Digital Commons Network^™

How Human Vs. Ai Chatbots Support Psychological Needs Of Students, Tymon T. Vu

Master's Theses

AI auto graders and virtual assistants are increasingly prevalent in educational set- tings. Although current literature demonstrates that AI chatbots can positively im- pact student motivation, there is little definitive evidence exploring whether these systems can replicate the effective motivational methods used by human teachers. Thus, in this experiment, we investigate how the perception of the identity of a tutor (AI versus human) impacts the psychological needs of students. 27 undergraduates taking introductory computer science courses were asked to explain code in plain English (EiPE). Participants received feedback from two tutors in within-subjects fashion: one human and one labeled as …

The Effects Of Maceration And Enzymes On The Chemical Characteristics Of Hard Apple Cider, Manou De Pelsmaeker

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of maceration and pectinase enzymes on the base chemical, polyphenolic, and volatile characteristics of cider. The apples (Fuji) were milled and macerated for 0, 4, 12, 24, or 36 hours, both with and without an enzymatic pectinase addition. While base chemical characteristics such as sugar content and ABV were unaffected, the acidity of cider was influenced maceration and enzymes. Extended maceration time resulted in lower concentrations of malic acid, and enzymes resulted in a lower pH compared to the control. Polyphenols were extracted during maceration time, resulting in higher concentrations …

A Study On Quantization And Hardware Cost Tradeoffs In A 5g Nr Ldpc Decoder On Fpga, Giancarlo Acosta

Master's Theses

The fixed-point implementation of a 5G New Radio LDPC decoder forces a tradeoff between precision and hardware cost, governed by the variable node word length W_L, the check node message width W_R, and the normalized min-sum correction factor α. This thesis characterizes how these three parameters affect both error correction performance and FPGA resource utilization for an LDPC decoder on an established LDPC decoder architecture. A bit-accurate MATLAB core model records bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) while a verified HDL Coder model generates synthesizable VHDL for Vivado synthesis, and both are swept …

Deep Learning For Affect Recognition: A Comparative Study Of Physiological Sensor-Based And Facial Image-Based Approaches, Ravi Panchal, Ravi Panchal

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates deep learning approaches for affect recognition using wearable physiological signals and facial image data. The sensor-based component evaluates stress and affect recognition on the WESAD dataset using wrist-based physiological windows and examines multiple temporal modeling strategies, including convolutional, recurrent, hybrid CNN-LSTM, attention-based, ensemble, and time-frequency approaches.

The image-based component evaluates hard-label facial expression recognition on AffectNet+ using pre-trained ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B3, and ConvNeXt-Tiny architectures across Easy, Challenging, and Difficult subsets representing different levels of expression ambiguity.

Experimental results show that the proposed Multi-Branch Attention CNN-BiLSTM (MBA-CNN-BiLSTM) model achieves the strongest wearable stress- and affect-recognition performance among the evaluated …

Integrating Sustainability Into Engineering Education, Riley R. Moller

Master's Theses

Engineering decisions shape lasting technology that affects environmental integrity, public safety, economic stability, and social equity. As global challenges such as climate change, infrastructure vulnerability, and rapid technological advancement intensify, the responsibilities placed on engineers continue to expand. Sustainability provides a framework for addressing these interconnected pressures through systems-based design and long-term thinking. Yet, sustainability education within engineering programs remains unevenly integrated, often positioned as elective or peripheral rather than as a foundational component of professional preparation.

Prior research shows that sustainability is most frequently addressed through stand-alone courses rather than embedded across required curricula, reflecting disciplinary structures that prioritize …

Reproducing And Evaluating Charger Surfing: Robustness Of Smartphone Charging-Line Side-Channels, Colby M. Watts

Master's Theses

Smartphones are frequently connected to external, untrusted charging hardware, creating opportunities for side-channel attacks that do not require malware or direct access to device data. Charger Surfing, a recently proposed charging-line power analysis side-channel attack, reported high accuracy in inferring touchscreen input from voltage measurements collected from a smartphone’s charging cable; however, the reproducibility and robustness of these results under different conditions remain unclear. This thesis presents an independent replication and evaluation of Charger Surfing, including the development of an end-to-end data collection pipeline consisting of a modified charging cable, oscilloscope-based recordings, custom Android app, automated trace processing, and convolutional …

