Digital Commons Network^™

Harnessing Airborne And Spaceborne Lidar For Large-Area Assessment Of Canopy Structural Complexity, Tahrir Ibraq Siddiqui

Theses

Forests play a vital role in global carbon cycling, biodiversity conservation, and the provision of ecosystem services. Accurate quantification of forest carbon sequestration rates – or forest production – therefore is essential for understanding ecosystem dynamics and informing sustainable forest management practices. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems, as an active remote sensing modality, have emerged as a powerful tool for capturing detailed structural information of forests. Studies employing terrestrial LiDAR demonstrated that canopy structural complexity (CSC) metrics are strongly correlated with forest production at stand to landscape scales. While terrestrial LiDAR systems provide highly detailed maps of internal canopy …

Factors Influencing Employee Engagement And Performance In Hybrid Work Environments, Saif Alblooshi

Theses

The widespread adoption of hybrid work arrangements, in which employees divide their working time between remote and office-based settings, has fundamentally altered how organisations manage, measure, and sustain workforce engagement and performance. While hybrid models offer tangible benefits such as increased autonomy, reduced commuting burden, and greater scheduling flexibility, they simultaneously introduce a set of organisational challenges that conventional management frameworks were not designed to address. Chief among these challenges is the difficulty of maintaining consistent levels of employee engagement across distributed work settings, where informal communication, social connection, and direct managerial oversight are structurally constrained. The absence of robust, …

A Hyperpipeline For Joint Inference Of The Equation Of State And Population Of Binary Neutron Stars, Marc Ebiri

Theses

The extreme environment within neutron stars presents the opportunity to probe the nuclear equation of state at high densities and study the nature of stellar remnants near 1 solar mass. Parameter inference for the equation of state has received abundant attention in previous studies, but only a fraction of those have employed nontrivial population models in their priors. In this work, we introduce an upgrade to the generalized version of the popular RIFT algorithm known as HyperPipe, enabling the inclusion of flexible, user-provided priors within preexisting likelihood marginalization scripts that will facilitate joint inference of the equation of state and …

A Scalable And Physically Interpretable Machine Learning Approach To Analyzing Agn Spectra, Liza Maria Matrecito Salcedo

Theses

The broad-line region (BLR) is a sub-parsec region in an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) where dense, optically thick gas clouds produce broad emission lines (BELs). BELs are important probes of physical processes near the central supermassive black hole (SMBH); however, a complete understanding of the BLR’s structure and dynamics remains lacking. The observed diversity in BEL profile shapes suggests substantial differences in BLR properties across AGN. The availability of large-scale spectroscopic databases provides a valuable opportunity to systematically study these properties in large samples of AGN. They also offer the opportunity to identify rare but important systems, such as SMBH …

Diabetter Together: Outcomes Of A Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating A Peer Mentor Behavioral Intervention For Young Adults With Type 1 Diabetes During The Transfer From Pediatric To Adult Care, Marisa E Hilliard, Charles G Minard, Samantha A Carreon, Wendy L Levy, Sarah K Lyons, Randi Streisand, Tricia S Tang, Siripoom V Mckay, Sridevi Devaraj, Barbara J Anderson

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Objective: Transition between pediatric and adult health care is complex, with high risk for loss to follow-up and suboptimal health outcomes for young adults with type 1 diabetes. This trial evaluated the efficacy of DiaBetter Together, a 12-month strengths-based behavioral intervention delivered by trained peer mentors. The intervention aimed to help young adults navigate the transfer process to promote optimal glycemic outcomes, shorten time to adult care follow-up, and improve psychosocial outcomes.

Research design and methods: Using a single-site randomized clinical trial design, we compared the 12-month intervention to usual care among n = 100 young adults aged 17-25 years …

Data Centers Face Volatile Regulatory Landscape, Michael B. Gerrard

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The construction of new data centers for artificial intelligence has become a major engine of the U.S. economy. More than 700 data centers are now under construction across 40 states, with many more to come.

These are typically multi-billion-dollar projects. This boom is facing growing public opposition, which has led to an extremely volatile regulatory land-scape, especially at the state and local levels. That landscape is the subject of this article. This volatility has raised the cost of capital for data centers and led to the cancellation of many, and to heightened due diligence by lenders and others.

