Digital Commons Network^™

Advancing Student Success By Implementing Research-Based Challenges In Capstone Design, Eleazar Marquez, Hiram Moya, Jesus Gonzalez

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications

In this study, a team of faculty members from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), participating in a research collaboration with two National Laboratories, created and implemented a set of capstone projects that aligned with the research demands and expectations of the funding entity. The objective of the collaboration effort between the three entities is to: 1) explore innovative manufacturing techniques that support the national security and scientific missions of the laboratories, and 2) prepare UTRGV students to secure internships and employment in high research areas. The capstone projects were implemented on the senior design curriculum and served …

After A Fire: Considerations For Residential Property Soil Testing And Restoration, Andrew J. Whelton, Todd Thalhamer, Yiming Liu, Sarah Miller, Hua Cai

Resilience to Emergencies and Disasters

No abstract provided.

Reducing Chronic Loneliness Among Lgbtq+ Older Adults In Greater Seattle, Douglas J. Gallup

Selected Social Change Portfolios in Prevention, Intervention, and Consultation

Goal Statement

The goal of this project is to reduce chronic loneliness and social isolation among LGBTQ+ adults age 65 and older in the Greater Seattle area by increasing access to affirming, accessible, and evidence-informed opportunities for meaningful connection.

Significant Findings

LGBTQ+ older adults in Seattle and King County face elevated risks of living alone, social isolation, and limited access to affirming services, while also demonstrating substantial resilience (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2015). A promising approach would combine meaningful activity, social support, practical access assistance, and PEARLS-informed strategies. GenPride is a logical community partner because its programs foster well-being and belonging …

How Utep Built A Teacher Residency At Scale, Erika L. Mein

Policy Briefs

This program brief outlines the core design components of the Miner Teacher Residency, the premier year-long preparation experience for all education majors and post-baccalaureate teacher candidates in the College of Education at the University of Texas at El Paso.  This brief serves as a companion document to “UTEP’s Miner Teacher Residents Boost Student Learning, Serve High-Need Schools, and Stay in Texas Classrooms,” which presents evidence of the positive impact of the residency on student learning outcomes in Texas classrooms.

Comparative Evaluation Of Similarity Metrics For Multi-Vendor Origin–Destination Matrix Comparison: A Case Study Using Data From Three Probe Data Vendors In Arkansas, Sagar Silwal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of commercial probe data vendors has posed both opportunities and challenges for transportation agencies regarding the choice of reliable vehicle probe data for decision making purposes. Probe data is a form of passive mobility data representing a small fraction of the traveling population. Vendors aggregate mobility data from different sources including GPS enabled smartphones, telematics systems, and connected vehicles. They possess unique data collection methodologies, sampling mechanisms, and expansion algorithms which introduce variability in derived traffic performance measures like speed and volume. The overall objective of this work is to assess similarities and differences among probe data vendors …

Jme 4110: E-Bike Power Take-Off Device, Masa Marmarchi, Anna Favaron, Alexis Brutcher, Julie Steiger, Ava Le

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

This project focuses on developing a portable power solution that allows an E-bike battery to be used to power small devices during emergency situations. The system is designed to provide a convenient alternative when traditional sources of electricity are unavailable, while remaining safe, practical, and easy to store and use with the E-bike. The final design combines the necessary electrical components with a compact storage solution, allowing the system to be carried with the bike and used when needed.

Jme 4110: Drill-Powered Beach Umbrella Anchor, Matthew Barton, Tanin Ramnath, Marquan Bailey, Zachary Van-Horn, Kaelin Mendoza

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

A common and potentially hazardous situation faced by beachgoers is when standard umbrella anchors fail to hold during wind gusts, causing the umbrella to potentially go airborne and injure nearby people. Existing anchors require manual operation, leading to inconsistent grip and no resistance to different wind directions. Our project is a motorized three anchor system that drives augers into the sand to ensure a consistent grip and security against the wind.

