Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Covid-19 On User Perceptions Of Public Transit, Shared Mobility/Micro-Mobility Services, And Emerging Vehicle Types, Konstantina Gkritza, Ricardo Chahine

Center for Connected and Automated Transportation

No abstract provided.

Intensification Differentially Affects The Delivery Of Multiple Ecosystem Services In Subtropical And Temperate Grasslands, Shishir Paudel, Nuria Gomez-Casanovas, Elizabeth H. Boughton, Samuel D. Chamberlain, Pradeep Wagle, Brekke L. Peterson, Rajen Bajgain, Patrick J. Starks, Jefferey Basara, Carl J. Bernacchi, Evan H. Delucia, Laura E. Goodman, Prasanna H. Gowda, Ryan Reuter, Jed P. Sparks, Hilary M. Swain, Xiangming Xiao, Jean L. Steiner

United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Faculty Publications

Intensification, the process of intensifying land management to enhance agricultural goods, results in “intensive” pastures that are planted with productive grasses and fertilized. These intensive pastures provide essential ecosystem services, including forage production for livestock. Understanding the synergies and tradeoffs of pasture intensification on the delivery of services across climatic regions is crucial to shape policies and incentives for better management of natural resources. Here, we investigated how grassland intensification affects key components of provisioning (forage productivity and quality), supporting (plant diversity) and regulating services (CO2 and CH4 fluxes) by comparing these services between intensive versus extensive pastures in subtropical …

Integrative Analyses Of Genomic And Metabolomic Data Reveal Molecular Mechanisms Associated With Uterine Disease Traits In Transitioning Dairy Cattle, Leanna C. Sanchez, Mohammed Abo-Ismail, Daniel Peterson, Fernando Campos-Chillon

Master's Theses

The metritis complex (MC), characterizing post-partum uterine diseases in dairy cattle has negative implications on animal welfare, production efficiency, and the economic stability of the dairy industry. The studies in this thesis aimed to investigate the genetic architecture of the metritis complex and identify genomic regions and metabolites associated with the development of MC. Thereby enhancing our understanding of the biological pathways and molecular mechanisms involved in the pathophysiology of MC during the transition period in Jersey and Holstein dairy cattle.

Chapter 2 sheds light on the previous work done on MC. The goals of this review were to (1) …

Direct Election, Bureaucratic Appointment, And Local Government Responsiveness In Taiwan, Sara A. Newland

Government: Faculty Publications

Does local democracy induce better service to citizens? While elected officials can be punished at the ballot box if they fail to address citizens’ needs, appointed bureaucrats may have policy knowledge that enables them to better serve citizens. Employing a multimethod design, this paper uses variation in local political institutions in Taiwan to assess the relative merits of direct election and bureaucratic appointment for local government responsiveness. While democratic institutions are often thought to induce responsiveness, I find that in Taiwan, with its historically strong bureaucracy and relatively new democratic institutions, the picture is somewhat more complicated. Elected and appointed …

Transactional And Transformational Leadership In The Superintendency: A Phenomenological Study Of Three Upper Peninsula Superintendents’ Experiences, Lisa A. Coombs-Gerou

All NMU Master's Theses

This study aimed to analyze and provide an understanding of how three rural public school superintendents in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan practiced transformational leadership. Transformational leadership includes the elements of idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration (Burns, 1978). Transformational superintendents must lead our schools to provide students with the best educational opportunity. The study focused on the superintendents experiences in deciding to become a superintendent, their beliefs about leadership, and how they approached decisions through a transactional or transformational process. The study also sought to provide insight into the relationship with their school board and how …

A Pilot Machine Learning Algorithm Detecting Security Breaches In Python, Young B. Choi

KAUPA Letters

This paper demonstrates how ChatGPT can be utilized to detect security breaches. The questions were tested by referencing the NVB (National Vulnerability Database) of NIST (National Institute of Technology). The experiment showed that the level of refinement of the question and its exactness according to the use’s requirements are very important to get the desired results. The possibility of automatic programming using Python was also identified. The experiment showed that using diverse types of security databases around the world, the machine learning algorithm designed by ChatGPT can improve the capabilities of security breaches detection further toward a generic machine learning …

Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Americana, And Pax Sinica Wannabe: Implications For Concerned Koreans, Yeomin Yoon

KAUPA Letters

No abstract provided.

