VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Social Media Analytics with Graph Convolutional Networks
Keywords: Graph Neural Networks
Social Media Analytics

Online social media, such as Facebook, has become a norm in our social and personal lives. The explicit or implicit social relationships established on social networks can be leveraged to market products or make recommendations. However, the open nature of online social media provides a favorable environment for malicious users to spread incorrect information, either for financial gains or to increase social influence. Therefore, social media analysis, such as social trust investigation, has attracted increasing attention from multiple disciplines. On the other hand, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) recently have shown to be powerful in learning on graphs. Their advantages provide great potential to analyze online social networks represented as graph data. In this dissertation, we investigate significant research problems in the context of graph convolutional networks, tackling complex social media analysis. We begin by reviewing some key concepts and unique properties and principles of graph convolutional networks and network representation learning --- a fundamental step for analyzing social networks. Then we present {\em Guardian} to evaluate social trust in online social networks. More specifically, {\em Guardian} is an end-to-end framework that stacks multiple trust convolutional layers, designed to discover hidden and predictive latent factors of trust in online social networks. With {\em Guardian}, we can effectively and efficiently estimate the value of trustworthiness between any two users who are not explicitly connected. Many real-world relationships can be represented as networks with positive and negative links, called {\em signed networks}, where the sign of links may indicate trust or distrust, and like or dislike relationships. Thus, complementary to {\em Guardian}, we propose {\em SiGCN}, to learn low-dimensional representations of signed networks. With {\em SiGCN}, we can learn effective user embedding for downstream signed network analysis. Finally, to investigate the robustness of GCNs, we also study the adversarial attacks on graph-structured data, particularly mounting attacks against link prediction algorithms based on GCNs. Evaluations and validations to our frameworks are not only analytical but also experimental. We conducted extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets, and our experimental results demonstrated that our approach effectively achieves the best possible performance for accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.
Towards Integrating Antiracism into Teaching English as a Second Language Training Programs in Ontario
Keywords: Antiracism
Canada
ESL
Immigrants
Racism
TESL

The adult English language education sector in Canada has gained momentum as a revenue-generating service ostensibly designed for new immigrants and international students in Canada. However, ESL teaching approaches and theories reproduce unequal power structures underpinned by settler-colonial mindsets that devalue and marginalize non-White and non-native speakers in the ESL/TESL sector. In this study, I argued that current ESL curricula, assessment, and classroom management procedures in Canada do not adopt antiracist pedagogies, even though many ESL learner and ESL/TESL teacher populations in Canada are racially diverse. Although ample research looks at how ESL curricula and teaching and hiring practices exclude and devalue ESL learners and non-native speaker ESL teachers in Canada, not many critical studies have explored TESL training programs in Canada. The twofold purpose of this study therefore was to: (a) investigate how 3 TESL Ontario accredited programs address race, racism, and antiracist praxis in their TESL curricula; and (b) explore how the experiences of TESL Ontario accredited ESL/TESL practitioners may inform the development of an antiracist TESL curriculum that addresses race and racism more effectively, explicitly, and practically. The qualitative inquiry comprised a content analysis of 3 TESL curricula, 3 focus group discussions with ESL teachers, and 8 semi-structured interviews with TESL trainers, curriculum developers, and program coordinators. I used a theoretical framework derived from multiple theories and debates around the issues of race, class, gender, Whiteness/White power, postcoloniality, neoliberalism, culture, cultural difference, and treatment of culture to analyze my data. Study findings identified problems at practical and theoretical levels for ESL teachers, TESL trainers, and curriculum developers seeking to identify, analyze, and act upon perceived social exclusions related to racism. Through their experiences and analysis, I identified the challenges, strengths, and gaps of current TESL programs in addressing social exclusions, particularly racism. Finally, the pedagogical and theoretical suggestions put forward by ESL teachers, TESL trainers, program coordinators, and curriculum developers can help create an antiracist TESL curriculum that will be pragmatic and effective in explicitly addressing and minimizing existing power hierarchies associated with the process of learning and teaching English as a second language in multicultural Canada.
Music to our Ears: Using a Queer Folk Song Pedagogy to do Gender and Sexuality Education
Keywords: curriculum
gender
listening
pedagogy
practitioner research
sexuality

