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Receipt, West Tennessee State Normal School, 1923

Documents

A diploma fee receipt of $5.00 for Ellen Davies when she graduated from West Tennessee State Normal School, Normal, Tennessee, in 1923 May.

University Of New Hampshire Library Annual Report 2026: Better Together, Mairead Small Staid

Annual Reports and Statistics

No abstract provided.

Why Do Women Pursue A Ph.D. In Computer Science?, Erika Ábrahám, Miguel Goulão, Milena Vujošević Janičić, Sarah Jane Delany, Amal Mersni, Oleksandra Yeremenko, Özge Büyükdağlı, Karima Boudaoud, Caroline Oehlhorn, Ute Schmid, Christina Büsing, Helen Bolke-Hermanns, Kaja Köhnle, Matilde Pato, Deniz Sunar Cerci, Larissa Schmid

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Context: Computer science, even now, attracts a small number of women, and the proportion of women in the field decreases through advancing career stages. Consequently, few women progress to Ph.D. studies in computer science after completing master's studies. Empowering women at this stage in their careers is essential, not just for equality reasons, but to unlock untapped potential for society, industry and academia. Objective: This paper aims to identify students’ career assumptions and information related to Ph.D. studies focused on gender-based differences. We propose a program to inform female master students about Ph.D. studies that explains the process, clarifies misconceptions, …

The Bridwell Quill. Issues 89–91: Saint Francis Of Frisco, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Publications

No abstract provided.

The Bridwell Quarterly, Issue 30 Winter 2026, Anthony Elia, Michelle S. Ried

Bridwell Library Publications

No abstract provided.

Streamlining Literacy Assessment, Sheila Mulder, Katie Anderson, Samuel W. Flint

Annual Research Symposium

Reading proficiency scores are low throughout the nation. Reading proficiency is a foundational skill that supports academic success across all content areas. Skilled reading involves multiple interrelated components. Assessment can support teachers to identify skill deficits and inform instruction; however, rural teachers lack the time, resources, and specialized support to translate the data into effective instruction and interventions. To better contextualize this need, we received 59 surveys from South Dakota teachers with 23 of the surveys being valid responses, finding that teachers feel prepared to teach reading and struggling readers. Teachers reported that they spend relatively little time in assessment, …

Secure-Home: Detect And Redact Pii, Hajar Niroomand, Omar F. El-Gayar

Annual Research Symposium

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakage from home environments poses significant identity theft risks. While enterprise networks employ robust security measures, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and access controls, these protections rarely extend to home settings, creating a critical security gap. Current firewall technologies lack the capability to detect and scrub PII from outbound traffic, leaving vulnerable populations such as children, elderly users, and remote workers exposed. This design science research proposes Secure-Home, a prototype outbound inspection tool that detects and redacts clear-text PII before data leaves home networks. Using rule-based detection and selective redaction, Secure-Home provides a practical last line of …

Packet Scheduling In Mixed Traffic Networks: A Simulation Study Using Ns-3, Landon Mohr

Annual Research Symposium

Packet scheduling determines the order in which packets are transmitted when multiple flows compete for a network link. Schedulers directly affect key performance metrics including latency, jitter, packet loss, and throughput. While scheduling algorithms have been widely studied, fewer evaluations examine their behavior under mixed traffic workloads representative of real networks. This study uses the NS-3 network simulator to evaluate how different packet scheduling algorithms behave under congestion across several representative traffic profiles.

Comparative Analysis Of Shipping Costs Across Multiple Routes Using Fedex Api Data, Valerija Curikova, Andrew Kramer

Annual Research Symposium

Shipping costs are an important factor for both individuals and companies, especially in industries like healthcare where medical material should be delivered quickly and reliably. While working as an intern at Avera Health in the Supply Chain logistics team, I was introduced to the challenge of the high cost of delivering medical supplies to different patient locations. Shipping prices vary depending on distance, route direction, and service type. Using real-time data from the FedEx API allows for more accurate analysis of shipping costs and helps identify opportunities to optimize delivery decisions and reduce logistics expenses.

Hardware Side-Channel Security Of Quantum System Controllers: A Timing Attack Perspective, Darpan Basnet, Anshu Bista, Varghese Vaidyan

Annual Research Symposium

Quantum computers use classical embedded processors to sequence control pulses. On STM32-class microcontrollers, firmware emits operation classes (gates (X, Y, Z), measurements (MEAS), and timing barriers (WAIT)) at precise intervals. If execution time depends on a secret value, an attacker with a logic analyzer can recover that secret. This classical control plane is a largely overlooked attack surface. This work presents a simulation-based investigation of timing side-channel leakage in quantum-control firmware sequencers.