Optimal Domain-Partitioning Algorithm For Real-Life Transportation Networks And Finite Element Meshes, Jimesh Bhagatji, Sharanabasaweshwara Asundi, Eric Thompson, Duc T. Nguyen

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

For large-scale engineering problems, it has been generally accepted that domain-partitioning algorithms are highly desirable for general-purpose finite element analysis (FEA). This paper presents a heuristic numerical algorithm that can efficiently partition any transportation network (or any finite element mesh) into a specified number of subdomains (usually depending on the number of parallel processors available on a computer), which will result in “minimising the total number of system BOUNDARY nodes” (as a primary criterion) and achieve “balancing work loads” amongst the subdomains (as a secondary criterion). The proposed seven-step heuristic algorithm (with enhancement features) is based on engineering common sense …

From Loss To Hope: A New Story For A Generation, Rogelio Paquini

Journal of Adventist Youth and Young Adult Ministries

Certain events in history change the story of a generation. Wars, terrorist attacks, and COVID-19 are examples of such events. For this generation of young people, already suffering from the highest levels of depression and anxiety in history, the pandemic carved on their minds a narrative of despair and a dim future. Members of Generation Z, especially those in high school during the pandemic and younger members of the generation, had been affected the most. Studies on neuroscience have discovered the ability of the brain to be re-molded. Through the Scriptures God had shown his intention to change the story …

The Ideal Spanish Candidate: The Effects Of Gender On The Electability Of Religious Candidates, Arabella Smith

Undergraduate Honors Theses

While the existing literature illustrates that voters living in Western countries are likely to elect female candidates and less likely to elect minority non-Christian candidates, literature has not yet addressed how the intersectionality of gender and religion affect voter preference. In this paper, I investigate how a candidate’s gender and religion interact to affect their likelihood of being elected. I use vignettes in a conjoint survey experiment of Spanish voters to show voter preference across two intersecting identities: gender and religion. I find that female Muslim candidates are significantly more electable than male Muslim candidates. This contributes to the body …

Commentary On The Special Issue: Seeing Self-Based Methodology Through A Philosophical Lens, Elizabeth Suazo-Flores, Signe E. Kastberg, Melva Grant, Olive Chapman

Teaching, Leadership & Professional Practice Faculty Publications

A mathematics teacher educator’s (MTE) use of self-based methodologies goes beyond developing MTE professional knowledge by contributing scholarly inquiry into MTE work. Existing discussions of MTEs’ use of self-based methodologies have provided descriptions of the methodologies and examples of their use by MTEs to unpack their practice. What is less clear is why MTEs elect to use self-based methodologies. Yet central to understanding and validating self-based methodologies as a means of developing knowledge in mathematics teacher education is understanding the aims of MTEs who use such methodologies. On the basis of author interviews, drafts, and final papers for this special …

Survival Homicide, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Cardozo Law Review

A significant number of women who are incarcerated in American prisons for homicide offenses have been subjected to various forms of domestic abuse, including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. This Article coins the term “survival homicide” to refer to cases where survivors of substantial and repeated domestic abuse kill abusive intimate partners or other abusive family members in circumstances where the abuse significantly contributed to their act. Abuse survivors are often prosecuted for murder and are over-punished by the criminal legal system.

Existing legal frameworks underlying survival homicide rest on exercising considerable discretion by various institutional actors, including prosecutors, juries, …

A Proportionality Analysis Should Govern Home Rule Disputes, Darien Shanske, David A. Carrillo

Cardozo Law Review

Despite more than a century of reform, state constitutional law governing the state–local relationship remains unsatisfactory. Current doctrine governing intrastate federalism struggles with the same issues as the more familiar interstate federalism doctrine does: in both contexts courts have failed to choose between categorization and balancing. Two recent trends highlight this unsatisfactory pocket of state constitutional jurisprudence. One is hyperpreemption, where punitive state laws override local regulations and invade traditional zones of local police power. The other pressure point is the nationwide housing crisis, which provokes intrastate conflict when state governments act to preempt local zoning to permit more, denser, …

The End Of Government Speech, G. Alex Sinha

Cardozo Law Review

Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court created the government-speech doctrine to protect certain forms of government action against First Amendment challenges. The government must speak to govern, the thinking goes, and the First Amendment regulates private rather than governmental speech. Therefore, government action that is classified as “government speech” should not be vulnerable to free-speech claims. The doctrine has since been used accordingly, vaccinating certain government programs against the First Amendment. For example, the doctrine has insulated regulations banning federally funded medical providers from counseling patients about abortion; advertising campaigns spearheaded by the federal government; state-level choices about which specialty …

The Forgotten Jurisprudence Of Parole And State Constitutional Doctrines Of Vagueness, Kristen Bell

