Digital Commons Network^™

Building Human-Aware Ai: Learning From And Assisting Human Decision-Makers, Saumik Narayanan

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As artificial intelligence systems become more capable, they are increasingly used not only as standalone problem-solvers, but as systems that learn from and interact with humans. In these settings, success depends not only on the strength of the model in isolation, but also on how well it fits the humans it is trained on or deployed alongside. This dissertation argues that human heterogeneity is a central ingredient in the design of effective human-aware machine learning systems. Rather than treating differences between people as noise to be averaged away, I show that variation in human expertise and preferences can provide useful …

Benefits Of Traffic Reprofiling For Delay Sensitive Networking, Jiaming Qiu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Deterministic networking systems, such as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Deterministic Networking (DetNet), require strict end-to-end delay guarantees while efficiently utilizing limited network resources. Conventional approaches typically focus on fixed traffic profiles, which can lead to suboptimal resource utilization in scheduling or admission control problems. This dissertation investigates traffic reprofiling—the proactive reshaping of traffic arrival patterns—as a complementary mechanism for improving both resource efficiency and delay performance under strict service guarantees. The dissertation consists of three parts. The first part studies bandwidth minimization under hard delay constraints for Service Curve Earliest Deadline First (SCED) schedulers. We show that traffic reprofiling can …

Assessing Hyperlocal And Local Air Quality Through Passive Samplers And Low-Cost Monitors, Yan He

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Air pollution is a major environmental health concern and has been associated with respiratory disease, cardiovascular morbidity, metabolic disorders, premature mortality, and additional adverse health outcomes. Air pollution often exhibits substantial variability at fine spatial scales, yet conventional regulatory monitoring networks are too sparse to resolve neighborhood-level exposure gradients that may exist in many urban and rural communities. Hyperlocal differences in pollutant concentrations—driven by local emission sources, land use characteristics, atmospheric chemistry, and meteorological conditions—can lead to systematic differences in long-term exposure among populations living only short distances apart. Improving exposure characterization therefore requires dense monitoring strategies and spatial modeling …

Revisiting Visualization Literacy: What Standardized Assessments Reveal And Conceal Across Instruments, Cultures, And Ai Systems, Saugat Pandey

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Data visualizations are now a primary medium for public communication, scientific reasoning, and decision-making. By transforming complex data into accessible graphical forms, visualizations are widely assumed to make information comprehensible to broad audiences. Yet the ability to accurately read, interpret, and critically evaluate a visualization, what researchers call visualization literacy, is neither uniform nor universal. It is a learned, multidimensional skill shaped by prior exposure, educational opportunity, and context. While the field has developed standardized instruments to measure visualization literacy, these tools were built under narrow assumptions: participants are typically paid, English-speaking, and recruited from Western online panels. When any …

Smart Kitchen: Towards Real-Time Ai Systems For Cognitive Support In Daily Activities, Ruiqi Wang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The rapid growth of the aging population and the rising prevalence of Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) highlight the need for continuous, unobtrusive assessment of functional cognition during everyday activities. Vision-based smart home systems offer a promising pathway for monitoring behavior and supporting independent living. However, enabling real-time cognitive assistance remains challenging. It requires not only accurately interpreting complex human behaviors to detect cognitive errors, but also supporting real-time deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and under dynamic wireless network conditions. This dissertation presents Smart Kitchen, an AI-driven system for real-time cognitive error detection through the monitoring of daily cooking activities. Under …

Individualized Models For Perception And Cognition, Dominic Marticorena

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation develops individualized models of perceptual and cognitive behavior, inferring latent capacities from limited data with sufficient efficiency, precision, and generality for person-level prediction. In perception, a nonparametric Bayesian framework for adaptive psychophysics is extended from audition to vision, producing an estimator that recovers dense individualized contrast sensitivity profiles through variational inference, a generalized kernel, and information-guided stimulus selection. A multitask extension enables simultaneous estimation of multiple psychometric fields by exploiting shared latent structure. Transferring this inferential logic to cognition, where relevant dimensions must be supplied by task design rather than physics, requires new measurement infrastructure. A Minecraft-based platform …

