Digital Commons Network^™

Human Factors In Visual Attention: Gender Differences In Engagement With Male-Oriented Ads, Mohamed Basel Almourad, Emad Bataineh, Zelal Wattar, Mohammed Hussain

All Works

In today's competitive market, it is increasingly important to understand how visual design shapes customer behaviour. This study examines the decision drivers influencing female customers' purchase choices when buying male-oriented products as gifts, identifying the visual components of advertisements that attract them by analysing the relationship between purchase intention and visual attention. Results show that participants with higher purchase intent focused more on product imagery and branding, indicating that visual appeal, perceived quality, and brand familiarity significantly guide their decisions, with brand awareness speeding up decision-making by reducing the need for repeated visual checks. Conversely, those with low purchase intent …

Towards A Context-Aware Driving Assistance System (Ca-Das): Advancing Intelligent Vehicular Safety Through Multimodal Context Integration, Fatma Outay, Siham Farrag, Anjum Zameer, Ansar Yassar

All Works

Driving-related behavioural factors are responsible for 90% of traffic collisions. The rapid growth of urbanization and the complexity of the traffic conditions demand a smart, efficient, and flexible transportation system. The advancement of transportation through technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI have reshaped the way that drivers interact with their vehicles and the surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive Context-Aware Driving Assistance System (CA-DAS) that employs sensor fusion, semantic context modelling, along with a machine-learning-based approach to provide personalised and proactive driving assistance across dynamic scenarios. The proposed CA-ADS was developed using a …

Exploring The Potential Of Renewable Energy For Sustainable Mobility: A Simulation- Based Study Of Hydrogen Vehicle Penetration In Oman’S Road Network, Siham Farrag, Tarek R. Sheltami, Fatma Outay, Ansar Ul Haque Yasar

All Works

Hydrogen fuel is gaining attention as a promising zero-emission energy source, aligning with global sustainability goals and supporting the transition to zero carbon emissions. This study examines the potential of using hydrogen as an alternative fuel for sustainable mobility in Muscat, Oman. We developed an integrated modelling framework that combines microscopic traffic simulation, energy demand modeling, refueling infrastructure station’ estimation, and well-to-wheel (WTW) emissions evaluation. A microscopic simulation software (SUMO) was applied to evaluate the penetration rate of hydrogen-powered vehicles (0%, 20%, 40%, 60%) with different hydrogen production pathways. Results indicate that with a 60% penetration of green hydrogen, total …

Machine Learning For Wearable Sensor-Based Human Movement Rehabilitation: A Five-Year Systematic Review, Yassine Benachour, Farid Flitti, Lina Maloukh, Aicha Beya Far, Elhocine Boutellaa, Mohamed Bentoumi, Marwa Chendeb El Rai, Nour Aburaed, Khaled Ali, Moez Rehman, Sultan Mosleh, Rania Dghaim, Sadok Bouamama

All Works

Wearable-sensor-based human movement analysis is an increasingly important component of digital health and rehabilitation, enabling objective monitoring and data-driven personalization of therapy. In parallel, machine learning (ML) methods have rapidly expanded for interpreting multimodal movement signals, yet the evidence base remains heterogeneous and difficult to benchmark. This PRISMA-guided systematic review synthesizes recent ML approaches for wearable human motion analysis in rehabilitation-oriented health applications. We searched IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and Scopus for English-language studies published from 2021 to 2025 and extracted information on sensor modalities, ML task formulations and model families, dataset characteristics, validation protocols, and reported performance metrics, together with …

Low-Energy Co2 Sequestration Via Palm Waste Biochar Activated With Carbide Lime For Mineral Carbonation Of Industrial Wastes, Maisa El Gamal, Ameera F. Mohammad, Basim Abu-Jdayil, Imen Ben Salem, Suhaib Hameedi

