Digital Commons Network^™

Program Review Report 9-3-24, Angela Brock

Program Review Committee

No abstract provided.

Utilizing Deep Learning In Smart Glass System To Assist The Blind And Visually Impaired, Asmaa A. Hekal, Mohamed S. Sharaf, Ahmed A. Sayed, Ibrahim R. Abdelrahman, Ahmed A. Salem, Ahmed M. Elhussieny, Saeed Y. Kouta, Eman S. Abass

Future Engineering Journal

This paper presents a groundbreaking assistive technology designed to empower visually impaired individuals in their daily lives. With an estimated global population of 2.2 billion facing visual impairments, addressing the challenges they encounter is of paramount importance. The research introduces a comprehensive electronic device integrating advanced computer vision and deep learning techniques. The system incorporates real-time object detection, robust facial recognition, and precise currency denomination identification. Powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B+ and an ESP32-CAM Development Board, the device offers users unparalleled environmental awareness. Utilizing YOLOv4-tiny for object detection and a hybrid face recognition model combining HaarCascades, Histogram …

“Home Is The Mouth Of A Shark”: Trauma And The Needs Of Students From Refugee Backgrounds From The Perspective Of Boundary Spanning Refugee Resettlement Workers, Shyla González-Doğan, Gonca Soyer, Siddika Asik Bayhan, Mualla Yazici, Meryem Akçay, Jordan Harb, Awad Mekkawi Ramadan, Adnan Turan

Montclair State University Scholarship & Creative Works

This research project examines the experiences of four individuals working in refugee resettlement and their perspectives on the educational needs of refugee students, given their role as boundary spanners. They also discuss the need for teachers to encourage students to use the Funds of Knowledge in the classroom. Participants discuss their varied experience as professionals in refugee resettlement, with two being refugees and one being an immigrant. This paper (1) explores the stress associated with relocation, (2) delves into the mental health issues faced by individuals from refugee backgrounds, emphasizing trauma, (3) analyzes how inefficiencies and lack of support within …

Fifty More Ways To Promote Scholarship Within A Law School Community, Jeremy R. Paul, Steven Wilf

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

It’S All Write: Teaching Legal Writing As Resistance, Jane E. Cross, Brenda Gibson, Tiffany N. Jeffers, Teri Mcmurtry-Chubb, Latisha Nixon-Jones, Shakira D. Pleasant, Saleema Snow

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Violence Against Muslims In India, Janai Wright

Ballard Brief

Violence against Muslims in India is an issue rooted in historical tensions and political ideologies. This violence encompasses various forms, including communal riots, targeted attacks, and spontaneous assaults. Historical factors dating back to the Partition of British India in 1947 with unresolved territorial disputes, have contributed to ongoing hostilities. Hindu nationalism, propagated by groups like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has exacerbated religious divisions, with policies and rhetoric marginalizing Muslims and promoting a Hindu majoritarian agenda. The failure of law enforcement and justice systems to address violence against Muslims further creates social insecurity. Consequently, Muslims in India face economic and …

Linfield University Catalog, 2024-2025, Linfield Archives

Student Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

On Measuring Muslim Segregation In Urban India, Arpit Shah, Anish Sugathan, Naveen Bharathi, Andaleeb Rahman, Amit Garg, Deepak Malghan

Working Papers

The spatial segregation of Muslims in urban India is central to their social, economic, and political marginalization. However, the quantitative characterization of Muslim segregation has suffered from the lack of readily available demographic data at high spatial and temporal resolutions. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of accurately quantifying Muslim segregation in urban India using the latest electoral rolls data from Bengaluru (a megapolis of over 13 million residents) and an improved open-source algorithm to identify Muslim names. Our approach provides significant improvements over past efforts in this regard. We introduce two new metrics (diversity and local divergence) to account for …

Improving Educator Readiness To Support Student Mental Health, Anna Dabrowski, Michelle Hsien, Tamara Van Der Zant, Syeda Kashfee Ahmed, Amy Berry, Maya Conway, Yung Nietschke

Wellbeing

This project used a mixed-method approach to understand educator readiness to support student mental health across early childhood, school based, and tertiary settings. The study features educators and relevant support staff working with children, adolescents, and adults in formal learning settings. Relevant experts such as mental health care workers, youth wellbeing support staff, counsellors, psychologists, and other professionals involved in education settings were also invited to take part in the study. Three research questions guided the focus of the study: How does educator anxiety and worry impact on their ability to support student mental health? To what extent are educators …