This study is situated in current social-political conversations in Canada about how to do gender and sexuality education, and what content should and should not be included in Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum. This research documents a 2 and a ½ month study in which a queer folk song pedagogy was used to conduct gender and sexuality education with 13 students, ages 16-20 years old, in an alternative secondary school classroom in Ontario. Using a practitioner research methodology, the students, the classroom teacher, and the researcher listened to a set of queer folk songs previously composed from interviews with LGBTQ2S+ families and queerspawn; wrote journal reflection responses to each song; and then participated in sustained, engaged dialogue with one another about a wide range of subject matter related to gender and sexuality. Analysis focused on three main themes. The first key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals and queerspawn are often not expected in certain spaces and have to explain their identities, bodies, and relationships to others. The second key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals often begin making sense of and orient toward their own queer identities in relation to queer and trans others they encounter. The third key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals also make sense of themselves and navigate their own identities in relation to various discourses about gender, sexuality, bodies, and relationships, whether this discourse is positive or harmful. Overarching conclusions from this study include the following: a queer folk song pedagogy opens up generative dialogic spaces creating an effective learning environment; students seek and construct much of the knowledge they have related to gender and sexuality outside of schools; queer teachers make a difference in delivering queer pedagogy; and queer curriculum and pedagogy can help orient LGBTQ2S+ students and queerspawn in schools. This research makes a case for listening as an important pedagogical strategy in classrooms, and a queer folk song pedagogy as an example of queer caring that has the potential to move students toward alternate possibilities for learning, relating, and living.
Information Practices in Amateur Classical Musicianship
Keywords: embodiment
ethnography
information behavior
information practice
music

People enjoy physical leisure activities, like sports and the arts, but many physical activities cannot be learned from a book and require learning from others. These observations motivate this thesis’s research questions: What are the information practices and role of the body in physical activities, and how are information practices in physical leisure both embodied and socially constructed? To answer these questions, I combine a scoping review of existing research on embodiment in library and information science (LIS) with empirical analysis of the case of amateur classical musicians using observant participation and participant interviews. The thesis makes several contributions to the study of embodied information practices in physical activities. First, the scoping review highlights the need for more empirical and methodologically innovative studies of embodied information practices, and the thesis begins to fill this gap with its findings about amateur classical musicians and use of observant participation as a data collection method. Second, the thesis contributes to our theoretical understanding of embodiment in information practices by making use of sociological understandings of the body to explain how musicians use their bodies, their senses, and bodily sensations in a wide range of information activities. Third, the thesis is the first study of the information practices of amateur classical musicians, demonstrating that they use both exosomatic information, including online audio and video recordings as well as digital applications, in addition to embodied information, and that these information practices are informed by shared, socially constructed meanings and norms within their community. Fourth, the thesis explains the ways in which these community-based information practices are central to musicians’ development of their identities as musicians and members of the classical music community. These findings advance scholarly research on the role of the body in everyday life and leisure in LIS and have implications for organizations, such libraries and schools, that support the pursuit of physical activities, whether for leisure or work. The findings also highlight the importance of information practices, including information literacy, for physical activities and careers, which is often overlooked in sociology of sport or social anthropology studies of community practices.
The Dying Gaul: Examining the Inverse Relationship between Lay and Religious Masculinities in Merovingian Gaul, 450-750
Keywords: Early Middle Ages
Franks
Gregory of Tours
Late Antiquity
Masculinities
Merovingians

This dissertation examines the interrelation between concepts of masculinity among the laity and the clergy in the Merovingian era of Gaul, fifth to seventh centuries. In doing so, the work aims to fill a gap in current scholarship by examining the relationship between religious men and lay men, rather than as separate groups, which has often been the trend to date. The focus is on specific sites of difference where masculine ideals came into conflict. Beginning with a brief examination of the transmission of classical neo-platonic ideals into the culture of the ecclesiastical aristocracy of the fifth century, I will provide a background for the religious masculinity against which the lay examples are framed. The study then moves on to the contrasting ideals surrounding hair, using a methodological framework of contrasting masculinities to demonstrate that the long hair of the Franks and the tonsuring of the clergy both reflected antithetical representations of each others’ masculinities. Chapter four examines the relationship between feasting and fasting culture among the laity and the clergy, as the participation in, and rejection of imbibing served to distinguish both groups of men through contrasting ideals. The following chapter examines the role that sexual conduct played in notions of honour particularly in the laity. The final chapter examines the different concepts of fatherhood and the importance of male children in maintaining a masculine role. The concluding chapter then offers some considerations on how the balance between masculinities was altered during the Carolingian Renaissance.
Adaptive and Learning Controllers for High-Accuracy Trajectory Tracking in Changing Conditions
Keywords: Adaptive Control
Learning-based Control
Model Predictive Control
Quadrotors
Robust Control
Transfer Learning

