Digital Commons Network^™

Boden Lecture: Taxation Of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Lucas Brasil Salama, Herbert Snitz, W. Robert Thomas

Articles

This Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place …

Reparations For Colonialism: Beyond Legal Responsibility, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

Reparations for colonialism and colonial-era atrocities have moved from an unrealized demand of citizens, politicians, and thinkers in the Global South to a project with some results in the real world. Key markers include the return of numerous art objects from museums in the Global North to their countries of origin; the release of the Caribbean Community and Common Market’s (CARICOM) proposal for reparations; and Namibia’s agreement with Germany on compensation for the German genocide against the Herero people in 1904–08 —along with the resultant controversy. These developments follow earlier claims for reparations directed to—and their eventual acceptance by—the governments …

Reckoning With Social Policy In Utility Regulation, Alexandra B. Klass, Gabriel Chan

Articles

State public utility regulation in the energy sector is undergoing a rapid transformation driven by public and private investment in clean energy deployment, the corresponding threat to incumbent fossil fuel interests, and growing demands for energy justice. This transformation will impact many aspects of societal well-being—from energy insecurity in disadvantaged communities to dramatic shifts in energy-sector employment—so it is unsurprising that public utility commissions would engage with social policy concerns. However, for decades, state courts and utility stakeholders have admonished commissions that they are economic regulators and that their jurisdiction does not include social policy. This Article shows that state …

Fletcher's Uncertainty Principle, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Articles

am here to talk about the equal protection challenges facing Indian Country. I am going to give you my thesis right off the bat, which is that Haaland v. Brackeen decided the equal protection issue for us already, and we should behave as if it is decided.

I will explain what I mean by that. But first, let’s talk about what we will call the Mancari rule. The Mancari rule is fundamentally what Indian law is about, and it goes something like this—I am going to more or less paraphrase the guiding principle of Morton v. Mancari from 1974. Any …

Creditors, Shareholders, And Losers In Between: A Failed Regulatory Experiment, Albert H. Choi, Jeffery Zhang

Articles

In the aftermath of the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, regulators encouraged many of the world’s largest banks to hold a new type of regulatory instrument with the goal of improving their safety and soundness. The regulatory instrument was known as a “CoCo,” short for contingent convertible bond. CoCos are neither debt nor equity. They are something in between, designed to give the bank a shot in the arm during times of stress. Many of the largest international banks have issued CoCos worth hundreds of billions of dollars. After more than ten years—a decade that includes the collapse of Credit Suisse …

Combatting The Financial Dismantling Of Public Higher Education, Priya Baskaran

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

How The 2025 Invocation Of Alien Enemies Act Erodes Immigrants’ Rights, Deborah Lee

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Training Set Augmentation And Harmonization Enables Radiomic Models To Detect Early Onset Of Lung Cancer, Claire Huchthausen, Menglin Shi, Gabriel L.A. Sousa, James Larner, Einsley Janowski, Jonathan Colen, Krishni Wijesooriya

Data Science Faculty Publications

Radiomics-based machine learning models have the potential to detect lung cancer at inception from CT scans and transform patient outcomes. Low malignancy rates in early-development pulmonary nodules (PNs) and variable image acquisition hinder development of clinically applicable radiomics-based early detection models. To address these challenges, we augmented training using later-development PNs and harmonized for acquisition effects. We first trained machine learning models to predict PN malignancy using radiomic features from scans of early-development benign and malignant PNs (n = 187) harmonized using ComBat. Observing near-chance performance, we augmented training with later-development benign and malignant PNs (n = 225). We evaluated …

Skip-Level Meetings: Perspectives Of Skipped First-Tier U.S. Tech Leaders, Samuel Blacher

Dissertations

Although significant research exists on numerous intersecting theories, such as adaptive leadership, leadership communication, and employee voice, and although they are discussed in business publications and widely yet inconsistently implemented in industry, skip-level meetings are little scholarly studied. Such meetings offer benefits for employees, direct (skipped) managers, and skip-level leaders, and through them, to organizations, yet they also hold risks and pitfalls, and are influenced by various contextual factors, such as stakeholders’ national culture and age. This exploratory qualitative study employed elements of interpretive phenomenology, followed by thematic analysis, to examine the experiences, perceptions, and emotions of a diverse set …

