Digital Commons Network^™

Did We Build What We Promised? Evaluating Maker Culture And Practice At A Public Historically Black University​, Harvey D. Long, Nicole Whetsel, Darian Quick

Faculty Publications

In 2021, F.D. Bluford Library at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T) received a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant to establish a makerspace to expand access to making, support project-based learning, and foster a sense of belonging at North Carolina A&T. Although the College of Engineering has a makerspace, North Carolina A&T did not have one available to students across all majors.

North Carolina A&T is a public, land-grant historically Black university, serving more than 15,000 students. As an institution with a longstanding emphasis on STEM education, entrepreneurship, and innovation, North Carolina A&T provides …

Sustainable Landscaping And Sustainability Education On A College Campus: A Case Study In Place-Based, Collaborative Ecosystem Science, Christine S. O'Connell, Shannon Hahn, Evelyn Jauregui, Michael V. Frazier, Anika R. Bratt, Mary A. Heskel, Megan Butler, Christie M. Manning

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Sustainability education on college campuses can leverage interdisciplinary collaborations between facilities services, sustainability offices, environmental studies researchers, and students to provide hands-on opportunities for place-based learning. In an effort led by student researchers that could be replicated in academic practice at other academic institutions, we collaborated across campus groups to improve campus landscaping and turfgrass management. Turfgrass is an ideal cover for high-traffic areas and recreation, but is energy intensive to maintain, inefficient at carbon sequestration, and requires fertilizing which contributes to nutrient pollution. Here, we outline a student-led research effort that combined experiential learning, using a college campus as …

Securing The Frontier: Environmental Adaptation Versus Urban Fortification In Strategic Border Gateways: The Case Of East Qantara, Ahmed M. Selim, Mohamed A. Shebl, Doha M. Saeed, Heba M. Gaber

HBRC Journal

Security-oriented urban design at strategic national gateways often restricts spatial openness, cultural identity, and social inclusion, all essential to functional public spaces. This study develops a multi-criteria framework for security-inclusive urban design at East Qantara, the primary vehicular gateway between continental Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. This study employed a sequential quantitative–interpretive design approach. In the quantitative phase, 51 criteria were identified from Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles, Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) guidance, publicness theory, and context-specific desert and socio-cultural literature, and subsequently revised to 37 criteria through expert panel validation. A structured expert questionnaire with a five-point …

Glynn S. Lunney, Jr., Glynn S. Lunney Jr.

Faculty CVs

No abstract provided.

Geometric Puzzles On A Circular Track: A Recreational Introduction To Quantization, Sayandip Pandit, Amit Priyadarshi, Mrinal Kanti Roychowdhury

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Imagine a circular running track with several water stations placed around it. If only a few stations may remain open, or if a few new stations may be built, where should they be located so that runners travel the shortest possible distance to reach one? This simple question leads to a collection of recreational geometry puzzles involving distance, symmetry, optimization, Voronoi regions, and quantization. Quantization is the mathematical problem of replacing a large collection of points by a smaller set of representative points while minimizing the approximation error. Using only elementary mathematics, we investigate several configurations of points on a …

Enabling Smart Waqf Investment Sukuk Through Blockchain Technology For Resource Sustainability And Return Development, Siham Rahmani, Mohamed Djafar Henni

Journal of King Abdulaziz University: Islamic Economics

This study aims to examine smart waqf investment sukuk as one of the contemporary applications of Islamic financial engineering, based on the integration of waqf objectives, Sharia-compliant investment structures, and modern digital technologies. It seeks to highlight the potential of employing blockchain technology in developing their institutional and operational digital infrastructure. The study also aims to propose a smart waqf investment sukuk model based on the Murabaha to the Purchase orderer structure, identifying its components, the roles of its stakeholders, and the mechanisms for managing the rights and operations associated with it. The study adopts a descriptive-analytical approach to establish …

Interview With James Lysinger, James Lysinger, Logan Dovalina

Rio Grande Valley Oral Histories

This oral history interview with James Lysinger was recorded in San Antonio on October 10, 2026. Born in Mission, Texas, on August 11, 1933, Lysinger recounts his childhood in the Rio Grande Valley, including life across from the Mission city park, the family’s move to Edinburg in 1938, and his schooling at Sam Houston Elementary and later Pan American College. He describes the small-town character of Mission and Edinburg in the 1930s and 1940s, wartime rationing, school life, and the early development of highways, traffic control, and Winter Texan communities.

