Digital Commons Network^™

Soci 376.50: Comparative Criminology, James Tuttle

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Soci 437.50: Communities And Crime, Jessie L. Slepicka

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Soci 491.03: Race, Politics & Public Opinion, Andrew J. Thompson

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Soci 563.01: Social Data Analysis, James Tuttle

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Nrsm 579.01: Practicum In Collaborative Conservation, Shawn M. Johnson, Nicolas T. Maya

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Ddsn 113a.01: Technical Drafting, Brian Hoover

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Distributed Coherent Beamforming At 60 Ghz Enabled By Optically-Established Coherence, Drake Silbernagel, Yu Rong, Isabella Lenz, Prithvi Hemanth, Carl Morgenstern, Owen Ma, Nolan Matthews, Nadar Zaki, Kyle W. Martin, John D. Elgin, Jacob Holtom, Daniel W. Bliss, Kimberly Frey

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

We implement and experimentally demonstrate a 60 GHz distributed system leveraging an optical time synchronization system that provides precise time and frequency alignment between independent elements of the distributed mesh. Utilizing such accurate coherence, we perform receive beamforming with interference rejection and transmit nulling. In these configurations, the system achieves a coherent gain over an incoherent network of N nodes, significantly improving the relevant signal power ratios. Our system demonstrates extended array phase coherence times, enabling advanced techniques. Results from over-the-air experiments demonstrate a 14.3 dB signal-to-interference-plus-noise improvement in interference-laden scenarios with a contributing 13.5 dB null towards interference in …

Mesospheric Gravity Waves Observed By Nasa Atmospheric Waves Experiment (Awe), Yucheng Zhao, Jiarong Zhang, Pierre-Dominique Pautet, Jun Ma, Joe Mcinerney, Hanli Liu, Steve Eckermann, Ludger Scherliess, Michael John Taylor, Burt Lamborn, Russ Kirkham

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

Although smaller scale gravity waves (GWs) (horizontal wavelengths ~30–300 km) are thought to account for the dominant energy and momentum inputs at the Ionosphere-Thermosphere-Mesosphere (ITM) altitudes, the sources, variability, and influences of these smaller-scale GWs are still major unknowns. The NASA Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) is designed to measure these GWs in the mesopause region. In November 2023, AWE was successfully launched and deployed on the International Space Station (ISS) and science data collection was started. The AWE instrument maps the nighttime hydroxyl (OH) layer (~87 km), providing 2D GW fields in mesospheric temperature and OH band intensity over a …

Orographic Wave Activity At Mesospheric Altitude Over The Southern Ocean Islands Observed By The Atmospheric Waves Experiment, P.-D. Pautet, S. D. Eckermann, L. Scherliess, J. Ma, Y. Zhao

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

A major source for the gravity waves (GW) measured in the stratosphere and higher is the orographic forcing produced by the tropospheric wind blowing over mountainous regions. Recent studies have shown that even small islands can generate waves which, under appropriate conditions, are able to penetrate above 80 km altitude, transporting large amount of momentum into the upper atmosphere. Investigating the exact effects of those islands is challenging because ground-based and even airborne measurements are limited above those generally isolated places.

The Utah State University (USU) Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) was designed and built to study mesospheric GW globally, even …

Police Chief Turnover In Texas: Do Institutional Environments Matter?, Yudu Li

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

The field of organizational studies has extensively examined factors influencing the turnover and succession of public officers, yet limited attention has been given to chiefs of police. Using institutional theory as a framework, this study explores police chief turnover by focusing on the institutional environment and the relationships between police chiefs and key individuals and entities within their communities. Utilizing survey data collected from police chiefs attending mandatory training programs designed for new appointees, the analysis reveals that police chief turnover is substantially associated with the quality of relationships with key stakeholders within the institutional environments, both individually and collectively. …

Randomized Trial: Peppermint Oil (Menthol) Pharmacokinetics In Children And Effects On Gut Motility In Children With Functional Abdominal Pain: 540 Mg Vs. 900 Mg Dose Comparison, Robert J Shulman, Bruno P Chumpitazi, Daniel Gonzalez, Uttam Garg, Salma Musaad, Jiali Wen, Gregory L Kearns

Children’s Nutrition Research Center Staff Publications

Aims: There is a paucity of information on the pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD) of menthol, the active ingredient in peppermint oil (PMO). We studied the PK of menthol (540 and 900 mg) in children and measured their effects on gut transit/contractility.

