Digital Commons Network^™

The Effect Of Vibrotactile Sensory Input Devices On Improving Subjective Speech Perception For Those With Normal Hearing, Elizabeth Kalinowsky

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how vibrotactile sensory augmentation can improve speech understanding in adverse listening conditions for those with normal hearing by providing auditory speech cues. It aimed to investigate whether there is any value of AVT devices for those with normal hearing in adverse hearing situations, where understanding speech is difficult due to background noise, reverberation, or other factors. This research project is a preliminary case study involving one participant. Tympanometry and distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) tests were conducted to verify that the participant did not appear to have hearing loss due to middle …

Zwitterionic And Anionic Ultrafiltration Membrane Modification For Efficient, Fouling-Resistant Microalgae Harvesting, Victor Okorie Mkpuma, Mohadeseh Najafi, Javad Farahbakhsh, Masoumeh Zargar, Navid Reza Moheimani, Houda Ennaceri

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Membrane surface modification is a promising strategy for fouling mitigation in membrane-based microalgae filtration, primarily by limiting the interactions between the membrane surface and the foulant particles. This study investigated the effectiveness of modified membranes in filtering Chlorella sp. MUR 269. First, three polyethersulfone membranes with varying pore sizes were evaluated to determine the influence of pore size on filtration performance and fouling behavior. The ultrafiltration membrane that exhibited the best performance was subsequently modified using two functional monomers: the zwitterionic [2-(methacryloyloxy)ethyl]dimethyl (3-sulfopropyl) ammonium hydroxide and the negatively charged mono-2-(methacryloyloxy)ethyl succinate (MMS). The filtration performance and fouling resistance of the …

Prioritising Follow-Up For People With Suspected Epilepsy Using A Digital Eeg Biomarker, Rohit Shankar, John Terry

Peninsula Medical School

Lengthy waits for follow-up testing are common for people with suspected epilepsy. This delays diagnosis, prolongs uncertainty and increases seizure risk. Initial EEGs are frequently inconclusive, yet follow-ups are often dictated by referral date, and there is no established method for risk-based prioritisation. Here, we tested whether an established digital EEG biomarker could help prioritise those most likely to have epilepsy for expedited follow-up EEG testing. We analysed 196 normal non-contributory (non-diagnostic) initial EEGs collected from six National Health Service (NHS) sites in England. From these recordings, we extracted eight previously validated computational features that quantify the likelihood that the …

Promoting Positive Youth Development With Adolescent Boys In Uk Schools: A Theory-Driven Evaluation Of The “Becoming A Man” Programme, Finlay Green, Cristina Preece, Kate Allen, Sean Manzi, Julia Mannes, Lynne Callaghan, Vashti Berry, Ediane Santana De Lima, Amy Woodburn, Tim Hobbs, Julie Harris, Nick Axford

Peninsula Medical School

Youth violence, including gender-based violence, is a major public health issue in the UK, yet evidence on effective interventions in the UK remains limited. Becoming a Man (BAM) is a two-year school-based positive youth development programme for adolescent boys, developed in Chicago, US, where two RCTs found reduced violent crime arrests and improved academic engagement. This study evaluated BAM’s potential in the UK using a theory-driven design (no comparison group). 97 boys aged 12–14 years (66% Black/Black British) in three London schools enrolled in BAM. Data sources included: implementation records (recruitment, attendance, adherence, quality, youth socio-demographics); school data (attendance, exclusions, …

Evaluating The Patient Journey Through Integrated Mental Health Services Using Routinely Collected Data: Utility Of The Dialog Patient-Reported Outcome And Experience Measure, Stuart G. Spicer, Rahul Bhattacharya, Katelyn Smalley, Akshith Shetty, Paul Sharpe, Richard Byng

Peninsula Medical School

Aims and method DIALOG is a patient-reported outcome and experience measure. We analysed anonymised DIALOG scores routinely collected from East London NHS Foundation Trust. We aimed to (a) examine changes in DIALOG scores through the patient journey (‘assessment’, ‘review’ and ‘discharge’); and (b) assess the impact of community mental health (CMH) transformation by comparing pre- and post-DIALOG scores. We analysed 11 198 DIALOG scores from 5007 patients in 2018–2019 and 2021–2022. Results DIALOG scores improved across treatment stages in both years. There was no clear difference pre- and post-CMH transformation, although in 2021–2022 there were lower satisfaction scores at referral. …

