VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Supporting Transfer Time Predictions in Medical Dispatch using Visualizations of Historical Data

Decision making in emergency medical dispatch is difficult due to the high time pressure and uncertainty faced by dispatchers. This is especially true in large-scale medical transport systems, such as Ornge in Ontario, because of the large geographical area serviced and the limited air and land ambulance resources available. Oversight agencies have highlighted the need to support patient transport time prediction for different transport options to facilitate better dispatch decisions. This dissertation proposes the use of visualizations of historical transport time data as a decision-aid to support predictions of patient transport time. Specifically, this dissertation examines whether visualizing the variability of historical data, which can help decision makers understand the uncertainty of the process, may improve transport time predictions. Historical time predictions recorded by Ornge were statistically analyzed and two field studies were conducted at Ornge. Transport time predictions were found to be an important part of the dispatch process, but they are often underestimated, and that dispatchers do not explicitly incorporate uncertainty information in their predictions, possibly due to time constraints. Based on these results, an interface and workflow for a decision-aid visualizing historical data was proposed. In order to support the design of this decision-aid, two experimental studies were conducted to examine the influence of display format and context information on prediction behavior. The experiments were based on a proposed framework, informed by the literature, for how individuals use historical data visualizations to predict values of a variable. The experimental results provided evidence that both display format and context information impact prediction behavior, however the underlying process used by the participants appeared to differ from that suggested in the proposed framework. Thus, further research is needed to improve this framework. Overall, this dissertation adds to the very limited literature on supporting medical dispatch decisions through the design of a decision-aid for transport time prediction. In addition, this dissertation provides preliminary evidence for how individuals use visualizations of historical data to generate predictions of variables and what factors may influence these predictions.

Keywords: Decision making
Decision support
Medical dispatch
Prehospital emergency care
Time prediction
Uncertainty visualizations
Advisor: Donmez, Birsen
MacDonald, Russell D
Aiming for Peace and Responding to Crisis: Movement and the Saints in Eleventh-Century Southern French Miracle Collections

Movement, a literal change in physical location, is often overlooked in historical studies of medieval miracle texts. Instead, scholars largely focus on the “miracle-working power” of the saints or other cultural economic, political, religious, and social details that can be gleaned from these sources. This dissertation adds to such readings of texts on saints’ miracles by using movement as a category of analysis. In the miracle texts of Saints Vivien at Figeac, Privat at Mende, and Enimie at Sainte-Enimie, all written in the eleventh century in the south of France, movements abound in a flurry of danger and excitement in reference to their relics. While the hagiographers never question the movements of relics, their discourse about movement of people shows a preference for stasis. If people must move, they should do so according to the proper protocol in support of the saints’ cults; out-of-the-ordinary movements, especially those “bad” movements made by proven criminals, are condemned and punishable by the saints. The first chapter introduces the field of research and the second chapter contextualizes seminal themes and the primary sources (reliquaries, the Peace of God, saints, and settings). After these two prefatory chapters, each of the three analytical chapters discusses different collaborations and directions of movement in the sources. Chapter 3 addresses the movements of relics and the populace on the road to and at Peace of God councils, portraying a sanctified version of the Peace. Chapter 4 examines movements of roving dangerous men-at-arms and retaliating saints wreaking vengeance away from the relics’ presence, showing that the anomalous movements of wicked men warranted reciprocal, similar movements on the part of vengeful saints. Chapter 5 recounts movements of all social groups drawn toward the saints’ shrines by their spiritual magnetism in hopes of experiencing transformation. Overall, the descriptions of movement included in the three miracle collections were meant to establish social norms of movement. Therefore, this dissertation concludes that movements of relics, with relics, and for relics were the most acceptable movements in these three miracle texts and that all other movements were subject to scrutiny.

Keywords: France
medieval
miracles
movement
reliquaries
saints
Advisor: Terpstra, Nicholas
Behavioural and Neural Correlates of Attention Bias to Infant Cues as Predictors of Parenting from Pregnancy to Postpartum

