Mason Smetana

Trevor Neece, Mason Smetana, Lev Khazanovich

Highway construction workers face a high risk of serious injury or death. Image-based training materials depicting hazardous scenarios are essential for engaging safety instruction but remain scarce due to ethical and logistical barriers. This study develops and evaluates a generative AI methodology for producing synthetic visualizations of highway construction hazards from OSHA Severe Injury Report narratives. Two modes were developed: a single-pass approach yielding one image per incident, and a temporal approach producing a four-stage sequence. A sample of 75 incident records yielded 750 images, evaluated using CLIP-based semantic retrieval and expert assessment across dimensions such as educational utility, fidelity, and alignment. Single-pass images achieved 81.1% educational acceptability with fidelity and alignment scores of 4.14/5 and 4.07/5, respectively, while temporal sequences achieved 60.9% acceptability with comparable alignment (3.94/5) but lower fidelity (3.51/5). CLIP-based retrieval revealed that both modes produce images with statistically significant retrieval capabilities. This is among the first studies to leverage modern autoregressive image generation models for visualizing construction hazards from reported severe injuries and to generate temporally sequenced hazard imagery, and a new multi-dimensional evaluation framework was developed to support future research in this domain. The work enables safety trainers to pair narrative storytelling with visual learning material without photographing real-world hazards, and the framework could be applied to datasets across diverse domains, enabling synthetic image generation tailored to new application areas.

Mason Smetana, Lev Khazanovich

Scientific literature is increasingly siloed by complex language, static disciplinary structures, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it cumbersome to capture the dynamic nature of modern science. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an adaptable large language model (LLM)-driven framework to quantify thematic trends and map the evolving landscape of scientific knowledge. The approach is demonstrated over a 20-year collection of more than 1,500 engineering articles published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marked for their breadth and depth of research focus. A two-stage classification pipeline first establishes a primary thematic category for each article based on its abstract. The subsequent phase performs a full-text analysis to assign secondary classifications, revealing latent, cross-topic connections across the corpus. Traditional natural language processing (NLP) methods, such as Bag-of-Words (BoW) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), confirm the resulting topical structure and also suggest that standalone word-frequency analyses may be insufficient for mapping fields with high diversity. Finally, a disjoint graph representation between the primary and secondary classifications reveals implicit connections between themes that may be less apparent when analyzing abstracts or keywords alone. The findings show that the approach independently recovers much of the journal's editorially embedded structure without prior knowledge of its existing dual-classification schema (e.g., biological studies also classified as engineering). This framework offers a powerful tool for detecting potential thematic trends and providing a high-level overview of scientific progress.