VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Digital Curation of Broadcasting Archives at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: Curation Culture and Evaluative Practice

Digital curation scholarship has become interested in how technical and computational processes and systems intersect with human and social factors in digital curation practices across curation domains. This dissertation contributes to this knowledge by examining the digital curation of broadcasting news archives, a considerable but underexplored curation domain. The study is based on participant observation and interview data collected at the news archive of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The data is analyzed using a practice theory approach that combines social, material, and cultural theoretical perspectives. Specifically, the dissertation examines how archivists at the CBC evaluate and enrich information in the context of their daily work, and it describes the institutional, organizational, and technological elements constitutive of this context. The analysis reveals how the CBC’s transformation from analogue to digital infrastructure has redefined the organizational roles and the boundaries of expertise at the news archive. It further reveals how the CBC’s institutional identity sets the goals of digital curation and how digital broadcasting systems are adapted to reflect preestablished procedural and symbolic traditions of work. Lastly, the dissertation examines the constitutive rules and heuristics of evaluation at the news archive and finds that evaluative practices are consequential during all stages of the curation lifecycle but are particularly salient at the stages of acquisition (when value is established), cataloguing (when value is enriched), and reuse (when value is negotiated to fit into a new context). Based on these findings two arguments are formulated. It is argued, first, that aside from being supported by socio-technical systems, digital curation practices are also supported by cultural systems. These cultural systems sustain collective action and situated cognition by providing vocabularies of motives and strategies for action. They are shaped by normative institutional frameworks, transmitted through material artifacts, and refracted through subjective interpretations. Second, it is argued that evaluative practices are an integral part of digital curation and a prerequisite for enhancing the value of data and digital materials. They are interwoven with social and cultural processes, used in adaptive ways, and difficult to formalize, as such they will vary across curation domains and practice contexts.

Keywords: broadcasting archives
culture
digital curation
evaluation
information practice
practice theory
Advisor: Dallas, Costis
Development of an Evolutionary Algorithm-Guided, High-Dimensional Optimization for Discovery of Serum-Free Media Formulations for Human Primary Cell Expansion

Substitution of serum supplements with chemically-defined components and creating defined media formulations optimized for cell culture is required for controlling the quality and consistency of cell therapy products. This result in a complex, large-scale optimization problem due to potentially uncharacterized factor effects and the large number of factors and dose levels involved, making conventional optimization methods unfeasible. In this study, a high-dimensional optimization (e.g. up to 15 factors and 6 dose levels) based on experimental feedback control provided a framework for the identification of serum-free media formulations for human primary cell expansion. The model-free approach utilized Differential Evolution principles as the foundational driving force, utilizing an iterative optimization process combining experimentation with algorithmic analysis to guide the combinatorial optimization of culture components based solely on the observed biological response. The efficiency of this strategy was first demonstrated using TF-1 cells, a serum-dependent human myeloid progenitor cell line, and the applicability to wider primary cell cultures demonstrated in the expansion of T cells isolated from 3 different subjects. In both cell types, a set of serum-free formulations that supported cell expansion comparable or superior to the commonly used serum-containing formulations was observed while testing less than 1x10-5 % of the total search space in vitro. Post hoc multivariable analyses with the tested formulations and corresponding cell expansions were used to gain further insights into the contributions of individual factors and factor interactions. This study presented an approach that was capable of overcoming the challenges of high-dimensional optimization problems by demonstrating the discovery and optimization of serum-free culture formulations for human hematopoietic cell expansion culture. Conducting the entire optimization based on information generated through selective exploration of a defined solution space guided by an algorithm, and without the assistance of any pre-existing model, presents a framework to streamline and accelerate the optimization process for efficient development of optimized media formulations.

Advisor: Audet, Julie
Quantitatively Assessing the Effects of Mutations on Signaling Pathway Function

Cells receive diverse stimuli from their surroundings and process them into distinct physiological responses through signal transduction pathways. Mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways (MAPKs) are responsible for many cellular functions. The overarching goal of this thesis was to study the effects of mutations on MAPK signaling function in living cells using complementary systems biology and genetic engineering methods. First, I asked how mutations could rescue overexpression driven decrease in signaling. I identified several variants of the yeast MAPK, Fus3, including those containing premature stop codons (PSC) which are naturally readthrough, that rescued mating function in an overexpression background. The location of the mutated residue in the protein structure and its identity play a role in determining the impact of the PSC on pathway function. These results suggest that selection can compensate for protein overexpression by introducing PSCs at permitted positions. Next, I quantified the effects of mutations on yeast mating and HOG signaling. I used the information theory measure of mutual information to measure signaling and introduced change in mutual information as the measure of the effects of mutations on signaling. I showed that information transmission in HOG signaling is more robust to spontaneous mutations than in mating signaling. I controlled for some of the possible reasons for this difference, redundancy and mutational target size, and found that although HOG signaling mutational robustness is compromised, it is still more robust suggesting that other mechanisms play a role in maintaining this mutational robustness. Finally, I compared the effects of the mutations in a shared component on information transmission in the pathways and found that large effect mutations have large effects on information transmission in both signaling pathways and that some of these effects are opposite. Overall, in this thesis work, we found both non-intuitive and intuitive results and ways to quantify both. Applying the tools of systems biology and genetic engineering is a comprehensive and complementary approach to answering evolutionary questions.