A Laboratory Investigation Of Energy Dissipators At Embankment Dams, Nathan L. Young

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Dams play a critical role in protecting communities from flooding and providing reliable water supplies. When large amounts of water pass through a dam’s spillway during floods, the discharge can travel at high speeds and carry potentially destructive kinetic energy that can damage the dam or erode downstream channels if that energy is not properly controlled. To reduce this risk, engineers commonly use hydraulic structures called energy dissipators that slow spillway discharge and safely release it downstream.

Commonly used energy dissipators at embankment dams include stilling basins that rely on a hydraulic jump – a sudden rise in water depth …

Magnetic Properties And Ultrafast Spin Dynamics In Quantum Materials, Trung Kien Mac

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Modern electronics mostly work by moving electric charge, which generates heat and hence wastes energy, especially as devices become smaller and faster. An alternative is to use the spin of electrons (a tiny magnetic property) and related “valley” states in certain atomically thin materials to store and process information more efficiently. This thesis explores how magnetism and spin behavior can be created and measured in a family of ultra-thin materials known as van der Waals quantum materials. Three kinds of materials are studied. First, atomically thin semiconductors are shaped into narrow nanoribbons. Because of their narrow size, their edges can …

Independent- August 2026, Alex Dolgin

The Independent (1988-present)

No abstract provided.

Lessons Learned From The Adrenalin Load Disaggregation Challenge, András Balázs Tolnai, Zheng Ma, Igor Sartori, Clayton Miller, Stephen White, Matt Amos, Gustaf Bengtsson, Akram Hameed, Nørregaard Bo Jørgensen

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Crowdsourced data science competitions have emerged as a powerful mechanism for advancing research in energy informatics, offering scalable pathways for developing machine learning solutions that enhance energy efficiency and smart building operations. The ADRENALIN Load Disaggregation Challenge addressed a central problem in energy analytics—non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) of heating and cooling loads in commercial buildings—while emphasizing the importance of model generalization across different buildings. This paper presents a comprehensive reflection on the lessons learned from organizing and executing the ADRENALIN competition, including technical insights, organizational challenges, and recommendations for future energy data challenges. In addition to the ADRENALIN case, a …

Transforming The Lives Of Adolescent Girls In West And Central Africa, Mame Soukeye Mbaye, Sarah Engebretsen, Maty Dia, Karen Austrian

Adolescents and Young People

The Girls’ Futures in Focus: Evidence from West and Central Africa series examines the challenges facing adolescent girls in the region and highlights evidence-informed approaches to improving their lives. The series focuses on eight countries that span the Sahel, coastal West Africa, and Central Africa and that reflect a range of fragility, conflict, and development contexts, allowing the GIRL Center’s findings to speak to adolescent girls’ compounded and diverse experiences across the region: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and Senegal. This series overview brief investigates their education, economic empowerment, mental health, …

Accelerating Progress For Adolescent Girls In Humanitarian Settings In West And Central Africa, Mame Soukeye Mbaye, Sarah Engebretsen, Maty Dia, Karen Austrian

Adolescents and Young People

The Girls’ Futures in Focus: Evidence from West and Central Africa series examines the challenges facing adolescent girls in the region and highlights evidence-informed approaches to improving their lives. This brief summarizes the evidence on what humanitarian crises mean for girls’ immediate safety, continuity of services, and longer-term life chances in West and Central Africa (WCA), particularly evidence from the GIRL Center’s priority countries. This brief summarizes the evidence on what humanitarian crises mean for girls’ immediate safety, continuity of services, and longer-term life chances. The brief informs strategies that have the potential to enhance protection, resilience, and development in …

Juvenile Lifers: Adapting To Life While Doing Life, Tristin Faust

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This qualitative study examined psychosocial maturation among individuals sentenced to life imprisonment for offenses committed during adolescence. Archival interview and survey data were analyzed for 30 men who had been resentenced and released after serving an average of 31 years in prison. Findings revealed a developmental progression across four stages: pre-incarceration, initial incarceration, catalysts for change, and later incarceration. Participants described entering prison with developmental immaturity compounded by trauma, unstable home environments, educational disruption, and antisocial peer influence. Their early years of incarceration were marked by anger, fear, misconduct, and survival-oriented behavior. Over time, participants identified discrete events and ongoing …

