diego Diaz

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Many college-aged men enter romantic relationships without the skills necessary to build and sustain healthy, respectful connections. This project addresses the impact of toxic masculinity, and a lack of education on young men’s ability to form healthy romantic partnerships. Grounded in Erikson’s psychosocial theory, particularly the stage of Intimacy vs. Isolation, a one-day interactive workshop was developed and delivered to members of a multicultural fraternity, Nu Alpha Kappa, at California State University, Monterey Bay. The workshop aimed to increase awareness of unhealthy behaviors, evaluate the role of toxic masculinity, and promote practical strategies for relationship success. Participants were engaged through …

The Impacts Of Instructional Technology On The Socio-Academic Development Of K-12 Students, Alivia L. Haines

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Becoming an educator in a post-Covid society results in many unknowns in regards to the socio-academic development of students. Specifically, the utilization of instructional technology in the classroom has become a centralized topic within educational settings over the past six years. Through research conducted from peer-reviewed journals, as well as surveys with fourteen educators and one hundred and fifty-one students, the result and findings revealed that, while there is a great divide over whether or not instructional technology is a net-positive or negative classroom asset, the use of technology in instruction impacts students’ socio-academic development with the overall consensus that …

Fostering Scientific Learning With An Integrated Arts Curriculum For 5th And 6th Graders., George Donovan Martisius

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The traditional scientific curriculum presented in schools limits students’ ability to make creative connections with their work and develop critical thinking skills. This often leads to students not fully engaging in their learning and risks their ability to engage with science in a holistic way. Integrated curriculum combines different domains of learning that emphasize creative expression such as art with those that focus on abstract concepts and natural phenomena such as scientific learning. An Integrated science and art curriculum fosters deeper engagements and personal connection to their learning. Given the potential integrated curriculum has to foster scientific learning, I created …

Teaching Social Emotional Skills In Early Childhood, Shawni M. Hughes

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Children in early childhood may not have yet fully developed social-emotional skills around self-regulation. Without the ability to self-regulate, children will act out or misbehave in order to communicate their needs or express their feelings. Children that are taught social-emotional skills may be able to express their feelings in developmentally appropriate ways, exhibit fewer externalized behaviors, develop stronger social relationships, experience decreased emotional stress, and present better self-confidence. In order to promote social-emotional development, I created a three-day lesson for preschoolers at the Monterey Peninsula College Early Childhood Education Lab School in Monterey, California.

Augsso: Secure Threshold Single-Sign-On Authentication With Popular Password Collection, Changsong Jiang, Chunxiang Xu, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Single-sign-on authentication is widely deployed in mobile systems, which allows an identity server to authenticate a mobile user and issue her/him with a token, such that the user can access diverse mobile services. To address the single-point-offailure problem, threshold single-sign-on authentication (PbTA) is a feasible solution, where multiple identity servers perform user authentication and token issuance in a threshold way. However, existing PbTA schemes confront critical drawbacks. Specifically, these schemes are vulnerable to perpetual secret leakage attacks (PSLA): an adversary perpetually compromises secrets of identity servers (e.g., secret key shares or credentials) to break security. Besides, they fail to achieve …

Reverse Modeling In Large Language Models, Sicheng Yu, Yuanchen Xu, Cunxiao Du, Yanying Zhou, Minghui Qiu, Qianru Sun, Hao Zhang, Jiawei Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse modeling, specifically with reversed text inputs. We found that publicly available pre-trained LLMs cannot understand such inputs. However, LLMs trained from scratch with both forward and reverse texts can understand them equally well during inference. Our case study shows that different-content texts result in different losses if input (to LLMs) in different directions---some get lower losses for forward while some for reverse. This leads us …

Triple-Valued Neutrosophic Set, Quadruple-Valued Neutrosophic Set, Quintuple-Valued Neutrosophic Set, And Double-Valued Indetermsoft Set, Takaaki Fujita

Neutrosophic Systems with Applications

Concepts such as Fuzzy Sets, Neutrosophic Sets, Rough Sets, and Plithogenic Sets have been extensively studied to address uncertainty, finding diverse applications across various fields. A Double-Valued Neutrosophic Set (DVNS) extends traditional neutrosophic sets by introducing two distinct indeterminacy components: one leaning towards truth and the other towards falsity. In this paper, we explore Triple-Valued Neutrosophic Sets, Quadruple-Valued Neutrosophic Sets, and Quintuple-Valued Neutrosophic Sets, as well as an extension of the Indetermsoft Set, termed the Double-Valued Indetermsoft Set. Note that related concepts such as the Multi-Valued Neutrosophic Set and the n-Valued Refined Neutrosophic Set have already been established.

