Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Beyond Emergency: Charting Pathways To Sustainable Development In Fragile And Conflict-Affected Settings: A Case Study Of Yemen, Sharif Abdurabu Salem Farid Alsahbool

Theses and Dissertations

For nearly a decade, Yemen's eastern governorates of Hadramawt, Shabwah, and Al‑Mahrah have been relatively stable, yet the international aid system has kept delivering short‑term humanitarian relief like food baskets and water trucking instead of shifting to sustainable development that could rebuild people's lives, create jobs, fix infrastructure, and strengthen local government. This thesis investigates why this transition has taken so long. Based on 21 interviews with government officials, international NGO staff, and local NGO managers in these three governorates, the study develops a new way of understanding the problem. It introduces three ideas: the 'emergency mentality', which is a …

Examining The Relationship Between Civic Agriculture Participation And Civic Engagement In South Texas, Allison Kaika, Dongkyu Kim, William Donner, Alexis Racelis, Owen Temby

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Civic agriculture is often credited with strengthening democratic life by encouraging civic and political engagement, yet this claim has scarcely been tested in socioeconomically marginalized regions. Using original survey data collected through a combination of random and purposive sampling, this study assesses that relationship in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a majority-Hispanic agricultural region marked by high poverty and low civic participation. Phone and online surveys were administered in English and Spanish to reach both the general population and individuals involved in civic agriculture initiatives, yielding over 400 responses. We examine whether civic agriculture participation predicts greater community …

Ai In Education And Information: Tool, Threat, Or Teammate? How Academia Is Shaping The Future Of Intelligent Work, Essraa Nawar

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the future of intelligent work across education, healthcare, leadership, communication, workplace culture, and health information management. Yet while AI adoption continues accelerating, institutions and professionals are still trying to understand what this transformation actually means for people, learning, careers, ethics, trust, governance, and human judgment. This interactive and forward-thinking panel brings together voices from higher education and healthcare information management to explore how AI is reshaping classrooms, workplaces, healthcare systems, professional identity, and future workforce expectations across generations.

Rather than focusing only on technology itself, the conversation will examine the broader cultural and organizational shift …

Parent Cultural Wealth: How Beliefs, Curriculum Familiarity, And Community Awareness Facilitate Home-Based Cs Conversations, Nicol Howard, Leiny Y. Garcia, Jean Ryoo, Julie Flapan, Michelle Choi, Paula Nazario, Wei Wei

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Parents are critical influences on children's computer science (CS) pathways, yet families’ involvement remains understudied. Guided by parental involvement and community cultural wealth frameworks, this work-in-progress examined survey data from 53 parents representing families historically underrepresented in computing within California (71% women; 54% Hispanic/Latin/x/e). Findings revealed that CS school curriculum familiarity and awareness of CS community events significantly predicted parent-child CS conversations, while parent CS confidence and attitudes did not, suggesting that curriculum transparency and community connections can promote equitable involvement. Future work will integrate qualitative interviews to examine how families draw upon their cultural wealth.

Assessing Indoor Heat Vulnerability And Cooling Strategies In Three Mobile Home Communities In Boulder, Colorado, Usa, Mehdi P. Heris, Skye Niles, Alana Wilson, Megan Mccurdy, Amy Lacourse, Nick Lankau

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Extreme heat is an increasing public health and environmental threat shaped by both physical and social factors. This study assesses the vulnerability of mobile homes and their residents at three mobile home parks in Boulder, Colorado. We examined indoor temperature, housing conditions, and social and personal risk factors of the households. We monitored indoor and outdoor temperatures using 27 indoor and 5 outdoor temperature data loggers, comparing mobile homes with air conditioning, swamp coolers, and passive cooling designs. This work provides a detailed analysis of indoor temperature patterns and demonstrates how evaluating trends yields insights into the performance and effectiveness …

Rape Pregnancies And Consequent Ptsd Resulting From The Overturn Of Roe V. Wade, Emma Lindenfelser, Yulia Garaeva, Nenette Nti-Agyemang, Ellen Davis, Anna Kabwa, Alexandra M Calaman

