Digital Commons Network^™

Sanitizable Access Control System For Secure Cloud Storage Against Malicious Data Publishers, Willy Susilo, Peng Jiang, Jianchang Lai, Fuchun Guo, Guomin Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing is considered as one of the most prominent paradigms in the information technology industry, since it can significantly reduce the costs of hardware and software resources in computing infrastructure. This convenience has enabled corporations to efficiently use the cloud storage as a mechanism to share data among their employees. At the first sight, by merely storing the shared data as plaintext in the cloud storage and protect them using an appropriate access control would be a nice solution. This is assuming that the cloud is fully trusted for not leaking any information, which is impractical as the cloud …

Understanding Crowdsourcing Requesters’ Wage Setting Behaviors, Kotaro Hara, Yudai Tanaka

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Requesters on crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) compensate workers inadequately. One potential reason for the underpayment is that the AMT’s requester interface provides limited information about estimated wages, preventing requesters from knowing if they are offering a fair piece-rate reward. To assess if presenting wage information affects requesters’ reward setting behaviors, we conducted a controlled study with 63 participants. We had three levels for a between-subjects factor in a mixed design study, where we provided participants with: no wage information, wage point estimate, and wage distribution. Each participant had three stages of adjusting the reward and controlling the …

Who Are The 'Silent Spreaders'?: Contact Tracing In Spatio-Temporal Memory Models, Yue Hu, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chai Quek, Quanjun Yin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The COVID-19 epidemic has swept the world for over two years. However, a large number of infectious asymptomatic COVID-19 cases (ACCs) are still making the breaking up of the transmission chains very difficult. Efforts by epidemiological researchers in many countries have thrown light on the clinical features of ACCs, but there is still a lack of practical approaches to detect ACCs so as to help contain the pandemic. To address the issue of ACCs, this paper presents a neural network model called Spatio-Temporal Episodic Memory for COVID-19 (STEM-COVID) to identify ACCs from contact tracing data. Based on the fusion Adaptive …

Do Pre-Trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation And A Reasonable Approach, Xin Lv, Yankai Lin, Yixin Cao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to capture factual knowledge from massive texts, which encourages the proposal of PLM-based knowledge graph completion (KGC) models. However, these models are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance. In this work, we find two main reasons for the weak performance: (1) Inaccurate evaluation setting. The evaluation setting under the closed-world assumption (CWA) may underestimate the PLM-based KGC models since they introduce more external knowledge; (2) Inappropriate utilization of PLMs. Most PLM-based KGC models simply splice the labels of entities and relations as inputs, leading to …

Storm The Capitol: Linking Offline Political Speech And Online Twitter Extra-Representational Participation On Qanon And The January 6 Insurrection, Claire Seungeun Lee, Juan Merizalde, John D. Colautti, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The transfer of power stemming from the 2020 presidential election occurred during an unprecedented period in United States history. Uncertainty from the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing societal tensions, and a fragile economy increased societal polarization, exacerbated by the outgoing president's offline rhetoric. As a result, online groups such as QAnon engaged in extra political participation beyond the traditional platforms. This research explores the link between offline political speech and online extra-representational participation by examining Twitter within the context of the January 6 insurrection. Using a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative thematic analyses, the study combines offline speech information with Twitter …

Unified And Incremental Simrank: Index-Free Approximation With Scheduled Principle (Extended Abstract), Fanwei Zhu, Yuan Fang, Kai Zhang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Hongtai Cao, Zhen Jiang, Minghui Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SimRank is a popular link-based similarity measure on graphs. It enables a variety of applications with different modes of querying. In this paper, we propose UISim, a unified and incremental framework for all SimRank modes based on a scheduled approximation principle. UISim processes queries with incremental and prioritized exploration of the entire computation space, and thus allows flexible tradeoff of time and accuracy. On the other hand, it creates and shares common “building blocks” for online computation without relying on indexes, and thus is efficient to handle both static and dynamic graphs. Our experiments on various real-world graphs show that …