Intention Is All You Need: Refining Your Code From Your Intention, Qi Guo, Xiaofei Xie, Shangqing Liu, Ming Hu, Xiaohong Li, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code refinement aims to enhance existing code by addressing issues, refactoring, and optimizing to improve quality and meet specific requirements. As software projects scale in size and complexity, the traditional iterative exchange between reviewers and developers becomes increasingly burdensome. While recent deep learning techniques have been explored to accelerate this process, their performance remains limited, primarily due to challenges in accurately understanding reviewers’ intents. This paper proposes an intention-based code refinement technique that enhances the conventional comment-to-code process by explicitly extracting reviewer intentions from the comments. Our approach consists of two key phases: Intention Extraction and Intention Guided Revision Generation. …

Hello Again! Llm-Powered Personalized Agent For Long-Term Dialogue, Hao Li, Chenghao Yang, An Zhang, Yang Deng, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open-domain dialogue systems have seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, most existing dialogue systems predominantly focus on brief single-session interactions, neglecting the real-world demands for long-term companionship and personalized interactions with chatbots. Crucial to addressing this real-world need are event summary and persona management, which enable reasoning for appropriate long-term dialogue responses. Recent progress in the human-like cognitive and reasoning capabilities of LLMs suggests that LLM-based agents could significantly enhance automated perception, decision-making, and problem-solving. In response to this potential, we introduce a model-agnostic framework, the Long-term Dialogue Agent (LD-Agent), which incorporates three independently …

Robust Threshold Ecdsa With Online-Friendly Design In Three Rounds, Guofeng Tang, Haiyang Xue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Threshold signatures, especially ECDSA, enhance key protection by addressing the single-point-of-failure issue. Threshold signing can be divided into offline and online phases, based on whether the message is required. Schemes with low-cost online phases are referred to as “online-friendly”. Another critical aspect of threshold ECDSA for real-world applications is robustness, which guarantees the successful completion of each signing execution whenever a threshold number t of semi-honest participants is met, even in the presence of misbehaving signatories. The state-of-the-art online-friendly threshold ECDSA with-out robustness was developed by Doerner et al. in S&P'24, requiring only three rounds. Recent work by Wong et …

Gamba: Marry Gaussian Splatting With Mamba For Single-View 3d Reconstruction, Qiuhong Shen, Zike Wu, Xuanyu Yi, Pan Zhou, Hanwang Zhang, Shuicheng Yan, Xinchao Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We tackle the challenge of efficiently reconstructing a 3D asset from a single image at millisecond speed. Existing methods for single-image 3D reconstruction are primarily based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) with Neural 3D representations. Despite promising results, these approaches encounter practical limitations due to lengthy optimizations and significant memory consumption. In this work, we introduce Gamba, an end-to-end 3D reconstruction model from a single-view image, emphasizing two main insights: (1) Efficient Backbone Design: introducing a Mamba-based GambaFormer network to model 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstruction as sequential prediction with linear scalability of token length, thereby accommodating a substantial number …

Exploring The Potential Of Large Language Models For Heterophilic Graphs, Yuxia Wu, Shujie Li, Yuan Fang, Chuan Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have presented significant opportunities to enhance various machine learning applications, including graph neural networks (GNNs). By leveraging the vast open-world knowledge within LLMs, we can more effectively interpret and utilize textual data to better characterize heterophilic graphs, where neighboring nodes often have different labels. However, existing approaches for heterophilic graphs overlook the rich textual data associated with nodes, which could unlock deeper insights into their heterophilic contexts. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs for modeling heterophilic graphs and propose a novel two-stage framework: LLM-enhanced edge discriminator and LLM-guided edge reweighting. In the first …

“It's Easier To Deal With The Vaccines You Know Than The Ones You Don't Know”: A Qualitative Study On Healthcare Workers' Vaccine Confidence In Nigeria, Ayobami A. Bakare, Elisa Gobbo, Kofoworola O. Akinsola, Carina King, Julius Salako, Damola Bakare, Halima Usman, Claudia Hanson, Adegoke G. Falade, Sibylle Herzig Van Wees

Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health

Vaccination is a cost-effective public health intervention that has saved many lives and improved well-being [1]. Between 2011 and 2020, over 20 million deaths were believed to have been averted due to vaccinations in GAVI supported countries [2]. Moreover, globally, Carter et al. estimated additional 51 million deaths are expected to be prevented from vaccines between 2021 and 2030 [3]. Yet, despite the importance of vaccines, there have been concerns about low uptake of vaccines globally [4,5]. This concern was accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Waning vaccine confidence has been recognized as a leading threat to global health [[6], [4], …

Correcting Sampling Bias With Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data: Inference Stability Under The Da-Mi Framework, Hannah Jiang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

With the rapid advancement into the Data Age, synthetic data has emerged as a promising avenue for sharing scientific information while protecting the original data. While existing research has primarily focused on generating synthetic data to accurately replicate the characteristics of observed data, we explore the potential of synthetic data to adjust for unrepresentative sampling. This study explores how sampling bias—specifically unbalanced subsets—impacts statistical inference, and whether synthetic data can help correct such bias. Using a Data Augmentation–Multiple Imputation (DA–MI) framework, we generate synthetic datasets from biased samples and evaluate parameter recovery under different correction strategies. Simulations under a Missing …

A Forgotten Incident In A Forgotten War: The Military, Political, And Social Effects Of The No Gun Ri Incident Of The Korean War, Gabriel Robert Evans

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In late July 1950, a company from the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry Regiment fired on a refugee caravan near the village of No Gun Ri, resulting in the deaths of many Korean civilians. The story of No Gun Ri was published by Associated Press reporters on September 30, 1999, prompting Army investigators within the Clinton Administration to spend nearly two years verifying the AP’s claims. While the Inspector General’s No Gun Ri Review confirmed that U.S. troops had killed Korean civilians, it was not a conclusive report. This thesis analyzes the No Gun Ri Incident and the Clinton Administration’s efforts …

Animal Burrow Detection In Levee Systems Using Res-Net 34, Christopher D. Moore

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Animal burrow detection is a time-consuming and costly task for levee inspectors. Annual budgets run up to approximately $16 million per state. The inspectors typically will have to travel to the inspection sites using government-assigned transportation. Depending on the distance to the site, it may take minutes or hours to arrive before any productive inspections occur. Once at the site, the inspectors were subject to human error, overgrown foliage, severe weather, or prohibitive landscaping that would make any human inspection impossible. Also, animal burrows could be small enough or overgrown, so the human inspector misses the problem areas. We aimed …

Character Development And The Fear Of Failure: Finding Huldey In Jen Silverman's The Moors, Caylee Sanders

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my process of developing the character of Huldey in Jen Silverman's play The Moors, directed by Madison Smith. I discuss the steps I took, the techniques I studied, the challenges I met, and how I faced and fought the fear of failure. In this production, I also studied characters from a few films suggested by our director for inspiration.

This paper also includes background information on the playwright, their inspirations for The Moors, including Charlotte Brontë’s letters, and historical information about the place and period in which it is set. I lay out my experience throughout the …

Scar Reveal, Danielle A. Unger

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Scar Reveal is a collection of twenty-eight poems. The author arranges the poems in three sections that explore the family of origin and religion, mental health and mortality, and love and labor. The collection is preceded by a preface essay where the author discusses her relationship with poetry and how her poetics have developed throughout her mental health recovery and work as a therapist. The author also provides a brief overview of some selected craft techniques and influences within the manuscript.

Neural Patterns Reflect Semantic Representation In Novice Sign Language Learners, Megan E. Hillis

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

How do novice language learners represent semantic information in their new language? The extent to which languages are supported by distinct or overlapping neural representations in bilinguals has been the topic of much research, but less is known about how new knowledge is integrated into established representational networks, especially at the earliest stages of language acquisition. Furthermore, most investigations have compared languages which share a modality (spoken). Signed languages can provide insight into language unconfounded by perceptual qualities that spoken languages share. Chapter 1 presents an initial study in which hearing English-speaking non-signers learned a set of nouns in American …

From Trauma To Treatment: Chronic Neurobehavioral Consequences And Emerging Treatments, Moriah E. Mcguier