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, access to safe legal abortions was limited and often restricted along racial, economic, and geographic lines. Nearly fifty years later, women’s health policy evolved again following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This court ruling decimated federal protections of abortion. This paper presents the research that the 2022 Dobbs judicial decision may contribute to and exacerbate rape-related PTSD on 1 out of 20 American who are unable to access a safe abortion after a rape-related pregnancy. Pregnant women living in conservative states that have outlawed …

Supporting Fair Practices In Scholarly Publishing With The Editorial Reference Handbook, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Allyson Lister, Rebecca Taylor-Grant, Matthew Cannon

FORCE 2026

Co-produced by academics and publishers (incl. CUP, Cell Press, EMBO Press, Taylor & Francis, GigaScience Press, OUP, PLOS, Springer Nature), the Editorial Reference Handbook (https://publishers.fairassist.org) assists scholarly publishers in supporting the sharing of digital research objects and in operationalising FAIR research practices by addressing gaps in editorial workflows, policy implementation and stakeholder alignment. The Handbook comprises three interrelated components—a checklist, detailed guidance documentation, and a flowchart—intended primarily for in-house editorial staff while also providing value to reviewers, authors, and service providers.

Beside this practical collaboratively developed product, the Handbook is also a socio-technical pilot to improve the culture …

Ten Years Of Tuwhera: A Commitment To Sustaining Open Access Publishing, Donna Coventry

FORCE 2026

Tucked away, far from the conference circuit, is a part of the world which doesn’t tend to make the headlines when it comes to open access initiatives. New Zealand and by extension, the South Pacific, is a region struggling with a history of colonisation and trying to make systematic change around decolonisation - open access to research about ‘our place in the world’ is vitally important. 

Ten years ago Auckland University of Technology’s library (Te Mātāpuna) made the decision to start hosting Diamond open access journals. Starting with two established journals, the service was named Tuwhera which can be translated …

Asian Open Research Data And Its Potential For Ai: Bridging The Digital Divide Through Strategic Data Sharing, Mark Hahnel, Simon Porter

FORCE 2026

The growing momentum for open research data in Asia intersects with global advances in artificial intelligence (AI). Open data policies and infrastructures are increasingly recognized as critical enablers of research equity, reproducibility, and innovation. This talk examines the current state of open academic data, highlights economic and scientific arguments for its adoption, and explores the transformative potential of Asian open data ecosystems in powering AI-driven discovery. Drawing on global examples such as the Protein Data Bank and emerging health datasets, the discussion positions Asian institutions to leverage open strategies that simultaneously meet compliance mandates, enhance visibility, and accelerate breakthroughs in …

Managing Ai Bot Access To Open Scholarly Infrastructures, Petr Knoth

FORCE 2026

The rapid rise of generative AI has created unprecedented demand for large, high-quality research corpora. Open access repositories and other open scholarly infrastructures have therefore become primary sources for AI bots, because they host research that is not universally reliable, but remains far more evidence-based than most web content. This is both an opportunity and a strain: repositories are now more valuable than ever, but machine traffic brings sustainability, capacity and policy challenges. Repositories may be able to scale, but who should fund that scaling, and under what conditions?

The core dilemma is how to curb abusive high-load bot activity …

Beyond The Launch: Seven Years Of Sustaining An Open Educational Resource After The Grant Ends, Susan Gardner Archambault

FORCE 2026

This presentation shares seven years of lessons from maintaining Project CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments), an award-winning, open-access platform where librarians and educators share adaptable information literacy assignments. Launched in 2016 with grant support and strong community engagement, CORA saw early success: international page views across 150+ countries, 200+ shared assignments and teaching resources, and community-building features like "adapt this assignment" and leaderboards.

