VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Using Relative Phase Analyses and Vector Coding to Quantify Pelvis-Thorax Coordination During Lifting—A Methodological Investigation

The objectives of this study were to determine if continuous relative phase (CRP) and vector coding (VC) analyses dissociate between biomechanically distinct lifting techniques and secondarily, if normalization and transformation is necessary to capture technique differences. Sixteen volunteers performed a sagittal lifting task with a freestyle (FRE), flexed spine (FLX), and neutral spine (NTL) technique. CRP and VC analyses were implemented to quantify pelvis-thorax coordination based on time-normalized, phase-normalized, and transformed relative phase signals. Mean relative phase along with thorax-only and in-phase coupling patterns were significantly different between FRE-NTL and FLX-NTL techniques (p

Keywords: Lifting
Lumbar Spine
Relative Phase
Vector Coding
Advisor: Beach, Tyson
Towards Inclusive Community Engagement: Engaging Marginalized Residents in the Urban Planning Process

The increasing diversity of Canadian communities presents a challenge to municipalities as planners are called upon to lead inclusive public engagement programs. This thesis identifies current engagement tools developed by Ontario municipalities to increase the diversity of citizen participation in urban planning processes, and evaluates how well they are implemented in practice. An online review of policies from twelve municipalities was conducted, followed by interviews with staff representing four municipalities. The research findings demonstrate that traditional engagement mechanisms, such as public meetings, are still commonly used by municipalities; however, planners are increasingly expanding their engagement toolbox in order to remove barriers to participation, and in turn reach an audience that more accurately reflects the population. The extent to which these modern engagement tools are resulting in processes and outcomes that are more inclusive and representative of the community is difficult to determine because most municipalities do not yet track participant demographics.

Keywords: Community planning
Diversity
Equity Planning
Inclusion
Public engagement
Advisor: Wakefield, Sarah
Mine or Thine? Examining the Influence of Ownership and the Presence of a Co-Actor on Peri-Personal Space

The overall purpose of this thesis research was to determine whether the perception of ownership and the presence of a co-actor exert an independent or interactive influence upon the perception of an individual’s peri-personal space. When an individual performs a stimulus-response compatibility task in the presence of a co-actor, there is an apparent ‘retraction’ in the perception of an individual’s peri-personal space. The current study was designed to examine the influence of ownership upon this social interaction. Participants completed a stimulus-response compatibility task, where the factors of social context, ownership, space, and object affordances were manipulated. Social context and ownership were found to affect the perception of space independently. However, these social cues did not exert an interactive influence upon the coding of space. These findings advance our understanding of the complex processes that enable us to efficiently move and interact with objects.

Keywords: Co-Actor
Ownership
Peri-Personal Space
Advisor: Welsh, Timothy N
Understanding Neighbourhood Food Access: Practices and Perspectives of Residents of Scarborough Village, Toronto

Within food access research, little attention has been given to the perspectives and practices of residents in food insecure neighbourhoods. Taking a people-centred approach and using semi-structured interviews, this thesis explores food access through the day-to-day practices, strategies, challenges, perspectives, and emotions of residents of Scarborough Village, a low-income and food insecure urban neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada. The findings of this research are used to argue that including the voices of those commonly marginalised in the decision-making process of neighbourhood food environments is an important and valuable step towards a more just food system. To include these voices, more urban food access research and action needs to shift its approach from simplistic understandings of food security toward more comprehensive understanding of food access based on the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty. Only by doing so will urban food access research realise the often complex, context-specific needs of those it seeks to assist.

Keywords: Food access
Food environment
Food justice
People-centred
Urban
Advisor: Kepe, Thembela
Understandings of Liveability: An Exploration of University Student Perceptions of Neighbourhood Spaces

Developing “liveable cities” that accommodate population growth while reversing trends toward sprawl is a foremost concern of urban planning. Across North America planner advocacy for “complete communities” has resulted in compact neighbourhood (re)design within urban cores but has encountered resistance in suburban locations. The contrast between planning visions and suburban consumer preference for the existing landscape prompts consideration of how residents perceive liveability and the implications posed for neighbourhood redesign. While planning authorities assume public education can persuade residents to embrace compact designs, this study suggests otherwise. Utilising photo-elicitation in focus groups with university students at an urban and suburban campus, the research indicates lived experience, rather than education, informs perceptions. Based on their lived experiences students from the two campuses reacted very differently to the same neighbourhood images. The results of the study suggest understanding resident perceptions is vital to successful planning for liveability.

