identifier: Petit Liang, Patricia  (2022) Expressing Displeasure: A Casual Guide to Making Sims 4 Machinima During a Pandemic.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Machinima is a unique artform that combines the aesthetics of gaming with filmmaking. Machinima challenges existing video game narratives through the remixing of its content. This creation-as-research project is a Sims 4 machinima video diary about negative feelings I experienced as a queer Asian femme during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project explores the topics of machinima, The Sims, women of color self-portraiture and amateur/DIY digital art through the lens of intersectional feminism. These subjects empower marginalized individuals to engage in creative artistic practices, self-reflection and identity formation. Concepts guiding this research include Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem,” bell hooks’ writings on “The Oppositional Gaze” and Donna Haraway’s writings on “situated knowledges.” Together, they describe ways women of color and other marginalized folk can unapologetically engage in artistic creation and knowledge production. The rest of this paper is dedicated to describing how I created my machinima project “burden: a short video diary” with The Sims 4, Fraps, Audacity and Adobe Premiere. This thesis is ultimately a guide for how to create personal, digital art while undergoing great personal difficulty.


identifier: Khatib, Mehdi  (2021) Bike Sharing Network Design with Service Levels: The Case of Montreal City.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

type: Thesis NonPeerReviewed

abstract: The rapid growth of urbanization and use of motor vehicles in the recent decades has led to many social and economic problems such as: rising fuel prices, energy crises, environmental problems and traffic congestion. All these problems together have decreased the quality of life of people all around the world. In recent years, municipal planners have increasingly focused on extending policies to promote a culture of using bicycles instead of cars. In many cases, urban planners try to build the infrastructure needed to increase the usage of bicycles and one of the measures that has been widely used by them in recent years is bike sharing programs. In this study, we design a bike sharing network considering the objectives of users and system designers simultaneously. From the customers’ view point, walking short distances before picking up and after dropping off a bike would be a preference and they will be satisfied when they find available bikes or empty docks in the system. From the system designer’s perspective, the objective is to achieve these service levels with the minimum network design cost. To achieve this, we develop a mixed integer linear programming model to minimize the cost of opening stations and transportation costs. We consider the pickup and drop off service level constraints in determining the location, dock capacity and demand allocation to the bike stations. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming model is developed and solved using CPLEX Software. In order to validate the network design solutions, we simulate the results of small to medium size instances in Arena. To solve the larger instances of the problem, a Genetic Algorithm is proposed that uses a heuristic method to generate a part of initial solutions and improves the solutions in its stochastic iterations and reaches near-optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of time. The proposed method is illustrated using the city of Montreal as case study.


identifier: Bakhtiari Koohsorkhi, Shiva  (2021) The spatial organization of chloroplast protein synthesis and the Calvin Benson Cycle in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Chloroplasts are the characteristic organelle in cells of plants and algae. They host numerous essential metabolic pathways, including photosynthesis. Many processes are required for the biogenesis and homeostasis of the chloroplast. This thesis will look at the spatial organization of some of these processes in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This unicellular alga is a model organism for chloroplast biology. The diverse functions of chloroplasts depend on the translation of thousands of different proteins. Most of these proteins are encoded in the nucleus, translated in the cytoplasm, and imported into the organelle post-translationally. Translation by organelle-bound ribosomes and co-translational import have been described for the ER and mitochondria, but not for the chloroplast. Chapter 2 describes evidence of localized translation at the chloroplast in Chlamydomonas and addresses the questions of ribosome docking on the chloroplast and co-translational import of chloroplast proteins. The results reveal a domain of the chloroplast envelope which is bound by translating cytoplasmic ribosomes and is a specialized location of co-translational protein import. These ribosomes are retained by chloroplasts, during their purification from other cellular organelles, can be visualized on the outer chloroplast envelope with immunofluorescence microscopy (IF) and high-resolution electron tomography, and are translationally active. Co-translational protein import is supported by results of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) showing that mRNAs encoding chloroplast proteins, but not an mRNA encoding a non-chloroplast protein, are retained by this domain during chloroplast purification. This envelope domain is spatially aligned with regions of envelope that were shown previously to be enriched in the protein translocons of the inner and outer membrane of the chloroplast envelope (TIC and TOC) and presumed to be specialized locations of protein import. Inside the chloroplast and adjacent to the envelope domain with translating cytoplasmic ribosomes is the chloroplast translation zone (T-zone). This intraorganellar compartment is where plastid ribosomes translate subunits of photosystem I (PSI) and photosystem II (PSII) of the photosynthetic electron transport chain. Together, these results reveal a complex spatial coordination of translation by cytoplasmic and chloroplast ribosomes for protein targeting and biogenesis of photosynthesis complexes in this semi-autonomous organelle.
Chapter 3 describes new insights into the spatial organization of the Calvin Benson Cycle, the pathway that converts CO2 to carbohydrates in photosynthesis. Using fluorescence microscopy, I show that, under certain conditions, enzymes and related proteins in this pathway are localized to a specific compartment in the chloroplast. This compartment is different from the widely accepted locations of these enzymes and suggest some intriguing possibilities and resolutions to current problems in the field. Together, these findings support the highly compartmentalized nature of chloroplasts in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and highlight the potentials of this model organism for studying chloroplast biogenesis and addressing fundamental cell biology questions. Moreover, they raise the possibility that similar organizations can occur in more complex photosynthetic organism such as higher plants.


