Digital Commons Network^™

Echo Chambers And The Rise Of The Alt-Right, Ian Robert Mcdonald

Masters Theses

The uses of social media have expanded with the growing number of platforms and niches that these platforms seek to fulfill. One of the more common uses of many current social media platforms is to engage with politics. Social media platforms have become a political tool to some, with an enormous amount of news and information being shared throughout social media platforms. The increasing use of social media has coincided with an increase in political polarization, with some raising concerns over the ability for certain groups to operate in ideological isolation, referred to as echo chambers, and the role they …

Auditory Ace Mobile Application Capstone Review, Layla Smith

University Honors Theses

This paper describes the development process and outcomes of my 2023-2024 Capstone Project, Auditory Ace, a self-directed auditory training mobile application for individuals with cochlear implants. Recognizing the limitations of current market offerings, Dr. Timothy Anderson created a Capstone project proposal to develop an accessible auditory training mobile application. The Capstone team that took on this proposal consisted of Darya Haines, Dustin Huynh, Jordan Nguyen, Nihar Koppolu, Scott Thorkelson, Sienna Day, and myself, Layla Smith. This paper is structured to follow the Agile software development methodology, which we used to develop Auditory Ace, reviewing in detail every major choice we …

Risk Analysis In Financial Statements, A Comparative Study Of Ai Vs Human Risk Assessment, Andre Denegri

University Honors Theses

This theses explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the auditing industry, focusing on its implications for audit quality, efficiency, and the evolving role of human auditors. A comprehensive review of relevant literature highlights the integration of AI-driven tools such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing in audit processes, emphasizing their capabilities in enhancing risk assessment, fraud detection, and data analytics.

The experimental design features an innovative approach to compare the efficacy of AI and human auditors in conducting risk analysis for three companies--Blockbuster, Enron, and Lehman Brothers--presented anonymously with pre-bankruptcy financial information. The findings …

The Cascading Effects Of Database Design, Liam Mccracken

University Honors Theses

This paper details how a relational database influenced the design of the rest of a software project. The software project in question is WonderTix, an open-source ticketing and donation platform for the use of Portland Playhouse under continuous development by teams of Portland State students as their computer science capstone project. The paper, a capstone review thesis, examines WonderTix as an instantiation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern, noting how the model, a relational database based on the SQL standard, influenced the design of the view and controller components. This influence is explored from three angles. First, when the implementation of …

Business Capstone Review: Team Dynamic Effects On Business Decision-Making, Lauren Mann

University Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on team dynamics and how they affect business decision-making when finding solutions collectively. It analyzes new team dynamics in relation to Tuckman's model of the five stages of team development. While much-existing research measures team dynamics and leadership styles, the purpose of this study is to highlight the characteristics and processes created in teams that lead to the strongest results. The constructive cohesion of team members comes from building a specific culture based on attitudes and guidelines. This knowledge is valuable because it can lead to the success or failure of decisions. This thesis argues that relationship-building …

The Mounted Warrior: An Investigation Into An Unpublished Coptic Textile Featuring Equestrian Imagery, Elizabeth Hines

University Honors Theses

The warrior on horseback visual motif has existed for millenia. Such equestrian imagery was widely distributed in the visual arts and material culture, including that of textiles. This scholarly exploration centers on an unpublished Coptic Egyptian textile fragment portraying a warrior atop a horse in motion, presenting an analysis of its symbolic significance and potential cultural functions. Through an intricate examination of the artifact and comparative study with contemporaneous first millennium CE eastern Mediterranean material culture, this extraordinary equestrian motif and its implications for understanding ancient visual narratives is realized. By situating the textile fragment within its historical and cultural …

End Of Life, Children's Mercy Kansas City

Clinical Pathways

No abstract provided.

Periacetabular Osteotomy Eras, Children's Mercy Kansas City

Clinical Pathways

No abstract provided.

Chair Care Pilot Project Final Evaluation Report, Prevention Research Center, University Of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Presbyterian Community Health, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Reports & Documents

No abstract provided.

