VTechWorks
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, including journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more by faculty, students, and staff. Faculty can deposit items to VTechWorks from Elements, including journal articles covered by the University open access policy. Email vtechworks@vt.edu for help.
Open Access Policy
Virginia Tech's open access policy enables researchers to deposit the accepted version of scholarly articles with no embargo.
Theses and Dissertations
Virginia Tech was first in the world to require ETDs in 1997, and continues to add scans of older theses and dissertations.
Open Textbooks
More than 50 freely available and openly licensed textbooks are among our most downloaded items.
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Recent Submissions
Intelligent eXtended Reality (iXR) A Systematic Review of Intelligent Context-Aware Adaptations in XR
Alimoradi, Saeid; Gabbard, Joseph L.; Bowman, Doug A. (2026)
Extended Reality (XR) interfaces situate digital content in the user's surroundings, and their effectiveness depends on how well the interface fits the user's situation. Context-aware XR systems address this fit through a detect-reason-adapt pipeline, in which contextual data is detected, inferred by a reasoning mechanism, and returned to the interface as a real-time adaptation. This study systematically reviews the extent to which existing XR systems are intelligent across this pipeline. Following the PRISMA framework, records were retrieved from Scopus, IEEE, and ACM, and 158 studies were analyzed along three dimensions: the source, type, and contextual category of the detected environmental, task, and/or user data; the reasoning mechanism and the output it produces; and the adaptation strategy and the interface elements it changes. The results show that the three layers are developed to unequal depths. Detection concentrates on user context, task context is rarely detected directly, and reliance on a single sensing channel is common. Context reasoning divides almost evenly between learning-based and non-learning mechanisms and learning-based models are mature only at percept extraction while situational interpretation remains hand-engineered. Adaptation is the shallowest layer, as most systems map an inferred condition to a fixed, predetermined change confined to the visibility and placement of content. Based on these findings, the review defines Intelligent XR (iXR) as a system with an identifiable learning or inference mechanism in both the reasoning and adaptation layers, supported by sufficient sensing breadth, within an interactive latency threshold.
Pseudoinverse Training for Neuromorphic Reservoir Computing Using Square-Root-Free Cholesky Decomposition
Ling, Jiaqiang (Virginia Tech, 2026-10-06)
Adaptive reservoir readouts require a compact training engine as well as an efficient inference circuit. This thesis develops a fixed-point, square-root-free readout trainer for a windowed echo state network used in MIMO-OFDM symbol detection. The trainer streams regularized sufficient statistics into a banked, packed memory, factors the 48-by-48 normal matrix in place with a reciprocal-based LDL-transpose decomposition, and reuses the factors for all four real outputs. A word-length analysis of the datapath shows that the statistics multipliers can be narrowed from 48 by 48 bits to 14 by 14 and 14 by 17 bits without changing any result bit, reducing DSP usage from 162 to 36 slices on the Zynq ZCU104. For the factorization, a standard eigenvalue argument shows that ridge regularization bounds every reciprocal operand by the inverse of the regularization constant. This bound sets the required operand range and explains why a smaller 32-bit factor/solve option, which uses 26 DSP slices, passes tests with strong regularization but rejects every recorded packet it was tested on at the regularization used for detection. The selected design, implemented in the detection configuration, uses 36 DSP slices, 31,488 LUTs, and 27 block-RAM tiles, meets a fully constrained 50 MHz out-of-context timing requirement with an estimated 69 mW of dynamic power, and completes a 540-sample training batch in 147,146 cycles, or 2.943 ms. In RTL simulation of 19,230 recorded frames from 30 recordings in five scenarios, it trains every frame and reproduces all 3,692,160 reference weights exactly. With these weights, the ESN detector reaches a bit error rate of 4.05 percent over all frames, against 5.78 percent for LS/ZF and 4.90 percent for baseline MMSE detection, and is the better of the three in four of the five scenarios; pilot-tracked conventional detectors remain more accurate. A triplet-STDP circuit study is also summarized, and the adaptation of the trainer to GlobalFoundries 40LP is identified as ongoing work.
