VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Inside Open Government Data Curation: Exploring Challenges to the Concept of a ‘Designated Community’ through a Case Study of the City of Toronto
Keywords: City of Toronto
Designated Community
Digital Curation
Open Data
Open Government

As digital curation continues to evolve as a field of research and practice, questions have emerged regarding the applicability of a key concept drawn from the field’s origins in digital preservation. Established models of digital preservation use the concept of a ‘designated community’ of potential future users as a reference point for the delivery of digital information. It is unclear, however, whether the concept of a designated community holds the same importance in curation situations where long-term preservation is a less central concern or how curation functions when there is no clear designated community to which curation services can be targeted. This dissertation explores these themes in the context of Open Government Data (OGD) curation. Here the mandate is to make datasets produced by the public sector available to anyone for any use, as part of the larger project of open government. In doing so, OGD curation presents a challenge to existing ways of conceptualizing digital curation, as drawn from digital preservation. Using the City of Toronto as a case study, this research investigates OGD curation processes and the influence conceptions of a ‘designated community’ of future users and their use of the data have on those processes. The study was structured using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a theoretical framework and data was collected using three methods: semi-structured interviews with curation participants and OGD advocates, analysis of documents, and the observation of public events. The findings revealed three distinct processes central to the interests of the study: the process of releasing OGD; the development of an Open Data Master Plan to revitalize the City’s open data program; and the creation of an OGD portal to help users’ access and engage with data. Conceptions of the data use and users present at the study site were drawn from the broader discourse surrounding OGD. Furthermore, this reference to OGD discourse and the innovations introduced by curators can be interpreted as a response to the challenge of curating data for a diverse audience.
Silicon and Silicon Nitride Photonic Devices and Platforms for Very Large-scale Photonic Integration
Keywords: Optoelectronic integration
Photonic integrated circuits
Polarization-independence
Silicon nitride
Silicon photonics
Variation-tolerance

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) on silicon (Si) hold the promise of densely integrated optical circuitry and low-cost, high-volume manufacturing on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication infrastructure. However, the high index contrast nature of the platform presents numerous obstacles for reliably realizing very large-scale PICs. In this thesis, we present photonic devices and platforms for addressing the challenges of dimensional and thermal tolerances, polarization dependence, and low-loss passive devices. Firstly, we present design strategies for improving the dimensional tolerances of devices fabricated on Si foundry platforms and confirm their efficacy through wafer-scale measurements. We exploit correlated dimensional fluctuations to design directional couplers with variation-tolerant splitting ratios, and we incorporate adiabatically widened waveguide bends within microring resonators to reduce the intradie and across-wafer spread in the resonant wavelength without compromising the quality factor. Secondly, we propose to use silicon nitride (SiN) in place of Si for low-loss, variation-tolerant, and thermally insensitive passive devices. On a SiN platform, we demonstrate a robust polarization-insensitive wavelength demultiplexer formed from cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer lattice filters for optical receiver applications. The design, which uses zero-birefringence waveguides and optimized directional couplers, provides a promising alternative to polarization diversity circuits, thereby reducing circuit footprint and complexity. Thirdly, we show how the superior passive characteristics of SiN can be combined with Si for active functionality in a SiN-on-Si photonic platform. We design and characterize a custom trilayer platform incorporating two SiN layers atop a Si layer. We develop the passive optical elements essential to the platform operation, including low-loss interlayer taper transitions for optical power transfer between layers and ultra-low-loss, low crosstalk waveguide crossings to facilitate routing. Using three layers breaks the trade-off between interlayer taper loss and crossing loss, and our trilayer platform is shown to be especially suitable for very large-scale PICs comprising hundreds or thousands of elements. To illustrate the platform utility, we fabricated photonic switches which represent some of the largest PICs ever attempted. The electro-optic switch cells operate with nanosecond scale speeds, and we present designs for a single polarization 16x16 switch and a polarization-independent 4x4 switch.
Walking Toronto's Red Road: The Story Pathways of Indigenous Social Workers
Keywords: Aboriginal
Anti-colonial
Indigenous
Indigneous Research Methodology
Social Work
Storytelling

