VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Construction of Entrepreneurial Identity among University Students
Keywords: Entrepreneurship Education
Social Identity
Student Development

Entrepreneurship education (EE) aims to instill tacit knowledge to increase entrepreneurial motivation, intention and behaviour. Extant research suggests that self-identity is also related to these outcomes, raising the possibility that entrepreneurial identity is an outcome of EE interventions. Identity construction is particularly salient in education since it provides insight into the cognitive processes undertaken by students and allows educators to design interventions around them. But there is very little literature on the development of entrepreneurial identity among students and the role, if any, of educational interventions in that process. This study closes this gap by addressing the question: “How does exposure to entrepreneurship education influence entrepreneurial identity construction among undergraduate students?” Approximately 40 one-hour semi-structured interviews were conducted at three universities with significant entrepreneurship programming. Interview participants were in their first or last year of undergraduate studies, were from business, engineering and arts and science faculties, were 30% female and had differing levels of exposure to entrepreneurship education programming. These interviews reveal that students create entrepreneurial identities in response to many forces beyond the reach of educational interventions but that interventions often act as triggers to crystallize these forces. Students reported forces that “pulled” them towards entrepreneurship (e.g., parental encouragement) but they also reported many forces that “pushed” them toward entrepreneurship as a potential resolution to an internal conflict or social/occupational dissonance (e.g., a lack of “fit” with peers). Some students also reported factors that impeded these forces (e.g., peer antipathy). The negotiation of these forces led to three dominant entrepreneurial identity patterns: Students with an “instrumental” entrepreneurial identity viewed EE as a tool for enabling their nascent ventures, students with a “functional” entrepreneurial identity viewed EE as training in a specific mode of behaviour (to be exercised in a new or existing organization), and students with a “contingent” entrepreneurial identity viewed EE as a way to achieve personal agency in the form of long-term career options. Understanding these patterns, and the entrepreneurial identity construction process will enable educators to design more targeted interventions, policy makers to establish better metrics and students to gain deeper self-insights.
Detecting Consistency Violations in Distributed Storage Systems
Keywords: Consistency
Distributed Storage Systems
Reliability
Security

As cloud computing becomes increasingly popular, there is a growing need for replicated distributed storage systems. These distributed storage systems provide various consistency models for client applications. Nonetheless, potential software bugs and security attacks can lead to consistency violations, the contravention of the guarantees promised by consistency models. Consistency violations can cause client applications to make incorrect decisions leading to devastating results. Therefore, it is critically important to detect consistency violations. In this dissertation, we show it is possible to significantly improve existing detection measures against consistency violations by making contributions in two areas: 1) detecting consistency violations caused by software bugs in distributed storage systems and 2) detecting consistency violations caused by security attacks against cloud services hosting distributed storage systems. Previous solutions related to finding software bugs in distributed systems use systematic state-space exploration, but the explored state-spaces are too generic to directly find specific types of bugs. Existing solutions relevant to detecting consistency violations caused by security attacks require either direct communication between clients or a highly available client device. However, emerging end-user devices often do not meet these requirements because these devices may be sitting behind a firewall that prevents direct communication or running on batteries. We designed and implemented two novel systems to overcome the limitations of existing solutions: 1) Modulo to detect consistency violations caused by software bugs and 2) Caelus to detect consistency violations caused by security attacks. Modulo takes a targeted approach to state-space exploration. It focuses on exploring various scenarios of diverging replicas to see if replicas successfully converge again regardless of how they have evolved. We found eight bugs, leading to convergence failures, in three well-known open-source distributed storage systems. Caelus detects consistency violations using battery-powered end-user devices that do not have direct communication channels. The proposed solution employs a novel combination of cryptographic, network security and distributed systems techniques to enable near real-time detection on limited end-user devices. Our empirical study demonstrated that it can effectively detect simulated attacks on the Amazon S3 service and significantly reduce battery consumption for end-user devices.
A Comparison Between Cervical and Thoracic Spinal Cord Injury: Critical Level-dependent Differences in Pathobiology
Keywords: cervical
RNA-seq
sequencing
spinal cord injury
thoracic