identifier: Farbridge, Peter  (2022) Postmarginality: Ethical Relationality of Theatre Rehearsal Practice.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Postmarginality: Ethical Relationality of Theatre Rehearsal Practice
Peter Farbridge

As debates about the under-representation of marginalized communities grow in North America, identity-centred perspectives have had a polarizing effect on cultural relations (Preciado; Couturier). In the Canadian theatre community, the ideals of artistic freedom in theatre creation conflict with the need to achieve meaningful progress in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), and the results have proven painful for different communities (Gilbert; Martelly; Aguirre). New communication tools are required in theatre rehearsal practice to help negotiate between the welcome increase in the political representation and agency of marginalized artists and the ongoing need for creative liberty. With a cohort of ethnoculturally-diverse participants, I devised a one-hour performative inquiry (Fels) from excerpts of a written play and devised solo work from the participants. The objectives of the inquiry were threefold: (1) to explore how social norms driven by a ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano and Ennis) manifest in the rehearsal process; (2) to examine if a posture of ethical relationality (Donald) can disrupt these social norms and lead to the rhizomatic connections of Tout-monde (Glissant) and Third Space (Donald; Ermine; Bhabha; Turnbull), and; finally (3) to evaluate if the psychophysical nature of theatre practice (Zarrilli) facilitates pathways towards intersubjectivity (Fuchs and Koch), empathy (Thompson), and generative dialogue (Scharmer). This project suggests that ethical relationality in theatre rehearsal practice would require less emphasis on hard-coded ethical approaches and embrace the dynamic, shifting nature of relationality in a way that generates spontaneous human agency and preserves the creative spirit of theatre practice.


identifier: Landrigan-Buttle, Meaghan  (2022) ‘Hell Is Waiting Where the Ocean Meets the Sand’: The Legacy of the Gallipoli Campaign in Ireland, 1915-2015.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The treatment of Great War remembrance and commemoration in the southern counties of Ireland has been overwhelmingly attributed to concepts of historical amnesia within nationalist memory of the war. Scholarship focuses primarily on Northern Ireland, the Battle of the Somme, and divisions between unionist and nationalist units. My study challenges this notion of amnesia by turning its focus to the Gallipoli campaign, the effects it had on life in Ireland, and its ongoing historical legacy in nationalist memory. Through an examination of Gallipoli’s remembrance and commemoration, it becomes clear that the experience of Irish soldiers at Gallipoli had a profound impact at home, adding to existing political tension. Through analyses of popular print media representations of the campaign, the influence of memory studies, and the intrinsic connection between commemoration and politics, this research examines why Gallipoli remains outside of the linear Irish historical narrative, despite efforts in the late-1990s and 2000s to revive Great War memory in Ireland. Additionally, the Decade of Centenaries project undertaken by the Irish government is centrally explored as a missed opportunity for Irish war commemoration to place Gallipoli within the narrative, next to events deemed more important like the Easter Rising, instead of keeping it on the fringes.


