VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Predicting Lithium-ion Battery Aging in Electric Vehicles and Second-life Stationary Applications

Electric vehicles (EVs) have become the most reliable option to replace the current automotive fleet, driven by significant battery technology advances, competitive battery prices, government policies and incentives, and global warming and climate change concerns. The reliability of EVs mostly depends on the performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), currently the preferred energy storage choice in EVs. The development and improvement of LIB chemistries, along with the design of effective Battery Management Systems (BMS) and Battery Thermal Management Systems (BTMS), have contributed to maximizing the lifetime of the LIBs. Despite these technological advances, degradation, commonly referred to as aging, is inevitable and irreversible, affecting battery performance over time, causing a decrease in power and capacity. Accurate battery health diagnosis and prognosis are therefore crucial for describing the aging phenomenon. Aging is mostly described and predicted as the evolution of battery performance parameters in time, through limited correlations based on accelerated test aging data or data-driven models supported by machine learning techniques. These approaches do not allow for the identification and segregation of the mechanisms responsible for aging, which would provide a valuable aging input to the BMS for optimal control actions, accurately setting key battery lifetime thresholds. On the other hand, electrochemically-based aging models are robust but computationally expensive and have not been successfully implemented in BMS algorithms. Data-based and electrochemically-based aging models have been mostly developed at the cell level. Moreover, batteries experience intrinsic cell-to-cell variations or spreading that, in addition to uneven extrinsic stress factors, cause different degradation trajectories per cell, contributing to cell imbalance. To overcome these challenges in modelling aging in LIBs, and hence to support the design and control strategies of both BMS and BTMS aiming to maximize the battery lifetime, this thesis work proposes an aging prediction framework in lithium-ion batteries by: (i) using a statistical-kinetics approach to obtain a set of test matrices and modelling guidelines for data-based models from aging accelerated tests; (ii) integrating an electrochemical reduced-order performance model with an electrochemical aging diagnostic tool, allowing for the identification and segregation of the main degradation mechanisms, and for the accurate identification of battery life thresholds such as first-, second- and unusable-life; and (iii) ensuring the scalability of the proposed approach from cell to battery level by considering cell spreading, using a stochastic approach to predict the state-of-health (SOH) of the battery.

Advisor: Amon, Cristina H
A Rhetorical Approach to Moral Argumentation

I argue in this dissertation that our North American educational institutions are obligated to formally attend to the inherent pervasiveness and complexities of rhetoric in preparing students to be fully-participating members of democratic society. The definition of rhetoric relevant here involves the use of language and stylistic elements to convince an audience of something. I advocate for rhetoric in two senses. I believe that our students, and societal members generally, should be knowledgeable of what makes rhetoric effective. I also claim that a form of “productive” rhetoric, not to be confused with solely “effective” rhetoric, is best suited for moral argumentation, deliberation and public debate. The first sense involves ‘knowledge of’ while the second concerns appropriate contextual ‘use’. A number of prototypical examples of productive rhetoric are offered as well as a depiction of what is and what is not conceived as productive, growth-oriented usage. The emotive, motivational and contextual elements of a rhetorical approach to moral argumentation need to be given more attention. Rhetoric holds potential to be an invaluable resource in moral argument, decision-making processes and education. Furthermore, it has the capacity to uniquely cause participants to cohere or connect. It can facilitate a shared affective foundation upon which common ends might be pursued. Not only does rhetoric hold this potential, but it is always already imbued with certain moral qualities. Directed by this claim, I survey the relationship between rhetoric and moral argumentation in the three major normative philosophical traditions: consequentialism, aretaic virtue ethics, and deontic discourse ethics. I also defend Rortyan and Davidsonian conceptions of rhetorical communication. The various traditions drawn from in this thesis all point to certain features of and opportunities for rhetoric in relation to possible growth among participants in moral discourse and education. While rhetoric is usually used to urge one conceptual framework over another, I champion its use to bridge frameworks. Certain forms of productive rhetoric canreasonably be expected to open up dialogue in an effort to create innovative solutions, mutual understandings, and sustainable agreements.

