VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Adaptive neuro-fuzzy modeling of electric arc furnaces

This thesis investigates the use of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Networks (ANFN) as means of implementing algorithms suitable for Nonlinear Black-Box Modeling and Prediction. One area of particular importance is the design of networks capable of modeling and prediction of the behavior of systems that involve complex, multi-variable processes with time-variant parameters. This thesis shows that ANFNs lend themselves well to nonlinear black-box modeling/prediction. To illustrate the applicability of the neuro-fuzzy networks, a case study involving electric arc furnaces (EAF) is presented here. EAF represents a complex, nonlinear load with stochastic behavior and as such prediction/Modeling of EAF characteristics is a demanding task. This thesis first describes the notion of nonlinear black-box modeling and shows that neuro-fuzzy networks are model structures suitable for nonlinear black-box prediction. A uniform treatment of artificial neural networks (ANN), fuzzy logic systems (FLS) and ANFNs are presented in which applications of these methodologies are explored to model v-i characteristic of an operational EAF whose measured data are used for training and validation of all networks. The successful developments of EAF models, using these different network architectures has been described. This thesis also presents application of two classes of hybrid neuro-fuzzy networks, namely, feedforward and recurrent, to the solution of a particular complex problem that is long-term prediction. A frame of reference is built, based on which other nonlinear black-box techniques suitable for single-step/multi-step prediction can be evaluated. Successful implementations of feedforward/recurrent neuro-fuzzy predictors are described and their performances are illustrated using the results obtained from adaptive neuro-fuzzy networks and recorded data.
Modeling water demand and considering climate change - a Toronto case study

Water demand is a process that involves physical and psychological response to climatic factors. Forecasting water demand is essential for planning of water supply facilities and for operation of existing systems. The prospect of global climate change adds a new dimension to the existing uncertainty in forecasting of water demand. This thesis provides an analysis of Toronto's daily water demand and a modeling technique for forecasting of demands. A model for the predication of the daily water demand of the city is developed. A second model for long-term forecasting of Toronto's water demand is also developed. The model is used to study the impact of climate change on Toronto's future demands. The study has shown that a 1°C increase in summer temperature would cause 2% increase in average summer demand and 1.8% increase in peak day demand. The thesis establishes that population increase with increase in temperature coupled with reduction in precipitation may increase significantly the average daily demand and peak demand. The study demonstrated that there is a need to included climate change scenarios in the planning and evaluation of future water supply projects in Toronto
Measurement of the top quark mass in the dilepton channel using the neutrino weighting algorithm at CDF II

We measure the top quark mass using approximately 359 pb-1 of data from pp⁻ collisions at s = 1.96 GeV at CDF Run II. We select tt⁻ candidates that are consistent with two W bosons decaying to a charged lepton and a neutrino following tt⁻ rarr; W+W-bb⁻ rarr; l+l- nn d1; bb⁻. Only one of the two charged leptons is required to be identified as an electron or a muon candidate, while the other is simply a well measured track. We use a neutrino weighting algorithm which weighs each possibility of neutrino direction to reconstruct a top quark mass in each event. We compare the resulting distribution to Monte Carlo templates to obtain a top quark mass of 170.8+6.9-6.5 (stat) +/- 4.6 (syst) GeV/c 2.
A system dynamics approach to modeling cardiology patient flow in Trillium Health Care Centre

Trillium Health Care Centre is having difficulty in ensuring a smooth Cardiology patient flow throughout the hospital. While many departments ask for more resources, basing their argument on their high occupancy rates, it is not obvious where the real bottleneck in patient flow is just by looking at occupancy rates. A System Dynamics model of Cardiology patient flow is developed to determine the number of beds required in each department to ensure a smooth patient flow, assuming there is no delay due to service or staff unavailability. The results show that CSICU is a major roadblock, which is not verified by the current situation in the hospital. A sensitivity analysis reveals that the model is highly sensitive to average medically-necessary length of stays in each department. Therefore, it is argued that to get more reliable results, more accurate data on medically-necessary length of stays in each department are needed.
The influence of perception of function on work status in individuals who sustain a work-related upper extremity musculoskeletal injury

The purpose of this thesis is to describe demographic, vocational, functional, medical, psychosocial and workplace characteristics of Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) claimants, who sustain an upper extremity injury, in order to identify patterns and determine if a worker's perceived level of function affects their work status. This study used a cross-sectional design of one-hundred and six (n = 106) consecutive individuals who met the inclusion criteria. Workers were interviewed by telephone at approximately six-weeks post-accident. The primary measures included; a clinical question regarding self perception of function, the Disability Arm Shoulder and Hand Questionnaire (DASH), select questions from the Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ and open-ended questions regarding the subjects' perception of their ability to work. A subset of the study sample (n = 32) participated in a six-month follow-up interview repeating the primary measures. As hypothesized, an individual's perception of their function is related to their work status (p
Twisted characters of depth-zero supercuspidal representations of GL(n)