All Works

A sustainable method for enhancing CO₂ capture and sequestration was developed by accelerating the carbonation of alkaline industrial wastes using carbide lime-activated biochar (BC(CLW)), an alkaline by-product of acetylene production. The biochar was produced from palm tree waste through slow pyrolysis at 400 °C, followed by activation with carbide lime slurry to enhance its alkalinity, surface basic sites, and reactivity toward CO₂. Three industrial residues, namely ladle furnace slag (LF), baghouse dust (BH), and cyclone silo dust (CD), were blended with 0, 5, 7, and 10 wt. % BC(CLW) and carbonated under ambient conditions. Characterization by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier-transform …

A Preliminary Exploratory Assessment Of Chatgpt To Generating Stride Data Flow Diagrams, Hassan Alsayegh, Mohamed El-Attar

All Works

Threat modeling is a core activity in security-by-design practices, enabling early identification of architectural weaknesses before system implementation. The drawings used during STRIDE analysis are typically Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs), referred to as “STRIDE diagrams” in this paper. STRIDE diagrams provide a visual approach for categorizing security threats; however, constructing accurate STRIDE diagrams require experience and is often time-consuming. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, raise important questions about their suitability for supporting structured security modeling tasks. This study presents a preliminary exploratory assessment of ChatGPT’s ability to generate, analyse, and iteratively refine STRIDE diagrams from …

Cliffinsight: An Educational Web Application That Visualizes The Calculation Of Effect-Sizes Using Cliff's Delta, Mohamed El-Attar, Ahmed Shuhaiber, Rima Grati, Sarah Kohail

All Works

The purpose of calculating effect sizes in statistics is to quantify the practical significance of observed differences beyond mere statistical significance. While standardized mean difference measures such as Cohen’s d are widely used, they require normally distributed data, an assumption frequently violated in educational and social science research. Non-parametric alternatives such as Cliff’s delta (δ) are more robust under these conditions yet remain underused due to perceived computational complexity and limited accessible resources. Existing web-based tools for Cliff’s delta function primarily as numerical calculators and do not expose the underlying dominance structure that gives the statistic its meaning. This paper …

From Image To Insight: Evaluating Llm Accuracy In Understanding Uml Use Case Diagrams With Claude, Mohamed El-Attar, Yasser Khan, Mahmood Niazi, Sajjad Mahmood, Mohammad Alshayeb

All Works

UML use case diagrams are a prominent artefact of requirements engineering, capturing the functional scope of a software system in terms of actors, use cases, and their stereotyped relationships. The emergence of multimodal large language models with image understanding capabilities raises the question of whether such models can reliably extract structured construct-level information from use case diagram images. This paper reports an empirical evaluation of Claude on the task of counting 14 notational construct types from a corpus of 78 computer-generated UML use case diagrams, assessed against manually verified ground truth annotations. Results reveal a strongly differentiated accuracy profile: Claude …

Mapping Multiclass-Targeted Hate Speech In Online Discourse: An Open Dataset, Sanaa Kaddoura, Sumaia Al-Kohlani

All Works

Online social networks have become central spaces for public discourse, where hostile and discriminatory language toward social groups can cause psychological and social consequences for marginalized communities. Although multiple public hate speech datasets are available, many rely on binary categorization practices that obscure linguistic, cultural, and contextual variation across targeted groups. As a result, minority and less visible forms of hate speech remain insufficiently documented and analyzed. This discussion paper examines methodological limitations in existing hate speech annotation schemes and presents a re-annotation framework applied to the HatEval2019 dataset. The proposed framework introduces target-specific multiclass labels that distinguish subcategories of …

Lower Suicidal Ideation Linked To Easier Access To Urban Green Spaces During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Nationwide Study In Japan, Zheng Xian, Tomoki Nakaya, Clive E. Sabel, Ryo Okubo, Kun Liu, Jinguang Zhang, Takahiro Tabuchi

