VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Phasor Measurement Unit Enabled Power Dispatch and Autonomous Black Start of AC Microgrids

The aim of this thesis is to develop a mathematical model and control for black start and power dispatch of AC microgrids powered by converter interfaced distributed energy resources (DERs). This utilizes the development of microgrid controls in an asynchronous reference frame to maintain the operation of local current mode control regardless of synchronization of dq-frame across dispersed DERs. The viability of using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) to leverage the capabilities of existing and upcoming microgrids to provide grid support is also evaluated. This thesis develops controls for operation of DER-fed AC microgrids in both islanded and grid connected modes. A power dispatch mechanism is proposed to either supply local loads using PMU values to calculate load demand, or provide dispatchable power, when in grid connected mode. In doing so, this thesis establishes a microgrid that can both energize and operate autonomously while also providing network support when grid connected.

Keywords: ac microgrids
black start
Phasor measurement units
Advisor: Lehn, Peter W.
Invisible Violence Against Hypervisible Women: Understanding Islamophobic Violence in the Greater Toronto Area Through Qualitative Interviews and Arts-Based Inquiry

Islamophobic violence against Muslim women is an understudied issue in Canada, even as it is increasing. Using an anti-colonial Muslim feminist theoretical framework and praxis, I conducted 21 interviews of Muslim women survivors of Islamophobic violence in the GTA, and analyzed these interviews to characterize the discourses that sanction Islamophobic violence; the different forms of Islamophobic violence and its impacts, including its relation to trauma; challenges for bystander intervention; and Muslim women’s strength and agency. Notably, several participants employed faith-based methods of understanding and responding to Islamophobic violence. Poetry by six Muslim women survivors of Islamophobic violence supplemented these findings by enriching them with emotional depth; this poetry will be included in a community toolkit on Islamophobic violence that will emerge from this study. Future research should continue to centre diverse Muslim women’s voices and focus on anti-colonial methods of challenging Islamophobia that focus on building relationships with Indigenous peoples.

Keywords: Canada
Gendered Islamophobia
Hate crimes
Islamophobia
Muslim women
Violence against women
Advisor: Magnusson, Jamie
Evaluation of Current Construction Permitting Process in City of Toronto and Future of Permitting in the Global Construction Industry

In this research, an evaluation of the construction permitting process for tall buildings in City of Toronto over the last decade was conducted, including gathering of a detailed database on the approval process of 174 tall residential buildings. This investigation identified e-permitting and automated code compliance checking as viable solutions to address many of the existing challenges with the current permitting process at City of Toronto. These recommendations were then investigated from a global perspective which resulted in development of a framework for automated model-based e-permitting system. This framework takes advantage of the recent technological advancements in the industry, including using BIM for automated code compliance checking and integrating BIM and GIS information for smart urban management applications. The three-level e-permitting framework is envisioned as a road map for advancing from traditional paper-based permitting practices to fully integrated city planning capabilities required to support the future of our built infrastructure.

Keywords: Building Information Model (BIM)
Construction Permit
e-permitting
Smart Urban Management
Tall Buildings
Advisor: McCabe, Brenda Y
Verifying Candidate Genes Underlying Flowering Time in Arabidopsis thaliana using tDNA Insertion Lines

Population genomic scan has emerged as a powerful tool in revealing regions in the genome that are potential targets of selection. Despite the success of genomic scans in identifying novel lists of loci underlying adaptation, few studies proceed to validate the function of these candidate genes. In this study, we used tDNA insertion lines to evaluate the effects of 31 candidate genes on flowering time in North American accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana. We compared the flowering time of tDNA insertion lines to a wildtype under long- and short-day conditions. Collectively, we validated the well-known effect of long-day conditions in accelerating flowering time and found that gene disruption caused by insertional mutagenesis tends to delay flowering. Finally, we identified six genes that significantly delayed flowering time under both long and short days, which provide invaluable opportunities for future work in investigating their role in controlling flowering time adaptation in angiosperms.

Keywords: Arabidopsis thaliana
Evolutionary genetics
Flowering time
Gene knockout
Quantitative genetics
tDNA insertion line
Advisor: Stinchcombe, John R
An Analysis of How the Ontario Social Studies Curriculum Addresses Issues of Social Justice

While it is generally agreed that social studies is the integrated study of history, social sciences, and the humanities, there is significant debate about what to include and what to emphasize. With social justice increasingly on the Social Studies agenda, the most recent version of the Ontario Social Studies curriculum includes an increase in references to social justice and equity. Such curriculum, however, has yet to be thoroughly examined for how it addresses issues of social justice. As a result, informed by Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I examine the 2013 Ontario Social Studies curriculum for how it addresses social justice issues, such as the Indian Residential Schools, racism, gender, and disability. Findings suggest that, despite its increasing use of vocabulary about social justice, the 2013 Ontario Social Studies curriculum remains dominated by forms of bias that whitewash history and social relations in Canada.