Building Explainable Rag-Based Clinical Decision Support, Irina Pecherskaia, Jason Mixon, Andrew Behrens, Andrew Smith

Annual Research Symposium

The objective of this research is to demonstrate how theoretical Explainable AI (XAI) principles are operationalized into a functional, accurate, and trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) prototype for assisting healthcare professionals in Clinical Decision Support. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful in knowledge synthesis, they often lack transparency and produce hallucinations. RAG can help address the problem by mitigating LLM hallucinations by grounding outputs in verified medical literature and clinical guidelines. This project bridges the clinical trust gap by implementing five core design principles into a RAG prototype that grounds AI responses in verified medical literature.

Post-Quantum Cryptography Secure Communication, Iot, And Blockchain, Nidhish Bhanse, Mark Spanier

Annual Research Symposium

Modern public-key cryptography, such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), plays a crucial role in securing data. However, the development of quantum computing threatens the security of data encrypted with these methods. Data encrypted today might be decrypted in the future due to the increased power of quantum computers. To combat this, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed new standards for post-quantum cryptography. The following research aims to provide an analysis of these NIST post-quantum cryptographic algorithms and their potential for use in various secure communication protocols and platforms.

Evaluating The Reliability And Equity Implication Of Acute Hospital Readmission Metrics In New Zealand, Christopher D. Elce, Martinson Ofori, Andrew Behrens

Annual Research Symposium

Acute 28-day hospital readmission rates are widely used in New Zealand to monitor hospital quality and health system performance. However, the policy value of readmission metrics depends on whether observed variation reflects real clinical differences or is driven by data-quality artifacts and population structure. This study evaluates the reliability of published benchmarked readmission rates for all Districts of Service.

Postmortem Analysis Of Israel's 7 October 2023 Intelligence Failure, Emily Helgeson, William Bendix

Annual Research Symposium

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack from the Gaza Strip into Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,200 people and triggering a larger conflict. Despite possessing impressive intelligence capabilities, Israel failed to anticipate the attack. This project provides one of the first postmortem analyses of the October 7 intelligence failure and demonstrates methods for assessing the role and significance of key contributing factors.

Llm Security Agents: Harness Design And Static Vs Dynamic Challenges, Joe Hammond, Eddie French, Austin O'Brien

Annual Research Symposium

LLM security agent performance depends on two factors: harness design and challenge type. A poorly designed harness prevents models from recovering from failures, while challenge type determines baseline difficulty. We tested these factors across two experiments. In Experiment 1, we evaluated 6 harness-model combinations against 5 live HackTheBox machines requiring scanning, enumeration, exploitation, and privilege escalation across SSH, SMB, FTP, HTTP, and DNS. In Experiment 2, we benchmarked 10 frontier models via Claude Code Router on 5 challenges from Cybench spanning pwn, forensics, web, reverse, and crypto categories using a Pass@3 metric. Our experiments show models achieving 100% with one …

Using A Spherical Speaker To Explore Sound, David Provance

Annual Research Symposium

The goal of this project is to explore the acoustics of a space using a consistent, replicable design. To do this, I used an omnidirectional speaker to play a recording designed to study room tone. The idea comes from the benefits of real-world sounds and digital consistency. Using real-world sounds often provides a more accurate representation of the room; however, each sound is unique due to inconsistency. Normal speakers have directional output, which makes the reflections in a room less realistic. Using a spherical speaker, I could create sounds that output all around the source and are consistent from one …

Interactions Of Bad Actors With Honeypots, Maryam Aliyeva, Andrew Kramer

Annual Research Symposium

Throughout daily life, computer users encounter different forms of malware, such as ransomware, adware, viruses, trojan horses, and spyware. To protect networks, individuals need to be able to comprehensively analyze a malicious actor’s behavior and tactics. These observations can be made through the usage of honeypots – a computer security mechanism set to track and deflect unauthorized activity. Honeypots frequently operate like decoys of legitimate websites that perfectly mimic an existing database, which makes them a valuable tool for researching cyber criminals’ behavior.