Abstract: A Long Story Short "The truth about stories is that’s all we are. ‘You can’t understand the world without telling a story,’ the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells us. ‘There isn’t any centre to the world but a story’" (King, 2003, p. 32). Tap. Tap. ‘Is this thing on?’ Clears throat. Pushing his way to the top of the paragraph, he continues, ‘I figure I would try to get to you first.’ Snicker. ‘As this is really all about me, anyways,’ Trickster says, fluttering his eyelashes, resting one hand on his chest. ‘I mean, sure, I suppose we are traveling the story pathways of Indigenous social workers in Toronto,’ he muses, lifting his hand to his chin. ‘But social work in North America is a dynamic tale of oppression and resistance,’ he pauses to think. ‘So, the ten (10) short stories shared here, created with the participants of this research journey, really are a collection of Trickster tales,’ he states, regaining all confidence. ‘And these stories, like Trickster tales, carry good lessons in their disorder,' Trickster says, slapping his knee. Cackle. Snort. Phew. After regaining some composure, he looks up off the page and back towards the reader. Tap. Tap. ‘Storytelling and land are interconnected with each other and to this anti-colonial endeavour’ Trickster says, eyebrow raised. ‘Somewhere between the significance of petroglyphs and carving your name into wet cement, these story landmarks will guide us in a journey through the relationship Indigenous social workers have with their profession,’ he says, slinking his way down the page. ‘Guided by an Indigenous research methodology, we take a journey through story, exploring the pathways Indigenous social workers create through their work,’ Trickster says. ‘Story pathways with some unexpected impacts and destinations, for Indigenous peoples, social work, and research itself,’ he smirks. ‘So, come walk along Toronto’s Red Road, aided by the stories of those who have gone before us, guiding and perhaps even cautioning we future travelers.’ Keywords: Indigenous, Aboriginal, Social Work, Stories, Landmarks, Story Pathways, Anti-Colonial, Research Methodology, Trickster, Toronto
The Development of Local-acting Biologics to Treat Rheumatoid Arthritis
Keywords: Arthritis
Biologics
Cell Therapy
CIA
Local-acting
TNF

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease characterized by chronic inflammation and progressive joint destruction. Anti-TNF biologics have been developed to treat RA and although effective in the majority of patients, they require repeated administration and systemically inhibit TNF. This systemic inhibition leads to systemic immune suppression and can result in side-effects including opportunistic infections, serious infections and malignancy. To address these limitations, I developed a novel, local-acting biologic known as TNF sticky trap. This biologic was shown capable of inhibiting TNF while sticking or localizing to the extracellular matrix (ECM) where it is produced or administered. Next, cell lines inducibly expressing this local-acting biologic were generated, characterized and evaluated for their therapeutic efficacy in an animal model of RA. A single injection of cells expressing TNF sticky trap was sufficient to reduce arthritis and this local-acting biologic was undetectable in the serum of treated animals. Lastly, to help advance the translation of RA cell therapies into the clinic, a cell safety mechanism was developed and characterized. The development of a safe cell therapy inducibly expressing local-acting biologics could avoid the limitations associated with systemic therapies and improve the current treatment of RA.
The Social Antecedents and Consequences of the Sense of Distributive Injustice
Keywords: Distributive justice
Mental health
Social psychology
Stress Process
Work-family interface

Roughly half of working adults in Canada and the United States report a sense of distributive injustice––that their earnings are unjustly too low. This evidence provides an impetus to document the antecedents and consequences of the sense of distributive injustice. More specifically, it encourages us to examine two fundamental questions in the study of distributive justice: (1) What do people think is just and why? (2) And, what are the consequences of the sense of injustice for individuals? Using population-based data, I address these questions through an interdisciplinary lens by integrating perspectives in the social psychology of distributive justice, the sociology of mental health, and occupational health psychology. I assess the first question by fusing ideas in distributive justice and the work-family interface. I argue that the conceptualization of work-related inputs can be elaborated by considering the intersection of work and family roles. Specifically, I propose a model that delineates how excessive job pressures––and the ensuing role blurring behavior and work-to-family conflict––shape the expectation for greater rewards. My findings provide an updated account of the nature of work contributions for contemporary workers that shape their ideas of what they should justly earn. The second part of the dissertation examines the consequences of underreward, focusing on the situational factors that function as moderators. In one study, I show that the relationship between underreward and job dissatisfaction is contingent on forms of security, such that the association is attenuated for those with high job and financial security, and for those employed in the public sector. The interpretation of the patterns for job security encourages the integration of the Job Demands-Resources Model and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In another study, I examine the ways in which two dimensions of SES––education and income––moderate the effects of perceived underreward on mental and physical health. I test two competing hypotheses––buffering-resource and status-disconfirmation––that delineate the moderating role of SES. Taken together, this dissertation draws upon and integrates diverse theoretical perspectives to identify new forms of work-related contributions that shape perceptions of a fair reward and the situational factors that modify reactions to underreward.
Relational Data Enrichment by Discovery and Transformation
Keywords: Data Discovery
Data Enrichment
Data Management
Data Science
Dataset Search
Feature Engineering

