Digital Commons Network^™

Game-Based Learning In Mathematics Education, Kyle Theobald

Education Masters

Game-Based Learning and Gamification have been the subject of much research in recent years. Game-Based Learning is an active learning strategy that emphasizes the use of actual games, including both physical and digital games, to drive and enhance student learning and engagement. Gamification is different in that it is a strategy that utilizes common game elements such as scoring, competition, and specific rules, to foster student engagement rather than using actual games. The purpose of this research is to examine the effectiveness of using a GameBased Learning approach to address students’ lack of engagement specifically in Math, and how it …

Age And Provenance Relationships Between The Basal Great Valley Group And Its Underlying Basement: Implications For Initiation Of The Great Valley Forearc Basin, California, U.S.A., Mariah C. Romero, Devon A. Orme, Kathleen D. Surpless, Chance B. Ronemus, Zachary Morrow

Earth and Environmental Geosciences Faculty Research

The Great Valley forearc (GVf) basin, California, records deposition along the western margin of North America during active oceanic subduction from Jurassic through Paleogene time. Along the western GVf, its underlying basement, the Coast Range Ophiolite (CRO), is exposed as a narrow outcrop belt. CRO segments are overlain by the Great Valley Group (GVG), and locally, an ophiolitic breccia separates the CRO from basal GVG strata. New stratigraphic, petrographic, and geochronologic data (3865 detrital and 68 igneous zircon U-Pb ages) from the upper CRO, ophiolitic breccia, and basal GVG strata clarify temporal relationships among the three units, constrain maximum depositional …

Kafka And The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Plant Worlds, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Plant communities create and enable most of Earth’s living worlds by shaping ecological water and airflows, producing energy and matter through photosynthesis, and linking into vast, interconnected mycorrhizal fungal networks of communication to form interactive, multispecies, and distributive intelligences. We all live in various plant-formed worlds, an under-acknowledged fact in many extractivist cultures today. This essay briefly compares three works of science fiction featuring alien forest worlds that focus specifically on world-shaping vegetal power in which human or humanoid beings exist: Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 The Word for World is Forest, Alan Dean Foster’s 1975 Midworld and Marcus Hammerschitt’s …

Dental Board Of California, Shun Lam, Marcus Friedman

California Regulatory Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Department Of Insurance, Lisette Cruz, Alexander Cesta, Marcus Friedman

California Regulatory Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Board Of Barbering And Cosmetology, Isaiah Artis, Marcus Friedman

California Regulatory Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Department Of Managed Health, Zoe Bulls, Marcus Friedman

California Regulatory Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Infinite Queerness And American Settler Colonialism, Jeremiah A. Ho

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

What the LGBTQ rights movement needs, especially with regard to legal challenges, is a lasting philosophical shift toward the idea that justice and equality are an infinite game rather than a finite and pragmatic one. This work here will explore why this posture is favorable at this moment—and generally in civil rights work. Beyond connecting queer sacrifice in recent Supreme Court cases to the functioning and maintenance of the American settler colonial project, this Article will posit why a strategy shift toward infinite thinking is increasingly necessary for more resolute work that results in the autonomy and equality of LGBTQ …

Masking Identity At Public Protests, Deborah R. Gerhardt

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

As masks have become increasingly popular at public protests, government officials, college administrators and law enforcement are struggling with how to handle masked protesters who evade responsibility for violence and intimidation. While some wear masks to safely engage in anonymous speech, others wear them to avoid accountability for violence and intimidation.

This Article will explore these issues to assist those seeking to enact constitutionally valid mask policies. To situate today’s mask regulation challenges in the context of American history, Part I reviews events that led to enactment of anti-mask laws many years ago. Part II explains when the First Amendment …

Identity And Procedural Subordination In Lgbtq Religious Exemption Cases, Kyle C. Velte

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article proceeds in four Parts. Part I summarizes the legal literature on procedural injustice. Part II briefly describes the white Christian nationalism movement, its connection with the LGBTQ civil rights movement, and contends that it is an identity-based movement akin to traditional identity-based civil rights movements. Part III summarizes the holdings of the Religious Exemptions Trilogy [Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis] and makes the argument that they are strongly procedural decisions. Part IV contends that the Court has engaged in identity-based …

Three's A Crowd: Addressing Discrimination Faced By Queer De Facto Parents In Child Custody Standing Proceedings, Shannon E. Callaghan

