VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Robotic Guidance on the Learning of a Golf Putt

Robotic guidance has been recently shown to improve movement smoothness by providing participants with an ideal trajectory. The main purpose of the current thesis was to investigate the impact of robotic physical guidance on the execution of a golf putting task. To investigate how robotic guidance influences the consistency and performance of a golf putting task, the studies employed a pre-test, acquisition, and retention testing phases in which participants completed putts to multiple targets. Using custom-built software, participants’ kinematic data were collected and converted into robotic coordinates to be delivered by a robot arm. As demonstrated in the first experiment, the robot’s trajectories were highly accurate, consistent, and smooth, replicating human trajectories. In the second experiment, participants trained with the robot (50% or 100% of training trials) or without the robot (0%). Following the training phase, participants performed an immediate retention test, putting to a target without the help of the robot arm. Participants that trained with the robot 50% of the trials were the only group to both improve their performance (i.e., stop the ball closer to the hole as well as task consistency). In the third experiment, participants were unable to see the ball’s trajectory and were asked to estimate the ball endpoint. As anticipated, the benefits of robotic guidance were replicated while showing that robotic guidance can also help develop error detection mechanisms. This research has improved our understanding of motor skill acquisition, especially as it pertains to the implementation of robotic guidance methods. Also, this project has led to novel robotic guidance tools, first applied to golf putting performance successfully and perhaps, can be expanded to different sports and other practical areas in the future (e.g., rehabilitation).

Keywords: error detection mechanisms
motor skill acquisition
robotic guidance
Advisor: Tremblay, Luc
"The Dream of Kurdistan is Buried Here": History, Violence, and Martyrdom in the Borderlands of the Modern Middle East

This dissertation attempts to answer two main questions. Firstly, how do you tell a history of national struggle that has not ended in the foundation of a nation state? Secondly, is here a way to include women in histories of national resistance without erasing their own desires for and understandings of liberation or reducing their participation in national struggle to accommodation or critique? This dissertation poses these questions from Kurdistan, what many Kurdish scholars describe as the largest nation without a state. Rather than attempting to explain why Kurds have not achieved statehood despite a long history of national resistance, the dissertation’s four chapters explore ways to narrate the nation that has not ended in a nation-state. The dissertation is about the writing of history from Kurdistan and the processing of the past in Doğubayazıt, a Kurdish town in Turkey that sits in the foothills of Mount Ararat. How do ‘ordinary’ Kurdish men and women make sense of an unfinished history of national resistance? How do they use this history to make sense of the ongoing history of state violence? There is no attempt to corroborate or verify the histories told in Doğubayazıt. Rather, the dissertation engages ethnographically with the past. Tracing and following the reanimation of the defeat of the Mount Ararat Rebellion (Ağrı Dağı İsyanı, 1926-1931) by its ‘descendants,’ this dissertation attempts to ‘rescue’ Kurdish history from the triumphal narrative of the nation-state. The reanimations of the defeat of the Mount Ararat Uprising by Kurdish resistance needs to be read as a critique rather than a celebration of the nation-state. Despite the profound transformations in the thought, practices, and goals of Kurdish nationalism over the last decades, scholars continue to confine the “dream of Kurdistan” to what Turkish Foreign Minister Tewfik Rüştü Bey described in 1927 as the two options for “smaller groups”—to “disappear” or to wait.. But if grasped as Walter Benjamin suggests as “it flashes up at a moment of danger,” Kurdish resistance is no longer the tragedy or romance of the nation-state in the Middle East but a desire for the possibility of other forms of belonging.