identifier: Deep, Samar  (2022) Hollow surface nano axial photonic cavities for microfluidic sensing.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Optical cavities are important parts of many scientific and industrial instruments and have been widely studied in the field of optics and photonics. The Surface nanoscale axial photonic (SNAP) cavity, a whispering gallery mode (WGM) type optical cavity has recently gained attention and became the focus of active research. In this thesis we present our work to make a thin-walled hollow SNAP cavity by using a hydrogen torch and a tapered microfiber (TMF) pulling setup. Our method does not require a carbon dioxide laser nor hydrogen fluoride etching. We use a tapered microfiber to excite localized optical resonant modes in the walls of this cavity. We show that when the walls of the capillary are thin enough (10 microns), the electric field from resonance mode extends beyond the internal walls of the cavity and interacts with the medium (air or water) inside the cavity. This shows a proof-of-concept that the thin-walled hollow SNAP cavities can be used as an optical microfluidic sensor. We also measure the transmission impulse response and light pulse dynamics of a SNAP optical cavity using an optical backscatter reflectometer. From the data we compute the lifetime of the light in the SNAP cavity in the time domain, and its round trip time.


identifier: Rasaee, Hamza  (2020) Explainable AI and susceptibility to adversarial attacks in classification and segmentation of breast ultrasound images.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Ultrasound is a non-invasive imaging modality that can be conveniently used to  classify suspicious breast nodules and potentially detect the onset of breast cancer. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) techniques have shown promising results in classifying ultrasound images of the breast into benign or malignant. However, CNN inference acts as a black-box model, and as such, its decision-making is not interpretable. Therefore, increasing effort has been dedicated to explaining this process, most notably through Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and other techniques that provide visual explanations into inner workings of CNNs. In addition to interpretation, these methods provide clinically important information, such as identifying the location for biopsy or treatment. In this work, we analyze how adversarial assaults that are practically undetectable may be devised to alter these importance maps dramatically. Furthermore, we will show that this change in the importance maps can come with or without altering the classification result, rendering them even harder to detect. As such, care must be taken when using these importance maps to shed light on the inner workings of deep learning. Finally, we utilize Multi-Task Learning (MTL) and propose a new network based on deep residual networks to improve the classification accuracies. Our sensitivity and specificity values are comparable to the state of the art results.


identifier: Shen, Xingyu  (2021) Automatic Keyword Tagging With Machine Learning Approach.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
With the explosive growth of information in the Internet age, the use of keywords has become the main tool for users to search for content of interest in a large amount of information. Keyword tagging can be divided into in-text keyword extraction and out-of-text keyword assignment. Keyword extraction is an important area in natural language processing (NLP), but the technology still has a lot of immaturity. Traditional keyword extraction methods are difficult to meet the commonly desired three characteristics simultaneously, i.e., understandability, relevance and good coverage, and thus even now in Web 2.0 many tags of web pages are still tagged manually.
In this thesis, we propose a novel unsupervised keyword extraction method that integrates word embedding (GloVe and fastText) with clustering (Affinity Propagation, Mean Shift and K-means). We use semantic relevance to cluster the terms in a document, and extract the noun phrase nearest to the center of the cluster as the keyword. This method ensures that the extracted keywords satisfy the above three characteristics at the same time. Our computer simulation results based on Hulth-2003, Krapivin-2009 and Nguyen-2007 datasets show that the proposed method outperforms all other existing methods in terms of common evaluation metrics such as Precision, Recall and F1-Score.
This thesis also proposes a CNN-BiLSTM model for keyword assignment, which uses word embedding method and attention mechanism. This model overcomes the limitation of single CNN model in ignoring the semantic and syntactic information of the input context, and effectively avoids the problem of gradient disappearance or gradient diffusion in traditional RNNs. Moreover, the use of attention mechanism can highlight important information and avoid the influence of invalid information on text sentiment and classification. Experimental results on three datasets, i.e., 20 Newsgroups, IMDB, SemEval 2018 task-1, show that the proposed keyword assignment method outperforms previous methods in terms of common evaluation metrics such as F1-Score, Accuracy and AUC, indicating the wide applicability of our method to various datasets.