Infant cues (e.g., faces and vocalizations) constitute powerful signals that bias adult attention. Research on the neuroanatomy of parenting primarily examines neural biases to passive viewing of or listening to target infant cues, with enhanced activations to infant versus non–infant cues seen in parents compared to non–parents. In contrast, behavioural paradigms present infant cues as task–irrelevant distractors during conflict tasks. While these studies suggest that infant cues capture attention and disrupt executive control, investigations into more specific types of neurocognitive processes affected by this bias are limited. Importantly, both neuroimaging and behavioural research suggests that heightened bias to infant cues is linked to more sensitive mothering. However, this work is largely specific to the postpartum period and does not address potential changes in infant bias during the transition from pregnancy to motherhood. Using event–related potentials (ERPs) one objective of this thesis was to establish how attention bias to distractor infant vocal cues modulates adult cognition and cortical activity (P2, N450) during a conflict task (Stroop) in non–parents (Study 1) and in pregnant mothers and non–mothers (Study 2). Whether variations in this bias during pregnancy predict the strength of the mother–infant bond was additionally addressed (Study 2). Subsequently, Study 3 determined how attention bias to distractor infant facial cues influences cognition and face–sensitive encoding (N170) during a conflict task (go/no go) in pregnant mothers and non–mothers, and whether a heightened bias during pregnancy predicts sensitive mother–infant interactions. A final objective was to explore prenatal to postnatal changes in cortical responses to target infant and adult facial cues (P1, P2, N170, LPP) and determine whether mothers’ individual differences in cortical change predict the strength of the mother–infant bond (Study 4). Overall, this thesis represents a step forward in identifying the mechanisms related to parenting.

Keywords: attention bias
electroencephalography
infant cues
maternal sensitivity
mother-infant bonding
pregnancy
Advisor: Haley, David W
Cultivating Bodies, Discipline and Pleasures: An Institutional Ethnography of a Sports School

Despite the proliferation of sports schools across Canada, very little attention has been paid to them within Canadian education systems. Starting from this premise, and given the relatively little academic attention directed toward understanding the sports school in sociological, educational and cultural terms, my dissertation set out to critically explore the historical development and social meaning of sport and recreation in a Canadian sports school. Engaging in a detailed institutional ethnography, I specifically examined how the space, everyday lives and experiences of student-athletes and staff in a sports school are an effect of a matrix of discourses—institutional discourses (e.g., Sport Canada policy statements, institutional documents) bodily discourses (e.g., management of the body through disciplinary technologies) as well as normalization of injury discourses (e.g., injury as a pain-reward complex), to name a few. I argue that the (re)production of disciplinary technologies, framed by discourses of excellence, enabled the manifestation of desire as a productive force. I demonstrate that while the culture of the sports school involves living within disciplinary apparatuses—apparatuses that may in fact limit the body’s potentiality—paradoxically, living within these disciplinary technologies and networks of pouvoir, can open youth up to the potential (puissance) for a range of embodied pleasures, even if this potential is quickly harnessed by the forces of pouvoir (Pronger, 2002). What my research illustrates is that living within such spaces of discipline and pleasure becomes a way of enacting discourse and practices that athletes (and adults) choose to apply to themselves and their daily lives. While desire and pleasure can be organized through adultist cultures of excellence and performance, what my findings make clear is that young people are legitimate participants in creating the cultures of their classrooms and sportscapes and can be agents in how they experience and embody desire and pleasures in their lives.

Keywords: body
discipline
institutional ethnography
pleasure
sports school
student-athlete
Advisor: Fusco, Caroline
Predicting Advanced Endovascular Aneurysm Repair Complications Using 3D Analytical Tools

Fenestrated and branched endovascular aneurysm repair [(F/B)EVAR] is a minimally-invasive method for the treatment of aortic aneurysms involving the visceral segment. These procedures involve the placement of a stent graft that incorporates fenestrations or branches with the goal of excluding the aneurysmal sac while preserving blood flow to the visceral arteries. These fenestrations or branches need to align precisely with the target arteries to maintain blood flow and prevent ischemia related adverse events. The objective of these studies is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of stent graft misalignment and to identify methods to predict and prevent stent graft misalignment with a long-term goal of making these procedures safer and more effective for patients. Stent graft misalignment is a multifactorial process that includes stent graft planning, intraoperative positioning, and stent graft rotation. Greater than 50% of patients undergoing (F/B)EVAR had at least one misaligned renal fenestration and misalignment was associated with higher rates of procedural target vessel complications and severe post-operative adverse events. Similarly, intraoperative stent graft rotation (occurring in 37% of fenestrated procedures) was also associated with a 36% absolute increase in post-operative adverse events. In a multivariate analysis, factors predictive of stent graft rotation included iliac artery torsion, iliac artery calcification, and device length. Insertion technique also plays an important role in the degree of stent graft rotation. In vivo correction for orientation which is commonly performed during the insertion of the device appears to increase the observed rotation and supports the concept of fully removing the device, adjusting the orientation, and subsequently reinserting. Finally, this thesis describes a finite element analysis-based method for predicting the final location of the delivery system and the resulting aortoiliac deformation.