Processes For Depositing Functionalized Nanoparticles Upon A Substrate, Erik T. Thostenson, Thomas Schumacher

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Processes for depositing functionalized nanoparticles upon a non-conductive substrate are disclosed herein. The processes may include the step of aerosolizing one or more particles into suspension within a gas, each of the one or more particles comprising functionalized nanoparticles having an electric charge. The processes may include the step the step of attracting the one or more particles onto a non-conductive substrate by a static electric charge opposite of the electric charge, wherein at least portions of the non-conductive substrate are having the static electric charge. The processes may include the step of depositing the functionalized nanoparticles onto the non-conductive …

A Case Study In Vacillant Literary Analysis: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Sara Casten

University Honors Theses

For the last 95 years, Nella Larsen's Passing has been a topic of discussion within the literary and scholarly communities. First considered Larsen's folly, her second novella Passing had struggled to received a compliment from critics and was quickly lost to readers until her work was rediscovered in the early 1970s. However, unbound by the restrictive literary trope of the era, scholars now wonder if Larsen's Passing had been a misinterpreted masterpiece. This thesis outlines the initial interpretations of critics and modern understanding of scholars in order to highlight the influences of outside influences when reading a written work from …

Edu 518.50: Inclusion And Collaboration, Morgen J. Alwell

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Combined Topsis Technique For Magdm Based On The Distance Measures And Critic Under Single-Valued Neutrosophic Sets And Applications To Quality Evaluation Of Whole Process Engineering Consulting Service Modes, Xia Wang, Yingxia Hou, Jing Peng, Jiekun Hu, Yue Li, Qiang Cai, Guiwu Wei

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems

According to survey data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, from 2011 to 2022, the total output value of China's construction industry showed an increasing trend year by year. From 2018 to 2021, infrastructure investment has always maintained a positive growth, indicating that the current construction industry is in a rapid development stage. In order to improve the development quality of the construction industry as much as possible, it is of great significance to develop the whole Process engineering consulting service model. The quality evaluation of whole process engineering consulting service modes is MAGDM. The single-valued neutrosophic sets (SVNSs) …

Spns 102.50: Elementary Spanish Ii, Alicia Gignoux

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Spns 102.51: Elementary Spanish Ii, Alicia Gignoux

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Posmlp-Video: Spatial And Temporal Relative Position Encoding For Efficient Video Recognition, Yanbin Hao, Diansong Zhou, Zhicai Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Xiangnan He, Meng Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, vision Transformers and MLPs have demonstrated remarkable performance in image understanding tasks. However, their inherently dense computational operators, such as self-attention and token-mixing layers, pose significant challenges when applied to spatio-temporal video data. To address this gap, we propose PosMLP-Video, a lightweight yet powerful MLP-like backbone for video recognition. Instead of dense operators, we use efficient relative positional encoding (RPE) to build pairwise token relations, leveraging small-sized parameterized relative position biases to obtain each relation score. Specifically, to enable spatio-temporal modeling, we extend the image PosMLP’s positional gating unit to temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal variants, namely PoTGU, …

Opportunity Or Exploitation? A Longitudinal Dyadic Analysis Of Flexible Working Arrangements And Gender Household Labor Inequality, Senhu Wang, Cheng Cheng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

It has been extensively debated over whether the rise of flexible working arrangements (FWAs) may be an “opportunity” for a more egalitarian gender division of household labor or reinforce the “exploitation” of women in the traditional gender division. Drawing on a linked-lives perspective, this study contributes to the literature by using longitudinal couple-level dyadic data in the UK (2010–2020) to examine how couple-level arrangements of flexible working affect within-couple inequality in time and different types of household labor. The results show that among heterosexual couples, women’s use of FWAs significantly intensifies their disproportionate share of housework and maintains their heavy …

Mobility Repertoires: How Chinese Overseas Students Overcame Pandemic-Induced Immobility, Jiaqi M. Liu, Rui Jie Peng

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The burgeoning field of immobility studies focuses on how migratory aspirations and capabilities shape a given (im)mobility status but devotes scant attention to how people traverse different (im)mobility categories. Through a case study of Chinese students in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article develops two arguments to shed light on migrants’ experiences and strategies in mobility transitions. First, during the pandemic, while China's restrictive travel policies and unfavorable public discourses made return migration extremely difficult, Chinese overseas students also felt unwelcome in the United States, due to visa restrictions and Sinophobic violence. This dilemma of being unable …