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Severe trauma exposure related to traumatic brain injury (TBI) or psychiatric disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) leads to neurobehavioral and physiological impairments that reduce the quality of life of individuals and remain difficult to treat with current therapeutic options. Further, these conditions are highly comorbid, notably in PTSD with blast-traumatic brain injury (bTBI) commonly experienced by military members via explosive forces, leading to complex and heterogenous outcomes. To address this, preclinical models have been developed to recapitulate aspects of TBI and PTSD. This thesis utilizes two such models in rats, bTBI and the single prolonged stress (SPS) model for …

Rethinking Policies: Impact Of School To Prison Pipeline, Lyrik S. Hampshire

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This senior capstone research project examines the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP), a system of policies and practices from schools that disproportionately push minority high school students into the criminal justice system. This study investigates how school policies, including zero-tolerance and truancy, disciplinary practices, the lack of resources, school funding disparities, and systemic racism, contribute to this STPP pipeline. Through a literature review and survey responses from school staff, the result findings revealed that there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the STPP among some educators and administrators, involving their role of biases and systemic issues. It is vital for educators …

Benefits Of Mentorship Programs For Peer Mentors [Poster], Kelle Bormann

Graduation with Distinction Posters

No abstract provided.

Small But Mighty: Strengthening The Value Of Local Pocket Parks, Makana Sm Higa

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

In Monterey County, youth obesity rates are climbing at an alarming rate. Ventana Wildlife Society, and Wellness Through Nature program seek to help lower these rates. Ventana looks to achieve this through outdoor education and family trips with migrant farm working families in the cities of Soledad and Salinas. These trips attempt to increase environmental stewardship and improve community health. The project aims to evaluate the effectiveness and community engagement in regards to pocket parks. The parks visited were Bataan Memorial Park, Harden Neighborhood Park, Cesar Chavez Park, Joe Ledesma Park and San Antonio Park. The research seeks to increase …

Systems Thinking’S Contribution To Youth Empowerment, Lucia O. Perez Perez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This capstone project explored how systems thinking can enhance leadership, personal growth, and school engagement among at-risk youth in Watsonville, California. Alongside Growing Greatness, a youth development initiative serving predominantly Latino and first-generation youth, the project centered on a focus group with seven students from New School, an alternative high school. The focus group gathered qualitative data to understand how youth perceive leadership, and community while applying systems thinking. The qualitative data was analyzed utilizing hybrid coding methods. The hybrid method uncovered emerging themes, including growth mindset, community connectedness, youth leadership, and new insights around emotional honesty and shared experiences. …

The Unseen Wounds: How Non-Utilization Of Va Benefits Contributes To Veteran Incarceration, Peter R. Barragan

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This project addressed the issue of justice-involved veterans who fail to utilize Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) benefits, increasing their risk of incarceration. The project consisted of distributing a VA Resource Handbook aimed at enhancing veterans' awareness and utilization of VA benefits, thus improving their reintegration outcomes. Using convenience sampling, the project administered pre- and post-intervention surveys to measure changes in awareness, barriers, and benefit utilization among 16 justice-involved veterans. Results indicated a significant increase in veterans’ awareness of VA benefits post-intervention, prompting additional benefit claims submissions. Critical barriers identified included long wait times, insufficient staffing at Monterey County Military …

The Price Of Health: Income Disparities, Chronic Disease And Nutritional Inequity., Joana Ortiz Atlixqueno

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Chronic disease has notably increased among children and adults. The alarming trend is especially pronounced in low-income communities. Everyone’s Harvest is a non-profit organization founded in 2002. They work to improve access to affordable fruits and vegetables through farmers' markets, targeting lower-income individuals. The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate one of Everyone’s Harvest’s community food programs, Fresh Rx. Fresh Rx is a collaboration with healthcare providers in which doctors prescribe $35 worth of fruits and vegetables weekly for 19 weeks to patients with chronic diet-related illnesses. It was essential to learn if patients coming to the market …

Mental Health Matters: Youth In Alternative School, Lizbeth Ochoa Ramirez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Mental health significantly impacts students’ success at Portola-Butler Continuation High School (PBSHS) in the South Monterey Joint High School Union. Students aged 14-17 at PBSHS face mental health challenges due to insufficient resources, a lack of mental health awareness, and limited parental support. The capstone project included a presentation on mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, and stress. Following this presentation, a post-survey was conducted with 20 students regarding their mental well-being and how PBSHS can assist them. Responses indicated that going to school causes feelings of anxiety and depression, with 19% feeling this way often, 50% rarely, and …