Examining Social Anxiety And Barriers To Engagement In School-Based Mental Health Services Among Black American Adolescents, Taylor Walls

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Social anxiety is common among Black American adolescents, though research examining the experience of social anxiety among this population is very limited. Furthermore, few studies have explored how sociocultural factors, such as racial discrimination and mental health stigma, may shape Black American adolescents’ perceptions of social anxiety and school-based mental health services. Using qualitative methods, the present study explored Black American adolescents’ perceptions of social anxiety, barriers to help-seeking, and views regarding school-based mental health services. A total of 15 Black American high school students in the northeastern United States (ages 14-15 years; M=16.0, SD=1.2) participated in focus groups and …

Cognitive Flexibility In Broader Autism Phenotype: Does Bilingualism Benefit And Emotion Hinder?, Nardin M. Yacoub

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The broader autism phenotype (BAP) is a milder manifestation of autistic traits just below the clinical threshold for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and provides a framework for studying and defining these traits in individuals related to autistic people. Cognitive flexibility (CF) is an executive functioning (EF) skill characterized by the ability to switch between tasks or thoughts based on environmental demands. The current study examined whether BAP was associated with CF and how bilingualism and emotion influenced this relationship across development. Previous research has found that bilinguals show enhanced task-switching abilities. Individuals with BAP may show differences in emotional processing, …

Predictors Of The Mother-Infant Bond: The Role Of Maternal Attachment Style, Parity, Race, And Motherhood Expectations, Samia Qadri

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study examined how maternal attachment style, parity, race, and motherhood expectations, individually and in interaction, predicted the quality of the mother-infant bond during the postpartum period. Grounded in a maternal feminist framework, the study used a quantitative, cross-sectional correlational design. Postpartum mothers aged 20–39 (N = 87) completed validated measures of maternal attachment style, motherhood expectations, mother-infant bonding, and depressive symptoms. Multiple regression compared a Primary Model containing the four focal predictors and planned interaction terms with a Secondary Model that added maternal depressive symptoms as a covariate. Depressive symptoms emerged as the strongest single predictor of bonding, and …

Too Hot To Work? Exploring The Average And Seasonal Effects Of Temperature Variability In The Philippine Labour Market, Paolo R. Magnata, Maire Carroline Magante

Economics Department Faculty Publications

Using temperature and employment data covering 16 regions from Q3 2003 to Q1 2022, this study examined the average and seasonal effects of temperature on year-on-year employment growth in the Philippines. Average effects are insignificant while seasonal effects are heterogeneous. During the dry and cool season (Q1), higher temperatures are associated with a temporary 0.0397% increase in employment growth. In contrast, higher temperatures in the dry and hot season (Q2) are associated with a persistent decrease of 0.1361% while higher temperatures during the wet and hot season (Q3) are associated with a persistent increase of 0.1450%, which is primarily driven …

Differential Effects Of Generative Artificial Intelligence On Formative And Summative Assessment Performance: A Quasi-Experimental Longitudinal Study, Md Istiak Morsalin

Master's Theses

Generative artificial intelligence has unsettled a core assumption of course assessment: that scores on unsupervised work reflect what students can do unassisted. This study tests whether the widespread availability of ChatGPT altered student performance differently on formative versus summative assessments in Business Analytics and Foundations, a required undergraduate quantitative-methods course taught by one instructor across nine cohorts. In a quasi-experimental longitudinal design, the Fall~2022 cohort ($n = 90$), the last to finish before ChatGPT's public release, serves as a control against eight post-ChatGPT cohorts spanning Spring~2023 through Summer~2025 ($N = 646$). Outcomes were drawn from McGraw-Hill Connect records using matched …

Examining Transcultural Approaches In Art Education: Transversality, Identity Formation, And Intercultural Understanding, Alexandra Grace Parsons

