VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Geographies and Infrastructures of School Segregation: A Historical Case Study of Rochester, NY

School segregation in the United States is at a crisis point. The educational landscape in Rochester, NY has become increasingly segregated along the lines of race, class, and geography in recent decades. This thesis investigates the geographies and infrastructures that laid the foundation for Rochester’s school segregation crisis. In particular, it asks how settler colonialism and racial capitalism have sculpted urban and suburban communities’ socio- spatial histories. This research aims to support academics, policymakers, and activists who are committed to developing more historically informed school desegregation policies, and to actualizing “equal educational opportunities for all.”

Keywords: Education Policy
Geographies of Education
Infrastructure Studies
Racial Capitalism
School Segregation
Settler Colonialism
Advisor: Cowen, Deborah
Longitudinal Differences in Cerebral Amyloid Accumulation and Cognition between users of Angiotensin-converting Enzyme Inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers

Background: Mounting but inconsistent evidence suggests that Angiotensin II Type-1 Receptor Blockers (ARBs) may protect against cognitive decline more than Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors (ACE-Is). This thesis performed head-to-head comparisons between these antihypertensives in older adults, examining related mechanisms and potential sources of heterogeneity. Methods: Propensity weighted mixed models examined longitudinal differences between ARB vs. ACE-I users in amyloid-β (Aβ) accumulation and cognitive performance among Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) Neuroimaging Initiative and National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Centre participants, respectively. APOE ε4 carrier status and blood-brain barrier (BBB) penetration were explored as potential heterogeneity factors. Results: In cognitively normal individuals, ARB exposure was associated with less Aβ accumulation. In individuals with AD, ARB exposure was associated with slower decline in multiple cognitive domains specifically among ε4 non-carriers, and particularly compared to non-crossing ACE-Is. Conclusions: ARBs were associated with favourable Aβ and cognitive outcomes, particularly in ε4 non-carriers and compared to non-crossing ACE-Is.

Keywords: Alzheimer's
Amyloid
Angiotensin receptor blocker
Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor
Cognition
Hypertension
Advisor: Swardfager, Walter
Black, Sandra E
Design and Implementation of a Telemetry System for Microsatellite Operations

Small satellites generate lots of telemetry data on orbit. These telemetry data are important for monitoring the health of spacecraft, validating design, and planning operations. As more small satellites are being launched into space, an integrated telemetry system is needed to store, access, and display telemetry data. This thesis presents the author's work in designing and implementing such a system. This telemetry system greatly facilitates checking telemetry data and provides a platform on which automated telemetry monitoring and autonomous operations can be implemented. First, a PostgreSQL database and a back-end interface are described, followed by the front-end components which include a graphical user interface and a visualization tool with Grafana. Then, tools that insert data into the database are presented along with performance benchmarking. Finally, use cases of the telemetry system are presented, including but not limited to telemetry monitoring and telemetry analysis.

Keywords: Database
Microsatellite
Operation
Telemetry
Advisor: Zee, Robert E
Is the Meal Hall Part of the Campus Learning System? Investigating Informal Learning in a University Residence Meal Hall

Food offers uniquely generative learning opportunities because it is both something to learn about (nutrition, ethical sourcing) and learn through (conversations over shared meals). This thesis bridges the fields of Food Studies, Higher Education and Student Affairs, and Adult Education by asking: What informal learning takes place in the university meal hall? I performed a qualitative case study on a meal hall with more than 1000 students from over 65 countries. My findings cluster around six themes: identity development, food literacy and embodied learning, community and social learning, learning and agency, habit and learning, and food systems learning. My findings point to the powerful promise of intentionally-curated learning in the meal hall to disrupt the invisibility of the modernist food system, and to maximize the pedagogical potential of food to contribute to the campus learning system. This research justifies further study of university meal halls as distinct learning communities.

