VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Role of Responsivity in Youth Rehabilitation: The Case of Mental Health

Mental health problems are a significant concern for justice-involved youth. Yet there is substantial variability in how mental health problems have been understood in terms of their role in offending and their significance to treatment planning and outcomes. Perspectives on mental health from a predominantly clinical literature differ from the conceptualization found in the rehabilitation-focused Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) literature. This dissertation consists of two papers addressing the role of mental health issues in justice system involvement, with a focus on youth. Paper 1 provides a conceptual analysis of the two literatures to elucidate points of contrast and potential for common ground. I argue that the two literatures differ in seven ways: major goals, definition of risk, predictors studied, outcomes of interest, timelines of interest, features- versus disorder- based approaches, and what is included in the category of mental health concerns. Using these identified differences as an interpretative framework, areas of concordance are then identified. Directions for research include the role of mental health in offending, especially for youth in a developmental context, and gender differences. Implications for policy and practice are reviewed. Paper 2 presents an empirical study that examined probation services and reoffending outcomes for 232 youth following comprehensive assessments of their mental health and criminogenic risk/needs. The role of mental health functioning was examined in the context of assessed and treated criminogenic needs. Youth with identified mental health needs were no more likely than youth without such needs to reoffend, regardless of whether those needs were treated. Youth who received mental health treatment were more likely than other youth to have their criminogenic needs treated, suggesting that mental health treatment was associated with intermediate treatment targets. However, criminogenic needs treatment reduced the risk of reoffending regardless of mental health; mental health treatment did not significantly moderate the effectiveness of criminogenic needs treatment. These findings are discussed in terms of possible interpretations of responsivity, reflecting either that treatment of mental health problems facilitated engagement in criminogenic needs treatment, or that youth received higher quality or more comprehensive services due to systems-level variables. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords: justice-involved
mental health
offender
rehabilitation
responsivity
treatment planning
Advisor: Peterson-Badali, Michele
Skilling, Tracey A.
Multimission Fuel-burn Minimization in Aircraft Design: A Surrogate-modeling Approach

Aerodynamic shape and aerostructural design optimizations that maximize the performance at a single flight condition result in designs with unacceptable off-design performance. While considering multiple flight conditions in the optimization improves the robustness of the designs, there is a need to develop a rational strategy for choosing the flight conditions and their relative emphases such that multipoint optimizations reflect the true objective function. In addition, there is a need to consider uncertain missions and flight conditions. In this thesis, the strategies to formulate the multipoint objective functions for aerodynamic shape and aerostructural optimization are presented. To determine the flight conditions and their corresponding weights, a novel surrogate-based mission analysis is developed to efficiently analyze hundreds of actual mission data to emulate their flight-condition distribution. Using accurate and reliable surrogate models to approximate the aerodynamic coefficients used in the analysis makes this procedure computationally tractable. A mixture of experts (ME) approach is developed to overcome the limitations of conventional surrogate models in modeling the complex transonic drag profile. The ME approach combines multiple surrogate models probabilistically based on the divide-and-conquer strategy. Using this model in the mission analysis significantly improves the range estimation accuracy, as compared to other conventional surrogate models. As expected, the multipoint aerodynamic shape and aerostructural optimizations demonstrate a consistent drag reduction, instead of the localized improvement by the single-point optimizations. The improved robustness in the multipoint optimized designs was also observed in terms of the improved range performance and more consistent fuel-burn reduction across the different missions. The results presented in this thesis show that the surrogate-model-assisted multipoint optimization produces a robust design that is optimized for a set of flight conditions matching real-world operations, which is ensured by the use of historical flight data.

Keywords: Aircraft Design
Mission Analysis
Mixture of Experts
Multidisciplinary Optimization
Multipoint Optimization
Surrogate Model
Advisor: Martins, Joaquim R. R. A.
A Teacher's Reflexive Story of Student Voice Pedagogies: An Autoethnography

