Digital Commons Network^™

Techniques For Qr-Enabled Card Capture For Mobile Payments, Dileep R. Dominic

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure relates to a method for facilitating secure card-not-present (CNP) mobile payments through the use of a physical payment card embedded with an encrypted QR code. The QR code encodes essential cardholder data, including a primary account number (PAN) and expiry date. The method involves recognizing a designated input field on a mobile device while accessing a payment gateway interface. An interface module displays a camera icon adjacent to the input field, enabling a scanning procedure that utilizes a native camera application to read the QR code. This scanning process automatically populates the input field with the decoded …

A Method And Payment System For Preventing Card Skimming During Payment Transactions, Binayak Biswas

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure relates to a method and payment system for preventing card skimming during payment transactions. The method involves generating a dynamic PIN token using a secret key and transaction-specific data. The dynamic PIN token is transmitted via a near-field communication (NFC) interface from a mobile device or contactless card to a point-of-sale (POS) terminal. This token is verified at a verification network utilizing the same secret key and transaction-specific data to confirm the authenticity of the payment transaction. Upon successful verification of the dynamic PIN token, the payment transaction is executed, ensuring that the token is unique for …

Self-Launching Boat (Slb), Colin Hilton

Defensive Publications Series

A maritime drone able to operate in displacement and planing modes on water, or as a sled upon surfaces like snow, ice or sandbanks. An ancillary feature of the craft is that as few as four motors allow it to be launched from land to water in the absence of any facilities, and afterward fly within 'surface-effect' should conditions permit.

Innovative Labyrinth Seal Design To Optimize Leakage And Thrust Loads In Refrigerant Compressor

Defensive Publications Series

Labyrinth seals play a crucial role in shaft sealing applications in protecting bearings and preventing contamination. However, they tend to have high leakage values which negatively impact compressor efficiency. This proposed solution of labyrinth seal provides an axial and radial arrangement of labyrinth design that reduces the leakage drastically and also helps in reducing the effective thrust load of the compressor.

Turbine Expander Wheel With An Integrated Thrust Generator

Defensive Publications Series

Designing a multi-stage centrifugal compressor involves several challenges, particularly concerning thrust and clearances. Efficient thrust balancing is essential to prevent excessive wear on bearings and ensure stable operation while optimizing tip clearance is essential to avoid performance losses. The proposed solution discloses a radial turbine wheel with a radially extended back disk that acts as a counterbalance thrust generator.

Reversed Compressor Housing Ported Shroud Rib

Defensive Publications Series

Ported Shroud for a turbocharger allows air from downstream of compressor to recirculate back to upstream to increase flow stability and avoid surge. To expand the operating range of a centrifugal compressor, shroud walls often have annular ribs. This invention proposes a reversed design of ported shroud rib that improves compressor surge behavior and widens compressor map without any additional cost.

Dynamic Channel Selection Via Persistent Client-Side State Mapping, Abhishek Prasad

Defensive Publications Series

Manual channel selection can be required when a user signs into a primary account with multiple corresponding profiles on a content sharing platform, provided that no default profile is configured. This results in redundant user prompts and inefficient use of network resources through additional round-trip requests. This disclosure relates to dynamically selecting an active channel based on historical activity on a specific client device. The identity of the last active channel used on the client device can be stored using authentication data (e.g., an encrypted state cookie). When a subsequent sign-in is initiated, the state cookie can be retrieved and …

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Context-Aware Source Code Modification, Zheng Liang, Aileme Omogbai, Erin Altenhof

Defensive Publications Series

Generative artificial intelligence models may face challenges when modifying components within large software systems, as they can lack the project-specific context to link a visual user interface element to its corresponding source code files. A system can utilize a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach where historical code revisions, which may include associated user interface images and textual descriptions, are processed with an embedding model to create a searchable vector index. At execution time, a user query, which can comprise a screenshot and a text prompt, may be used to search the index and retrieve semantically similar historical changes. This retrieved information, …

Scalable Personalized Score Approximation Via Core Subgraph Pre-Computation, Leonid Kuligin

Defensive Publications Series

Computing link analysis algorithm scores for individual nodes in a large-scale graph can be computationally expensive, which may limit practical application. A technique for approximating such a computation may be applied to graphs that can be partitioned into a core subgraph (G1) and a peripheral subgraph (G2) without edges pointing from G1 to G2. The approach may involve pre-computing and caching pruned vectors for nodes within the G1 subgraph. A link analysis algorithm score for a node in the G2 subgraph can then be approximated by calculating a linear combination, such as an arithmetic mean, of the cached vectors corresponding …