Keywords: Food equity
Food pedagogy
Informal learning
Student Housing and Residence Life
Student learning and development
Sustainable food systems
Advisor: Sumner, Jennifer
Modelling Effort-based Decision-making: A Dimensional Approach to Understanding Motivation Deficits in Schizophrenia and Major Depressive Disorder

Motivation deficits are prominent symptoms in schizophrenia (SZ) and major depressive disorder (MDD). One critical facet of motivation is effort valuation and decision-making, whereby cost-benefit calculations guide the amount of effort one is willing to expend for a desired reward. In order to advance our understanding of how individuals with SZ and MDD utilize different sources of cost-benefit information to guide choice behaviour, the present study utilized a dimensional approach to characterize individual differences in the computations underlying effort-based decision-making. A sample of 145 participants (n=51 SZ, n=43 MDD, n=51 healthy controls (HC)) completed the Effort Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT), with mixed effects modelling conducted to estimate the subject-specific predictors of decision-making. Our findings revealed meaningful individual differences amongst participants in their utilization of cost-benefit information. Further, two clusters of individuals were identified, irrespective of diagnostic status, with distinct behavioural profiles of cost-benefit information utilization and differential clinical correlates.

Advisor: Foussias, George
Zakzanis, Konstantine K
Zinc-binding to Leukocyte Cell Derived Chemotaxin 2 and Implications for its Associated Amyloidosis

Deposition of leukocyte cell-derived chemotaxin 2 (LECT2) as amyloid (ALECT2) leads to ALECT2 amyloidosis, an amyloid disease with no known cure. Recent findings indicate that ALECT2 amyloidosis is severely underdiagnosed. All sequenced ALECT2 amyloidosis patients have a single nucleotide polymorphism that changes an isoleucine (WT) to a valine (58V) at position 58. Currently, little is known of the mechanism by which the protein misfolds and aggregates. Herein, we demonstrate the first molecular characterization of the misfolding and aggregation of the mature LECT2 protein. Through various biophysical methods, we found that zinc-binding alters the secondary structure, increases the conformational stability, and reduces aggregation propensity of both WT and 58V-LECT2. No significant difference was found between the variants in their secondary structure, conformational stability, and zinc-binding affinity. However, zinc-free 58V-LECT2 was significantly more amyloidogenic than WT-LECT2. Therapies aimed at ALECT2 amyloidosis should exploit putative conformational differences between zinc-bound and zinc-free LECT2.

Keywords: ALECT2 Amyloidosis
LECT2
LECT2 aggregation
Leukocyte cell derived chemotaxin 2
Protein biochemistry
Advisor: Chakrabartty, Avijit
Examining Factors which Affect Self-esteem of Professional Immigrants in Canada

To benefit the economy, Canada accepts thousands of professional immigrants each year. However, they often encounter unforeseen hardships in acculturation and employment pursuits which negatively impact self-esteem: a predictor of career success and life satisfaction. Since existing supports for professional immigrants have proven unsatisfactory, the current study aimed to identify and understand impacts of adjustment barriers on self-esteem to inform development of resources including career counselling protocols. Methodologies included analysis of qualitative interviews with professional immigrants who underwent retraining in Canada. Results revealed fluctuations in self-esteem throughout adjustment periods. Self-esteem was highest prior to immigration and upon initial arrival in Canada but significantly decreased during primary attempts at job searching and acculturation. During retraining and post-retraining employment, self-esteem increased but was threatened by remaining adjustment barriers. Eleven key impactors on self-esteem were revealed. By identifying challenges for professional immigrants, results can inform development of resources to encourage health and success.

Keywords: Career Psychology
Counselling Psychology
Education
Immigration
Self-esteem
Vocational Development
Advisor: Chen, Charles
Audio-viisual Temporal Judgments and the Schutz- Lipscomb Illusion in Younger and Older Adults

When objects collide, they produce an auditory and visual event. Studying impact events can be used to expand what is known about audio-visual integration. The present study used the Schutz- Lipscomb Illusion to examine how an audio-visual impact event is perceived by younger and older adults and whether temporal and spatial offsets of the audio and visual stimuli influence judgements. Twenty-one older and 21 younger adults completed tone duration and temporal order judgements (TOJ) for audio-visual stimuli in which the spatial and temporal offsets were manipulated. Results demonstrated that the strength of the illusion based on tone duration did not differ between groups and was not influenced by spatial or temporal offsets. Older adults showed an “auditory bias” when making TOJs. TOJ precision and illusion strength were not correlated. The current findings extend beyond traditionally used audio-visual paradigms to help provide a further understanding of age-related differences in audio-visual integration.

