VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring Technology, Design and Dementia: Design approaches, considerations, and implications for an emerging field

The majority of people with dementia live at home. Consequently, they are, to varying degrees, users of home technologies. Yet we know very little about the design of these technologies for this population, including suitable design resources and approaches, analytical tools, and other key considerations. To gain a panoramic view of this topic, three perspectives were explored: developers, people with dementia (PwD), and their caregiving significant others (SO). The first group has never been studied; and the second, in this context, only more recently. In Study I, developers were surveyed on topics ranging from design resources to technology values. Developers could name no resources dedicated to technology design for people with dementia; and technical specialists were aware of few design frameworks to support their work. Values emphasised cost, learnability, self-confidence, and usability. Emotional variability was also cited as an important consideration as was empathy. In Study II, PwD stressed usability and learnability as important technology values. Participants also discussed their emotional responses connected to technology use, particularly their frustrations. In demonstrations of phones, almost all users experienced difficulties placing a call. In Study III, SOs valued usability, learnability and self-confidence most; and highlighted user diversity, familiarity, and emotional factors as other key considerations. Over the course of the project, design factors were identified and design implications, inferred. Some implications referred to human factors and others to systems design considerations. Furthermore, a systems analysis of PwD using phones was conducted to address the question of how to analyse a home technology system in this field. Other key findings include the diversity of PwD (e.g. age, comorbidities); the importance of emotion; and the value that users place on learnable, usable designs. Finally, empathy emerged as an important design approach, both as a way to address diversity and to access usersâ emotional lives.

Keywords: assistive technology
cognitive work analysis
dementia
design
Advisor: Mihailidis, Alex
USING MULTIMODAL IMAGING TO EXAMINE CLINICAL AND COGNITIVE CORRELATES OF MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT AND ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may interact with depression to mediate the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Investigating the relationship between depression-related and AD-associated pathological changes such as beta-amyloid (Aβ), tau, and hippocampal volume loss may help to explain the mechanistic links between depression and the cognitive and functional impairment underlying AD. We employed different neuroimaging techniques, including positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging, to investigate several in-vivo markers of AD pathology, allowing us to examine their associations with clinical (e.g. symptoms of depression) and cognitive correlates of MCI and AD. The thesis covers five themes. The first theme seeks to explore the relationship between a lifetime history of depression and cortical Aβ burden using PET. The second theme investigates the association between late-life depressive symptoms and cortical Aβ, also using PET. The third theme examines hippocampal volume atrophy to observe how depressive symptoms and progressive hippocampal volume loss mediate the conversion process from MCI to dementia. The fourth theme focuses on the longitudinal and structural trajectories of MCI patients with suspected non-Alzheimer’ disease in order to examine how their pathological and cognitive profiles differ from other MCI groups. The final theme seeks to investigate the link between usage of the psychoactive agent benzodiazepine and cerebral Aβ levels using participants’ longitudinal cognitive profile and PET. Overall, a history of depression appears to be more strongly associated with increased Aβ burden than late-life depressive symptoms. However, late-life depression, in conjunction with hippocampal atrophy, may accelerate the conversion process to AD. Furthermore, this thesis emphasizes that Aβ level is not required to promote cognitive and functional deterioration; thus Aβ levels only partially explain mechanisms underlying AD pathogenesis. Lastly, this thesis elucidates the importance of early and preventative interventions to reduce the future incidence of AD.

Keywords: Alzheimerâ s disease
dementia
depression
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
mild cognitive impairment
Positron Emission Tomography
Advisor: Graff-Guerrero, Ariel
Charitable Giving, Corporate Image Building, and Market Expansion: The Case of Walmart

Focusing on the world's largest retailer, Walmart, this thesis studies the effectiveness of a company's local charitable giving on the company's expansion in local markets and then investigates charitable giving strategy, with a focus on the interaction between a company's charitable giving strategy and market expansion strategy. Using detailed charitable giving data and social media data (Twitter) about Walmart in each city, we first provide reduced-form analysis. The reduced-form estimation results suggest that Walmart strategically carries out charitable giving as we find systematic evidence showing the correlation between Walmart's charitable giving amount and its store proposal in local markets. We find that its charitable giving has a positive effect on improving Walmart's local market expansion. We also show that the benefits of charitable giving in terms of facilitating market expansion mainly work through improving local reputation and thereby reducing protests against its store proposals. The reduced-form evidence empirically provides a novel channel via which a company's charitable giving can be beneficial to the company. Using the structural estimates and counterfactual analysis, we further quantify the extent to which Walmart's charitable giving is used for facilitating market expansion and we find that this could not serve as the major motivation underlying Walmart's charitable giving. Furthermore, we find Walmart's return of charitable giving is decent and for each dollar that Walmart gives to charities, the average long-term returns are equal to or greater than 2.5 dollars.