But when funding ended in 2018, Project CORA entered what many open projects experience but few discuss publicly: the precarious post-grant phase, when initial funding and enthusiasm fade but infrastructure still needs support. Annual contributions dropped …

Diamond Open Access Journals In India: Status, Sustainability And Challenges, Mallikarjun Dora, Kanagasabai K, Raj Kishor Kampa

FORCE 2026

Open-access publishing has transformed scholarly communication in recent decades. The share of OA articles between 2014 and 2024 increased by 26%, from a modest 14% in 2014 to 40% in 2024. OA journals have evolved over time and exist in various models based on funding mechanisms, including the Gold, Green, Hybrid, and Diamond models. While OA publishing emerged in response to scientific inequality, middle- and low-income countries face the barrier of high Article Processing Charges (APC), which hinder them from publishing in those journals (Alperin, 2022). The Article Processing Charges are part of the Gold and Hybrid OA models, where …

Using Ai-Assisted Programming To Develop Research Services Tools For Research Impact, Open Access Publishing & More, Gary Lee

FORCE 2026

Academic libraries play a vital role in scholarly communication, As research practices become more data‑driven and interdisciplinary, librarians can help scholars by creating and sharing flexible, customizable tools that align with local workflows and user needs.

AI Assisted programming (sometimes called “vibe coding”) offers a new way for librarians without extensive programming knowledge to develop such tools . This allows previously non-expert librarians to go from conceptual goals to working applications by rapid prototyping, experimentation, and roll-out, resulting in service innovation and improvement.

This presentation illustrates how librarians at HKUST have explored vibe coding with tools like GROK, POE, and …

[2026 Honorable Mention] Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, Daylyn R. Reese

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

This research offers unique insights into the creation and development of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary (N.M.S.) with a focus on indigenous populations’ roles (primarily Chumash and Costanoan). In this episode, I analyze what makes this NMS different from every NMS precluding it, how it recognizes a new goal in conservation (thrivability), and the areas in which improvements still must be made to authentically include and honor indigenous voices.

Recognizing And Rewarding Peer Review: Rethinking Research Assessment For Openness, Fairness, And Global Equity, Tung Tung Chan, Bernd Pulverer, Johan Rooryck

FORCE 2026

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review has developed a comprehensive framework for reforming how scholarly review is valued within research careers. Our recommendations address a fundamental question: how can peer review, a critical yet often invisible scholarly contribution, be made visible, credited, and meaningfully integrated into research assessment?

Developed through a collaborative effort across 16 European organisations, the Working Group’s outputs offer targeted recommendations for four key stakeholder groups: research performing organizations, research funding bodies, publishers and editors, and individual researchers. These recommendations are structured across five key dimensions:
(1) Openness: …

Open Research Information - How To Support Publishers To Make Metadata Openly Availble, Bianca Kramer

FORCE 2026

Research information, or scholarly metadata, is important for decision making around strategic priorities, distribution of resources, and evaluation of researchers and institutions. It is also used to assess the effect of policies, and to find and assess research results. Open research information (free to access and free to (re)use) is increasingly valued for fair assessment and equitable decision making, and is also important in digital sovereignty.


The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information calls on organizations performing, funding and evaluating research to make openness of research information the default, work with services and systems that support and enable open research …

Holistic Strategies For Optimizing Municipal It Operations And Cost Efficiency, Joseph Yazdanpanahi

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Municipalities work to deliver secure and impactful IT (information technology) services while often working within tight budget constraints. To address this problem, this article offers an experience-based and comprehensive framework to optimize municipal IT operations. It emphasizes leveraging automation, streamlining hardware and software management, and forging strategic partnerships to drive cost savings and efficiency gains. Designed to equip municipal IT leaders with practical tools and insights, this article aims to help modernize IT processes.

Social Media Is A Juggernaut: Lagged Correlation Analysis Using Ngram Data On “Internet” And “Social Media” With Amplification By The Advent Of The “Iphone”, William Zywiak, Gao Niu, Nicolas Petrell, Victoria Nichele, Kirsten Hokeness

Mathematics and Economics Faculty Journal Articles

The amount of new information transmitted per day can be overwhelming. The data available through Ngram Viewer allows statistical examination to determine the most salient topics, as well as lagged correlation and lagged variance to support possible causal connections between concepts. Using this database, we determined that COVID, crypto, microplastics, and especially social media are important topics of the last few years. We also present results that suggest the development of the internet and the iPhone fueled the prominence of social media, and the access of the iPhone also increased access to the internet.