Adaptive Correction Of Digital Map Features Using A Text-Guided Generative Model, Yotam Intrator, Idan Kligvasser, Ehud Rivlin, Amir Livne

Defensive Publications Series

Static machine learning models applied in automated cartography may produce inaccurate map features or may not adapt to localized guidelines without potentially costly retraining. A post-processing framework can utilize a multi-modal, text-guided generative model to perform adaptive corrections. For example, a system can receive a visual representation of a map segment, such as a raster image of road markings, and a set of natural language guidelines as input. The generative model can then process these inputs to synthesize a new visual representation where map features may be altered to conform with the specified guidelines. This approach can decouple correction logic …

Automated Generation Of Product Compliance Briefs Using A Generative Model And Enterprise Data Sources, Venkat Sharma Gaddala, Gary Borella, Krish Mohan, Nanda Balasubramanian, Raghu Ravisankar, Shaswat Kumar, Joe Heinrich, Debbie Masada

Defensive Publications Series

The manual creation of specialized compliance documentation for international trade may be a resource-intensive process, potentially leading to operational delays. Systems and methods are described for the automated generation of product briefing documents. The technology may utilize a central orchestration service that integrates a generative artificial intelligence model with multiple enterprise data sources, for example, product lifecycle management systems and repositories of existing documents. To generate a new document, the system can identify similar products based on shared attributes, such as a commodity code, and could use data from these products to construct a few-shot prompt for the model. This …

Cascaded Model Architecture For Resource-Efficient Contextual Action Suggestion, Lixia Liu, Jian Wu, Georgi Angelov, Jiang Wang

Defensive Publications Series

Providing real-time contextual action suggestions in communication environments can involve computational cost and latency associated with running large-scale artificial intelligence models. A system can address these considerations using a cascaded, multi-layered modeling architecture. The system may first process contextual data, such as live meeting transcripts, through a lightweight, computationally inexpensive classification model. If this model returns a prediction with a confidence score below a predetermined threshold, the request can be escalated to a more resource-intensive model, such as a large language model, for a more nuanced analysis. This gating mechanism can balance predictive accuracy with computational efficiency, which may reduce …

Dynamic Distillation Cache For Augmenting A Local Generative Model With Teacher Model Reasoning, Ben Mccormack, Pablo Rodriguez, Karin Breitman, Sol Chea, Orna Berry Keren

Defensive Publications Series

Organizations in regulated or disconnected environments may face challenges in deploying high-performance generative models due to data residency or connectivity constraints, while local models can exhibit a performance gap for certain complex tasks. A hybrid architecture can augment a local student generative model using a dynamic distillation cache. This system can capture outputs, such as final answers, and underlying reasoning patterns from a remote teacher model. When a new query is received, the system can use semantic similarity to retrieve relevant cached reasoning and provide it as context to the local student model. This method of in-context distillation may allow …

Extract_Text_From_Pdfs, Manish Rami

Software

This file uses two programs to extract text from pdfs. The text then can be analyzed for various purposes.

Lindenwood Celebrates Five Years Of Partnership With University Of Mosul, Lindenwood University

Archived Lindenwood Press Releases

No abstract provided.

Taming Psoriatic Inflammation: Targeting The Inos–Oxidative Stress–Necroptosis Axis For Precision Therapy, Tolulope Omotope Omolekan, Tithi Roy, Jean Christopher Chamcheu

Faculty Publications

Necroptosis is increasingly recognized as a central driver of psoriatic inflammation, promoting keratinocyte death and sustaining immune activation. Recent evidence shows that inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) deficiency and exogenous nitric oxide (NO) supplementation ameliorate psoriasis-like dermatitis in mice by reducing oxidative stress and constraining necroptotic signaling. These findings identify iNOS-derived NO as both a mediator of reduction–oxidation (redox) imbalance and a key regulator of necroptosis, thereby advancing mechanistic insight into psoriatic pathogenesis. Importantly, they highlight the iNOS–oxidative stress–necroptosis axis as a translationally actionable therapeutic target. Modulating necroptotic cell death through NO-based interventions may restore epidermal homeostasis and improve clinical …

The Expansion Of Exposure Notification Software To Enhance Disease Surveillance And Ring Vaccination, Julia Felton

URGENT Matters

No abstract provided.