Keywords: Argumentation
Democratic
Growth
Language
Moral
Philosophy
Advisor: Bialystok, Lauren
Community Disturbance and Host-parasite Interactions at the Wildlife-domestic Interface in a Neotropical Biodiversity Hotspot

Tropical ecosystems worldwide are threatened by land-use change. The resulting increased interaction between wildlife, domestic species, and humans can lead to parasite spillover and emerging diseases that can significantly impact wildlife. Measuring spillover risk presents multiple challenges, including identifying drivers of species interaction, quantifying host densities and overlap, and estimating parasite prevalence. I studied anthropogenic pressures and the associated risk of parasite spillover in the Osa peninsula, an important biodiversity hotspot in southern Costa Rica. In Chapter 1, I analyzed how anthropogenic disturbance, land protection, and habitat quality shape the vertebrate community. In collaboration with multiple institutions, I conducted a region-wide camera-trap survey and analyzed the occurrence of terrestrial mammals and ground birds using a joint species distribution model. Overall disturbance had negative impacts on occupancy of large predators and herbivores. Mesopredators like ocelots (Leopardus pardalis) were only marginally affected by disturbance and could therefore be exposed to parasites of domestic species. In Chapter 2, I used camera trap data, and estimation frameworks for marked and unmarked species, to determine ocelot density, a key determinant of epidemiological dynamics. I found important design incompatibilities between frameworks regarding camera distribution, which should be considered for density comparisons. The estimated density (34 individuals/100 km2 ) suggests a healthy population. However, ocelots frequently use trails, exposing them further to parasites of domestic species, particularly dogs. In Chapter 3, I analyzed the spillover risk of soil transmitted helminths from domestic hosts to wild felids using microscopy, molecular diagnostic, and mathematical modelling tools. I found high prevalence of hookworms (Ancylostoma caninum) in dog scats (74%). I could not identify a related parasite found in feline scat. The hookworm prevalence observed in ocelots (25%), however, was higher than the prediction from a mathematical model (5%), suggesting there is no regular transmission of helminths across species. Human encroachment on natural habitats will continue to represent a risk of emerging disease for vulnerable wildlife, domestic animals, and humans, particularly in highly biodiverse systems like the Osa. Parasite monitoring therefore must become an integral part of conservation studies at the wildlife-domestic interface. These urgent efforts will necessarily require multidisciplinary, local-based approaches.

Keywords: mammal community
population density
tropical forest
wildlife disease
Advisor: Molnár, Péter K
Avicenna on Emotions: Their Nature and Significance for Knowledge and Morality

This dissertation examines the view of emotions found in the writings of the philosopher and medical doctor Avicenna (Ibn Sīna, d. 1098 CE). Avicenna is known to have influenced the course of cognitive psychology in the Muslim East and the Latin West, yet little has been written on his affective psychology. Over the course of five chapters, I examine his accounts of animal and human emotions, their physiology, and their relation to voluntary action and moral dispositions. Avicenna is notable for the degree to which he highlights uniquely human emotions, while simultaneously giving attention to the complexity of emotions able to be felt by animals. He also stands out for the way that he integrates his knowledge of physiology into his analysis of philosophical questions. Emotions, according to Avicenna, are acts of the animal motive faculty, caused by cognitions of varying complexity. For example, uniquely human emotions are caused by cognitions of which only humans are capable, but they are fundamentally actualizations of the same motive faculty shared by animals and humans alike. Emotions are also to be understood as inclinations (Ar: inbiʿāthāt/nizāʿāt), meaning that they incline us towards various objects and courses of action, but do not on their own initiate any type of movement. This dissertation includes a full translation of Avicenna’s section on emotion in his Healing: Rhetoric.

Keywords: Aristotle
Avicenna
Emotions
Ibn Sina
Physiology
Psychology
Advisor: Black, Deborah L
Drainage Reorganization and Landscape Evolution at the Puna Plateau Margin, NW Argentina

Investigating the controls of fluvial erosion and how these controls are recorded in topography is key for understanding tectonic-climate coupling and the landscape evolution of orogenic plateaus. However, these investigations are limited by systematic assumptions that may bias apparent controls of fluvial erosion and neglecting how rivers respond through adjusting planform patterns. This thesis explores these complications at the Puna Plateau margin and broken foreland of NW Argentina and (1) assesses how spatial variability and interactions among potential tectonic, climatic, and lithologic controls drive fluvial erosion rates, (2) identifies planform drainage reorganization and its controls, and (3) determines how planform reorganization may influence the preservation and destruction of orogenic plateau margins. This thesis systematically analyzes how spatial variability and independent variable interactions influence 10Be-derived catchment-wide fluvial erosion rates through a multivariate Bayesian regression model. Within-catchment spatial variability of vegetation produces the strongest relationship; this suggests that catchment-wide fluvial erosion rates in NW Argentina are likely dominated by rapid erosion in steep, high elevation, and unvegetated portions of a single catchment. These results highlight the utility of considering summary statistics other than the catchment-wide mean when conducting quantitative analyses of fluvial erosion rate controls. Using a combination of geomorphic, morphometric, and structural evidence, this thesis identifies drainage reorganization across the Puna margin. Stream captures and progressive divide migration forced the Puna margin into the plateau interior, until it largely stabilized at a position predicted by tectonically-controlled base-level differences across the divide. Locations of ongoing divide migration coincide with rapidly-uplifting thrust faults. This thesis additionally synthesizes published thermochronologic and sedimentologic evidence to construct a chronology of range uplift and drainage reorganization in the broken foreland. Unlike thin- and thick-skinned wedges, fault-parallel longitudinal drainages in the broken foreland are long-lived, and are controlled by the unique tectonic setting of the region, in which shortening is accommodated by out-of-sequence uplift along steep inherited faults. This thesis concludes that tectonics, particularly through tectonically-controlled base-levels and inherited structures, controls patterns of drainage reorganization and therefore plays a key role in shaping the topography of orogenic plateaus and their associated forelands.