Jme 4110: Drill Powered Pressure Washer, Kathryn Keele, Ashley Givance, Reagan Grass, Andrew Ellis, Jacob Thebeau

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

This project focuses on developing a drill-powered pressure washer attachment that connects to a standard cordless drill and garden hose. The device uses the drill as its only power source to pressurize water for cleaning applications. This portable design provides a convenient, low-cost alternative to traditional electric or gas-powered pressure washers.

Block Kinematics, Interseismic Coupling And Fault Slip Rates In The Aegean Region From Gps And Earthquake Slip Vector Data: 1. Upper Plate Structures, Konstantinos Chousianitis, Sotiris Sboras, Volkan Özbey, Robert Mccaffrey, Semih Ergintav

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

We represent the active deformation of the Aegean region with an elastic‐kinematic block model composed of a finite number of rotating crustal blocks whose boundaries coincide with major active structures. A total of 832 GPS velocities and 146 earthquake slip vectors were inverted to provide estimates of block rotations and interseismic locking on block‐bounding faults so as to best reproduce the observed deformation field. Our regional model allowed us to derive a self‐consistent set of geodetic slip rates for upper plate faults and the Hellenic subduction system, the results of which are presented in a companion paper, and to determine …

Public, Private, Acquired, Alexander I. Platt, Matthew T. Wansley

Articles

For the last quarter-century, IPOs have been declining. SEC officials usually attribute the decline to startups’ choices to stay private. But that explanation is incomplete. As startups grow, they face a three-way choice between going public, staying private, and being acquired, and they have increasingly chosen the third option. In this Essay, we show how securities regulation pushes startups towards acquisitions by increasing the cost of raising capital and accessing liquidity in both public and private markets. We consider how the trend towards acquisitions could reduce competition, innovation, opportunities for diversification, and transparency. And we offer suggestions for how the …

Hsv-1 Us3 Hijacks Conserved Actin Regulatory Complexes To Drive F-Actin Remodeling, Md Imran Hossain, Md Arifuzzaman, Md Mehedi Hasan, Seung Jong Park, Leila Rahimian, Ojasvi Dutta, Vladimir Chouljenko, Harikrishnan Mohan, Reza Ghavimi, Konstantin G. Kousoulas

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) US3 is a multifunctional serine/threonine kinase that promotes HSV-1 replication and spread. But its role and the mechanisms by which US3 regulates actin cytoskeletal remodeling remain poorly defined. We combined flow cytometry, confocal microscopy, immunoprecipitation-mass spectrometry (IP-MS), protein complex mapping, and machine learning to characterize US3-mediated F-actin dynamics. Flow cytometry and confocal microscopy showed that wild-type HSV-1 induces significant F-actin remodeling, while the ΔUS3 mutant displays F-actin levels comparable to uninfected cells, identifying US3 as a key regulator. IP-MS identified 47 high-confidence US3 interactors enriched in conserved actin regulatory complexes, including Arp2/3 nucleation machinery, …

An Abundant Lack Of Introspection, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

In this review Jonathan Adler critiques Abundance authors Klein and Thompson's analysis of how regulation is holding back progress in decarbonization, America's housing supply crisis, and innovation. While agreeing with the authors' assessment that regulation policy is hampering efforts in these areas, Adler objects to the book's proposals for improving regulatory bottlenecks, arguing the authors of Abundance refuse to acknowledge the role of market institutions in creating abundant supply or to admit the fault in their assumption that the failures of centralized government decision making can be repaired while maintaining centralized government decision making.

This abstract has been constructed from …

Mab-Dqa: Addressing Query Aspect Importance In Document Question Answering With Multi-Armed Bandits, Yixin Xiang, Yunshan Ma, Xiaoyu Du, Yibing Chen, Yanxin Zhang, Jinhui Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Document Question Answering (DQA) involves generating answers from a document based on a user’s query, representing a key task in document understanding. This task requires interpreting visual layouts, which has prompted recent studies to adopt multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that processes page images for answer generation. However, in multimodal RAG, visual DQA struggles to utilize a large number of images effectively, as the retrieval stage often retains only a few candidate pages (e.g., Top-4), causing informative but less visually salient content to be overlooked in favor of common yet low-information pages. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-Armed Bandit–based …