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Urban green spaces (UGSs) have been linked to improved mental health and lower suicide rates, yet their protective role during large-scale crises remains underexplored. We examined associations of UGS accessibility with long-term and pandemic induced new-onset suicidal ideation during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in urban Japan, using data from a nationwide health survey of 17,376 participants (August 2020). Modified Poisson regression models estimated prevalence ratios (PRs) for suicidal ideation by UGS accessibility (area, number, and type) within 5, 10, and 15-minute walking thresholds from home, controlling for individual and area-level confounders. UGS accessibility exhibited dose-response relationships with …

Direct And Indirect Metal Contamination Of Estuarine Sediments By Boat Paint Particles, Andrew Turner, Ho Kwan Cheung

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Surface and subsurface estuarine sediments close to a cluster of abandoned boats have been fractionated (between <250 and 5000 μm) and analysed microscopically for paint particles. Paints were encountered in all samples, with concentrations calculated for whole sediment samples up to 1450 per kg (dry weight). X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis of paint particles retained by the coarsest (>5000 μm) size fraction revealed heterogeneous concentrations of Ba, Cu, Pb, Sn and Zn that reflect pigments and antifoulants used in various recent and historical antifouling and above waterline boat paints. Analysis of sediments by XRF revelated heterogeneous distributions of these metals between locations, size fractions and depths, and among replicate measurements at different positions of the same sample. Consequently, no relationship with grain size (evaluated using Rb as a proxy) was evident and concentrations often greatly exceeded predicted effect levels for sediments. Re-analysis …

Assessing The Application Of Optical-Photothermal Infrared Spectroscopy For Single-Grain Chemical Palynology, Laura Scoble, Hao Meng, Simon J. Ussher, Mark F. Fitzsimons, Lauren Ansell, Mustafa Kansiz, Billy Simmonds, Nick Stone, Ralph M. Fyfe

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Single-grain pollen analysis is essential for advancing chemical palynology, which classifies morphologically similar taxa based on taxon-specific pollen and sporopollenin chemistry. Fourier-Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and microspectroscopy (μFT-IR) are widely used to differentiate morphologically similar grains but face limitations from Mie scattering and coarse spatial resolution. Here, we present the first application of Optical-PhotoThermal Infrared (O-PTIR) spectroscopy to chemically treated single pollen grains, using Molinia caerulea as a model taxon to fully test and evaluate the technical capabilities and limitations of this technique. O-PTIR achieves sub-micron “super-resolution” infrared spectroscopy through non-contact, non-destructive measurements by exploiting the photothermal effect. O-PTIR spectra …

Right Child In The Right Place: A Mixed-Method Case Study Of Plymouth City Council’S Placement Decision Systems, Leetice Taylor, Sheena Asthana, Oliver Beer, Cath Quinn

School of Health Professions

This research aims to understand how to reduce the use, and cost of inappropriate placements for Plymouth’s children in care. The number of children in care in England is rising, and local authorities are under pressure to find a suitable home within their local area for children in care, where appropriate. Local authorities are paying unsustainable costs for placements where children are facing potential negative outcomes. This research will synthesise information from academic literature, financial and demographic data, council staff, children in care and carers to understand best practice in placing children in the right place and driving down costs. …

Ottoman Wikālas In Cairo: Islamic Architecture Beyond The Mosque, Yumna Moussa

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces one of the largest architectural typologies in Cairo: the wikāla, a type of urban caravanserai unique to Egypt. Estimated to have reached more than five hundred buildings by the 18^th century, the wikāla was the building of choice for most patrons in Ottoman Cairo. This study initially investigates the evolution of commercial architecture within the Islamic city. It then explores the defining architectural features of Cairene wikālas built between the 16^th and 18^th centuries—their plans, decorative/iconographic programs, and urban distribution—based on waqfiyyas, chronicles, travelers’ accounts, and photographic archives. Since many of …

Chronofy: A Temporal-Logical Decay Architecture For Information Validity In Time-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Muntaser Syed, Marius Silaghi, Sheikh Abujar, Sharun Akter