Keywords: Evolution
Signaling
Synthetic Biology
Yeast
Advisor: Moses, Alan M
The Narrative and Descriptive Influence of Latin Hagiography on Beowulf

The search for sources of elements in Beowulf has provided significant insight into the poem’s literary context, thematic makeup, and historical setting. While much value has been derived from identifying Norse and Old English analogues, less attention has been paid to Latin texts. If we accept that the Beowulf-poet was literate, Latinate, and possibly monastic, the influence of Latin literature—particularly hagiography—emerges as a distinct probability. This dissertation suggests that the influence of hagiography manifests itself in similarities of narrative and description, and examines two common depictions found in both saints’ lives and Beowulf: sea journeys and the hostile wilderness. Through schematizing these scenes, it establishes a set of conventions underlying their depiction and compares them to their analogous scenes in Beowulf. The voyages of seafaring saints can typically be articulated into overarching narrative components comprising a call to action, a commission and blessing, a procession to the shore and boarding, a voyage aboard ship, an arrival sequence, disembarking, and an onshore meeting, each component featuring remarkably durable elements. Beowulf’s two sea journeys echo the structural components of these vitae closely, and their corresponding elements tend to reflect those alignments found in hagiography. Though less tied to narrative structure, sacred hermits’ wilderness homes typically depict a robust complement of primary elements: trees, water, mountainous stone, a route, hostile wildlife, fables about the region, negative descriptors, and fabricated space. Readers of Beowulf will be familiar with these elements as they appear throughout Hrothgar’s description of Grendel’s mere and its subsequent appearance in the text. From these observations, it appears that the Beowulf-poet was incorporating the narrative and descriptive tendencies conventional to Latin hagiography into the Old English poem in spite of divergent subject-matter. These findings serve to reinforce the value of examining the Latinate literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England and its influence on Beowulf. Some compelling analogues within specific vitae suggest that further inquiry into their individual influence on the poem will be rewarded. However, this dissertation most clearly demonstrates the continuing value of seeking sources for elements of Beowulf in the wider conventions of hagiography.

Keywords: Beowulf
Hagiography
Literature
Medieval
Advisor: Townsend, David
Precomposed and Extemporized: Rediscovering the Life and Improvisatory Work of Canadian Organist Victor Togni (1935 – 1965)

The legacy of the Canadian organist Victor Togni (1935 – 1965) lies in his contributions to church and organ music as a performer, composer, pedagogue, and improviser. Considered by Jean-Jacques Grunenwald as his most gifted and brilliant student, lauded by Olivier Messiaen for his abilities as a composer, and praised by Healey Willan as being “the most accomplished and brilliant Catholic organist in Canada”, Victor Togni was a rising star of Canadian organ music. His early passing at the age of 30 in a car accident undoubtedly contributed to the dearth of published materials on his life and music. Though public awareness of Togni is limited, this dissertation brings to light substantial previously-unpublished materials, revealing a missing link in the cultural mosaic of Canadian music. It provides a biographical text on Victor Togni and assesses his role in the field of organ performance and improvisation in the mid-1900s. It addresses Togni’s role as an organist-improviser in North America, his philosophies on concert/liturgical improvisation, as well as the philosophical influence of his teachers, including Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, Jean Langlais, Marcel Dupré, and Olivier Messiaen, among others. Seventeen recordings of Togni improvising, of which fifteen are unpublished, are analyzed and contextualized. Togni’s efforts to advance the field of organ improvisation in Canada are considered, with particular importance given to Togni’s unpublished draft method book, The Liturgical Organ Improvisation. This dissertation also analyzes Togni’s well-known precomposed organ suite Five Liturgical Inventions with a view to asserting the presence of improvisatory formulas drawn from his draft improvisation method book. Furthermore, several of Togni’s extemporized works themselves are transcribed and also analyzed, showing a more complete picture of Togni’s improvisatory style. The centrality of Togni’s unpublished method book both in his precomposed and his extemporized works is shown, reemphasizing his efforts to advance the field of organ improvisation in Canada.