Backlash: How Racial Justice In Higher Education Is Being Trumped By Politics, Aaron N. Taylor

AccessLex Institute Research

This article discusses contemporary social and political backlash to racial justice and how it has overshadowed and flouted higher education antidiscrimination law and principles of racial justice. The first three parts chart the evolution of U.S. Supreme Court precedent in higher education affirmative action cases. Part I interrogates the Court’s fallacious detachment of affirmative action from its racial justice origins in Defunis and Bakke. Part II discusses how the Grutter majority tacitly departed from Bakke, using the vague concept of critical mass to seemingly empower schools to engage in affirmative action as a racial justice tool. Part III explains how …

Policy Brief For Evidence-Based Telehealth Use In Ems: A Comprehensive Reference For Program Administrators, Field Leaders, And Clinical Directors, Florida Center For Emergency Medical Services

Florida Center for Emergency Medical Services Research Reports

Executive Summary

Telehealth-supported emergency medical services (EMS) represents an evidence- based approach to enhancing prehospital care delivery, expanding access to physician expertise, and improving resource utilization. The evidence base demonstrates clear benefits in appropriate contexts: for time-sensitive emergencies, telehealth enables significant reductions in treatment times; for low-acuity conditions, programs report transport reductions of 50–67% while maintaining high safety profiles.

Successful implementation requires appropriate patient selection, robust technical infrastructure, comprehensive training, and systematic quality assurance. Programs demonstrate success when targeting patients with stable vital signs and absence of conditions requiring immediate physical intervention. Implementation barriers commonly include regulatory and reimbursement limitations, …

Evidence-Based Telehealth Use In Ems: A Comprehensive Reference For Program Administrators, Field Leaders, And Clinical Directors, Michael Lozano Jr.

Florida Center for Emergency Medical Services Research Reports

Executive Summary

Telehealth-supported emergency medical services (EMS) represents an evidence-based approach to enhancing prehospital care delivery, expanding access to physician expertise, and improving resource utilization. This best-practice reference synthesizes current evidence and operational experience to guide EMS administrators in evaluating, implementing, and sustaining telehealth programs tailored to their communities' needs and resources.

Telehealth in EMS encompasses multiple distinct applications. General teleconsultation enables paramedics to connect with remote emergency physicians for real-time clinical guidance and disposition decisions. Specialty-specific applications focus on time-sensitive conditions including stroke and acute myocardial infarction, where early specialist involvement compresses treatment timelines. Community paramedicine integration extends EMS …

People's Upr Written Record: Compiled By The International Human Rights Clinic At The University Of Illinois Chicago School Of Law And The Human Rights At Home Litigation Clinic At The Saint Louis University School Of Law, Sarah Dávila A., Lauren E. Bartlett

Faculty White Papers

This written record compiles the lived experiences of directly impacted persons. Directly impacted persons include people who have personally faced the conditions, policies, or practices documented in this written record in the United States and who have chosen to share their testimonies. The testimonies in this written record include those provided in-person, via video recording, which have been transcribed, or in writing. Testimonies are presented anonymously with ▊ sign as names and identifiable information has been redacted. Their accounts provide first-hand evidence of how these human rights issues operate in practice, offering essential context and depth that cannot be captured …

Journal Of The Arts And Special Education: Volume 6, Issue 1

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

No abstract provided.

Let’S Dance!: A Community Partnership Fostering Movement, Connections, And Inclusion, Michelle J. Cook, Michele Dunleavy, Carrie A. Payne, Sarah E. Whitney, Matthew Levy, Jack M. Mcbride, Ella Garrity

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Despite the many documented physical and social benefits, dance is frequently not accessible to individuals with and without disabilities. We share an inclusive dance community partnership called Let’s Dance! that was developed to foster movement, connections, and inclusion. To increase awareness and inclusive dance opportunities, this community partnership involved (a) a workshop on inclusive dance practices for preservice teachers and (b) a community-based inclusive Let’s Dance! dance event. Following a review of the literature outlining the benefits of dance and the barriers that need to be dismantled to make dance more inclusive for students of all abilities, we share inclusive …

