Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study provided an enhanced understanding of the intentions, motivations, and beliefs about blood donation among the young generation in the U.S. An online quantitative Qualtrics survey was administered at a large public university to collect data from the campus community, with participants aged 18 to 39 (N = 954). Data were collected via an adapted questionnaire on the TPB constructs: attitudes towards blood donation, subjective norms of peers and loved ones, perceived control of behavior, and intention to donate blood. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis were employed to explore the associations of these constructs. Primary findings revealed that the intention to donate blood regularly was positively associated with social norms. Secondary findings suggested that a hierarchical multiple regression analysis provided strong support for the role of social media apps as a major determinant of motivations for donating blood, with TPB constructs accounting for 34% of the variance. Tertiary findings from this study derived Cronbach’s $\alpha$ = 0.555, indicating a poor level of internal consistency. The generalizability of the results in this study could be verified by increasing the number of questions in each construct and conducting future studies at larger universities and blood centers.

The integration of edge computing for real-time data processing in autonomous systems has been identified as a promising solution to mitigate the performance bottlenecks and latency associated with traditional cloud-based models. Autonomous systems, including vehicles, drones, and robotics, rely heavily on quick data analysis to make timely decisions. However, cloud computing, with its inherent data transmission delays, hinders the responsiveness and efficiency of these systems. To address these challenges, edge computing is proposed as a means to process data locally, at the point of use, thus enabling faster decision-making processes and reducing data transfer overhead. This approach leverages distributed machine learning for decision-making and dynamic resource allocation to balance computational tasks between edge and cloud resources. Through extensive experimentation, it has been demonstrated that the edge computing paradigm can reduce latency by up to 65%, offering substantial improvements in both energy efficiency and data processing speed when compared to traditional cloud-based methods. Furthermore, the proposed system outperforms existing alternatives in terms of computational speed, reliability, and energy consumption. The introduction of an Edge Computing Decision Model (ECDM) and a Dynamic Resource Allocation Algorithm (DRAA) is shown to optimize system performance by balancing computational demands between local edge nodes and remote cloud servers. These innovations enable autonomous systems to function more effectively and efficiently, even in resource-constrained environments. This study highlights the importance of integrating edge computing into autonomous system architectures to meet the growing demand for low-latency, high-performance applications. The potential of edge computing to significantly enhance the reliability and operational capacity of autonomous systems has been established, paving the way for more reliable and scalable solutions in real-time environments.

Handwritten digit classification represents a foundational task in computer vision and has been widely adopted in applications ranging from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to biometric authentication. Despite the availability of large benchmark datasets, the development of models that achieve both high accuracy and computational efficiency remains a central challenge. In this study, the performance of three representative machine learning paradigms—Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Feedforward Deep Neural Networks (FFDNNs)—was systematically evaluated on the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) dataset. The assessment was conducted with a focus on classification accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability. Experimental results demonstrated that deep learning approaches substantially outperformed traditional Decision Tree (DT) methods. GANs and FFDNNs achieved classification accuracies of approximately 97%, indicating strong robustness and generalization capability for handwritten digit recognition tasks. In contrast, CHAID achieved only 29.61% accuracy, highlighting the limited suitability of DT models for high-dimensional image data. It was further observed that, despite the computational demand of adversarial training, GANs required less time per epoch than FFDNNs when executed on modern GPU architectures, thereby underscoring their potential scalability. These findings reinforce the importance of model selection in practical deployment, particularly where accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability must be jointly considered. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in pattern recognition by providing a comparative analysis of classical machine learning and deep learning approaches, thereby offering guidance for the development of reliable and efficient digit recognition systems suitable for real-world applications.