Project Tackle 12 Years Of Cia And Taiwanese Joint Reconnaissance Overflights, Maximilian Digiovanni

Honors Theses and Capstones

Project TACKLE was a joint collaborative project between the CIA and the Taiwanese government to facilitate U-2 spy plane missions flown by Taiwanese pilots over China. These missions, conducted from 1962 to 1974, provide critical insights regarding the US and Taiwan’s fluctuating relationship during this period. TACKLE missions played a crucial role in informing policymakers on a variety of subjects, such as the progress of China’s rapidly evolving nuclear weapons program. This paper situates the TACKLE missions within the broader political context of their time to highlight the constant prioritization challenge that plagued the program.

Hit Me, Baby, One More Time: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Celebrity Gossip Magazine Shaming Of Britney Spears, Anna Rae Drabik

Honors Theses and Capstones

Britney Spears is an American pop star who rose to fame in the late 1990s at the age of 17 with her music, performances, and fashion. Spears was a prominent figure in celebrity gossip magazines, a genre which grew to prominence alongside and, in many ways, because of Spears. The distinct aesthetic and style of celebrity gossip magazines involved stories, blurbs, and images which wielded praise and shame—directly and indirectly—as tools to enforce norms and expectations for both female celebrities and female readers. Through a critical discourse analysis of 378 People and Us articles throughout the first ten years of …

Harnessing Digital Twins: Advancing Virtual Replicas For Optimized System Performance And Sustainable Innovation, Muuhammad Nawaz Khan, Imtiaz Ahmad

Babylonian Journal of Mechanical Engineering

Digital twins (DTs) have recently become an extremely influential and disruptive concept in engineering and technology. They are characterized as dynamic virtual replicas of physical systems used for real-time monitoring, simulation, and optimization. In the face of growing complexity in modern industries, digital twins offer the capacity to aggregate data from IoT sensors, utilize AI-based analytics, and provide predictive and prescriptive decision-making to achieve operational excellence and drive sustainable innovation. This review presents an in-depth overview of the state-of-the-art in digital twin technologies, covering their conceptual foundations, enabling technologies, application domains, theoretical frameworks, as well as the key challenges and …

A Biphasic Microstructural Model Of Skeletal Muscle To Study Structure-Function Mechanisms Under Multiaxial Tensile And Compressive Conditions, Benjamin Wheatley, Minhaj U. Bhuiyan, Sabrina S. Lorza, Kevin M. Moerman, Pierre-Yves Rohan

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Insuring The Uninsurable: The Case For Nontraditional Data, Catherine Ingram

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

C 3 An: Custom, Compact And Composite Ai Systems - A Neurosymbolic Approach: 4Th-Generation Evolution Of Intelligent Systems, Amit P. Sheth, Kaushik Roy, Revathy Venkataramanan, Venkatesan Nadimuthu

Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems continue to evolve rapidly. From the architecture perspective, it is evolving from large, monolithic models trained on massive internet data to complex, multi-component “compound” systems and “agentic” frameworks capable of semi-autonomous decision-making. These systems show immense promise yet face numerous challenges in reliability, consistency, transparency, and alignment with user goals. In this article, we propose Custom, Compact and Composite AI with Neurosymbolic (C3AN) approach, a framework that paves way to 4th-generation of AI that integrates data, knowledge, and human expertise to build robust, intelligent and trustworthy AI systems defined by 14 foundation elements.

Custom emphasizes …

Global Decoupling Of Functional And Phylogenetic Diversity In Plant Communities, Stefan A. Schnitzer

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Plant communities are composed of species that differ both in functional traits and evolutionary histories. As species’ functional traits partly result from their individual evolutionary history, we expect the functional diversity of communities to increase with increasing phylogenetic diversity. This expectation has only been tested at local scales and generally for specific growth forms or specific habitat types, for example, grasslands. Here we compare standardized effect sizes for functional and phylogenetic diversity among 1,781,836 vegetation plots using the global sPlot database. In contrast to expectations, we find functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity to be only weakly and negatively correlated, implying …

Scope And Mechanism Of The Ruthenium-Catalyzed Sp3 C–H Coupling Reaction Of 2-Alkylindoles With Enones For The Synthesis Of Carbazole Derivatives, Krishna Prasad Gnyawali, Mina Son, Donghun Hwang, Nuwan Asanka Pannilawithana, Mu-Hyun Baik, Chase S. Yi