Let F be a finite extension of [special characters omitted], for p an odd prime. Given an automorphism &thetas; of G = GLn(F) of finite order, any irreducible, &thetas;-stable representation π of G may be extended to an irreducible representation π+ of G+ = G [special characters omitted] ⟨&thetas;⟩. If π is supercuspidal, we obtain a Harish-Chandra-type integral formula for the character Θπ +, of π+, expressed on sufficiently regular elements of G+. In the case that π is a depth-zero supercuspidal representation of G, we use this integral formula to compare values of Θπ+ on a neighbourhood of &thetas; in G+ to a (finite) linear combination of characters of depth-zero supercuspidal representations of the group G&thetas; of &thetas;-fixed points in G. Then, using properties of the characters in this linear combination, we compare Θπ+ to a linear combination of Fourier transforms of orbital integrals on the Lie algebra Lie(G&thetas;) of G&thetas; .
Evaluating the impact of cerebrovascular disease on cognition using quantitative MRI

Brain atrophy and cerebrovascular disease are associated with cognitive dysfunction, increase in frequency with age and commonly co-occur. However, the relationships between these pathologies and their independent contributions to cognitive function remain unclear. This study quantified brain atrophy and multiple expressions of cerebrovascular disease in 205 individuals, including 34 normal elderly controls, 30 with cognitive impairment and 141 with dementia. Correlations between brain measures were identified and factor analysis was used to generate independent variables that could be used in multiple linear regression models of brain-behavior relationships. The results confirm and extend previous findings suggesting that brain atrophy is the strongest correlate of cognitive impairment. Atrophy was the only relevant factor in those under age 65. Diffuse and strategically located cerebrovascular disease contributed independently to cognitive status in those over age 65. Both the volume and location of cerebrovascular disease (e.g. anterior-medial thalamus) were important determinants of the effects of cerebrovascular disease on cognition. The concept of strategic location of cerebrovascular disease was extended to subcortical white matter pathways and possible specific effects of hyperintensities in acetylcholinergic white matter pathways were identified. Taken together, these in vivo studies demonstrate that cerebrovascular disease has small but independent effects on cognitive function and provide impetus to study interventions which might slow or halt the development of cerebrovascular disease with age.
On textolatry: Madelstam's "The Egyptian Stamp" (1928) and Pasternak's "The Tale" (1929)

On Textolatry is a study of Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp (1928) and Pasternak's The Tale (1929). These works are examined as textual examples that illuminate the prose innovations of the 1920s, a period of turning abruptly away from lyric verse. This dissertation deals with the movements of this “era of prose”, including ornamentalism, proza poeta (poet's prose) and the “literature of fact”, and demonstrates how the concepts of these schools are manifested in the texts in question. Mandelstam's The Egyptian Stamp is discussed as a work which makes unique use of the “litmontage” technique, demonstrates the collision of epic and lyric characteristic of proza poeta and produces an overabundance of graphophilic textual imagery. Pasternak's The Tale is read as a text that polemicizes with the tenets of literatura fakta (the liturature of fact), deploys proza poeta's “emotional” word within a semantically-driven prose text, and reveals its self-conscious stance towards genre within the movement for denovelization. This dissertation employs narrative and genre theory and gives close readings of these difficult texts, while making use of Russian-language material, English translations and transliterations are used throughout. The conclusions reached in these chapters show The Egyptian Stamp and The Tale to be richly evocative of the experiments which ran counter to the movement for a conventional novelistic art. These works emerge as self-reflective and self-reflexive literary artifacts that expose and express textolatry, the obsession of texts with their own textuality.
Nonlinear multilayered sequence models

Feature discovery is a fundamental problem, for the performance of any learning algorithm depends on the features it is given. In this thesis we focus on the problem of feature discovery for sequential data, such as video or speech, which is important for many practical problems, including that of constructing an intelligent agent. The hidden variables of probabilistic models that are fitted to the data often act as useful features for discrimination tasks that are not known during learning. We introduce several powerful probabilistic sequence models with efficient learning and inference algorithms that can learn accurate models of highly complex, high-dimensional sequence data and produce hierarchical features.
Negotiating community long-term care: The experience of spousal caregivers caring for their partners with dementia