Keywords: Liveability-neighbourhood
Perceptions
Students
(Sub)Urban
Advisor: Leydon, Joseph
The Role of Resident Embryonic-Derived Cardiac Macrophages in Ischemic Injury

Heart disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide and macrophages (MFs) play a central role in both tissue healing and tissue injury. The precise origin and role of cardiac MFs in ischemic injury remains unknown, which could help explain the paradoxical role MFs seemingly play. Initial work in the lab suggested that adult bone marrow-derived MFs play a role in inducing inflammation, whereas resident embryonic-derived (EmbryoD) cardiac MFs promote repair. This thesis demonstrated that most cardiac MFs in steady state were EmbryoD and they persisted for the life of the animal. Following MI in adult animals, EmbryoD cardiac MFs were initially lost within the infarct and subsequently competed with recruited MFs within the heart. Specific chronic depletion of EmbryoD MFs post-MI resulted in depressed cardiac function and adverse cardiac remodeling in the vulnerable peri-infarct zone. The ability to increase the abundance of reparative EmbryoD cardiac MFs post-MI now represents a novel therapeutic approach.

Keywords: Cardiovascular disease
Heart failure
Innate immunity
Macrophage
Advisor: Epelman, Slava
Launch-time Optimization of OpenCL Kernels

OpenCL kernels are compiled first before kernel arguments and launch geometry are provided later at launch time. Although some of these values remain constant during execution, the compiler is unable to optimize for them since it has no access to them. We propose and implement a novel approach that identifies such arguments, geometry, and optimizations at compile time using a series of annotations. At launch time the annotations, combined with the actual values of the arguments and geometry, are processed and used to optimize the code, thereby improving kernel performance. We measure the execution times of 16 benchmarks our approach. The results show that annotation processing is fast and that kernel performance is improved by a factor of up to 2.06X and on average by 1.22X. When considering the entire compilation flow, improvement can be up to 1.13X, but can also potentiality degrade to 0.44X, depending on the launch scenario.

Advisor: Abdelrahman, Tarek S
Elucidating the Metabolic Role of Macrophage Janus Kinase 2

During obesity, macrophages can infiltrate metabolic tissues and contribute to chronic low-grade inflammation as well as mediate insulin resistance and diabetes. Our study addresses the essential role of macrophage JAK2, a key mediator downstream of various cytokines, hormones and growth factors, in the pathogenesis to obesity and insulin resistance. Macrophage-specific JAK2 knockout (M-JAK2

Keywords: Diabetes Mellitus
Inflammation
Insulin Resistance
Janus Kinase 2
Macrophages
Advisor: Woo, Minna
Winer, Daniel A
MEMS Accelerometer Specifications and Their Impact in Inertial Applications

Recent development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers improved their performance. Coupled with their benefits of lower cost and smaller size, enabled their increased utilization in navigation, automotive and consumer devices. However, specification and testing methodologies of these devices are not robustly defined. This work investigates and defines a set of testing methodology for MEMS accelerometers, making use of a 3D printer based testing platform and a scalable inertial sensor testing board. Specification results show that Kionix KXRB5 and Invensense MPU6000 perform the best of the devices tested. Furthermore, commonly used inertial algorithms were applied to study the impact of accelerometer choice in an inertial navigation system (INS). Across a attitude estimation and dead reckoning tests, results indicate that noise density has little impact on performance after inertial algorithms are applied. Cross-axis, bias variability and step motion specification results are better indicators of performance after inertial algorithms are applied.

Advisor: Johns, David A.
Effect of Different Ceramic Crown Preparations on Tooth Structure Loss—An In Vitro Study

Objective: To quantify and compare the amount of tooth-structure reduction following the full-coverage preparations for crown materials of porcelain-fused-to-metal, lithium disilicate glass-ceramic and yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystalline for three tooth morphologies. Methods: Groups of resin teeth of different morphologies were individually weighed to high precision, then prepared following the preparation guidelines. The teeth were re-weighed after preparation and the amount of structural reduction was calculated. Statistical analyses were performed to find out if there was a significant difference among the groups. Results: Amount of tooth reduction for zirconia crown preparations was the lowest and statistically different compared with the other two materials. No statistical significance was found between the amount of reduction for porcelain-fused-to-metal and lithium disilicate glass-ceramic crowns. Conclusion: Within the limitations of this study, more tooth structure can be saved when utilizing zirconia full-coverage restorations compared with lithium disilicate glass-ceramic and porcelain-fused-to-metal crowns in maxillary central incisors, first premolars and first molars.

Keywords: aesthetic dentistry
ceramics porcelain
dental materials selection
emax
restorations in dentistry
zirconia
Advisor: El-Mowafy, Omar
Circulating N1 Neutrophils Are Proinflammatory Granulocytes That are First Responders at Sites of Inflammation

Neutrophils are the most abundant cellular component of the innate immune system. As first responders, they are rapidly recruited to sites of infection, where they eliminate invading pathogens. Although neutrophils are generally regarded as a homogeneous cellular population, recent research suggests that they may be made up of multiple subsets. In cancer, neutrophils present as multiple subsets, impacting tumour growth and metastases. We identified two subsets of neutrophils, N0 and N1, in na誰ve bone marrow and blood of healthy mice, based on the surface expression of 4 CD markers. The N1 neutrophils are first responders, with a proinflammatory phenotype, while the N0 population is the resting state subset. We show that the percent of N1 neutrophils in circulation changes during acute and chronic inflammation, suggesting that studying this population may allow us to better understand the role of neutrophils in maintaining health, and their role in regulating the inflammatory processes.