Inference-Time Scaling For Robust And Adaptive Computational Imaging, Yuyang Hu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Computational imaging has transformed fields such as medical imaging, computational photography, and remote sensing by combining physical measurement models with advanced image reconstruction algorithms. Two major paradigms have driven significant progress: model-based deep learning (MBDL), which integrates learned priors with physics-based data consistency, and generative models, especially diffusion models, which capture complex image distributions and enable posterior sampling for uncertainty quantification. Despite their success, most existing methods still operate under static inference: they rely on fixed pretrained priors, predetermined sampling procedures, and a fixed forward model during reconstruction. This rigidity limits their robustness in the presence of distribution shift, complex …

Optimization Of A Point Absorber Wave Energy Converter (Wec), Rutwa Dilipkumar Nagar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

This study examines the performance and optimization of a point absorber wave energy converter with a partially submerged spherical float. A comprehensive open-source computational framework integrates frequency-domain hydrodynamic analysis with time-domain simulation using Capytaine, BEMIO, and WEC-Sim. Hydrodynamic coefficients such as added mass, radiation damping, and excitation forces are calculated and integrated into the governing equation of motion using the Cummins formulation. A parametric analysis varies the float diameter and geometric configurations across several cases. Hydrodynamic coefficients and response amplitude operators are assessed to analyze system behavior and resonance characteristics. Results indicate consistent trends in normalized added mass, with radiation …

Cooperation And Conflict: Oswald Veblen And Abraham Flexner, Juan Carvajalino, Della Dumbaugh

Department of Math & Statistics Faculty Publications

In 1929, Caroline Bamberger Fuld and her brother, Louis Bamberger, sold their department stores, Bamberger & Co., at a particularly timely moment. They invested their sizeable fortune in a new academic initiative in America, an institute devoted to research that would go by the name of the Institute for Advanced Study. This paper introduces two colleagues, Abraham Flexner and Oswald Veblen, and explores the cooperation and conflict between them as they worked alongside one another to shape the Institute for Advanced Study and the School of Mathematics within it.

A Causal-Comparative Study Of Critical Thinking Skills In Community College And University Stem Students, Jason H. Tucker

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to examine the relationship between STEM students’ classification (freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior) and their overall critical thinking scores among community colleges and universities in north central Ohio. This study is important because critical thinking has been shown to improve success in collegiate STEM programs and the future careers of their students. In addition, there has been growing interest in examining potential critical thinking differences between STEM students enrolled in two-year community colleges and four-year universities. The sample is composed of 231 community college and university students enrolled in STEM programs. Data …

Teacher Leadership Inventory Among The Nine Seventh-Day Adventist Unions Of The North American Division: A Quantitative Causal-Comparative Study, Adam C. Littell

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to determine if there was a difference in sharing expertise, sharing leadership, and/or supra-practitioner behaviors among the teachers of the nine Seventh-day Adventist Unions of the North American Division. This study is important because it meets an important gap in teacher leadership understanding, both within the broad context of education and specifically within the Seventh-day Adventist educational system. The sample was composed of 264 Seventh-day Adventist full-time teachers from across the North American Division (with the exception of the Seventh-day Adventist Church of Canada due to privacy laws prohibiting participation) who did …

Graduate And Undergraduate Student-Teacher Alliance During Problem Solving: A Comparative Phenomenological Study, Quidi-Ann Reynolds

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This transcendental phenomenological (TPh) study aimed to help current and future teachers reach their full teaching potential by making them aware of the need to stay up-to-date in their field and meet the needs of different students in their classrooms. Furthermore, the investigation enabled educators to acquire strategies for mitigating mathematics anxiety and to identify a theoretical framework that aligned with their teaching pedagogy and learners. It also facilitated maintaining instructional control or compliance, fostering a conducive environment that encouraged teaching and learning. The phenomenological investigation explored the experiences of undergraduate and graduate professors regarding student-teacher alliances and their impact …

