Digital Commons Network^™

A Global Internal Tide Modeling Framework For Improving Satellite Observations Of Fine-Scale Ocean Circulation, Badarvada Yadidya, Brian K. Arbic, Edward D. Zaron, Jay F. Shriver, Maarten C. Buijsman, Eric P. Chassignet, Loren Carrère, Michel Tchilibou

Faculty Publications

Small-scale oceanic eddies and filaments mediate the vertical exchange of heat and carbon within the global ocean. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission resolves these features through wide-swath interferometry, but internal tides often mask these observations. Non–phase-locked internal tides present special difficulty because they vary with the evolving ocean background. We show that this chaotic variability can be predicted. We use a data-assimilative ocean forecast model to resolve the mesoscale environment and separate tidal signals from the broader circulation. The model captures the organized structure of these incoherent waves in the independent SWOT measurements. Correcting for the total …

Wrack Lines Spring-Summer 2026 Volume Number 1, Margaret Cozens, Johann Heupel, Owen Placido, Paul Salopek, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

“Building community around the places we love,” is the theme of the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Wrack Lines magazine. Learn about the work of the Six Lakes Park coalition in Hamden, Riverfront Recapture in Hartford, MyCoast in southeastern Connecticut and the statewide land conservation conference. Additional stories tell about the artistry and mission of photographer-videographer Tomas Koeck, and National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek, who is traveling the world on foot.

From Story To Stage: A Journey In Pursuit Of Virtuous Leadership And Artistic Intentionality Through Student Directing A Full Play Production At University Level Theatre, Josephine L. Partridge

Honors Projects

A passionate storyteller and artist, earning her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Honors Liberal Arts and Theatre-Performance, explores her personal potential as the play Director of Little Women, a stage play adaptation based on the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott, adapted from the 1912 play by Marian de Forest and Jessie Bonstelle written by Josephine Partridge. Throughout the course of four months, Partridge adapted the script and works as Director and Marketing Director for this production with SPU Theatre Company club. She uses this experience to deepen her understanding and practice of intentionality with artistic vision and virtuous leadership. …

Whitlatch, Jo Bell, San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

University of California, Berkeley, Library & Information Studies, 1987 PhD

University of California, Berkeley, Asian Studies, 1973 MA

University of Minnesota, Library Science, 1966 MA

University of Minnesota, History, 1964 BA

Iajes Website Redesign, Justin Fan, Nicolas Gibson, Isabelle Hu, Anisha Malani

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

The International Association of Jesuit Engineering and Science Schools (IAJES) connects more than sixty Jesuit institutions worldwide to promote collaboration and shared learning in STEM research. Santa Clara University is one of more than sixty member universities whose faculty and staff participate in conferences and task forces to address priority issues identified by the Society of Jesus. IAJES’ existing website, built on a static no-code platform, limited the organization’s ability to manage content, support member interaction, and scale with its growing global network. Users faced unclear navigation options, a basic design, and no effective tools for managing roles, resources, or …

Jesus-Centered Preaching: A Christocentric Approach Based On The Hermeneutical Implications Of The Gospels As Βίοι., Mark Palmer

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to discover the implied hermeneutic of the Gospels as βίοι and to propose a congruent homiletic. The study addressed the following research questions: What is the genre of the Gospels and the resulting hermeneutic? Does current Christ-centered preaching account for his hermeneutic? Does Christological research account for intrinsic characteristics? What is the intrinsic Christology of Mark’s Gospel? What homiletical process is needed to align with the genre-based hermeneutic of the Gospels? The methodology of this study followed a four-step process: Genre research confirming the Gospels as βίοι, Christological research including the development of an …

Southeastern Librarian 74(1) Spring 2026 (Full Issue), John H. Barnett

The Southeastern Librarian

Complete issue of the Southeastern Librarian, Volume 74 Number 1, Spring 2026

Smart Walker, Viet Ha, Harry Ying, Ayden Dauenhauer

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Traditional walkers provide essential physical support for people recovering from injury, surgery, or reduced mobility, but do not collect objective information about how a person walks. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a SmartWalker system that transforms a standard mobility walker into a portable gait data collection platform. The system integrates Intel RealSense cameras mounted on a walker, NVIDIA Jetson embedded computing units, local storage, and a graphical user interface to record lower-body movement, process video locally, and present clinician-reviewable gait metrics.