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

In the United States, between five percent and eight percent of adults identify as queer, and as of 2020, fifteen percent of queer couples have children in their households. While recent legal victories have expanded queer rights, family law continues to lag in affording legal recognition to “nontraditional” families. This is particularly problematic for unmarried, queer co-parents who have virtually no legal claims to the children they have raised with their partners. Current standing requirements for custody proceedings treat these de facto parents as legal strangers to their children due to the absence of biological, marital, or adoptive ties. As …

Narratives Unbound: The Role Of Queer Transformative Works In Shaping Legal And Cultural Landscapes, Morgan E. Spencer

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Queer transformative works promote social justice in marginalized queer communities by offering much-needed representation and visibility. These works fill an essential gap in a societal storytelling canon historically bereft of such material. Notwithstanding this societal benefit, these works pose complex legal and ethical challenges at the crossroads of copyright protections and creative expression. This Note examines the cultural significance and social benefits of queer transformative works in combination with an analysis of the legal landscape and ethical considerations that such works must navigate to maintain a harmonious existence with the original works that inspired them. A more nuanced understanding of …

Gendered Capital Punishment, Sandra Babcock

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article, for the first time, grapples with the influence of gender on decision makers in women’s capital trials. Part I provides a brief overview of scholarship examining the experiences of women offenders in the criminal legal system. Part II explains how gender inflects the prosecutions of women charged with capital crimes, drawing on scholarly research as well as a data set comprised of the trial transcripts of every woman currently on death row in the United States. Part III explores how the gender of key decision makers could affect the quality of justice received by women capital defendants. I …

Table Of Contents (Vol. 31, No. 1)

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Solubility Characterization Of Organic Molecules For Aqueous Organic Redox Flow Batteries, Anthony W. Ferrell, Harkeerith K. Vij, Seamus D. Jones

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

The major obstacle to renewable energy sources is a lack of long-term energy storage capabilities. Energy produced during the day dissipates, leaving insufficient electricity for at night. The goal of the project is to design an Aqueous Organic Redox Flow Battery (AORFB) to act as long-term energy storage. Work has been done using machine learning to identify suitable compounds for the batteries. In this work there was no indication as to the aqueous solubility of the molecules; this controls the device’s energy storage capabilities. We used a machine learning model to determine the aqueous solubility of slightly more than 3000 …

Targeting Federated Learning: A Study Of Membership Inference Attacks On Healthcare Data, Brett W. Hillyard, Aditi S. Lappathi

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This study investigates the vulnerabilities of federated learning models in the healthcare domain, specifically focusing on membership inference attacks (MIA). Federated learning allows local models to train on sensitive healthcare data without sharing the data itself, making it an attractive method for protecting privacy. However, even in this decentralized framework, models remain vulnerable to MIAs, where attackers can infer whether certain data points were used to train a model by analyzing model updates. Using the Texas100 dataset, this study demonstrates that as the number of local models increases, the attack accuracy of MIAs also increases due to higher bias …

Fast And High-Resolution View Synthesis From A Single Input Panorama, Nam Nguyen, Angela V. Chen, Theresa Zhu, Seth Johnson, Pranav Dumpa, Benjamin Geil

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

We introduce a novel method to convert a single input panorama into a 3D colored mesh representation of the scene. Unlike recent methods based on neural rendering, which are limited to low-resolution inputs and offline rendering, our approach supports 4k resolution inputs and real time rendering in a virtual reality headset. We first estimate a depth map and produce an initial layered depth image (LDI) representation. We fill unseen regions behind objects by iteratively cutting and inpainting the LDI. We then convert the LDI into an optimized, texture mapped mesh to achieve a compact representation

Enhancing Semantic Search With Human-Crafted Knowledge In Sentence Embeddings, Zachary Weinfeld

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Semantic search plays a critical role in many domains, with numerous algorithms developed to address it. A common approach involves using sentence transformers to generate embeddings for both search queries and documents, allowing for the comparison of their vectors. While many different embedding models are widely used, our approach integrates these models with human-crafted knowledge in a novel way, resulting in an improvement in the Mean Average Precision (MAP) scores. Traditional embeddings often rely heavily on the specific words used in a query or document. Our technique mitigates this dependency by refining the vectors to capture the overall semantic meaning, …

"Deep Learning For Microscope Image Denoising", Nasreen Buhn, Sriya Adunur, Guy Hagen, Jonathan Ventura