identifier: Zaerpour, Masoud ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5986-1628 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5986-1628>  (2021) An Improved Stochastic Generation Approach for Assessing the Vulnerability of Water Resource Systems under Changing Streamflow Conditions.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Water-related disasters such as floods and droughts highlight the urgent need for securing water resource systems for human and ecosystem utilizations. Increasing anthropogenic interventions along with climate variability and change have exacerbated the intensity and frequency of such water-related events, which will continue to increase in the future. Such pressures introduce substantial and unprecedented vulnerability to water resource management. Understanding the extent of potential vulnerabilities, however, is not trivial due to the uncertainty in current top-down impact assessments. To address current limitations, bottom-up frameworks have been proposed in the past decade to provide alternatives to top-down and scenario-led vulnerability assessments. The core idea behind bottom-up schemes is to analyze the potential impacts directly as a function of potential changes in streamflow conditions through a systematic stress testing scheme. To make such stress tests reliable, systematic methodologies are needed to synthesize streamflow, and other hydroclimatic variables, beyond the historical observations. Despite ongoing advances in stochastic streamflow generations under stationary conditions – with which the vulnerability assessment can be performed – little attention has been given to advancing the perturbation algorithms for altering the streamflow characteristics under nonstationary conditions; and in fact, only a few incorporate climate-related proxies into streamflow generation. This thesis aims to shed light on some limitations of bottom-up approaches and propose an improved stochastic streamflow generation framework for impact assessment in water resources systems under changing streamflow conditions. This takes place through: (1) Identifying uncertainties in current stochastic streamflow generation approaches as well as how and why these uncertainties matter to bottom-up impact assessment; (2) providing a guideline on the choice of the optimal scheme(s) for stochastic generation of streamflow series in various temporal and spatial scales; (3) proposing a methodology to incorporate the effect of large scale climate indices in stochastic streamflow generation; (4) identifying the types of changes in the streamflow regime through a systematic and globally-relevant approach; as well as (5) proposing a generic algorithm to shift a wide range of streamflow characteristics in streamflow time series, and to make a transient and non-stationary flow generation.  This research results in an improved stochastic streamflow generation scheme capable of generating scenarios of change under nonstationary conditions. The skill of the proposed algorithm is assessed over multiple natural streams, showing good performance in representing the plausible changes required for the vulnerability assessment of water resource systems.


identifier: Gheitasi, Kian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6399-0994 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6399-0994>  (2021) Security of Constrained Cyber-Physical Systems.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In this thesis, the safety and security problems in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are addressed. In general, CPSs are referred to as physical systems tightly coupled with computation and communication capabilities, which have the potential to improve traditional engineering systems in terms of efficiency, reliability, and performance. However, such added features come along with potential vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks, as testified by the different types of cyber-attacks reported against CPSs. In the last decade, several control solutions have been proposed to detect such attacks and mitigate their impact on CPSs.

In the first part of this thesis, we show that most of the studied attacks, if performed for a finite-time duration, can be straightforwardly detected in the post-attack phase. Moreover, we show the existence of a new type of cyber-attacks, namely finite-time covert attacks, affecting both constrained and unconstrained control systems. It is formally proved that this class of attacks is undetectable, during their actions and after their termination, if the anomaly detector is implemented on the controller side of the CPS. To design such attacks against unconstrained control systems, we combine a finite impulse response receding-horizon filter and reachability arguments. On the other hand, for constrained control systems we resort to a Set-Theoretic Model Predictive Control (ST-MPC) approach leveraging robust reachability arguments.