Keywords: critical pedagogy
curriculum
social justice
social studies
truth and reconciliation commission
whitewash
Advisor: Cummins, James P
Comparison of carbohydrate oxidase activity produced using in vivo versus cell-free in vitro systems

Potential industrially relevant enzymes are left uncharacterized across phylogenies due to the limitations of traditional in vivo protein expression. Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) can permit rapid surveys of enzymes across a phylogeny, which can help identify enzymes industrially relevant for recombinant protein expression and characterization. The CFPS method was tested for its ability to produce the Sarocladium strictum gluco-oligosaccharide oxidase (GOOX) and the Fusarium graminearum galactose oxidase (GAO), and the commercial PURExpress protein synthesis was optimized for this production. The method was able to express analytical quantities of these enzymes within four hours, which were subsequently tested using a sensitive Amplex Red assay. The CFPS was optimized for reaction temperature and timing of the cofactor addition, and the activity profiles of the synthesized enzymes were similar to their recombinant in vivo expressed counterparts.

Keywords: cell-free protein synthesis
galactose oxidase
glucooligosaccharide oxidase
in vitro protein synthesis
Advisor: Master, Emma R
Defining the power and limits of an approach for detecting drug resistance in polyclonal Plasmodium falciparum infections

Drug resistance is a critical challenge confronting global malaria control. Conventional tools struggle to detect variation in susceptibility to drugs among parasite genotypes within an infection. A recent study was able to overcome this challenge posed by within-host diversity by using next generation sequencing technologies to show how individual parasite haplotypes respond to treatment. Here, we use in silico infections to further investigate the power and limitations of this approach for detecting drug resistance. We modeled multi-haplotype P. falciparum infections incorporating realistic noise, based on parasite clearance data collected from infected patients who were treated with an artemisinin combination therapy. Simulation results show that rates of false positives increase as parasite density decreases, and number of haplotypes within an infection increase. Incidence of false positive results remain low following addition of noise, however this may prove to be a conservative test, as false negative results remain high under some conditions.

Advisor: Mideo, Nicole
Model-based Exploration of the Variability in Lake Trout (Salvelinus namaycush) BAFs caused by Physiology and Trophic Relationships

Because eating fish is often a major vector of human exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs), much effort is directed towards a quantitative understanding of fish bioaccumulation using mechanistic models. Many such models fail to consider how uptake and loss rate constants relate to fish physiology. Here, we calculate the bioaccumulation factor (BAF) of hypothetical POPs, with octanol-water partition coefficients values ranging from 104.5 to 108.5, in lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), with a food web bioaccumulation model that uses bioenergetics to ensure that physiological parameters applied to a species are internally consistent and energetically balanced. Fish in six Canadian lakes were modelled to understand what causes the BAFs of differently sized lake trout to vary between and within lakes. Lake trout activity, diet composition, prey contamination levels and the fraction of the total energy intake spent on growth were found to affect the bioaccumulation potential of chemicals.

Keywords: Bioaccumulation
Bioenergetics
Lake trout
Modelling
Persistent organic pollutants
Advisor: Wania, Frank
Parent Engagement and Schooling: Examining Black Parents' Experiences in the Greater Toronto Area

Within the dominant discourse, Black parents have been positioned as disinterested in the school system, their involvement analyzed from a deficit approach, and barriers to their engagement not fully examined. This research utilized Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) to examine the engagement of three Black parents in the Greater Toronto Area, their experiences navigating the school system, the challenges and tensions they experienced, and the strategies they employed. The study used a narrative inquiry approach to examine and explore their experiences. The findings reveal that Black parents, contrary to the dominant discourse, are advocates for their children. The study also highlights the significance of race in the relationship of Black parents with schools, and the ways in which this impacts their engagement. The findings of this study will be important to teachers, teacher education programs, school leaders, administrators and all stakeholders in education.

Keywords: African
Black
Critical Race Theory
Parent Engagement
Parent Involvement
Advisor: Lopez, Ann E
An Event-Based Language for Programmable Debugging

Conventional debuggers do not provide an efficient means to perform complex observations. This has motivated the development of tools for programmable debugging. Heavyweight instrumentation frameworks such as Valgrind and DynamoRIO can perform a wide variety of observations, but development of plugins for these frameworks is a difficult and low-level task. The event-based approach introduced in the DTrace and SystemTap languages allows observations to be expressed compactly, but these languages lack the flexibility to observe combinations of events required for debugging. This thesis introduces E, an event-based language for debugging complex software problems, designed around a high-level model of the state transitions and events within a program’s execution. E provides a simple and expressive means for programming heavyweight instrumentation plugins. The thesis presents an E implementation based on heavyweight instrumentation frameworks and demonstrates how E can simplify the diagnosis process for complex real-world debugging scenarios.