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

The catalytic system consisting of a cationic Ru–H complex 1 and 3,4,5,6-tetrachloro-1,2-benzoquinone (L1) was found to be highly effective for the dehydrative sp³ C–H coupling reaction of 2-alkyl substituted indoles with enones to form 2,4-disubstituted carbazole products. The analogous coupling reaction of 2-alkylindoles with linear enones bearing the cyclic olefinic group afforded tetracyclic carbazole products. A normal deuterium kinetic isotope effect was measured from the coupling reaction of 1,2-dimethylindole versus 1-methyl-2-(methyl-d₃)indole with (E)-3-penten-2-one (k_H/k_D = 2.5). The Hammett plot was constructed from the reaction of para-substituted …

Optimizing Material Selection And Operational Conditions For Xhv Systems: Lessons From Aisi 1020 And 316l Comparative Studies, Aiman H. Al-Allaq, Md Abdullah Mamun, Matt Poelker, Abdelmageed Elmustafa

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

In this study, AISI 1020 low-carbon steel was investigated as a cost-effective alternative to SS316L stainless steel for reaching extreme high vacuum (XHV) conditions. After being baked at 400°C, a vacuum chamber made of low-carbon steel material exhibited an outgassing rate approximately 2000 times smaller than a similar chamber made of stainless steel. Its activation energy for hydrogen diffusion (27 kJ/mol) is less than half that of stainless steel (60.3 kJ/mol), indicating more efficient hydrogen removal during bakeout. MolFlow+ simulations supported the experimental data and demonstrated the importance of system geometry optimization and minimizing stainless steel content for achieving optimal …

An Analytical Model Of Motion Artifacts In A Measured Arterial Pulse Signal—Part Ii: Tactile Sensors, Md Mahfuzur Rahman, Subodh Toraskar, Mamun Hasan, Zhili Hao

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper, the second of two parts, presents an analytical model of motion artifacts (MA) in measured pulse signals by a tactile sensor, which contains a deformable microstructure sitting on a substrate. While the tissue-contact-sensor (TCS) stack and the sensor are both treated as a 1DOF (degree-of-freedom) system, tissue–sensor contact joins their mass together to form a 1DOF system with springs and dampers on both sides. MA on the sensor substrate causes baseline drift and time-varying system parameters (TVSP) of the TCS stack simultaneously. An analytical model is developed to mathematically relate baseline drift and TVSP to a measured pulse …

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Optimal Takeoff Trajectory Design Of An Evtol Drone, Nathan M. Roberts, Bingling Huang, Xiaosong Du

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The continuing development of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft presents promising opportunities to alleviate transportation congestion. However, designing and executing takeoff trajectories that optimally balance energy usage, passenger comfort, and aircraft constraints remains challenging. Conventional design optimization provides a solution for pre-defined flight conditions and environments but is not ideal in real-world applications. In contrast, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) implements optimal policy making real-time decisions with no assumption of mathematical models. Seeing the lack of literature on DRL-based takeoff trajectory design of eVTOL aircraft, we implement and conduct DRL-based optimal takeoff trajectory designs for the Airbus³ Vahana …

Securities Law—Beware The Shadows—District Court Broadens Federal Insider Trading Laws To Include “Shadow Trading”—Sec V. Panuwat, No. 21-Cv-06322-Who, 2024 Wl 4602708 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 9, 2024), Trevor Pilkington

Suffolk Journal of Trial and Appellate Advocacy

No abstract provided.

Alternative Treatments And Potential Cures For Type 1 Diabetes, Dillon Peterson

Biology and Microbiology Graduate Students Plan B Research Projects

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease that affects multitudes of people without a cost-effective cure. T1D is caused by the immune system reaching a threshold where it then begins to attack the beta cells in the pancreas causing inflammation, which eventually leads to the death of beta cells. Once a large majority of the beta cells die off, the pancreas begins to inadequately supply insulin to the body, which is when the symptoms of T1D begin to emerge. To treat these symptoms, the person must utilize synthetic insulin. The utilization of synthetic insulin, along with the plethora of …

Culpable Kids, Cara H. Drinan

Scholarly Articles

When a child commits a crime, how do states determine if that child is culpable? There are procedural rules that determine the forum for a minor’s trial and doctrines that limit children’s exposure to the most severe sentencing. But when it comes to culpability, states employ the same substantive law whether the defendant is 50 or 15. As this Article explains, that approach is profoundly flawed. In the early 21st century, in a series of cases known as the Miller trilogy, the United States Supreme Court established that youth are fundamentally different from adults and state sentencing practices must recognize …

Undergraduate Bulletin, 2025-2026, Minnesota State University Moorhead

Undergraduate Bulletins (Catalogs)

No abstract provided.