Methods: Children 7-12 years of age with functional abdominal pain underwent wireless motility capsule (WMC) testing. One week later, they were randomized to 540 mg or 900 mg of oral enteric-coated PMO. Blood was sampled over 24 h to determine menthol PK. The WMC test was repeated while they took their respective dose (180 mg thrice or 180 …

Health Policy Institute: Using Data To Leverage Policy, Deesha Bhaumik, Marko Vujicic

Metro Denver Dental Society Articulator Magazine

This article highlights the American Dental Association Health Policy Institute’s (HPI) pivotal role in providing data-driven insights that shape federal and state dental policy. Illustrating recent initiatives, it covers the projected impact of Medicaid funding cuts, alongside HPI’s economic analysis used by dental organizations to advocate for preserving core benefits. The article also details HPI’s research supporting community water fluoridation, quantifying the cost increases if fluoride is removed, and evaluates the effects of federal tax policy changes on dental practices, emphasizing advocacy efforts to protect financial viability for practices serving underserved communities.

Leading With Purpose: How The Ada’S Advocacy Is Advancing The Profession, Brett Kessler, Richard Rosato

Metro Denver Dental Society Articulator Magazine

This article underscores the American Dental Association’s (ADA) commitment to advocacy and purpose-driven leadership in response to profound changes and persistent challenges in dentistry. It details ADA’s efforts on the national stage, including successful advocacy for oral health integration in healthcare policy, robust defense of community water fluoridation, promotion of economic sustainability for dental practices and leadership in insurance and workforce reforms.

Editorial Foreword Ijsls Volume 4 Number 2, Sulistyowati Irianto

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

This edition features a variety of articles on legal issues and policies, and their implementation. These articles enrich interdisciplinary legal studies. Topics covered include inheritance governance in Malaysia, the institutionalised mediation of family legal matters in Bangladesh, the strategies employed by female heads of households in Indonesia to survive through self-organisation, the collapse of democracy in Indonesia after 38 years of reform, and the country's role as a transit point or destination for refugees and the problems this poses.

Supporting Satisfaction, Satisfying Support: Bidirectional Associations Of Social Support And Life Satisfaction, Jonathan Louis Jie Sheng Chia, Andree Hartanto, William Tov

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Existing literature has explored the impact of social support (SS) on life satisfaction (LS). However, the reciprocal relationship—that is, the influence of LS on SS—remains understudied, despite extant theoretical support. In addressing this gap, the present study employed bivariate latent growth modeling to examine bidirectional associations between SS and LS trajectories among 8,449 middle-aged and older adults in Singapore, over seven waves spanning almost 6 years. Results provided evidence supporting the notion of bidirectional associations. Specifically, baseline SS positively predicted subsequent changes in LS, and baseline LS positively predicted subsequent changes in SS. Findings underscore the potential for interventions and …

The Return Of Chinese Emigrants: Legal Barriers And Local Practices, Jiaqi M. Liu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While China has observed an increasing influx of foreign nationals, a notable phenomenon involves Chinese emigrants opting for return migration to reestablish themselves in their country of origin. The process of emigrants returning to China, referred to as “return and resettlement” (huiguo dingju 回国定居) in official terminology, however, is not automatic. Emigrant returnees must fulfill a set of selective and documentary criteria, implying that only economically affluent and duly documented migrants are permitted to resettle in China. Through a comprehensive review of national policies and an analysis of local practices in a diaspora hometown, this chapter argues that the hukou …

An Efficient Security-Enhanced Accountable Access Control For Named Data Networking, Jianfei Sun, Yuxian Li, Xuehuan Yang, Guomin Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Named Data Networking (NDN) is embraced as the crucial implementation of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), enhancing content distribution and caching efficiency through edge routers. However, existing NDN architectures face significant security and privacy challenges, including: (a) a lack of secure and efficient access control; (b) inadequate support for flexible and selective content management by content publishers; (c) insufficient implementation of accountability and privilege revocation mechanisms. To handle these challenges, we propose ESAS, the first-ever Efficient Security-enhanced Accountable Access Control Scheme for NDN. Specifically, our ESAS incorporates anonymous authentication using group signatures at network routers to prevent unauthorized access, employs key-aggregation-based access …

Educator Perceptions Of Devops Teaching Recommendations And Their Alignment With Common Challenges, Marcelo Romulo Fernandes, Pablo Paiva, Samuel Lucas De Moura Ferino, Roberta Coelho, Christoph Treude, Eduardo Aranha, Uirá Kulesza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

DevOps education presents unique pedagogical challenges due to the diversity of tools, rapid technological change, and the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Although previous work has proposed recommendations to address these challenges, it is unclear how educators perceive these recommendations and whether they align with the challenges encountered in practice. In this paper, we present a quantitative and qualitative methods study involving 11 DevOps educators who interacted with Improve, a tool that presents a curated set of educational challenges and recommendations derived from previous literature. Educators indicated which recommendations they already use, which they intend to use, and which challenges …