Keywords: Dialetical Image
Feminism
Kurdistan
Resistance
State Violence
Temporality
Advisor: Hanssen, Jens
Dividing Lines: Early Photogravure, Reproduction, and the History of Photography

The refinement of photomechanical techniques, which would ally photography to publishing and solve the problem of image fading, was a chief concern of the French photographic establishment from the 1850s through the 1870s. Photomechanical prints from this period exist in collections worldwide and are noted in seminal publications devoted to the history of photography, but they are rarely subjected to serious analysis. This owes in part to the persistent assumption that their only use is reproductive, in the replicative sense; to their hybrid nature as ink-based prints with photographic roots; to a teleological understanding of early photomechanical processes as tentative steps along the path to the halftone; and to their holding institutions—frequently, libraries rather than art museums, which are not obvious points of departure for visual scholarship, do not catalogue archival holdings at the item level, and infrequently employ adequate vocabularies for the description of visual materials. Over time, photomechanical prints from the dynamic period of their initial florescence have become invisible as compared to photographs from the same period. Amongst photomechanical processes, photogravure was the closest to traditional fine-art printmaking in its materials, applications, and techniques. It also had the greatest impact on the development of fine-art photography at the end of the century, as Peter Henry Emerson’s and the Pictorialists’ process of choice for the dissemination, and oftentimes elaboration, of their work. This dissertation is the first to focus on photogravure prints made prior to Emerson’s. It traces the incomparably productive and sustained photogravure career of Édouard Baldus (1813–1889) in order to comprehend the field as a whole. Baldus’s photogravures point toward three categories of production: facsimiles of line engravings; creative translations of silver-based photographs; and original images elaborated only, in their final form, as photogravures. Through analyses of all-but unknown prints and practices in each category, this study challenges assumptions about what photogravure produced and the relevance of its products to nineteenth-century audiences. It furthermore argues that the study of these seemingly marginal photographic objects can illuminate key issues in photography scholarship, such as reproduction, image manipulation, and field formation.

Keywords: Charles Amand-Durand
Édouard Baldus
Historiography
Nineteenth-Century France
Photography
Photogravure
Advisor: Bear, Jordan
Self-management Support Needs and Longitudinal Trajectories of Symptom Burden on Survival in Advanced Breast Cancer: A Population-based Study

Background: Advanced (metastatic) breast cancer patients are understudied, and with their survival increasing in recent years, understanding their symptom burden and self-management support needs across the disease trajectory becomes important. Objectives/Methods: Based on Andersen’s Behavioral Model of Health Services Utilization, this dissertation had three main objectives: 1) to characterize the self-management behaviours and self-management support needs of advanced stage cancer patients for managing chronic symptom burden using a scoping literature review methodology; in a population-based sample of metastatic breast cancer patients: 2) to examine the longitudinal trajectories of symptom burden (based on Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) symptom scores) and the influence of covariates on trajectory patterns using group-based trajectory modelling, and 3) to examine the predictive effect of longitudinally-collected symptom scores on patient time to death and the influence of patient characteristics, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, home care and palliative care on overall patient survival using joint modelling analysis. Results: A total of 55 articles within the scoping review identified a wide variety of self-management behaviours utilized by patients with advanced cancer and a wide range of self-management support needs to manage the physical effects and cope with the emotional consequences of an advanced, chronic disease. For the second objective, six distinct group trajectories for symptom burden were identified within the population-based cohort. Patients with higher baseline symptom burden were likely to follow a high, uncontrolled symptom burden trajectory over time with the trajectory patterns predicted by chemotherapy, radiotherapy, home care and palliative care in different ways. Lastly, chronic, ongoing low symptom burden was identified in patients for the third objective, with results from the joint modelling showing that symptom burden predicts patient survival. Conclusions: Metastatic breast cancer patients have heterogeneous symptom burden trajectories over time and utilize a range of self-management behaviours with diverse self-management support needs. Controlling patient symptom burden becomes important due to increased risk of death. Treatment and supportive care, such as self-management support should be tailored to meet patient needs and be based on the core skills of self-management support accordingly.