Keywords: Aging
Integration
Multisensory
Advisor: Campos, Jennifer L
A Framework for Real-time Bus Travel Time Prediction with Reliability Sensitivity

Surface transit systems face many challenges in their operation, which can result in poor schedule adherence. Passenger information systems that predict arrival times using real-time data from location tracking devices on transit vehicles can reduce the inconvenience caused by schedule deviations. However, real-time location data streams are often noisy, incomplete or inaccurate, requiring special consideration in real-time prediction applications. Additionally, transit may operate in conditions of high or low service reliability, which may require different treatments. This study proposes and tests a real-time prediction framework that uses measures of both service reliability and data reliability/quality to characterize conditions while making predictions sequentially and leveraging a variety of Machine Learning methods. The tests performed show that the proposed framework offers distinct advantages, while additional investigations carried out as part of the study highlight the framework's limitations and potential for future research.

Advisor: Shalaby, Amer
Pedagogy Otherwise: Queer Temporality and Social Justice Education

Social change is an engagement with time: it alters, reframes, and reckons with temporal experiences and expectations. Social change engages time to improve the justice of our conditions. As such, social justice education should be conscious of the ways that its pedagogies engage time. This thesis looks to critical pedagogies and community education to draw out how time is already considered in social justice education, and to suggest how else time might be taken up in pedagogy. To do this, the thesis looks at how education can broaden possibilities by rejecting the dominant order as the only reality. The thesis looks at the various ways that queer theorists understand thinking about the future, and what these conceptions of time mean for social justice pedagogies. The findings of this thesis are collected under the concept of Pedagogy Otherwise, which offer an initial sketch of how temporal conceptions can support social change through education.

Keywords: community education
critical pedagogy
future
queer theory
queery temporality
social justice education
Advisor: Bialystok, Lauren
Towards Modular Multispectral Object Detection using Adaptive Weighted Fusion

Object detection is a common computer vision task, used for perception for robotic applications and autonomous vehicles. While many deep learning-based approaches have improved the accuracy and performance of these systems, they lack the environmental robustness to be reliably deployed in critical applications. We propose a novel multispectral, modular object detection architecture to improve the environmental robustness of these systems using an adaptive approach. Our approach is modeled after the multimodal nature of human perception, and it's ability to dynamically weigh senses given the environment. Furthermore, our architecture is modular/model agnostic allowing for simpler deployment. We evaluate our architecture on two datasets with a wide-range of simulated environmental perturbations. Our architecture manages to improve robustness in these conditions and reduces variance in performance regardless of the environment, reducing the sample variance of the mAP between experimental scenarios to ~0.0012, compared to ~0.111 on the early fusion architecture.

Keywords: Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Machine Learning
Object Detection
Perception
Sensor Fusion
Advisor: Kundur, Deepa
The Induced Membrane Technique: Effects of Antibiotic-impregnated PMMA on Healing of a Rat Model of Segmental Defect

The induced membrane technique (IMT) is a therapeutic option for managing bone defects. Although not described in the original reports of the technique, surgeons now frequently incorporate antibiotics into the polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) spacer to prevent or treat infection. However, the effects of these antibiotic concentrations on bone healing are not clear. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the practice of using antibiotic-impregnated spacers in the IMT, impacts bone repair. PMMA spacers with no antibiotics, low-dose and high-dose antibiotics were implanted in 5 mm segmental femoral defects. Bone grafting was performed four weeks later. Twelve weeks post-graft, defects treated with spacers without antibiotics and those treated with low-dose antibiotics had higher rates of radiographic union, and higher bone volume compared to defects treated with high-dose antibiotic spacers. In the context of the IMT, our results suggest that high doses of antibiotics in PMMA may negatively impact bone healing.