Avadclip: Audio-Visual Collaboration For Robust Video Anomaly Detection, Peng Wu, Wanshun Su, Guansong Pang, Yujia Sun, Qingsen Yan, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing adoption of video anomaly detection in intelligent surveillance domains, conventional visual-only detection approaches often struggle with information insufficiency and high false-positive rates in complex environments. To address these limitations, we present a novel weakly supervised framework that leverages audio-visual collaboration for robust video anomaly detection. Capitalizing on the exceptional cross-modal representation learning capabilities of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) across visual, audio, and textual domains, our framework introduces two major innovations: an efficient audio-visual fusion that enables adaptive cross-modal integration through lightweight parametric adaptation while maintaining the frozen CLIP backbone, and a novel audio-visual prompt that dynamically enhances …

Robust Graph Learning On The Web: Challenges, Methods, And Applications, Ao Xiang, Yang Liu, Guansong Pang, Yuanhao Ding, Hezhe Qiao, Dawei Cheng, Qing He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph learning is transforming web intelligence, powering applications from recommender systems to anomaly detection. However, most existing approaches implicitly assume ideal conditions where training and testing data are accurate, complete, and free from manipulation. In reality, web environments rarely exhibit such stability. Dynamic user behavior, incomplete or outdated content, adversarial interference, and sudden distribution shifts can all erode the reliability of even state-of-the-art models, leading to biased or unsafe outcomes. This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of emerging strategies for robust graph learning on the web. We first present a structured taxonomy of the principal robustness threats specific to web …

Purifai: Detecting And Fixing Search-Induced Distortions In Web-Augmented Llms, Guoqing Wang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Xiaofei Xie, Yizhou Chen, Yanchao Tan, Dan Hao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly serve as interfaces for proprietary data (e.g., enterprise knowledge bases, legal statutes), ensuring their fidelity to trusted internal information is paramount. While integrating real-time web search can enhance model utility, it introduces a critical vulnerability: the ingestion of conflicting, misleading, or hallucinated content from the open web can override the model's adherence to its verified internal knowledge. We define this failure mode as search-induced distortion, a significant risk in high-stakes domains where the internal knowledge base serves as the absolute ground truth.To address this challenge, we present PurifAI, a proactive, model-agnostic, cache-level purification system …

Generation-Augmented Video Corpus Moment Retrieval, Mingjin Kuai, Qianyin Xiao, Juncheng Li, Jin Peng, Lizi Liao, Wei Ji

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR) requires models to efficiently retrieve and precisely locate specific moments relevant to natural language queries within a massive, untrimmed video corpus. However, existing discriminative approaches typically rely on shallow visual-textual feature matching mechanisms, which often struggle to capture fine-grained semantic differences. To address this limitation, we propose Video-GAR, a novel framework that reframes the conventional retrieval task from superficial matching to generative understanding, positing that the capability for query reconstruction evidences deep semantic comprehension. Specifically, Video-GAR orchestrates three synergistic components: To overcome the computational efficiency bottleneck, we construct a Bi-Mamba backbone that leverages the linear …

Bridging Llm Embeddings And Vae Parameters For Disentangled Recommendation, Nhu-Thuat Tran, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Disentangled recommendation within the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework aims to capture multiple user interests. While effective, these VAEs are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on interaction data alone, lacking the rich external semantic knowledge needed to properly structure and separate latent interests. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at deriving profound user preference signals from textual data. Prevailing methods for integrating LLMs into recommendation, however, either focus on single-interest modeling or perform a shallow fusion by aligning LLM and VAE representation spaces. Thus, they fail to fundamentally shape the VAE's latent space for multi-interest learning, hindering recommendation performance. To bridge …

Verbalizing Lightgcn: Direct Learning Of Textual Representations From User-Item Interaction Graph Via Llms, Manh-Khanh Ngo Huu, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we propose VerbaLightGCN, a novel LLM-based recommendation framework that integrates the semantic understanding of LLMs with user-item interaction modeling. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) models typically embed user and item IDs into a latent space to capture interaction signals. However, pretrained LLMs cannot natively interpret these learned embeddings. To bridge this gap, VerbaLightGCN adopts a CF-as-text paradigm, in which collaborative signals are encoded in textual form and directly learned from the user–item interaction graph, and are then combined with semantic information to construct user and item profiles that function as latent embeddings. Inspired by LightGCN, our method retains …