Keywords: Canada
Improvisation
Music
Organ
Pedagogy
Togni
Advisor: Komisaruk, Kevin
Teacher Insights: Self-efficacy and Professional Development Needs Related to Supporting Children with High-functioning Autism

This qualitative research explored the knowledge, self-efficacy, and comfort of general education teachers supporting learners with high-functioning autism (HFA) in the mainstream classroom and their thoughts on related teacher professional development experiences and needs. 5 primary teachers from 5 different Ontario school boards participated in in-person, semi-structured interviews. 3 main findings emerged out of the data: (1) familiarity with students with HFA had a positive impact on teachers and students, which related to increased teacher self-efficacy and understanding of learners with HFA, changes to practice, and benefits to peers and other staff, with participants who had taught the greatest numbers of students with HFA reporting higher confidence ratings and demonstrating more knowledge of HFA; (2) systemic barriers impacted teachers’ ability to support all students, such as inadequate teacher preparation, inaccessibility of services, interventions, and physical and personnel resources; and (3) teachers envisioned their ideal professional development (PD) to support teacher learning, which included what they wanted to learn about HFA, factors increasing or decreasing the likelihood of their participation, as well as preferred characteristics and formats of PD, with all teachers underscoring the importance of opportunities to collaborate and problematize relevant classroom concerns with colleagues. Implications for teacher education programs and ongoing professional development for teachers, as well as potential directions for future research, are presented.

Keywords: Asperger's Syndrome
Autism
Elementary school
Neoliberalism
Professional development
Teacher self-efficacy
Advisor: Cooper, Karyn
Online Physical Design And Materialization in Scalable Data Management

The technique of materializing intermediate results and reusing these results to answer future queries is applied widely in data management because it can greatly improve the performance of real-life workloads. Although it has proven to be a crucial performance factor, the physical design of data is usually considered independent of materialization. One problem of tackling physical design and materialization independently is that it neglects the correlation between these two techniques and may produce suboptimal solutions. The access patterns of real-life workloads typically evolve frequently, and the evolving access patterns bring the challenge of automatically adapting the physical design to the workload. An effective approach to solve this problem is an online physical design, which does not assume prior knowledge of the workload but adapts the design based on the history of the workload. In this thesis, we discuss a general problem of combining physical design and materialization to improve workload performance. We prove our solution to the general problem is broadly applicable to instances of this problem by systematically investigating: (1) partition and re-partition materialized views to honor the access patterns of non-update workloads; and (2) allocate data dynamically between streaming engines and analytical engines in a federated system for hybrid workloads consisting of data ingestion, transactions, and analysis. We then extend our research by showing a preliminary study on how to apply our solution to a third instance of this problem: tune data co-location and materialization for non-update workloads. Our techniques work in an online fashion and thus are capable of adapting the design automatically to evolving workloads. We demonstrate that our techniques of integrating physical design and materialization significantly outperform approaches that solve them independently and thus greatly improve the workload performance.

Keywords: Database
Materialization
Physical design
System
Advisor: Miller, Renee J
How Children Cognitively Process and Emotionally Respond to Victimizing Others: A Multimethod Developmental Approach

After violating ethical norms, such as stealing, why do some children feel positively-valenced, selfish emotions while others feel negatively-valenced, kind emotions? Psychologists have argued that, while victimizing others, how people cognitively process environmental cues related to conflicting selfish and other-oriented concerns influences how they emotionally respond. Yet, no studies have examined these assertions during childhood, when kind emotions develop most. In this dissertation, I tested these assertions using multiple methods and study designs with samples of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds. In Study 1, I used eye tracking and found that, across age groups, attentional tendencies (calculated as the percentage of time children visually attended to other-oriented minus self-serving cues) positively and negatively related to kind and selfish emotions, respectively. In Study 2, I incorporated facial expression recognition technology to examine how concurrent measures of attentional tendencies and sad facial expressions related to each other, as well as kind and selfish emotions. I found that attentional tendencies better predicted sad facial expressions than vice versa, but that only sad facial expressions were directly related to kind and selfish emotions. In Study 3, I experimentally tested three techniques for promoting children’s cognitive processing of other-oriented cues, with the goal of enhancing their kind emotions. In the other-focused and self-focused role-taking conditions, children were instructed to think about, respectively, how the victim would feel and how they would feel if they were the victim during each transgression. In the orienting condition, children were only drawn to attend to the victim’s face via an animation. The results revealed that children in the orienting condition reported the most kind emotions and significantly more than the other-focused, but not the self-focused, condition. Overall, this dissertation points to the impact of children’s cognitive processing on their emotional responding during ethical transgressions. In doing so, it offers new insights for theory and the practice of parents, teachers, and interventionists.