Constructing Information Systems: Technology Frames And Career Interest Among Middle School Students, Sai Mounika Chintalapudi, Cherie Noteboom

Annual Research Symposium

Information Systems (IS) plays a critical role in modern society, supporting organizations, healthcare systems, businesses, and digital infrastructure. Despite its importance, many students develop limited or inaccurate perceptions of the IS field at an early age, which may influence their willingness to pursue IS-related careers. Middle school is an important stage where students begin forming career interests and professional identities. However, little research has examined how younger students interpret and understand the field of Information Systems. Technology Frames of Reference (TFR) explains how individuals interpret technology through cognitive frames related to its nature, purpose, and use. While TFR has traditionally …

Mid-Generation Jailbreaks In Open-Source Llms Using A Pause-And-Edit Attack, Aman Singh, Komal More, Samyam Aryal, Mark Spanier

Annual Research Symposium

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in AI assistants, chatbots, and decision-support systems. To prevent harmful responses, most LLMs rely on safety alignment mechanisms that generate refusal responses when users request unsafe content. However, most safety evaluations assume that alignment is only required at the start of generation. In this research, we investigate a mid-generation jailbreak attack called Pause-and-Edit, where a refusal response is interrupted, modified, and resumed. This manipulation can cause the model to override its original safety decision and generate harmful instructions. Our study evaluates how vulnerable modern open-source LLMs are to this type of attack.

Exaim: A Real-Time Explainability Middleware For Multi-Agent Clinical Decision Support Systems, Abem Woldesenbet, Andrew Behrens

Annual Research Symposium

PROBLEM:

• Current LLM-based CDSS only provide post-hoc explanations, not live transparency. 
• Clinicians cannot observe diagnostic reasoning as it unfolds.
• Multi-agent reasoning generates long, overwhelming token streams.

GAP:

• No existing CDSS supports token-level, real-time explainability. 
• Flow control and semantic interpretation are tightly coupled in current systems.
• Prior work focuses on static summaries or rule-based rationales.

PURPOSE:

• Objective: Design EXAID, a middleware that summarizes evolving diagnostic reasoning as tokens are streamed. 
• Goal: Enable clinicians to monitor live logic without being overwhelmed by raw data.

Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation For Federated Learning In Imbalanced Credit Card Fraud Detection: A Comparative Analysis Of Smote Vs. Gan Approaches, Muhammad Bhutta, Abid Mehmood

Annual Research Symposium

Credit card fraud detection faces two critical challenges: extreme class imbalance with less than 0.2% fraud cases in typical datasets, and strict privacy regulations that prevent financial institutions from sharing sensitive transaction data for collaborative model training. This research addresses these challenges by investigating privacy-preserving synthetic data generation approaches in federated learning settings. The study compares two methods: Federated-SMOTE, which employs secure cross-bank nearest neighbor discovery to generate synthetic fraud cases through interpolation with strong privacy guarantees (ε=0.3), and Federated-GAN, which uses generative adversarial networks with differential privacy to synthesize realistic fraud patterns with relaxed privacy constraints (ε=0.7). Using the …

Bardella And The Curse Of Silence, Karl Lexvold

Annual Research Symposium

Bardella and the Curse of Silence is a short demonstration Metroidvania video game that involves Wwise middleware audio integration with a heavy emphasis on audio output as not just an artistic element, but a narrative and gameplay element as well. Heavily influenced by works such as Hollow Knight and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, this demonstration is a glimpse into a larger world where music is wielded as a magical force, and a curse of silence devastates the land.

Comparing Classical And Quantum Machine Learning For Cyberattack Detection In Smart Grids, Tracey Kwarteng, Grace Dushime, Mariam Gado

Annual Research Symposium

Smart grids use digital technology and automation to make electricity distribution efficient and reliable, relying on central control nodes to manage flow. If attackers compromise these nodes, they can disrupt load management, overload the system, and cause blackouts in critical locations like hospitals and factories. Classical machine learning has improved smart grid intrusion detection but struggles to handle large, unbalanced data, adversarial attacks, and real-time scalability.

This project compares a classical Support Vector Machine (SVM) against a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) to evaluate which is more effective at detecting cyberattacks versus safe signals. Both models are evaluated on accuracy, …

Growstem At Dsu Year Two Summary Report, Richard I. Avery, Tom Halverson, Viki Johnson

Grant Reports

Increasing participation, improving research infrastructure, and enhancing educational support for students were the core goals of the GROWSTEM program. GROWSTEM recruitment in Computer Science, Cyber Operations, Math, and Artificial Intelligence was targeted to underrepresented populations in an effort to increase participation in STEM at DSU. Undergraduate research is a high-impact educational practice and the undergraduate research seminar was created to provide the infrastructure to nurture and disseminate the results of undergraduate research. The study tables were developed using a backward design to provide personalized, one-on-one tutoring in the preferred format, e.g., face-to-face, online, etc. during convenient times for GROWSTEM scholars.