Watch Me Watch: Reaction Videos As A Social Form Of Online Video Engagement, Rodney Okyere, Carlos Augusto Bautista Isaza, Jaehoon Pyon, Ihudiya Finda Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, Shuo Niu, Sang Wong Lee

Computer Science

Reaction videos (RVs) are surging in popularity, emerging as a distinctive facet of participatory culture on modern social video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. This study aims to explore not only the motivations and engagement patterns of viewers towards RVs, but also the underlying nature of the virality and community-building phenomena that this sub-genre of video content fosters. We conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with individuals who identified as regular viewers of reaction videos to gain a deeper understanding of how they discover reaction videos (RQ1), the values that drive their motivations for viewing RVs (RQ2), and the ways …

Interprofessional Perspective: Development Of The National Academies Of Practice Joint Health Literacy Position Statement, Teresa Wagner, Vincent Salyers, Bich Nguyen, Tanya Sudia, Kate Taylor, Devora R. Winkfield, Nancy Colletti, Felicia Chew, Sarah Manspeaker

Department of Occupational Therapy Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Congressional Reform Project, Hanna Brant Ph.D.

School of Arts & Sciences

This assignment was developed by SUNY Geneseo Professor Hanna Brant during the spring 2026 semester.

Learning Objectives

• Describe and analyze the legislative process of the United State’s Congress;
• Identify the internal and external factors that influence legislative behavior;
• Critically analyze arguments concerning the appropriate role and powers of the legislature;
• Interpret social science research on the behavior of legislators;
• Evaluate policy strategies for advancing a legislative agenda; and
• Collaborate and communicate with peers on contemporary legislative issues and challenges.

Dnp Final Report: An Evidence-Based Project To Decrease Stress In Undergraduate Nursing Students, Elaine Wallace

DNP Final Reports

Stress among undergraduate nursing students is a well-documented concern that negatively affects academic performance, clinical readiness, well-being, and program retention. Stress levels are often heightened before clinical skills check-offs, highlighting the need for practical, evidence-based interventions. This Doctor of Nursing Practice quality improvement project examined whether mindfulness-based mandala coloring could reduce perceived stress in undergraduate nursing students. Using the PICOT framework, the project evaluated whether undergraduate nursing students (P) who participated in mindfulness-based mandala coloring (I), compared with no intervention (C), experienced reduced perceived stress levels (O) over a 12-week implementation period (T).

A comprehensive search of the literature supported …

Steric And Electronic Considerations Of Ester Hydrolysis: Updating A Longstanding Physical Organic Kinetics Experiment, Mara J. Aucoin

Chemistry Theses

A current, longstanding undergraduate physical chemistry kinetics experiment uses UV-Vis spectrophotometry to follow the hydrolysis of para-nitrophenyl acetate (NPA) with an imidazole (Im) catalyst. The catalyzed and uncatalyzed reaction paths can be studied simultaneously under pseudo first order conditions ([Im]>>>[NPA]). To obtain the rate constants for the catalyzed and uncatalyzed reactions, the concentration of imidazole is varied between reactions and then plotted against the observed rate constant (k_obs).This produces a linear line where the slope is equal to the rate constant of the catalyzed reaction (k_cat) and the intercept is equal to …

Targeting Oncogenes: Development And Characterization Of Aurka And Her2 Inhibitors, Itzel Montoya

Chemistry Theses

Targeted inhibition of oncogenes has remained a key strategy in the development of more potent, effective, and less toxic therapeutic anticancer agents. Among the most clinically significant signaling pathways are those mediated by the Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2 (HER2) and Aurora Kinase A (AurKA). HER2 is a member of the ErbB receptor family that supports cell growth and proliferation through downstream signaling of the PI3K and MAPK pathways and is closely linked to more aggressive tumors and therapeutic resistance. AurKA is a protein kinase essential for mitotic spindle assembly, centrosome maturation, and other key processes in cell cycle …

Dollar$ And $Ense: A Financial Aid And Academic Records Newsletter - Spring 2026, Nova Southeastern University