Cardozo Law Review

The majority of carceral sentences in the United States include the possibility of discretionary release on parole. Most such sentences, however, are unconstitutionally vague. Their unconstitutionality has gone unnoticed because contemporary scholarship and litigation about vague laws have focused on the U.S. Constitution in lieu of state constitutions. This Article unearths historic state court decisions holding that sentences that end through the discretionary judgment of a parole board are “void for uncertainty.” Although state void for uncertainty doctrines share some similarity with the federal vagueness doctrine, they are far more demanding as applied to criminal punishment. By urging revival of …

A No Man’S Land Of Fair Use: Marano V. The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Sarah Landry

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

How To Alleviate The Repercussions Of Wrongful Convictions: Holistically Righting The Wrongs Of Inadequate Compensation Statutes, Marissa Cohen

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Offense: Why The First Amendment Does Not Protect Deliberate Misgendering, Molly Dower

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Inventing Deportation Arrests, Lindsay Nash

Articles

At the dawn of the federal deportation system, the nation’s top immigration official proclaimed the power to authorize deportation arrests “an extraordinary one” to vest in administrative officers. He reassured the nation that this immense power—then wielded by a cabinet secretary, the only executive officer empowered to authorize these arrests—was exercised with “great care and deliberation.” A century later, this extraordinary power is legally trivial and systemically exercised by low-level enforcement officers alone. Consequently, thousands of these officers—the police and jailors of the immigration system— now have the power to solely determine whether deportation arrests are justified and, therefore, whether …

Multi-Head Attention Graph Convolutional Network Model: End-To-End Entity And Relation Joint Extraction Based On Multi-Head Attention Graph Convolutional Network, Zhihua Tao, Chunping Ouyang, Yongbin Liu, Tonglee Chung, Yixin Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

At present, the entity and relation joint extraction task has attracted more and more scholars' attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP). However, most of their methods rely on NLP tools to construct dependency trees to obtain sentence structure information. The adjacency matrix constructed by the dependency tree can convey syntactic information. Dependency trees obtained through NLP tools are too dependent on the tools and may not be very accurate in contextual semantic description. At the same time, a large amount of irrelevant information will cause redundancy. This paper presents a novel end-to-end entity and relation joint extraction …

Strategic Planning For Flexible Agent Availability In Large Taxi Fleets, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large scale multi-agent systems like taxi fleets, individual agents (taxi drivers) are self interested (maximizing their own profits) and this can introduce inefficiencies in the system. One such inefficiency is with regards to the "required" availability of taxis at different time periods during the day. Since a taxi driver can work for limited number of hours in a day (e.g., 8-10 hours in a city like Singapore), there is a need to optimize the specific hours, so as to maximize individual as well as social welfare. Technically, this corresponds to solving a large scale multi-stage selfish routing game with …

How To Resuscitate A Sick Vm In The Cloud, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A guest virtual machine in a cloud platform may fall “sick” when its kernel encounters a fatal low-level bug or is subverted by an adversary. The VM owner is hence likely to lose her control over it due to a kernel hang or being denied of remote accesses. While the VM can be rebooted with the assistance from the cloud server, the owner not only faces service disruption but also is left with no opportunity to make an in-depth diagnosis and forensics on the spot, not to mention a live rectification. Currently, the cloud service provider has neither incentive nor …

Livoauth: Liveness Detection In Voiceprint Authentication With Random Challenges And Detection Modes, Rui Zhang, Zheng Yan, Xueru Wang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Voiceprint authentication provides great convenience to users in many application scenarios. However, it easily suffers from spoofing attacks including speech synthesis, speech conversion, and speech replay. Liveness detection is an effective way to resist these attacks. But existing methods suffer from many disadvantages, such as extra deployment costs due to precise data collection, environmental disturbance, high computational overhead, and operational complexity. A uniform platform that can offer voiceprint authentication as a service (VAaS) over the cloud is also lacked. Hence, it is imperative to design an economic and effective method for liveness detection in voiceprint authentication. In this article, we …

Evading Deepfake Detectors Via Adversarial Statistical Consistency, Yang Hou, Qing Guo, Yihao Huang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, as various realistic face forgery techniques known as DeepFake improves by leaps and bounds, more and more DeepFake detection techniques have been proposed. These methods typically rely on detecting statistical differences between natural (i.e., real) and DeepFake-generated images in both spatial and frequency domains. In this work, we propose to explicitly minimize the statistical differences to evade state-of-the-art DeepFake detectors. To this end, we propose a statistical consistency attack (StatAttack) against DeepFake detectors, which contains two main parts. First, we select several statistical-sensitive natural degradations (i.e., exposure, blur, and noise) and add them to the fake images …