Keywords: attention
development
facial expressions
kindness
morality
transgressions
Advisor: Malti, Tina
Longitudinal Patterning of Structured Light and its Applications in Sensing

Recent advances in laser beam shaping using tools such as Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) or phase plates has made it possible to engineer various properties of light in a sophisticated manner, thus opening many new possibilities in Structured Light. In particular, much attention has been dedicated to engineering the properties of non-diffracting light beams, mainly due to their long depth-of-field and self-healing behavior. Notably, controlling the intensity profile of non-diffracting beams has led to many advances in optical tweezers, micro-manipulation, and atom guiding. In addition to intensity, beams with helical phase fronts have been constructed such that they carry Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM); a conserved degree-of-freedom that can be transferred to micro-particles or deployed as means of optical communications. Furthermore, the wavelength and state of polarization are two additional properties of light that play a decisive role in applications such as materials processing, microscopy, and optical communications. While much effort has been dedicated to structuring the aforementioned properties of non-diffracting light beams ― namely its intensity, OAM, polarization, and wavelength ― at a single 2D plane, controlling such properties at multiple planes along the beam's axis has scantly been investigated. In this dissertation, we establish a systematic method to design, create, and analyze a new generation of non-diffracting Structured Light beams in which various properties of light can be controlled, separately or simultaneously, along the beam's longitudinal axis of propagation. This includes longitudinal control over the intensity profile, OAM, polarization, wavelength, and even the propagation trajectory of the beam (almost at-will); thus creating a new optical toolkit with many degrees-of-freedom to meet the rising demand for advanced Structured Light. In addition, we report on unusual physical phenomena; for instance, one in which the OAM of light can be reversed/changed locally without violating any conservation laws. Finally, we show that Longitudinally Structured Light can be exploited to measure the index of refraction of fluids; providing high resolution measurements over a wide dynamic range, and thus solving an old trade-off that has hitherto been untackled in refractive index sensing.

Keywords: Electromagnetic Waves
Fourier Optics
Holography
Laser Beam Shaping
Nondiffracting Beams
Structured Light
Advisor: Mojahedi, Mo
Mixing Monte Carlo and Partial Differential Equation Methods For Multi-dimensional Optimal Stopping Problems Under Stochastic Volatility

In this thesis, we develop a numerical approach for solving multi-dimensional optimal stopping problems (OSPs) under stochastic volatility (SV) that combines least squares Monte Carlo (LSMC) with partial differential equation (PDE) techniques. The algorithm provides dimensional reduction from the PDE and regression perspective along with variance and dimensional reduction from the MC perspective. In Chapter 2, we begin by laying the mathematical foundation of mixed MC-PDE techniques for OSPs. Next, we show the basic mechanics of the algorithm and, under certain mild assumptions, prove it converges almost surely. We apply the algorithm to the one dimensional Heston model and demonstrate that the hybrid algorithm outperforms traditional LSMC techniques in terms of both estimating prices and optimal exercise boundaries (OEBs). In Chapter 3 we describe methods for reducing the complexity and run time of the algorithm along with techniques for computing sensitivities. To reduce the complexity, we apply two methods: clustering via sufficient statistics and multi-level Monte Carlo (mlMC)/multi-grids. While the clustering method allows us to reduce computational run times by a third for high dimensional problems, mlMC provides an order of magnitude reduction in complexity. To compute sensitivities, we employ a grid based method for derivatives with respect to the asset, S, and an MC method that uses initial dispersions for sensitivities with respect to variance, v. To test our approximations and computation of sensitivities, we revisit the one-dimensional Heston model and find our approximations introduce little-to-no error and that our computation of sensitivities is highly accurate in comparison to standard LSMC. To demonstrate the utility of our new computational techniques, we apply the hybrid algorithm to the multi-dimensional Heston model and show that the algorithm is highly accurate in terms of estimating prices, OEBs, and sensitivities, especially in comparison to standard LSMC. In Chapter 4 we highlight the importance of multi-factor SV models and apply our hybrid algorithm to two specific examples: the Double Heston model and a mean-reverting commodity model with jumps. Again, we were able to obtain low variance estimates of the prices, OEBs, and sensitivities.

Keywords: Monte-Carlo
Optimal Stopping Problems
Partial Differential Equations
Stochastic Volatility
Advisor: Jaimungal, Sebastian
Jackson, Kenneth