Digital Commons Network^™

Soil Moisture Regime Effects On Greenhouse Gas Emissions In A Native Tallgrass Prairie In The Ozark Highlands, Thomas William Dockery

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Ozark Highlands is an ecoregion in the mid-southern portion of the United States that is characterized by a mosaic of tallgrass prairies, oak (Quercus spp.) savannas, and oak-hickory (Carya spp.) forests, which represents a unique biophysical transition zone between the relatively dry grasslands of the west and the humid forests of the southeast. Quantifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, namely carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), from natural, undisturbed ecosystems is critical to understanding atmospheric warming and climate-change implications. The objective of this study was to simultaneously evaluate CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions in an aquic and …

Drawing Conclusions: Autonomy And Mental Maps In Denmark And The Faroe Islands, Erik Steven Breidinger

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops and tests a comparative heuristic device called optimal autonomy to explain when and how autonomous territories, or simply autonomies, become durable components of the global system of sovereign states. Drawing on a mixed‑methods case study of Denmark and the Faroe Islands, the study operationalizes optimal autonomy as a heuristic device using three interacting metrics: territorial delineation, national distinction, and state dependence. Using semi‑structured interviews with public officials and a mental‑mapping experiment with university students, this research shows that optimal autonomies are not made from single institutional designs but rather a dynamic equilibrium between maximal territorial delineation, medial …

I Can’T Fight This Feeling Anymore: Investigating The Influence Of Cognitive Emotion-Related Impulsivity On Behavioral Impulsivity Through The Lens Of Emotion Regulation In Daily Life, Dylan Shelton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emotion-related impulsivity is a transdiagnostic risk factor that is seen across a wide range of psychiatric disorders. Traditionally, emotion-related impulsivity has been studied at the trait level, reflecting that it is something that someone has rather than something that they do. However, recent studies have highlighted the importance of viewing emotion-related impulsivity as a dynamic process that occurs in response to momentary emotional experiences. However, it is less clear about the influence of attentional and evaluative processes on downstream behavioral responses that may be aimed at rapidly regulating emotion. This study aimed to investigate emotion-related impulsivity through the lens of …

Physics-Informed Machine Learning For Predictive Digital Twins In Greenhouses, Hoang Kim Tran

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Greenhouses are widely used to create controlled environments for crop production, where indoor climate variables such as air temperature, relative humidity, CO2 concentration, radiation, and soil or substrate conditions directly affect plant growth, yield, energy consumption, and resource use. However, greenhouse climates are highly dynamic because they are influenced by complex interactions among outdoor weather, greenhouse structure, crop transpiration, heating systems, ventilation, screens, fans, irrigation, and other actuators. Building digital twins for greenhouses provides a powerful way to represent, monitor, and predict these climate dynamics. A predictive digital twin can simulate future indoor climate states based on current greenhouse conditions, …

A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial Examining The Efficacy Of Group-Based Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (Pcit) For Autistic Youth: A Mixed-Method Design, Julia L. Kiefer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Caregivers of autistic children experience a myriad of barriers when seeking psychotherapy for their children including a lack of family-based treatment options, lengthy waitlists, and limited access to specialized therapists. As the demand for both accessible and affordable mental healthcare for autistic youth increases, group-based interventions may be a useful alternative to more time intensive individual treatment options – allowing for multiple clients to be seen at once. The present study examined the efficacy of an adapted evidence-based intervention, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, to be delivered in a brief, group-based format with families of autistic youth. Driven by input from a …

Benchmarking Current Progress In 3d Content Generation, Vuong Ho

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, 3D generation has rapidly advanced with the development of powerful generative AI models capable of producing high-quality 3D content from various modalities, including text, images, and multi-view inputs. These advancements have significantly accelerated progress in applications such as gaming, virtual reality, robotics, and digital content creation. Despite this progress, there is still a lack of standardized and fair benchmarking protocols for evaluating 3D generation methods. Existing approaches are often assessed under inconsistent experimental settings, using different datasets, evaluation metrics, and processing pipelines. Such inconsistencies make reliable and objective comparisons difficult, limiting our understanding of the strengths and …

Iterative Generation Of Feature-Based Cad Models Using An Llm With Domain Specific Constraints, Ammon I. Hepworth