A Causal-Comparative Study Of Music Teacher Efficacy In Elementary Grade-Level Music Inclusive Classrooms Based On Special Education Training, Stanley N. Harris Iii

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative causal-comparative study aimed to determine whether there is a significant difference in overall teacher self-efficacy scores between rural and urban elementary schools and between music educators with and without formal special education training. This study is important because teacher efficacy directly impacts teachers’ engagement in learning with students with special needs. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature on teacher efficacy by examining differences between music teachers with formal special education training and those without such training who teach in inclusive classrooms. The sample included 146 music educators from rural and urban elementary schools who teach students with …

A Causal-Comparative Study Of Student Self-Efficacy And Academic Persistence Among Non-Traditional College Students With And Without Remedial Math Coursework, Lakin Fannin

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative causal-comparative study examined whether differences existed in math self-efficacy and academic persistence between non-traditional community college students who completed developmental math coursework and those who did not within the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Data were collected from 81 non-traditional students using the Mathematics Self-Efficacy Scale and the College Persistence Questionnaire. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to compare outcomes between the two groups. Results indicated no statistically significant differences in math self-efficacy or academic persistence based on developmental math enrollment status. The null hypothesis was not rejected, suggesting that completion of developmental math coursework …

The Predictive Relationship Between Teachers’ Knowledge Of Developmental Dyslexia And Literacy Self-Efficacy Among General Education Teachers: A Predictive Correlational Study, Robyn Nicole Mcclellan

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative, predictive correlational study explored the relationship between teachers' knowledge of dyslexia and their literacy self-efficacy instruction in the general education classroom. The study is important because when a teacher is not confident in teaching literacy to this special-needs population, they are less likely to provide appropriate and effective interventions and accommodations. The sample of this study consisted of 111 public school general education teachers from multiple school districts across multiple states. A convenience sample of 111 participants was given two scales: Knowledge and Beliefs About Developmental Dyslexia (KBDDS) and the Teachers' Sense of Efficacy for Literacy Instruction (TSELIS). …

Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Media, And The Criminal Justice System, Jeffrey J. Jacobs

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to evolve at an exponential pace, and their utilization of synthetic media in criminal activity presents both unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges for criminal justice systems. This dissertation explores the intersection of AI-driven synthetic media crime and the U.S. criminal justice system, identifying how such technologies are being utilized in criminal activity and evaluating the system’s capacity to adapt. This study uses a longitudinal, mixed-methods research design; it also collects and analyzes data from law enforcement agencies, AI developers, and cybersecurity experts to forecast future crime trends and assess the efficacy of current justice system …

A Phenomenological Study: The Lived Experiences Of Uncertified Bilingual Teachers In Dual Language Elementary Schools At A Mid-Sized Urban Public-School District In Texas, Jeini Gordon

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences teaching in a dual-language classroom for uncertified teachers at a mid-sized urban public-school district in Texas. A teacher’s lack of participation in an adequate teacher preparation program may alter students’ educational outcomes, even more so that of English language learners, influencing their academic achievement. The theory that guided this study was Walberg’s theory of educational productivity, which posits that student achievement is affected by student aptitude and motivation, instructional quality and quantity, and a student’s social and cultural learning environments. This phenomenological study focused on the shared …

A Phenomenological Study Exploring The Experiences Of Rural Elementary School Teachers’ Stem Education And Training Development, Jack W. Owens

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to understand the lived experience rural elementary school teachers receiving STEM education, professional development, and training to provide high-quality STEM education to students at rural elementary schools. The theory guiding this research study was Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory, which promotes autonomy, competence, and relatedness; when these factors are present, thereby teachers’ motivation and effectiveness in teaching STEM are enhanced. The central research question was: What are the lived experiences of rural elementary teachers concerning their preparedness to teach STEM subjects? This research study used a transcendental phenomenological qualitative design. This …