Dollars & Sense Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Super Lidar Intensity For Robotic Perception, Wei Gao, Jie Zhang, Mingle Zhao, Zhiyuan Zhang, Shu Kong, Maani Ghaffari, Dezhen Song, Chengzhong Xu, Hui Kong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conventionally, human intuition defines vision as a modality of passive optical sensing, relying on ambient light to perceive the environment. However, active optical sensing, which involves emitting and receiving signals, offers unique advantages by capturing both radiometric and geometric properties of the environment, independent of external illumination conditions. This work focuses on advancing active optical sensing using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which captures intensity data, enabling the estimation of surface reflectance that remains invariant under varying illumination. Such properties are crucial for robotic perception tasks, including detection, recognition, segmentation, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). A key challenge with …

Learning Feature Inversion For Multi-Class Anomaly Detection Under General-Purpose Coco-Ad Benchmark, Jiangning Zhang, Chengjie Wang, Xiangtai Li, Guanzhong Tian, Zhucun Xue, Yong Liu, Guansong Pang, Dacheng Tao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection (AD) is often focused on detecting anomaly areas for industrial quality inspection and medical lesion examination. However, due to the specific scenario targets, the data scale for AD is relatively small, and evaluation metrics are still deficient compared to classic vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. To fill these gaps, this work first constructs a large-scale and general-purpose COCO-AD dataset by extending COCO to the AD field. This enables fair evaluation and sustainable development for different methods on this challenging benchmark. Moreover, current metrics such as AU-ROC have nearly reached saturation on simple datasets, which …

Can Financial Literacy Enhance Esg Disclosures?, Xiaoran Jia, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Kiat Bee Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an international sample of firms and two country-level measures of financial literacy, we find robust evidence of a positive relation between financial literacy and firms' Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosures. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of financial literacy in enhancing ESG disclosures is more prominent in poorer information environments, weaker legal institutions and weaker ESG reporting environments. Lastly, we find that financial literacy also enhances ESG performance. Our study contributes to and extends the literature by providing strong evidence that citizens' financial literacy enhances firms' ESG disclosure and the associated ESG performance.

Agentspec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement For Safe And Reliable Llm Agents, Haoyu Wang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agents built on LLMs are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, automating complex decision-making and task execution. However, their autonomy introduces safety risks, including security vulnerabilities, legal violations, and unintended harmful actions. Existing mitigation methods, such as model-based safeguards and early enforcement strategies, fall short in robustness, interpretability, and adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose AgentSpec, a lightweight domain-specific language for specifying and enforcing runtime constraints on LLM agents. With AgentSpec, users define structured rules that incorporate triggers, predicates, and enforcement mechanisms, ensuring agents operate within predefined safety boundaries. We implement AgentSpec across multiple domains, including code execution, embodied agents, …

Conflogger: Enhance Systems’ Configuration Diagnosability Through Configuration Logging, Shiwen Shan, Yintong Huo, Yuxin Su, Zhining Wang, Dan Li, Zibin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern configurable systems offer customization via intricate configuration spaces, yet such flexibility introduces pervasive configuration-related issues such as misconfigurations and latent softwarebugs. Existing diagnosability supports focus on post-failure analysis of software behavior to identify configuration issues, but none of these approaches look into whether the software clue sufficient failure information for diagnosis. To fill in the blank, we propose the idea of configuration logging to enhance existing logging practices at the source code level. We develop ConfLogger, the first tool that unifies configuration-aware static taint analysis with LLM-based log generation to enhance software configuration diagnosability. Specifically, our method 1) identifies …

Causality-Aware Safety Testing For Autonomous Driving Systems, Wenbing Tang, Mingfei Cheng, Renzhi Wang, Yuan Zhou, Chengwei Liu, Yang Liu, Zuohua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulation-based testing is essential for evaluating the safety of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs). Comprehensive evaluation requires testing across diverse scenarios that can trigger various types of violations under different conditions. While existing methods typically focus on individual diversity metrics, such as input scenarios, ADS-generated motion commands, and system violations, they often fail to capture the complex interrelationships among these elements. For instance, identical motion commands can produce different collision risks in varying scenes, and the same collision may result from different commands under different scenarios. This oversight leads to gaps in testing coverage, potentially missing critical issues in the ADS …

