Computer Sciences Commons^™

Hierarchy And Ideology Antagonism: Artificial Intelligence In Ridley Scott's Alien, Grace Anastasia Pula

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines the objectively threatening structure of artificial intelligence (AI) in the narrative plot of Alien and how it exerts control over the humans. Using a structuralist approach with Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), I will examine the character relationships and how an android, Ash, enforces a patriarchal, hierarchical system. Drawing on Mark Coeckelbergh’s AI Ethics and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, I will outline broader fears that technology will surpass human intellect and serve a destructive function within an oppressive system. Analyzing two examples of AI characters, the film showcases capitalist ambitions through technological identities and their …

Artificial Intelligence Adoption In The Workplace. An Exploration Of Augmentation, Oyinkansola O. Sodiya

Management Dissertations

As collaborative work with artificial intelligence (AI augmentation) gains interest, it is crucial to investigate factors that affect how employees perceive and use AI tools at work. Drawing on task-technology fit and technology adoption theories, this dissertation examines the ways in which task dimensions, organizational contexts, and individual differences affect the perceived usefulness of working with AI tools. This dissertation demonstrates that task-technology fit is fundamental. Employees in jobs with high information processing demands are likely to positively perceive the usefulness of AI augmentation relative to employees in jobs with high interpersonal demands. Employees with more proactive personalities perceive greater …

Toward Interpretable Multi-Omics Multimodal Biomedical Artificial Intelligence, Yanjun Lyu

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

The complexity of human disease arises from biological processes that unfold across multiple scales, from molecular variation through cellular function, tissue organisation, brain phenotypes, each of which is associated with distinct measurement modalities, regularities, and characteristic. Contemporary biomedical artificial intelligence has brought the opportunity to reveal the complexity with in; however, its methodological default, in which models are trained on most readily available modality, does not adequately engage with the multi-scale connected structure by which biological meaning is constituted. The research area of multi-omics and multi-modal AI for biomedicine remains at an early exploratory stage, and the work presented in …

Ablative Study Of Large Language Model-Based Gesture Inference For Autonomous Navigation, Neil Loftus

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Human gesture inference has broad applications ranging from sign language interpretation to device control. Traditional methods often rely on extensive manually labeled hand datasets for deep learning. Furthermore, they are typically limited to a discrete set of gestures existing in these datasets. Large Language Models (LLMs) created by enterprise companies such as OpenAI have demonstrated positive results in many artificial intelligence tasks, with a notable strength being their adaptability. Existing literature has shown that LLM based systems can not only perform gesture inference but can propose user intent provided with a context and list of possible actions. We propose an …

Improving Pid Control With Bayesian Optimization For Adversarially Robust Federated Learning, Adrian Pena, Sergei Chuprov, Raman Zatsarenko, Leon Reznik

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Federated Learning (FL) often suffers from unstable convergence and reduced robustness under non-IID data and malicious attacks. In this paper, we present FedPIDAvg_tuned, a control-theoretic aggregation framework for improving stability and adversarial robustness in FL. In particular, our approach combines a server-side Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) controller with Bayesian optimization to tune controller gains for different data and attack conditions. The PID controller regulates global model updates through feedback on loss dynamics, providing adaptive scaling that improves stability and convergence. The tuned gains are applied within a trust-weighted trimmed-mean mechanism to remove adversarial or outlier updates. Using the Flower framework, we evaluate …

Creating A University-Based Accessible Makerspace For Use By Local Community Members Through Participatory Design Workshops, Erin Higgins, John J. Magee Iv, Foad Hamidi

Computer Science

While Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) has been shown to provide needed AT for individuals who might not otherwise have access, the makerspaces utilized to create these technologies have proven to be inaccessible. A promising direction for creating accessible makerspaces is to utilize participatory methods to develop new spaces for use by a diverse community of individuals. We explored these possibilities through participatory design workshops focused on building a new accessible community makerspace situated within a university campus setting. Through these workshops, we found that there are unique physical, technical, and human supports needed to create an accessible space for the …