Advisor: Ching, Andrew
FleXight: Flexible Information Channel for Software-Defined Networking

The idea of separating data-path from control, introduced by Software-Defined Networking (SDN), leads to a major opportunity to revolutionize computer networks. However, the control channel in OpenFlow, the de facto SDN standard in industry and academia, becomes a bottleneck that limits the controller's access to adequate information for complex tasks. Previous attempts to solve this problem either implement such tasks in the data-path or move the controller closer to the switch. In this thesis, we propose a new approach: a flexible information channel for SDN named FleXight that is based on adaptive per-flow sampling. FleXight enables the controller to dynamically balance between the overhead of information collection and the level of detail. The core of FleXight is FleXam, our proposed per-flow sampling extension for OpenFlow that allows the controller to define which packets should be sampled, what parts of the sampled packets should be sent, and where they should be sent to. FleXam can be implemented in data-path with minimal modifications, operate at line rate with minimal overhead, and be used for creating a wide array of applications. We present two case studies of how FleXam can be used to implement network applications: elephant flow detection, and port scan detection. Naive sampling can have unacceptably high overhead. Through theoretical modeling and experimental analysis of real-world network traces, we develop multiple techniques to reduce and control the overhead of sampling in FleXight: dynamically reducing the sample rate of flows as they grow (flow triage), predicting flow completion (expedited eviction), and delaying rule installation for new flows (flow incubation). We present a detailed analysis of how each technique can reduce the overhead, and its effect on the accuracy of the collected information (e.g., flow description, size, and duration). We also present a software-defined firewall platform for home users. It is a showcase of how FleXight enables us to implement complex systems as controller applications (a task that is difficult, if not impossible, with previous solutions) with low overhead and high accuracy. For example, it can detect all horizontal port scanners and identify compromised hosts almost perfectly with only 0.75% network overhead.

Keywords: FleXam
FleXight
Sampling
SDN
Advisor: Ganjali, Yashar
Balakrishnan, Ravin
Investigations into the Structural Validity and Divergent Domain Scoring Methods of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5)

The Alternate Model of Personality Disorders in the DSM-5 Section III Emerging Models and Measures presents a new model of personality pathology (DSM-5 trait model). Several different methods of measurement exist to assess these personality constructs, most prominently the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5), of which there are self-report, informant-report, and two abbreviated self-report forms. This model has received extensive empirical attention. At present, however, the PID-5 has questionable structural validity, largely due to interstitial lower-order facets that relate to more than one domain. Further, there is inconsistent domain scoring across studies. Consequently, researchers are conceptualizing the PID-5 higher-order domains in different ways and scoring these domains differentially, which could influence the comparability of research findings and clinical utility of the DSM-5 trait model. The current research aims to address these issues through two studies that employ large clinical (N = 388) and undergraduate (N = 492) samples. In Study 1, the results from a network analytic approach were compared to existing factor analytic results of PID-5 lower-order structure, in efforts to clarify the optimal primary domain of interstitial facets. The combined network and factor analytic results supported the model modification of three facets to a different primary domain based on the PID-5 structure introduced by Krueger and colleagues (2012). The differences in results produced by several PID-5 domain scoring methods and two forms of the PID-5 were compared in Study 2. The findings supported instances in which a substantial difference in results occurred because of different domain scoring methods or PID-5 forms. This research contributes to ongoing efforts to validate the DSM-5 trait model and PID-5 instruments, raises awareness that these discrepancies regarding model structure exist, and offers future directions that could assist in improving inconsistent structure and communication between researchers, clinicians, and institutions utilizing the model.

