VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The “Unhealthy” Racist

North America’s increasingly diverse demographic meant that intergroup interactions are often an essential component of daily living. The consequences of experiencing racism and discrimination during negative intergroup interactions have been well researched from the perspective of the targets. However, few studies have examined prejudice’s impact on the racists themselves. Recent research suggests that prejudice correlates with cardiovascular mortality (Leitner et al., 2016), and this association is mediated by stress (Mendes et al., 2007) or negative emotions such as anger (Thomas & Williams, 1991). This study assessed the connection between people’s levels of prejudice, stress, anger, and health by considering 27 potential models of the relationships between these constructs. Two models emerged as the most probable representations of the variables’ relationships. Both models included only the prejudice, anger, and health variables. The study's findings suggest that anger is an important variable when examining the health of racists.

Advisor: Page-Gould, Elizabth
Examining the Measurement Invariance and Psychometrics of the Drug Abuse Screening Test for Adolescents (DAST-A) in Justice-Involved Youth

Substance abuse can be a risk factor for reoffense and potential rehabilitation barrier for justice-involved youth; to address this need, reliable and valid assessment tools are critical. The psychometric properties of the DAST-A, a well-established drug use survey, have not yet been explored in youth justice samples. We examined the measurement invariance and psychometrics of the DAST-A in 741 (Nfemales=105) justice-involved youth. The tool showed strong internal consistency in the overall sample and subgroups (males, females, White, Black youth; α=.87-.92), and good convergent and concurrent validity. Logistic regression results indicated that, with each unit increase in DAST-A total score, the odds of being diagnosed with a SUD increased by 23% (overall sample; predictive validity). The predictive findings were more robust for White youth compared to Black youth; a different cut-off score was recommended for Black youth as a result. The DAST-A demonstrated configural invariance across groups, supporting a unidimensional structure.

Keywords: drug abuse
justice-involved youth
measurement invariance
psychometrics
screening
substance use disorder
Advisor: Peterson-Badali, Michele
Skilling, Tracey
Is Pragmatically Delivered Prehabilitation Cost-effective Compared to Usual Care? A Cost-effectiveness Analysis

A significant and growing proportion of major surgeries are undertaken in high-risk patients, where the rate of surgical complications and associated burdens are disproportionately high. Surgical prehabilitation describes the process of increasing physical and psychological reserve prior to surgery to improve postoperative outcomes and reduce the risk of harm. The impetus toward implementing prehabilitation among hospitals has followed burgeoning empirical evidence regarding its safety, feasibility, and efficacy. This thesis investigated the economic merit of prehabilitation to inform the emergent hospital implementation decision-making context. A cost-effectiveness analysis from a hospital perspective was piloted using data from a clinical trial of a pragmatic model of prehabilitation, including three iterations of prehabilitation delivery, for high-risk surgical patients in Ontario, Canada. This work contributed novel, understudied, preliminary insight regarding the economic merit of prehabilitation implementation from a hospital perspective and informed the design of future prehabilitation economics research.

Keywords: Cost-effectiveness analysis
Economic evaluation
Health economics
Healthcare quality improvement
Prehabilitation
Preoperative optimization
Advisor: Santa Mina, Daniel
“There are no shadows that cannot be illuminated:” Memory, Museality, and August Sander’s Portraits of Persecuted Jews

This thesis focuses on August Sander’s Portraits of Persecuted Jews and investigates its stakes for memory and memorializing Jewishness through a visual analysis and consideration of the sub-collection’s museological functions. By focusing on Sander’s work, this thesis demonstrates how the Portraits of Persecuted Jews might be seen to contest the National Socialist visual regime, which drew on photography as a means of creating and reinforcing stereotypes of Jewishness—as part of a bureaucratic process with the core objective of elimination. I explore how the Portraits of Persecuted Jews in exhibited, published, and archival form can be used to inform readings of Jewish identity and Holocaust history—to ask how these interpretations are read when considered en masse. By focusing on representations of the face, embodiment, and the relationship between singularity and the collective—I contend that Sander’s portraits centre humanization above all else.