Simple Or Complex? Together For A More Accurate Just-In-Time Defect Predictor, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction aims to automatically predict whether a commit is defective or not, and has been widely studied in recent years. In general, most studies can be classified into two categories: 1) simple models using traditional machine learning classifiers with hand-crafted features, and 2) complex models using deep learning techniques to automatically extract features. Hand-crafted features used by simple models are based on expert knowledge but may not fully represent the semantic meaning of the commits. On the other hand, deep learning-based features used by complex models represent the semantic meaning of commits but may not reflect useful …

On The Transferability Of Pre-Trained Language Models For Low-Resource Programming Languages, Fuxiang Chen, Fatemeh H. Fard, David Lo, Timofey Bryksin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A recent study by Ahmed and Devanbu reported that using a corpus of code written in multilingual datasets to fine-tune multilingual Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) achieves higher performance as opposed to using a corpus of code written in just one programming language. However, no analysis was made with respect to fine-tuning monolingual PLMs. Furthermore, some programming languages are inherently different and code written in one language usually cannot be interchanged with the others, i.e., Ruby and Java code possess very different structure. To better understand how monolingual and multilingual PLMs affect different programming languages, we investigate 1) the performance of …

Shellfusion: Answer Generation For Shell Programming Tasks Via Knowledge Fusion, Neng Zhang, Chao Liu, Xin Xia, Christoph Treude, Ying Zou, David Lo, Zibin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shell commands are widely used for accomplishing tasks, such as network management and file manipulation, in Unix and Linux platforms. There are a large number of shell commands available. For example, 50,000+ commands are documented in the Ubuntu Manual Pages (MPs). Quite often, programmers feel frustrated when searching and orchestrating appropriate shell commands to accomplish specific tasks. To address the challenge, the shell programming community calls for easy-to-use tutorials for shell commands. However, existing tutorials (e.g., TLDR) only cover a limited number of frequently used commands for shell beginners and provide limited support for users to search for commands by …

Arsearch: Searching For Api Related Resources From Stack Overflow And Github, Kien Luong, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow and GitHub are two popular platforms containing API-related resources for developers to learn how to use APIs. The platforms are good sources for information about API such as code examples, usages, sentiment, bug reports, etc. However, it is difficult to collect the correct resources regarding a particular API due to the ambiguity of an API method name. An API method name mentioned in the text would only refer to one API, but the method name could match with different APIs. To help people in finding the correct resources for a particular API, we introduce ARSearch. ARSearch finds Stack …

When Helping Hurts: Understanding Resource Recovery In Nonprofit Workplaces, Anna Laura Waldron

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The present study examined the relationship between recovery experiences and strain within the nonprofit context, and identified the role that work calling, boundary permeability, and relaxation remorse had on recovery and the relationship between recovery and strain. Participants (n = 124 nonprofit workers and volunteers) completed a web-based survey that included questions related to their work-nonwork roles, personal recovery activities, and dimensions of strain. Regression-based analyses indicated effects of recovery on some strain outcomes and the effects of calling, boundary permeability, and relaxation remorse on recovery. Psychological detachment was most frequently related to strain in these models. Results failed to …

The Adaptation And Innovation Model Of Organizational Resilience, Daniel Desa

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The present study was designed to broaden the way researchers and practitioners of the organizational sciences conceptualize, measure, and ultimately work to improve the adaptability, innovativeness, and resilience of organizations. This involved identifying how to measure and delineate the relationships between the interlinked multilevel psychosocial constructs of organizational adaptability, innovativeness, and resilience and the individual and organizational level resources of personal resources, human capital, social capital, and job-related resources as components to a conceptual model of organizational effectiveness coined The Adaptation and Innovation Model of Organizational Resilience, or AIR model. A survey was developed and administered to operationalize worker perceptions …

