Digital Commons Network^™

Classification Of Acoustic Emission Data Into Load Steps Using An Artificial Neural Network, Allen Ross

Theses and Dissertations

The average age of bridges in South Carolina is approaching 40 years, very close to the 50-year service life. Almost 11% of the bridges in South Carolina are rated as structurally deficient, greater than the national average of 7.5% (South 2021). Health monitoring is the concept that in-situ sensors can continuously monitor civil structures and send real time signals of damage. This process allows for automation and could save time and money on the inspection and load rating of bridges. Health monitoring requires sensors that provide uninterrupted data without sacrificing the functionality of the bridge. A prime candidate for this …

Effectively Integrating Technology To Engage Students And Meet Learning Objectives In Language Arts Classrooms, Jessica L. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Technology is an ever-changing resource that is more advanced now than it has ever been. This action research project explored how teachers intentionally plan the use of technology in their classroom based on the objectives that need to be taught. The main study that this action research explores is how teacher align objectives to integrate intentional technology that engages students in the middle school ELA classroom? By collecting data via questioning, interviewing, observing and collaboration among participants, the findings show that the use of technology in the classroom is most efficient when implementing a backwards design approach to lesson planning.

The Relation Between Adhd Symptoms And Alcohol And Marijuana Use Outcomes Among College Students: The Mediating Role Of Experiential Avoidance, William Joshua Bradley

Theses and Dissertations

Individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at significantly greater risk for alcohol and marijuana misuse and abuse compared to their peers. College students with ADHD may be particularly vulnerable to problematic alcohol and marijuana use, given the widespread use and abuse of these substances by college students generally and liability associated with ADHD specifically. Experiential avoidance, or avoidance of unwanted thoughts, feelings, and other internal experiences, is positively associated with ADHD symptoms and substance use problems. However, it is unclear what role experiential avoidance plays in the relation between ADHD and alcohol and marijuana use. This study examined whether experiential …

“Zoom Degrees”: A Reflection On Education And Experience During The Covid-19 Pandemic Of The 2020s, Campbell Childers

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a self-reflection on time in the three-year Master of Fine Arts in Theater program at the University of South Carolina, during the 2020 rise of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the years after. It is a chronologically structured examination of two years of academic experiences, both prior to and during the pandemic, and one year of professionally application experience post-pandemic. The academics cover course experiences to production assignments and design opportunities, going into detail on the student’s process and thoughts at the time. The reflections on professional experience discuss the student’s future goals and how they have evolved …

Functional Facets Of Intergenic Hairpin Structures In Genus Caulobacter, Geetha Saarunya Clarke

Theses and Dissertations

DNA replication, recombination and repairs maintain bacterial genome stability. But these processes may also induce genome rearrangements leading to inter andintra chromosomal structural variations. Genus Caulobacter undergoes extensive genome rearrangements. Genomic studies in bacteria usually focus on the codingregions, but there is important information present in the intergenic DNA spaces inaddition to the regulatory elements involved in transcription. Recently, Ely published a new model for recombination in genus Caulobacter with simultaneousloss and gain of genes resulting from preferential recombination at non- homologous regions flanked by regions of homology. In my dissertation, I observedand catalogued hairpin structures at known sites of …

Supervisory Allyship For University Custodial Staff, Daniel Colascione

Theses and Dissertations

This study will examine the lived experiences of campus custodians in search of creating an anti-racist workplace. Custodians will have the opportunity to share about their experiences involving racism and will be asked to explain their expectations of leadership in creating an anti-racist workplace. This study seeks to understand the expectations Black staff members have of their departmental and university level leadership to identify ways to narrow the gap between their expectations and the support they receive from those in positions capable of doing so.

The Effect Of Concrete Material Properties On Rigid Pavement Design In South Carolina, Nicolet Anne Devine

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the effect of concrete material inputs on rigid pavement design in the state of South Carolina. The impact of concrete strength input parameters in the historical AASHTO pavement design method and MEPDG method is investigated using three newly constructed concrete sections, I-85 in Cherokee County, I-20 in Lexington County, and I-85 in Spartanburg County. Strength data obtained from the sections were the result of QA/QC testing provided by the SCDOT during construction, as well as from UofSC laboratory testing. The compressive strength data from these tests was correlated to the elastic modulus and modulus of rupture (which …

Metal Free Bond Activation By Carboranyl Phosphines, Gayathri B. Gange

Theses and Dissertations

In the past few decades, main group-based catalysts have attracted increasing attention as an alternative approach to overcome the most prevailing issues of transition metal catalysts such as high cost, toxicity, and low abundance. Among these main groupbased catalysts, Phosphine based compounds have shown a variety of bond activations due to the strong nucleophilicity from their congener species. To the contrary, unique electron deficient boron-based clusters have the tendency to accept two electrons reversibly due to their electron deficiency. In this study, we have synchronized the electron donor ability of the phosphine with the electron acceptor ability of the ortho …