Keywords: abdominal aortic aneurysm
endovascular
EVAR
fenestrated
stent graft
Advisor: Amon, Cristina
Forbes, Thomas
Random matrix theory: From mathematical physics to high dimensional statistics and time series analysis

Random matrix serves as one of the key tools in understanding the eigen-structure of large dimensional matrices. The application ranges from the estimation and inference of the high dimensional covariance matrices, the noise reduction of rectangular matrices to the understanding of separable matrices and even matrices having correlation both in rows and columns. Assuming that we can observe a p by n data matrix, where log p is comparable to log n, we derive the convergent limits and distributions for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors for a few random matrix models related to the above problems in the study of high dimensional statistics. This part is based on a few papers jointly with Zhigang Bao (HKUST), Fan Yang (UCLA) and Ke Wang (HKUST), where we employ the dynamic approach developed by Laszlo Erdos and Horng-Tzer Yau. Non-stationary time series is important in understanding the temporal correlation of data. Assuming that only one time series is observed, we develop a methodology to estimate the underlying high dimensional covariance and precision matrices. Based on our methodology, we can infer the covariance and precision matrices using the strategy of bootstrapping. This part is based on two papers jointly with Professor Zhou Zhou (UofT). It is notable that, we apply Stein's method to prove the Gaussian approximation, which is essentially the same as the Green function comparison strategy for proving the universality for random matrix models.

Advisor: Quastel, Jeremy
Essays in Labour and Urban Economics

This thesis contains three essays that focus on topics in labour and urban economics. In Chapter 1, I use new administrative Canadian matched owner-employer-employee data to investigate the mechanisms that drive entry into entrepreneurial careers and entrepreneurial success among young individuals. I pay particular attention to the value of prior work experience in entrepreneurship. I use information on the career choices and earnings of individuals each year to structurally estimate a dynamic Roy model of career choice. I recover parameters governing: (a) the returns to various types of experience in the labour market and in entrepreneurship, (b) the non-pecuniary benefits associated with being a worker and an entrepreneur, and (c) career-specific entry costs. I use the estimated model to evaluate the impact of policies designed to promote successful entrepreneurship. Chapter 2 (joint with Leah Brooks and Gisela Rua) investigates how containerization impacts local economic activity. Containerization is premised on a simple insight: packaging goods for waterborne trade into a standardized container makes them dramatically cheaper to move. We use a novel cost-shifter instrument -- port depth pre-containerization -- to contend with the non-random adoption of containerization by ports. Container ships sit much deeper in the water than their predecessors, making initially deep ports cheaper to containerize. Consistent with New Economic Geography models, we find that cities near container ports grow an additional 70 percent from 1950 to 2010. Gains predominate in cities with initially low population density and manufacturing. Chapter 3 (joint with Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Stefano Polloni, and Matthew Turner) investigates the relationship between the opening of a city's subway network and its air quality. We find that particulate concentrations drop by 4% in a 10km radius disk surrounding a city center following a subway system opening. The effect is larger near the city center and persists over the longest time horizon that we can measure with our data, about eight years. We estimate that a new subway system provides an external mortality benefit of about $594m per year. Although available subway capital cost estimates are crude, the estimated external mortality effects represent a significant fraction of construction costs.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship
Human capital
Occupational choice
Unobserved heterogeneity
Advisor: Baum-Snow, Nathaniel
Trefler, Daniel
Optimizing Data Analytics Jobs with Fairness Constraints in Datacenter Networks

Thanks to the exponential growth of data that needs to be processed in cloud datacenters, data parallel frameworks, such as MapReduce and Spark, have emerged as foundations of cloud computing. It becomes increasingly significant to improve the performance of data analytics jobs running in a shared cluster. Towards this objective, we investigate important research problems in this dissertation as follows. Utility-Optimal Coflow Scheduling. A coflow represents a set of network flows in the communication stage of a data parallel job. The completion time of a job is determined by the collective behavior of a coflow and influenced by the amount of network bandwidth allocated to it. We focus on the design and implementation of a new utility optimal scheduler across competing coflows, to provide differential treatment to coflows with different degrees of sensitivity, yet still satisfying max-min fairness across these coflows. Job Scheduling across Datacenters. As large volumes of data are generated and stored across geographically distributed datacenters, recent research proposed to distribute the tasks of a data analytics job across datacenters, considering both data locality and network bandwidth. Yet, it remains an open problem in the more general case, where multiple jobs need to fairly share the resources at these datacenters. We study the assignment of tasks belonging to multiple jobs across datacenters, with the specific objective of achieving {\em max-min fairness} across jobs sharing these datacenters, in terms of their job completion times. Multi-Path Routing across Datacenters. To process geo-distributed data, optimizing the network transfer in communication stages also becomes increasingly crucial to application performance, as the inter-datacenter links have much lower bandwidth than intra-datacenter links. We focus on exploiting the flexibility of multi-path routing for inter-datacenter flows of data analytics jobs, with the hope of better utilizing inter-datacenter links and thus improve job performance. We formulate the scheduling problems as lexicographical optimization problems and address the challenges incurred by their multi-objective and discrete nature. We design and implement our solutions as real-world coflow scheduler based on the Varys open-source framework and fair scheduler based on Spark. We also design and implement an optimal multi-path routing and scheduling strategy.