Introduction: Despite advances in acute medical and surgical care, there are no effective regenerative or reparative strategies for traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). Patients with SCI experience a lifetime of neurological impairment, respiratory and cardiovascular distress. While incomplete injuries to the cervical cord are amongst the most common, preclinical and clinical efforts—driven by ease-of-access-have mostly focused on the modeling and treatment of the thoracic injuries. While translational efforts remain difficult, no comparative study of level-dependent SCI pathogenesis exist. In this thesis, I have examined the local, systemic and peripheral responses to a clinically-relevant model of cervical and thoracic SCI with the overarching hypothesis that baseline differences between the levels of injury will result in distinct vascular pathologies following SCI and trigger contrasting profiles of downstream secondary injury locally and systemically. Methods: Female Wistars rats were subjected to either moderate-severe C6-7 or T6-7 SCI, RNA-sequencing, Western blot, ELISAs, Luminex arrays, immunohistochemistry and high-resolution ultrasound were used to characterize the local and peripheral changes in the spinal cord, spleen and plasma. Results: We found reduced baseline levels of collagen, fibronectin and astrocytic laminin in the cervical relative to the thoracic cord. This corresponded to rapid tissue clearance, increased neuroinflammation and gliosis after cSCI. Secondly, we found that there were profound reductions in the concentration of circulating cytokine and chemokines after cSCI. Finally, we found a dramatic surge in splenic norepinephrine, cortisol and cleaved caspase-3 and a corresponding reduction in leukocyte trafficking molecules to the spleen after thoracic, but not cervical, SCI. Discussion and Impact: Taken together, this work demonstrates that: 1) vascular disruption after cervical SCI should be a critical acute therapeutic target as it results in irreversible tissue and thereby functional loss following traumatic injury; 2) circulating reductions in cytokines and chemokines are likely due to a pooling at local injury sites; and 3) the level-dependent phenomenon of SCI-immunodeficiency syndrome (SCI-IDS) which has not been consistently shown in patients is reversed in our model of incomplete SCI, suggesting that incomplete injuries result only in local deafferentation and reconciles the reason why SCI-IDS has not been consistently shown in patients.
Recording the Work of a World: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Diary Film and the Domestication of Cinema
Keywords: Anne Charlotte Robertson
diary
labour
mental illness
multi-modal
world-making

Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary is a multi-modal project that comprises cinematic, written, audio and food diaries that span forty years of the artist’s life. Robertson would come to understand the work in different ways: as a weight loss diary; as a “trousseau” for her “one true love,” to present to him when they meet; and, in periods of psychic breakdown, as a film that would encompass the history of the entire world. This dissertation takes up these three ways of framing the project to describe and make sense of Five Year Diary. In doing so it positions Robertson more prominently in terms of two scholarly histories: the history of feminist art in the United States, and the history of experimental film, particularly in the form of personal or diary filmmaking. When Robertson begins her multi-modal Five Year Diary in 1981, she is doing so at the tail-end of the women’s liberation movements that coursed through the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The diary project takes up many of the concerns of second wave feminism, including gendered labour, women’s time, and feminist desire. Robertson thus uses the diary, which historically has often been one of the only forms easily accessible to women, for the project of feminist world-making that Five Year Diary engages in. Her intervention here lies on two fronts. First, as an artist that makes of the most extensive and conceptually rich use of the diary within feminist art and filmmaking; and second, in her veneration of domesticity and heterosexual marriage, as forming part of an alternative history of second-wave feminism. It is Robertson’s treatment of the domestic that forms one axis of her intervention in the history of experimental film: by collapsing the labour of the home and the labour of the filmmaker, hers is, I argue, the true “domestication of cinema” that David E James attributes to Stan Brakhage. The second axis relates to form and how the diary film has traditionally been sketched in experimental scholarship, as fragmented, often formless, an assertion Robertson’s rigorous formalism and carefully pieced together aesthetic vision undermines.
Ontario’s Graduate Certificate Programs: An Exploration into Colleges’ Perspectives and Students’ Decision-making Processes
Keywords: Differentiation Framework
Graduate Certificates
Human Capital Theory
Reverse Transfer
Student Decision-making
Transition Systems

This mixed methods study explored the nature and role of one of the credentials offered by the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) – graduate certificates – in school to work transition of Ontarians and it explored students’ decision-making processes when enrolling in these programs. The role of education in human capital theory underpins specific ways qualifications can be used for economic progress; however, in liberal market economies where an education logic dominates, such a role is not clearly defined. The conceptual frameworks that grounded my study included Iannelli and Raffe’s (2007) concept of transition systems, differentiation (cited in Parsons Platt, 1973, Rhoades, 1983), Perna’s (2006) model of student choice, and Reverse Transfer (cited in Clark, 1960; Hossler et. al, 2012). These were used to analyze data from: 335 program websites; statistical data from the Ontario government and Colleges Ontario documents; and, interviews with six institutional leaders, five program coordinators from five selected CAATs (out of 24), four third-party professionals and 17 students. The quantitative data included all graduate certificates offered by 22 English language Ontario CAATs in fall 2017. The conclusions drawn from this study suggest that graduate certificate programs are the only post-diploma credential offered by the CAATs where degrees are one of the key entry requirements. Due to the government’s policies and market pressures, these programs are relatively homogenous which contributes to isomorphism in Ontario CAATs. These programs produce highly positive labour-market outcomes and this study’s participants considered these program curricula to be closely linked with the job market. However, the system-wide data show that more than half of the graduates get jobs outside their fields of study. Participants perceived the level of these programs to be higher than baccalaureate programs and students enrolled in these programs to gain applied skills which were not offered by their previous education. This study contributes to the existing literature on role of qualifications in liberal market economies and may inform policy, improve program design and delivery, and help increase the understanding of role of these credentials in Ontario’s transition and higher education systems.
New Methodologies for the Synthesis of Aminoboronic Acids and Tetrahydroquinolines
Keywords: boron
caseinolytic protease P
inhibitors
multicomponent reactions
photochemistry
serine hydrolases