Large Lithium-Ion Battery Model For Secure Shared E-Bike Battery In Smart Cities, Donghui Ding, Zhao Li, Linhao Luo, Ming Jin, Bin Zhu, Yichen Zhong, Junhao Hu, Peng Cai, Huiqi Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electric bikes powered by lithium-ion batteries are increasingly used in smart cities to promote sustainable mobility and efficient delivery services. However, limited battery range and slow plug-in charging remain key challenges. Shared electric bike battery systems, facilitated by battery swapping stations, offer a promising solution by enabling quick and efficient battery replacements. However, their success hinges on accurate anomaly detection, battery health estimation and remain range prediction. These tasks remain challenging due to data scarcity, battery diversity and environmental variability. Here we show that a large-scale lithium-ion battery model trained on over ten million battery time series data enables robust …

Stylegan-∞: Extending Stylegan To Arbitrary-Ratio Translation With Stylebook, Yihua Dai, Tianyi Xiang, Bailin Deng, Yong Du, Hongmin Cai, Jing Qin, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although pre-trained large-scale generative models StyleGAN series have proven to be effective in various editing and translation tasks, they are limited to pre-defined fixed aspect ratio. To overcome this limitation, we propose StyleGAN-∞, a model that enables pre-trained StyleGAN to perform arbitrary-ratio conditional synthesis. Our key insight is to distill the expressive StyleGAN features into a StyleBook, such that an arbitrary-ratio condition can be translated to other forms by properly assembling pre-defined StyleBook vectors. To learn and leverage the StyleBook, we employ a network with three distinct stages, each corresponding to StyleBook extraction, StyleBook correspondence learning, and arbitrary-ratio synthesis. Extensive …

Dgl: Dynamic Global-Local Information Aggregation For Scalable Vrp Generalization With Self-Improvement Learning, Yubin Xiao, Yuesong Wu, Rui Cao, Di Wang, Zhiguang Cao, Xuan Wu, Peng Zhao, Yuanshu Li, You Zhou, Yuan Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a critical combinatorial optimization problem with wide-reaching real-world applications, particularly in logistics, transportation. While neural network-based VRP solvers have shown impressive results on test instances similar to training data, their performance often degrades when faced with varying scales and unseen distributions, limiting their practical applicability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce DGL (Dynamic Global-Local Information Aggregation), a novel model that combines global and local information to effectively solve VRPs. DGL dynamically adjusts local node selections within a localized range, capturing local invariance across problems of different scales and distributions, thereby enhancing generalization. At the …

Rethinking Cognitive Complexity For Unit Tests: Toward A Readability-Aware Metric Grounded In Developer Perception, Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo, Yinghua Li, Xueqi Dang, Xin Zhou, Anil Koyuncu, Jacques Klein, David Lo, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically generated unit tests-from searchbased tools like EvoSuite or LLMs-vary significantly in structure and readability. Yet most evaluations rely on metrics like Cyclomatic Complexity and Cognitive Complexity, designed for functional code rather than test code. Recent studies have shown that SonarSource's Cognitive Complexity metric assigns nearzero scores to LLM-generated tests, yet its behavior on EvoSuitegenerated tests and its applicability to test-specific code structures remain unexplored. We introduce CCTR, a Test-Aware Cognitive Complexity metric tailored for unit tests. CCTR integrates structural and semantic features like assertion density, annotation roles, and test composition patterns-dimensions ignored by traditional complexity models but critical for …

Flow, Immersion, And Presence: Creating Virtual Reality And Engagement In The Era Of Ubiquitous And Intelligent Technologies, Yi Maggie Guo, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Nannan Xi, Marshall Scott Poole

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers use the concepts of flow, immersion, and presence to explain the usage of and engagement (e.g., cognitive absorption) with information technology. In this special issue, we showcase four papers on empirical investigations of flow and immersion, their antecedents, and their outcomes. These papers address research questions that range from investigating the antecedents and consequences of immersion in head-mounted displays of virtual reality, designing for the flow experience in extended reality, studying factors influencing user engagement in the metaverse, and identifying adverse effects of work-related flow. We also provide directions and suggestions for future research.