Lysinger details his father’s role as one of Hidalgo County’s …

Cyber Threats And Network Intrusion Detection: A Comparative Analysis Of Soft And Hard Voting Ensemble Methods, Muath Alshaikh, Farid Binbeshr, Jumana Alamoudi, Sheikh Bawazer, Ala Hag

Mesopotamian Journal of CyberSecurity

More reliable techniques for detecting network intrusions are needed due to the growing supremacy of cyber attacks. Despite using signature-based techniques, traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) are still not very successful against new threats. A thorough comparison of soft and hard voting ensemble techniques for binary network traffic classification is provided in this article. To create a powerful classifier system, the suggested approach combines five distinct supervised machine learning (ML) techniques. This study uses the UNSW-NB15 dataset, and correlation analysis is used extensively in feature selection to determine the optimal intrusion detection settings. According to experimental results, group approaches reach …

An Intelligent Systems Explanation Of Type 2 Diabetes And A Narrative To Promote Lifestyle Change, Michael E. Hyland

School of Psychology

Type 2 diabetes is an error in the glycemic control system caused by insulin resistance. Self-organizing control systems use artificial intelligence to monitor and correct how they function and are used in modern applications of robotics. The development of type 2 diabetes is gradual and reversible through lifestyle changes, and this is consistent with insulin resistance being formed through a self-organizing or intelligent control system rather than the traditional control system on which current biomedical control systems are modelled. Lifestyles that induce high levels of glycemic variation would, in an intelligent control system, be detected as excessive oscillation, and an …

Estimation Of Unmeasurable External Disturbances Of A Dynamic Object Based On A Robust Adaptive Kalman Filter, Bunyod Mamurjon Ugli Buronov

Technical science and innovation

This article considers the problem of directly estimating unmeasurable external disturbances acting on a dynamic object under the condition that the state vector of the object is available for measurement. In the considered case, the problem is reduced to the estimation of an unknown input of a dynamic system. It is shown that when the system state is measurable, both a direct inversion scheme based on the object’s dynamic equation and filtering methods that eliminate the need for coarse numerical differentiation can be applied. For slowly varying disturbances, a random walk model with a small process noise covariance is proposed, …

Technical, Environmental And Institutional Readiness For Nuclear Power Deployment In Seismically Active Power Systems, King Harold A. Recto, Izech Brian O. Edwin

Electronics, Computer, and Communications Engineering Faculty Publications

The deployment of nuclear power in seismically active power systems presents significant engineering, environmental, and institutional challenges. Although nuclear energy offers a low-carbon option capable of supporting long-term energy transition goals, its adoption requires careful evaluation of readiness factors beyond reactor technology alone. This study investigates the technical, environmental, and institutional determinants influencing nuclear power deployment in seismically active regions. A systematic review of engineering, environmental, and policy literature was conducted to identify key factors affecting nuclear energy integration, including grid capacity requirements, seismic safety considerations, hydrological conditions for reactor cooling, and long-term radioactive waste management strategies. These factors are …

The Engine Of Innocence: Discovery And Invention Of Eden In John Crowley's Engine Summer, Ian Berger

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The article explores John Crowley's Engine Summer (1979) as a retelling of Genesis from the perspective of Adam and, in its depiction of Eden as the emblematic likeness of innocence throughout American history and Western Civilization—small, false, and ultimately unsustainable in light of modern experience—confronts the reader to "move beyond nostalgia" and challenge the myth of innocence.

The Rhetoric Of The Road: The Romantic Journey As A Map Of Myth, Memory, And Majesty, Joe R. Christopher

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Scholar Guest of Honor Address at Mythcon 54, Weatherford OK, July 2026. This wide-ranging talk covered Dr. Christopher's personal and family connections with both the Mythopoeic Society and the city and state in which we met, as well as his decades of scholarly interest in the Inklings, tying it all together through Romanticism and the connecting theme of the Mother Road, Route 66.

Corrections:

On page 8, Dr. Christopher traveled to his first Mythcon from Texas, not Oklahoma.

On page 14, the quotation from Tolkien is on p. 241 in Green and Hooper.

On page 16, the biography should list …

Editorial, Janet Croft

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Editorial introduction to Mythlore issue #149, Fall 2026.

Global Research Trends In Library And Medical Information Science, Mahshid Lotfi, Zahra Kalhori, Zahra Bahrani Pour, Faeze Rahmati, Ensieh Badi

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Introduction

Determining research directions is an essential method for charting the publication landscape of a scientific discipline. The goal of this study was to explore research trends in library and medical information by reviewing articles indexed in Web of Science, PubMed, Ovid, ProQuest, and Scopus databases between 2000 and 2024.