Keywords: Ethics
Jewish Studies
Museum Studies
Photography Studies
Visual Studies
Advisor: Phu, Thy
Bear, Jordan
Advancing a Safeguarding Culture in Sport: Sports Journalists' Coverage of Athletic Abuse, Harrassment and Discrimination

Sports journalists play a key role in making issues visible and mobilizing discussion through their coverage. The purpose of this thesis was to explore how sports journalists’ coverage of athlete maltreatment could advance a safeguarding culture in sport. A qualitative constructionist approach guided semi-structured interviews with 12 sports journalists and data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three main themes were generated: journalistic implications of social justice orientations in sport and society, safeguarding people and their stories and journalistic outlooks on advancing a safeguarding culture. Findings position sports journalists as safeguarding agents given how they construct their role in relation to values-based strategies and in alignment with the proactive, coordinated, multi-agency approach needed to advance a safeguarding culture in sport. Applied recommendations for stakeholders across sport and journalism, and directions for future research across both areas are discussed.

Keywords: Athletes
Equity-deserving
Maltreatment
Safe Sport
Safeguarding Culture
Sports Journalism
Advisor: Stirling, Ashley E
Diet-related Tooth Development and Replacement in Early Amniotes, with Comparison to a Stem Amniote and Extant Reptiles

The present study investigates the relationship between dental development, replacement rates, and feeding strategies among members of the oldest known complex terrestrial vertebrate community and compares them to the stem amniote, Seymouria, and various extant varanid lizards. Three patterns of tooth replacement were observed within the early synapsids: (1) long-lived teeth with slower replacement rates, as seen in herbivores, (2) short-lived teeth with rapid replacement rates, as in the varanopid predator Mesenosaurus, and (3) long-lived teeth with rapid replacement rates, as seen in the apex predator Dimetrodon. While Seymouria had an intermediate tooth longevity and replacement rate. Additionally, the largest extant varanid lizard, Varanus komodoensis, was found to maintain up to five replacement teeth per position and an exceptionally rapid replacement rate (40 days). The distinct patterns of dental development among these terrestrial amniotes reveal a hidden aspect of dental complexity in the diverse terrestrial amniote community.

Advisor: Reisz, Robert R
Application of Tabulated Chemistry to Laminar Co-flow Diffusion Flames at Atmospheric and Elevated Pressures

Numerical simulations of combustion can be very computationally expensive, particularly when combustion of the complex fuels frequently found in aircraft gas turbine engines is considered. The large chemical mechanisms required to simulate flames involving these fuels become computationally prohibitive when realistic combustion conditions are used. In order to render these simulations tractable, this thesis investigates chemistry tabulation techniques, which have the potential to significantly reduce the computational costs of simulating reacting flows. In this thesis, four different tabulation techniques will be assessed by applying the methods to the prediction of steady, laminar, co-flowflames. The tabulation techniques considered are the flame prolongation of intrinsic low dimensional manifold (FPI) method, the steady laminar flamelet method (SLFM), the flamelet/progress variable (FPV) method, and the radiative flame prolongation of intrinsic low dimensional manifold (RFPI) method. These techniques are all applied to ethylene flames at atmospheric pressure, methane flames at 5 atm and 10 atm, and Jet A surrogate flames at atmospheric pressure. The results are compared to those obtained for the same case obtained using detailed chemistry, both with and without low-Mach preconditioning. This comparison facilitates the discussion of the relative merits of the tabulation techniques in relation to each other and to detailed chemistry.

Keywords: chemistry
computation
tabulated
Advisor: Groth, Clinton PT
200GS/s Analog to Digital Converter Frontend in SiGe BiCMOS

This thesis investigates time-interleaved analog to digital converter front end circuits for use in next-generation fiber optic receivers capable of 200 GS/s with analog bandwidths reaching up to the Nyquist frequency. Measurements were conducted on an existing time-interleaved ADC front end which displayed record-breaking performance while sampling at 200 GS/s. A full four-way 200GS/s time-interleaved ADC front end employing a novel architecture was designed and fabricated in a 55nm SiGe BiCMOS process technology. The constituent track and hold amplifier was measured and achieved a record-breaking 101 GHz of track mode bandwidth. Finally, a 60GHz digitally-controlled oscillator was also designed and fabricated in 22nm FDSOI-CMOS technology with the goal of producing on-chip high-frequency clock signals to enable a full time- interleaved ADC front end system on chip.