What Collaboration Means To Me: From Coordination To Collective Action: Cclp And Cyclops As Infrastructure For Collaborative Collection Stewardship, Boaz Nadav-Manes

Collaborative Librarianship

Academic libraries face growing pressure to manage complex collections under significant resource constraints. While consortial collaboration has long been recognized as a strategic response, existing models remain limited, often failing to influence the full collections lifecycle. This article examines how the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) and the Cyclops platform together offer a new model for moving beyond coordination toward genuine collective action in collection stewardship. CCLP provides a community-governed framework structuring collaboration from selection and acquisition through preservation and deaccessioning, while Cyclops complements it with an open, analytics-driven infrastructure that aggregates data across institutions, enabling cross-institutional analysis and translating …

Emotional Support Through Ai: Venting To Artificial Intelligence Or A Perceived Human May Offer Comparable Emotional Well-Being Benefits, Meilan Hu, Jerlyn Q. H. Ho, Claire Ng, Shermaine S. M. Wong, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots are increasingly being explored as sources of informal emotional support, with emerging evidence suggesting that venting to these systems can reduce negative affect. Yet, it remains unclear whether such benefits depend on the responder's perceived identity. Given that emotional relief from venting often hinges on perceived authenticity and emotional validation, this study investigates whether the emotional well-being benefits of venting differ when users believe they are interacting with an AI chatbot versus a human, even when responses are content-matched. In a pre-registered experiment ( N = 279), participants were randomly assigned to either an AI-assisted venting …

The Association Between Ethical Ai Use And Well-Being Among Young Adults In The Uae: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach, Areej Elsayary, Zeina Hojeij, Lames Abdul Hadi

All Works

This study examines the association between ethical AI use and young people’s emotional, social, and psychological well-being in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the number of hours spent on GenAI serves as a moderator. Framed within the Theory of Planned Behavior and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and SDG 13 (Climate Action), this research examines how responsible digital engagement is associated with both individual mental health and broader digital sustainability. A Structural Equation Modeling approach assessed how ethical AI behaviors are associated with well-being. A total of 204 participants, predominantly …

Flood Risk Assessment And Water Diversion Scenarios For Terre Haute, Indiana Based On Time-Series Remote Sensing And In-Situ Measurements, Hung Q. Ha

2026 Spring Reports (Terre Haute)

The City of Terre Haute has faced growing concerns over the increasing frequency and intensity of riverine flooding along the Wabash River, alongside risks associated with urban inundation. To create more safely floodable areas – specifically by locating wetland areas using GIS and researching government ordinances on development in those areas – the City of Terre Haute sought to better understand flood patterns and identify viable floodwater diversion strategies. The project was formally titled as “Pattern of Flooding along the Wabash River in Vigo County and Scenarios for Floodwater Diversion”. Faculty and students from Geospatial Intelligence Lab, Department of Earth …

Navigating Oer Support Without Drowning In Ai, Lydia Burrage-Goodwin, Christine Moynihan

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

This was a presentation at the June 2026 Boston Library Consortium at Connecticut College.

UMB Healey Librarians Lydia Burrage-Goodwin and Christine Moynihan talk about what experiences they have had with faculty using OER and AI, which led them to develop ethics guidelines to support librarians who work with faculty authors. Attendees learned about creating AI use statements for OERs, using AI transparency logos, and applying open licenses to fully AI generated content as well as OER adaptations.

Public Acceptance Of Meat-Reduction Policies Across Cultures: Comparing Singapore And Switzerland, Bianca Wassmann, Shu Tian Ng, Mark Chong, Angela K. Y. Leung, Michael Siegrist

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose – As meat-reduction policies are discussed across the globe, many are met with public resistance. Cultural values may help explain this pushback, yet their role in shaping support for food policy remains poorly understood. This study is the first to apply cultural cognition theory to food policy by examining how cultural worldviews shape the acceptance of meat-reduction interventions in Singapore and Switzerland—two economically developed countries with contrasting cultural profiles. Design/methodology/approach – In an online survey, participants (Singapore: n = 357; Switzerland: n = 495) rated their acceptance of 11 meat-reduction interventions (e.g. taxes, subsidies, labelling). We then analysed to …