Robots are expected to perform tasks reliably in unknown and dynamic environments, which can include unknown disturbances and changing dynamics. This thesis investigates controllers for high-accuracy trajectory tracking of quadrotors in changing conditions. The proposed controllers use ℒ1 adaptive control to handle disturbances and learning- and optimization-based controllers to improve tracking in changing conditions. The underlying ℒ1 adaptive controller forces systems subject to unknown disturbances and changing dynamics to behave close to a specified reference model. Learning- and optimization-based controllers improve the tracking performance of the ℒ1 controlled systems. This thesis presents five frameworks: (i) Iterative Learning Control (ILC), (ii) Multi-Robot Transfer Learning, (iii) Multi-Robot, Multi-Task Transfer Learning, (iv) Adaptive Model Predictive Control (MPC), and (v) Robust, Adaptive Model Predictive Control. ILC calculates a feedforward input that minimizes tracking error by using information from previous iterations of the same trajectory. ILC assumes the system has a repeatable behaviour, which may not be true in changing conditions. Repeatability is achieved by using an underlying ℒ1 adaptive controller. Dynamically different systems can behave in the same specified way if they are equipped with an ℒ1 adaptive controller. Hence, trajectories learned on one system can directly be transferred to a dynamically different system in a Multi-Robot Transfer Learning framework. Typically, a new learning process has to be started for each desired trajectory. The Multi-Task Transfer Learning framework uses insights from control systems theory to generalize previously learned tasks and enable a Multi-Robot, Multi-Task Transfer Learning framework. In order to eliminate the need for a learning phase to achieve high-accuracy trajectory tracking, ℒ1 adaptive control is combined with model predictive control. The proposed adaptive MPC leverages the performance guarantees of ℒ1 adaptive controller to improve tracking performance on the first iteration. However, modelling errors may remain despite the presence of the ℒ1 adaptive controller. Therefore, we propose and show performance guarantees of a robust adaptive MPC that is robust to modelling errors and improves the trajectory tracking performance in changing conditions. The proposed frameworks were implemented on the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 and Bebop 2 quadrotors and showed high-accuracy trajectory tracking in changing conditions.
Action, Causation, and Discretion: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Intentional Action
Keywords: Agency
Agent-Causation
Causation
Choice
Free Will
Intentional Action

“What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §621). What, that is, is the difference between an action of mine and a (perhaps empirically indistinguishable) change in me that is not my action? This essay seeks to give a partial answer to this question: My arm’s going up is my action, I will say, just in case it is brought about by me at my discretion. An agent is a special sort of cause. He is the cause of certain changes in himself that do not just happen to him. These changes are neither causally determined by other changes, nor are they causally undetermined; they are determined by the agent; they are, in a word, radically up to him. This, I claim, follows from our every-day, pretheoretical conception of what an action is, a conception that, I claim, is closed to revision in the light of new information about those changes whose supposed relation to us gives rise to the idea that they are in a special sense attributable to us and, so, that they are our actions.
The Voice Prints of Poetry: Recorded Speech and the Listener’s Body in Victorian and Modernist Verse
Keywords: Empathy
Media studies
Modernist literature
Poetry
Victorian literature
Voice