Keywords: Debugging tools
Domain-specific languages
Dynamic instrumentation
Software engineering
Systems programming
Advisor: Yuan, Ding
Visualization of Brain Shift Corrected Preoperative fMRI for Functional Mapping during Awake Brain Surgery

Surgical treatment of brain tumors requires careful balance between maximizing tumor excision and preserving eloquent cortex. Often, the patient is kept awake but sedated so that the gold standard technique of direct cortical stimulation (DCS) can be used to map brain function intraoperatively. Preoperatively, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) facilitates planning by identification of brain areas critical for language and motor function, helping to guide DCS and other aspects of the surgical plan. However, brain deformation during surgery limits the usefulness of preoperative fMRI. To address this, an image registration pipeline has been developed that displays preoperative fMRI data corrected for brain shift overlaid on the exposed cortical surface at the beginning and completion of DCS mapping. This pipeline has been validated on clinical data, providing accuracy comparable to DCS resolution. This multimodality visualization of fMRI and DCS has potential benefits for improving the intraoperative brain mapping process.

Advisor: Graham, Simon J
Schweizer, Tom A
Nonlinear Dynamic Analysis of Bolted Flanges in Aero-Engine Casings

Bolted flanges in aero-engine casings exhibit a nonlinear response when subjected to forced vibration. The current models for the structural dynamic analysis of bolted flanges are accurate, but they are cumbersome for the design of new structures. The challenge lies in building a nonlinear model that is computationally efficient and has easily identifiable parameters. This study presents a new lump model that accounts for the nonlinear phenomena of partial clearance and friction, and has analytical parameters related to the flange geometry. The model was implemented in finite element analysis and compared with an experiment where a test structure is excited by an electromechanical shaker. The lump model predicts the structural response better than a traditional linear method and it solves faster than distributed contact elements, the most popular approach for nonlinear joint modeling. This study supports the use of geometric lump models in the field of nonlinear structural dynamics.

Keywords: Aero-engine
Bi-linear stiffness
Bolted flange
Nonlinear structural dynamics
Partial clearance
Spigot connection
Advisor: Behdinan, Kamran
The Development of Propagated Discharge and Behavioural Arrest in Temporal Lobe Focal Seizures with Impairment of Awareness

Patients with focal temporal lobe seizures often experience transient episodes of impaired awareness with behavioural arrest, but the precise mechanism remains unknown. The Blumenfeld hypothesis attributes these deficits to a loss of cholinergic input to the cortex. This is presumed to result from increased activation of inhibitory regions that suppress subcortical arousal, giving rise to slow wave activity. To investigate this hypothesis – and more specifically, to characterize the relationship between propagated discharge, cortical slow waves and behavioural arrest – we performed kindling studies in rats. We found that the onset of propagated discharge in subcortical and cortical sites did not always match with the onset of behavioural arrest. In the addition, the activity seen in the cortex did not resemble the slow waves seen in deep sleep. Together, these findings suggest an additional mechanism – other than the Blumenfeld hypothesis – to explain how temporal lobe seizures may produce behavioural arrest and impair awareness.

Keywords: awareness
behavioural arrest
consciousness
epilepsy
seizures
temporal lobe
Advisor: Burnham, Willets McIntyre
In Silico Comparative Evaluation of Classical and Robust Dimension Reduction for Psychological Assessment

The classic exploration of correlated multivariable psychological assessment data employs dimension reduction of the original p¬ variables to a lower q-dimensional space through principal component analysis (PCA). Standard criteria in the selection of the number of q dimensions may be affected by non-normal distributions and atypical observations. Performance of PCA was compared to robust dimension reduction techniques including Grid Projection Pursuit and robust covariance estimation (ROBPCA) in the accurate identification of the predetermined number of q-dimensions according to selection criteria for the cumulative proportion of variation, Kaiser-Guttman eigenvalue rule, and quantitative localization of Cattell’s scree plot ‘elbow’ via segmented regression. Based on in silico benchmarking using various simulated multivariate conditions, ROBPCA was consistent in correctly identifying the true q-dimensions. PCA can be improved through the adjustment of values for the cumulative proportion of variation and eigenvalue thresholds. Grid Projection Pursuit was the lowest performer among the techniques under simulated conditions.