Advances And Challenges In Digitally Connected Point-Of-Care Biosensing, Abdellatif Ait Lahcen, Jegan Rajendran, Gymama Slaughter

Center for Bioelectronics Publications

Point-of-care (POC) biosensors are undergoing a paradigm shift from isolated diagnostic tools to digitally connected, intelligent platforms that enable continuous and decentralized healthcare delivery. This review critically examines recent advances in wearable, implantable, and portable biosensors, highlighting how integration with wireless communication, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and artificial intelligence is transforming their functionality and clinical utility. Particular attention is given to innovations such as smartphone-enabled interfaces, cloud-based analytics, and machine learning-assisted analysis, which collectively enhance sensitivity, specificity, and user accessibility across diverse healthcare settings, from personalized home monitoring and bedside diagnostics to deployment in resource-limited regions. The review …

Recent Advances In Triboelectric Nanogenerators For Biomedical And Cardiovascular Monitoring, Amit Sarode, Jegan Rajendran, Gymama Slaughter

Center for Bioelectronics Publications

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have emerged as versatile self-powered platforms for wearable and implantable biomedical sensing, offering an alternative to battery-dependent electronic devices. By converting biomechanical energy from physiological motion into electrical signals, TENGs enable simultaneous energy harvesting and active sensing within flexible, lightweight, and biocompatible architectures. This review summarizes recent advances from 2020 to 2025 in triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG)-based cardiovascular monitoring. The discussion focuses on material systems, device configurations, sensing mechanisms, and applications including pulse detection and cuffless blood pressure estimation. Representative studies are compared to highlight emerging trends in wearable and self-powered sensing technologies. However, differences in experimental conditions, …

A Novel Lightweight Framework For Low-Light Image Enhancement Via Gaussian Denoising And Clahe, Daniel Oluwaseun Adesoji

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Low-light image enhancement is a major challenge in digital imaging, especially in medical imaging, surveillance, and autonomous vision systems. Images captured under poor illumination often appear dark, noisy, and low in contrast, which makes it hard to observe important details. Traditional enhancement methods can improve brightness but usually introduce artifacts or increase noise. Although deep learning methods have shown strong performance, they usually require large datasets, and high computational resources. This creates a need for simpler and more efficient enhancement techniques. This study proposes a lightweight framework that incorporates Gaussian denoising with Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) to enhance …

Balanced Multi-Party Tournament Designs, Parsa Nematollahe

Honors College Theses

This paper introduces Multi-Party Tournament (MPT) designs that generalize established combinatorial structures, including Whist, Pitch, and Generalized Whist tournament designs. This work will formally define MPTs, establish the fundamental properties of resolvability, fullness, and balance, and formulate a mathematical and algorithmic foundation for multi-party tournament scheduling. The primary contributions of this research are the presentation of necessary and sufficient existence conditions for MPTs across various properties and parameters, the identification of connections between MPTs and other fields of mathematics such as combinatorial design theory, graph theory, and probability theory, and the investigation of MPT construction algorithms, including tree-search, finite-field constructions, …

Radial And Carotid Arterial Pulse Signals For Assessing Cardiovascular Function At Rest And During Post-Exercise Recovery In A Heart Transplant Patient: A Case Study, Md Mahfuzur Rahman, Mamun Hasan, Jennifer F. May, John M. Herre, Leryn Reynolds, Zhili Hao

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Aim: This study investigates the feasibility of using radial and carotid arterial pulse signals to assess cardiovascular (CV) function at rest and during post-exercise recovery in a heart transplant (HTx) patient. Method: Two micro-fabricated tactile sensors were used to simultaneously acquire arterial pulse signals at the radial artery (RA) and carotid artery (CA). Measurements were taken at rest and at multiple time points post-exercise on three subjects: an HTx patient, a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI; coronary stent) patient and a healthy control. An SDOF-TF-based time-frequency analysis algorithm was applied to extract a comprehensive set of CV parameters, including heart rate …

Trust-Aware Algorithms For Stackelberg Ground Vehicle Routing, Doris Evelyn Meredith Brown