Keywords: ADC
BiCMOS
Frontend
Switched Emitter Follower
THA
Advisor: Voinigescu, Sorin P
Semidirect Products of ∞–Operads

We provide a construction of an ∞–operad from a functor BG −> Op ∞ encoding the action of a group G on a given unital ∞–operad whose underlying ∞–category is a Kan complex. This construction, restricted to classical operads in Set viewed as ∞–operads, coincides with the semidirect product construction. Taking this as the definition of semidirect product of ∞–operads, we show that the action of G on the given ∞–operad is equivalent to the trivial action if and only if the corresponding semidirect products are equivalent. We then outline how one might generalize this result to operads in Top and use this to show that the semidirect product of the real version of the little n–disks operad with SO(n − 1) or SO(n − 2) for n even or odd respectively corresponding to the usual action is equivalent to the semidirect product corresponding to the trivial action.

Keywords: higher category
infinity-operad
operad
product
semidirect
straightening
Advisor: Kupers, Alexander
Cell-specific Effects of Insulin in a Murine Model of Restenosis under Insulin-sensitive and Insulin-resistant Conditions

Restenosis following percutaneous revascularization is increased in subjects with insulin resistance and diabetes. Currently, the vascular effect of insulin is unclear. In vitro, insulin’s effects on endothelial-cells (EC) are beneficial, whereas on smooth-muscle-cells (SMC) are mainly mitogenic. In vivo, we have shown an anti-restenotic effect of insulin in rodent models of restenosis that was abolished in insulin-resistant conditions. Thus, we examined the effect of insulin on neointimal growth under insulin-sensitive (low-fat-diet: LFD) and insulin-resistant conditions (high-fat-high-sucrose-diet: HFSD) in vascular cell-specific insulin receptor (IR)-deficient mice. In LFD-fed conditions, insulin decreased neointimal growth in controls but not in endothelial or SMC IR-deficient mice. In HFSD-fed conditions, insulin had no effect in either controls or endothelial and SMC IR-deficient mice. These data demonstrate that endothelial and SMC IRs are required for the anti-restenotic effect of insulin in insulin-sensitive conditions, and that in insulin resistance insulin has no adverse effect on SMC in vivo.

Advisor: Giacca, Adria
The Impact of Long-term Glycemic Control on the Autonomic Nervous System in Healthy Individuals

High blood glucose in patients with diabetes has profound impacts on the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the brain. However, the relationship between blood glucose and the nervous system in healthy individuals is unclear. This thesis aims to understand the relationships amongst glycemia, the ANS, and brain function. Glycemia was indexed by glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), ANS function was assessed through heart rate variability (HRV), and brain function was assessed by functional connectivity on neuroimaging. Higher HbA1c was significantly correlated with lower root-mean-square of successful difference (RMSSD), log-transformed high frequency HRV (log(HF-HRV)), and low frequency HRV (log(LF-HRV)). Higher RMSSD and log(HF-HRV) were also significantly correlated with increased network connectivity in the central autonomic and salience networks. Further, HRV significantly mediated the relationship between HbA1c and functional connectivity in the salience network. These findings suggest the presence of a link between glycemia and the brain through the ANS.

Keywords: autonomic nervous system
glycemic control
heart rate variability
resting-state functional connectivity
Advisor: Chen, Jean
Mah, Linda
NVCaracal: A Deterministic Database for Non-volatile Main Memory

Deterministic databases provide strong serializability while avoiding concurrency-control related aborts by establishing a serial ordering of transactions before their execution. Recent work has shown that they can also handle skewed and contended workloads effectively. These properties are achieved by batching transactions in epochs and then executing the transactions within an epoch concurrently and deterministically. However, the predetermined ordering leads to long-latency transactions having a more significant performance impact on these databases. As a result, they have mainly been designed as main-memory databases, which limits the size of the datasets that can be supported. We design a deterministic database for non-volatile main memory (NVMM) called NVCaracal that supports larger-than-DRAM datasets and fast failure recovery. We minimize the performance impact of NVMM's higher latency compared to DRAM by exploiting NVMM's byte addressability and the batching mechanism used in deterministic databases. Our evaluation shows that NVCaracal achieves up to 79% of DRAM performance.