The Security Of Llm-Generated Code, Christopher Brian Gonzalez Ayala

Student Theses

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has transformed coding practices by enabling automated code generation, completion, and optimization. Despite these advantages, concerns persist regarding the security and reliability of LLM-generated code. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of both the functional correctness and security of code produced by three prominent LLMs as of early 2026. A total of 4,800 code snippets were generated using 100 security-focused programming prompts derived from the OWASP Top 10:2025, translated across eight natural languages and two phrasing styles (literal and natural developer-oriented prompts). To assess performance, a multi-stage experimental framework …

Adversarial Robustness Of Perceptual Hashing Systems: A Unified Security Evaluation Framework, Avijit Roy

Student Theses

Social network platforms, child safety organizations, and image provenance systems use perceptual hashing to identify known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), support content moderation and reverse image search, and verify image integrity. Perceptual hashing works by producing similar fingerprints for visually similar images, even after common transformations such as compression, resizing, or minor brightness changes. This useful similarity-preserving property also creates an adversarial attack surface, as attackers can use AI-assisted or conventional image manipulation techniques to move a hash across a matching threshold while maintaining visual similarity, often without access to specialized hardware.

The security failures produced by adversarial attacks …

Trace: Temporal Rhetorical Analysis And Consistency Evaluation For Legislative Speech, David Hernandez

Master's Theses

Legislators frequently discuss the same policy issues across multiple hearings and legislative sessions, sometimes maintaining consistent positions and other times modifying or reframing their stance over time. Understanding how these positions evolve is important for analyzing political discourse and democratic accountability, yet identifying such shifts at scale remains difficult.

We introduce TRACE (Temporal Rhetorical Analysis and Consistency Evaluation), a system built on the Digital Democracy Database (DDDB) for detecting rhetorical inconsistency in California legislative hearing testimony. TRACE organizes utterances into speaker-anchored timelines indexed by bill and session, then applies hybrid semantic retrieval — combining dense BGE embeddings with BM25 lexical …

A Predictive Coding Account Of Spatial Working Memory Following Prophylactic Levetiracetam Administration Prior To Traumatic Brain Injury, Omeima Mutwali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptom prevention and remediation is an important area of research that would benefit vulnerable groups, including active-duty and veteran soldiers. These patients can sustain penetrative forces in fields of combat or in training, which result in focal lesions that trigger inflammatory and degenerative processes in the brain. Both primary and secondary injuries are associated with changes to cognition, behavior and affective state. This disease poses increased risk of epileptogenesis, as well. Given these outcomes, prior research has evaluated levetiracetam (LEV) as a prophylactic treatment for seizures, cognitive deficits and negative emotionality. LEV acts as a presynaptic …

Can Generative Ai Make Farming Decisions? Current Status And Future Pathways: A Case Study In Row Crop Production With Chatgpt, Nipuna Chamara, Yufeng Ge, Joe Luck, Yu Pan, Saleh Taghvaeian, Cory Walters, Christopher Proctor, Daran Rudnick, Daren Redfearn

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

The agricultural decision-making process is experience-based, knowledge-dependent, time-sensitive, complex, and driven by historical data. Planting, fertilization, irrigation, and chemigation are key categories in farm decision-making, and currently there is no one-shot decision-support tool that covers all these activities. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are more advanced than traditional machine learning and deep learning models. These models have been trained on vast amounts of data from the internet, allowing them to accept unstructured data in various forms and generate human-like text, solutions to problems, and scenario predictions. Given this capability, we became interested in exploring the potential of generative AI in …

Extensive And Intensive Margin Labor Supply On Ride-Sourcing Platforms, Hao Sun, Hai Wang, Zhixi Wan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid expansion of ride-sourcing platforms has enabled freelance drivers to flexibly determine both their participation and working hours. Understanding this flexible labor supply behavior is essential for managing platform capacity and evaluating the impacts of pricing and incentive policies on driver welfare. This study develops a labor supply model in which drivers optimally choose whether to participate (extensive margin) and how long to work (intensive margin) to maximize their utility from consumption and leisure. The model incorporates heterogeneity in drivers’ other income, idle time, and participation costs, allowing us to analytically characterize equilibrium labor supply decisions. The results show …