Stress And Emotion Regulation In U.S. Undergraduate Students: A Theoretical And Narrative Review, Joshua Ross Pilchik

ETD Collection

Everyone experiences stress, but young adulthood brings some of the most intense and impactful stressors people face in their entire lives. For U.S. undergraduate students, persistent academic, financial, and social demands are ever-present, concurrent with a niche developmental period marked by identity exploration, assumption of new life roles, and growing autonomy (Arnett, 2000, 2015). Emotion regulation guides the ways people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express them (Gross, 1998, 2015). Emotion regulation acts as a cornerstone for how students interpret and respond to these stressors (Compas et al., 2014; Aldao, 2013), …

The Rise Of The Black Female Producer: The Representation Of Black Joy, Mar'vellis T. Martin

McNair Scholars Collection

Issa Rae and Quinta Brunson are redefining what it means to tell Black stories on screen. Through shows like Insecure and Abbott Elementary, they elevate Black joy, community, and offer narratives that reflect the culture. With a rise in diverse female voices in media, Black female producers have emerged as cultural powerhouses telling stories beyond trauma and stereotype. This project examines how their shows contribute to a broader movement of authentic Black storytelling. Through comedic elements and community-based narratives, both shows capture the richness of everyday Black life.

Prediction Of Outcome From Spatial Protein Profiling Of Triple-Negative Breast Cancers., Ali Foroughi Pour, Te-Chia Wu, Javad Noorbakhsh, Jan Martinek, Santhosh Sivajothi, Paul Robson, Karolina Palucka, Jeffrey Chuang

Faculty Research 2026

BACKGROUND: In tumors, reciprocal spatial interactions between immune cells, their mediators, the extracellular matrix, and mutated neoplastic cells impact all aspects of treatment resistance. The operational mechanisms of these interactions are foundational for developing insights and targets for cancer therapy and prevention. Spatial quantification of the tumor microenvironment system from image data has untapped potential for patient stratification.

METHODS: Here, we present SparTile, a powerful computational approach for the analysis of multiplex proteomics images to reveal clinically relevant structural organization in the tumor microenvironment. SparTile enables robust and unbiased identification and characterization of tumor microenvironments based on spatial relationships among …

Global Spatiotemporal Multi-Criteria Analysis Of Coastal Risk: Current And Future Hot Spots And Clusters, Marco Bidoia, Carlo Giupponi

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

Coastal zones are among the environments most threatened by climate change. Although various efforts for global mapping and classification of coastal social and ecological systems have been undertaken, the ability to analyse and describe the spatial heterogeneity and multidimensionality of these phenomena remains limited. In the current study, we developed a methodological framework for assessing risk from extreme sea levels and examined its application at the global level. A multi-criteria analysis method was applied to the current scenario and to two future combinations of shared socioeconomic (SSP2 and 5) and representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and 8.5), accounting for risk attitudes. …

Clinical Outcomes Of Patients Hospitalized For Conventional Pacemaker Implantation With Protein-Energy Malnutrition, Phuuwadith Wattanachayakul, Pojsakorn Danpanichkul, Chalothorn Wannaphut, Hamza Tahir, John Malin, Thanathip Suenghataiphorn, Kanokphong Suparan, Aman Amanullah

Einstein Health Papers

INTRODUCTION: The impact of protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) on patients hospitalized for conventional pacemaker implantation remains poorly understood.

METHODS: We utilized the 2020 U.S. National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database to evaluate the impact of PEM on the in-hospital outcomes of patients who underwent conventional pacemaker implantation. Patients aged 18 and older were identified by ICD-10 CM and PCS codes. Multivariable survey logistic and linear regression analyses were employed to examine in-hospital outcomes, including in-patient mortality, system-based outcomes, and post-procedural complications.

RESULTS: A total of 108 020 patients were identified with 4315 (3.99%) diagnosed with PEM. The mean age of the cohort …

Prediction Of Outcome From Spatial Protein Profiling Of Triple-Negative Breast Cancers., Ali Foroughi Pour, Te-Chia Wu, Javad Noorbakhsh, Jan Martinek, Santhosh Sivajothi, Paul Robson, Karolina Palucka, Jeffrey Chuang

Faculty Research 2026

BACKGROUND: In tumors, reciprocal spatial interactions between immune cells, their mediators, the extracellular matrix, and mutated neoplastic cells impact all aspects of treatment resistance. The operational mechanisms of these interactions are foundational for developing insights and targets for cancer therapy and prevention. Spatial quantification of the tumor microenvironment system from image data has untapped potential for patient stratification.