Keywords: big data analytics
coflow scheduling
datacenter networking
fairness
resource allocation
Advisor: Li, Baochun
The Development of Substrates and Inhibitors of the PNAG Biosynthetic Machinery

Biofilms are surface-attached colonies of bacteria that are encapsulated in an extracellular matrix composed of a milieu of proteins, nucleic acids and polysaccharides. In a wide variety of clinically relevant bacteria including Staphylococcus epidermidis and Escherichia coli the composition of the biofilm matrix is dominated by a partially deacetylated polymer of β-(1,6)-linked N-acetylglucosamine (PNAG). The protein components that are responsible for the synthesis, modification and export of the PNAG polymer are encoded by the ica and pga operons in S. epidermidis and E. coli respectively. It has been shown that deletions of any of the gene products comprising the Pga or Ica biosynthetic machinery result in the absence of a biofilm-forming phenotype and severely attenuated virulence. This work explores new ways of understanding the activity of enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of the PNAG polysaccharide. An NMR-based assay was developed to more directly observe the rates of PNAG biosynthesis in vitro. Analogues of UDP-GlcNAc incorporating NMR-active nuclei were synthesized using a chemoenzymatic approach and validated with the processive glycosyltransferase PgaCD. Additionally, substrate-based inhibitors of the deacetylase enzymes PgaB and SpPgda were designed and synthesized. A 2-C gluco scaffold was accessed through glycosidation of a cylcopropyl donor and functionalized with either a methylphosphonate or sulfonamide moiety, meant to mimic the anionic tetrahedral deacetylase transition state. In a separate effort, using structure- and fragment-based inhibitor design strategies in combination with in silico docking, inhibitors of PgaB were developed and synthesized. Finally, new fluorogenic substrates of deacetylase enzymes were synthesized and tested against PgaB and IcaB. The most promising new substrate, AMMU, facilitated high throughput screening of IcaB using a library of over 130 000 compounds.

Keywords: Assay Development
Biofilms
Deacetylase
Drug Design
Enzymology
PNAG
Advisor: Nitz, Mark
The benefit of game design for facilitating productive negativity in monotonic and non-monotonic learning scenarios in undergraduate medical and life sciences education

Game-based learning (GBL) approaches in science and medicine have been shown to lead to greater cognitive outcomes than traditional methods of learning in many scenarios. However, there is little empirical evidence linking game design patterns or mechanics to learning outcomes, thereby limiting the practical implications of this research on instructional design. This dissertation postulates that a primary benefit of GBL is its ability to facilitate negative experiences that lead to learning. The concept was investigated in two exemplar learning scenarios with undergraduate students: (1) a case of monotonic learning (i.e. knowledge gain) with medical students studying human vascular anatomy, and (2) a case of non-monotonic learning (i.e. conceptual change) with biology students who hold misconceptions about the emergent nature of molecular environments. In both case studies, GBL interventions were compared to active control conditions with identical pedagogical content, core interaction mechanics, and visual aesthetics as the games—but which lacked gaming-specific elements—to determine the benefit of game design in facilitating productive negativity and its relationship with learning outcomes. It was found that, for both monotonic and non-monotonic learning scenarios, the increased probability of negativity created by the game significantly changed patterns of interactions: individuals exposed to the GBL interventions engaged in a strategic style of interaction, while those exposed to the control engaged in more exploratory/experimental interactions. Only in-app performance in the GBL groups were predictive of learning outcomes across all studies, suggesting a kind of learning guarantee in the presence of game design. Secondary findings regarding levels of motivation/engagement were inconclusive; those regarding the confounding effect of student attributes suggest that culture may play a role in the acceptability and efficacy of GBL approaches by undergraduate students, while previous gaming exposure, gender, and academic abilities do not. Future work should continue to investigate the possible link between culture, productive negativity, and GBL acceptability, and seek better ways of measuring negativity.

Keywords: conceptual change
game-based learning
game design
life sciences education
medical education
randomized controlled trials
Advisor: Jenkinson, Jodie
Morshead, Cindi