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

In order to avoid damaging live cells, optical microscope imaging must be conducted under low-excitation light intensity and/or short exposure times, resulting in low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Deep learning methods offer an effective solution for removing microscope noise, utilizing algorithms that are able to reconstruct finer features in low SNR images. This research explores the denoising capability of several deep learning methods based on PSNR and SSIM. Tested methods include traditional approaches (BMED), supervised learning (CARE and Restormer), and unsupervised methods (Noise2Fast, N2V, SSD-Unsupervised, and SASSID). The Restormer model, which employs an encoder-decoder transformer architecture and progressive learning, stood out …

Promoting Retention And Success Of Underrepresented Minorities In Engineering, Sebastian Macias-Gonzalez

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Equity gaps in higher education have long been a pressing concern, with factors like race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status influencing college attendance, retention, and success rates. While CSU-wide initiatives have been implemented to reduce these disparities, Cal Poly's distinctive role as the only campus transitioning into a Hispanic-serving institution calls for heightened efforts on our campus. Additionally, the persistence of equity gaps in STEM fields, combined with Cal Poly’s strong engineering program, makes it essential to focus on retaining and supporting underrepresented minorities (URM) in engineering disciplines.

Development Of Python Library For Spacecraft Modeling, Shreya Kale

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This project involved developing a python library to be used in modeling spacecraft attitude dynamics and control

Deploying A Distributed Cloud-Based Microservice Application Benchmark Suite, Sai Dhruthik Murthy, Srish Maulik, Joydeep Mukherjee

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Cloud services have lately transitioned from a single monolithic application to several loosely coupled microservices. This design shift from a single complex monolithic application to tens or hundreds of single-purpose microservices has enabled modern cloud services to be deployed, scaled, and managed in a more efficient way. Microservices can be deployed inside their own lightweight containers hosted on a cloud platform, and they can be individually developed, updated, tested, and elastically scaled. Each microservice can also be developed in its own suitable language, with only a common API for microservices to communicate with each other. Due to these benefits, large …

Gamified Machine Embroidery, Sai Rama Balakrishnan, Vince Thanh Doan

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This project aims to improve accessibility to the embroidery field by developing an application that captures the utility of a embroidery software (controlling an embroidery machine to produce embroidered output) and combines it with the playfulness of a game, to put those advanced controls in the hands of novices.

Agentic Ai In Search & Rescue, Belal Elshenety

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

No abstract provided.

Ai For Search And Rescue: Probabilistic Reasoning, Emi Dinh, Sydney Lynch, Swayam Chidrawar

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

No abstract provided.

Wearable Sensor-Based Gait And Balance In Elementary And Middle Schools, Sofie Zalatimo, Catherine Semaan

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

No abstract provided.

Significance Of Noninvasive Endothelial Dysfunction And Other Cardiovascular Measurements In Various Communities, Sofi Z. David, Lily Wilcox, Kalia Richard

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This pilot study aims to raise awareness of endothelial dysfunction in underrepresented communities, where cardiovascular disease is prevalent. By delivering educational presentations and materials, the study seeks to increase participants' understanding and interest in endothelial dysfunction, potentially leading to proactive health behaviors. The results will inform future initiatives to enhance public knowledge and reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease in these communities.

In the future, there will also be a 3 vs 5-minute hyperemia study. Thirty participants without a history of cardiovascular disease will undergo testing using the Cordex SmartCuff™ device. If the three-minute hold proves to accurately measure endothelial …

Impact Of Composites Material Research On Underrepresented Communities, Neil Bedagkar

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

The purpose of this research is to qualify and quantify the amount of research into composite materials applicable to certain engineering industries, then examine the impact these industries have on communities of a lower socioeconomic status. Of a random sample of papers from ScienceDirect over the last 24 years, it was found that the amount of research applicable to industries cascades as follows: the most is applicable to the construction industry, followed by automotive, defense, renewable energy, and biomedical. The effects of each industry have been examined and are presented as well.

Digital Twin For Shelf Intelligence: Ai-Driven Inventory Management For Minimizing Food Waste, Charlotte Maples, Marvin Velazquez

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This project aims to develop a solution for improving grocery store inventory management by leveraging AI-driven image recognition. Traditional inventory methods, which rely on manual counting or barcode scanning, are inefficient, labor-intensive, and prone to human error. Over an 8-week period, we designed and developed a basic iPad app capable of identifying specific types of fruit and automatically updating inventory records in real time. By utilizing the iPad’s camera and machine learning algorithms, the app demonstrates the potential to streamline inventory tracking, reduce manual labor, and improve accuracy in managing perishable goods. Future work will focus on expanding the app’s …