Keywords: Animal Model
Antibiotics
Bone Defect
Bone Graft
Induced Membrane
Masquelet
Advisor: Nauth, Aaron
Cognitive Discrepancies, Values and Subjective Well-Being in People with Schizophrenia

Past research indicates that people with schizophrenia often achieve similar levels of subjective well-being (SWB) compared to healthy individuals despite prominent symptomatology and significant functional, social and cognitive difficulties. People with schizophrenia also report more conservative value systems (less openness to change and greater emphasis on tradition), suggesting that changing motivations and personal values may contribute to SWB and the apparent motivational deficits commonly reported in this population. In the current study, middle-aged people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (n=29) and community control participants (n=23) rated their current SWB, life satisfaction, hope, and values. They also completed a battery of cognitive tests and diagnostic interviews. Patients reported similar levels of SWB in the context of significant cognitive, social and functional difficulties, more conservative value systems, and a greater propensity for goal disengagement compared to controls. These results are discussed in relation to lifespan development and motivational theory.

Keywords: Lifespan development
Psychosis
Schizophrenia
Subjective well-being
Values
Advisor: Remington, Gary
Goghari, Vina
Compensation for Bioelectric Signal Changes in Chronic Selective Nerve Cuff Recordings: A Simulation Study

Peripheral nerve interfaces (PNIs) allow us to extract motor, sensory, and autonomic information from the nervous system and use it as control signals in neuroprosthetic and neuromodulation systems. Recently, the recording selectivity of PNIs has been improved using spatiotemporal patterns from multi-contact nerve cuff electrodes as input to a convolutional neural network (CNN). The performance of this approach during chronic implantations is not known. In this simulation study, approaches were evaluated for maintaining the selective recording performance in the presence of chronic implantation challenges (encapsulation tissue, electrode movements, and contact failures). This study demonstrated that a selective recording algorithm trained at baseline will fail over time due to changes in signal characteristics resulting from the chronic challenges. Results further showed that periodically recalibrating the selective recording algorithm can maintain its performance over time, and that machine learning techniques have the potential to reduce the frequency of recalibration.

Keywords: Computational Modeling
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
Machine Learning
Neural Engineering
Peripheral Nerve Interface
Selective Recording
Advisor: Zariffa, José
Characterizing the Genome-wide Associations of Somatic Mutations and Chromatin Accessibility in Cancer

Somatic mutation rates in cancer genomes are associated with chromatin state and informative of tumor tissue of origin. However, earlier studies considered the chromatin states of cell lines and normal tissues, while those of primary tumors remain uncharacterized. We used a machine-learning approach to evaluate tumor-specific chromatin accessibility profiles as predictors of mutation rates in 2,500 whole cancer genomes with 23 million SNVs. Mutation rates were more accurately predicted by chromatin accessibility derived from tumours than healthy cells, suggesting that somatic mutagenesis is largely associated with the chromatin state of tumour cells rather than normal cells. Interestingly, melanoma mutations were better predicted by normal melanocyte chromatin accessibility, suggesting earlier mutational timing. Furthermore, chromatin state was an accurate predictor of carcinogen-induced mutation rates while the mutations of endogenous mutational processes were only weakly statistically associated. Integrative analysis of mutations and chromatin state provides us insight into tumour evolution and heterogeneity.