Improving The Reliability And Performance Of A Supersonic Indraft Tube Wind Tunnel, Christian J. Kaml

Master's Theses

Access to supersonic testing is increasing in demand, and wind tunnels remain one of the safest and most cost-effective methods for gathering high-speed flow data. Despite being more economical than alternative options, supersonic wind tunnel facilities often require substantial investment to construct, operate, and maintain.

The novel indraft tube tunnel architecture was conceived as a high-speed flow testbed that incorporates features of both Ludwieg tubes and indraft wind tunnels to maintain costs low enough to be accessible even to small universities. This design was first developed and tested in 2018 at California Polytechnic State University, featuring a cost per test …

Preserving Structural Alias Information Across The Mlir-To-Llvm Lowering Boundary, Shravan Sheth

Master's Theses

Machine learning training and inference workloads run at massive scale, where the efficiency of generated machine code directly affects throughput and energy consumption. The compilers that lower model specifications to hardware instructions rely on optimization passes that can only exploit information visible in the representations they operate on. MLIR, the intermediate representation framework underlying production machine learning compilers such as IREE and Triton, is designed so that each abstraction level can encode semantics that lower levels cannot represent. One example is memref.subview, which partitions a buffer into typed regions with explicit offsets and sizes, making structural non-overlap provable from the …

Praxsmith: An Actor-Centric Domain Specific Language For Emergent Narratives In Video Games, Jacob C. Kelleran

Master's Theses

The video game industry is rapidly growing, and interest in game development is growing alongside it. Among this growing interest is a desire to include branching and emergent narratives in games. This subject is understood to be difficult, as every possible trajectory within the story creates exponential complexity. Large studios are sometimes able to create convincing implementations, but that is often with hundreds of developers and writers. Over the years, various solutions have been proposed to create frameworks and languages that aim to tackle this problem, with varying degrees of success. Some frameworks attempt this by placing the focus on …

An Evaluation Of Road Network Structure As A Predictor Of Traffic Volume, Colin M. Mcdonald

Master's Theses

This thesis evaluates the relationships between various graph theory metrics and taxi traffic volume for the cities of San Francisco, California and Porto, Portugal. We also evaluate a modified betweenness centrality metric which incorporates the count of distinct origin-destination pairs from the taxi data as the weight function. This thesis extends a paper by Pengyao Ye, Bo Wu, and Wenbo Fan by reducing circularity through a temporal train-test split and by comparing both line-graph and primal-graph formulations of betweenness centrality.

We found that past traffic volume is almost perfectly correlated with future traffic volume and that the modified betweenness centrality …

Sustainable Management Of Soilborne Pathogens In Strawberry Production Through Host Resistance And Sanitation Practices, Maria G. Alvarez Arredondo

Master's Theses

Strawberry production in California is significantly impacted by soilborne pathogens that reduce plant productivity and increase management costs. This research addressed management of these pathogens through two independent approaches: evaluation of host resistance in strawberry cultivars and assessment of sanitation practices for reducing pathogen movement between fields.

Macrophomina root rot, caused by Macrophomina phaseolina, was evaluated over two growing seasons (2024–2025 and 2025–2026) using field trials at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. In Year 1, disease incidence varied widely among genotypes, with mortality ranging from 1.3% to 88.8% and an average mortality of 26.4%. Area under the …

Improving The Clinical Trial Landscape For Patients With Atypical Variants Of Alzheimer's Disease, Nick Corriveau-Lecavalier, Neus Falgàs, Deepti Putcha, Jonathan Graff-Radford, Keir X.X. Yong, Baayla D.C. Boon, Rosaleena Mohanty, Eric Westman, Colin Groot, David T. Jones, Lea T. Grinberg, Gil D. Rabinovici, Jennifer L. Whitwell, Liana G. Apostolova, Melissa E. Murray, Dustin B. Hammers, Suzanne E. Schindler, Inga Atonsdottir, Elizabeth K. Rhodus, Jonathan M. Schott, Ignacio Illán-Gala, Ogbuagu Chukwuanugo, Jorge J.Llibre Guerra, Ruth Peters, Erin L. Abner, Carla Abdelnour, Albert Lladó, Renaud La Joie