Methods

This study used scientometric and descriptive methods to analyze librarianship and medical information research trends from 2000-2024, using data from selected databases. Vocabulary co-occurrence and social network analysis were applied, with VOSviewer used for visualization and to identify key elements in the field.

Discussion

The keyword "medical information" appeared …

Not Until He's Warm, Daniel Feast

Night Flight: Online Literary Journal

No abstract provided.

Free University Press: February 22, 1971

UTA Underground Newspaper Collection

No abstract provided.

Free University Press: May 11, 1970

UTA Underground Newspaper Collection

No abstract provided.

Expanding Ai Literacy: The 5cs Of News Literacy In The Era Of Generative Ai, Seth Ashley, Adam Maksl, Paul Cook

Journal of Media Literacy Education Pre-Prints

This article adapts the 5Cs framework of news literacy—context, creation, content, circulation, and consumption—to media environments shaped by generative artificial intelligence. We argue that prevailing discussions of AI literacy overemphasize technical or functional competencies while underemphasizing the social, cultural, political, and communicative systems in which AI operates. Drawing on previous research, we define AI literacy as knowledge of the technical, social, and ethical dimensions of AI-mediated content production, distribution, and consumption, along with the critical capacities needed to exercise agency within those processes. We show how the 5Cs can be reinterpreted for generative AI environments and integrate pedagogical implications for …

Sensor-Driven Synthesis Of Group-Optimized Models Using Personalized Adapters, Vivek Kushwaha

Defensive Publications Series

Intelligent agents on shared computing devices, such as smart displays or in-vehicle infotainment systems, may not effectively serve groups of concurrent users, as they can be tied to a single user account or a generic profile, which can limit their ability to adapt to a specific group composition. After obtaining appropriate permissions and consent, the disclosed technology can use on-device sensors, for example, cameras and microphones, to detect and identify multiple users. For each identified user, a corresponding personalized, parameter-efficient adaptation module can be retrieved. These modules may then be dynamically weighted based on real-time contextual signals, such as user …

Asymmetric Workload Offloading For Real-Time Media Moderation On A Local Device Network, Vivek Kushwaha

Defensive Publications Series

Real-time media moderation on resource-constrained devices, for example, smart televisions, may present computational challenges, while cloud-based solutions can introduce latency and privacy concerns. A system can distribute computational workloads for content moderation across a local area network, such as a Wi-Fi network. A primary media device can operate a lightweight trigger agent to heuristically scan for potential anomalies in a media stream. Upon detection, a segment of the media may be offloaded to one or more available secondary devices, for instance, smartphones or personal computers, on the network. These secondary devices can perform computationally intensive analysis using advanced models and …

Resilient Automated Communication Management Using Limit-Aware Orchestration And Persistence-First Logging, Parnika Singhal, Martin Pauser-Cowman

Defensive Publications Series

In some large-scale data processing environments, such as customer relationship management platforms, automated systems for managing inbound communications can be unreliable. These systems, which can be configured to filter non-actionable cases, may fail silently when platform-enforced processing limits are exceeded, potentially leaving cases unresolved and affecting data integrity. A described technology can provide a framework featuring persistence-first logging and limit-aware dynamic orchestration. For example, before analysis, a durable tracking record can be created to facilitate auditability. An orchestration component can then evaluate platform resource availability and select an execution path, such as synchronous, asynchronous, or batch, to help mitigate failures. …

Multimodal Generative Biosignal Synthesis Using Continuous-Time Diffusion, Dongeek Shin

Defensive Publications Series

Everyday wearable devices, such as smartwatches, smart rings, and fitness trackers, track valuable health metrics, but analyzing this data becomes tricky when sensors record at different speeds, miss measurements, or get bumped during exercise. Traditional processing methods attempt to fix this by dropping or padding data, which visibly destroys important physiological details. This publication describes a generative artificial intelligence (AI) system that uses machine learning to seamlessly combine health signals recorded at different speeds, automatically reconstruct corrupted data gaps (data imputation), and dynamically generate a biometric profile or digital twin of the user’s physiology to run interactive “what-if” simulations and …

System And Method For Recomputation Difficulty Scoring And Cost-Differential Storage Placement For Distributed Ai Pipeline-Execution, Shubham Shivhare, Faiz Ahmed

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method for managing intermediate computational states in a distributed artificial intelligence pipeline are disclosed. For each intermediate computational state generated during execution of the pipeline, a recomputation difficulty score is determined based on a plurality of factors comprising a computational cost of regenerating the intermediate computational state, a pipeline latency associated with regeneration, a depth of an upstream dependency chain, a semantic importance of the intermediate computational state, and a likelihood of subsequent reuse. The recomputation difficulty score is mapped to one of a plurality of difficulty classifications, and a storage placement action is selected based on …