Keywords: database
Advisor: Goel, Ashvin
Demke Brown, Angela
Wilderness Search for Lost Persons Using an Aerial-Terrestrial Multimodal Robot Team

This Thesis considers the use of a team of multimodal robots capable of switching between aerial and terrestrial locomotion modes in wilderness search and rescue. It presents a novel search planning method that coordinates the robots to maximize the probability of locating a mobile target in the wilderness, potentially, last seen on an a priori known hiking trail. It has two major components: (i) target-motion prediction, and (ii) probability-guided multimodal robot search-trajectory generation. In the former subproblem, the formulation of 3D probability curves captures target distributions under the influence of a priori known trails. In the latter, the use of a tree structure represents decisions involved in multimodal probability-curve-guided search planning, which enables simultaneous optimization of trajectory generation and mode selection. Through simulations, it has been demonstrated that multimodal robotic search teams, coordinated via the trajectory planning method presented, clearly outperform their unimodal counterparts in terms of search success rates.

Keywords: hybrid robots
multimodal robots
wilderness search and rescue
Advisor: Nejat, Goldie
Benhabib, Beno
The Need for Shared Health Governance, Mutual Collective Accountability, and Transparency in COVAX

This study addressed the question: to what extent does COVAX employ shared health governance, mutual collective accountability, and transparency? We conducted a multi-method qualitative study triangulating document analysis and key informant interviews. Data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results demonstrate that each of COVAX’s co-convening organizations are governed by and formally accountable to their individual boards. This structure for accountability, however, is ineffective when decisions are made collaboratively. As a result, most effective accountability for COVAX comes from informal accountability mechanisms such as media scrutiny. Furthermore, COVAX lacks transparency and has not achieved its goals to date. These results demonstrate that COVAX does not employ shared health governance or mutual collective accountability. These results also illuminate barriers to successful global collaboration and contribute to the literature about the roles of good governance, transparency, and accountability in global health initiatives.

Keywords: Accountability
COVAX
COVID-19
Governance
Transparency
Vaccines
Advisor: Kohler, Jillian C
Exploring Positive and Negative Liberty for COVID-19 Vaccination

This study investigated how COVID-19 has influenced experiences of the positive and negative liberty. More specifically, if the decision to be vaccinated is influenced by positive liberty through internal desires, or if it infringes on negative liberty through external limits. A qualitative analysis was conducted using open-ended questions and thematic analysis. The findings indicated that some participants experienced a violation of their negative liberty due to restrictions from COVID-19 public health measures. However, there were also participants that experienced positive liberty by taking the initiative to expand their knowledge about immunization which increased their willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

Advisor: Ferrari, Michel MF
PR-MRC: MRC Construction using Non-statistical Sampling

Miss ratio curves (MRCs) play an important role for visualizing and deciding on an effective cache size for a given workload. Unfortunately, generating exact MRCs require processing and memory overheads that are not practical for online use in production systems. Previous approximate algorithms employ statistical sampling where the set of sampled keys is decided based on satisfying a random sampling condition. We introduce a new approximation algorithm that employs non-statistical sampling where the set of sampled keys is decided based on prior knowledge from previously accessed keys. Our algorithm, called PR-MRC (Pattern Recognition MRC), only updates the MRC when the access pattern is changing. We evaluate PR-MRC using publicly available traces. More than eighty MRCs were generated and compared to the exact MRC. Results show up to 5.5% lower throughput for MRC generation compared to existing approximation algorithms, while achieving improved MRC accuracy.