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Patients with atypical variants of Alzheimer's disease (AD) often present at a younger age with predominantly non-amnestic impairments and a more aggressive disease course. Historically, individuals with atypical presentations have not been included in large-scale clinical trials, which typically focus on late-onset, sporadic amnestic-predominant AD. Consequently, treatment options and research efforts specific to atypical AD remain limited. The emergence of amyloid-targeting therapies that slow disease progression underscores these challenges, as evidence supporting their efficacy in early-onset amnestic and non-amnestic AD variants is scarce. This perspective article argues that atypical AD represents an excellent disease model for clinical trials and proposes …

Transportability Analyses In Comparative Effectiveness Research, Blythe Adamson, Wei Liu, Stephen Duffield, Anouk Déruaz-Luyet, Dimitri Bennett, Montse Soriano Gabarró, Mehmet Burcu, Daniela Claudia Moga, Sarah Welby, Tianze Jiao, Xuerong Wen, Grammati Sarri

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

The Problem: Transportability considerations are increasingly important to answer research questions in comparative effectiveness research (CER) to support the transfer of evidence on medicinal products across countries or settings. As drug development costs rise and healthcare systems and professionals face economic and resource pressures, leveraging existing data and evidence generated across borders or settings can improve efficiency and inform decisions in product development and decision-making (regulatory, health technology assessment [HTA] and clinical care). Differences in population characteristics, healthcare systems, and data availability, including coding discrepancies, may present significant challenges to the transportability of CER evidence. Without rigorous methodological approaches, the …

Understanding The Contribution Of Toxicant Exposures To Alzheimer's Disease And Related Dementias., Gareth R Howell, Paul R Territo, David Aylor, Lee E Goldstein

Faculty Research 2026

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) are modulated by gene-environment (GxE) interactions across the lifespan. Variants of specific genes increase AD risk and synergize with exposures to environmental toxicants ("exposome"), including neurotoxic metals and metalloids such as lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), and arsenic (As). These neurotoxicants enter the body (via drinking water, contaminated food, and airborne particulates), transit in blood, cross the blood-brain barrier, and distribute in brain where the retained toxicant disrupts central nervous system development, structure, and function. Chronic exposure to these ubiquitous toxicants is common in disadvantaged communities, raising concerns about health risk disparities linked to geographic, …

The Montana Travel Industry - 2025 Summary, Melissa Weddell

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

In 2025, Montana welcomed 13.2 million visitors — a 4% decline from 2024 — who collectively spent $5.6 billion across the state. Tourism supported 52,610 jobs (1 in 11 statewide), generated $360 million in state and local taxes, and saved the average Montana household over $740 in taxes. Glacier Country led regional spending at $1.79 billion, followed by Yellowstone Country at $1.34 billion. The typical visitor was 57.8 years old, traveled in a group of 2.2, stayed 5.2 nights, and arrived primarily by car (74%). Top origin states were Washington, Idaho, and North Dakota. Visitors were drawn most by mountains …

2025 Estimates - Nonresident Visitation, Expenditures, And Economic Contribution, Kara Grau

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

Montana welcomed an estimated 13.24 million nonresident visitors in 2025, generating $5.64 billion in traveler expenditures and contributing an estimated $7.11 billion in total economic output to the state's economy. Nonresident spending supported approximately 52,620 jobs and generated $360.4 million in state and local tax revenues. Fuel (21%) and restaurant/bar spending (20%) accounted for the largest shares of visitor expenditures, followed by lodging, outfitter/guide services, and groceries. Summer travel remained the dominant season, with the third quarter accounting for 45% of annual visitation and 54% of total expenditures. Vacation travelers represented the largest visitor segment (41%) and had the highest …

Montana Resident Report: Rural Montana And Tribal Communities And Activities, Q1 2026, Carter Bermingham, Megan Schultz

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This study was designed to better understand residents’ perceptions of smaller, rural towns in Montana, along with their level of interest in visiting and participating in activities in American Indian communities across the state. The Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research (ITRR) conducts resident studies on a quarterly basis to better understand current topics throughout the state, with resident travel routinely serving as one of those topics. Recent efforts at the state level have focused on expanding Montana’s tribal tourism industry to provide economic benefits and to inspire visitation to Indian Country.