Vibemus: Proactive Agentic System For Music Personalization, Zhiliang Guo, Teng Tu, Yunshan Ma, Xun Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) enable diverse forms of AI-assisted creation, yet they often struggle to bridge the preference-articulation gap: users may provide incomplete or vague intentions or lack the vocabulary to specify what they want, yielding outputs misaligned with true preferences. To address this gap and facilitate music creation in a vibe-centric environment, we introduce VibeMus, a proactive agentic system built on open-source components. The system engages in multi-turn dialogue to progressively determine the music’s emotion, genre, lyrics, and other aspects before generation. Simulated evaluations show that proactive clarification improves alignment with users’ intended nuances. Our approach is training-free, leveraging …

Improving Co-Decoding Based Security Hardening Of Code Llms Leveraging Knowledge Distillation, Dong Li, Shanfu Shu, Meng Yan, Zhongxin Liu, Chao Liu, Xiaohong Zhang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted by developers in software development. However, the massive pretraining code data is not rigorously filtered, allowing LLMs to learn unsafe coding patterns. Several prior studies have demonstrated that code LLMs tend to generate code with potential vulnerabilities. The widespread adoption of intelligent programming assistants poses a significant threat to the software development process. Existing approaches to mitigating this risk primarily involve constructing secure data that are free of vulnerabilities and then retraining or fine-tuning the models. However, such an effort is resource intensive and requires significant manual supervision. When the model parameters …

Exploring Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Techniques For Code Generation With Large Language Models, Martin Weyssow, Xin Zhou, Kisub Kim, David Lo, Houari A. Sahraoui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities to generate accurate code snippets given natural language intents in a zero-shot manner, i.e., without the need for specific fine-tuning. While prior studies have highlighted the advantages of fine-tuning LLMs, this process incurs high computational costs, making it impractical in resource-scarce environments, particularly for models with billions of parameters. To address these challenges, previous research explored in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as strategies to guide the LLM generative process with task-specific prompt examples. However, ICL and RAG introduce inconveniences, such as the need for designing contextually relevant prompts and the absence …

September 2025 News Releases, University Of Montana--Missoula. Office Of University Relations

University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present

No abstract provided.

The Moderating Role Of Trait Online Disinhibition In Exacerbating The Online Victim-Bully Cycle, Sandeeshwara K Tennakoon Appuhamillage Kasturiratna, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The growth of the internet and social media as a communication platform has increased the incidence of cyberbullying victimisation. While there has been increasing research interest on the antecedents of cyberbullying perpetration, little is known on why some individuals who themself experience cyber victimisation are more likely to become cyberbullying perpetrators. Considering the large number of individuals who experience cyberbullying victimisation in the current, highly digitalised world, this trend of victims turning into bullies poses a worrisome possibility and deserves research attention. One promising individual difference that could potentially moderate the relationship between cyberbullying victimisation can lead to cyberbullying perpetration …

Replication Of Blood Dna Methylomic Signatures Associated With Cerebrospinal Fluid Levels Of Ykl-40 And Nfl Biomarkers, Timo Kaleck, Rafael Campos-Martin, Amanda Cano, Maria Victoria Fernández, Pamela Martino-Adami, Luca Kleineidam, Victor M Andrade Fuentes, Kumar P Tripathi, Kayenat Parveen, Raquel Puerta, Itziar De Rojas, Kishore A Ravichandran, Oliver Peters, Julian Hellmann-Regen, Josef Priller, Maria Gemenetzi, Anja Schneider, Jens Wiltfang, Emrah Düzel, Katharina Buerger, Robert Perneczky, Stefan Teipel, Christoph Laske, Frederic Brosseron, Marta Marquié, Daniel La Van Den Hove, Mercè Boada, Michael T Heneka, Michael Wagner, Natalie Marchant, Jean-Charles Lambert, Ruth Frikke-Schmidt, Frank Jessen, Agustín Ruiz, Alfredo Ramirez

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

No abstract provided.

Drivers Of Frequent Emergency Department Use In Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Older Adults: A Qualitative Study, Anita Chary, Annika Bhananker, Michelle Suh, David Leavitt, Elise Brickhouse, Shreya Tamma, Jose Ramirez, Mariana Rios, Aanand D Naik, Margaret Samuels-Kalow, Naomi George

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: The emergency department (ED) is the safety net for and a common point of healthcare access for socioeconomically disadvantaged older adults. Little is known about socioeconomically disadvantaged older ED patients' perspectives on their health, healthcare access, and ED use. Such insights could guide tailored interventions to address unmet clinical and health-related social needs (HRSN).

Methods: We performed a qualitative study with older adults in a single public safety net hospital ED. We interviewed patients age 60+ who had ≥ 4 ED 4 visits in the past year. Semi-structured interviews explored perceived health needs and motivations underlying ED visits. We …