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite decades of research focused on reducing ground vehicle traffic congestion, urban traffic networks worldwide continue to experience traffic flows that lead to increased network travel times, largely resulting from the routing decisions of individual vehicles. To address this challenge, this work leverages a Stackelberg game framework to model the interaction between a vehicle agent and a routing authority as a leader–follower game, in which the routing authority proposes routing interventions to which the agent responds. This research contributes to existing traffic mitigation literature by exploring the role of trust in route decision-making and providing trust-aware algorithms that influence vehicle …

Integrative Approaches And Data Analysis For Single-Cell Rna Sequencing Data, Teng Long

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

The rapid growth of single-cell RNA sequencing and transcriptomic datasets has created major computational challenges in causal discovery, representation learning, and biologically faithful data generation. To address these challenges, this dissertation presents three complementary deep learning frameworks for the analysis and modeling of transcriptomic data. Together, these methods form an integrative computational toolkit for understanding complex biological systems from high-dimensional and heterogeneous gene expression data.

First, this dissertation introduces DAG-VAERL, a causal discovery framework that integrates variational autoencoders, graph neural networks, reinforcement learning, and attention mechanisms to infer directed acyclic graphs for gene regulatory network analysis. DAG-VAERL improves causal structure …

From Physical Correlation To Emotional Connection: The Role Of Passive Haptics On Empathy In Virtual Reality, Jemely Robles

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Virtual reality is increasingly explored as a tool for cultivating empathy, and haptic feedback as a tool for enhancing immersion. This paper investigates the effects of combining the two.  Fifty-two participants experienced a custom-built VR scene in which a character was shown packing up a room. Participants were assigned to either a haptic condition, receiving passive haptic feedback corresponding to the character's actions, or a non-haptic control condition that did not receive any haptic input. Trait empathy was measured beforehand, and state empathy and engagement were measured after the experience. Thematic analysis was conducted on post-study interviews, and headset recordings …

Evaluating Llms For Cpe Identification In Iot Reconnaissance, Christopher Davisson

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Vulnerability identification during penetration testing relies on rigid string-matching to map network scan data to Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) identifiers and downstream Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). The approach frequently fails on physical Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which produce non-standard, irregular service banners that resist deterministic parsing. Large Language Models can reason through these fuzzy associations, but cloud-hosted models introduce cost, latency, and operational security concerns when processing reconnaissance data from live networks. This thesis asks whether locally-hosted open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform this task well enough to be useful, and how performance varies with model scale, …

Learning Design To Advance Human-Ai Collaboration In K-12 Education, Wing Sha Chan, Jinhee Kim, Seongryeong Yu, Rita Kay Detrick

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This chapter explores key components for designing effective Human-AI Collaboration (HAC) in K–12 education, addressing the current lack of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for structuring and implementing HAC in teaching and learning. It examines four essential areas: curriculum design, student and teacher–AI interaction, learning environments, and the evolution of HAC over time. The chapter introduces the concept of HAC in K–12 contexts, highlighting how humans and AI can leverage each other's strengths through co-evolutionary processes that foster mutual learning and collaboration. It reviews current HAC practices in schools and discusses their contributions to both teaching and learning. Finally, it presents …

Impacts Of Segmenting Principle On Learner Performance And Attitude In A 3d Environment: A Mixed-Method Multiple Case Study, Kristin Herman, Mohan Yang, Jim Shifflet, Noah Glaser

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This study presents a conceptual replication of Moreno’s (Appl Cogn Psychol 21:765–781. 10.1002/acp.1348, 2007) study on the benefits of adhering to the segmentation principle when utilizing multimedia learning objects. Furthermore, this study expands upon the original by taking place in a low-immersive virtual reality environment, allowing for further understanding on the extent to which multimedia principles are still relevant. Both a synchronous and an asynchronous case are presented. Results indicate benefits for both cases in far transfer of learning. Furthermore, synchronous learners indicated a significant reduction in cognitive load and increased overall attitudes towards learning due to segmented instruction.

