VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Learning Regulator
Keywords: cryptoassets
high-frequency trading
robo-advice
securities regulation

Politicians routinely give regulators the authority to make decisions that affect the interests of others, but set procedures for the exercise of this authority. Procedures are said to guide the substance of the decisions regulators reach by making these decisions more transparent. The more sunlight its decisions attract, the less likely it is that a regulator will pursue its own policy preferences in place of those reflected in legislation. This account of how procedures guide substance has been the subject of persuasive criticism, however, which in turn casts doubt on whether procedures guide substance in the first place. If politicians cannot guide regulators’ decisions through procedures, this would seem to call into question the democratic pedigree of much of the administrative state. In Canada, securities regulators, with their broad powers to engage in rulemaking with little to no direct involvement from politicians, would seem especially vulnerable on this score. This thesis argues it is too early to reject the claim that procedures guide substance. Instead, it proposes an alternative account of how procedures might guide substance: by shaping the learning process that feeds into regulators’ decisions. By shaping regulators’ choices about what and how much information to gather and use in making decisions, procedures may serve to ensure these decisions reflect value judgments made by politicians and reflected in law. The thesis develops this account through three case studies, each comparing Canadian securities regulators’ efforts to learn about and respond to a new financial innovation against those of their US and UK counterparts, and illustrating how procedures might have helped guide them in different directions. If procedures guide substance, this does not necessarily mean that regulation always promotes social welfare or some other interpretation of the public interest. Procedures might inadvertently guide regulators in a different direction than politicians intended. Politicians might also use procedures to guide regulators towards making decisions that cater to vested interests. The thesis suggests pathways for future work shedding light on these risks and options for reform.
University Inc. and the Spectre of Violence
Keywords: authority and the State
bell hooks
critical methodology
critiques of the university
social justice education
violence and education

This thesis shines a light on the socio-political experience of a particular sub-discipline at a large research-intensive university in North America. It explores the authoritatively controlled narrative framing the university, questions its normative practices, and establishes ‘all is not as it seems’. From the data the university emerges as an intensely authoritative place with employment expectations tightly wound around ideological control. This conclusion is in relation to the theoretical framework which highlights the relationships between the university, research and teaching, and their ideological accordance with the maintenance of State violence. Proceeding this is a literature review which empirically grounds the theory and illustrates the connection between the historically enfranchised and the types of socio-political participation still excluded. To understand this issue further academics are interviewed: the interviewees allude to the authoritative dynamics in their sub-discipline and how they limit their ability to participate on their own ideological terms. In addition, research and pedagogy are bound clearly to the power of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal knowledge traditions which reify State violence. The discussion section offers a model for engaging with individual participation in relation to the reproduction of the university in its current authoritative and ideological form.
An Engineered 3D Co-Culture Model of Macrophages and Pancreatic Cancer Organoids to Explore Cellular Interactions in the Tumour Microenvironment
Keywords: 3D in vitro models
Hypoxia
Macrophages
Organoids
RNA-seq
Tumour microenvironment

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common form of pancreatic cancer and is currently the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in Canada. Despite innovations in research and the advent of immunotherapies, PDAC remains one of the deadliest cancers. PDAC is extremely challenging to treat because of its highly dysregulated tumour microenvironment (TME) comprised of aggressive cancer cells and pro-tumorigenic immune cells that interact with hypoxic and molecular gradients to promote malignancy. Specifically, interactions between tumour associated macrophages (TAMs) and cancer cells in the hypoxic TME have been shown to play significant roles in disease progression. However, deciphering these complex interactions is challenging with current cancer models, which either do not capture the complexities of the TME or allow for the interrogation of cellular interactions in physiologically relevant microenvironmental gradients. In this work, we present a fully human engineered 3D co-culture model of primary macrophages and patient-derived pancreatic cancer organoids based on the Tissue Roll for Analysis of Cellular Environment and Response (TRACER). Here, we incorporate macrophages with PDAC organoids and show that cell-generated hypoxic gradients and expected responses to these gradients are observed in TRACER. Moreover, we report that the TRACER co-culture can be used to evaluate the impact of macrophage-cancer interactions on response to chemotherapies and T-cell inflammation. To decipher these cancer-immune cell relationships with more granularity, we performed bulk transcriptional analysis. Here, we show that transcriptional profiles, such as metabolic rewiring of tumour cells, were uniquely present in TRACER but not in cells cultured in hypoxia chambers. Importantly, we observe that macrophages in TRACER resembled pro-tumourigenic PDAC TAMs. Interestingly, we reveal that organoids in co-culture with macrophages in TRACER were less sensitive to gradient and hypoxia-driven perturbations, and that macrophages played a potentially dominant role in driving these changes. Overall, we anticipate that our TRACER co-culture model will uniquely enable the investigation of intersecting parameters between cancer cells, immune cells and microenvironmental gradients like hypoxia, and will provide valuable insight on how the PDAC TME can be modulated for therapeutic benefit – a feat that is not possible with other in vitro models or patient data alone.
Storying the Social: Opening Interpretations of Deafness, Disability, and Race in Accessibility Training Modules and Videoed Encounters
Keywords: deafness
disability
narrative
policing
race
storytelling