In The Poetry of Experience, Robert Langbaum places the dramatic monologue from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot at the heart of the “modern literary tradition,” describing it as a “poetry of sympathy” that engages the reader through feeling. In this dissertation, I argue that Langbaum’s formulation misses the importance of the reader’s body to the construction and dissemination of voice in poetry with dramatic qualities. In arguing for the primacy of the reader’s body, I draw on an extensive scholarship on sympathy and its relationship to technology, affect, embodiment, and gender in the six decades since Langbaum wrote. I focus in particular on the production and dissemination of voice in poems by Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, and several popular poems on the phonograph and the radio to demonstrate the significance of the body to recorded voices in verse and sound recordings from the early Victorian to high Modernist periods. My first chapter traces speakers’ relationships to both characters’ and readers’ bodies in individual poems by Tennyson and Browning. I argue that these poems rely on readers’ embodied reactions to their speakers to make their arguments. My second chapter focuses on the phonograph and phonograph poems (1888-1901). I argue that hearing recorded voices on the phonograph—the first ever sound recording and playback technology—caused auditors to conflate the human voice with the phonograph body, creating an entirely new type of speaker from those in printed poems. In my third chapter I examine how the intangibility and decorporealization of voices in early American radio and radio poems (1922-1945) offers speakers a new way of bonding with real and imagined listeners. My final chapter looks at T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and contrasts it with The Waste Land for iPad application (2011) to consider how Eliot generates empathy for female characters who have survived traumatic assaults as told by male speakers’ voices. Throughout, I discuss how these poems urge us to value the uniqueness and imperfections in speakers’ voices through our embodied reactions to them, on the page and also in mechanically reproduced forms.
Impact of Noncoding Genetic Alterations on the Cis-regulatory Networks of Prostate Cancer
Keywords: 3d genome
epigenetics
foxa1
genomics
mutations
prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed malignancy in men worldwide. While the majority of low-risk patients with localized prostate cancer have favourable outcomes, aggressive intermediate-risk and high-risk patients experience recurrence upon initial treatment and ultimately develop lethal metastatic disease. Hence, there remains a need to better our biological understanding of prostate cancer to improve patient care. Whole-genome sequencing revealed that primary prostate tumours are burdened by thousands of mutations with the majority residing in the noncoding space with unknown function. To address these gaps in our understanding, I investigated the impact of these noncoding mutations by focusing on their involvement in gene regulation through three-dimensional chromatin interactions. I found that mutations enrich at the binding sites of essential transcription factors in prostate cancer genome-wide with a subset that can significantly modulate their binding and drive aberrant activity of cis-regulatory elements. Furthermore, I identified a set of cis-regulatory elements targeted by noncoding mutations that converge on regulating FOXA1 mRNA expression, a potent prostate cancer oncogene. My work also involved the identification of an enhancer-hijacking event as a result of the TMPRSS2 - ERG fusion that that lead to a subtype-specific cis -regulatory landscape, makingthese cancer cells vulnerable to NOTCH signalling inhibitors. Lastly, through chromatinconformation capture of 12 primary prostate tumour samples, my work revealed novel structural variants that can impact chromatin organization in three-dimensional space. Taken together, my work ascribed functional relevance to noncoding mutations by focusing entities involved in gene regulation through three-dimensional chromatin interactions. Ultimately, my work pushes forward our functional understanding of noncoding mutations that will expand our growing list of oncogenic drivers in prostate cancer and other cancer types.
Modern Islamic Messianism: Eschatology to Teleology
Keywords: Iranian Studies
Islamic history
Messianism
Middle East
Shi'ism

In this dissertation, I use primary and secondary sources to trace the development and transformation of the concept of Mahdi in Iran from the early 1900s to the late 1970s. I provide an alternative historiography of the Mahdi that has been missing from the Mahdist scholarly work arguing that there was a significant discursive shift regarding the Mahdi in Iranian religious writings from a distant figure in the early period to a revolutionary figure of future hope and justice in the late 1970s. In the early period, intellectual circles did not focus on the urgency of the Mahdi’s arrival, content to maintain the Mahdi’s distance. This changed in the early 1940s where the Mahdi took on a revolutionary aura and writings regarded his imminent arrival as critical for the revolutionary ethos to reach its logical conclusion in religious and political emancipation. In this dissertation, I argue that this discursive shift occurred due to a number of factors which caused contemporary Iranian society to question the idea that emancipation would come from the constitutional revolution. This shift also occurred due to rising divergences among intellectual circles including leftists, secularists, and nationalists whose criticisms of religion forced the religious figures out of their intellectual comfort zones. I am mainly focused on unpacking the nature of this factor by charting discursive treatments of the Mahdi through this period among these various intellectual milieus.
‘Don’t Under React’: The Limits of Compassion and Risk Management in Toronto School Safety from 1999-2007
Keywords: compassion
pastoral power
risk management
school lockdowns
school safety
zero-tolerance

The purpose of this dissertation is to situate school safety policies within the emergence of organizational risk management. I argue that the turn to a risk management of everything re-shapes safety and discipline in the school system. Concomitantly, the compassionate and pastoral aspects of schooling re-shapes risk management. This is important because risk management and school discipline practices are often described as cold exclusionary turns whereas my research shows that the inclusionary pull and dream of mandatory education, if never fully realized, impacts how risk management is achieved in the school system. The main question addressed by this dissertation is how does the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) manage risk to students, educators and its reputation by looking at three distinct areas: 1) the disappearance of zero-tolerance policies; 2) the role of the centralized Safe Schools Office in handling student discipline; and 3) the organizational responses to school shooters via lockdown and threat assessments. As part of this turn to risk management, institutions are becoming insular to external research so I had to rely on creativity to collect data. I attended training seminars and received resources normally reserved for school principals and conducted by senior administrators in the TDSB. I augmented the data from the training materials with TDSB policy and procedural memoranda; debates by politicians (School Board Trustees and Members of Provincial Parliament) and the work that emerged from two TDSB led task forces on discipline and safety. The research provides greater nuance to the literature by focusing on how inclusivity and compassion have implications for risk management strategies. The research also suggests how to approach and stifle purely exclusionary policies.