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve and integrate external knowledge to ground large language model (LLM) outputs. However, current RAG architectures treat all retrieved facts as equally valid regardless of temporal provenance, leading to temporal hallucination, where plausible but obsolete facts corrupt the output. A clinical lab reading from yesterday is actionable; the same reading from six months ago is noise. We present Chronofy, a three-layer neuro-symbolic framework implementing the Temporal-Logical Decay Architecture (TLDA) that embeds temporal validity directly into the representation, retrieval, and reasoning layers of RAG systems. Layer 1 reserves a dedicated temporal subspace within Matryoshka embeddings to make …

Epistemic Edge: Subjective Logic Guardrails For Llm-Driven Iot Actuation, Muntaser Syed, Marius Silaghi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

Deploying large language models (LLMs) as decision-making agents in safety-critical Internet of Things (IoT) systems introduces risks that purely behavioral guardrails, such as action whitelists, cannot fully address. This paper presents Epistemic Edge, a four-tier neuro-symbolic pipeline that augments LLM-driven actuation with subjective logic (SL) uncertainty quantification, temporal decay, and dual guardrails combining epistemic threshold checks with behavioral whitelists. We evaluate seven locally-deployed models: three PrismML Bonsai 1-bit models (1.7B, 4B, 8B), three 4-bit quantized models (Qwen3-8B, Llama 3.2-3B, Phi-3.5-mini), and the DeepSeek-R18B reasoning model, across eight ablation conditions and five IoT actuation scenarios (2,800 controlled trials). We further validate …

Does My Job Love Me? - A Story Of Transforming While Investigating Newly Qualified Teachers’ Knowledge Of And Practices In Early Reading., Ali Beaman

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences Theses

For nearly 50 years, a vast amount of evidence shows that a Phonological Awareness (PA) deficit is a primary risk factor for reading difficulties (Wagner and Torgesen, 1978 and Kilpatrick, 2012, 2016, 2019). The initial aim of my research in early 2019 was to investigate, over a period of a year, Newly Qualified Teachers’ (NQTs’) knowledge of and practices in early reading, with a specific focus on NQTs' knowledge and understanding of PA. Policy for Education in England requires all teachers to show effective early reading education (Rose, 2009 and Department for Education and Employment, 1998a). According to the Teachers’ …

Improving Primary Initial Teacher Training (Itt) Trainees’ Confidence In Mathematics Teaching, Pinar Gumus

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences Theses

This research aimed to investigate how primary ITT trainees’ confidence in teaching mathematics could be improved through the curriculum coherence approach. A convergent mixed-method case study design was employed, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data from undergraduate trainees over three years via questionnaires. University mathematics tutors and selected school-based mentors were also interviewed using a semi-structured format.Following the analysis of the first year’s questionnaires, a new mathematics curriculum was designed for the second year of the study. As required by DfE and Ofsted, teaching plans and resources incorporated conceptual mathematics techniques, theory-practice links, and the Core Content Framework (CCF). The …

Legal Semiotics, Political Ontology, & Merging Chronotopes Of Identity Through The Federation Of Aboriginal Nations Of The Americas, Kevin T. Inglesby

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation studies the concept of self-determination related to a confederation known as the Federation of Aboriginal Nations of the Americas. It addresses three main questions: How does FANA represent an institution of legal cooperation? In what ways does cultural capital become reproduced? And what are key principles for the Federations’ code of unity? Self-determination is a core principle of international law and may be identified through treaties and social conventions like Wunnandry. The study explores an interdisciplinary approach to American Indian selfdetermination through a focus on applied anthropology, cultural heritage, and Peircean legal semiotics to problematize some historical approaches …

Searching For Nooks And Crannies: Geometric And Mechanistic Perspectives On Transformer Language Model Interpretability, Anna Marbut

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic capabilities, but the internal mechanisms driving their performance and behavior remain poorly understood. This dissertation investigates the interpretability of transformer-based language models from two complementary perspectives: the geometric organization of model internals in encoder-only models, and the mechanisms underlying safety behavior in decoder-only generative models.