Keywords: CD Markers
Immunology
Inflammation
Neutrophils
Subsets
Advisor: Glogauer, Michael
Non-invasive assessment of aortic coarctation severity using computational fluid dynamics

Aortic coarctation (CoA) is a congenital cardiovascular disease characterized by an abnormal narrowing of the proximal descending aorta, which can result in serious morbidity and complications after treatment. The severity of CoA is quantified by the blood pressure drop across the stenotic coarctation lesion, and intervention is recommended if the pressure drop exceeds 20 mmHg [1]. The clinical gold standard to obtain the pressure drop is catheterization, which is however an invasive procedure with a 1 in 1,000 risk of patient death or serious injury [2]. In the thesis, we propose an image-guided computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method for noninvasive assessment of CoA severity. The method reconstructs the geometry of the aorta from medical images and solves the Navier-Stokes equations numerically to estimate the pressure drop across the CoA. The Cohen0 s kappa statistic test indicates that CFD has the potential of becoming a non-invasive alternative to catheterization for estimating CoA severity.

Keywords: Aortic coarctation
CFD
Medical image processing
Advisor: Triverio, Piero
JimĂŠnez-Juan, Laura
EVALUATING THE WETTING AND DRYING RESPONSE OF GYPSUM DRYWALL SUBJECT TO LIQUID WATER

Gypsum drywall is susceptible to moisture damage due to their porous structure and common exposure to liquid water from floods, plumbing leaks, condensation, and enclosure leaks. There are many types of drywall, including some that are designed to be resistant to moisture damage and many ways of measuring moisture. In this thesis, I evaluate multiple methods of moisture measurement on different types of drywall under different water wetting amounts and environmental conditions. Different types of drywall respond differently to water and surface treatments play an important role in their response to moisture. Even on the same type of drywall, different sensors can provide different responses to wetting events in magnitude, duration, and temporal dynamics. The implications of this work are that the drywall itself, as well as the environmental conditions, the method of moisture measurement, and the nature of the wetting all are important to the availability of water for microorganisms and moisture-related decay processes.

Keywords: Equilibrium Relative Humidity
Gypsum
Moisture
Sensors
Water
Water Activity
Advisor: Siegel, Jeffrey
Characterizing the role of ice1 in maintaining zebrafish neural stem cells

Maintenance of neural stem cell (NSC) niches is required for the continued growth of the zebrafish retina and forebrain after embryogenesis. The zebrafish mutant kess564, which maps to the ice1 locus, exhibits reduced NSC niches. RNA polymerase II-dependent snRNA transcription requires the little elongation complex (LEC) for which ICE1 is an essential scaffolding component. Mutant NSCs which are normally active no longer express markers of cycling cells and become apoptotic. Furthermore, quiescent NSCs of the mutant retina are unable to dedifferentiate in response to UV lesion. Whole-transcriptome analysis of ice1 mutant larvae show a decrease in CNS and cell cycle levels, and an increase in splicing genes indicative of a possible compensatory mechanism. snRNA transcript levels appear to be unaffected in a subset of NSCs but reduced in differentiated neurons. This work demonstrates that ice1 is essential for NSC maintenance in an in vivo loss of function model.

Keywords: ice1
little elongation complex
neural stem cell
snRNA
Advisor: Tropepe, Vincent
Hardware-Aware Motion Estimation via Low Resolution Motion Hints

This thesis is concerned with the emerging screen content coding (SCC) extension in recent video coding standards. Until recently, the developments of video coding standards such as HEVC and its predecessor H.264/AVC have focused on the compression of camera-captured video sequences. However, the proliferation of applications that use video devices to display screen content have initiated a new challenge to video coding. Many of these applications are latency and power sensitive. The goal of this thesis is to propose a methodology to exploit the characteristics of screen content to improve efficiency of SCC to meet latency and power requirements. We expand on the motion estimation process of video codecs, and propose an algorithm to leverage the characteristics while taking into account algorithmic complexity. We build a software environment to emulate the targeted hardware codec. This thesis demonstrates that our algorithm achieves within 1.5dB of pure software SCC under hardware constraints.