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents a method to generate feature-based parametric mechanical CAD models from text input. The method uses domain-specific constraints (DSCs) to guide a large language model (LLM) in the generation of scripts to build models from the CAD API. It also presents a framework for an iterative text-based system that produces parametric CAD models. The method was implemented by developing DSCs for FreeCAD and Open AI GPT-5.2 and incorporated into a web-based software application which generates models that can be visualized with an interactive viewer after each iteration. Tests were run comparing various models with and without this method. …

Organic-Complexed Or Inorganic Trace Mineral Tub Supplementation: Impacts On Productivity And Reproductive Outcomes In Beef Cows And Heifers, Jacy Riddle

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The objective of these experiments was to investigate the effects of organic-complexed or inorganic trace minerals (copper, cobalt, manganese, and zinc) on cow reproductive performance, suckling calf growth, as well as heifer development and reproductive outcomes utilizing free-choice tub supplementation. In lactating cows, treatments consisted of molasses-based tub supplementation containing either complexed or inorganic trace minerals, with an additional pre-breeding drench administered only to cows receiving complexed minerals. The drench contained complexed or organic copper, cobalt, manganese, and zinc. Supplementation began approximately 6 weeks prior to fixed-timed artificial insemination (FTAI) and continued until bull removal (d 105). In weaned replacement …

Making Meaning In Gender Affirming Therapy: Voices Of Transgender And Gender Diverse Individuals, Shelby Freeman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people frequently seek out counseling services and experience greater mental health difficulties than the general population. Oppressive political and social structures are often cited as a main contributor to mental health disparities. As antitransgender laws and sentiments increase in the U.S., the likelihood of mental health professionals encountering TGD clients will also increase. This requires specific competencies in how to provide effective gender-affirming mental health services. Affirming MHPs are more accessible to TGD clients now than ever due to increases in provider training and improved attitudes. However, previous research revealed that MHPs who identify as …

Valorization Of Rice Bran For Functional Film Fabrication Using Cold Plasma For Food Packaging And Biomedical Applications, Saydul Md Safwa

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Over the past few years, conventional plastic packaging materials have become increasingly concerned with their environmental impact. Therefore, the demand for bioplastics has been increasing significantly over the years. Rice milling, a process that modifies paddy rice into edible rice, generates by-products such as rice bran. Rice bran has cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, and protein, which makes it a potential material for bioplastic fabrication. However, like most biodegradable films, rice bran films fall short when it comes to practical packaging applications. They often lack the strength, flexibility, moisture resistance, and barrier performance needed to compete with synthetic plastics. Most importantly, …

Seasonality Of Bovine Respiratory Disease Incidence, Nasal Temperatures, And The Nasal Microbiome In Receiving Beef Cattle: Understanding The Risk Of The Bovine Respiratory Disease Complex, Robin Ashley Cheek

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) has persistently been the leading cause of morbidity of beef cattle in the United States. Season has been directly associated with respiratory disease incidence and is likely a proxy for weather conditions, which vary by geographical location. The nose is one of the first points of contact between the outside environment and inside the body. The nasal microbiome and its relationship with BRD have been heavily studied within beef cattle, but there are not yet any studies to determine if the environment within the nasal cavity has a role to play in this mechanism. This dissertation …

Soft Urea Nitridation Of Tantalum-Based Thin Films For Oxynitride Synthesis, Rishabh Srivastava

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rising global energy consumption and the transition toward low-carbon technologies place new demands on functional materials. Particularly, semiconductors that convert sunlight directly into chemical fuels with high efficiency and long operational lifetimes. The synthesis of visible light active tantalum oxynitride (TaON) thin films for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting typically requires ammonolysis with pressurized NH3 gas, which presents persistent barriers in safety and phase selectivity. In this work, a soft urea ammonolysis route was employed in which solid urea was employed as an in-situ nitrogen source inside a vacuum-sealed reactor. The finite urea mass establishes a self-limiting nitrogen chemical potential that …

Integrated Sensing And Communication For Uavs With Oddm Waveforms, Mohammad Abdul Mobin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A new delay-Doppler (DD) integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. In the DD-ISAC framework, both sensing and communications are performed by using the orthogonal delay Doppler division multiplexing (ODDM) waveforms, which unify sensing and communication designs through their unique properties, such as local bi-orthogonality and dual-resolution in the DD domain. Specifically, the dual-resolution property enables the generation of delay-Doppler map for accurate and low complexity sensing, and the bi-orthogonality minimizes interference for both sensing and communications. The ODDM waveforms are used in combination with the phase comparison monopulse technique and a scaled …

Soilless Substrates As A Critical Control Point For Mitigating Food Safety Risks Within Hydroponic Leaf Lettuce Production, Eric Nuertey Tetteh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effect of hydroponic soilless substrates and microbial biocontrol agents on the persistence of foodborne pathogens in indoor lettuce production is variable depending on substrate type, pathogen species, and biocontrol formulation. This study addressed key gaps by first characterizing the ability of different substrates to support Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes survival and then evaluating the ability of pine biochar and Bacillus subtilis to suppress pathogen persistence in selected substrates under controlled conditions. In the first experiment, the persistence of Salmonella and L. monocytogenes was evaluated in four soilless substrates: rockwool (RW), low density foam (LDF), peat moss (PM) and coco …

Design, Fabrication, And Testing Of A Pdms-Based Nanochannel Using Nano Embossing, Cooper James Haskamp

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

DNA sequencing has become increasingly important in the field of biomedical research and clinical applications. Currently, the most well-established sequencing technique is ‘Sequencing by Synthesis’ with accuracy in the range of 99.2% to 99.74% and sequencing lengths of only 300 base pairs. Sequencing by Synthesis is a lab-based method that requires expensive equipment and fast parallel computing. It is not suitable for portable, on-site applications. A new technique known as ‘nanopore’ was developed to meet these requirements. Nanopore is an electrical sequencing method that relies on the translocation of a DNA molecule through a nanoscale pore, where the blockage current …

Tipping In The Digital Age: Comparing Group And Individual Tipping Behavior Across Cashless Payments, Akosua Sayer Koduah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Tipping has long been central to the U.S. hospitality industry, where it provides a substantial share of service workers’ income. What was once a cash-based practice is now increasingly mediated through digital platforms such as card readers, QR codes, and peer-to-peer apps. These systems introduce features such as visibility of the decision, preset defaults, and group payment options that reshape how customers decide whether and how much to tip. While traditional tipping has been widely studied, research on digital restaurant tipping remains limited. This study focuses on two underexplored mechanisms: visibility (whether staff can observe the decision) and group context …

Statistical Machine Learning For Calibrating Climate Model Wind Fields., Augustine Ouru

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates statistical calibration methods for wind data from Global Climate Models (GCMs), with emphasis on wind speed and wind direction. The analysis uses 30 years of daily observed and GCM wind records from 9 spatial locations in the South East USA. Wind is represented in polar coordinates, but also often modeled in Cartesian coordinates. Four calibration models are compared: a marginal wind speed model, an independent Cartesian model. The calibration models are based on semi-parametric quantile regression, a flexible conditional density estimator fitted using neural networks. The neural network objective functions are optimized using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) …

Precise-Dyad: A Prospective Cohort Study Linking Maternal And Infant Health Trajectories In Sub-Saharan Africa, Marie-Laure Volvert, Robin Owino, Angela Koech, Onesmus Wanje, Isaac Mwaniki, Joseph Mutunga, Emily Mwadime, Geoffrey Omuse, Moses Mukhanya, Marvin Ochieng, Grace Mwashigadi, Agnes Mutua, Marleen Temmerman, Melissa Gladstone, Amina Abubakar, Helen Nabwera

Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health

Purpose The PREgnancy Care Integrating Translational Science, Everywhere (PRECISE)-DYAD Study is a prospective observational cohort designed to investigate health outcomes among mother-child pairs (dyads) over the first 3 years of life in two contexts from sub-Saharan Africa. The primary objective of the study was to explore the effects of selected placenta-related complications, such as pregnancy hypertension, fetal growth restriction and preterm birth, on (1) Child health and development, and (2) Women’s health and well-being, including outcomes after stillbirth.

Participants The PRECISE-DYAD Study enrolled women (and their children) originally recruited into the PRECISE pregnancy cohort study in The Gambia and Kenya …

Information-Aware Autonomy Through State Estimation, Control, And Observability, Andres Enriquez Fernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

State estimation is fundamental to autonomous systems operating in uncertain environments, where navigation, coordination, and decision-making depend on accurately inferring internal system states from incomplete and noisy observations. While classical estimation theory primarily focuses on reconstructing hidden states from available measurements, practical autonomous systems must also contend with sensing interruptions, communication constraints, limited computational resources, and nonlinear system dynamics that reduce the availability and usability of estimation-relevant information. This dissertation adopts an information-centric perspective on state estimation by introducing the concept of an Information Lifecycle, in which information is generated through system behavior, utilized by estimation algorithms under operational constraints, …

Inactive Nurses In New Mexico: Insights Into License Lapse And Inactive Reserve Status, Kiyoko Dell Davis

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Nursing shortages have varied over the decades, yet persist at local, national, and global levels. Nurses report leaving the workforce for many reasons, including professional environment factors resulting from these shortages, further exacerbating a shrinking workforce and population growth. Recent efforts include recruitment and education incentives and implementation of the New Mexico Board of Nursing (NMBON) Inactive Reserve Licensure option, which allows retiring nurses to maintain a reduced-scope nursing license with fewer barriers. Despite these efforts, questions remain: why are nurses in New Mexico leaving the profession and would this licensure category have impacted retention? The purpose of this project …

Improving Continuity Of Care: Evaluating Universal Nursing Handoff Sheets, Elizabeth Ifeloluwa Sanya

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Effective communication during nursing handoffs is essential for safe, patient-centered care, as breakdowns in communication are a leading cause of adverse patient outcomes. At a large academic level I trauma center, inconsistent nursing handoff practices were identified across progressive care units following the COVID-19 pandemic. This variability contributed to incomplete transfer of patient information and was associated with increased patient safety incidents, including delayed wound care, central line dressing lapses, and medication errors involving high-alert therapies. The purpose of this DNP project was to plan, implement, and evaluate the use of  standardized nursing handoff sheet and its impact on continuity …

Inactive Nurses In New Mexico: Insights Into License Lapse And Inactive Reserve Status, Kiyoko Dell Davis

Doctor of Nursing Practice Posters and Presentations

Nursing shortages have varied over the decades, yet persist at local, national, and global levels. Nurses report leaving the workforce for many reasons, including professional environment factors resulting from these shortages, further exacerbating a shrinking workforce and population growth. Recent efforts include recruitment and education incentives and implementation of the New Mexico Board of Nursing (NMBON) Inactive Reserve Licensure option, which allows retiring nurses to maintain a reduced-scope nursing license with fewer barriers. Despite these efforts, questions remain: why are nurses in New Mexico leaving the profession and would this licensure category have impacted retention? The purpose of this project …

Multicbr: Multi‑View Contrastive Learning For Bundle Recommendation, Yunshan Ma, Yingzhi He, Xiang Wang, Yinwei Wei, Xiaoyu Du, Yuyangzi Fu, Tat‑Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bundle recommendation seeks to recommend a bundle of related items to users to improve both userexperience and the profits of platform. Existing bundle recommendation models have progressed from capturing only user-bundle interactions to the modeling of multiple relations among users, bundles, and items.CrossCBR, in particular, incorporates cross-view contrastive learning into a two-view preference learningframework, significantly improving SOTA performance. It does, however, have two limitations: (1) the twoview formulation does not fully exploit all the heterogeneous relations among users, bundles, and items; and(2) the “early contrast and late fusion” framework is less effective in capturing user preference and difficultto generalize to …

Late-Night And Early-Morning Train Scheduling With Non-Traffic Hour Maintenance Window In Urban Rail Transit Systems, Yaochen Ma, Hai Yang, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Regular maintenance during non-traffic hours (NTH) is vital for the resilience of urban rail transit (URT) systems, yet an insufficient NTH maintenance window poses a challenge for URT systems in various cities. For instance, the Hong Kong MTR Corporation has noted that the required NTH maintenance time often exceeds the available window, prompting service adjustments such as earlier late-night closures and/or later early-morning starts. To address this challenge, this study develops an optimal scheduling framework that links late-night and early-morning URT services through the NTH maintenance window requirement to maximize public welfare. A Decoupled Optimization Model (DOM) first derives closed-form …

Survey On Learning-Based Dynamic Fault Localization: From Traditional Machine Learning To Large Language Models, Chunyan Liu, Yan Lei, Huan Xie, Jinping Wang, Yue Yu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning-based dynamic fault localization techniques play a crucial role in the field of software engineering. These techniques dynamically execute test cases to meticulously extract useful knowledge from the execution information in the program, with the aim of identifying fault locations by leveraging machine learning, deep learning, and large language models. Currently, there is already a flourishing body of research that is intensely focused on learning-based dynamic fault localization. Research literature can be categorized into two main aspects for learning-based dynamic fault localization: data-based enhancements (i.e., the datasets) and model-based enhancements (i.e., the suspiciousness algorithms). Thus, we conduct an extensive literature …

Deep Learning For Video Anomaly Detection: A Review, Peng Wu, Chengyu Pan, Yuting Yan, Guansong Pang, Qingsen Yan, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to discover behaviors or events deviating from the normality in videos. As a long-standing task in the field of computer vision, VAD has witnessed much good progress. In the era of deep learning, with the explosion of architectures of continuously growing capability and capacity, a great variety of deep learning-based methods are constantly emerging for the VAD task, greatly improving the generalization ability of detection algorithms and broadening the application scenarios. Therefore, such a multitude of methods and a large body of literature make a comprehensive survey a pressing necessity. In this article, we present …

Operationalizing Ethics For Ai Agents: How Developers Encode Values Into Repository Context Files, Christoph Treude, Sebastian Baltes, Marc Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As AI coding agents become embedded in software development workflows, developers are beginning to operationalize ethical principles by encoding behavioral rules into repository-level context files for AI agents, such as AGENTS.md files. Rather than examining the ethics of AI agents in the abstract, this vision paper investigates how ethics and values are already being translated for AI agents into actionable instructions that shape agent behavior. Through a preliminary investigation, we find that developers are already embedding guidance related to fairness, accessibility, sustainability, tone, and privacy. These artifacts function as a developer-authored governance layer, translating abstract principles into situated, natural-language directives …

A Dataset Of Agentic Ai Coding Tool Configurations, Matthias Galster, Seyedmoein Mohsenimofidi, Levi Böhme, Jai Lal Lulla, Muhammad Auwal Abubakar, Christoph Treude, Sebastian Baltes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex execute multi-step coding tasks with limited human oversight. To steer these tools, developers create repository-level configuration artifacts (e.g., Markdown files) for configuration mechanisms such as Context Files, Skills, Rules, and Hooks. There is no curated dataset yet that captures these configurations at scale. This dataset, collected from open-source GitHub repositories, fills that gap. We selected 40,585 actively maintained repositories through metadata filtering, classified them using GPT-5.2 to identify 36,710 as belonging to engineered software projects, and systematically detected configuration artifacts in these repositories. The dataset covers 4,738 repositories across …

Oscbench: Benchmarking Object State Change In Text-To-Video Generation, Xianjing Han, Bin Zhu, Shiqi Hu, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Patrick Carrington, Roger Zimmermann, Jingjing Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have made rapid progress in producing visually high-quality and temporally coherent videos. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on perceptual quality, text–video alignment, or physical plausibility, leaving a critical aspect of action understanding largely unexplored: object state change (OSC) explicitly specified in the text prompt. OSC refers to the transformation of an object’s state induced by an action, such as peeling a potato or slicing a lemon. In this paper, we introduce OSCBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess OSC performance in T2V models. OSCBench is constructed from instructional cooking data and systematically organizes action–object interactions into …

Tranx-Adapter: Bridging Artifacts And Semantics Within Mllms For Robust Ai-Generated Image Detection, Wenbin Wang, Yuge Huang, Jianqing Xu, Yue Yu, Jiangtao Yan, Shouhong Ding, Pan Zhou, Yong Luo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid advances in AI-generated image (AIGI) technology enable highly realistic synthesis, threatening public information integrity and security. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating texture-level artifact features alongside semantic features into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can enhance their AIGI detection capability. However, our preliminary analyses reveal that artifact features exhibit high intra-feature similarity, leading to an almost uniform attention map after the softmax operation. This phenomenon causes attention dilution, thereby hindering effective fusion between semantic and artifact features. To overcome this limitation, we propose a lightweight fusion adapter, TranX-Adapter, which integrates a Task-aware Optimal-Transport Fusion that leverages the Jensen-Shannon divergence …