In Part I, we address the challenge of measuring geometric properties in high-dimensional latent spaces, proposing and evaluating alternative measures of data spread that improve upon commonly used metrics. We then apply these measures alongside quantization-based metrics to examine the relationship between latent space geometry and downstream …

Advancing Understanding Of Lived Experience Of Unhoused People To Reduce Social Stigma And Promote Community Health: A Theoretically-Guided Photovoice Study, B-Rad Stephen Applegate

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Homelessness is a persistent public health challenge shaped by structural inequities, stigma, and exclusion from social and health systems. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) has increasingly been used to center the knowledge of people who are unhoused, yet limited attention has been given to the theoretical frameworks guiding this work across disciplines. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine theories and methods used in CBPR with unhoused populations and to explore the extension of Margaret Newman’s Theory of Health as Expanding Consciousness from a nursing-focused theory to a public health framework for understanding lived experience.

Using a scoping review methodology …

Between Care And Protection: Constraints On Political Authority In Kamala Harris's 2024 Presidential Campaign, Marissa Barbara Pax

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Competing expectations about strength, care, and protection shape how presidential leadership and authority are constructed in contemporary U.S. politics, particularly for members of marginalized communities. This thesis examines Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign as a case study to explore how candidates negotiate competing understandings of political authority through appeals to Lakoff’s (2002, 2008) Strict Father Morality and the Nurturant Parent Morality. An analysis of her campaign reveals that Harris repeatedly appeals to both moral frameworks, constructing authority through empathy, mutual responsibility, and care while also emphasizing threat identification, protection, discipline, and moral strength. Although Harris successfully mobilizes the rhetorical resources …

The Experience Of A Single Parent Participating In Child-Parent Relationship Therapy: An Instrumental Single-Case Study, Matthew Nicholas Schramm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traditional family structures in the United States have shifted significantly, with single-parent households facing systemic barriers that increase parental stress and strain the parent-child relationship. As this bond is critical for healthy child development, accessible mental health support is essential for these families (Parache et al., 2023).

Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT), a ten-week evidence-based program, strengthens this bond by training caregivers to use play as a therapeutic tool (Landreth & Bratton, 2020). This instrumental single case study (Stake, 1995) examined one single-parent's experience of CPRT delivered in a condensed four-week telehealth format, addressing the limited representation of single-parent households …

Enhancing Market Transparency Through Co-Creation Of Csr And Sustainability Ratings Between Firms, Rating Agencies And Customers, Christopher Agyapong Siaw

Plymouth Business School

No abstract provided.

Dampened Social Motivation In Dysphoria: The Role Of Negative Social Expectancies And Internal Causal Attribution Style, Julie L Ji, Nilly Mor, Colin Macleod

School of Psychology

Dysphoria is associated with dampening of social interaction intention, but the cognitive mechanisms that underpin this relationship are under-investigated. This study tested the hypothesis that heightened negative social expectancies mediate the association between dysphoria and dampened social motivation. Additionally, it tested the hypothesis that the association between dysphoria and negative social expectancies is mediated by an attribution style bias that attributes negative, but not positive, outcomes to internal causes. University students (N = 271) with varied levels of dysphoria read vignettes describing hypothetical situations where they initiate a social interaction that results in positive or negative outcomes. Participants rated their …

Training Healthcare Professionals To Deliver A Group-Based Intervention For People Living With Severe Obesity: Lessons From The Progroup Feasibility Trial, Shokraneh Moghadam, Mark Tarrant, Lily Hawkins, Dawn Swancutt, Rod Sheaff, Laura Hollands, Raff Calitri, Jonathan Pinkney, Jenny Lloyd