In the context of data preparation for data science, we study the data enrichment problem, which is the challenge of augmenting a table with relevant data. We consider two enrichment paradigms: (1) data enrichment via discovery, and (2) data enrichment via transformation. In the first paradigm a table is enriched with relevant data discovered in data lakes. Specifically, we study table union search as the search problem of finding tables that can be unioned with a query table. We present a probabilistic solution for finding top-k unionable tables with a query table within massive data lakes. We show that our table union search outperforms in speed and accuracy existing algorithms for finding related tables and scales to provide efficient search over large open data lakes. We also consider the complementary problem of building a directory structure over a data lake. We define a data lake organization as a navigation structure (graph) containing nodes representing sets of attributes within a data lake. We present a new probabilistic model of how users navigate a data lake and propose an approximate algorithm for constructing the optimal directory structure. We show that the organizations constructed by this algorithm dramatically improve the expected probability of discovering tables over a baseline technique and linkage graphs. In the second paradigm, a table is enriched with new attributes (features) that are constructed by transforming the existing attributes in the table. We define the prediction-based feature engineering for classification as the problem of predicting the most effective feature to augment a table with. We show that we can enrich tables with new attributes that improve the performance of classification tasks. We also show that the prediction-based feature engineering technique outperforms other feature engineering approaches in effectiveness and response time.
Explaining the Resultative Parameter
Keywords: generative
label theory
parameters
resultatives

This thesis proposes an explanatory account for the fact that some, but not all languages exhibit adjectival resultatives. It does so by synthesizing a number of earlier proposals. From Snyder (1995, 2016), I adopt the proposal that the setting of the resultative parameter must be acquired indirectly, being inferred from the presence or absence of bare stem compounding in the primary linguistic data. From Kratzer (2005), I adopt a small clause analysis of resultatives and the proposal that Snyder’s parameter is related to inflectional features on adjectives. Finally, from Son and Svenonius (2008), I adopt the proposal that adjectival resultatives involve a single syntactic argument being shared by the primary and secondary predicates. These proposals, combined with minimalist assumptions, yield: (i) a structural analysis of resultatives, in which they are represented by a resP adjoined to a VP, with a DP argument undergoing sideward movement between them, and (ii) an analysis of the parameter, according to which languages generate adjectival resultatives only if their lexicon contains uninflected categorizing heads. I then show that, under Chomsky’s (2013, 2015) label theory, with some modifications, an adjectival resultative can be derived only if the result adjective is categorized by an uninflected adj head (e.g., {adj_∅ , √FLAT} ). This demonstration concludes the theoretical explanation of the resultative parameter. The remainder of the thesis addresses some consequences of the explanation. First I address the appearance that my theory seems to wrongly rule out copular clauses and depictives in, for example, French. I argue that this stems from our conception of Agree, and present a theory of postsyntactic Agree that gives the right empirical results. Next, I address the previously unrecognized generalization that sideward movement from adjuncts is always necessary when possible. Using Cinque’s (1996) analysis for ACC-ing clauses, I show that this can be explained by a novel theory of adjunction synthesizing the pair-merge (Chomsky 2004) and late adjunction (Stepanov 2001) theories. Finally, I discuss the semantics that follows from my syntactic analysis. Although the semantic analysis seems implausible, I present corroborating evidence in its favour and argue that is more plausible than the alternatives.
Geodesic Nets With Few Boundary Points
Keywords: curvature
differential geometry
geodesic nets
riemannian geometry

Geodesic nets on Riemannian manifolds form a natural class of stationary objects generalizing geodesics. Yet almost nothing is known about their classification or general properties even when the ambient Riemannian manifold is the Euclidean plane or the round 2-sphere. We survey some results and open questions (old and new) about geodesic nets on Riemannian manifolds. A particular focus will be put on the question if the number of inner vertices (balanced vertices) in a geodesic net can be bounded by the number of boundary points (unbalanced vertices) or the total imbalance. We prove that a geodesic net with three unbalanced vertices on a non-positively curved plane has at most one balanced vertex. We do not assume any a priori bound for the degree of unbalanced vertices. The result seems to be new even in the Euclidean case. We demonstrate by examples that the result is not true for metrics of positive curvature on the plane, and that there are no immediate generalizations of this result for geodesic nets with four unbalanced vertices which can have a significantly more complicated structure. In particular, an example of a geodesic net with four unbalanced vertices and sixteen balanced vertices that is not a union of simpler geodesic nets is constructed. The previously known irreducible geodesic nets with four unbalanced vertices have at most two balanced vertices. We provide a partial answer for a related question, namely a description of a new infinite family of geodesic nets on the Euclidean plane with 14 unbalanced vertices and arbitrarily many balanced vertices of degree greater or equal to three.
The Influence of Biomass Burning on the Arctic Atmosphere
Keywords: ammonnia
Arctic
FTIR
PEARL
spectroscopy
wildfires