Graduate Bulletin, 2025-2026, Minnesota State University Moorhead

Graduate Bulletins (Catalogs)

No abstract provided.

Epilogue: Every Þrose Has Its Thorn On Poison, The Cure, And Other Pharmacological Prickles; Or, Why Are You So Far Away?, David Ben-Merre Ph.D., Manu Samriti Chander Ph.D.

English Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Physiological And Neurophysiological Measures Used To Quantify Cognitive Workload Of Uas Operators, Pooja Jain, Cooper Molloy, Patricia A. Shewokis, Kurtulus Izzetoglu

International Symposium on Aviation Psychology - 2025

Cognitive workload, the mental effort required to complete a task, is a factor thatcan impair performance in safety-critical missions, such as operating unmannedaerial systems (UAS). Traditional assessments like the NASA Task Load Index(NASA-TLX) rely on subjective ratings but can be intrusive and inaccurate. Thisstudy explores objective and continuous measures with functional near-infraredspectroscopy (fNIRS) and eye-tracking. Thirty-five participants completedsimulated flight scenarios, and data were collected from eye-tracking, fNIRSbiomarkers, performance scores, and questionnaire responses to analyze cognitiveworkload. Machine learning classifiers, including Support Vector Machine andLogistic Regression, trained using biomarkers derived from feature selectionalgorithms, achieved moderate success (LR classifier trained on forward selectedneurophysiological …

Measuring Workload & Situational Awareness Using The Detection Response Task, Stephen R. Pickard, Ami Eidels, Leslie M. Blaha

International Symposium on Aviation Psychology - 2025

This research is attempting to detect a loss of situational awareness (SA) in anaviation context, using the Detection Response Task (DRT). A survey phaserevealed current aviation personnel’s understanding of the construct of SA, how itis currently taught and assessed, and what are the observed indicators of a loss ofSA. The survey results validated the link between SA, cognitive capacity andworkload, and the cognitive and physical indicators of SA loss identified from theliterature review. This experimentation phase used the Modifiable MultitaskingEnvironment (ModME) software to simulate pilot workload and behaviour. Part ofthe ModME design incorporated a version of the DRT as a …

A Training Study To Improve Monitoring During A Go-Around, Randall J. Mumaw, Amber Villa, Dorrit Billman, Lucas Cusano

International Symposium on Aviation Psychology - 2025

The go-around (GA) maneuver varies greatly in line operations from how it istypically trained. To support improved maneuver performance, we developed atraining module based on a description of skilled monitoring performance. Wehad U.S. airline pilots fly GAs (in a simulator) in the Pilot Monitoring (PM) roleboth before and after training. The Pilot Flying (PF), a confederate, flew someGAs poorly to see whether the PM could detect and correct the poorly flownmaneuvers. Our data showed that training that focuses on developing clearexpectations about system performance can lead to significant improvements inmonitoring performance. The PMs trained in the experimental conditionoutperformed the control …

Lessons Learned To Prevent Loss Of Control: A Review Of Incidents From Pilot Archives, Neelakshi Majumdar, Karen Marais

International Symposium on Aviation Psychology - 2025

Inflight loss of control (LOC-I) remains the leading cause of General Aviation accidents. Previous accident database analyses suggest that human factors play arole in LOC-I but provide limited details on specific causes. Moreover, with halfof LOC-I accidents being fatal, identifying lessons learned from survivors is challenging. This study analyzed 21 LOC-I incidents reported in the AOPA Pilot magazine’s ‘Never Again’ series over 12 years to identify causal factors contributing to loss of control. Findings highlight aircraft control issues,complacency, and poor decision-making, particularly in severe weather as major contributors. Lessons learned from these articles highlight the importance of situational awareness and …