This dissertation engages stories produced by, within, and for institutions of policing, in particular institutions of police, revealing different possibilities for how we might understand deafness, disability, race, and policing differently. It explores and analyses a set of cultural artefacts: (a) videos of encounters between d/Deaf people and police officers occurring in North America, and (b) accessibility training modules from the AccessForward program developed in 2012 by Curriculum Services Canada. Drawing on the work of the early Dorothy Smith and Thomas King, I develop my method of storying the social. Interpretive disability studies (specifically blindness as perception), Black methodologies (specifically counterstorytelling), and Indigenous epistemologies frame how I proceed, shaping my desire to unfold another approach to interpreting the human and the world of police training. In storying the social, a slow and poetic attention to the videos and modules reveals how linear patterns of storytelling obliterate signs of interpretation, producing problem-characters and watchable-types in relationship to a juridical discourse that authorizes police officers, specifically in Canada and the United States, as necessary enforcers of racial capitalist and settler colonial rule. Approaching our everyday lives as narratively-mediated appears deafness, disability, and race as interpretive scenes always already determined by routine protocols of accessibility training and police officer conduct. Foremost concerned with making and uncovering connections, storying the social is a transformative and abolitionist act of sociological inquiry that, by way of wonder and pause, opens what otherwise remains closed interpretations of deafness, disability and race. This way of proceeding challenges a dominant human imaginary that aspires to manage, define, extract, and dominate. Instead of presenting improved training programs as solutions to police violence, I argue for noticing the relations that we are already part of, such that a world that stories disability as a problem and institutions of police as problem-solvers becomes our object of perception.
Multifaceted Investigations on Transit Demand Resilience: A Roadmap for Developing Sustainable Urban Transit Policies
Keywords: Choice modeling
COVID-19 pandemic
Public Transit
Risk perception
Transportation Resilience
Traveler behavior and values

The thesis inspects transit's resiliency during an unprecedented disruptive event and conducts longitudinal analysis to identify strategies for transit to resist, recover and adapt to such disturbances. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the transit system and its overall functions. Besides, users' vigilant safety concerns and the consequent transit avoidance behavior left the concerned authorities searching for recovery strategies. Therefore, the research aimed to conduct empirical investigations on the COVID impact on users' multidimensional transit preferences at different pandemic phases. The study also intended to fabricate a comprehensive travel demand model to provide data-driven insight into the plausible policies for building a health crisis-resistant transit system.The dissertation presents six empirical investigations, each highlighting different research avenues. For behavioral studies, the emphasis lies in administering and designing multiple surveys, conceptualizing choice experiments, preprocessing collected data, and devising advanced transportation demand modeling techniques. The first study examines the passenger's transit mode choice behavior capturing the user's sensitivity to specific pandemic characteristics and infection-resistant transit safety policies. The second work uses an integrated modeling approach to investigate the interaction between users' in-vehicle safety perception and transit usage during the second pandemic year. It also portrays the efficacy of rapid vaccine rollout in restoring transit demand. Later, the research examines the long-lasting impact of pandemic fear, individuals' vaccination status, and level of service attributes on users' transit route choice behavior. Then, the thesis presents a hypothesized psychometric model utilizing the protection motivation theory. It captures the interplay amongst trip makers' pandemic-induced psychometric factors, altered travel behavior, and future transit usage. Conversely, the fifth work provides insight into the potential of post-pandemic interventions in reinstating the demand. However, the final work developed a multimodal network microsimulation model in an agent-based framework for the Greater Toronto Area using a simulation tool, MATSim, and a wide range of transportation data. The model will be a testbed for evaluating the policies endorsed in former analyses. The empirical findings provide first-hand evidence for transit planners with timely and effective transit policies and service planning to withstand the unexpected pandemic shock and reinstate its regular functionality.
Control of Magnetic Microrobotic Swarms
Keywords: Magnetic swarms
Medical robotics
Microrobotic swarms
Microrobotics
Microswarms
Robotics