This study is an autoethnography of my experiences with student voice reforms. Ultimately, I am concerned with better understanding the possibilities for student voice as a transformative teaching and learning practice within the context of neoliberal education. The discussion is anchored in two past student voice projects in which I was involved, one as a researcher and one as a facilitator. As method, I revisit these experiences through memory and various artifacts by way of field notes, personal journals, lesson plans, and email correspondences, to unpack embodied voices of difference that frame contemporary epistemological questions of how we come to know and understand our life worlds. More specifically, I am concerned with how teachers take up student voice in their pedagogies, how teachers come to understand themselves and their students in terms of student voice, and how social differences come to contour student voice pedagogies. I query: How do teachers understand student voice? What are the ways in which teachers experience student voice? How does the experience of student voice organize and inscribe teacher ←→ student relationships? And, how are student voice practices shaped, organized, and inscribed through social difference? Grounding this inquiry is poststructural feminist anti-racism as an interwoven discursive orientation and politics for troubling and transforming schooling and education. My analyses address how my presence as an individual and as a member of socio-historical groups in the student voice initiatives affected the projects' dynamics. My findings amplify the necessity of time and space for educators to critically reflect on their practices when implementing reforms, time and space that were provided by engaging autoethnography. The study contributes important strategic processes towards realizing the necessary goals of critical reflexive practices in teaching and learning, addressing the question of `how' to do critical reflection through autoethnography.

Keywords: Autoethnography
Pedagogy
Poststructural Feminist Anti-Racism
Race and Marginalized Youth
Social Justice Education
Student Voice
Advisor: Dei, George J.S.
Meditation and Holistic Contemplative Pedagogy: An Exploration of the Relationship of Five Teachers' Meditation Practices to the Pedagogical Process

This qualitative study examines how five teachers' meditation practices have an impact on their pedagogy. The teachers' spiritual practice of mindfulness meditation shapes their understanding of themselves and their students, generating a holistic contemplative pedagogy. While there has been a growing body of literature on meditation, contemplation and holistic education, this research brings these fields into a more in-depth, detailed conversation. Teachers gain knowledge from their lived experience in the profession, which works to benefit their mindfulness practice. The study reveals that the experiential practice of mindfulness meditation can help teachers access their thoughts and feelings better, and create a more benevolent engagement with students. Meditation helps the teachers transcend and recast negative emotions. Through mindfulness, they become more loving and respectful of both themselves and their students, all while providing them a safer space in which to thrive. The practice of meditation, then, mirrors the practice of teaching. Mindfulness meditation helps shape a holistic contemplative pedagogy, which enhances teachers' understandings of their profession and the lives of students in a contemporary moment of change. The dissertation, therefore, contributes to a wider field of inquiry into the benefits of mindfulness meditation, not only in education, but also in the human sciences more broadly.

Keywords: meditation
phenomenology
Advisor: Miller, Jack P.
Actions in the Eye

Systems based on bag-of-words models from image features collected at maxima of sparse interest point operators have been used successfully for both computer visual object and action recognition tasks. While the sparse, interest-point based approach to recognition is not inconsistent with visual processing in biological systems that operate in `saccade and fixate' regimes, the methodology and emphasis in the human and the computer vision communities remains sharply distinct. Here, we make three contributions aiming to bridge this gap. First, we complement three existing state-of-the art large scale static and dynamic computer vision annotated datasets (Hollywood-2, UCF Sports and Pascal VOC Actions) with human eye movements collected under the ecological constraints of visual action and scene context recognition tasks. To our knowledge these are the first large human eye tracking datasets to be collected and made publicly available for video and images, unique in terms of their (a) large scale and computer vision relevance (over 2 million fixations), (b) dynamic, video stimuli (Hollywood-2 and UCF Sports) and (c) task control, as well as free-viewing. Second, we perform quantitative analyses on the problems of inter-subject consistency and task influence on eye movements. To this end, we propose novel algorithms for the automatic discovery of areas of interest (AOI) and introduce several sequential consistency metrics. Our findings underline the stability of patterns of visual search among subjects in the experimental conditions we consider and show that task instructions can influence visual search patterns. Third, we leverage the significant amount of collected data in order to pursue studies and build automatic, end-to-end trainable computer vision systems based on human eye movements. Our studies not only shed light on the differences between computer vision spatiotemporal interest point image sampling strategies and human fixations, as well as their impact on visual recognition performance, but also demonstrate that human fixations can be accurately predicted, and when used in an end-to-end automatic system, leveraging some of the advanced computer vision practice, can lead to state of the art results.