Advisor: Draper, Stark C.
Pilot Patterns for the Primary Link in a MIMO-OFDM Two-Tier Network

To meet the exponentially growing demand for high data rates in wireless mobile networks, high capacity cells are required. One way of increasing the cellâ s capacity is by the use of MIMO-OFDM two-tiered networks. These networks can also be used to efficiently connect IoT devices, of which many are expected to be stationary and deployed within a small area, to the internet. As primary links could create a bottleneck in the system, we focus on increasing the capacity of these links through achieving a more accurate channel estimate without adding overhead to the system- when compared to the 3GPP LTE system. We achieve this by proposing a new Reference Signal (RS) structure that focuses on reducing the effect of the AWGN on the different pilot symbol positions without reducing the amount of power or bandwidth available for data transmission, and without adding complexities to the system. We show the effectiveness of the proposed design and the impact of AWGN at pilot symbol positions on the linkâ s capacity through mathematical analysis and simulation results.

Advisor: Sousa, Elvino
First-Principles Study of Emission Spectra of Fluorescent Dyes in the Gas Phase

Isotope effects were found experimentally in four fluorescent dyes: cresyl violet, darrow red, oxazine 4 and oxazine 170. To understand the underlying mechanism responsible for these effects, we searched for a first-principles approach to describe the electronic structure of these dye molecules. We found that TD-DFT methods using TPSS and B3LYP functionals with the 6-31G* basis set performed well in describing emission spectra of these dyes. This provided us with a solid base for further investigation of the isotope effect in these compounds.

Keywords: Gaussian
Isotope
TD-DFT
Advisor: Izmaylov, Artur F
Oxidation of Toluene by Ferrous Activated Persulfate in a Glass Replica of a Rock Fracture

In this study the potential for remediation of toluene NAPL in fractures by in situ chemical oxidation with persulfate was investigated. Ferrous activated persulfate was injected into a lab-scale glass fracture containing a toluene blob using two different concentrations and injection strategies. Results indicate that the application of an inline mixer significantly reduced the persulfate self-decomposition, and the higher concentration of persulfate enhanced toluene oxidation for a short term compared to lower concentration. With injection of 157.6 pore volumes of persulfate, the area of the fracture occupied by toluene NAPL decreased by only 31.8%. It indicates the interfacial area between persulfate and toluene plays a dominant role in toluene oxidation in fractures. Ferric precipitates generated in the fracture accumulated around the boundary of the toluene blob, gradually reducing the interfacial area. Results indicate that a long term treatment program would be needed for NAPL contamination in fractured media.

Keywords: Ferrous activated persulfate
Glass fracture
Groundwater remediation
NAPL contamination
Advisor: Sleep, Brent E
The Deposition of Liposomes on Glass Microbeads Using Chemoselective Ligation

Bicelles and liposomes have proven to have potential as membrane models, drug delivery reservoirs, and therapeutic vectors. Recently, our lab was able to deposit a lipid bilayer on 3Îźm polystyrene beads. This was done via hydrophobic anchoring of bicelles containing CHOLOA, a modified cholesterol moiety covalently bonded to a PEG150 linker with an oxyamine functional group, reacting with aldehyde groups on the surface of PS beads. The reaction of both functional groups lead to the covalent binding of the polystyrene beads to the bicelles. This thesis extends the efforts of this project by altering a couple of aspects of this system. Most importantly, CHOLOAâ s ethylene glycol length was increased to assess the effect that had on the efficiency of binding to the beads. A CHOLOA derivative with ten ethylene glycol units was successfully synthesized, incorporated into liposomes, and bound to glass microbeads.

Keywords: chemoselective ligation
cholesterol
Drug delivery
Glass microbes
Large unilamellar vesicles
Liposomes
Advisor: Macdonald, Peter M
Proxy Relearning for Feature-Driven Pattern Recognition in High-Dimensional Imbalanced Time Series Data Sets

This thesis explores the possibility of feature-driven time series pattern recognition from both practical and theoretical perspectives for predictive modelling in a situation where data are imbalanced, minority class examples are scarce, the ratio of feature dimension to sample size is high, and the class labels provided might not be optimized for the application. These problems are common in learning patient-specific patterns in medical and health domains, where labels provided by medical experts might not fit the goal of predictive modelling. Extracting informative labels for supervised learning is a difficult and time-consuming task. A novel strategy is proposed to solve the problems mentioned above, which aims to reduce human effort by automatically finding the earliest pattern that a classifier can recognize. The proposed algorithm locates and learns similar patterns across training examples that maximize the difference between both classes. This method ensures precise learning and boosts the performance of classifier by reducing the number of false positives. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated based on the classification results and the anticipation responses on the data provided by EPILEPSIAE, a European Epilepsy Database. An average false positive of 0.0519 per hour was achieved using the proposed algorithm with a sensitivity of 0.79 in anticipating seizures.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence
Epilepsy
Labelling Algorithms
Machine Learning
Pattern Recognition
Predictive Modeling
Advisor: Genov, Roman