The thesis describes the motivation for the monitoring of gait based on walking, the user …

Table Of Contents

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Whiteness Of Wealth & Black Student Loan Debt, Renee Nicole Allen

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

“I Was Well Informed. It Was A Great Advantage”: Pre-Arrival Information Seeking, Information Intelligence, And Immigrants’ Settlement, Nafiz Z. Shuva, Paulette Rothbauer

Publications and Research

This study reports on the role of pre-arrival information seeking and informed decision making in the settlement experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants in Canada. Despite the importance of immigrants in shaping Canada’s future in innovation, economy, and population, this research shows a significant mismatch between immigrants’ expectations and their actual settlement experiences, particularly in terms of their employment. This mismatch can lead to depression, frustration, and anxiety, affecting integration into Canadian society. While there has been a recent increase in immigrants’ settlement information behavior research in LIS, most focus on post-arrival information needs and seeking. Research findings of this study contribute …

Llzk-Symex: Building A Circuit Verification Framework For The Llzk Zero-Knowledge Intermediate Language, Nicolás Iair Schaievitch

Computer Science Senior Theses

The rising adoption of ZK (Zero-Knowledge) technology has led to a plethora of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) for facilitating the development of ZK circuits. At the same time, there has also been an increase in the number of compilation targets for these languages, with different cryptographic foundations and performance optimizations. LLZK, by Veridise, aims to unify the ecosystem by providing a single IR (Intermediate Representation) for the different frontend DSLs, that would then also allow choosing between different backends. Given the high stakes (particularly financial) that a lot of ZK circuits are under, together with their high level of complexity, …

Capturing Large Language Model Similarity Through Spectral Analysis, Ishan Verma Prasad

Computer Science Senior Theses

With the rapid development of open-sourced models on Huggingface, there is a strong need for a way to systematically determine the similarity between models. More strongly, for intellectual property and organization, we need a way to determine the "lineage" of models. We borrow principles from Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization and Random Matrix Theory to provide an inference-free method to accomplish this. We cluster a corpus of several model families by their spectral fingerprints and demonstrate that each model family occupies a distinct region in weight space. This confirms prior ideas of training setups leaving artifacts on model weights and allows us to …

Reliability-Aware Mixture-Of-Agents For Robust Ai-Generated Image Detection, Jake Jump, Yu-Wing Tai

Computer Science Senior Theses

Detecting AI-generated images requires reasoning across multiple levels of evidence, ranging from low-level statistical artifacts to high-level semantic inconsistencies. Existing approaches typically rely on a single class of signals or emphasize complex multi-agent coordination, which limits robustness under distribution shifts and common image degradations. We propose a reliability-aware Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) framework that treats Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents and computational features as complementary experts and aggregates their predictions based on empirically calibrated reliability. Rather than relying on intricate inter-agent reasoning, our approach centers on structured aggregation: high-precision “anchor” agents drive predictions, while weaker but complementary signals are adaptively incorporated to resolve …

Dancing For The People: A Culturally Grounded Learning-To-Rank Framework For Powwow Dance Evaluation, Avery C. Sutherland

Computer Science Senior Theses

Powwow dance is a form of Indigenous expression that combines movement, storytelling, regalia, and community values. Within competition powwows, dancers are evaluated through a highly subjective judging process that often lacks standardized criteria, creating challenges for consistency, transparency, and fairness. This work investigates whether a learning-to-rank framework can model subjective powwow dance preferences while remaining grounded in the cultural context of the practice. To support this research, a new dataset was constructed consisting of 19 Women's Fancy Shawl dancer profiles and 236 pairwise preference labels collected from experienced members of the powwow community. Each dancer profile combines textual descriptions, images, …