Respondents were asked to comment on how much …

Clinical Presentations Of Pemphigus Vulgaris In Patients With Skin Of Color: A Systematic Literature Review, Haya Alkiswani, Simona Alomary, Jared Boetes, Nicole J. Baker, Susan C. Taylor

SKMC Student Presentations and Publications

Background: Pemphigus vulgaris (PV) is a rare, often severe autoimmune disease affecting skin and mucous membranes. Despite the scarce literature on PV in skin of color (SOC) populations (Fitzpatrick III-VI), existing studies suggest that there are misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, and recurrence of symptoms in SOC patients with PV. Objective: This review explores the clinical presentations of PV reported in patients with SOC, diagnostic challenges and delays, treatments, and patient outcomes to allow for an improved understanding of how PV manifests clinically in darker skin. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted using articles found in PubMed and Embase. Two independent …

2026 Cyber-Resilient Health Care Workshop Report, Malcolm Schongalla, Sergey Bratus

Computer Science Technical Reports

The ISTS and the Dartmouth College Cybersecurity Cluster hosted the successful, inaugural Cyber-Resilient Health Care (CRHC) Workshop, March 5th & 6th, 2026. The event theme was "Innovation and Implementation," in response to the need to shift from reactive to proactive resiliency measures in the healthcare sector. Approximately 30 experts in clinical health care, cybersecurity, medical technology, policy, and innovation met to discuss solution-focused innovations addressing hard, cyber-related problems in health care. The agenda featured keynotes, an expert panel, innovation pitches, small group discussions, and a tabletop infrastructure disaster exercise. Participants gained insights into the obstacles and solutions involved in supporting …

Seqra Developments: Amendments To Ease Housing Construction, Revised Regulations, New Cases, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In the hopes of easing the housing shortage, on May 26 the New York Legislature passed and Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill that will exempt many multifamily housing projects from the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA).

A month before, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) issued regulations on protecting disadvantaged communities, and took steps to require more discussion of climate impacts under SEQRA.

Some Realism About Constitutional Remedies, Thomas P. Schmidt, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has wavered between two approaches to questions of executive power, which are often labeled institutional formalism and realism. Formalism treats an institution like the presidency as a “black box” to which the Constitution assigns certain powers. In Trump v. Hawaii,  for example, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s infamous travel ban by focusing not on the “particular President” and his past call for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” but rather on “the authority of the Presidency itself.” That is the language of institutional formalism.

Realism, on the other hand, peers into the “black …

The Impact Of Ai Companions On Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

People of all ages and backgrounds regularly use AI companions — virtual friends, lovers, and confidantes powered by artificial intelligence. As a new form of relationship, this development poses novel doctrinal and policy questions for family law. As a doctrinal matter, what does child neglect look like when a parent delegates caretaking to an AI companion? How should standards for elder neglect adapt to the widespread use of robotic caregivers? Should lawmakers impose mandatory reporting requirements on therapy bots if children share experiences of abuse or neglect? And can people designate an AI companion as a health care proxy? As …

Public Perceptions Of Family Caregiving Of Children Versus Older Adults, Elizabeth S. Scott, Tamar Kricheli-Katz

Faculty Scholarship

The population of older adults in the United States is growing at a rapid rate, both because people are living longer lives and because older adults are an increasingly large share of the population as baby boomers age. It is predicted that by 2030, one in ¿ve adults in the United States will be of retirement age, and one in six people worldwide will be age 60 or older. By 2034 there will be more adults age 65 and older in this country than minor children under age 18.

