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Recent Submissions
Inclusive wildlife viewing programs: A case study of Get Outdoors & Get Together Day, New York
McGregor, Freya A.; Dayer, Ashley A. (2026-10-05)
State wildlife agencies historically engage with hunters and anglers, yet these activities are only participated in by 26% of wildlife-related recreationists, while 97% of wildlife-related recreations are wildlife viewers (United States Department of the Interior, & U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2023). If state wildlife agencies seek relevancy, developing programs that support wildlife viewers is critical. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 Americans have a disability (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2025), as do 39% of wildlife viewers (Sinkular et al., 2024). Wildlife viewing programs designed to support disabled wildlife viewers will benefit nondisabled wildlife viewers too (Sinkular et al., 2024); this is known as the curb cut effect (Blackwell, 2017).
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) partners with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP), the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD), and other state agencies to host a statewide outdoor recreation event every June called Get Outdoors & Get Together Day. The aim is to encourage people from historically marginalized communities to learn about and try beginner-level outdoor recreation activities. These activities are held at over 20 locations statewide. Promotional efforts focus on people who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color, and people with disabilities, as well as those who are new to outdoor recreation. The hope is this will encourage previously unreached members of the public to begin recreating outdoors safely, and feel more comfortable visiting DEC properties. Hiking, camping, archery, fishing and birding are frequently offered, although specific activities vary by site. Adaptive equipment is provided to support people with various disabilities in participating.
This report has been informed by interviews with five DEC staff involved in Get Outdoors & Get Together Day in different capacities, and onsite observation of the 2025 Get Outdoors & Get Together Day at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center near the state capital of Albany. Two birding programs were held at this site, and observations of the social environment, adaptive equipment and leadership approach are discussed. Descriptions of the statewide and Five Rivers event, resources used, challenges experienced and navigated, and advice from staff is provided to support other state wildlife agencies in creating inclusive birding programs, which may require effective outreach to local disability communities. Additional insights are shared about collaborating with other agencies, the logistics of a statewide event, and the challenges and strengths of such an approach.
This case study report answers the following questions:
- What is an inclusive wildlife viewing program? Why are they important?
- What is Get Outdoors & Get Together Day?
- How did Get Outdoors & Get Together Day get implemented at the agency level?
- How are Get Outdoors & Get Together Day host locations determined?
- Which DEC staff are involved in organizing Get Outdoors & Get Together Day?
- How might someone learn about Get Outdoors & Get Together Day?
- What is Five Rivers Environmental Education Center?
- What did Get Outdoors & Get Together Day at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center include?
- What did the birding program entail? What about it made it inclusive to people with disabilities?
- What resources are needed? Where does the money come from?
- What challenges did staff face with implementing Get Outdoors & Get Together Day in 2025?
- Advice on implementing an inclusive birding program and a statewide outdoor recreation event
References and appendices are included, including information about methods, information about the historical context for Get Outdoors & Get Together Day, examples of key resources and marketing strategies used to promote Get Outdoors & Get Together Day, and the budget for the event at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center.
While Get Outdoors & Get Together Day is a large, multi-site event, agencies are encouraged to begin with an inclusive wildlife viewing program at one location and expand if desired. The lessons shared in this report about inter-agency collaboration likely apply to partnerships agencies may develop with local disability-related organizations.
Microsoft Office Security and Possible Bypasses
Zahadat, Nima (2022-05-10)
This presentation investigates the internal security architecture of modern Microsoft Office documents and evaluates practical methods for bypassing protection controls. Because modern Office documents are XML-based compressed archives, security implementations fall broadly into two categories: content-level locking and full-file encryption. The author demonstrates that content-level locks provide minimal security and can be circumvented manually by unpacking the underlying ZIP archive and deleting restriction tags (such as removing "settings.xml" in Word or the "" line within Excel worksheet XMLs), or by opening Word documents in WordPad to strip edit permissions. In contrast, true file encryption requires cryptographic hash extraction followed by offline or cloud-based cracking using dictionary and brute-force attacks. Through comparative testing with utilities like Hashcat, commercial software like Passware, and web-based services such as OnlineHashCrack, the study examines real-world cracking efficiency, recovery timelines, and software limitations across modern Office iterations. Finally, the presentation underscores crucial operational security considerations, emphasizing software version compatibility, the unreliability of older free GUI crackers, and the privacy and data security risks inherent in uploading proprietary encrypted files to third-party online cracking platforms.
Effect of BYOD On Today’s Enterprise Security Systems
Zahadat, Nima (INCOSE, 2013-10-29)
This research presentation investigates the operational benefits, architectural vulnerabilities, and governance challenges associated with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) adoption across modern enterprise environments. Motivated by the academic neglect of mobile security and informed by expert interviews at NIST and George Washington University, the study explores the organizational incentives driving BYOD—such as heightened employee productivity, cost reductions in hardware and training, work-from-anywhere flexibility, and service expansion in critical domains like healthcare and telemedicine.