Data Defines Success: Algorithm For Dataset Quality Assessment In Deep Learning For Malware Detection, Matei Ionescu

Theses and Dissertations

The field of artificial intelligence is based upon the premise of constructing architectures through which to propagate training data. However, the majority of existing research literature is focused on architecture. While necessary, the attention devoted to the architecture should not so precipitously exceed that of the data. It should be noted that this disparity is not without reasonable cause. Data quality is often exceedingly difficult to verify due to particularities of the field or subfield; LLM repositories of text are distinct from image recognition pictures of dog breeds which are distinct from EEG waveforms of human brains which are distinct …

Wearable Sensor-Based Phase Segmentation Analysis Of Front Crawl Swimming: A Scoping Review, Jonathan Simoes, Samuel Aylward, Daniel Hamze, Daniel James Goble, Daniel M. Russell, Joshua Haworth

Exercise Science Faculty Publications

Front crawl swimming stroke phase segmentation has historically relied on video analysis, but the development of wearable sensor technology has created new opportunities for automated phase segmentation. This scoping review mapped the available evidence on wearable sensor-based stroke phase segmentation methods in front crawl swimming, following PRISMA-ScR guidelines. A systematic search of SPORTDiscus, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore conducted from January to June 2026, identified 15 eligible peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024. The review revealed an emerging field of research that has converged methodologically around inertial measurement units (IMUs) and the Chollet phase segmentation framework while remaining …

Tackling The Societal And Regulatory Challenges Of Emerging Technologies: A Case Study Of Deepfake, Jingyao Li

2026

Governing emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses enduring challenges for policymakers, industries, and societies. Early-stage governance is often hindered by limited understanding of technological implications, rapid innovation cycles, and resistance from powerful industry actors who favor minimal oversight. Yet, timely and effective governance is essential, as new technologies are most malleable in their formative stages. This dissertation examines how emerging technologies can be governed effectively by using deepfakes technology as a focal case. This dissertation comprises three interrelated studies.

The first paper reviews the literature on deepfakes and emerging technology governance, identifying the distinct characteristics of deepfake technology …

Do Developers Read Type Information? An Eye-Tracking Study On Typescript, Samuel W. Flint, Robert Dyer, Bonita Sharif

Research & Publications

Statically-annotated types have been shown to aid developers in a number of programming tasks, and this benefit holds true even when static type checking is not used. It is hypothesized that this is because developers use type annotations as in-code documentation. In this study, we aim to provide evidence that developers use type annotations as in-code documentation. Understanding this hypothesized use will help to understand how, and in what contexts, developers use type information; additionally, it may help to design better development tools and inform educational decisions. To provide this evidence, we conduct an eye tracking study with 26 undergraduate …

A Specification-Driven Framework For Self-Supervised Learning In Specialized Vision Domains, Mahmut S. Gokmen

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a principled approach to visual representation learning that derives supervisory signal directly from unlabeled data, enabling foundation models to be trained at scale without manual annotation. Deployments in medical imaging and biometric recognition have demonstrated the potential of this paradigm, yet the assumptions that make SSL effective on natural image benchmarks fail systematically in specialized domains. Generic SSL pipelines encode a tacit assumption that the most informative correspondence is spatial proximity within a single acquisition. In specialized domains this assumption breaks at the level of the data-generating process: the signal that carries domain-specific information …

Understanding Phishing Susceptibility Through Expert Consensus Using Digital Marketing Parallels And A Machine Learning-Based Implementation, Mansoor Ahmad

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Phishing remains one of the most effective attack vectors for gaining unauthorized access to organizational systems, yet defenders often lack systematic methods to assess their exposure before an attack. This study develops a framework that uses machine learning to encode the collective expertise of cybersecurity practitioners into a portable phishing susceptibility assessment tool, with the goal to help security teams proactively identify patterns, prioritize awareness training, and strengthen detection controls. The study surveyed 27 practitioners with extensive experience in social engineering, red teaming, penetration testing, and threat analysis to identify which factors most influence phishing susceptibility. Practitioners provided quantitative ratings …

Legal Ethics Of Ai Snake Oil: Navigating The Hype, Harm, And Hope Of Legal Ai, Drew Simshaw

Scholarly Works

This paper argues that the legal ethics of AI extend far beyond competence and hallucinations. It shows how AI often functions as a mirror, exposing deeper ethical questions about institutional incentives, lawyer wellbeing, access to justice, and AI's broader social and environmental impacts.