Protecting Computer Systems In The Post-Quantum World, Thomas C. Gerlach

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The 20th century saw remarkable growth due to technological advances, with many of the most significant advances due in no small part to the transistor and the computer revolution it spawned. During the last several decades, an even more transformative technology has been making incredible advances: quantum computing. Quantum computers will significantly impact computer security, with a profound risk to encryption and privacy. However, because of the incredibly complicated nature of quantum computing and the variety of fields involved, quantum computing continues to be viewed as science fiction by many and is failing to garner enough attention within the computer …

Thermal And Reactive Transport Phenomena In Plasma With Numerical Modeling, Nitish Kumar Singh

Theses

As semiconductor node technology advances to below 5 nm, it is vital to control Non-uniformity, Line Edge Roughness (LER), and Line Width Roughness (LWR). These factors are crucial for meeting performance, reliability, and yield goals. This study presents a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for optimizing Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) processes, focusing on the synthesis of thin films such as Silicon Dioxide from precursor gases like Silane and Nitrous Oxide. The model is designed to accurately simulate the complex transport and reaction dynamics within the low-pressure, non-equilibrium plasma environment. The transport of neutral radical species (which form the bulk …

Career And Technical Education Teacher Efficacy In Embedding Disciplinary Literacy: A Predictive Correlational Study, Susan Gwin Higley

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this predictive correlational nonexperimental study was to determine the relationship between high school career and technical education (CTE) teachers’ years of experience, teachers’ highest level of education, and teachers’ participation in disciplinary literacy professional development, and their relationship to teachers’ efficacy in embedding disciplinary literacy instruction into their content area teaching. The reading requirements for CTE students are very different from the curriculum taught in English Language Arts classes. Also, texts in specific disciplines of CTE vary greatly. As such, CTE teachers must embed disciplinary literacy in their daily teaching to ensure that their students develop the …

Taylor Swift And The Social Construction Of Risk: Harms Realized And Avoided, Jack L. Rozdilsky, Talia Shortt

The Manuscript: Journal of Taylor Swift Studies

An especially difficult ten-day period for Taylor Swift and her fans occurred in late July to early August 2024 as the Eras Tour was wrapping up its European leg.  On July 29, 2024, a Taylor Swift themed yoga and dance workshop taking place in Southport, United Kingdom, was attacked.  A disaster was realized as three children were killed during a criminal mass stabbing attack.  On August 7, 2024, a sequence of three Eras Tour concerts intended to be held in Vienna, Austria, was suddenly cancelled due to the discovery of an anticipated terrorist attack that was in the advanced stages …

Teacher Candidates’ Reflective Practices Of Mathematics Curriculum From The Lens Of Universal Design For Learning, Weichen Zhao

Journal of Practitioner Research

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework encourages educators to proactively remove barriers in curriculum and instruction to increase accessibility for all learners. While UDL is often applied during lesson planning, it can also serve as a powerful tool for critically examining and revising existing mathematics curricula. Drawing on qualitative data from teacher candidates’ reflective journals and curriculum artifacts collected over two semesters, this study examines how guided reflection supported teacher candidates in identifying barriers, proposing inclusive adaptations, and deepening their understanding of equity-oriented mathematics instructional design. As a self-study grounded in participatory action research, the findings also informed the …

Research On The Accessibility Elements Of Rural Public Digital Cultural Services Based On Aism-Fmicmac, Lihui Peng, Banruo Gu, Chuang Hong, Xisheng Hu

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] A structural analysis of the stratified dependencies among accessibility determinants in rural public digital cultural ecosystems enables identification of pivotal developmental nodes, thereby establishing theoretical foundations for optimizing service delivery mechanisms and achieving spatial equilibrium in digital cultural provision. [Method/process] This study applies grounded theory to conduct a comprehensive coding analysis of policy documents related to China's rural public digital cultural services. Through this process, five dimensions and fifteen sub-components of accessibility are identified. An index system for accessibility factors is then developed using the AISM approach. The identified elements are classified into three hierarchical levels. To further validate …