Preventing Privacy Attacks In Iot Devices, Justin K. Joshuva

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Today, people use many connected devices to make people’s lives easier in a connected environment. Devices like fitness trackers, smartwatches, smart home appliances, and other devices make people’s lives easier. People can use their smartphones to control the thermostat, television, vacuum cleaner, and other connected devices. While IoT devices make their lives easier, they also concern security threats like privacy. Organizations like the U.S. DoD forbid having fitness trackers on some of their buildings, while other organizations discourage patrons from using them in their spaces. The question of how to use IoT devices and simultaneously safeguard users' privacy is a …

Reading With Social, Digital Annotation: Encouraging Engaged Critical Reading In A Challenging Age, Miranda L. Egger

English Theses & Dissertations

This design-based research study examines the pedagogical role of social, digital annotation in teaching reading as rhetorical invention, particularly the kind of invention necessary for thoughtful democratic participation in the contemporary discursive era, often described as troubled. In this dissertation study, I deployed a classroom-based intervention meant to challenge how educators in rhetoric and composition/writing studies might directly address the acute and exigent discursive struggle in the first-year composition classroom. This study ultimately finds that social, digital annotation invites significant shifts in students’ reading habits, in that Hypothes.is-based annotations yielded a far more complex, multifaceted set of reading skills, behaviors, …

Guilty As Not (Re)Charged: Calling, Work-Recovery Guilt, And Their Effects On Recovery Experiences, Jeffrey Drake Terry

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Public and scholarly interest in the concept of work as a calling has grown considerably over the past few decades (Thompson & Bunderson, 2019). Much of this research has focused on the positive outcomes of calling, including increased work engagement (e.g., Dobrow Riza et al., 2019) and job performance (e.g., Park et al., 2016). However, a few studies have focused on the negative outcomes of calling, such as limited psychological detachment from work (Clinton et al., 2017). According to Work as Calling Theory (WCT; Duffy et al., 2018), psychological climate and individual differences may help to explain why some individuals …

Bad Actors, Wendell Ward

English Theses & Dissertations

This manuscript contains a collection of short stories. It also includes the first several chapters of a novella. Within are characters who act and suffer consequences without the imposition of supernatural elements to affect outcomes, which is hopefully what makes them seem “real.” But then there are ambiguities and archetypes and symbolic imagery dancing around the edges of their predicaments, too. Think flambéed Flaubert with the saltiness of Hemingway and the peppery tang of Woolf complimented with a sugary pinch of Charlotte Bronte to bring out the flavor of the tomatoes, poured over with a rich, Jungian gravy. If this …

Fragmentation In The Dual Enrollment Experience: The Importance Of Students’ Self-Perceptions In Dual Enrollment First-Year Composition Students, Sarah Crystal Johnson

English Theses & Dissertations

Dual enrollment has become an embedded aspect of our writing programs yet is still an under-researched area within rhetoric and composition. One reason for this research gap is that many DE students experience their FYC courses on secondary campuses, liminal spaces that are more difficult to access for research. DE students within these spaces experience daily tensions between the collegiate expectations of FYC curriculum and the secondary social contexts in which their DE FYC courses are taught. These unique contextual experiences impact their perceptions of themselves as writers. This research is an attempt to step into this DE research gap …

Zinā In The Criminal Legislation Act (1999-2000): An Evaluation Of The Implication For Muslim Women's Right In Nigeria, Paul Orerhime Akpomie

Theses and Dissertations

The research engages in an exploration of human rights in Islam. Human rights issues are then contrasted with international law positions. The data gotten is then used for investigating women’s human rights issues in Shariʾa penal tradition regarding zinā (adultery) in Nigeria. The re-emergence of Sharia penal codes adopted by 12 Northern states in Nigeria in 1999 as an operative Islamic law has sparked concerns about rulings amounting to stoning to death in several cases of zinā. These events raised concerns about Shariʾa penal traditions’ legality and relationship with other legal traditions operational in Nigeria, a secular political space. …

Does Proactivity Drive Use? Understanding Growth In Chat Reference Services, David A. Hurley, Adrienne Warner