Rscore - A Tool For Learning And Quantifying Software Infrastructure Resiliency, Selena Yujia Zhou

Computer Science Senior Theses

As LLMs take over writing code, infrastructure resilience has become the central challenge of software development, especially for gaming applications, where latency, availability, and scale demands are extreme. However, holistic software infrastructure is difficult to understand for casual developers because of the multiple layers of abstraction that make up an application, and the lack of structured information from proprietary companies. This thesis explores the creation of rscore, a tool that quantifies software infrastructure resiliency and subsequently educates developers about the architecture of any existing gaming application. The tool generates two graphical models of a game’s early versus current infrastructure and …

Carbon Accounting And Beyond: An Evidence-Based Life Cycle Assessment Of The Environmental Impacts Of Data Center It Equipment, Meghann Smith, Manveer Mann, Pankaj Lal

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Data centers are essential to modern infrastructure, but are significant contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) and related environmental challenges. Despite energy efficiency improvements, rising electricity demands driven by technologies like AI pose challenges to sustaining low-emission sector growth. Regulatory requirements mandate data center operators to report electricity use and emissions, yet current methods, particularly pertaining to indirect sources, remain insufficient. This study explores how life cycle assessment (LCA)-based estimates of data center IT equipment impacts compared with commonly used corporate GHG accounting methods: average-data and spend-based. Environmental impacts were modeled at both grouped and granular levels to support enterprise-wide reporting …

Blendmo: A Blender Mocap Toolkit, Kelly Lee, Angela Zhou, Dana Steinke

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Motion capture technology is vital for achieving realistic movement in 3D animation, but industry-standard tracking suits and studios remain expensive and inaccessible for students, independent artists, and amateur filmmakers. Consequently, many creators rely on accessible, marker-less motion capture methods, which frequently yield noisy data, scale mismatches between the actor and the rigged model, and unnatural behaviors like foot sliding. To address these technical barriers, this project introduces a free and accessible extension for Blender designed to streamline the cleanup and integration of marker-less motion capture data. It consists of various solutions for methods of combats to motion-captured complications: the keyframe …

Formation Control Of A Multi-Agent System, Benjamin Banh, Paul Lancaster, Daniel Sims

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The primary objective of this project is to design and implement a ROS2-based multi-agent robotic prototype capable of demonstrating aggregation and formation-control behavior in a controlled indoor environment. The project explores how multiple mobile robots can coordinate through decentralized interaction rules, peer state information, and namespaced ROS2 communication rather than relying on a single centralized controller.

The project began with theoretical study and MATLAB/Simulink simulation of artificial potential fields, singleintegrator dynamics, aggregation, desired-distance formation control, and obstacle-repulsion concepts. These simulations provided an idealized environment for evaluating the general behavior of the control strategy before physical hardware limitations were introduced.

The …

Neal Miller V. Joseph Wolk

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Briarwood Affordable, Llc V. Flowers

All Decisions

In this nonpayment proceeding, the court dismissed the petition for failure to plead landlord's receipt of a Division of Alternative Management Programs (DAMP) and Article XI of the Private Housing Finance Law tax incentive administered by HPD, as required by RPAPL §741(4). The omission was prejudicial to tenant because the undisclosed regulatory agreement restricted the monthly rent landlord could legally charge and hampered tenant's ability to determine whether the legal regulated rent was correct. Amendment was not permitted upon a finding of prejudice.

Ogundiran V Spira

All Decisions

In this action for damages against a former landlord, the tenant alleged retaliation under RPL § 223-b along with harassment, invasion of privacy, property damage, nuisance, and emotional distress. The Appellate Division affirms dismissal, holding the tenant failed to allege any retaliatory action protected by RPL § 223-b and that the remaining claims were either time-barred or legally insufficient.