Keywords: Andes
Drainage reorganization
Fluvial erosion
Tectonic geomorphology
Advisor: Schoenbohm, Lindsay M
Addressing the Data Annotation Bottleneck in Breast Digital Pathology

Early diagnosis and targeted therapies are priorities in the treatment of cancer. Advancements such as whole-slide scanning of a tissue sample can help experts assess cancer more precisely; however, analysis of a tissue specimen is expensive and time-consuming. Machine learning can alleviate the load for the expert by providing an objective assessment complementary to the pathologist, or by highlighting possible regions of interest on the slide to reduce the examination time. The number of labeled images in machine learning tasks is found to be positively correlated with the task performance; however, labeled data is scarce and expensive. The problem is exacerbated in medical image analysis tasks, where an expert must exhaustively annotate data to cover both common and rare cases of disease. In this thesis, I propose techniques to either expedite the labeling step, or to reduce the requirements for labeled data. I start by addressing the generalization gap, where an automatic diagnostic tool (e.g., breast cancer detection) trained using data from a specific scanner or a hospital performs poorly on data from another hospital for the same task. My aim is to achieve similar performance on the unseen data by identifying features that are common in both the training and the unseen data. Later, I propose a technique to train a segmentation network by leveraging easier-to-label image-level patches combined with a few pixel-level segmentation annotations. Thirdly, I utilize a learning paradigm called self-supervision which is used to learn salient features from unlabeled images without any supervision. These learned features are later used to train for tasks such as classification, regression, and segmentation. The experiments show that the accuracy can be improved by up to 30% on various tasks, including breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colorectal tissue classification tasks. Finally, I outline unique challenges associated with whole-slide images (WSIs), and find techniques that achieve satisfactory performance on smaller images may not translate to good performance in a more clinically relevant workflow involving WSIs. I propose alternative methods to overcome this discrepancy, and verify the efficacy of the proposed technique in a clinically challenging breast cancer task.

Keywords: digital histopathology
medical image analysis
self-supervised learning
unsupervised learning
weakly supervised learning
whole-slide images
Advisor: Martel, Anne ALM
Hölder Continuity of Tangent Cones and Non-branching in RCD(K,N) Spaces

This thesis is concerned with the study of the structure theory of metric measure spaces (X, d, m) satisfying the synthetic lower Ricci curvature bound condition RCD(K, N). We prove that such a space is non-branching and that tangent cones from the same sequence of rescalings are Hölder continuous along the interior of every geodesic in X. More precisely, we show that the geometry of balls of small radius centred in the interior of any geodesic changes in at most a Hölder continuous way along the geodesic in pointed Gromov-Hausdorff distance. This improves a result in the Ricci limit setting by Colding-Naber where the existence of at least one geodesic with such properties between any two points is shown. As in the Ricci limit case, this implies that the regular set of an RCD(K, N) space has m-a.e. constant dimension, a result recently established by Brué-Semola, and is m-a.e convex. It also implies that the top dimension regular set is weakly convex and, therefore, connected. In proving the main theorems, we develop in the RCD(K, N) setting the expected second order interpolation formula for the distance function along the Regular Lagrangian flow of some vector field using its covariant derivative.

Keywords: Geometric analysis
Metric geometry
Riemannian geometry
Advisor: Kapovitch, Vitali
Assessing the Competence of Physical Therapists who Perform Airway Suctioning with Adults