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Libraries that implement trigger-initiated proactive chat reference services see substantial increases in the number and complexity of reference transactions. However, it is not clear if this growth is a result of something inherent to proactivity, or other factors such as increased awareness of the service. To investigate this, we compare usage during periods with and without proactivity in databases in which our chat reference service is established. Steep and immediate increases when proactivity is enabled and sharp declines when it is disabled suggests that proactivity itself is driving the changes. We recommend human computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) …

Pushing At The Seams: French Zines & Bricolage As A Liberatory Act, Shayna M. Davidson

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the contemporary literary value posed by independently produced French fanzines. French fanzines represent a convergence of textual and graphic narratives, echoing la bande dessinée in many senses. I argue that the liberty of form and expression utilized by the fanzine creator permits a more nuanced iteration of life-writing. The circulation of texts amongst informal economies based in social networks suggests that creators are able to explore narratives of self-hood that do not conform to neoliberal market-oriented categories of identity. Furthermore, the influx of digitally stored and distributed French fanzines confounds their traditional categorization as ephemeral text-objects; as …

Lived Experiences Of Parents With Transgender And Gender Expansive Children, Mary Kathryn Brammer

Individual, Family, and Community Education ETDs

Parents of transgender and gender expansive (TGE) children can be recognized as a marginalized community often not represented or visible in the context of Westernized society. They experience significant challenges that impact their job as primary caregivers and burden their ability to raise healthy and happy TGE people. This research, guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology and Queer theory, aimed to discern parents of TGE children’s subjective and collective experience raising a TGE child in New Mexico, understand how they experience a support group each participant has attended at least one time, and recognize the significance of these experiences for …

Keeping Your Cool: Thermoregulatory Performance And Plasticity In Desert Cricetid Rodents, Richard W. Ramirez, Eric A. Riddell, Steven R. Beissinger, Blair O. Wolf

Biology ETDs

Small mammals in hot deserts often avoid heat via nocturnality and fossoriality and are thought to have a limited capacity to dissipate heat using evaporative cooling. Research to date has focused on thermoregulatory responses to air temperatures (T_a) below body temperature (T_b). Consequently, the thermoregulatory performance of small mammals exposed to high air temperatures is poorly understood, particularly responses across geographic and seasonal scales. We quantified the seasonal thermoregulatory performance of four cricetid rodents (Neotoma albigula, N. lepida, Peromyscus eremicus, P. crinitus) exposed to high T_a, at four sites …

"When The Tide Is Out, The Table Is Set": Shellfish Harvesting Throughout The Holocene At Labouchere Bay, Southeast Alaska, Mark R. Williams

Anthropology ETDs

“When the tide is out, the table is set” is a familiar saying among Native communities on the Northwest Coast of North America. This phrase encapsulates traditional ecological knowledge passed down for generations concerning intertidal marine resources. Recent archaeological excavations of shellfish gathering camps at Labouchere Bay confirm that ancient people may have followed similar principles throughout the Holocene (c.9,500 -2,500 years ago). For millennia, shellfish have been a highly reliable food source that helped support sedentary fisher-hunter-gatherer settlements. Although shellfish habitats represent highly predictable foraging opportunities, optimal foraging strategies must be carefully managed to avoid overharvesting. Collecting just enough …

Peripheral Neuropathy Evaluations Of Patients With Prolonged Long Covid., Anne Louise Oaklander, Alexander J Mills, Mary Kelley, Lisa S Toran, Bryan Smith, Marinos Dalakas, Avindra Nath

Department of Neurology Faculty Papers

Background and objectives: Recovery from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection appears exponential, leaving a tail of patients reporting various long COVID symptoms including unexplained fatigue/exertional intolerance and dysautonomic and sensory concerns. Indirect evidence links long COVID to incident polyneuropathy affecting the small-fiber (sensory/autonomic) axons.

Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional and longitudinal data from patients with World Health Organization (WHO)-defined long COVID without prior neuropathy history or risks who were referred for peripheral neuropathy evaluations. We captured standardized symptoms, examinations, objective neurodiagnostic test results, and outcomes, tracking participants for 1.4 years on average.