Evaluating the influence of biomass burning on the Arctic requires continuous and long-term measurements of the transported emissions. In this thesis, ground-based Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) solar-absorption spectroscopic measurements at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka, Nunavut, Canada from 2006-2018 are used to retrieve the atmospheric abundance of the biomass burning species CO, HCN, C2H6, C2H2, CH3OH, H2CO, HCOOH and NH3 . The retrievals of NH3 from Eureka FTIR measurements are the first long-term ground-based measurements of NH3 in the high Arctic. Measurements of NH3, CO, HCN and C2H6 were simultaneously enhanced in July-August 2014 and attributed to the 2014 Northwest Territories wildfires. Enhancements were observed in FTIR measurements at Toronto, and due to the differences in traveltimes between the sites, an approximate 2-day lifetime of NH3 in a smoke plume was determined, allowing for NH3 to undergo long-range transport and therefore suggesting that boreal wildfires may be a considerable episodic NH3 source to the Arctic. The greatest enhancements of NH3, CO, HCN, and C2H6 were observed from FTIR measurements at Eureka (2006-2017) and Thule, Greenland (2006-2017) from 17-22 August 2017 and attributed to the 2017 British Columbia and Northwest Territories wild- fires. A GEOS-Chem simulation illustrated that these wildfires contributed to surface-layer NH3 enhancements in the Canadian Archipelago of 0.01-0.11 ppbv from 15-23 August 2017, 0.14-5.50 times the background due to local seabird-colony sources, further indicating that boreal wildfire NH3 is an important episodic source of NH3 in the summertime high Arctic in addition to the persistent seabird-colony source. Detection of wildfire pollution events was performed for Eureka FTIR measurements and nine other Northern high- and mid-latitude Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) FTIR sites from 2003-2018. Enhancements of CO were detected and correlated with simultaneous enhancements of the biomass burning tracers HCN and C2H6, providing a means of wildfire pollution detection. Source attribution of the detected events was performed using a GEOS-Chem tagged CO simulation. Boreal North America and boreal Asia were the largest contributors to anomalous enhancements at all sites, with a recent increase in the boreal North American contribution from 2013-2018.
Concussions in Competitive Artistic Swimming: Investigating Incidence and Injury Context through a Community-based Approach
Keywords: artistic swimming
athletic injury
concussion
incidence
youth sport

Artistic (synchronized) swimming is a fast-paced, predominantly female aesthetic sport on which there has been very little research. Despite origins in theatrical performance, the physical demands of artistic swimming have evolved significantly, subsequently increasing the potential for traumatic injury, including concussion. Sport-related concussion is a traumatic brain injury that can result in behavioural complaints, cognitive impairments, mood disturbance, and altered sleep. Despite findings that female athletes may experience a greater rate of concussion, more symptoms, and longer recovery than male athletes, females remain under-represented in sport concussion research. Sport-related concussion in artistic swimming has not yet been examined. The purpose of this research was to explore the incidence and injury context of sport-related concussion in youth artistic swimmers in Ontario within a community-based research setting. First, a retrospective study examined the injury context factors surrounding concussions sustained during artistic swimming. Second, a prospective study measured the incidence of concussion in this population over one season, and further explored the injury context of concussion. The incidence risk of concussion was 1.91%, and the clinical incidence was 1.91 per 100 athletes. The most frequent mechanism of injury was contact with another athlete, most commonly during pattern transitions and highlights. Concussions occurred most frequently in in-pool training between November and March, and in the deep-end of the pool. Valuable sport-specific concussion resources for the artistic swimming community were developed through collaboration with Ontario Artistic Swimming. One of these resources was an injury tracking program. A qualitative study examining coaches’ perceptions of the injury tracker provided valuable feedback for improvements. The important lessons learned from this partnership include the identification of contact between athletes in artistic swimming, findings of concussion incidence comparable to other girls’ sports, and description of the injury contexts associated with concussion in artistic swimming. Exploration of concussion in artistic swimming is warranted to protect the health and safety of these athletes, to expand the research on sport concussion in girls and women, and assist coaches and officials in understanding the nature of concussions in artistic swimming.