Keywords: advanced disease
health services research
longitudinal methods
metastatic breast cancer
observational study
self-management
Advisor: Howell, Doris
Neuroligin 2 Regulates Absence Seizures through GABAergic Transmission within the Thalamocortical Circuitry

Autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and epileptic seizures are heterogeneous disorders but have high rates of co-occurrence. The comorbidity of these two disorders implies the existence of potentially shared mechanisms. Neuroligins (NLGs) are a family of postsynaptic cell adhesion molecules critical for synapse formation, maturation and function. Genetic mutations in the NLG genes are also linked with ASD and other neurodevelopmental disorders. However, the role of NLGs in the pathogenic process of epileptic seizures remains unknown. In this thesis, I investigated the involvement of Neuroligin 2 (NLG2) in epileptic seizures and identified the molecular link for the shared underlying mechanisms. The deletion of NLG2, but not other NLGs in the family, resulted in spike and wave discharges (SWDs) in cortical EEG recordings and were associated with behavioral arrest that are characteristic of absence seizures. The SWDs in NLG2 knock out (KO) mice were also sensitive to the anti-absence seizure drug ethosuximide (ETX) and allosteric GABA receptor modulator diazepam, injected either systematically or locally into the thalamus, but not hippocampus or cortex. Similar to the diazepam effect, I found the diminished GABAergic transmission, but not excitatory transmission in thalamocortical (TC) neurons in NLG2 KO mice. Accordingly, I demonstrated that the restoration of GABAergic transmission of the TC neurons rescued the impaired GABAergic transmission and reduced the SWDs in NLG2 KO mice. Optogenetic activation of the thalamic reticular nucleus (nRT)-TC neuronal circuit also increased the GABAergic transmission and reduced the SWDs in NLG2 KO mice. Furthermore, I showed the NLG2 dependent autistic behaviors are associated with epileptic seizures. Anti-absence seizure drug ETX rescued behavioral arrests, anxiety and impaired social interaction in NLG2 KO mice. Optogenetic activation of nRT-TC circuit and postsynaptic overexpression of NLG2 in the TC neurons also reduced the behavioral arrests in NLG2 KO mice. Overall, these results highlight the role of NLG2 in thalamocortical circuitry during absence seizures and provide crucial evidence that NLG2 may serve as molecular link between seizures and ASD via regulating GABAergic transmission at nRT-TC circuit.

Advisor: Jia, Zhengping
The Birth of the Animal: The Politics of Interspecies Culture in China, 1900-1959

In the first sixty years of the twentieth century, China witnessed the emergence of contested expressions of nonhuman animals and cultural politics of human-animal relations. This dissertation is a historical investigation into the emergence of modern Chinese conceptions of the animal and their effects on modern Chinese culture. Many of these concepts and practices challenged the dominant modern divide between the human and the (nonhuman) animal. They also paved the way for critical cultural practices that envisioned social, ethical, and affective bonds between humans and animals, and created alternative imaginations of the human. In order to prove this contention, this dissertation examines a series of animal-related concepts and practices via literary texts, translations, popular science essays, cartoons, and social campaign documents at five moments stretching from the early twentieth century to the first decade of socialist China. The dissertation organizes the sources chronologically. Each chapter considers a distinct set of conceptions of the animal and the human in the related historical moment. I examine two contested approaches to human-animal relations in the first decade of the twentieth century in my first chapter. One is represented by anarchist Li Shizeng李石曾 (1881-1973), who envisioned a world of a multi-species coexistence without hierarchies. The other approach is associated with Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) and Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885-1967), both of whom incorporated a construction of brutalized animality in their early writings. The emergence of Chinese popular science essays was a result of the epistemic politics between European animal science and the technique of taxidermy and Chinese philological and folk conceptions and practices of species. I prove this intermingling via Jia Zuzhang’s 賈祖璋(1901-1988) bird writings from 1920s and 1930s in my second chapter. I also argue that the writings of Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883-1943) re-imagined animals as half-humans—unfixed subjects––who actively receive the pains and bodily affects from others in my third. My case studies of Feng Zikai 豐子愷 (1898-1975) and Hongyi 弘一 (1880-1942) grounds my fourth chapter. Through their exploration of the new artistic form of manhua 漫畫 (cartoons), they rendered visible and sensible invisible violence towards nonhuman sentient beings. Feng and Hongyi’s works re-inscribed the interspecies experiences of pleasure, play, and exile upon memories of war. Finally, I focus on the contested conceptions of the animal in the Eliminating Four Pests Campaign in the 1950s because this campaign (and in resistance to it) emblematize the politics of interspecies affects in twentieth-century China.

Keywords: humanism
interspecies affects
modern Chinese literature and culture
the animal
the human-animal relationship
Advisor: Meng, Yue
Development of Flexible Pressure and Strain Sensors for Electronic Skin Applications

Human intervention can be replaced through development of devices with a broad range of sensory capabilities for various applications from human-robot-interaction to wearable electronics. Similar to the five human senses, sensors interface with their surroundings to stimulate a suitable response or action. The sense of touch which arises in human skin is among the most challenging senses to emulate due to its ultra-high sensitivity. Development of flexible pressure and strain sensing devices with human-like sensory capabilities has thus been the focus of many studies. Some novel challenging issues brought forth in this area are fabrication of flexible pressure sensors with tunable parameters and high sensitivity, development of a comprehensive analytical model capturing their pressure sensing performance, and fabrication of large strain flexible strain sensors with high stretchability and sensitivity and low hysteresis. Therefore, this work attempts to address some of these issues and provide a platform for further optimization and enhancement of flexible pressure and strain sensors. The research focuses on two main sections: i) Flexible pressure sensors, and ii) Large strain flexible strain sensors. For pressure sensing purposes, the change in the contact resistance is utilized as the main sensing mechanism within two structures as a conductive hydrogel and an interlocked microstructured elastomer. The former is constituted from hollow microspheres whereas the latter contains protruding micropyramids. A semi-analytical model is also developed to capture the change in the contact resistance in response to a mechanically applied stress. For strain sensing purposes, flexible and highly stretchable nano/micro fibers are fabricated using an electrospinning technique. The developed fibers possess shape memory properties which contribute to an enhanced recovery of the sensor after undergoing large deformations. Furthermore, using a thermoplastic elastomer, strain sensors with stretchability up to 1000%, high sensitivity and low hysteresis are fabricated using a modified electrospinning technique.

Keywords: Constriction Resistance Model
Flexible Pressure Sensors
Interlocked Flexible Sensors
Large Strain Flexible Strain Sensors
Shape Memory Properties
Stretchable Electrospun Fibers
Advisor: Naguib, Hani E
Kwon, Roy H
Co-administration of Complementary Therapies for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Reduction in Type 2 Diabetes

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the main cause of mortality in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Selected dietary and herbal supplements with complementary mechanisms of action have been indicated in management of diabetes along with standard therapy. The objective of this thesis was to determine if a 24-weeks co-administration of 4 diet and herbal supplements will improve CVD risk factors beyond conventional therapy in T2D. The project consisted of a randomized, double-blind, controlled trial with two parallel groups involving 104 individuals with T2D (HbA1c: 70.05%) which were randomly assigned to test (10g viscous fiber, 60g Salba-Chia, 1.5g American and 0.75g Korean red ginseng extracts daily), or energy and fibre matched control (53g oat bran, 25g inulin, 25g maltodextrose and 2.25g wheat bran daily) for 24 weeks. Fasting blood was drawn at weeks 0, 12 and 24. Primary and secondary endpoints was change in HbA1c, blood pressure and serum lipids over 24 weeks. The study was conducted at two centres: St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada and Vuk Vrhovac University Clinic in Zagreb, Croatia. Results were computed using an intent-to-treat analysis with multiple imputations. Eighty-seven participants completed the trial (test n=44; control n=43). The test intervention significantly reduced HbA1c (0.270.13% (p=0.03) and 24-hour systolic blood pressure by 3.81.2 mmgHg (p

Keywords: Cardiovascular Disease
Cardiovascular Disease Risk
Clinical Trial
Diabetes
Fibre
Ginseng
Advisor: Vuksan, Vladimir
The Dominant Role of Surface States in Electron Transport and Chemical Sensing in InAs Nanowires

Semiconductor nanowires have shown great promise for applications in electronic, optoelectronic, and chemical sensing devices. Electronic transport in nanowires is confined in two lateral dimensions which obscures the distinction between surface and bulk. Consequently, the properties of nanowire surfaces are intimately tied to the operation and performance of nanowire-based devices. This is most evident in InAs nanowires where the high electron mobility, low effective mass, and native surface accumulation layer augments the unavoidable connection between transport and surface properties. Because of their small size, conventional surface science and capacitance-based measurements for the characterization of nanowire surfaces and surface states are either extremely difficult or not possible. We develop novel conductance-based methods to characterize surface states in InAs nanowire field-effect transistors revealing the spectral distribution of donor-like surface states in the InAs NW bandgap. The effects of chemical surface passivations on the InAs NW transport properties and surface states are characterized. The best results are obtained from 1-octadecanethiol which was found to decrease the density of donor-like surface states in the bandgap and increase the field-effect mobility by ∼ 100%. Capture and emission processes from surface states exhibited thermally activated character and caused hysteresis and relaxation in the nanowire conductance. Slow surface trap densities as high as 4×10^13 cm^−2 are observed when measurement time intervals are expanded. A time-dependent transport model based on non-equilibrium carrier populations and thermally activated capture and emission is constructed that shows excellent agreement with experiment. We demonstrate that the spectral distribution and dynamic characteristics of surface states dictate the transport properties of InAs nanowires. The mechanism of chemical sensing by InAs nanowires is elucidated towards ethanol and NO2. Physisorption and chemisorption mechanisms are identified, and the time-dependent transport model is adapted to describe and predict the sensor response. A new regime of highly sensitive chemical sensing unique to nanowires is identified based on the single molecule sensor response where ethanol concentrations as low as 10 ppb are detected at room temperature by physisorption. Sensing by physisorption is shown to be preferable to chemisorption due to the fast time scale and reversibility of the sensor response.

Keywords: field-effect-transistor
InAs
nanowire
sensor
surface state
transport
Advisor: Ruda, Harry E
Photonic Devices using Coupled Plasmonic Structures

The loss-confinement trade-off is the key limitation that prevents realistic utilization of plasmonic components in photonic integrated circuits. Although coupled-mode plasmonic structures can help alleviate the trade-off, stringent symmetry requirements limit the fabrication tolerance and the optical functionalities that can be supported. In this dissertation, a coupled hybrid plasmonic waveguide (CHPW) capable of supporting both long-range propagation and subwavelength confinement is presented as a versatile platform for designing integrated optical devices. The supermodes guided by CHPWs are formed via the coupling of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) and hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) modes across a common metal layer. By manipulating the destructive interference between these highly dissimilar plasmonic modes, it is shown that the modal field overlapping the lossy metal region can be minimized without being significantly redistributed. As such, experimental realization of CHPW shows propagation loss and mode area of only 0.07dB/um and 0.002um^2 respectively. As these attributes are fabrication-tolerant and wavelength-insensitive, CHPW micro-ring resonator with loaded Q-factor of 3276 is also demonstrated. The advantage of CHPW as a device platform is that it can also support active functionalities. Specifically, the metal-semiconductor interface where the SPP portion of the supermode is guided can serve as an internal photoemission-based Schottky photodetector. Experimentally, a 20um CHPW photodetector demonstrates responsivity of 80mA/W and sensitivity of

Advisor: Helmy, Amr M