The study employed a survey design with a convenience sample of 85 spousal caregivers who lived with their partners and who were using some form of community long-term care services. The face-to-face administration of the study questionnaires allowed caregivers to offer further remarks regarding their experiences with both the service system and caregiving in general. These comments were valuable in extending interpretations of the quantitative data. The objectives of this study are twofold: (a) to examine the relationship between the long-term community care system and spousal caregivers' mental health and (b) to explore the associations between different types of community long-term care services and caregivers' mental health. Informed by an ecological systems framework, this dissertation aims to depict the relationship between, a complex, market-oriented, resource-limited, long-term community care system and caregiving spouses' mental health. The results of this study highlight that adult day programs offer spousal caregivers a unique form of respite. Of three different types of respite services including; day program services, in-home community support workers' services, and institutional respite services, only the frequency of day program use significantly correlated with caregiver burden. Multiple regression analysis showed that caregivers whose spouse used more days of a day program experienced less burden. Comments made by caregivers in this study reinforced the important respite afforded by adult day programs. The results of this study further demonstrate that new or substitute in-home community support workers, who are not informed about the needs of caregivers and persons with dementia, negatively contribute to spousal caregivers' perceptions of services. Specifically, a multiple regression analysis demonstrated that, the less informed in-home community support workers were the more spousal caregivers experienced service discontinuity. Finally, the findings from this research suggest that spousal caregivers do not currently have access to ongoing one-on-one professional support for case coordination, and for information and guidance. Consequently, these caregivers are isolated in their provision of some of the most complex and emotionally challenging types of care. This study offers practice and policy implications that look to close the gap between spousal caregivers' needs and the long-term community care system.
Haplotype inference using a hidden Markov model with efficient Markov chain sampling

Knowledge of haplotypes is useful for understanding block structures of the genome and finding genes associated with disease. Direct measurement of haplotypes in the absence of family data is presently impractical. Hence several methods have been developed previously for reconstructing haplotypes from population data. In this thesis, a new population-based method is developed using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for the source of ancestral haplotype segments. A higher-order Markov model is used to account for linkage disequilibrium in the ancestral haplotypes. The HMM includes parameters for the genotyping error rate, the mutation rate, and the recombination rate. Four mutation models with varying number of parameters are developed and compared. Parameters of the model are inferred by Bayesian methods, using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Crucial to the efficiency of the Markov chain sampling is the use of a Forward-Backward algorithm for summing over all possible state sequences of the HMM. This model is tested by reconstructing the haplotypes of 129 children in the data set of Daly et al. (2001) and of 30 children in the CEU and YRI data of the HAPMAP project. For these data sets, family-based haplotype reconstructions found using MERLIN (Abecasis et al. 2002) are used to check the correctness of the population-based reconstructions. The results of this HMM method are quite close to the family-based reconstructions and comparable to the PHASE program (Stephens et al. 2001, Stephens and Donnelly 2003, Stephens and Scheet 2005) and the fastPHASE program (Scheet and Stephens 2006). The recombination rates inferred from this HMM method can help to predict haplotype block boundaries, and identify recombination hotspots.
City, state, and the Grand Canal: Jining's identity and transformation, 1289--1937

While traditional scholarship regards imperial Chinese cities as administrative centers whose origins and functions correspond to political and military needs, some scholars have recently argued for another pattern: cities as economic centers, with urbanization either grounded on regional rural-based commercialization in late imperial period, or influenced by Western capitalism in the modern period. This dissertation proposes a new model of urbanization and city formation: urbanization largely driven by transportation. The Grand Canal changed the political economy along its course, especially in the north, making the canal belt part of the economic core of late imperial China. Jining's emergence as an important city in a predominantly agricultural region resulted mainly from the stimulation of trade and commercial production caused by the growth of transportation on the Grand Canal. This experience suggests an exogenously driven type of urbanization. However, the state also established a strong governmental hold there, meaning that Jining and many other canal cities were both economic and political centers. The northern canal cities' dependence on the Grand Canal profoundly shaped their culture and society too. However, why did northern canal cities sharing the same path of urbanization and economic orientation demonstrate great variety in their cultural characteristics and social structure? This dissertation undertakes an analysis of Jining's particular urban identity. Located in the north, its position in the national network of the Ming-Qing imperial economy and culture led it to adopt many southern cultural features and social elements, such as a strong commercial cultural ethos, and a powerful and open-minded urban gentry class, in contrast to the typical image of a northern city: having a strong political coloration but a smaller gentry class. The gentry elites' efforts in Jining's urban space not only turned it into a distinctive cultural center and tourist destination, but also affected state-society relations such that local interests were favored, helping conserve the city's own cultural and economic integrity. This dissertation also illustrates an example of partially successful modern urban transformation in hinterland China. When canal transportation collapsed in the modern period, in tandem with the decline of state power and the influx of Western capitalism from coastal areas, most northern canal cities became marginalized in the new national economic network. Jining found itself in decline but it did not collapse. Its modern story shows the legacy of its late imperial identity: the Jining people's recognition of the vitality of transportation to both local economy and identity; the city's strong commercial cultural ethos; the influential open-minded elite were all saving graces in this new era. The local elites employed a variety of measures to hold back the locality's regression and worked toward its modernization.
The design of an arctic structure for three-pier foundations