Is Acts Really “The Most Overtly Missionary Book”?, Ekaputra Tupamahu

Faculty Publications - Portland Seminary

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to challenge the white reading of the book of Acts, and second, to offer an alternative reading by placing the story of the marginalized people, the colonized people, at the center. The first part of this article interrogates how white pentecostal scholars read the book of Acts as a missionary book and identify themselves with the disciples in the book of Acts. After presenting the problems with this reading, I propose an alternative interpretation of the movement in Acts as a migration movement instead of a missionary movement. Reading it from a …

Large Language Models For Biomedicine: Foundations, Opportunities, Challenges, And Best Practices, Satya S Sahoo, Joseph M Plasek, Hua Xu, Özlem Uzuner, Trevor Cohen, Meliha Yetisgen, Hongfang Liu, Stéphane Meystre, Yanshan Wang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Objectives: Generative large language models (LLMs) are a subset of transformers-based neural network architecture models. LLMs have successfully leveraged a combination of an increased number of parameters, improvements in computational efficiency, and large pre-training datasets to perform a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Using a few examples (few-shot) or no examples (zero-shot) for prompt-tuning has enabled LLMs to achieve state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of NLP applications. This article by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) NLP Working Group characterizes the opportunities, challenges, and best practices for our community to leverage and advance the integration of …

Generative Large Language Models Are All-Purpose Text Analytics Engines: Text-To-Text Learning Is All Your Need, Cheng Peng, Xi Yang, Aokun Chen, Zehao Yu, Kaleb E Smith, Anthony B Costa, Mona G Flores, Jiang Bian, Yonghui Wu

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Objective: To solve major clinical natural language processing (NLP) tasks using a unified text-to-text learning architecture based on a generative large language model (LLM) via prompt tuning.

Methods: We formulated 7 key clinical NLP tasks as text-to-text learning and solved them using one unified generative clinical LLM, GatorTronGPT, developed using GPT-3 architecture and trained with up to 20 billion parameters. We adopted soft prompts (ie, trainable vectors) with frozen LLM, where the LLM parameters were not updated (ie, frozen) and only the vectors of soft prompts were updated, known as prompt tuning. We added additional soft prompts as a prefix …

Ensemble Pretrained Language Models To Extract Biomedical Knowledge From Literature, Zhao Li, Qiang Wei, Liang-Chin Huang, Jianfu Li, Yan Hu, Yao-Shun Chuang, Jianping He, Avisha Das, Vipina Kuttichi Keloth, Yuntao Yang, Chiamaka S Diala, Kirk E Roberts, Cui Tao, Xiaoqian Jiang, W Jim Zheng, Hua Xu

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVES: The rapid expansion of biomedical literature necessitates automated techniques to discern relationships between biomedical concepts from extensive free text. Such techniques facilitate the development of detailed knowledge bases and highlight research deficiencies. The LitCoin Natural Language Processing (NLP) challenge, organized by the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, aims to evaluate such potential and provides a manually annotated corpus for methodology development and benchmarking.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: For the named entity recognition (NER) task, we utilized ensemble learning to merge predictions from three domain-specific models, namely BioBERT, PubMedBERT, and BioM-ELECTRA, devised a rule-driven detection method for cell line and …

“Just Attaching A Face”: Engaging Local Refugee Communities In Preservice Teacher Education Focused On Students With Immigrant/Refugee Backgrounds, Stephanie Wessels, Theresa Catalano, Jenelle Reeves, Alison E. Leonard, Uma Ganesan, Alessia Barbici Wagner, Consuelo Gallardo

Teaching and Learning Faculty Publications

This arts-practice research study explores what happens when preservice high school teachers (aka teacher-learners) and local refugee communities engage in the co-creation of art together via an arts-and community-based project. Grounded in social justice teacher education, the researchers conducted a 2-week workshop in which participants included preservice high school teachers and local Yazidi community members who explored art in a museum together, spent time getting to know each other and their backgrounds, and re-created some of their stories in the form of dance. Findings reveal a variety of ways in which the workshops helped teacher-learners develop interculturality, increase understanding of …

Young Children’S Directed Question Asking In Preschool Classrooms, Michelle Wong, Koeun Choi, Libby Barak, Elizabeth Lapidow, Jennifer Austin, Patrick Shafto, Elizabeth Bonawitz