Europeanization and De-Europeanization in the Eastern Partnership Countries
Brantly, Aaron F.; Vasilyan, Syuzanna; Seferian, Nareg; Nuriyev, Elkhan; Brantly, Nataliya D.; Tsuladze, Lia; Pântea, Serghei; Rabinovych, Maryna; Leshchyshyn, Anastasia; Hlomb, Marta; Popova, Maria (West Point Press, 2026-10-05)
Europeanization and De-Europeanization in the Eastern Partnership Countries examines how states on the EU eastern borders navigate the promises and limits of integration. Challenging linear accounts of Europeanization, it introduces de-Europeanization to show how alignment with EU norms can stall, shift, or reverse. Through comparative analyses of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, the volume highlights how domestic politics, identity, security pressures, and economic interests shape divergent trajectories. Against Russia’s war in Ukraine and renewed enlargement debates, it assesses EU initiatives including European Neighborhood Policy and Eastern Partnership. The book shows European influence is actively negotiated rather than simply adopted.
From Policy to Practice: A Multi-Scale Analysis of Vision Zero Implementation
Perez Vidal-Ribas, Marta (Virginia Tech, 2026-10-20)
Vision Zero is a transportation safety approach that originated in Sweden in 1997. It aims to eliminate all traffic related fatalities or serious injuries and is based on the Safe System Approach.
The Safe System Approach is a novel transportation safety initiative that shifts the responsibility of a car crash from the driver to the design of the system. Hence, responsibility is shared amongst all stakeholders and not solely dependent on human error. Since it was implemented in Sweden, Vision Zero has spread globally and shown promising success. However, with this global spread, implementation has varied throughout, making it difficult to understand which components of Vision Zero contribute the most to safety outcomes. This dissertation examines Vision Zero through three studies to understand the framework, perceptions, and implementation intensity of Vision Zero initiatives. The first study focuses on four cases to create a comprehensive framework to characterize Vision Zero implementation. The second study seeks practitioner and researcher input to understand how Vision Zero is perceived. The last study applied the framework developed in the first study to Swedish counties, to analyze if implementation intensity affected fatality outcomes from 2019 to 2024. The findings of these studies were synthesized to paint a holistic picture of Vision Zero implementation. Findings suggest that Vision Zero is more complex than policy adoption alone and is dependent on the strategies and intensity. Implementation intensity was calculated through the index developed in the first study, and a negative binomial regression model was run to assess the index's correlation to fatality rates. The model found that higher implementation intensity was associated with a lower fatality incidence rate. These results were then compared to the survey results to identify if the model was cohesive with what practitioners and researchers encountered. Their perceptions, however, did not always align with the findings from the model, and some implementation challenges they experienced could not be wholly captured in the implementation intensity index or framework. Overall, the findings strengthen the idea that Vision Zero is a collection of different strategies that all work toward eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Evaluating how these strategies are implemented may be able to provide a more meaningful understanding of Vision Zero effectiveness.
Afro-Diasporic Carnival and Women's Performances as Embodied epistemologies in Brazil and Trinidad
Jorge, Andreza da Silveira (Virginia Tech, 2026-10-20)
This dissertation examines how Black women cultivate and transmit knowledge through dance within Afro-diasporic Carnival practices in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Trinidad. Centering the performances and lived experiences of Black women, particularly the Carnival figures of passistas and jamettes, the research understands Carnival as a cultural and epistemological field in which embodied practices sustain continuities across memory, spirituality, artistic creation, and collective life. Particular attention is given to the pelvis as a bodily territory where ancestral knowledge and the historical inscriptions of racialized and gendered violence coexist with pleasure and creativity.
The research was developed through fieldwork in both territories, bringing together participation in Carnival practices, dance and artistic creation, archival research, and relationships cultivated with women artists and cultural practitioners. Instead of treating Brazil and Trinidad as comparative case studies, the dissertation follows the relations and resonances that emerge between these territories through the historical and cosmological movements of the African diaspora. In dialogue with Black, feminist, decolonial, and counter-colonial thought, the research develops Escrevivência Corporal as an embodied methodology that recognizes the researcher's lived experience as a constitutive part of knowledge production. Built through relationships established with the territories and with the women who participated in the research, the methodology brings artistic practice and fieldwork into relation, allowing dancing and researching to participate in the same process of knowledge elaboration.
The dissertation argues that dance constitutes a living practice of knowledge production and transmission through which Black women sustain ancestral continuities and create possibilities for life in the present. Carnival makes these processes publicly visible, but the knowledge circulating within it is cultivated far beyond the days of celebration. Dance keeps such knowledge in circulation across bodies, territories, and generations, making movement a form of continuity and elaboration of Afro-diasporic life.