Silver Screen Reversals Of The Domino Theory: American Cold War Movies And The Re-Imagination Of British Experiences In Southeast Asia, Wen-Qing (Wei Wenqing) Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines how Hollywood was affected by the successful anticommunism of Britain and its local allies in Malaya and Singapore, victories that unfolded alongside Vietnam’s mounting crisis in the early 1960s. It shows that American movies of this era which portrayed the intertwining of US and British experiences in 1950s Malaya and 1940s Singapore conveyed an uneasy yet clear optimism about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.

A Dual-Angle Exploration Towards Understanding Lapses In Covid-19 Social Responsibility, Sean T. H. Lee, Jerome J. X. Mah, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Breaking infection chains requires not just behaviours that allow individuals to stay healthy and uninfected (i.e. health protective behaviours) but also for those who are possibly infected to protect others from their harboured infection risk (i.e. socially responsible behaviours). However, socially responsible behaviours entail costs without clear, immediate benefits to the individual, such that public health-risking lapses occur from time to time. In this important yet understudied area, the current exploratory study sought to identify possible psychological factors that may affect people's likelihood of engaging in socially responsible behaviours. Assuming that self-perceived infection should provide an impetus to engage in …

Conventionalization Of Alternative Agriculture And The Intervention Of External Investors: Case Sharing Community-Supported Agriculture Farm, China, Meiling Wu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The trend of alternative farmers adopting conventional farming methods, known as conventionalization, has become increasingly prevalent. External investment can be a catalyst for the conventionalization of alternative agriculture. The study seeks to examine the dynamics through which external investment and investors facilitate the conventionalization of alternative agriculture. A study was conducted on a Sharing Community Supported-Agriculture (CSA) Farm, with data being gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic methods. The findings indicated that (1) the low economic sustainability of Sharing CSA Farm leads to an influx of external investment; (2) external investors compel the farm manager to relax adherence …

Dappscan: Building Large-Scale Datasets For Smart Contract Weaknesses In Dapp Projects, Zibin Zheng, Jianzhong Su, Jiachi Chen, David Lo, Zhijie Zhong, Mingxi Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Smart Contract Weakness Classification Registry (SWC Registry) is a widely recognized list of smart contract weaknesses specific to the Ethereum platform. Despite the SWC Registry not being updated with new entries since 2020, the sustained development of smart contract analysis tools for detecting SWC-listed weaknesses highlights their ongoing significance in the field. However, evaluating these tools has proven challenging due to the absence of a large, unbiased, real-world dataset. To address this problem, we aim to build a large-scale SWC weakness dataset from real-world DApp projects. We recruited 22 participants and spent 44 person-months analyzing 1,199 open-source audit reports …

Inceptionnext: When Inception Meets Convnext, Weihao Yu, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Xinchao Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inspired by the long-range modeling ability of ViTs, large-kernel convolutions are widely studied and adopted recently to enlarge the receptive field and improve model performance, like the remarkable work ConvNeXt which employs 7×7 depthwise convolution. Although such depthwise operator only consumes a few FLOPs, it largely harms the model efficiency on powerful computing devices due to the high memory access costs. For example, ConvNeXtT has similar FLOPs with ResNet-50 but only achieves ∼ 60% throughputs when trained on A100 GPUs with full precision. Although reducing the kernel size of ConvNeXt can improve speed, it results in significant performance degradation, which …

Consistent3d: Towards Consistent High-Fidelity Text-To-3d Generation With Deterministic Sampling Prior, Zike Wu, Pan Zhou, Xuanyu Yi, Xiaoding Yuan, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Score distillation sampling (SDS) and its variants have greatly boosted the development of text-to-3D generation, but are vulnerable to geometry collapse and poor textures yet. To solve this issue, we first deeply analyze the SDS and find that its distillation sampling process indeed corresponds to the trajectory sampling of a stochastic differential equation (SDE): SDS samples along an SDE trajectory to yield a less noisy sample which then serves as a guidance to optimize a 3D model. However, the randomness in SDE sampling often leads to a diverse and unpredictable sample which is not always less noisy, and thus is …