Master's Theses

Art education is often treated as marginal within formal schooling, valued as enrichment rather than recognized as a vital contributor to students' intellectual, cultural, and emotional development. Funding and policy decisions made by state and local bodies produce significant regional disparities in access to art education across the United States. This thesis examines how transcultural approaches to art education can respond to increasingly diverse, post-migrant school communities. Using a comparative qualitative case study design, the study analyzes program structures, partnership models, and pedagogical practices at Birmingham Arts School in the United Kingdom alongside schools within Fulton County and Atlanta Public …

Educator Experiences Of Schoolwide Pbis Discipline Implementation: Exploring School Culture In Private Pk–12 Schools, Jessica L. Guarneri

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore educators’ lived experiences implementing schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) discipline systems and to understand how those experiences influenced school culture in private PK–12 schools. Historically, PBIS focused on specific outcomes, such as reductions in discipline referrals, suspensions, and behavioral incidents. Though these indicators are critical, they do not consider in what way educators experience disciplinary systems, nor how their lived experiences affect routine interactions with students. Educators play a key role in implementing PBIS; their experiences foster consistency, trust, and sustainability. The participants included certified educators and administrators employed …

Global Kinetic Dynamics Of Black Hole Magnetospheres And Accretion, Martin Luepker

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has provided stunning images of the immediate vicinity of two supermassive black holes, M87* and Sgr A*, revealing the plasma swirling around them. To understand the complex emission observed, researchers have turned to general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations, which model the plasma as a fluid. These simulations have been successful in reproducing some features of the EHT images, but they rely on assumptions that do not apply in the low-density, high-magnetic-field environments around these black holes. General relativistic particle-in-cell (GRPIC) simulations offer a first-principles approach to modeling this environment, but their application to global black …

Examples And Evaluation Of Sustainability Research With Tribes, Aaron M. Canter, Sharon Hausam

Faculty Publications

This is a working paper produced as part of National Science Foundation project #2115169, “Transforming Rural-Urban Systems: Trajectories for Sustainability in the Intermountain West,” known as the “Intermountain West Transformation Network” (TN), led by the University of New Mexico with institutional partners at three additional universities in New Mexico, two in Arizona, and one each in Utah, Colorado, and Washington. The TN’s Indigenous and Tribal engagement was supported through a contract with Dr. Sharon Hausam, additional work by Aaron M. Canter, coordination with Dr. Lani Tsinnajinnie, and an Advisory Committee on Indigenous Information Needs primarily comprised of Indigenous representatives in …

An Analysis Of Mating Strategies In Rotifers Inhabiting Temporary Habitats, Ariel Bollinger

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Reproduction is critical for organisms inhabiting ephemeral aquatic habitats where desiccation risk favors rapid and successful mating. Monogonont rotifers rely on sexual reproduction to produce diapausing eggs that withstand harsh conditions. I investigated how mating behaviors vary among populations of five rotifer species based on the hydroperiod of their habitat: Epiphanes brachionus and E. chihuahuaensis were sampled from habitats with short (SH) and long (LH) hydroperiods; Euchlanis dilatata was collected from a short (SH) and a permanent habitat; and Plationus patulus and Sinantherina socialis were collected from a long (LH) and a permanent (Perm) habitat. I hypothesized that SH populations …

Power Signature-Based Hardware Security Techniques For The Internet Of Things, Ashish Mahanta

Dissertations

The rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced significant security challenges, particularly concerning stealthy, instruction-level malicious code injections that evade traditional software defenses. While conventional power analysis techniques are highly effective at detecting such subtle abnormalities, they require capturing high-resolution, voluminous power trace data. This dependency necessitates bulky data acquisition (DAQ) instrumentation, power-hungry analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and intensive computational resources, making these methods impractical for deployment on resource-constrained IoT devices. To bridge this critical gap, this dissertation presents a novel hardware security paradigm, the Power Rising and Descending Signature (PRIDES) methodology. Instead of quantizing actual power consumption …

Applications Of Machine Learning For Nondestructive Evaluation Data Analysis, Connor Chase Seavers