Airway suctioning is a treatment technique used to remove retained secretions from the lungs. Given the higher-risk nature of this technique, it is important to ensure the competence of health care professionals who perform it. This dissertation explores the process used to develop and evaluate a new measure intended to assess the clinical competence of physical therapists who perform suctioning with adults, the Physical Therapy Competence Assessment for Airway Suctioning (PT-CAAS). Assessing the competence of physical therapists is of interest because they have fewer opportunities to perform suctioning in practice compared to other health care professionals, such as nurses and respiratory therapists. Consequently, they may be at greater risk for erosion of competence. The first study used a scoping review methodology to explore the nature and extent of measures to assess the competence of health care professionals who perform suctioning with adults. In that review, we failed to identify any existing measures that would be appropriate for current use with physical therapists who perform suctioning within the Canadian health care context. In the second study, expert consensus was used to develop an initial version of the PT-CAAS and assess its sensibility. In that study, we found preliminary evidence in support of the PT-CAAS’s face and content validity. In the third study, qualitative interviews were used and we found further evidence to support the PT-CAAS’s content validity. In the fourth study, scoring rules were developed and the inter-rater and intra-rater reliability of the PT-CAAS were assessed. We found evidence of moderate to good inter-rater reliability and good intra-rater reliability; however, the precision of the reliability estimates was a concern. Based on our findings, the initial version of the PT-CAAS was revised. Further assessments of the PT-CAAS’s reliability and validity are recommended.

Advisor: Brooks, Dina
Mori, Brenda
Relating Ionic Composition to the Photophysics and Photochemistry of Natural Organic Matter in Aqueous Environments

Photochemical reactions in the natural aquatic environment are important drivers of chemistry, including degradation of pollutants and formation of volatile species at the air-water interface. Several species found in this environment may contribute to photochemistry. One of the most important species is natural organic matter (NOM), a complex and ubiquitous component of aquatic environments. NOM contains chromophores that absorb light and may undergo intersystem crossing to form the excited triplet state, which can act as a photosensitizer or react, forming reactive intermediates, such as singlet oxygen and hydroxyl radical. In this thesis, several NOM samples were used to investigate the differences in NOM photophysics and photochemistry in seawater compared to freshwater. Systematic investigations, using seawater components such as halides and metal ions, determined how water composition affects the photophysics of NOM through fluorescence. The changes in photophysics were then linked to changes in NOM photochemistry via the formation of reactive intermediates, such as the excited triplet and singlet oxygen, or photosensitization mechanisms. The first investigation indicated that the presence of magnesium changed the photophysics of NOM through enhanced NOM fluorescence, linked to a change in NOM photochemistry through decreased formation kinetics of the excited triplet state and singlet oxygen. The study hypothesized that the decrease in the formation kinetics of singlet oxygen was due to changes in the conformation of NOM due to NOM-magnesium complexes. Fluorescence anisotropy was used in the second study to determine that NOM-metal complexes did not change the conformation of NOM, but did influence the photophysics of NOM. Finally, the difference in photochemistry occurring in seawater versus freshwater was investigated at the air-water interface by exploring the formation kinetics of gas-phase products from seawater and freshwater. These investigations determined that differences in water composition affected the number, concentrations, and growth rates of species formed. The studies presented in this thesis illustrate that water composition plays a significant role in altering the photophysical and photochemical mechanisms of NOM, with greater implications towards changes in aqueous photochemical processes.

Keywords: Aqueous Photochemistry
Environmental Chemistry
Interfacial Chemistry
Metal Complexes
Natural Organic Matter
Volatile Organic Compounds
Advisor: Donaldson, D. James
A Mixed-method Study of Bariatric Patients’ Experiences in Integrated Care: Implications for Patient-centered Care

Patient-centered care is a hallmark of high-quality care. Despite the significant attention and quality improvement efforts that followed the 2001 ‘Crossing the Quality Chasm’ report by the Institute of Medicine, notable gaps in care delivery persist for patients with chronic diseases. A challenge to addressing these gaps is the ability of current patient experience measures to capture important aspects of care delivery, such as chronic disease self-management, from the patient’s perspective. Development of reliable measurement tools that truly assess patient-centered care is critical to bridging these care gaps. In this dissertation, I investigated the relationship between patient-centered care and patient outcomes in the context of the integrated care model for chronic disease management. The primary aim of this research was to determine the key aspects of integrated care delivery that promote patient-centered care from the patient’s perspective and improve health-related quality of life (HRQoL) outcomes in an integrated bariatric surgery program. Study 1 generated the “Caring About Me” framework, which defines patient-centered care from the patient’s perspective. Study II demonstrated distinct differences in bariatric patients physical and mental HRQoL following bariatric surgery. Study III examined bariatric patients’ personal care experiences to explain difference in HRQoL trajectories. Results from this mixed-methods research program revealed that integrated care can enable patient-centered care that impacts long-term clinical outcomes by enabling positive patient-care team interactions, promoting access to responsive treatment interventions and empowering patients through the development of long-term self-management skills. Overall, this dissertation illuminated the core care elements that promote patient-centered care and improve clinical outcomes in integrated care. This relationship reinforces the importance of integrated care pathways that address the personalized care needs of the target patient population.

Keywords: Bariatric Surgery
Chronic Disease Management
Health Related Quality of life
Mental Health
Obesity
Patient-Centred Care
Advisor: Sockalingam, Sanjeev