Results: Among 17 patients (mean age …

Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection For Edge-Layer Devices, Jonathan Hunter

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis work proposes a novel DL-based anomaly detection framework for IoT environments, employing higher-capacity embedded devices as a first line of defense for the IoT edge layer. In the proposed framework, embedded devices implement the DL anomaly detection engine at the network gateway and adapt to potential attacks by retraining on incoming network traffic. In order to test the feasibility of this framework, two neural network models, trained on variations of the CICIDS 2018 Intrusion Detection Data Set, are deployed and tested on the Raspberry Pi 4. Model performance metrics, including fit and evaluation time across various batch and …

Knowledge-Based Artificial Neural Network Modeling Assessment: Integrating Heterogeneous Genomics Data To Uncover Lifespan Regulation, Taylor Day

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Biological analytics and more advanced data analysis techniques have made remarkable advancements as the area of machine learning continues to grow. More specifically, genetic modeling and neural network building are gaining interest as it becomes a fundamental piece of most model building we see today. We propose a Knowledge-Based Artificial Neural Network (KBANN) to predict phenotype while providing insight to effected subsystems. Within KBANN, the input layers are a single or group of Gene Ontology (GO) terms while each layer’s input is a single number between 0 and 1, explaining how expressed the given term is. The expression number provides …

Food Deserts, Crime, And Neighborhood Context: An Examination Of The Impact Of Food Insecurity On Violent Crime In Little Rock, Sarah Dean

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis seeks to explore the indirect and direct relationships between food insecurity, concentrated disadvantage, and distribution of violent offenders through the lens of social disorganization. Data gathered by the Little Rock Police Department, American Community Survey, and city business license records are used to test neighborhood-level relationships across Little Rock, Arkansas’ 155 Census block groups. Pearson’s Correlation is used at the bivariate level and negative binomial regression tests multivariate relationships. The results suggest a null relationship between food insecurity and distribution of violent offenders across Little Rock block groups. However, several findings are consistent with prior research and theory– …

Analysis Of The Factors Influencing Multiple Uses Of Crime Guns: An Exploratory Study, Samantha Scott

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

A broad body of literature has been built around the topic of gun violence in the United States. The characteristics of communities, victims, and offenders have each been used to explain variation in the likelihood and frequency of gun crime. Less attention has been given to the factors associated with multiple uses of crime guns. The current study applies binary logistic regression to crime logs maintained by the police department of a mid-size city in the Southeastern U.S. to examine how neighborhood and initial incident characteristics influence the likelihood that a crime gun will be used in multiple incidents. Gang …

Novel Parallel Computing Decoupling Methods For Power System Distribution Networks, Noman Saied

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This work presents and describes three strategies for decoupling distribution power networks among parallel processing cores in a real-time (RT) multi-core environment. The proposed techniques help remove computational limitations and speedup real-time simulation of networks. Prior to this work, the solutions employed include approaches such as decoupling with Stublines or delay-free State Space Nodal (SSN) solvers. Further, these approaches are limited to high-end proprietary hardware and software. The main issues addressed in this work are reducing computational complexity, storage complexity, and employing general-purpose computers to allow simulation of large power networks using RT-systems. The Compensated Distributed Line Decoupling (CDLD) method …

Improving Iot Security Through The Use Of Deep Learning At The Physical Layer, Mohamed Fadul

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a heterogeneous network interconnection connecting electronic and electro-mechanical devices to the Internet. The total number of IoT devices is estimated to reach 26.66 billion and is expected to reach 75.4 billion by 2025. Currently, only 30% of the IoT devices employ encryption, which puts the majority of the IoT devices and their underlying infrastructure under risk of attacks by: 1) devices that are wrongly authenticated to access the network specially when digital credentials are transmitted without encryption, and 2) devices that can detect, intercept, and exploit communications between IoT devices. Therefore, more advanced security …