Keywords: Alternative Model of Personality Disorders
construct validity
factor analysis
network analysis
Personality Inventory for DSM-5
psychometrics
Advisor: Bagby, Dr. R. Michael
Spatial Skills Activities in the Middle School Mathematics Teachers' Toolkit: The Impact of Spatial Skill Activities on Mathematical Thinking

This study investigated the impact of the incorporation of spatial skill activities into their pedagogical repertoire by middle school mathematics teachers on the mathematical reasoning of their students. Current research suggests that success in spatial reasoning is a strong predictor of success in STEM fields, and is known to be strong in successful mathematicians (Newcombe, 2013; Tepylo Moss, 2013; Uttal et al., 2012). In this study, teachers replaced starter activities three or more times per week with hands-on spatial skill problems that required mental rotation and spatial visualization to solve. While there have been many studies linking spatial skill to success in mathematics, there are few studies that attempt to establish a relationship through intervention in a middle school classroom. Findings suggest that incorporating spatial skill activities into mathematics lessons had a positive impact on both the teachersâ reflective practice and the studentsâ learning skills. While there was some improvement in mathematical reasoning, it was not possible to definitively attribute this to the spatial skill activities.

Keywords: Mathematical Reasoning
Spatial Skill
STEM fields
Advisor: McDougall, Douglas
The Privatization Imperative: Women Negotiating Healthcare in Kandy, Sri Lanka

Since the 1980s, poorer countries have shifted health reform efforts from strengthening public systems to increasing the private sector’s role in healthcare provision. Empirical research on healthcare access focuses on quantifying out-of-pocket payments or service utilization, making invisible both user experiences and how the dynamics of public and private provision are contingent on place and social relations. Historically a model for poorer countries, Sri Lanka’s public healthcare system is seeing steady privatization following decades of insufficient state investment alongside incentivized private expansion. However, little is known about what this restructuring means for healthcare access in Sri Lanka. I employed a Third World Marxist feminist qualitative methodology to explore how the presence of private healthcare shapes access for women in Kandy, Sri Lanka. I asked: Where do women go for healthcare? What are their impressions of the health services they use? How do they navigate public and private systems? And how are these questions shaped by social location? Using focus groups, interviews, meetings, and a short survey, I gathered data from 40 residents of Udawatta Division. My analysis linked macrostructures and processes of healthcare restructuring with women’s everyday experiences of utilizing healthcare. Economic exclusion and quality concerns limited the range of private healthcare ‘choices’ available to users. Almost all women mixed public and private services, with these hybrid arrangements differing by social location. Economically disadvantaged users were compelled to consume private healthcare owing to service deficits in the public system. Middle-class women mostly used private outpatient services, and exploited ‘dual practice’ to access more responsive public inpatient care. Socially disadvantaged women, particularly ethnic minorities, relied on the same pathway to avoid neglect and/or abuse within the public system. The state’s ‘withdrawal’ from healthcare provision, and its incentives for private expansion, has wide-ranging implications for users in Kandy. As women struggle to address service gaps in the public sector, hybrid arrangements stratify services along class and ethnic lines, creating opportunities for private accumulation. My findings interrogate the direction of Sri Lanka’s health reform and call into question global health advocacy for ‘mixed health systems’ as a path to achieving ‘Universal Health Coverage.’

Keywords: critical qualitative methodologies
global health
healthcare access
healthcare privatization
Sri Lanka
Third World Marxist feminist approaches
Advisor: McDonough, Peggy
Financial Safety Nets in Emerging Market Economies

Why have financial safety nets in emerging market economies expanded dramatically in recent years? This dissertation argues that emerging market economies have increasingly turned to domestic financial safety nets as the politically viable solution to the puzzle of how to combine international financial integration and domestic credit growth with domestic financial stability. Yet the widespread proliferation of state-level financial safety nets was not an inevitable outcome, but a common response by emerging market economies to the general unwillingness of the large financial powers to provide robust international equivalents. Indeed, despite the many emerging market financial crises in the post-Bretton Woods era, international financial safety nets remained weak, or, at best, supplied as global club goods. Yet despite this common motivation and the widespread expansion in financial safety nets, there is significant variation in their size and scope across countries and across time. Three explanatory variables stand out in this regard. First, the geopolitical closeness and relative degree of financial integration with the United States sets the parameters regarding a state's relative access to an international financial safety net. A formal model and anecdotal case study evidence suggests that, all else equal, states with greater access to an international financial safety net face fewer incentives to provision an equivalent domestic financial safety net. Second, the relative degree and pace of democratization, as well as the desire for governments to legitimate their rule via high rates of private credit growth, has pushed governments to supply more expansive financial safety nets. Third, the degree of independence the agent in control of the financial safety net has from political authority has tended to boost financial safety nets. This effect was found to be operative with respect to independent central banks and resolution authorities operating with formal independence (Turkey) or with few effective political constraints (Mexico).