Keywords: action recognition
computer vision
consistency analysis
human eye movements
machine learning
saliency prediction
Advisor: Sminchisescu, Cristian
Dickinson, Sven J.
The Representation of Masculinity in Crisis: An Interrogation of Its Roots and Reasons

This dissertation develops out of the disturbing realization that masculinity is pervasively represented as `in crisis.' It argues that both `masculinity' and `crisis' are discursive constructs, which have been functioning in unison since the late nineteenth century to bolster male hegemony. My introductory chapter offers an explication of how discursive domination functions at the level of signification. It explains, and applies to numerous examples, the method of discourse analysis developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and also engages with Reinhardt Koselleck's critical history of the concept `crisis,' which has recently been further developed in the work of Janet Roitman. In chapter two I examine the roots of the `masculinity in crisis' discourse in the European fin de siècle. This search proceeds by way of readings of Rémy de Gourmont's La Dissociation des Idées, Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, and Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter. Chapter two also examines the crucial role that the representation of women played in defining masculinity as `in crisis' during the period. My third and fourth chapters offer in-depth readings of several literary and cinematic works, these showing that while `masculinity' being represented as `in crisis' is a constant, the forms and tropes employed in this representation vary over time and are geographically contingent. I focus in chapter three on Arthur Schnitzler's stories Leutnant Gustl and Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief, prose works within which contemporaneous psychological, gender and class discourses converge in protagonists representative of bourgeois Austrian masculinity `in crisis.' Chapter four argues by way of analyses of the canonical Weimar era films Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari and Die Straße as well as Ernst Toller's Heimkehrer drama Hinkemann that the sudden postwar domination of the discursive field by visual forms of media - what Martin Jay calls `a scopic regime' - resulted in `masculinity in crisis' becoming increasingly spectral - taking on ghostly and/or monstrous forms - and spectacular, namely as an event staged for the voyeuristic gaze. In my conclusion I pursue answers to why `masculinity' has been for over a century, and more importantly continues to be, pervasively represented as `in crisis.'

Keywords: Critical Theory
Fin de Siecle
German Film
Germanic Literature
Masculinities
Weimar Republic
Advisor: Noyes, John K
Structure and Properties of Nano- and Meso-scale Materials Prepared by Designed Self-Aasembly of Nanoparticles

The work presented in this thesis explores the homo- and co-assembly process, structural characteristics and properties of nano- and meso-scale, one- and three-dimensional structures composed of nanoscale building blocks. In chapter 3, we developed a method for terminating the colloidal polymerization process of gold nanorods by post-assembly photocrosslinking of polymer ligands. By functionalizing gold nanorods with a hydrophobic polymer containing pendant double bonds, we were able to compartmentalize a hydrophobic photoinitiator. We could then suppress the association ability of the polymer ligands by covalently crosslinking them using photoirradiation. The averaged aggregation number of the polymers could be predicted from the kinetics of molecular step-growth polymerization. Furthermore, we found that following crosslinking, the inert-rod distance reduced, and the nanorod co-linearity increased, both allowing for better electromagnetic coupling between the nanorods. In chapter 4, we further explored the resemblance between colloidal and molecular polymerization reactions by applying strategies from molecular copolymerization to the co-assembly of gold nanorods with different dimensions into random and block copolymer structures (plasmonic copolymers). The approach was extended to the co-assembly of random copolymers of gold and palladium nanorods. We showed that the formation of random copolymers is achieved regardless of the composition, size, or concentration if both co-monomers are present at the beginning of the copolymerization. Block copolymers were prepared by combining one pre-polymer with the second monomer, or two pre-polymers. A kinetic model validated and further expanded the kinetic theories developed for molecular copolymerization reactions. Chapters 5 and 6 explore a bottom-up method to produce composite materials from spherical nanoparticles with different core-composition, surface-characteristics, and concentrations and cellulose nanocrystals. A relationship was established between the physical properties of the spherical particles and the characteristics of the co-assembled composite by extensive structural and optical characterization of mixed suspensions and composite solid films.

Keywords: Nanoparticles
Self-Assembly
Advisor: Kumacheva, Eugenia
Group Decision Making with Partial Preferences