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts. In this study, we examined children’s question-asking targets (adults, other preschoolers, self-talk) during an open-play period in a US preschool classroom and assessed how the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of questions varied …

Improving Large Language Models For Clinical Named Entity Recognition Via Prompt Engineering, Yan Hu, Qingyu Chen, Jingcheng Du, Xueqing Peng, Vipina Kuttichi Keloth, Xu Zuo, Yujia Zhou, Zehan Li, Xiaoqian Jiang, Zhiyong Lu, Kirk Roberts, Hua Xu

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

IMPORTANCE: The study highlights the potential of large language models, specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, in processing complex clinical data and extracting meaningful information with minimal training data. By developing and refining prompt-based strategies, we can significantly enhance the models' performance, making them viable tools for clinical NER tasks and possibly reducing the reliance on extensive annotated datasets.

OBJECTIVES: This study quantifies the capabilities of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for clinical named entity recognition (NER) tasks and proposes task-specific prompts to improve their performance.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: We evaluated these models on 2 clinical NER tasks: (1) to extract medical problems, treatments, …

Collaborative Intrusion Detection System To Identify Joint Attacks In Routing Protocol For Low-Power And Lossy Networks Routing Protocol On The Internet Of Everything, Omar A. Abdulkareem, Raja Kumar Kontham, Farhad E. Mahmood

Mesopotamian Journal of CyberSecurity

The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) routing protocol is utilized in the Internet of Everything (IoE) is highly vulnerable to various collaborative routing attacks. This attack can highly degrade network performance through increased delay, energy consumption, and unreliable data exchange. This critical vulnerability necessitates a robust intrusion detection system. This study aims to enhance a Collaborative Intrusion Detection System (CIDS) for detecting and mitigating joint attacks in the RPL protocol, focusing on improving detection accuracy while minimizing network delay and energy usage. A series of algorithms and techniques are implemented, including Queue and Workload-Aware RPL (QWL-RPL) for …

Aast 208h.01: Africa - From Ancient Egypt To Apartheids Origin, Kristen M. Che

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Environmental Contributions To Cognitive Development: The Role Of Cognitive Stimulation, Divyangana Rakesh, Katie A. Mclaughlin, Margaret Sheridan, Kathryn L. Humphreys, Maya L. Rosen

Neuroscience: Faculty Publications

Early environmental experiences influence children's cognitive and neural development. In particular, cognitive stimulation, defined as environmental inputs that engage the senses and provide learning opportunities for children, fosters acquisition of knowledge across various cognitive domains. Low levels of cognitive stimulation in early life may restrict learning opportunities, contributing to lasting consequences for neural development and later academic and occupational achievement. This review delves into the role of cognitive stimulation in neural development and related cognitive performance, available tools for measuring cognitive stimulation in various settings, and offers insights into future research directions. In addition, variability in cognitive stimulation, often linked …

Seventeen Crises In Western Civilization That Have Arisen Since The Dark Ages: A Cognition Science-Oriented Approach, Andrew Targowski

Comparative Civilizations Review

The purpose of this article is to synthesize those crises in the unfolding of Western civilization that are controlled by human knowledge and wisdom. The methodology is transdisciplinary, utilizing a cognitive science-oriented, big-picture view of civilization and main conflicts. The crises are investigated across three time periods; the Dark Ages (from the fifth to the fourteenth century), Modern Times (from the fifteenth to the twentieth century), and the present century. The findings reveal that today Western civilization faces seventeen significant crises. Knowledge is not sufficient to solve these crises; we need to employ knowledge-based wisdom. This approach presents a new …

Musi 312.02: University Chamber Chorale Iii, Stevie J. Hirner

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 270s.50: Introduction To Linguistics, Mckenna R. Flannigan

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 461.01: Speech Data Annotation For Linguistics Research, Mizuki Miyashita

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 470.01: Linguistic Analysis, Mckenna R. Flannigan

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 472.01: Syntax, Leora A. Bar-El

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 494.01: Seminar In Linguistics, Leora A. Bar-El

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 561.01: Speech Data Annotation For Linguistics Research, Mizuki Miyashita

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ling 572.01: Syntax, Leora A. Bar-El

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Irsh 101.00: Elementary Irish, Traolach O'Riordain, Luke P. O'Donoghue, Elis Ni Iarlaithe, Aine Humphries

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Psyx 525.01: Psychological Evaluation I, Gregory R. Machek

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.