A Quantum Quandary: Does Algorithmic Complexity Inherently Diminish Security, Chinyere Isaac-Heslop

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Although essential, cryptographic security practice often relies on assumptions and abstractions that are difficult to audit under emerging quantum resource models. This creates an unnecessary barrier between the algorithms that govern the connected and the people cryptography protects. Modern cryptography relies on the assumption that computational complexity guarantees security. As algorithms become increasingly complex, their resistance to attack is presumed to increase. Practical constraints suggest that this relationship is neither linear nor indefinite. Resource limitations, algorithmic structure, and pressures from quantum computing introduce points at which added complexity ceases to improve and may instead degrade cryptographic robustness. This dissertation asks …

Grade Assessment Types, And Student Performance In An Online Marketing Course, Vivek Madupu

AMTP Proceedings 2026

These days, asynchronous online courses are very common in business schools at universities. Online courses are attractive as they offer flexibility for students, especially working and non-traditional students. Even though online courses are widely popular, assessment design is often based more on instructor experience and intuition rather than on research evidence. In many cases, faculty rely on exams or participation-based activities without knowing how different assessment types relate to student learning and performance.

Learning analytics (LA) refers to the collection and analysis of data generated by students through Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, etc. These data include grades, quiz scores, discussion forums, …

Moral Outrage To Market Impact: A Multi-Level Analysis Of Corporate Cancel Culture, Sayan Gupta, T. Andrew Poehlman

AMTP Proceedings 2026

Corporate cancel culture is often dismissed as “just social media noise,” but for managers the real stakes show up in markets. This paper develops and tests a three-level framework linking moralized social-media discourse, online brand reputation, and firm-level financial outcomes. Using three canonical cancellations—Dolce & Gabbana’s China controversy, Tesla’s politicization via Elon Musk, and Bud Light’s backlash after its transgender influencer partnership—we first show that these events are organized around spikes in moral-emotional language and structural virality, not generic negativity. We then document how this moral outrage predicts shifts in brand sentiment, associations, and engagement across platforms, before examining corresponding …

An Assessment Of The Reinforcing And Aversive Properties Of Transition-Related Stimuli, Lillian Louise Skiba-Thayer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Transitions from relatively favorable (rich) to relatively unfavorable (lean) activities have been shown to disrupt behavior. Transition-related disruptions in behavior have been observed across laboratories, species, and procedural arrangements. The most commonly reported disruption in basic research is a pause in the reinforced behavior in the signaled transition from a relatively rich to a relatively lean condition of reinforcement (Perone & Courtney, 1992). The present study assessed the function of the stimuli associated with transitions as either reinforcing, punishing, or neutral across two experiments using eight pigeons as subjects. Experiment 1 tested the function of two stimuli, one correlated with …

Ai In The Workplace: Understanding The Path Between Ai Adoption Intensity And Ai-Induced Job Insecurity, Joanna J. Frieske

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming more embedded in organizational workflows and is reshaping work environments, changing how we work, make decisions, stay engaged, perform, and learn. While AI adoption is associated with a wide range of benefits, it also presents negative aspects that may affect employee experiences and influence the future of work. Drawing on extant literature and on the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model, Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, and the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework, this research proposes a model in which psychological safety mediates the relationship between AI adoption intensity and job insecurity, while procedural justice and AI self-efficacy act …

Assessing Flood Resilience In West Virginia Communities: Integrating Physical, Institutional, Socioeconomic, And Environmental Dimensions, Anahita Mahmoudi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Flooding is one of the most frequent and damaging natural hazards in the United States, with impacts expected to intensify under changing climate conditions. In regions such as West Virginia, complex terrain, development patterns along river corridors, and socioeconomic disparities contribute to elevated flood risk. Traditional approaches to flood risk assessment often focus on single dimensions of vulnerability or rely on binary floodplain maps, which do not fully capture the spatial variability and multidimensional nature of flood resilience.

This dissertation develops an integrated, community-scale framework for assessing flood resilience in West Virginia by combining physical, environmental, institutional, and socioeconomic dimensions …