Keywords: Central Banking
Club Goods
Emerging Market Economies
Financial Crises
Financial Safety Nets
International Political Economy
Advisor: Pauly, Louis W
Manger, Mark S
Governing the Lives of Immigrants: A Foucauldian Perspective on Tuberculosis Immigration Medical Surveillance in Canada

This dissertation critically examines the experiences of new Canadian immigrants and immigration applicants undergoing immigration TB health screening and surveillance, and focuses on the social effects of this process on the health and wellbeing of newcomers. Using Foucault’s theoretical framework of governmentality, this study seeks to understand how various knowledges about health and the immigrant body are (re)produced through the articulation of immigration, public health, and biomedical discourses, and how these regimes of knowledge and power constitute social relations and structure the daily reality of newcomers to Canada. The first purpose of this study was to document the ways in which ‘medicalization’ of the immigration process shaped the migratory journeys (i.e. constrained and enabled possibilities for action) of immigration applicants. The second objective was to understand how these overlapping discourses created rationalities of governance to construct and regulate immigrant subjects, and to what effect. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews (15) with newcomers undergoing immigration TB screening and surveillance, observations of immigration TB clinic appointments (14), and observations of the TB clinic itself. The data were analyzed to determine how newcomers navigated the immigration and settlement, and immigration medical surveillance (IMS) processes, and how they negotiated power during interpersonal encounters with authorities and experts, particularly at the site of the TB clinic. The tensions arising from competing discourses and logics were found to have multiple negative effects: they create structural barriers to obtaining immigration status causing physical, psychological and emotional suffering for applicants; they produce conflicting and perceivably irreconcilable subjectivities for applicants (the ‘desirable’ immigrant vs. the ‘good’ TB patient); and they unwittingly implicate TB health care providers into the mechanism of immigration surveillance as state authorities, corroding the doctor-patient relationship and undermining their ability to provide adequate medical care to newcomers. I argue that an overemphasis on biomedical approaches to treating TB among newcomers in the name of biosecuritization does little for actually controlling TB in Canada. Instead, this study reveals the need to incorporate a social determinants of health approach, particularly one that acknowledged the immigration and settlement process itself as a determinant of TB and immigrant health.

Keywords: immigrant health
medical surveillance
poststructuralism
qualitative research
social determinants of health
tuberculosis
Advisor: Gastaldo, Denise
New Message Passing Methods for Min-Max and Sum-Product Inference

Message passing algorithms powered by the distributive law of mathematics are efficient in finding approximate solutions to NP-hard inference problems. This thesis proposes new message passing algorithms to enable and improve performance in two important modes of inference. First is min-max inference which seeks the assignment that minimizes the worse-case outcome. Examples include well known NP-hard combinatorial problems such as min-max clustering, the asymmetric K-center problem, K-packing, the bottleneck traveling salesman problem, and makespan minimization. Within min-max inference two algorithms are proposed. The first is Min-Max Propagation (MMP), a min-max version of Belief Propagation (BP) obtained by noting that min and max operators satisfy the distributive law. With MMP, it is shown that for any high-order function which can be minimized in O(ω), the message update can be computed using an efficient O(K(ω + log(K)) procedure, where K is the number of variables. The second algorithm reduces min-max inference to a sequence of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). Both approaches perform well on NP-hard combinatorial problems. The second mode of interest is sum-product inference. Here, loopy BP performs poorly when the underlying mass contains multiple disjoint modes, capturing only one mode when it reaches a fixed point. As such, a message passing procedure that attempts to model all the fixed points of BP by defining a distribution over BP messages is considered; namely Survey Propagation (SP). Unfortunately SP is intractable beyond CSPs because, to perform general SP updates, one has to operate on distributions over a continuous domain. To efficiently extend the application of SP to marginalization in binary pairwise graphical models an approximation scheme is proposed. This scheme has O(DKlog(DK)τ ) complexity per iteration, where τ is the complexity of BP per iteration, D is the maximum node degree and K is a resolution constant controlling the approximations fidelity. Experiments show that this method can track many BP fixed points, achieving a high marginalization accuracy within a few iterations, in difficult settings where BP is often non-convergent and inaccurate.

Keywords: Combinatorial Optimization
Graphical Models
Inference
Message Passing
Advisor: Frey, Brendan J