Group decision making is of fundamental importance in all aspects of a modern society. Many commonly studied decision procedures require that agents provide full preference information. This requirement imposes significant cognitive and time burdens on agents, increases communication overhead, and infringes agent privacy. As a result, specifying full preferences is one of the contributing factors for the limited real-world adoption of some commonly studied voting rules. In this dissertation, we introduce a framework consisting of new concepts, algorithms, and theoretical results to provide a sound foundation on which we can address these problems by being able to make group decisions with only partial preference information. In particular, we focus on single and multi-winner voting. We introduce minimax regret (MMR), a group decision-criterion for partial preferences, which quantifies the loss in social welfare of chosen alternative(s) compared to the unknown, but true winning alternative(s). We develop polynomial-time algorithms for the computation of MMR for a number of common of voting rules, and prove intractability results for other rules. We address preference elicitation, the second part of our framework, which concerns the extraction of only the relevant agent preferences that reduce MMR. We develop a few elicitation strategies, based on common ideas, for different voting rules and query types. While MMR can be applied in a distribution-free context, in many practical environments decision makers have access to historical datasets of, and probabilistic knowledge of agent preferences. To leverage such information, we first address the problem of learning probabilistic models of preferences from pairwise comparisons---the building block of many preference structures---for which previous techniques cannot handle. Then we extend our framework to a multi-round elicitation process that leverages probabilistic models to guide and analyze elicitation strategies. We empirically validate our framework and algorithms on real datasets. Experiments show our elicitation algorithms query only a fraction of full preferences to obtain alternative(s) with small MMR. Experiments also show our learning algorithms can learn accurate mixture models of preference types, which we then use to guide the design of one-round top-k elicitation protocols.

Keywords: machine learning
optimization
preference elicitation
psychometrics
rank aggregation
social choice
Advisor: Boutilier, Craig E
Toying with Healthy Eating: Developing a Play-based Nutrition Education Program

Kindergarten-aged children are a key group for establishing lifelong healthy eating behaviours. However, current school-based nutrition education programs have reported little success in achieving this important goal. Though a number of different reasons account for programs' limited success, I focused on creating a kindergarten nutrition education program rooted in theory that also considered the needs and preferences of the teachers who implement such programs in their classes. Consequently, the present thesis describes the process of developing a preliminary draft of a kindergarten play-based nutrition education program, Sociodramatic Nutrition Activities for Kindergartens (SNAK). With the overarching goal of developing SNAK, I drew upon traditional and innovative data in order to learn about play-based teaching and healthy eating in kindergartens through a two phase process: 1. Program Landscaping, where I analyzed provincial and territorial ministry of education healthy eating kindergarten curricula and conducted a netnography (comprised of analyzing kindergarten teachers' social media discussions and interviewing a sample of kindergarten teachers). 2. Program Development, where I developed SNAK based upon findings derived from phase one. Analysis of the curricula, social media discussions, and teacher interviews revealed a myriad of factors that influence teachers when they implement play-based teaching and healthy eating in kindergarten classes. Findings both replicate and suggest new research questions for the nutrition and education literature. These findings also greatly benefited the development of SNAK. Future SNAK research includes further development and pilot testing to determine if kindergarten children (and teachers) can benefit from the program. Furthermore, I also describe how I combined traditional and innovative data and the insights obtained through netnography. Opportunities for developing programs and forming hypotheses can be found through examining the vast amount of teacher social media discussions, and I encourage other researchers to seek out innovative data.

Keywords: Netnography
Nutrition education
Ontario kindergarten
Play-based teaching
Social media
Teachers' perspectives
Advisor: Sellen, Daniel
Preschool Children`s Early Spelling and Writing

Abstract This dissertation work was motivated by an attempt to better understand preschool children's early spelling and writing. Much of the literature focuses on reading, and yet spelling and writing provide a functionally meaningful context for children to use their growing knowledge of print and their ability to analyze language into sound to recode speech to print. The primary goals of the three studies that make up this thesis were: (1) to identify the component skills that predict preschool children's early word spelling and name writing (Study 1 found in Chapter 2), (2) to identify group differences in bilingual preschool children's early literacy and spelling ability relative to monolingual children (Study 2 found in Chapter 3), and (3) to investigate the efficacy of professional development to support preschool educators' ability to engage preschool children in talk related to print and phonological awareness (Study 3 found in Chapter 4). The findings of this dissertation both corroborate and add to the early spelling literature. Word spelling involves a distinct role of phonological awareness (blending), while name writing does not. This suggests that spelling involves recoding sound to print while name writing may make use of an orthographic form acquired through repeated exposure to seeing one's name in print. Further, bilingual children demonstrated distinct profiles in emergent literacy skills relative to a group of monolingual children depending on parent report of the amount of time they heard or spoke a minority language at home. Finally, coaching by a speech language pathologist as part of an emergent literacy professional development program enhanced preschool educators' use of interactions related to phonological awareness and the children's engagement in talk related to this predictor of early literacy ability. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the studies as well as future directions for research (Chapter 5).

Keywords: educator
English as a Second Language
phonological awareness
preschool
spelling
Advisor: Girolametto, Luigi E