Multi-Scale Modeling Method For Intelligent Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Combat, Yelei Zhu, Shoulin Shen, Jiang Zhu, Chuanhua Wen

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle swarm combat exhibits multi-scale characteristics of microlevel tactical autonomy, meso-level resource constraints, and macro-level network collaboration. In view of the problem that a single-scale modeling method is difficult to simultaneously characterize individual decision-making details, resource flow process, and system collaboration mechanism, a multi-scale modeling method integrating multi-agent modeling, system dynamics, and complex network theory was proposed. By designing six formal coupling operators to achieve cross-layer information mapping, a time progression mechanism based on a master-slave clock and hybrid synchronization was established, and a proof of error boundedness was provided. A prototype system was implemented on …

Research On Safety Monitoring System For Digital Twin Fully Mechanized Mining Face In Thin Coal Seams, Ya Liu, Zhaoyun Zhang, Cheng An, Canguang Zheng

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To solve the problems of opaque production processes, difficult expression of production information, and high difficulty in real-time model driving and safety monitoring in fully mechanized mining faces of thin coal seams, studying the use of digital twin technology and risk early warning models to solve beyond-visual-range visual production operations and safety monitoring control of the working face has important theoretical and practical value. This paper studied the construction methods of the digital twin system for fully mechanized mining faces in thin coal seams and discussed the construction of high-precision three-dimensional models, the real-time collection and processing conversion of …

Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction For Tracing Culpability In Ai Systems, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood—a paradox that fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)—a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework—and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)—a tool for mapping causal interactions among human actors, organizations, and AI systems. OA evaluates an AI’s observable operational characteristics: its goal-directedness (as a proxy for intent), predictive processing (as a proxy for foresight), and safety architecture (as a proxy for standard of care). OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these …

Research On Multi-Objective Hybrid Flow-Shop Scheduling With Order Splitting, Junjie Yu, Weixi Ji, Chen Chen, Jingyu Lu, Chaoyang Zhang

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To address the order splitting multi-objective hybrid flow-shop scheduling problem (OSMOHFSP), a dual-objective optimization model was formulated with the objectives of minimizing makespan and total order tardiness. Fixed sub-batch specification constraints were incorporated to reflect common splitting limitations in actual production. A sub-batch generation strategy based on a candidate set of sub-batch specifications was designed to efficiently filter feasible splitting combinations, effectively reducing the search space dimensionality and computational complexity. A hybrid multi-objective metaheuristic algorithm integrating NSGA-II and SA was proposed. The global search capability was enhanced by constructing two crossover and four mutation operators. An improved SA embedding …

Ultra-Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Prediction Method Based On Spatio-Temporal Feature Enhancement Of Ground-Based Cloud Images, Zhiwei Kou, Fengyue Xin, Xiaoming Cui, Yu Yin, Feifan Li, Yongsheng Qi

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: In view of the time lag in ground-based cloud image acquisition and the insufficient accuracy of existing photovoltaic power prediction models, an ultra-short-term photovoltaic power prediction method named spatial-temporal feature enhancement-ground-based cloud image-improved LSTM (STFE-GCI-ILSTM), which is based on spatio-temporal feature enhancement-ground-based cloud images-improved long short-term memory (LSTM) network was proposed. A ground-based cloud image prediction model with multi-scale spatio-temporal feature enhancement (STFE-GCI) was constructed. By spatial feature enhancement, temporal feature enhancement, and multi-scale feature fusion technologies, the deep spatio-temporal features of historical cloud image sequences were extracted to generate future predicted cloud image sequences, thereby eliminating the time …

Prediction Of Industrial Concentration Parameters Based On Caudformer Model, Kaipeng Xu, Yan Wang, Xin Zhang, Yang Liu, Zhenzhong Wang, Xiang Liu, Zhicheng Ji