“Whoz Ya People?”: Defining Lumbee Citizenship And Belonging In The 21St Century, Timothy Blake Hite

Theses and Dissertations

The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is a state-recognized tribe with an estimated 60,000 citizens. From 2018-2020, the tribe closed their enrollment office so that the tribe could reexamine enrollment policies, particularly the criterion for appropriate contact with the tribal homeland. During this closure, the tribe was continuing its long journey for federal recognition, with a bill passing the U.S. House of Representatives and receiving support from then President Donald Trump and current President Joseph Biden. During the summer of 2021, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the tribe’s enrollment department, located in Pembroke, NC, to answer the question of how …

Application Of The Test For Memristor To Experimental Memory Devices, Jinsun Kim

Theses and Dissertations

In early seventies, the memristor was introduced as the fourth fundamental nonlinear two-terminal circuit element coupling the charge and flux by Dr. L. Chua. In 2008, the experimental discovery of the memristor was announced triggering significant interest in the development of resistance switching memory devices and their applications. According to Chua, the pinched hysteresis loop in the current-voltage characteristic of experimental memory devices is the fingerprint of memristors (“if it’s pinched it’s a memristor”). However, such loops are not an exclusive feature of memristors as they are also found in the response of other devices with memory that are not …

Epitaxial 4h-Sic Radiation Detectors For Harsh Environment Applications, Joshua W. Kleppinger

Theses and Dissertations

Epitaxial 4H-silicon carbide (4H-SiC) is an essential semiconductor material for the development of harsh environment radiation detectors due to its excellent electrical and thermal properties and resistance to radiation damage, opening the door for a wide variety of applications in NASA space missions, nuclear safeguards, and nuclear energy. However, the low atomic numbers of its constituent atoms Si (Z = 14) and C (Z = 6) make 4H-SiC nearly transparent to most neutrally charged radiation which can only be compensated using thicker active volumes.

In this dissertation, Ni/n-4H-SiC Schottky barrier diode (SBD) radiation detectors are fabricated for the first time …

Metaphors Of Memory: Complexity And The Fourth Canon, Amber Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four main sites of memory scholarship (bodily memory, historical and historiographical memory, material memory, and digital memory), arguing that at each site, memory is treated in ways which are inconsistent with most current scholarly understandings of how it operates. Each chapter focuses on one of the major sites of memory scholarship, demonstrating how particular uses of keywords at that site undercut its own attempt to address memory’s complexity. In the process, I lay the groundwork for alternative conceptions of memory in that site that offer new avenues for memory research.

Shieldfl: Mitigating Model Poisoning Attacks In Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning, Zhuoran Ma, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (PPFL) is an emerging secure distributed learning paradigm that aggregates user-trained local gradients into a federated model through a cryptographic protocol. Unfortunately, PPFL is vulnerable to model poisoning attacks launched by a Byzantine adversary, who crafts malicious local gradients to harm the accuracy of the federated model. To resist model poisoning attacks, existing defense strategies focus on identifying suspicious local gradients over plaintexts. However, the Byzantine adversary submits encrypted poisonous gradients to circumvent existing defense strategies in PPFL, resulting in encrypted model poisoning. To address the issue, in this paper we design a privacy-preserving defense strategy using …

Surveying Structural Complexity In Quantum Many-Body Systems, Whei Yeap Suen, Thomas J. Elliott, Jayne Thompson, Andrew J. P. Garner, John R. Mahoney, Vlatko Vedral, Mile Gu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantum many-body systems exhibit a rich and diverse range of exotic behaviours, owing to their underlying non-classical structure. These systems present a deep structure beyond those that can be captured by measures of correlation and entanglement alone. Using tools from complexity science, we characterise such structure. We investigate the structural complexities that can be found within the patterns that manifest from the observational data of these systems. In particular, using two prototypical quantum many-body systems as test cases-the one-dimensional quantum Ising and Bose-Hubbard models-we explore how different information-theoretic measures of complexity are able to identify different features of such patterns. …

On Explaining Multimodal Hateful Meme Detection Models, Ming Shan Hee, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Wen Haw Chong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hateful meme detection is a new multimodal task that has gained significant traction in academic and industry research communities. Recently, researchers have applied pre-trained visual-linguistic models to perform the multimodal classification task, and some of these solutions have yielded promising results. However, what these visual-linguistic models learn for the hateful meme classification task remains unclear. For instance, it is unclear if these models are able to capture the derogatory or slurs references in multimodality (i.e., image and text) of the hateful memes. To fill this research gap, this paper propose three research questions to improve our understanding of these visual-linguistic …

Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks For Link Prediction In Biomedical Networks, Yahui Long, Min Wu, Yong Liu, Yuan Fang, Chee Kong Kwoh, Jiawei Luo, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivation: Graphs or networks are widely utilized to model the interactions between different entities (e.g., proteins, drugs, etc) for biomedical applications. Predicting potential links in biomedical networks is important for understanding the pathological mechanisms of various complex human diseases, as well as screening compound targets for drug discovery. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been designed for link prediction in various biomedical networks, which rely on the node features extracted from different data sources, e.g., sequence, structure and network data. However, it is challenging to effectively integrate these data sources and automatically extract features for different link prediction tasks. Results: In …

Comai: Enabling Lightweight, Collaborative Intelligence By Retrofitting Vision Dnns, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Dhanuja Wanniarachchige, Tarek Abdelzaher, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While Deep Neural Network (DNN) models have transformed machine vision capabilities, their extremely high computational complexity and model sizes present a formidable deployment roadblock for AIoT applications. We show that the complexity-vs-accuracy-vs-communication tradeoffs for such DNN models can be significantly addressed via a novel, lightweight form of “collaborative machine intelligence” that requires only runtime changes to the inference process. In our proposed approach, called ComAI, the DNN pipelines of different vision sensors share intermediate processing state with one another, effectively providing hints about objects located within their mutually-overlapping Field-of-Views (FoVs). CoMAI uses two novel techniques: (a) a secondary shallow ML …

Gesturelens: Visual Analysis Of Gestures In Presentation Videos, Haipeng Zeng, Xingbo Wang, Yong Wang, Aoyu Wu, Ting Chuen Pong, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Appropriate gestures can enhance message delivery and audience engagement in both daily communication and public presentations. In this paper, we contribute a visual analytic approach that assists professional public speaking coaches in improving their practice of gesture training through analyzing presentation videos. Manually checking and exploring gesture usage in the presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There lacks an efficient method to help users conduct gesture exploration, which is challenging due to the intrinsically temporal evolution of gestures and their complex correlation to speech content. In this paper, we propose GestureLens, a visual analytics system to facilitate gesture-based and …

Ampsum: Adaptive Multiple-Product Summarization Towards Improving Recommendation Captions, Quoc Tuan Truong, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Changhe Yuan, Jin Li, Jim Chan, Soo-Min Pantel, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In e-commerce websites, multiple related product recommendations are usually organized into “widgets”, each given a name, as a recommendation caption, to describe the products within. These recommendation captions are usually manually crafted and generic in nature, making it difficult to attach meaningful and informative names at scale. As a result, the captions are inadequate in helping customers to better understand the connection between the multiple recommendations and make faster product discovery.We propose an Adaptive Multiple-Product Summarization framework (AmpSum) that automatically and adaptively generates widget captions based on different recommended products. The multiplicity of products to be summarized in a widget …

Victor: An Implicit Approach To Mitigate Misinformation Via Continuous Verification Reading, Kuan-Chieh Lo, Shih-Chieh Dai, Aiping Xiong, Jing Jiang, Lun-Wei Ku

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We design and evaluate VICTOR, an easy-to-apply module on top of a recommender system to mitigate misinformation. VICTOR takes an elegant, implicit approach to deliver fake-news verifications, such that readers of fake news can continuously access more verified news articles about fake-news events without explicit correction. We frame fake-news intervention within VICTOR as a graph-based question-answering (QA) task, with Q as a fake-news article and A as the corresponding verified articles. Specifically, VICTOR adopts reinforcement learning: it first considers fake-news readers’ preferences supported by underlying news recommender systems and then directs their reading sequence towards the verified news articles. To …

The Politics Of Bank Opacity, Heng Yue, Liandong Zhang, Qinlin Zhong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The distribution of power in the political system shapes the financial reporting opacity of banks. Specifically, banks located in states with senators on the Senate Banking Committee (BC senators) have greater abnormal loan loss provisions than banks in other states. The result is stronger for larger banks and banks with higher risk. In addition, BC senators have a negative effect on the likelihood of banks in their home states receiving enforcement actions, and, more importantly, this effect is stronger for more opaque banks. These findings suggest that politicians, regulators, and banks use opaque financial reporting to facilitate regulatory forbearance. Moreover, …

Developing Future-Ready Talent Through ‘Real-World’ Digital Projects, Gary Pan, Benjamin Huan Zhou Lee, Yuanto Kusnadi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

A close collaboration between university and industry partners through ‘real-world’ digital projects could help develop future-ready accountants

Regulatory Interventions In Response To Noncompliance With Mandatory Derivatives Disclosure Rules, Neil Bhattacharya, Hye Sun Chang, Raluca Chiorean