Unsafe2safe: Controllable Image Anonymization For Downstream Utility, Minh Dinh

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Large-scale image datasets frequently contain identifiable or sensitive content, raising privacy risks when training models that may memorize and leak such information. We present Unsafe2Safe, a fully automated pipeline that detects privacy-prone images and rewrites only their sensitive regions using multimodally guided diffusion editing. Unsafe2Safe operates in two stages. Stage 1 uses a vision--language model to (i) inspect images for privacy risks, (ii) generate paired private and public captions that respectively include and omit sensitive attributes, and (iii) prompt a large language model to produce structured, identity-neutral edit instructions conditioned on the public caption. Stage 2 employs instruction-driven diffusion editors …

Ai Vs. Genai: Combating Llm Generated Prescription Fraud With Transformer Based Detection Models, Ankitha Vokkaleri Shankarappa

Selected Full-Text Master Theses 2021-

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced a sophisticated new vector for healthcare fraud: the generation of high-fidelity, synthetic medical prescriptions. Traditional fraud detection systems, which rely on rule-based engines and basic statistical anomalies, are increasingly ill-equipped to identify these AI-generated forgeries that mimic the structural and clinical logic of authentic records. This thesis presents a robust detection framework using Transformer-based architectures to distinguish between human-authored Medicare Part D prescriptions and fully synthetic records generated by GPT-4.

The research was conducted across two distinct phases: an initial pilot study using 4,000 samples and a rigorous validation stress …

Erosion Of Trust In Online Information, Tirth Desai

A with Honors Projects

Researching how AI spreads misinformation and impacts trust in information.

Basis Design For Electronic Structure And Beyond, Weishi Wang

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

At the intersection of quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and materials science, electronic structure is the study of electrons in solid-state and molecular systems. Electronic-structure computation relies on discretizing the many-electron Hamiltonian with a finite single-particle basis set. However, basis-set construction is conventionally treated as an ad hoc preprocessing step. This thesis develops an expressive and flexible framework for active, system-oriented basis-set design and numerical modeling strategies that treat basis functions as tunable representations to encode electronic ground-state information.

We first introduce a multi-layered, differentiable basis-construction framework that embeds a set of primitive parameters into mixed-contracted Gaussian-type orbitals. We then develop …

How Should Ai Talk About Us? Llms And Social Generics, Tiffany A. Zhu

Philosophy Faculty Publications

How should AI-generated speech balance epistemic aims, such as precision and accuracy, with ethical and social considerations? This paper examines a subtle yet consequential aspect of LLM-driven communication: the use of generic generalizations that convey information about social groups (e.g., “immigrants work low-wage jobs”). While central to human epistemic and pedagogical practices, generics are theorized to reinforce stereotypes, essentialism, and injustice. Using ChatGPT-3.5 as a case study, I uncover tendencies for AI chatbots to inconsistently hedge and refuse generics, including those that reflect well-documented social structural patterns, such as “women are more likely to get attacked while walking alone at …

You Only Need One Stage: Novel-View Synthesis From A Single Blind Face Image, Taoyue Wang, Xiang Zhang, Xiaotian Li, Huiyuan Yang, Lijun Yin

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

We propose a novel one-stage method, NVB-Face, for generating consistent Novel-View images directly from a single Blind Face image. Existing approaches to novel-view synthesis for objects or faces typically require a high-resolution RGB image as input. When dealing with degraded images, the conventional pipeline follows a two-stage process: first restoring the image to high resolution, then synthesizing novel views from the restored result. However, this approach is highly dependent on the quality of the restored image, often leading to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the final output. To address this limitation, we extract single-view features directly from the blind face image …