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: To solve the problems in the industrial concentration process of traditional Chinese medicine that traditional prediction methods are difficult to deal with complex characteristics such as nonlinearity, high-dimensional coupling, and highly skewed distribution and that existing deep learning models insufficiently consider causal relationships among variables, ignore frequency-domain periodic characteristics, and lack long-range dependency modeling capabilities, an improved multivariate time series prediction model CauDformer was proposed in this paper. Based on the iTransformer architecture, a causal multi-head self-attention mechanism (C-MHSA) was introduced to compulsorily constrain the dependency direction among variables by utilizing a lower triangular causal mask, guiding the model …

Survey On Learning-Based Dynamic Fault Localization: From Traditional Machine Learning To Large Language Models, Chunyan Liu, Yan Lei, Huan Xie, Jinping Wang, Yue Yu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning-based dynamic fault localization techniques play a crucial role in the field of software engineering. These techniques dynamically execute test cases to meticulously extract useful knowledge from the execution information in the program, with the aim of identifying fault locations by leveraging machine learning, deep learning, and large language models. Currently, there is already a flourishing body of research that is intensely focused on learning-based dynamic fault localization. Research literature can be categorized into two main aspects for learning-based dynamic fault localization: data-based enhancements (i.e., the datasets) and model-based enhancements (i.e., the suspiciousness algorithms). Thus, we conduct an extensive literature …

Accountable Agents In Software Engineering: An Analysis Of Terms Of Service And A Research Roadmap, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

AI coding assistants and autonomous agents are becoming integral to software development workflows, reshaping how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained. While recent research has focused mainly on the capabilities and impacts of productivity of these systems, much less attention has been paid to accountability: who is responsible when agents generate, modify, or recommend code? In practice, accountability is defined through the Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents that govern the use of AI-powered development tools.In this vision paper, we present a comparative analysis of the Terms of Service for widely used AI coding assistants and agent-enabled development …

A Dataset Of Agentic Ai Coding Tool Configurations, Matthias Galster, Seyedmoein Mohsenimofidi, Levi Böhme, Jai Lal Lulla, Muhammad Auwal Abubakar, Christoph Treude, Sebastian Baltes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex execute multi-step coding tasks with limited human oversight. To steer these tools, developers create repository-level configuration artifacts (e.g., Markdown files) for configuration mechanisms such as Context Files, Skills, Rules, and Hooks. There is no curated dataset yet that captures these configurations at scale. This dataset, collected from open-source GitHub repositories, fills that gap. We selected 40,585 actively maintained repositories through metadata filtering, classified them using GPT-5.2 to identify 36,710 as belonging to engineered software projects, and systematically detected configuration artifacts in these repositories. The dataset covers 4,738 repositories across …

A Framework For Top-K Queries With Constrained Preferences, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Nikolaos Chaloulakos, Bo Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional rank-aware processing assumes a dataset that contains available options to cover a specific need (e.g., restaurants, hotels, etc) and users who browse that dataset via top-k queries with linear scoring functions, i.e., by ranking the options according to the weighted sum of their attributes, for a set of given weights. In practice, however, user preferences (weights) may only be estimated with bounded accuracy, or may be inherently imprecise due to the inability of a human user to specify exact weight values with absolute accuracy. Motivated by this, we define the constrained-preference top-k (CT) query. Given an approximate description of …

Tranx-Adapter: Bridging Artifacts And Semantics Within Mllms For Robust Ai-Generated Image Detection, Wenbin Wang, Yuge Huang, Jianqing Xu, Yue Yu, Jiangtao Yan, Shouhong Ding, Pan Zhou, Yong Luo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid advances in AI-generated image (AIGI) technology enable highly realistic synthesis, threatening public information integrity and security. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating texture-level artifact features alongside semantic features into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can enhance their AIGI detection capability. However, our preliminary analyses reveal that artifact features exhibit high intra-feature similarity, leading to an almost uniform attention map after the softmax operation. This phenomenon causes attention dilution, thereby hindering effective fusion between semantic and artifact features. To overcome this limitation, we propose a lightweight fusion adapter, TranX-Adapter, which integrates a Task-aware Optimal-Transport Fusion that leverages the Jensen-Shannon divergence …