Among the important consequences of this demographic trend will be a …

(R2133) Analysis Of A Bulk Queue With Balking, Adaptive Overloading Service, Multiple Vacation, Inspection And Rework, S. Karpagam, R. Lokesh

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

We consider a queueing system that utilizes a single server to manage product flow through bulk and overload service modes, depending on queue length. Balking occurs when the queue length reaches ‘N’. After completion of service, products undergo quality inspection, with defective products sent for rework based on specific probabilities. If the product is non-defective, the server continues processing until the queue length exceeds a certain threshold; beyond this point, the server is either routed back to bulk service or directed to an overload service. Also, the server goes into a vacation mode when the queue size is below a …

Feedback Loops: What Am I Missing?, Patrick Barry

Articles

In May, 2024, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “For Conversations You Dread, Try a Chatbot.” Here are the opening lines: Many people worry about the outsize role that AI may eventually play in our lives. But what if employing an AI program could actually help us with issues that cause fear and anxiety? We’ve found that it can be a surprisingly effective tool for figuring out how to approach emotionally charged conversations.

Environmental Repair In The Energy Transition, Martin Lockman

Faculty Publications

For nearly a century, American laws have required mines, oil and gas companies, and other potentially hazardous industries to restore land affected by their activities to a safe condition when they are done with it. These laws represent a grand bargain—they allow operators to make profitable but damaging use of land today in exchange for the promise of expensive remediation tomorrow. However, this bargain has proven hard to enforce. Dozens of “zombie” mines scar mountains in Kentucky. Unrecorded “orphaned” wells poison groundwater in Texas. Over the past century, these laws have become the center of a legal arms race. Fossil …

A Copula-Based Framework For Multivariate Count Time Series With Mixed Marginal Distributions, Dimuthu Fernando, Yuxin Wen, Wimarsha Jayanetti

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We developed a class of multivariate integer-valued time series models using copula theory. Each count time series is modeled as a Markov chain, with serial dependence characterized through copula-based transition probabilities for Poisson and negative binomial marginals. Cross-sectional dependence is modeled via a trivariate Gaussian or a “t-copula”, allowing for both positive and negative correlations and providing a flexible dependence structure. Model parameters are estimated using likelihood-based inference, where the trivariate Gaussian or t-copula integrals are evaluated through standard randomized Monte Carlo methods. Simulation results, along with an analysis of annual counts of major hurricanes (Category 3+) across the North …

"I Just Broke Down": Critical Care And Secondary Traumatic Stress In Multilingual Schools, Elaine Allard, Barbara Thelamour, Yusra Ali , '24, Naw Hser Nay Paw , '27

Educational Studies Faculty Works

Drawing on nearly a decade of qualitative data collection and educator engagement at an immigrant-serving high school in Philadelphia, this essay explores the intersections of critical multilingual pedagogy with secondary traumatic stress (STS). STS is a mental health condition impacting professionals who work closely with trauma-impacted individuals, which can adversely impact their job satisfaction and career trajectories. Weaving teacher accounts with scholarship on critical care, STS, and teachers’ working conditions, the authors paint a complex picture of how, in spite of its myriad benefits for students, critical care can increase educators’ risk of developing STS in multilingual, immigrant- serving schools, …

Recreational Fishing Identification Guide, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Fisheries Occasional Publications

Please note: this updated version (9th edition) published in June 2026 replaces the version published in 2023.

This guide has been developed to help you identify the more common species in Western Australia that you may encounter. The purpose of this guide is to enhance consistent and accurate species identification.

If you are unsure about a particular species (or if it is not in this guide), please discuss it with a representative of the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia. You can access additional information from dpird.wa.gov.au

Throughout this guide you will see all or some of …

Recreational Fishing Location Guide, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Fisheries Occasional Publications

Please note: this version (6th edition) published in 2026 replaces the version published in 2023.

This guide has been developed to help you identify the fishing locations that you may visit. The purpose of this guide is to enhance consistent and accurate identification of fishing locations and block numbers within each Bioregion. If you are unsure about a particular location, please discuss it with a representative of the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia.