VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Somewhere in the Middle: Understandings of Friendship and Approaches to Social Engagement among Postsecondary Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract This study examined the social experiences and understandings of friendship of postsecondary students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ten students from Ontario postsecondary institutions participated in semi-structured interviews and data were analyzed according to the principles of modified grounded theory. Participants’ responses indicate that they had conventional understandings of friendship that included compatible interests and aspects of intimacy. They expressed confidence about their strengths, personalities, and social abilities, and were motivated to develop and maintain friendships and participate in social activities with their peers. They also described experiencing communication challenges and difficulty engaging in various social environments. Participants positioned themselves as “somewhere in the middle” of peers with and without ASD in terms of social functioning, viewed supports as appropriate for others with ASD but not themselves, and employed strategic approaches to socializing in order to balance their desire for social connection with the impacts of the challenges that they experienced. They described areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction or ambivalence with regard to their social lives. They expressed positive views about their friends, social activities, and ability to manage social situations, and described feelings of discomfort, concerns about making social errors, being evaluated negatively by others, the number of friends they had and how much time they spent with them. Participants’ descriptions revealed two pathways in terms of context selection, social engagement, and satisfaction that correspond with gender. Females prioritized maintaining contact with friends from before postsecondary and described higher levels of social engagement and satisfaction than males who emphasized socializing with peers from postsecondary. The relationship between context selection and level of social engagement on satisfaction was mediated by actively pursuing social goals and having a gradual approach to social development. The findings of this study have implications for research, advocacy, and support provision. These include the importance of accounting for differences among individuals with ASD in terms of their experiences, perspectives, skills, and goals, and the extent to which they identify with their diagnoses. Supports may also vary in relation to characteristics such as gender and cognitive abilities, and factors such as life stage and environmental contexts.

Keywords: Adults
Autism
Friendship
Postsecondary Students
Advisor: Ferrari, Michel
A New Approach to Active Removal of Space Debris

As a result of human space activities for over sixty years, there exist numerous man-made debris objects in the Earth orbits. Such objects not only jeopardize current operations of important space assets, but can also seriously hinder future space missions through a potential chain reaction of colliding space debris. This research addresses mitigation and remediation of the space debris environment. The thesis entails research in four critical subject areas: i) characterization of the debris environment, ii) assessment of the active debris removal methods proposed in the literature, iii) detailed engineering of a novel removal concept using a CubeSat spacecraft, called Deorbiter CubeSat, for sizable debris objects in low-Earth orbit, and iv) design of attitude and orbit controllers for the proposed spacecraft. The research first develops a probabilistic method for the prioritization of debris objects to be consid- ered in near-future removal missions. Then, a comparative study and in-depth analysis is conducted on the removal methods proposed in the literature to investigate their viability, through a number of multi- criteria assessment techniques. A Monte Carlo analysis is used in the study to quantify the intrinsic uncertainty associated with the space debris population. Next, a new debris removal mission utilizing Deorbiter CubeSats is conceptualized, and the design of CubeSat subsystems is detailed. A mothership spacecraft carries and deploys a number of Deorbiter CubeSats into designated orbits near their target debris. Each CubeSat uses an eight-unit form factor, and consists of commercially-available components with substantial space heritage. The actual performance specifications of the components are used to examine the proposed space debris removal approach. Finally, control schemes are synthesized for the critical maneuvers in the mission, using a unilateral low-thrust propulsion and a three-axis reaction wheel systems onboard the CubeSat, namely, i) concurrent rendezvous and attitude synchronization maneuver for approaching and attaching to the debris, ii) detumbling maneuver for stabilizing the debris attitude motion, and iii) deorbiting maneuver for transferring the debris from its original orbit to a deorbit altitude along a time-optimal trajectory. Several numerical simulations verify and validate the proposed approach as well as the control schemes.

Keywords: Active Debris Removal
Attitude and Orbit Control
Attitude Dynamics
Deorbiter CubeSat
Orbital Dynamics
Space Debris
Advisor: Emami, M. Reza
Measures of Adherence to Varenicline: Impact on Smoking Cessation Outcomes

There are currently over one billion tobacco smokers worldwide and tobacco use remains a major contributor to the global disease burden. In addition to prevention, effective treatment for tobacco dependence is necessary to reduce the overall prevalence of smoking and tobacco-related disease. A significant barrier to effective treatment is low medication adherence. While varenicline is the most efficacious smoking cessation pharmacotherapy currently on the market, the impact of adherence on varenicline-assisted cessation has not been fully explored. This thesis investigated the validity of different measures of adherence to varenicline, the impact of adherence on cessation and the underlying factors contributing to low adherence. We found poor associations between self-report pill count (a widely used approach to measure smoking treatment adherence) and salivary varenicline drug concentration [Spearman rho ranges: 0.10-0.15; rate of correct classification (area under the curve ranges: 0.53-0.59)]. Approximately 20% of participants misreported pill counts relative to their varenicline drug concentration. When these individuals were excluded, the associations improved modestly suggesting self-report pill count overestimates adherence and that direct measures of adherence, such as drug concentrations, are superior. In terms of the relationship between adherence and cessation outcomes, we demonstrated that adherence based on varenicline drug concentration was predictive of both early and long-term cessation success (odds ratio ranges: 1.92-3.16), whereas adherence based on self-report pill count was not. Furthermore, a pharmacogenomic biomarker’s impact on cessation (nicotine metabolite ratio by treatment) was strengthened when adherence was confirmed by varenicline drug concentration. As lower adherence was associated with a lower likelihood of cessation success, we explored factors that lowered adherence using mediation modelling. We found that early nausea, a varenicline-related adverse effect, was associated with early-, mid- and long-term cessation success, and that this association was mediated in part by adherence, measured by varenicline concentration. Overall, our findings demonstrate the superiority of varenicline drug concentration in contrast to self-report pill count as a measure of adherence to varenicline, and provide avenues for enhancing cessation rates and reducing smoking-related disease burden.

Keywords: Addiction
Adherence
Nicotine
Tobacco Dependence
Treatment
Varenicline
Advisor: Tyndale, Rachel F
Exploring the Relationship between Skin Tone and Self-esteem Among Females in South Asian Families in India: A Multigenerational Comparison

Colourism or skin colour stratification is a persistent dilemma for people in India. Socially and culturally constructed definitions of beauty based on skin tone, represent Western realities and continue to sustain beauty ideals that shape the beliefs and practices around fair skin for women. The study of skin tone and its relationship to self-esteem is essential in expanding upon the limited research examining the intersections between body image and the sociocultural experiences of South Asian Indian women. Against the backdrop of Western hegemony, the research discusses how a fair skin beauty ideal impacts different generations of women in New Delhi. More specifically, investigating the relationship between skin tone and self-esteem among women in South Asian families through a multigenerational comparison, provides a deeper understanding of how skin tone bias is perpetuated, while reinforcing and normalizing white heteropatriarchy. Skin tone bias is disseminated through the family, culture and media. The narratives highlight how skin tone bias manifests itself among adult women in different South Asian family units according to their life stage and membership in the family. Women from the young age group (generation) had the lowest self-esteem and faced the most pressure to conform to white skin beauty ideals when compared to older generations in their families. Skin tone appeared to be heavily emphasized for these young women, namely in the context of marriage.

Keywords: body image
colourism
hegemony
self-esteem
skin color
skin tone bias
Advisor: Wane, Njoki
PHIP Promotes Breast Tumor Initiation by Facilitating Histone Modifications of the Genes that Drive Metabolic Reprogramming

Breast cancer is a common form of cancer among women worldwide and leads to a considerable number of deaths every year in spite of various methods of treatment. One of the major advances has been the identification of a small population of cells in breast tumors known as ‘cancer stem cells’; these cells are associated with high rates of tumor recurrence and resilience to any existing method of treatment. Extensive research from past decades has led to a better understanding of the development and progression of breast cancer. However, substantially less is known about the deregulated signaling and metabolic pathways in cancer cells. In this study, we investigated the role of a bromodomain (BRD)-containing protein, Pleckstrin Homology domain Interacting Protein (PHIP) in breast cancer. PHIP has been implicated in the regulation of insulin signaling in fibroblasts, and cell proliferation and survival of pancreatic β-cells, yet its role in cancer is largely unknown. Here we show that endogenous PHIP is elevated in breast cancer cells, and that certain cell lines depend on PHIP for their growth. Overexpression of PHIP in immortalized mammary epithelial cells (MCF10A) increased the mammosphere number and also enriched the CD44high/CD24low cancer stem cell population. Moreover, the induction of PHIP promoted mammary tumor formation in NOD SCID mice. Consistent with its function as an epigenetic modifier, some of these effects only required transient induction of PHIP. Indeed, PHIP initiated an epigenetic reprogramming of cell metabolism toward aerobic glycolysis through up-regulation of Myc and hypoxia inducing factor 1α (HIF1α). We also show that PHIP increases post translational modifications (PTMs) that are associated with gene activation such as H3K27ac, H3K9ac and H3K4me3 on its key target gene promoter/hypoxia response elements (HRE) regions. In addition, knockdown of either Myc or HIF1α blocked PHIP-induced increase in mammosphere-forming ability of MCF10A cells. Thus, PHIP is a major driver of tumorigenesis in certain tumor cells, providing a new target for the treatment of aggressive breast cancer driven by this oncogene.

Advisor: Rozakis Adcock, Maria
The L2 Production of Spanish Taps and Trills by L1 Romanian and L1 French Speakers

This dissertation explores two learning problems in L2 phonology: (1) acquiring a new L2 distribution when both sounds exist in the L1 as allophones; (2) acquiring the same L2 distribution when neither sound has a direct L1 counterpart. Previous literature has investigated these problems separately, focusing more on the first situation than the second. To explore these scenarios, I analysed the L2 production of Spanish taps and trills, which are contrastive word-medially intervocalically, by 10 L1 Romanian and 10 French speakers. 13 native Spanish controls were also included. These language pairings were chosen because Romanian has both rhotics as allophones (albeit in free variation), with the tap being the most common, and the trill sometimes occurring word-initially, while French has neither. Data was elicited using two tasks: a sentence reading (more formal, orthography) and a picture description task (less formal, no orthography). The stimuli included nonce and real words containing word-initial and word-medial rhotics. Because a secondary objective was to provide empirical evidence and acoustic analyses for rhotics in Romanian, participants also completed similar tasks in their L1. The results confirm previous observations that the most common Romanian rhotic is the tap. The trill mainly appears word-initially. The L2 data showed that the tap was less difficult than the trill, with both learner groups producing taps at high rates. However, both learner groups had low trilling rates. Though the L1 Romanian group produced more trills than the L1 French group overall, when the position of trills was considered, there were no differences between groups. Specifically, both learner groups had significantly higher trilling rates word-medially than initially, corroborating previous research, and there were no group differences. Furthermore, speakers produced more of the expected rhotics in the sentence reading than in the picture description task. Overall, given the low trilling rates, these findings suggest that recategorizing L1 allophones may be just as challenging as learning a new L2 distribution that does not have L1 counterparts, though the difficulties may be due to different reasons. Finally, this study also provides acoustic data supporting previous observations regarding Romanian rhotics.

Advisor: Colantoni, Laura
The Impact of Open-ended Exercises on Student Experiences in Introductory Computer Science

Improving student engagement and learning within introductory Computer Science (CS1) courses has been heavily studied within CS Education (CSE) research due to their fundamental role in a student’s early experiences with learning foundational CS concepts. One issue with many CS1 courses is that the practice of standardized grading leads to limited opportunities for creative thinking, which is problematic since the CS industry often demands and encourages creativity. This dissertation examines the impact of incorporating opportunities for creativity into a CS1 course through the use of open-ended exercises. Data was collected from 284 students in a CS1 course, where roughly half of the students completed exercises which included an open-ended aspect that allowed them to make their own decisions about their projects. The other half completed similar exercises throughout the semester but with a specifically defined, closed-ended checklist of requirements. A mixed-methods analysis of survey data collected throughout the course showed a significant connection between open-ended exercises and (1) increased motivation, especially in terms of confidence and satisfaction, (2) faster self-efficacy gains in the middle of the term, and (3) stronger feelings of enjoyment and ownership about the exercise material. Although no effect on academic performance was found, open-ended exercises had important attitudinal effects, improving personal learning experiences by fostering positive feelings in students about the coursework. The data also suggested the potential for open-ended exercises to promote diversity in CS1 by positively impacting motivation and self-efficacy particularly for female, nonmajor and inexperienced students.

Keywords: assignments
computer science
creativity
motivation
open-ended
self-efficacy
Advisor: Brett, Clare
An Adaptive Approach to Optimal Sparse Mobile-target Search Planning using Heterogeneous Agents

Planning an effective search for locating mobile-targets is essential in a variety of scenarios (e.g., search and rescue, environmental monitoring, law enforcement, etc.). Effective planning is especially important when resources are sparse (i.e., they are insufficient to search a significant fraction of the area of interest). For example, in wilderness search and rescue, where the search area is typically much larger than the search team can cover, effective planning is necessary to locate a lost person as soon as possible and maximize their probability of survival. Most research to-date has investigated the topic of effective search planning that makes use of homogeneous resources. Heterogeneous search teams (e.g., a team employing static sensors, unmanned ground vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles) could enhance the variety and overall quantity of resources deployed for search. Additionally, due to the varied nature of heterogeneous search resources, synergies between resource types could be exploited to achieve effectiveness that surpasses what would be achievable when working independently. This dissertation presents the results of an in-depth investigation into the topic of search planning for locating mobile targets. Specifically, it presents novel methods and strategies for planning a mobile-target search with heterogeneous search resources to maximize the probability of success. The strategies and methods presented herein are: (i) a spatiotemporally optimized dynamic static-sensor network deployment planning method, (ii) two static-mobile hybrid search planning methodologies, and (iii) an aerial-ground hybrid search planning method. These methodologies were developed with an application to wilderness search and rescue in mind, assuming sparseness of search resources, the existence of terrain, and limited information regarding the target. However, despite this focus, the problem formulation and solution methods presented herein are applicable to a wide variety of problems in other fields as well. The validity of the methodologies is supported by the results of extensive simulated search experiments. By developing search planning methodologies for heterogeneous search teams which include static-sensors, mobile ground units, and mobile aerial units, this research has expanded the range of resources and tools available to searchers to improve search success probability in real world mobile-target search.

Keywords: multi agent coordination
search planning
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)
unmanned ground vehicles (UGV)
wilderness search and rescue
wireless sensor networks (WSN)
Advisor: Benhabib, Beno
Nejat, Goldie
Object-orieinted Representation and Interaction: A Step Towards Cognitively Direct Interaction

Since the dawn of civilization, we have striven to invent tools to support our productivity and creativity. A key role of these tools is to maintain, display, and provide means to operate on certain representations of information. The ideal representations visualize information in forms that can be perceived effortlessly and afford interactions which enable users to reason, analyze, and make sense of the information. Perhaps the most complex tool invented so far is digital computer. Since its inception, research has been striving to leverage computation to augment our productivity and creativity. The increasingly fast computation has shifted the bottleneck of employing computation from the hardware specifications to the representation of and interaction with digital information. The Window, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) user interface has been the dominant Graphical User Interface (GUI) framework of digital computers for 50 years. The many problems of the WIMP have long been recognized and yet unresolved: it relies on tedious manipulation of complex interface elements to achieve simple tasks; with mouse and keyboard as primary input, it does not effectively leverage the rich interaction capabilities we possess. We contribute a novel representation, the Object-Oriented Representation. By representing abstract elements in users’ workflow as concrete objects, the Object-Oriented Representation offloads abstract content and structure from users’ minds to external interfaces, which reduces cognitive load. By directly matching users’ internal representations of the information, it enables users to directly articulate their intentions, rather than translating them into tedious actions constrained by inappropriate representations. The smallest unit of GUI, attribute, is first objectified as Attribute Object. Attribute Object affords rich interactions which were tedious or impossible, and allows for the composition of higher-level elements to address other complex tasks, including Collection Object which holistically addresses the many problems of interacting with multiple objects, and Mapping Object which facilitates the creation of complex data visualization. This exploration demonstrates the potential of a new representation which can unleash and boost our creativity and productivity. A set of design principles are further distilled, which describe how representation, interaction, and functionality should be combined to enable of cognitively direct interaction.

Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction
Advisor: Wigdor, Daniel