Swarms, which stem from the collective behavior among individual elements, are commonly seen in nature. Over the past decade, the generation mechanism of microrobotic swarms has been explored for understanding the guiding principles of living swarms, and the swarms have been functionalized to enable specific applications. Nevertheless, the generation and navigation of microrobotic swarms under gravity and fluidic flow remain challenging, due to the the complexity in controlling agent-agent interactions. This thesis focuses on developing a strategy that enables the swarming of magnetic microparticles against gravity into vertical swarms. By analyzing the interparticle interaction under the influence of gravity and hydrodynamic drag, a unique dual-axis oscillating magnetic field was designed. The necessity of the vertical interparticle interactions, attraction among the intermediate structures, and positional reconfigurability of particles for the generation of the vertical swarms were revealed. The gravity-resisting capability, pattern reconfiguration, adaptive locomotion, and collective behavior of the vertical swarms were demonstrated. Next, this thesis presents the generation and navigation of magnetic nanoparticle swarms in fluidic flow. The interparticle interaction and locomotion mechanism of the magnetic particles in fluidic flow were analyzed and validated in experiments. Based on the findings, an actuation strategy was established to navigate the swarms in fluidic flow. Using the proposed strategy, downstream and upstream navigation of the swarms were realized in a blood flow with a rate of 2 mm/s. Moreover, this thesis focuses on the integrity of swarms in fluidic flow. An analytical model that described the relationships between fluid viscosity, flow rate, branching angle, magnetic field strength, and swarm integrity, was established. Based on the model, dynamic magnetic fields were designed to selectively maintain swarm integrity. Combining the dynamic fields and thrombin-coated magnetic particles, a microrobotic swarm-based strategy was developed to address the low selectivity issue of existing embolization techniques. Experiments in microfluidic channels, ex vivo tissues, and in vivo porcine kidneys validated the efficacy of the proposed strategy for selective embolization. The research deepens the fundamental understanding of swarm generation and behavior under gravity and fluidic flow, and establishes a route for developing the next generation of targeted delivery and embolization approaches.
Reexamining Assumptions in Compartmental Models of Heterosexual HIV Transmission applied to Eswatini
Keywords: bias
HIV
mathematical model
population heterogeneity
sex work
Southern Africa

Compartmental HIV transmission models help guide global, national, and local epidemic responses via detailed projections, hypothetical scenarios, and mechanistic inference. While such models must make simplifying assumptions due to time and data constraints, prior work has shown that these assumptions can sometimes bias model outputs. In this thesis, I re-examine common assumptions used in compartmental HIV transmission models, and explore their potential influence on key model outputs. I focus on disproportionate risk among female sex workers, within the high-prevalence HIV epidemic of Eswatini. First, I systematically review how differential risk has been captured in prior models exploring HIV treatment scale-up across Sub-Saharan Africa. Among 94 studies, I find that only 2/5 explicitly included sex work, and only 1/4 considered differences in treatment access across risk groups. Next, I design, parameterize, and calibrate a model of heterosexual HIV transmission in Eswatini. The model features 4 partnership types and 8 risk groups, including higher/lower risk female sex workers and their clients. While parameterizing the model, I develop several new adjustments for common sources of bias in sexual behaviour data. I also critically review existing "force of infection equation" approaches, used to model HIV transmission via sexual partnerships within compartmental models, with respect to their implicit assumptions, data needs, strengths, and limitations. Drawing on this review, I develop a new approach - the Effective Partnerships Adjustment - which can overcome some of the key limitations of existing approaches. Comparing the new and existing approaches in the Eswatini model, I show that some existing approaches might be systematically overestimating the impact of prevention in longer partnerships, and underestimating the impact of prevention in shorter partnerships. Finally, I apply the Eswatini model to further explore scenarios with different HIV treatment scale-up across risk groups. I find that the prevention impacts of treatment could be substantially reduced if higher risk groups are "left behind". Taken together, these results suggest that existing compartmental HIV transmission models may underestimate the importance of prioritizing resources to populations at highest risk of HIV acquisition and/or transmission, including female sex workers, even within a high prevalence epidemic such as Eswatini.
Autonomous Low-cost Data Capture and Inference with Incomplete Data for Indoor Construction Environments
Keywords: Autonomous UAVs
BIM
Data Capture
GNN
Robotics
Semantics