Keywords: Cache
Miss ratio curve
Phase detection
Sampling
Advisor: Stumm, Michael
Multimodal Unsupervised Deep Learning Algorithms for Fall Detection

Falls are one the major cause of both death and injury in people over 65 years of age. Fall detection is critical to minimize the risk that falls pose. Existing methods of fall detection require constant use, invade privacy and/or struggle with practical implementation. This thesis seeks to explore video fall detection as an anomaly detection problem. A novel fall data set is explored to compare multiple modalities from a performance and privacy aspect. Infra-red cameras are found to perform the best, while depth cameras provide the most privacy. Various methods of multi-modal fusion and a novel loss function are explored to improve performance. This method was able to achieve 0.925 AUC ROC and 0.125 AUC PR, improving on individual modalities by 0.03 AUC ROC and 0.05 AUC PR.

Keywords: Anomaly Detection
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Fall Detection
Machine Learning
Video
Advisor: Mihailidis, Alex
Khan, Shehroz S
Dancing Memory: Exploring the Personal Experience through the Dramaturgy of Movement (and vice vesa)

This study focuses on practise as a research approach to act against the critical problem of contemporary performance arts—the commodification of a performer’s body and soul. How can this problem be overcome? The research sees the solution in appealing to personal experience and embodied memories. What role do personal memories play in creating the dramaturgy of movement performance? How can somatic memory be used to restore the dancer's authenticity, values, truths, and spirit? What are the choreographic and dramaturgical practises and approaches to working with bodily memory? This investigation is an exegesis of an artistic work, a dance performance, devoted to the stages of a woman’s life and created with appeal to the personal, familial, and transgenerational experience. The research reveals the topics of improvisation, embodied memories, dance narratology, collaborative creation, and the body- mind relationship, using improvisational movement and reflective conversations as the main methods.

Keywords: Body-mind relationship
Dance improvisation
Dance narratology
Dancer's body
Physical theatre
Somatic memory
Advisor: Carter, Jill
Simulating Behaviour of a Person-following Delivery Robot in Pedestrian Environments

As e-commerce continues to grow, the demand for fast and efficient last-mile delivery is increasing. Person-following robots are a solution that is now beginning to be deployed to assist foot couriers in performing last-mile delivery tasks in public areas, such as underground pedestrian walkways and malls. Although they have proved their capacity to operate successfully in uncrowded spaces like warehouses, it is still uncertain whether their performance would be satisfactory in crowded, complex environments. This study proposes a simulation approach for evaluating the performance of a commercial person-following delivery robot, EffiBOT, in dynamic pedestrian environments. Laboratory experiments are conducted to understand EffiBOT’s operating characteristics. Based on the empirical observation, a computer simulation model of EffiBOT is developed in the pedestrian simulator MassMotion. The model is calibrated and validated with the experimental data. Lastly, research limitations and recommendations for future work are identified.

Keywords: Last-mile Delivery
Person-following Robots
Robot Delivery
Robot-Pedestrian Interaction
Advisor: Roorda, Matthew
Pulmonary Arterial Hemodynamic Relationships in CTED Patients with Normal and Abnormal Exercise Pulmonary Vascular Load

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) may be caused by organized non-resolving thrombi in pulmonary arteries (PA), known as chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). CTEPH is associated with more prominent abnormalities of pulsatile relative to resistive pulmonary vascular load. We tested the hypothesis that exercise right heart catheterization (RHC) would elicit more frequent latent pulsatile than resistive vascular load abnormalities, among patients with non-resolving thrombi and normal resting mean PA pressure ≤20mmHg). We also evaluated the effect of exercise on the interdependent physiology of pulmonary venous and PA hemodynamics. Of 45 patients analyzed, 18 (40%) had no abnormalities (CTED group), while 27 (60%) had abnormalities of pulmonary vascular afterload (Latent CTEPH group). As hypothesized, exercise elicited abnormalities of pulsatile afterload more frequently than resistive afterload. The physiological relationship between changes in PA pressure relative to pulmonary venous pressures during exercise was not predictable in the latent CTEPH group.

Keywords: Chronic Pulmonary Embolic Disease
Exercise
Hemodynamics
Pulmonary Embolism
Pulmonary Vasculature
Advisor: Mak, Susanna