Drug Risk Knowledge Discovery For Western Medicines Based On Knowledge Graph Link Prediction, Jianxiang Wei, Ma Hengyuan Ma, Yuehong Sun, Wenwen Du, Letian Hu

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] The risk information contained in drug instructions is usually incomplete, and some new adverse reactions can only be discovered in actual clinical use. This paper proposes an information organization and knowledge discovery method for pharmacovigilance, in order to timely and accurately identify missing risk knowledge in drug instructions. [Method/process] Drug instructions of 8 152 Western medicines are collected as the research data; On the basis of ontology construction, data annotation, and model training, the UIE model is used to jointly extract entity and relationship triplets from the research data; A new knowledge graph link prediction method CompGCN-RotatE, is proposed, …

Coexistence Of“Emotion”And“Rationality”：Analysis Of The Impact Mechanism Of Frequent Reversal Events On The Evolution Of Online Public Opinion, Liqiang Wang, Xueqi Li, Yixian Wang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] In recent years, frequent reversal events have negatively impacted the online media environment, leading to an increasing number of skeptical voices during the evolution of public opinion.These doubts are no longer merely emotional outbursts but also involve rational understanding of the event's authenticity. This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon and attempts to reveal the impact mechanism of frequent reversal events on the evolution of online public opinion. [Method/process] Through surveys and computer simulation experiments, the study analyzes various elements such as individuals, media environment, and evolution patterns in online public opinion,then according to the …

Research On Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion Method For Emergent Events Based On Bigru And Graph Contrastive Learning, Peng Wu, Zhenyu Lu, Xuechen Zhang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] During emergencies, social media short texts contain critical information but are heavily interfered with by noise. Traditional static knowledge graph completion techniques struggle to effectively address their dynamic evolution and data sparsity issues, making it imperative to introduce temporal modeling methods. [Method/process] This study proposes a dynamic completion framework that combines the temporal feature capture capability of Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) with the noise-resistant representation learning advantages of Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL). At the completion level, the ConBiTE method is introduced, which captures temporal dependencies through self-attention mechanisms and BiGRU, while leveraging GCL to enhance the completion of …

Exploring Researcher-Practitioner Authorship Collaboration In English, Foreign Language, And Mathematics Education, Rachel Cullen, Joseph Taylor, Matthew Laney, Mohamed Nouri

Journal of Practitioner Research

This study examined collaboration and bidirectional relationships between researchers and practitioners in the context of journal publications. Through exploration of research and practitioner journals in the areas of English, Foreign Languages, and Mathematics, we aimed to understand how authorship patterns and types of references illustrate the gap between research and practice. Findings indicate that collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the context of journal publications is minimal, and practitioner presence is scarce in research. The types of references included in publications are high quality regardless of authorship, but there is a problem of exposure that limits the research from reaching …

Student Perceptions Of Service Quality Provided By Their University, Alex Brinkmeier, Melissa Clark, Monica B. Fine

The Coastal Business Journal

Purpose: The student-to-college/university relationship is akin to the buyer-seller relationship in marketing. Buyers vary based on their level of involvement (i.e. engagement), motivation, attitudes, and expectation of the buying experiences. Sellers, on the other hand, work to create a brand message and to share that message with existing and prospective customers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that impact the perceptions of service quality held by current students in higher education.

Research Methodology: This study examines the individual student/consumer influences (i.e., involvement, motivation, attitude, and expectations) on student perceptions of service quality. Well-established measures of service …

Copyright On Stage: Protecting The Directions Behind The Performance, Eliana Sakin

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

In this comment, the author argues that theatrical stage directions should be recognized as copyrightable material under the U.S. Copyright Act, primarily by categorizing them as "choreographic works". Sakin highlights that while the 1976 Copyright Act explicitly protects choreography and pantomimes, stage directions—which serve as the "blueprints" for a production's blocking, technical cues, and artistic mood—currently exist in a legal gray area. Through an analysis of historical context and industry disputes, such as the Urinetown and The Most Happy Fella settlements, the author illustrates a growing industry recognition of a director’s staging as a protectable, original contribution, despite the lack …