Construction projects require effective control mechanisms to ensure alignment between the intended design and the as-built reality. This process entails a cyclic comparison between the two, often involving the capture, pre-processing, and analysis of data to extract valuable information. This information is then modeled and documented, serving as a basis for informed decision-making and subsequent actions. This dissertation addresses two main challenges related to on-site construction data (i.e., 2D images and 3D point clouds): autonomous data capture in indoor construction environments and inference with incomplete data. Indoor construction environments are characterized by clutter and their dynamic nature, making frequent data capture a highly challenging task. Furthermore, even with an ideal data capture solution, on-site data are often plagued by noise and occlusion, resulting in incomplete data. In the first part, it proposes a tag-based visual-inertial localization method to facilitate low-cost autonomous image collection in indoor construction environments. The proposed on-manifold formulation allows for modeling manual tag installation errors to enhance localization robustness. It also enables 4D planning of tag size, number, and location to reliably support localization throughout the project while minimizing tag installation costs. Experimental validation in simulation and laboratory settings demonstrates the feasibility of autonomous indoor data collection using low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) instead of expensive robots. The second part of this dissertation presents a novel method that effectively addresses inference challenges posed by high levels of noise and occlusions in on-site 3D point cloud data through the exploitation of semantic relationships between building elements. This part introduces the BIM-Graph Neural Network (BIM-GNN), a novel approach to element-wise quality assessments that leverages semantics in as-designed Building Information Models (ad-BIMs) and the expressiveness power of GNNs. The contributions of this research are fourfold. In the first part, it (1) proposes an on-manifold formulation for tag-based visual-inertial localization of low-cost UAVs for indoor construction environments; (2) demonstrates the utility of the proposed formulation in modeling uncertainties in the determination of the pose of the tags on site, resulting in enhanced localization robustness; (3) presents a 4D perception-aware genetic algorithm-based tag placement planner (PGA-TaPP) to determine the optimal tag configuration using 4D-BIM, considering the project progress, safety requirements, and UAV's localizability. The second part of the dissertation (4) introduces BIM-GNN, a semantic-aware approach to element-wise quality assessment that leverages semantics in ad-BIM to infer the status of partially observed and unobserved elements.
The Role of Information Seeking and Use in Management Accounting: Exploring the Process of Creating a Budget for Complex Projects.
Keywords: Budgeting Process
Capital Budgeting
Information Behaviour
Information Seeking and Use
Management Accounting
Thematic Analysis

This research study investigates the relatively unexplored topic of the ‘process’ of creating a budget. In this study, the focus is on preparing the budget for use, as opposed to using the budget as a tool once it has been prepared. This study on the budget creation process, a topic in management accounting studies, draws upon research from the information science domain. Understanding the process of creating a budget, i.e., how information is located, evaluated, and used, can be significant as the quality of the budget as a product (the output from the process) can have a downstream effect on the decisions for which the budget may be an input. This study applies both information science and management accounting literature to help improve our understanding of the budgeting process. A preliminary conceptual framework, informed by the review of literature in both management accounting (budgeting) and information science (information needs, seeking, and use), was designed to be used as a guiding star/map. The preliminary conceptual framework evolved through interviews with 22 industry professionals. A semi-structured interview approach was utilized in an individual 1:1 interview setting. This empirical method allowed the participant to tell their story, while ensuring that prompts and a few prepared structured questions were provided to help guide the conversation. Six main themes (task readiness and organization, information needs, sources of information gathered, information seeking, information use, influence of experience) surfaced from the analysis of the participant interview data. The research contribution from this study is a Conceptual Framework for Budgeting Process that can be used while working through the process of creating a budget. The conceptual framework produced from this study is a unique offering of a roadmap to understand the “role of information seeking and use in management accounting” during the process of creating a budget. The outcomes of this research study also contribute by adding an important critical thinking element to the management accounting literature. This research study also suggests further possibilities for research linking information behavior to other management accounting topics or other accounting disciplines, e.g., auditing and assurance, financial accounting, that can be explored.