Groundnlq @ Ego4d Natural Language Queries Challenge 2023, Zhijian Hou, Lei Ji, Difei Gao, Wanjun Zhong, Kun Yan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Nan Duan, Mike Zheng Shou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this report, we present our champion solution for Ego4D Natural Language Queries (NLQ) Challenge in CVPR 2023. Essentially, to accurately ground in a video, an effective egocentric feature extractor and a powerful grounding model are required. Motivated by this, we leverage a two-stage pre-training strategy to train egocentric feature extractors and the grounding model on video narrations, and further fine-tune the model on annotated data. In addition, we introduce a novel grounding model GroundNLQ, which employs a multi-modal multiscale grounding module for effective video and text fusion and various temporal intervals, especially for long videos. On the blind test …

Lessons Learned From The Hospital To Home Community Care Program In Singapore And The Supporting Ai Multiple Readmissions Prediction Model, John Abisheganaden, Kheng Hock Lee, Lian Leng Low, Eugene Shum, Han Leong Goh, Christine Gia Lee Ang, Adny An Ta Wee, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a prior practice and policy article published in Healthcare Science, we introduced the deployed application of an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict longer-term inpatient readmissions to guide community care interventions for patients with complex conditions in the context of Singapore's Hospital to Home (H2H) program that has been operating since 2017. In this follow on practice and policy article, we further elaborate on Singapore's H2H program and care model, and its supporting AI model for multiple readmission prediction, in the following ways: (1) by providing updates on the AI and supporting information systems, (2) by reporting on customer …

Tracing The Twenty-Year Evolution Of Developing Ai For Eye Screening In Singapore: A Master Chronology Of Sidrp, Selena+ And Eyris, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This working paper is entirely comprised of a timeline table that begins in 2002 and runs through mid-2023. Across these two decades, this timeline traces the evolutionary development of the following:

• The early Singapore R&D efforts to apply software-based image analysis algorithms and methods to analyse eye retina images for diabetic retinopathy and other eye diseases. This was based on a collaboration between the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) and its parent organization, the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC), with faculty from the School of Computing at National University of Singapore.
• The establishment and operation of the Singapore Integrated Diabetic …

Class-Incremental Exemplar Compression For Class-Incremental Learning, Zilin Luo, Yaoyao Liu, Bernt Schiele, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Exemplar-based class-incremental learning (CIL) finetunes the model with all samples of new classes but few-shot exemplars of old classes in each incremental phase, where the "few-shot" abides by the limited memory budget. In this paper, we break this "few-shot" limit based on a simple yet surprisingly effective idea: compressing exemplars by downsampling non-discriminative pixels and saving "many-shot" compressed exemplars in the memory. Without needing any manual annotation, we achieve this compression by generating 0-1 masks on discriminative pixels from class activation maps (CAM). We propose an adaptive mask generation model called class-incremental masking (CIM) to explicitly resolve two difficulties of …

Distpreserv: Maintaining User Distribution For Privacy-Preserving Location-Based Services, Yanbing Ren, Xinghua Li, Yinbin Miao, Robert H. Deng, Jian Weng, Siqi Ma, Jianfeng Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location-Based Services (LBSs) are one of the most frequently used mobile applications in the modern society. Geo-Indistinguishability (Geo-Ind) is a promising privacy protection model for LBSs since it can provide formal security guarantees for location privacy. However, Geo-Ind undermines the statistical location distribution of users on the LBS server because of perturbed locations, thereby disabling the server to provide distribution-based services (e.g., traffic congestion maps). To overcome this issue, we give a privacy definition, called DistPreserv, to enable the LBS server to acquire valid location distributions while providing users with strict location protection. Then we propose a privacy-preserving LBS scheme …

Determination Of Fungal And Parasitic Infections Caused Vaginitis: Molecular Identification Of Candida Parapsilosis In Al-Nasiriyah City, Iraq, Enas R. Alwaily, Mohammed H. Flaih, Meethaq S. Abood, Khwam R. Hussein

Baghdad Science Journal

The current study aims to determine the prevalence of Trichomonas vaginalis and Candida spp., and also to identify Candida parapsilosis and some virulence genes. It was conducted in Bint Al-Hoda Hospital of Maternity and Children in Thi-Qar province, south of Iraq for the period from the beginning of January to the end of December 2020. Two hundred and fifty samples were collected from the female genital tract for women whose age ranged between 17-50 years. Microscopic, traditional and molecular tests were used in the sample examination. The results recorded 12 (4.8%) samples infected with T. vaginalis parasite, whereas 130 (52%) …