There has been a rising interest in aminoboronic acids since their medicinal properties have been realized. Thus, new strategies for the synthesis of α- and β-aminoboronic acids would enable the discovery of bioactive molecules. Tetrahydroquinolines are also privileged scaffolds that are commonly found in natural products and therapeutically relevant molecules. This thesis reports the use of amphoteric boron carbonyl reagents in the synthesis of α- and β-aminoboronic acids. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 discusses the development of the Ugi four-component reaction with α-boryl isocyanide to furnish peptidomimetic α-aminoboronic acids. These molecules were shown to be bioactive against human caseinolytic protease P. In Chapter 3, the preparation of various β-aminoboronic acids from α-boryl aldehydes is described such as boryl enamide synthesis, boryl-Strecker reaction and an Ugi/aza-Wittig multicomponent reaction. The boryl enamides were highly useful synthetic intermediates and enabled the construction of tetracyclic lactams. The β-aminocyano(MIDA)boronates generated from the boryl-Strecker reaction were found to be potent and selective inhibitors of serine hydrolase α/β-hydrolase domain 3. Lastly, Chapter 4 presents a novel strategy for the synthesis of Povarov-type products using photocatalysis.
Latent-variable models for drug response prediction and genetic testing
Keywords: domain adaptation
drug response prediction
hidden markov model
machine learning
non-invasive prenatal testing
variational autoencoder

High-throughput DNA sequencing and related biotechnologies revolutionized our understanding of human genomics and diseases with genetic component, particularly of cancer -- one of the leading causes of death world-wide. Despite the progress in cancer research and availability of over 150 FDA-approved anti-cancer drugs, the cancer treatment is often unsuccessful. Identifying the best cancer treatment using computational models to personalize drug response prediction holds great promise to improve patient’s chances of successful recovery. Unfortunately, the computational task of predicting drug response remains very challenging. In this thesis I develop a deep latent-variable machine learning model with amortized variational inference that improves accuracy of drug response prediction over the currently used models. Besides increased expressiveness of this model thanks to parameterization by neural networks, the achieved improvement stems from integration of drug-induced perturbation profiles, a resource not fully utilized before. Clinical trial datasets of cancer treatments which also include genomic characterization of the tumours are small and scarce, therefore for the vast majority of drugs only responses in pre-clinical biological models are available. To this end, I assess applicability of popular domain adaptation approach, based on domain-invariant representation learning, to the drug response prediction task. I conclude that necessary conditions of successful domain adaptation are often not satisfied in the available datasets and as such many current methods are misguided. Last but not least, in this thesis I also contribute to the area of non-invasive prenatal testing. Using a hidden Markov model I propose a method for analysis of cell-free DNA fragments isolated from maternal plasma that also contain admixture of DNA fragments derived from the fetal genome. Here presented method is a first proof-of-concept for non-invasive sub-chromosomal CNV detection.
Acceptance of Allogeneic Cell Transplants without Systemic Immune Suppression
Keywords: allograft tolerance
immune evasion
stem cells
tolerance
transplantation

Cell-based therapies hold great promise for the future of modern medicine. A large number of injuries and diseases that are currently not possible to cure or effectively treat could benefit from therapeutic approaches where healthy cells are transplanted into the disease/injury sites. However, before stem cell-based therapies can become a reality, several major obstacles need to be overcome. One of the most pressing is the rejection of allogeneic transplants. Although patient-derived induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs) may offer an appealing solution, the derivation, expansion and quality control needed for application in clinical settings is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. This thesis describes the creation of pluripotent stem cell lines that are accepted as allografts without the need for systemic immune suppression. We genetically altered murine Embryonic Stem Cells (mESCs) to express a set of eight immune-modulatory genes at high levels. Transplantation of these cells into allogeneic hosts resulted in the successful formation of teratomas. Most importantly, this immunologic acceptance was achieved without the administration of immune-suppressive drugs. We envision that this approach will allow the same cell line to be used for transplantation into any individual. Rigorous testing and quality control would be cost-effective and cells could be made available as “off the shelf” products.
Interneuron Specific (Dis)Inhibitory Control in the CA1 Hippocampus: A Single-cell Computational Study Spanning In Vitro and In Vivo Virtual Network Contexts
Keywords: Computational Neuroscience
Disinhibition
Hippocampus
Interneurons

The hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for memory formation, has a large diversity of different inhibitory neuron types. Because inhibitory neurons are fewer than excitatory neurons, they are relatively less studied. In this thesis, I study one such neuron type, the interneuron specific 3 (IS3) cell. IS3 cells belong to a neuronal class that specializes in the inhibition of other inhibitory neurons, including oriens lacunosum moleculare (OLM) cells, which suggests a primary role in disinhibitory control of excitatory neurons. In vivo, it is unknown when IS3 cells become activated and how they contribute to circuit function. I use computational modelling techniques to create in vivo-like scenarios for IS3 cell models, to predict their activation under various patterns of behaviourally-relevant spiking inputs. Specifically, I find that IS3 cells require approximately balanced inhibition and excitation to generate in vivo-like states that remain sensitive to additional inputs. During these states, their inputs dictate that they become activated during the rising to peak phases of theta rhythms as well as during sharp wave- associated ripples, though inclusion of inhibition dampens their recruitment during the latter. Analysis of experimental data confirms their activation during the rising to peak phases of theta rhythms, however only towards the end of theta-run epochs. As well, IS3 cells are not active during sharp wave-associated ripples, suggesting the presence of additional inhibitory mechanisms. Further computational modelling predicts that IS3 cell activation primarily lengthens the interspike intervals of OLM cells rather than elicits post-inhibitory rebound spiking. This suggests that IS3 cell control over OLM cell spiking is mainly facilitated through disinhibition of pyramidal cells and not direct connections from IS3 cells to OLM cells. Lastly, the excitability of IS3 cells is altered during aging. Using computational modelling I predict that the electrical changes are due to alterations in fast delayed rectifier potassium channel expression. While experimental recordings of these currents does not confirm significant changes during aging, considerable conductance variability suggests more expression modulation of these channels. Altogether, this work provides insights into the biophysical mechanisms through which IS3 cells are active and contribute to circuit function in vivo.
Physiological Stress Reactivity in Childhood Leukemia and Lymphoma Patients and an Exploration of Neurological and Behavioural Characteristics Associated with Stress Regulation
Keywords: 31P MRS
Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Late-effects of childrens cancer
Physical activity
Stress reactivity

Significant stress during childhood is associated with health and functional consequences related to dysfunctional physiological stress regulation. Childhood cancer is a stressful experience with indirect evidence of altered regulation of the many systems integrated for appropriate stress regulation. No studies have investigated stress reactivity in this population, however evidence of altered i) physiological stress signalling, ii) neurological structure and function, and iii) coping characteristics, including physical activity and fitness, and psychosocial function, have been reported. To investigate this, 15 childhood cancer patients ages 8-18 who had completed treatment in the previous 6-36 months, and 16 age and sex matched healthy controls were recruited to participate in the study. Participants completed psychological stress testing (TSST- C), resting structural brain scans (DTI), a submaximal aerobic test, in-magnet exercise using 31P MRS, as well as questionnaires relating to physical activity habits, psychological resilience, quality of life, and stress experiences. Salivary samples for cortisol, sAA, and cytokines, as well as, HR, and ratings of perceived stress were collected at 3 time-points prior to (home, -15 minutes, -0 minutes) and 3 time-points following (+0 minutes, +15 minutes, +45 minutes) the TSST-C. No group or interaction effects were observed for HPA reactivity, but patients exhibited lower sAA and HR responses, as well as higher overall IL-8 and TNFa concentrations. Resting DTI showed significant differences between groups for mean FA, MD, RD, and AD of corticolimbic regions analysed. Regional FA differences were also found in the bilateral amygdalae, hippocampi, and interhemispheric limbic lobe. Lower estimated relative VO2peak and HR responses to exercise, as well as ATP regeneration by oxidative phosphorylation and anaerobic glycolysis, and physical activity were found in the patient group, with moderate to large effect sizes. No significant differences were found between groups for psychological wellbeing. These findings indicate that childhood leukemia and lymphoma patients have evidence of blunted SAM reactivity to psychological stress, and neurological and behavioural characteristics that may increase their risk of stress dysregulation and associated adverse health and functional outcomes.