Adaptive Leadership In Performance-Based Budgeting: Overcoming Implementation Barriers In Texas Municipalities, Tracy Rosalies

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

This article examines how adaptive leadership shapes the implementation of performance-based budgeting (PBB) in Texas municipalities. PBB has been promoted as a rational reform linking government spending to measurable results. Through qualitative interviews with two Texas city managers, this article explores how trust, education, and ethical stewardship influence whether performance information is interpreted as meaningful guidance or treated as a compliance task. The findings show that leadership behaviors, rather than measurement systems alone, determine the durability of performance reforms. When leaders create conditions for shared understanding and reflective learning, PBB becomes a collaborative framework that supports fiscal discipline, transparency, and …

Transitioning To Privatization With An Employee-First Approach: The Role Of The Employee Success Team, Hanna E. Andersen

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Convention centers are vital economic and cultural assets, driving commerce, tourism, and local engagement. In addition to hosting conferences and trade shows, they serve as gathering spaces for civic events and community celebrations. Like many municipalities, the City of Waco shifted the Waco Convention Center from direct municipal operation to private management to improve efficiency and service quality. Guided by its commitment to community assets, the city adopted an employee-first approach through its Employee Success Team (EST). The EST addressed the challenges of privatization—such as staff uncertainty and restructuring—by placing employees in roles within the city or with the new …

The Evolution And Impact Of Artificial Intelligence In Municipal Grant Applications And Management, Butch Calvert

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into municipal operations represents a paradigm shift in how local governments approach resource acquisition and management. As municipalities face increasing pressure to secure funding while operating with limited staff and resources, AI technologies offer promising solutions to streamline grant processes, enhance proposal quality, and improve post-award management. This research examines the current landscape of AI applications in municipal grant writing, application preparation, and post-award management, exploring both the transformative potential and the challenges that accompany these technological innovations

Holistic Strategies For Optimizing Municipal It Operations And Cost Efficiency, Joseph Yazdanpanahi

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Municipalities work to deliver secure and impactful IT (information technology) services while often working within tight budget constraints. To address this problem, this article offers an experience-based and comprehensive framework to optimize municipal IT operations. It emphasizes leveraging automation, streamlining hardware and software management, and forging strategic partnerships to drive cost savings and efficiency gains. Designed to equip municipal IT leaders with practical tools and insights, this article aims to help modernize IT processes.

Rlf Nazareth Llc V. York Rsg International Ltd

2026 Decisions

USDC for the District Court of the Virgin Islands

Residential Ai Data Centers: Security, Privacy, And Governance Concerns, Alan Saquella

Publications

The concept of placing mini data centers and distributed AI computer nodes inside residential homes may appear innovative from an energy efficiency perspective, but it introduces significant security, privacy, governance, and liability concerns. What is effectively occurring is the expansion of commercial and potentially critical infrastructure into lightly protected residential environments.

Once a residence becomes part of a distributed computer grid supporting hyper-scalers, AI providers, or enterprise workloads, the home is no longer simply a private residence. It becomes a commercial technology asset, a potential cyber target, and even a physical target. A distributed network of thousands of residential nodes …

Wearable Hazard Detection System For The Visually Impaired, Nolan Daly, Sergio Diaz, Brandon Ng

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

This project presents a wearable assistive system designed to help blind or visually impaired people navigate their surroundings more safely. The system uses a Raspberry Pi 5 connected to Camera Module 3 (NoIR Wide) sensors to capture a wide field of view. Real-time object detection is performed using a lightweight YOLOv8 model, and a redundancy-based merging algorithm combines detections across cameras to improve reliability. By requiring agreement between multiple cameras, the system reduces false positives and increases confidence in identifying obstacles.

The device is designed to operate in real time and provide reliable feedback about nearby hazards, helping users make …

Government Documents For All, Tim Dodge

The Southeastern Librarian

The Government Documents for All column for the Spring 2026 issue of The Southeastern Librarian