Keywords: dimension reduction
PCA
projection pursuit
robust
Advisor: Binns, Malcolm A.
Curious Pressure Dependence of the Stability of d(TGnT)

Monomolecular guanine-rich four-stranded DNA molecules (G-quadruplexes) are destabilized by hydrostatic pressure. These G-quadruplexes (GQ) are made up of loops (non-guanine regions) and tetrads (guanine-rich regions). The molar volume change (∆V total) of monomolecular GQ is the difference in the molar volume of the unfolded and folded states. We studied the effect of pressure on tetramolecular GQs because they have no “loops". From this, we determined the ∆V of each G-tetrad and the ∆V of the loops in monomolecular GQ. Our data show that there is no net molar ∆V between the folded and unfolded states of d(TG3-4T)4. Furthermore, the ∆V is unrelated to the parallel orientation of the strands in d(TG3-4T)4. Therefore, the factors causing the ∆V arising from the formation of tetramolecular GQ balance each other resulting in the net ∆V as zero. Thus, the ∆V values in monomolecular GQ are due to the “loop” regions of those structures.

Keywords: cancer
G Quadruplex
high pressure
tetramolecular
volume
Advisor: Macgregor Jr., Robert B
Investigating a Novel Type of Reinforcement for Conventional and Ultra-High Performance Fibre-Reinforced Concrete

GRIP Metal, a novel metal product developed for the automobile industry, possesses great potential for concrete and composite constructions. This research program investigates the material itself as well as structural components incorporating GRIP Metal. Applications related to both conventional and ultra-high performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) were studied. At a material level, GRIP Metal tensile properties and bond with concrete were experimentally determined. At a system level, this research explored the potential uses of GRIP Metal as flexural reinforcement in beams, shear connector in timber-concrete composites, and joint for UHPFRC. Experiments were carried out to validate the feasibility of these applications.

Advisor: Gauvreau, Paul Douglas
Logistics Sprawl: Spatial Patterns and Characteristics of New Warehousing Establishments in The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area

A significant sprawl in logistics facilities have been identified both in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH). The objective of this thesis is to analyze the spatial patterns and characteristics of new warehousing establishments that have located in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) since 2003. The study found that the major share of increase in number of warehouses in the GTHA occurred between the years 2005 and 2006, and years 2009 and 2010 respectively. This growth illustrates the emergence of clusters of new warehouses around the Toronto Pearson International Airport, and the Canadian National and the Canada Pacific intermodal terminals. The building footprint and the property size used for development by the new warehouses indicates the emergence of large scale warehouses in the GTHA. Inward movement of warehousing establishments towards the distribution centers of major firms has been observed.

Advisor: Roorda, Matthew J.
Miller, Eric J.
The Association Between University Sport Participation and Well-Being of Former Athletes in Mid-Adulthood: A Focus on Prior Concussions and Type of Sport Played

Sport-related concussions and collision sport participation have been associated with long-term cognitive, neurobehavioural, and psychiatric issues. However, research to date has primarily examined former professional male athletes. This thesis examined the association between sport participation and well-being in middle-aged male and female former university athletes, with specific focus on prior concussions and sport type. Former athletes reported fewer depressive symptoms, greater mental and physical health, and higher life satisfaction than non-athletes. Former athletes with a history of concussion reported more anxiety symptoms than athletes without a history of concussion. Sport type (i.e., collision, contact, non-contact) was not associated with self-reported well-being after controlling for concussion history, gender, and age. Results suggest former athletes in mid-adulthood generally report greater well-being than non-athletes. Furthermore, compared to research examining former professional male athletes, prior concussions and participation in collision sports at the university level are not associated with profound negative health outcomes.

Keywords: Concussion
Middle-Aged Former Athletes
Sport Type
University Sport Participation
Well-Being
Advisor: Hutchison, Michael G
Characterizing a Novel Ligand for the Farnesoid X Receptor using Transgenic Zebrafish

Nuclear receptors (NRs) are ligand activated transcription factors that are involved in variety of processes, such as metabolism, development, and reproduction. The farnesoid x receptor (FXR) is a NR that is involved in maintaining lipid homeostasis in the liver. When FXR is downregulated in the liver, diseases such as fatty liver disease can arise. Using the ligand-trap system in zebrafish, a novel ligand for FXR, 8215 Ethyl, was identified. This ligand was characterized and it was discovered that 8215 Ethyl induces FXR expression robustly and selectively in the liver at non-toxic concentrations. 8215 Ethyl is also able to induce activation of the NRs PPARγ and RORγ in zebrafish. FXR, PPARγ, and RORγ are regulated by 8215 Ethyl through the direct binding of the ligand to the ligand binding domains of these NRs. These findings indicate that 8215 Ethyl may have therapeutic potential to treat diseases associated with downregulation of FXR.

Keywords: Drug Screening
Farnesoid X Receptor
Ligand Characterization
Ligand Trap System
Nuclear Receptor
Advisor: Krause, Henry