School of Psychology

Introduction: Group-based programmes are increasingly adopted to support people living with obesity, as they have the potential to reduce staff time and costs and enhance motivation and capability for behaviour change. Group-based programmes could also provide members with opportunities to form meaningful social connections. As such, training should equip healthcare professionals to deliver group interventions successfully and be accessible and feasible for them to complete. This study presents how mixed-methods process evaluation data from the feasibility randomised controlled trial of PROGROUP (a group-based weight management intervention for people living with severe obesity) informed optimisation of the PROGROUP training programme. Methods: …

Others’ Requests May Dampen The Desire To Do Good: The Effect Of Requests On Children's Prosocial Motivation Across Five Cultures., Anneliese Skrobanek, Patricia Kanngiesser, Jahnavi Sunderarajan, Jorge David Mantilla Salgado, Saiwa Sisa Quimbo Yacelga, Shoji Itakura, Marie M. Morita, Masanori Yamaguchi, Nadia Chernyak, Lucy M. Stowe, Joscha Kärtner

School of Psychology

There exists cultural variation in how people react to prosocial obligations, but we still know little about when these differences emerge in development and how they can be explained. We investigated this in a study with 6- to 11-year-old children (N = 686) in five cultural contexts. Children listened to scenarios about spontaneous and requested (within-subjects) helping and sharing. They rated requested scenarios as less desirable and less satisfying, but there was significant cross-cultural variation in the magnitude of this effect, which was mostly stable with age. We also measured children's sense of individual agency and internalization of prosocial norms …

Video Interaction Guidance With Adults With Intellectual Disabilities And Their Support Workers: A Service Evaluation, Áine Maguire, Vicky Anagnostopoulou, Joe Levi-French, Deanna J. Gallichan

School of Psychology

Background: This service evaluation focused on support workers' perceptions of Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) offered by an NHS Community Learning Disabilities Team. Methods: A mixed-methods design was employed. Support workers developed goals and rated their progress before and after VIG sessions. Thematic analysis was used to analyse qualitative data on the nature of the goals developed, and the strengths and working points identified. The differences between progress ratings before and after VIG were analysed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Retrospective interviews helped to further understand support workers' experiences of VIG. Findings: Support workers identified goals, strengths and working points that …

Virtual Screening Of Phytochemicals From Medicinal Plants As Promising Pde5 Inhibitors Against Erectile Dysfunction, Farouk Boudou, Alaeddine Berkane, Amal Belakredar, Ahcene Keziz, Huda Alsaeedi, Brian A. Murray, Mikhael Bechelany, Ahmed Barhoum

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

This study evaluates bioactive phytochemicals from Algerian medicinal plants as potential phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) inhibitors for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED) using an integrated in silico approach. A total of 76 compounds from 48 plant species were screened for drug-likeness using SwissADME. Overall, 72% of the compounds complied with Lipinski's Rule of Five, indicating favorable oral bioavailability, while toxicity prediction identified 29 non-toxic candidates. Molecular docking was validated by redocking the co-crystallized PDE5 ligand (RMSD = 0.264 Å). Ellagic acid (−9.4 kcal·mol⁻¹), rosmarinic acid (−9.2 kcal·mol⁻¹), salvinorin A (−9.2 kcal·mol⁻¹), and catechin (−9.0 kcal·mol …

Video-Dprp: A Differentially Private Approach For Visual Privacy-Preserving Video Human Activity Recognition, Allassan Tchangmena A. Nken, Susan Mckeever, Peter Corcoran, Ihsan Ullah

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Considerable effort has been made in privacy-preserving video human activity recognition (HAR). Two primary approaches to ensure privacy preservation in Video HAR are differential privacy (DP) and visual privacy. Techniques enforcing DP during training provide strong theoretical privacy guarantees but offer limited capabilities for visual privacy assessment. Conversely, methods such as low-resolution transformations, data obfuscation and adversarial networks, emphasize visual privacy but lack clear theoretical privacy assurances. In this work, we focus on two main objectives: (1) leveraging DP properties to develop a model-free approach for visual privacy in videos and (2) evaluating our proposed technique using both differential privacy …