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We investigate regulatory actions in response to violations of mandatory derivatives disclosure rules (SFAS 161) and the outcomes of these regulatory interventions using a hand-collected sample of derivatives disclosures. Derivatives are used by nearly two-thirds of U.S. nonfinancial firms, and they are one of the most complex types of financial contracts. Consequently, inadequate derivatives disclosures could pose significant challenges to financial statement users in assessing the risk and financial health of enterprises. First, we document that firms with high proprietary and agency costs are less likely to comply with SFAS 161. Next, by examining derivatives-related SEC comment letters, we further …

Non-Gaap Earnings And Stock Price Crash Risk, Charles Hsu, Rencheng Wang, Benjamin C. Whipple

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We investigate whether non-GAAP earnings disclosures increase stock price crash risk. Consistent with non-GAAP disclosures allowing managers to inflate investors' perceptions about firm performance, our results indicate that income increasing non-GAAP reporting increases crash risk. We also find that managers can use non-GAAP reporting as a substitute for earnings management to withhold bad news from investors (the traditional explanation for crashes). Finally, we find a positive association between non-GAAP reporting and the likelihood of subsequent events that can trigger a crash. Overall, our evidence is consistent with some non-GAAP disclosures exposing investors to risks of large and sudden price declines.(c) …

“Native Speakers Do Not Understand Me”: A Phenomenological Study Of Student Experiences From Developing Asian Countries At An American University, Wolayat Tabasum Niroo, Mitchell R. Williams

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

International students from developing Asian countries where English is the second and foreign language are marginalized in some American Universities due to language barriers. Native English speakers often assume that whoever comes to the United States should be able to speak and write English perfectly. In developing Asian countries, such as South Asia, however, the English language belongs to the families of the Middle and Upper classes. They can get admission in English spoken countries’ higher education institutions. However, when those students come to English-speaking countries, they feel othered, left alone, and disappointed. This study utilizes a phenomenological research method …

International Student Mobility And Internationalization Of Higher Education In Hungary And China: A Comparative Analysis, Feifei Wang, Yi Wang

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

Global competition is currently reshaping higher education worldwide. Hungarian and Chinese higher education institutions are increasingly channeling resources to higher education development to promote the internationalization of higher education. There have been few studies specified differences between Hungarian and Chinese higher education internationalization. Over the past few years, both Hungarian and Chinese governments have started to prioritize raising international student mobility to enhance countries’ competitiveness at the global level. This article outlines the definition of higher education internationalization to provide a comprehensive understanding of this term. This article also briefly describes the background of higher education in Hungary and China …

International Student Mobility And Internationalization Of Higher Education In Hungary And China: A Comparative Analysis

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

No abstract provided.

Chatbot4qr: Interactive Query Refinement For Technical Question Retrieval, Neng Zhang, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Ying Zou, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical Q&A sites (e.g., Stack Overflow(SO)) are important resources for developers to search for knowledge about technical problems. Search engines provided in Q&A sites and information retrieval approaches have limited capabilities to retrieve relevant questions when queries are imprecisely specified, such as missing important technical details (e.g., the user's preferred programming languages). Although many automatic query expansion approaches have been proposed to improve the quality of queries by expanding queries with relevant terms, the information missed is not identified. Moreover, without user involvement, the existing query expansion approaches may introduce unexpected terms and lead to undesired results. In this paper, …

Securead: A Secure Video Anomaly Detection Framework On Convolutional Neural Network In Edge Computing Environment, Hang Cheng, Ximeng Liu, Huaxiong Wang, Yan Fang, Meiqing Wang, Xiaopeng Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection offers a powerful approach to identifying unusual activities and uncommon behaviors in real-world video scenes. At present, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been widely used to tackle anomalous events detection, which mainly rely on its stronger ability of feature representation than traditional hand-crafted features. However, massive video data and high cost of CNN model training are a challenge to achieve satisfactory detection results for resource-limited users. In this paper, we propose a secure video anomaly detection framework (SecureAD) based on CNN. Specifically, we introduce additive secret sharing to design several calculation protocols for achieving safe CNN training and …

Establishment’S Political Priority To Free Exercise, Marc O. Degirolami

Notre Dame Law Review

Americans are beset by disagreement about the First Amendment. Progressive scholars are attacking the venerable liberal view that First Amendment rights must not be constricted to secure communal, political benefits. To prioritize free speech rights, they say, reflects an unjust inflation of individual interest over our common political commitments. These disagreements afflict the Religion Clauses as well. Critics claim that religious exemption has become more important than the values of disestablishment that define the polity. Free exercise exemption, they argue, has subordinated establishment.

This Article contests these views. The fundamental rules and norms constituting the political regime—what the Article calls …