Few-Shot Learner Parameterization By Diffusion Time-Steps, Zhongqi Yue, Pan Zhou, Richang Hong, Hanwang Zhang, Sun Qianru

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Even when using large multi-modal foundation models, few-shot learning is still challenging—if there is no proper inductive bias, it is nearly impossible to keep the nuanced class attributes while removing the visually prominent attributes that spuriously correlate with class labels. To this end, we find an inductive bias that the time-steps of a Diffusion Model (DM) can isolate the nuanced class attributes, i.e., as the forward diffusion adds noise to an image at each time-step, nuanced attributes are usually lost at an earlier time-step than the spurious attributes that are visually prominent. Building on this, we propose Time-step Few-shot (TiF) …

Applicability And Challenges Of Indoor Localization Using One-Sided Round Trip Time Measurements, Quang Hai Truong, Xi Kai Justin Lam, Guru Anand Anish, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Radio Frequency fingerprinting, based on WiFi or cellular signals, has been a popular approach for localization. However, adoptions in real-world applications have confronted with challenges due to low accuracy, especially in crowded environments. The received signal strength (RSS) could be easily interfered by a large number of other devices or strictly depends on physical surrounding environments, which may cause localization errors of a few meters. On the other hand, the fine time measurement (FTM) round-trip time (RTT) has shown compelling improvement in indoor localization with ~1-2 meter accuracy in both 2D and 3D environments [13]. This method relies on the …

Closest Pairs Search Over Data Stream, Rui Zhu Zhu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

��-closest pair (KCP for short) search is a fundamental problem in database research. Given a set of��-dimensional streaming data S, KCP search aims to retrieve �� pairs with the shortest distances between them. While existing works have studied continuous 1-closest pair query (i.e., �� = 1) over dynamic data environments, which allow for object insertions/deletions, they require high computational costs and cannot easily support KCP search with �� > 1. This paper investigates the problem of KCP search over data stream, aiming to incrementally maintain as few pairs as possible to support KCP search with arbitrarily ��. To achieve this, we …

Poster: Profiling Event Vision Processing On Edge Devices, Ila Nitin Gokarn, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As RGB camera resolutions and frame-rates improve, their increased energy requirements make it challenging to deploy fast, efficient, and low-power applications on edge devices. Newer classes of sensors, such as the biologically inspired neuromorphic event-based camera, capture only changes in light intensity per-pixel to achieve operational superiority in sensing latency (O(μs)), energy consumption (O(mW)), high dynamic range (140dB), and task accuracy such as in object tracking, over traditional RGB camera streams. However, highly dynamic scenes can yield an event rate of up to 12MEvents/second, the processing of which could overwhelm …

Predicting Mild Cognitive Impairment Through Ambient Sensing And Artificial Intelligence, Ah-Hwee Tan, Weng Yan Ying, Budhitama Subagdja, Anni Huang, Shanthoshigaa D, Tony Chin-Ian Tay, Iris Rawtaer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports an emerging application leveraging ambient and artificial intelligence techniques for in-home sensing and cognitive health assessment. The application involves a prospective longitudinal study, wherein non-pervasive sensing devices are installed in homes of over 63 real users undergoing clinical cognitive assessment, and digital signals of the users’ activities and behaviour are transmitted to a central cloud-based data server for further processing and analysis. Based on the sensor readings, we identify a set of digital biomarkers covering four key aspects of daily living, namely physical, activity, cognitive, and sleep, and develop a suite of customized feature extraction methods for …

Improving Interpretable Embeddings For Ad-Hoc Video Search With Generative Captions And Multi-Word Concept Bank, Jiaxin Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aligning a user query and video clips in cross-modal latent space and that with semantic concepts are two mainstream approaches for ad-hoc video search (AVS). However, the effectiveness of existing approaches is bottlenecked by the small sizes of available video-text datasets and the low quality of concept banks, which results in the failures of unseen queries and the out-of-vocabulary problem. This paper addresses these two problems by constructing a new dataset and developing a multi-word concept bank. Specifically, capitalizing on a generative model, we construct a new dataset consisting of 7 million generated text and video pairs for pre-training. To …