However, these advantages introduce severe technical and policy complications stemming from operating system fragmentation, differing OS versions, diverse device manufacturers, and friction with legacy architectures. The analysis reveals significant security shortcomings, notably inconsistent enforcement between desktop and mobile endpoints, data leakage across shared media and cloud sync backups, improper endpoint disposal, and minimal overall management. Evaluating commercial Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms, the authors identify a critical control gap: across 69 standard security control objectives, only 12 are universally supported across major MDM solutions, demonstrating that software platforms alone cannot fully secure personal devices.
To bridge these gaps, the presentation proposes a comprehensive security framework tailored for non-classified yet confidentiality-dependent enterprise environments. This framework balances technical controls with organizational governance, emphasizing continuous user education, rigorous compliance testing, strategic incentive structures, and sustained partnership between IT departments and end users.
An Examination of Recruitment and Retention of Pregnant Individuals for Neuroimaging and Developmental Studies of Early Life
Chinaka, Oziomachukwu (Virginia Tech, 2026-10-06)
Birthing individuals have long been underrepresented in research, despite initiatives like the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act advocating for increased inclusion of women and minorities. As research is being conducted in biomedical fields on maternal and infant health to attain equitable health outcomes for all individuals who bear children, studies need to prioritize inclusion of diverse groups from various ethnicities, ages, races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Current literature in various fields has given recommendations on how to recruit underrepresented participants and insights to barriers that are faced when recruiting and retaining these participants, from the perspectives of underrepresented communities; however, the perspectives of researchers have been understudied and limited in current research. The proposed study aims to conduct a descriptive evaluation examining RandR within the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study national consortium and various data collection site-level characteristics and procedures that influence RandR from the perspectives of research personnel.
The sample size of this study was n=41 HBCD RandR personnel. We conducted semi-structured interviews as the data collection method. We used inductive coding and thematic analysis for the data analysis utilizing Braun and Clake multidirectional model to guide the analysis.
For our first study, we identified strategies for recruitment into the HBCD Study. W found 6 emergent themes which were 1) in-person recruitment, 2) outreach, 3) distributing recruitment materials, 4) developing partnerships, 5) word of mouth/referrals, and 6) media recruitment. Peer navigators or support staff were also noted in this study as a key strategy for recruiting pregnant people with a history of substance use. These findings suggest alignment with previous research studies but provide specific context to where these recruitment strategies are occurring and which regions are doing which strategies.
The second study looks at barriers and facilitators to RandR. Barriers identified to RandR included 1) time constraints and commitment, 2) distance and transportation, 3) staffing, 4) Procedures and procedural changes, 5) approvals, 6) misalignment with partnerships, 7) HBCD applications not working correctly 8) life circumstances, 9) No show / no communication, , 10) social influences. Facilitators to RandR noted in this study included 1) being a trusted establishment, 2) providing resources and incentives, 3) team characteristics, 4) HBCD RandR personnel characteristics, 5) soft touches, 6) extensions for completing visits, 7) participants feeling that they were contributing to science.
These two studies provide information that aids in understanding the context of what is needed for the RandR for pregnant people from diverse backgrounds. The findings in this study also add to the literature as it identifies structural and institutional factors that also impact the RandR process. These factors could not be identified without receiving the perspectives of the HBCD RandR personnel.
Program Comprehension for Human and LLM-Based Software Maintenance
Haroon, Sabaat (Virginia Tech, 2026-10-06)
Modern software systems increasingly rely on abstractions, transformations, and automated tools that make it difficult to understand how source-level programs relate to their actual behavior. Effective debugging and testing therefore depend on accurate program comprehension by both human and automated agents that perform these tasks. This thesis investigates how program comprehension can be improved for developers and systematically assessed for Large Language Models (LLMs) used in software maintenance. The first part focuses on improving human program comprehension in distributed systems. This thesis develops an interactive debugging approach that connects developer-written SQL to its transformed distributed execution by mapping intermediate execution data back to corresponding parts of the original query. This allows developers to understand complex execution behavior using the same abstractions in which the program was originally expressed. As LLMs are increasingly used for coding tasks, program comprehension shifts from human developers to automated agents. The second part investigates LLM program comprehension in automated debugging. The evaluation examines fault localization under semantics-preserving code changes to determine whether LLMs consistently understand program behavior or are influenced by superficial properties of how code is written. The final part extends this investigation to LLM-based test generation under software evolution, evaluating whether generated tests remain reliable when program functionality is preserved and whether they appropriately reflect changes when program behavior is modified. Together, these contributions examine program comprehension from two complementary perspectives: improving developers' understanding of program behavior and evaluating whether LLMs possess the comprehension required for reliable automated debugging and testing.