Developing Blockchain-Based Transparent E-Commerce Solutions For Danish Smes To Promote Sustainable Design Products, Somnath Mazumdar, Robert John Kauffman, Thomas Jensen, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Jan Damsgaard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Typically, a firm's objectives include establishing consumer confidence, preserving its brand image, and developing a profitable business strategy. Consumers now place greater emphasis on the sustainability and transparency of their purchases. Given environmental and economic limitations, firms are often compelled to implement sustainable production methods. This is especially a struggle for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with new technology, as it can increase their risk of failure. This has led to a problem for consumers, who must cross-check the sustainability-related claims of the firms they buy from. This is challenging because of limited process trace data and restricted enforcement capabilities. …

Bridging Draft Policy Misalignment: Group Tree Optimization For Speculative Decoding, Shijing Hu, Jingyang Li, Zhihui Lu, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a lightweight draft model propose multiple tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Yet existing training objectives optimize only a single greedy draft path, while decoding follows a tree policy that re-ranks and verifies multiple branches. This draft policy misalignment limits achievable speedups. We introduce Group Tree Optimization (GTO), which aligns training with the decoding-time tree policy through two components: (i) Draft Tree Reward, a sampling-free objective equal to the expected acceptance length of the draft tree under the target model, directly measuring decoding performance; (ii) Group-based Draft Policy …

From Spatial To Actions: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Model In Spatial Foundation Priors, Zhengshen Zhang, Hao Li, Yalun Dai, Zhengbang Zhu, Lei Zhou, Chenchen Liu, Dong Wang, Francis E. H. Tay, Sijin Chen, Ziwei Liu, Yuxiao Liu, Xinghang Li, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing vision-language-action (VLA) models act in 3D real-world but are typically built on 2D encoders, leaving a spatial reasoning gap that limits generalization and adaptability. Recent 3D integration techniques for VLAs either require specialized sensors and transfer poorly across modalities, or inject weak cues that lack geometry and degrade vision-language alignment. In this work, we introduce FALCON (From Spatial to Action), a novel paradigm that injects rich 3D spatial tokens into the action head. FALCON leverages spatial foundation models to deliver strong geometric priors from RGB alone, and includes an Embodied Spatial Model that can optionally fuse depth, or pose …

Thinktank-Me: A Multi-Expert Framework For Middle East Event Forecasting, Haoxuan Li, He Chang, Yunshan Ma, Yi Bin, Yang Yang, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event forecasting is inherently influenced by multifaceted considerations, including international relations, regional historical dynamics, and cultural contexts. However, existing LLM-based approaches employ single-model architectures that generate predictions along a singular explicit trajectory, constraining their ability to capture diverse geopolitical nuances across complex regional contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce ThinkTank-ME, a novel Think Tank framework for Middle East event forecasting that emulates collaborative expert analysis in real-world strategic decision-making. To facilitate expert specialization and rigorous evaluation, we construct POLECAT-FOR-ME, a Middle East–focused event forecasting benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of multi-expert collaboration in handling complex temporal geopolitical forecasting …

Discrete Diffusion For Bundle Construction, Teng Tu, Ai Li, Yunshan Ma, Shuo Xu, Xiaohao Liu, Haokai Ma, Liang Pang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a central task in product bundling, bundle construction aims to select a subset of items from large item catalogs to build an entire bundle or, more practically, complete a partial bundle. Existing methods often rely on the sequential construction paradigm that predicts items one at a time, nevertheless, this paradigm is fundamentally unsuitable for the essentially unordered bundles. In contrast, non-sequential methods model a bundle as a set, but still face two dimensionality curses: the combinatorial space grows exponentially with both bundle length and catalog size. Accordingly, we identify two technical challenges: 1) how to effectively and efficiently model …

On Autopilot? An Empirical Study Of Human-Ai Teaming And Review Practices In Open Source, Haoyu Gao, Peerachai Banyongrakkul, Hao Guan, Mansooreh Zahedi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly automate software engineering tasks. While recent studies highlight the accelerated adoption of “AI as a teammate” in Open Source Software (OSS), developer interaction patterns remain under-explored. In this work, we investigated project-level guidelines and developers’ interactions with AI-assisted pull requests (PRs) by expanding the AIDev dataset to include finer-grained contributor code ownership and a comparative baseline of human-created PRs. We found that over 67.5% of AI-co-authored PRs originate from contributors without prior code ownership. Despite this, the majority of repositories lack guidelines for AI-coding agent usage. Notably, we observed a distinct interaction pattern: AI-co-authored PRs …