Specialist in Education (Ed.S.), University of Dayton, 2024, School Psychology

This thesis investigates the relationship between the presence of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) and school staff attitudes toward and knowledge of LGBTQ+ students and issues. Drawing upon existing literature highlighting the significance of social supports for LGBTQ+ populations in educational settings, this study focuses on the attitudes and knowledge of LGBTQ+ rights and risk factors held by school staff in high schools with and without GSAs. A quantitative survey design was employed, utilizing adapted measures from existing research tools to assess school staff attitudes and knowledge regarding LGBTQ+ student populations. Results revealed no significant differences in knowledge or attitudes between schools with and without GSAs. These findings suggest that while GSAs provide vital support for LGBTQ+ students, additional strategies beyond their presence alone may be necessary to enhance school staff knowledge and attitudes, emphasizing the importance of comprehensive LGBTQ+ inclusivity initiatives within educational settings.

Committee: Susan Davies (Committee Chair) Subjects: Counseling Psychology; Educational Psychology; Glbt Studies; Psychology; School Counseling

Master of Sciences (Engineering), Case Western Reserve University, 2023, EECS - Computer and Information Sciences

In recent years, new value-based statistical fault localization methodologies have been introduced that utilize causal inference techniques to better estimate where faults occur in a program. These methods (1) convert numerical Java programs into equivalent numerical Java programs in an inspired version of Gated Single Assignment (GSA) form, they (2) create causal maps that contain causal relationships between all of the GSA variables in the translated program, and (3) they use these causal relationships to adjust for confounding bias during the fault localization calculations. In this thesis, a new source-to-source compiler is introduced, and it converts numerical Java programs into true GSA form (not an "inspired" version like the previous studies). This new tool is tested on a set of numerical Java libraries and compared with the previous studies, and it is found that true GSA form causes a significant increase in fault localization correctness.

Committee: Andy Podgurski (Advisor); Michael Rabinovich (Committee Member); Harold Connamacher (Committee Member); Vipin Chaudhary (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, Cleveland State University, 2021, Washkewicz College of Engineering

In this thesis, we draw attention to the problem of cross-service attacks, that is, attacks that exploit information collected about users from one service to launch an attack on the same users on another service. With the increased deployment and use of what fundamentally are integrated-services networks, such as 4G/LTE networks and now 5G, we expect that cross-service attacks will become easier to stage and therefore more prevalent. As running example to illustrate the effectiveness and the potential impact of cross-service attacks we will use the problem of account association in 4G/LTE networks. Account association attacks aim at determining whether a target mobile phone number is associated with a particular online account. In the case of 4G/LTE, the adversary launches the account association attacks by sending SMS messages to the target phone number and analyzing patterns in traffic related to the online account. We evaluate the proposed attacks in both a local 4G/LTE testbed and a major commercial 4G/LTE network. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed attacks can successfully identify account association with close-to-zero false negative and false positive rates. Our experiments also illustrate that the proposed attacks can be launched in a way that the victim receives no indication of being under attack.

Committee: Ye Zhu (Committee Chair); Yongjain Fu (Committee Member); Sui-Tung Yau (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Information Technology; Technology

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2015, Civil Engineering

This research investigates the progressive collapse vulnerability of an existing steel building, Haskett Hall, on the Ohio State University (OSU) campus. The building was tested by removing one of the first-story columns to observe its collapse resistance. Progressive collapse is a partial or complete collapse of a structure due to the loss of a supporting element, a column in this case. Few researchers have been able to conduct full-scale experiments to understand progressive collapse. One previous OSU study tested the vulnerability for progressive collapse of a steel frame building in Northbrook, Illinois, and another steel building on the OSU campus. It was concluded that more detailed models are needed to account for nonlinearity, three-dimensional and dynamic effects in analysis of a building frame including beams and columns surrounding the removed column. To address these issues, in this research deflections and strains within the neighboring beams and columns were measured during column removal. A structural analysis program, SAP2000, is used to run linear static and nonlinear dynamic analysis to predict building response, which is then compared to the measured data. The goal of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of geometric and modeling assumptions of two-dimensional and three-dimensional models in analyzing a historic steel building for progressive collapse. By following the General Services Administration (2003 and 2013), Haskett Hall was calculated to satisfy strength and stiffness requirements to prevent progressive collapse.

Committee: Halil Sezen (Advisor); Shive Chaturvedi (Committee Member); Abdollah Shafieezadeh (Committee Member) Subjects: Civil Engineering