Cellular Network Failure Diagnosis Using High-Throughput, Low-Latency Lazy Decoding, Longlong Zhu, Allan Ke, Kuo-Yu Huang

Defensive Publications Series

Conventional diagnostic platforms for diagnosing complex field failures in cellular networks suffer from several drawbacks, such as garbage collection spikes or pauses, memory fragmentation, memory exhaustion, out-of-memory kernel crashes, and/or LLM context-window overflow. This disclosure describes techniques for diagnosing complex field failures in cellular networks by performing high-throughput, low-latency lazy decoding of raw binary trace files. For example, temporal anchors received from an edge device are used to selectively load and parse only the relevant frames of the binary trace file that correspond to the anomaly, bypassing non-relevant protocol frames without payload expansion. Protocol state trees are instantiated within a …

Cloud Diagnostic Platform For Wireless Network Failure Diagnosis Utilizing An Asymmetric Edge-Cloud Architecture, Longlong Zhu, Jie Tang, Kevin Tsailin, Vincent Huang

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes an asymmetric edge-cloud architecture for distributed telecommunication fault diagnosis. Per the techniques, an edge processing terminal processes high-dimensional binary baseband events into a low-dimensional semantic summary and timestamp array associated with an anomaly and sends the data to a cloud-based diagnostic platform server. The server allocates contiguous physical memory pages on-demand using zero-copy memory-mapped file offsets, constrains an LLM-based diagnostic engine via a dynamically structured constraint matrix generated based on target segments of raw binary protocol trace files to obtain an RCA report, and executes an automated diagnostic action, such as transmitting a physical control command to …

Real-Time Protocol Stream Triage And Adaptive Log Slicing At Edge Terminal, Longlong Zhu, Weiyue Huang, Li Wang

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques for real-time triage of network anomalies in telecommunication protocol streams and adaptive slicing of binary trace files within an edge terminal. Network anomalies are classified based on a correlation between Layer 1 physical radio performance metrics and Layer 3 protocol state transitions. When a physical channel environmental failure is detected, transmission of diagnostic data is suppressed to save network bandwidth and wear of local flash memory storage. When a protocol stack software defect is detected, a time-bounded log snippet is extracted from a local memory buffer, the log snippet is prevented from being overwritten by subsequent …

Ranging Technology Transition With Make Before Break, Roshan Pius, James Eidson, Ante Culo

Defensive Publications Series

Proximity-based service use cases use ranging technologies to provide distance measurements. However, in such use cases, a single static ranging technology is chosen before a ranging session and used throughout the session. This can degrade ranging performance. This disclosure describes techniques for dynamically switching between different ranging technologies during an ongoing ranging session. Per the techniques, when switching from a first to a second ranging technology, the second technology is activated concurrently with the first technology when a corresponding transition criteria is satisfied and the first technology is deactivated only after an ok-to-stop criteria is satisfied. This prevents gaps in …

System And Automated Method For Isomorphic Concept Discovery And Cross-Domain Architectural Synthesis Via Controlled Hallucination And Reverse Constrained Mapping: Vector-Isolated Rag Pipeline And Bi-Directional Optimization Loop For Open-Domain Structural Analogy Generation., Herbert Gillis

Defensive Publications Series

An automated data processing system and computer-implemented method are disclosed for programmatically synthesizing novel structural architectures in a vacant target domain space utilizing the invariant physical or structural laws of a highly validated source domain. The system executes a generative forward loop by extracting an ordered tuple of structural and functional mechanics from a source domain, removing forward-validation lexicon filters, and enforcing aggressive semantic isolation and lexical pruning to block known industry-specific terms. Forced into a vector space void, an optimization engine or generative model synthesizes a structurally constrained neologism and an associated set of invented mechanisms. The system then …

System For Ai-Generated Interactive Suggestions On Spatially Annotated Digital Media, Harshita Sharma

Defensive Publications Series

Discussions related to shared digital media may be disconnected from the visual content, which can fragment the user experience and delink comments from specific visual details. Systems and methods are described that can augment media with an interactive, context-aware conversational layer. A user can affix an annotation to a specific spatial location within visual media, such as an image, and this annotation may serve as a contextual prompt for a multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) model. The AI model can process the annotation's text in conjunction with the visual data of the underlying media region to generate and present relevant follow-up …