Keywords: Cancer Genomics
Epigenomics
Machine Learning
Mutational Processes
Advisor: Reimand, Jüri
"What Happens Beyond the Talking": A Critical Policy Analysis of Sport and Recreation Equity Policies in Higher Education

This thesis is a critical policy analysis of a Canadian urban university sport and recreation department’s equity policies. Through a documentary analysis and interviews, this research reveals the connection between what equity policies claim to achieve and the (in)equity experienced by students. Findings demonstrate that the policies advance discourses that evince neoliberal values of competition, commodification, and elitism. They also further notions of institutional excellence in equity, while simultaneously lacking a plan to achieve such equity. The study concludes with recommendations for policies rooted in anti-oppression principles that address the needs of marginalized students through structural change, including a measurable action plan. Equity policies should also name publicly histories of oppression and exclusion in Canada as the rationale for institutional commitments to supporting Muslim, transgender, queer, Indigenous, Black, and racialized students who do not identify with Eurocentric cultures of masculine and competitive athletics, or fitness routines revolving around normative bodies.

Keywords: critical policy analysis
critical race theory
discourse
equity
social justice
sport and recreation
Advisor: Todorova, Miglena
Sztainbok, Vannina
The Impact of an Informational Website on Behavioural Intentions and Attitudes about Patient Engagement in Research: A Mixed Methods Evaluation

Patient engagement in research (PER) is a rapidly emerging practice and resources are needed to prepare patients and researchers for collaboration. This study asked: What are the perceptions of patients and researchers about an informational website about PER, and how did it impact intentions and attitudes toward PER? A mixed methods approach was used, entailing pre-post surveys, focus groups, and web analytics. 49 patients and researchers participated. The findings revealed 1) intentions and attitudes toward PER decreased after viewing the website, however participants reported that the website did not impact, or positively impacted, their attitudes and intentions, and 2) overall satisfaction with the website, with variation in preferences for design, and a desire for more PER guidance, easily accessible information, and detail regarding diversity in engagement and compensation for participants. These findings reveal considerations for the development of online resources about PER and understanding divergent findings within mixed methods research.

Keywords: patient engagement in research
Social Learning Theory
Theory of Planned Behavior
website evaluation
Advisor: Law, Susan
Location and Size of Preterm Cerebellar Hemorrhage and Childhood Development

Cerebellar hemorrhage (CBH) is a common complication of preterm birth but has never been quantitatively mapped. This thesis aimed to (1) measure and spatially define CBH and (2) examine the association between CBH size and location and neurodevelopmental outcomes, hypothesizing that larger anterior CBH would be associated with neuromotor dysfunction whereas posterior CBH would be associated with cognitive and behaviour problems. The MRIs of 221 very preterm neonates were segmented for CBH. CBH occurred mostly in the inferior posterior cerebellar lobes and CBH volume was associated with motor, visuomotor, and externalizing behavioural outcomes at 4.5 years independent of supratentorial brain injury. Moreover, CBH extending deeper into the cerebellum predicted adverse motor, visuomotor, and behavioural outcomes. Therefore, in preterm neonates, CBH size and location were associated with reduced neurodevelopmental function in a dose- and location-dependent fashion. The volumetric quantification and localisation of CBH may promote improved preterm outcomes via targeted intervention.

Keywords: Brain development
Cerebellum
Hemorrhage
MRI
Neurodevelopment
Preterm
Advisor: Miller, Steven P
HiCSR: A Hi-C Super-resolution Framework for Producing Highly Realistic Contact Maps

Hi-C data has enabled the genome-wide study of chromatin folding, and has led to important discoveries in the structure and function of chromatin conformation. Here, high resolution data plays a particularly important role as many chromatin substructures such as Topologically Associating Domains (TADs) and chromatin loops cannot be adequately studied with low resolution contact maps. However, the high sequencing costs associated with the generation of high resolution Hi-C data has become an experimental barrier. By carefully examining the properties of Hi-C maps and integrating various recent advances in deep learning, we developed a Hi-C Super-Resolution (HiCSR) framework capable of accurately recovering the fine details, textures, and substructures found in high resolution contact maps. The resulting framework can generate enhanced Hi-C maps more visually similar to the original high resolution maps, and also excels on a suite of reproducibility metrics produced by members of the ENCODE Consortium compared to existing approaches.

Keywords: 3D genome
contact maps
Hi-C
HiCSR
Super-resolution
Advisor: Frey, Brendan