Dissertations

A fourth industrial revolution is currently taking place in the manufacturing sector, called “Industry 4.0,” where material production and fabrication processes are becoming fully automated using integrated sensors, closed-loop feedback mechanisms, and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML). The nondestructive evaluation (NDE) field has begun to follow suit by integrating AI/ML techniques in material inspection processes to automate defect detection for many NDE methods. Since material inspection processes are paramount in ensuring safety and reliability in critical manufactured products, it is important that new AI/ML techniques are trustworthy for NDE data analysis. The current approach to building trust in new AI/ML methods …

Listening To Fire: Using Passive Acoustic Monitoring To Detect And Explain Prescribed Fire Effects On Avian Communities In Oak-Hickory Forests Of The Central Hardwood Region, Wesley Petty

Dissertations

Prescribed fire is an increasingly important tool for restoring oak-hickory forests in the Central Hardwood Region, yet its effects on avian communities remain poorly understood because traditional monitoring methods cannot easily capture wildlife responses across the large spatial and fine temporal scales at which fire effects unfold. This dissertation develops and tests a framework for using passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) to detect prescribed fire effects on avian communities and to explain the ecological mechanisms behind them. Acoustic data were collected at Giant City State Park and Touch of Nature Environmental Center in southern Illinois across six recording sites for seven …

Nitrogen Dynamics In Riverine Wetlands Of The Leveed Middle Mississippi River Floodplain, Joseph M. Krienert

Dissertations

Excess dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) in the Mississippi River basin degrades aquatic ecosystems and drinking‑water quality. Riverine wetlands can mitigate these impacts by providing hydrologic and geochemical conditions that support nitrification and denitrification, converting DIN to inert nitrogen gas. This service may be especially important along high‑order rivers, yet its magnitude and controls remain unclear. This research evaluates DIN processing in two riverine wetlands along the 8th‑order middle Mississippi River (MMR) floodplain, one connected to the River and one disconnected by levees.This valley was shaped over millennia by lowland river processes and glacial outwash, filling the confined bedrock valley with …

Efficient And Universal Watermarking For Llm-Generated Code Detection, Boquan Li, Zirui Fu, Mengdi Zhang, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun, Xingmei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the usability of AI-generated code, providing effective assistance to programmers. This advancement also raises ethical and legal concerns, such as academic dishonesty and the generation of malicious code. For accountability, it is imperative to detect whether a piece of code is AI-generated. Watermarking is broadly considered a promising solution and has been successfully applied to identify LLM-generated text. However, existing efforts on code are far from ideal, suffering from limited universality and excessive time and memory consumption. In this work, we propose a plugand- play watermarking approach for AI-generated code detection, named ACW …

Dynamic Spectral Denoising With Global-Context Attention For Multi-Behavior Recommendation, Miaomiao Cai, Yunshan Ma, Fangqi Zhu, Junfeng Fang, Zhijie Zhang, Zhiyong Cheng, Xiang Wang, See-Kiong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-behavior recommendation improves target-behavior predic-tion by exploiting heterogeneous auxiliary feedback (e.g., view,collect, and cart), yet its robustness is often undermined by behavior-dependent noise and inconsistency. We argue that the key bottle-neck is not merely noisy behaviors, but a representation-level failurecaused by two coupled heterogeneities. First, intra-behavior rep-resentation entanglement arises when multi-hop propagationblends incidental signals with true preferences in the embeddingspace. This entanglement renders coarse spatial denoising inef-fective, since it cannot suppress noise without sacrificing weak-but-informative niche signals. Second, inter-behavior reliabilityheterogeneity complicates cross-behavior fusion, as the predic-tive value of auxiliary behaviors varies substantially across usersand contexts. Without reliability calibration, aggregation can …

Hvi-Cidnet+: Beyond Extreme Darkness For Low-Light Image Enhancement, Kangbiao Shi, Xiaowen Ma, Yixu Feng, Tao Hu, Peng Wu, Guansong Pang, Qingsen Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) aims to recover visually pleasing content and details from degraded low-light images. However, existing RGB-based methods often suffer from color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity. Although the HSV color space can decouple brightness and color, it introduces noticeable red and black noise artifacts. To address these challenges, we adopt the Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI) color space for LLIE, which is defined by the HV color map and learnable intensity. The former enforces small distances for red coordinates to alleviate red noise artifacts, while the latter adaptively compresses low-light regions to suppress black noise …