This document is a study of the design-related issues for a residential Arctic structure, where seasonal heaving is a serious concern. In recent years, this heaving has inspired many innovative concepts including the use of three-pier support systems. Due to its ability to harmlessly accommodate differential settlement, the three-point system was adopted for this study. The current designs of this type involve either rigid chassis or space frames supporting a conventional home, else a Monocoque type home capable of supporting itself. While a Monocoque commonly utilizes the walls as deep beams to carry floor and roof loads, there is a reduction in thermal efficiency of the walls and restriction on door and window placement. It was therefore suggested to provide most of the load distribution within the roof structure, thus creating an ‘inverted chassis’ structure. In order to provide the needed resistance against twisting, the stressed-skin approach as used in Monocoque designs was employed. Common to all self-supporting three-point designs, stability and vibration criteria must be met. It is for this reason that a form of shock absorber or dynamic reaction at the unsupported corners was suggested. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
A preconditioned iterative parallel solver for the incompressible navier-stokes equations

An efficient parallel iterative method for structured and unstructured grids is presented in this thesis. The novelty is the use of a localized ILU preconditioner for the parallel Navier-Stokes equations solver which enhances the degree of parallelization and keeps load balance. In order to stabilize the localized ILU(0) preconditioning, an additive Schwarz domain decomposition (ASM) for overlapped regions is introduced. Parallel performance is evaluated for blood flow through artery and Lid driven cavity flow. The ILU(0) preconditioner significantly increases the convergence rate and also decreases the CPU time which results in better speed up and efficiency for parallel solver.
Multiagent reconfiguration using hybrid optimal control

The study of multiagent systems has gained great attention due to its flexibility and reconfigurability. In this thesis, the goal is to transfer n vehicles from random initial configurations onto a target line in minimum time, preferably without collisions. The single-agent optimal path computed by other researchers is applied to each of the n vehicles, however, collisions may occur. This collision avoidance problem is opened and an intermediate step is to detect whether a collision will happen. A methodology is developed to determine all initial configurations that if a vehicle starts within this set, a collision will happen. This set of initial configurations is defined as the hazard region. Another interesting problem is to reconfigure vehicles to a target line without specifying its position. A method is developed to find this optimal line, the target line where all the vehicles will get on in minimum time.
Cyclic flow characteristics within a water analog engine

The cyclic flow was simulated with a square cross-section optical water analog engine. A stereoscopic particle image velocimetry was constructed using two charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras to produce three component velocity vectors over a 17 mm by 20 mm area. Measurements were taken at nine different locations behind the upper-valve centerline. Engine speeds were at 15 and 20 revolutions per minutes (RPM). Three different valve configurations were studied using different combinations of two open valve lift (10 and 20 mm). Statistically significant numbers of image sets were obtained at a number of specific crank angles. The adaptive cross-correlation algorithm (Usera, 1999) was applied to extract velocity fields from captured images. Three different averaging methods were employed to decompose the instantaneous velocity into mean and turbulence components: ensemble, cyclic and wavelet-based averaging. The ensemble averaging does not consider the cycle-to-cycle mean variation as opposed to cyclic and wavelet averaging. The wavelet-based averaging better met the mean value based criteria introduced by Catania and Mittica (1990) than cyclic averaging. The large-scale vortex structure found during the intake stroke broke down at 180 CAD and disappeared during the exhaust stroke. The turbulence level was relatively high while the large-scale vortex structure was sustained in the process. Mean Reynolds stress and turbulence intensity showed that the out-of-plane component of turbulence was significantly higher than the in-plane components and significant turbulent energy transfer occurred between two in-plane components. A number of statistical quantities indicated large discrepancies in scales and distributions determined using different averaging schemes, which may lead to differing physical interpretations of the flow. The objective of the present study was to experimentally investigate the mixing characteristics of cyclic flow. The technical and analytical limitations from previous experiments were defined and their impacts on the interpretation of cyclic flow were discussed. Two shortcomings were identified from past experimental studies: (1) technical limitations because of incomplete measurement velocity components and insufficient measurement points, (2) analytical limitations because of inappropriate averaging of the turbulence. The current experimental study closes these gaps.