METHODS: Here, we present SparTile, a powerful computational approach for the analysis of multiplex proteomics images to reveal clinically relevant structural organization in the tumor microenvironment. SparTile enables robust and unbiased identification and characterization of tumor microenvironments based on spatial relationships among …

The Perception Of Fentanyl’S Harm, Rachel Antenucci

ETDs from 2020-2029

While drug overdose deaths have generally decreased in the past year, close to 60,000 overdoses involving opioids occurred in 2024. The opioid crisis has lasted over two decades and is now in the fourth wave. The fourth wave has been characterized by overdoses resulting from fentanyl adulteration in the drug supply and polysubstance overdoses involving fentanyl. The purpose of the current study is to compare the perceived harm of fentanyl to other drugs of abuse and identify differences in the perceived harm of fentanyl between groups of people who use substances. An online survey was conducted across 15 states in …

Nilotinib-Mediated Reprogramming Of Bone Marrow Macrophages Alters Hematopoietic Stem Cell Fate In Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, Tiffany Davia Ricketts

ETDs from 2020-2029

Tyrosine kinase inhibition (TKI) is highly effective and promotes favorable long-term outcomes for many patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). However, many patients experience treatment resistance or recurrence after TKI cessation due to leukemic stem cell (LSC) persistence within the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) niche. Within the niche, macrophages adopt different activation states to alter HSC function, however, CML disrupts niche signals to selectively support LSCs and macrophages may contribute to this process. We hypothesize that macrophages contribute to pro-inflammatory activation within the niche to promote LSC development and nilotinib will reprogram macrophages to selectively support non-leukemic stem cells. To …

Conserved Chromatin Programs Orchestrate Cardiac Cell States In Health And Disease And Drive Cardiomyocyte Proliferation After Injury, Xiaoxiao Geng

ETDs from 2020-2029

Chromatin structure is a central regulator of gene expression and cellular identity, yet the chromatin structural factors driving cardiac disease and regeneration remain incompletely defined. This dissertation investigates how modulation of chromatin architecture shapes pathological and regenerative cardiac phenotypes through integrated single-cell transcriptomic, epigenomic, and functional analyses. To determine whether chromatin structural regulators distinguish healthy from diseased cardiac states, we curated a comprehensive list of chromatin structural genes and applied it to single-nuclei RNA sequencing datasets from human hearts with and without dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). Chromatin structural gene expression effectively stratified cardiomyocyte and fibroblast populations by disease status. Diseased cardiomyocytes …

Austin Peay State University, January 2025, Tennessee. Comptroller Of The Treasury.

Financial and Compliance Audit Reports

No abstract provided.

Strengthening The Use Of Sexual And Reproductive Health And Rights Evidence In Refugee And Humanitarian Settings, Baobab Research Programme Consortium

Humanitarian Task Force

This guide offers practical, experience-based direction for strengthening the uptake of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) evidence in refugee and humanitarian settings. Drawing on five years of Baobab’s work in Uganda and Ethiopia, it outlines principles for effective research uptake, including embedded partnerships, rigorous locally owned methods, stakeholder engagement, capacity development, adaptive communication, and continuous learning. The guide illustrates how these approaches enabled pioneering evidence generation—such as the first Humanitarian Violence Against Children Survey (VACS)—and informed service innovations, national policy reforms, and cross-country learning. It provides a replicable framework for translating SRHR research into action and system level …

Cover And Contents

Turkish Journal of Botany

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Hydro- And Nano-Priming Treatments On Seed Germination And Metabolism In Sugar Beet (Beta Vulgaris L.), Sarah Jorjani, Ömer Can Ünüvar, Songül Gürel, Ekrem Gürel

Turkish Journal of Botany

This study examined the effects of hydropriming and nanopriming on the germination and physiological parameters of sugar beet seeds. Seeds were treated with distilled water as a traditional method and with TiO2 nanoparticle solutions at concentrations of 5, 10, and 15 ppm as an advanced method. Seeds were soaked for 3, 6, and 9 h, followed by postpriming maintenance for 10 and 45 days. T he results indicated no statistically significant differences in germination rates between the control and primed groups. Both priming methods markedly increased alpha-amylase activity and chlorophyll content, indicating improved metabolic and photosynthetic potential. Notably, nanopriming for …