In the second part of the thesis, we consider a constrained control system, subject to state and control input constraints, and we propose a novel networked control architecture to ensure the plant’s safety, i.e., fulfillment of plant’s safety constraints in the presence of cyber-attacks on the communication channels, regardless of attacker’s actions and duration. To this end, two different detectors are proposed to detect attacks on the setpoint signal as well as on the control inputs and sensor measurements. In addition, an Emergency Controller (EC), local to the plant, is designed to replace the networked controller whenever an attack is detected. The concept of a robust N−step attack-safe region is introduced to ensure that the EC is activated, regardless of the detector performance, at least one step before the safety constraints are violated.

In the third part of the thesis, we propose a novel networked control architecture aiming to minimize the tracking performance degradation under cyber-attacks. On the plant side, a local controller is designed to take care of attacks on the actuation channel. In particular, given a finite number of pre-determined admissible safe equilibrium points, this unit exploits a Voronoi partition of the state space and a family of dual-mode set-theoretic model predictive controllers to safely confine, in a finite number of steps, the system state into the closest robust control invariant region. On the other hand, on the controller side, the reference tracking controller operations are enhanced with an add-on module in charge of dealing with attack occurrences on the measurement channel. Specifically, by leveraging the Voronoi partition used on the plant’s side and robust reachability arguments, the objective of this unit is to reduce the tracking performance loss by allowing a supervised system open-loop evolution until the best possible outcome in terms of tracking is achieved.


identifier: Mahran, Sara  (2021) Design of a Triple-Mode Low Power Single-Ended Source-Series-Terminated Driver.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In data centers, the multi-mode fiber (MMF) links and vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) diode are widely used for short-reach optical communications (< 100 m) because of their low cost and their ability to handle the ever-increasing data rates. In conventional VCSEL drivers, the laser diode driver (LDD) can be bonded to a chip carrier, while the host chip is bonded to another chip carrier. This host chip contains an electrical link driver and is connected to the VCSEL driver via a short electrical link. To reduce the overall power consumption of the conventional VCSEL driver system, the electrical link driver in the host chip can be modified so that it can drive the VCSEL diode directly, eliminating the laser diode driver. Thus, the modified driver can drive either an electrical link or a VCSEL diode. By modifying the packaging, the VCSEL diode can be wire bonded to the host chip and directly driven.
Driving a VCSEL diode requires features such as asymmetric equalization, relatively low modulation current, and DC current source to bias the VCSEL. On the other hand, driving an electrical link requires symmetric equalization, relatively high output voltage swing from the driver, and matched output impedance. Accordingly, a typical electrical link driver cannot drive a VCSEL diode and the VCSEL driver is not suitable for driving an electrical link. The proposed design is a single-ended source-series-terminated (SST) voltage-mode driver in a CMOS 65 nm technology with three driving modes: driving electrical links with losses up to 16 dB (mode I), driving VCSEL diodes through a short electrical link (mode II), and driving VCSEL diodes directly wire bonded to the driver (mode III). The proposed design provides a tunable output swing without changing the driver output impedance and achieves a smooth transition between symmetric and asymmetric equalization as needed. In simulation, the proposed triple-mode driver operates up to a bit rate of 20 Gb/s, and dissipates at most 27.6 mW of power when operating at mode II when using a supply voltage of 1.2 V.


identifier: Reid, Miranda  (2021) Navigating Diverse Perspectives: The Longitudinal Development of Children’s Intellectual Humility in Philosophical Dialogues.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Developmental accounts of intellectual humility (IH) are currently emerging and thus little is known about how children engage in IH and which contexts may support its development. Further, IH has yet to be operationalized within a dialogic context in childhood. Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) is a pedagogy that has been heavily theorized to foster epistemic virtues such as IH, and may be an informative context within which to study IH in children. The present study is a longitudinal, instrumental case study analysis of the development of IH in the context of P4wC dialogues among five children who participated in activities associated with a P4wC-based charity over four years between 2015-2018. From a situative analytic lens, this study elucidates how children’s participation in P4wC dialogues supports the development of IH. My findings suggest four categories of discursive indicators associated with IH and two broad categories of indicators associated with a lack of IH. The categories associated with IH are: self-correction, openness to others, willingness to doubt and labelling one’s own perspective. Categories associated with a lack of IH are: asserting and defense to disagreement. My findings also suggest potential developmental patterns within indicators of IH, such that meta-cognitive or explicit expressions appeared after time and experience. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how dialogue type and facilitator scaffolding impact indicators of IH. Overall, this study provides evidence to suggest that children are capable of demonstrating and developing IH, and that P4wC is a good pedagogical context to foster and study IH in childhood.


identifier: Arbis, Ashley Marie  (2022) Missing social sustainability: Planning “green condo-ism” in the Namur de la Savane sector in Montréal.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Condominiums are present in urban skylines throughout the world, including Canada. The condominium literature helpfully identifies the political-economic actors behind their development. However, it misses the role of urban planning and, in particular, the ways that planners’ pursuit of sustainability goals relates to condominium developments and “condo-ism”. This research, focused on urban planning in the Namur de la Savane sector of Montréal, aims to answer the following question: How do environmental and social sustainability policies promote condominiums as the ideal form of urbanism? What are the social consequences of this ideal form of urbanism? To answer these questions, I used document analysis of various planning documents and policies between 2004 and 2020. The document analysis showed how planners pursue ecological sustainability through the promotion of green urban landscapes, density, and transit-oriented development. The pursuit of social sustainability appears in these documents in the limited form of “social mix,” including some support for social housing. The implications here are twofold. First, the pursuit of these goals ultimately leads to the promotion of condominiums. Second, the framing of the goals ignores many important social considerations, including the social effects of condominiums on the broader neighbourhood. These findings contribute to the literature on condo-ism, showing how urban planning is central to the latter. Indeed, these findings can make a contribution as various levels of government are putting forward sustainability policies that will greatly influence urban planning but must take into consideration the importance of social sustainability in the planning of future cities.


identifier: Messina, Cynthia  (2021) Methodology Development for Facile Access to Biphenyls and Multi-Arylated Heteroarenes via Pd-catalyzed Cross-Couplings.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Multi-arylated heteroarenes and bi-phenyls are important motifs in a number of industries, such as organic semi-conductors and medicinal chemistry. Biphenyls are classically synthesized by transition metal catalyzed cross-couplings. Typically, non-symmetric, multi-arylated thiophenes and furans are prepared either by cyclization or transition metal catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. The latter strategy is more attractive as it allows for late stage functionalization and facilitates the synthesis of compound libraries. It is, however, more challenging to regioselectively functionalize each position on the heteroarene with cross-coupling. These synthetic steps tend to require a stoichiometric amount of organometallic reagent, and therefore generate heavy metallic waste, and can be impractical in terms of air- and moisture-sensitivity and long reaction times. To facilitate access to multi-arylated thiophenes and furans, we have developed cross-coupling methodologies that utilize the different facets of a carboxylic acid/ester functional group to regioselectively arylate thiophene and furan. This approach is both greener than previously reported methodologies and very practical in its relative simplicity. First, a double decarboxylative cross-coupling (DCC) route is devised as an effective strategy for quick access to non-symmetric, di-arylated thiophenes. Second, an expanded route utilizing directed halogenation, DCC, and Suzuki-Miyaura cross-couplings is developed in order to access tetra-arylated thiophene, tetra-arylated furan, as well as the various isomers of di- and tri-arylated thiophenes and furans. Of the cross-couplings utilized in these modular routes, DCC has the advantage of avoiding the use of organometallic reagents to generate the nucleophilic coupling partner. Unfortunately, this reaction is low yielding with un-activated benzoic acids, and requires hazardous solvents, high temperatures and long reaction times with these substrates. To access biphenyl bonds with a cross-coupling reaction that minimizes organometallic waste, avoids hazardous solvents and is done under relatively mild condition, a first-generation deselenative cross-coupling was also developed.


identifier: Bagher Zadeh Ansari, Naghmeh  (2021) Augmented Reality in Ventriculostomy.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

title: Augmented Reality in Ventriculostomy

abstract:
Freehand ventriculostomy is one of the most common neurological procedures
performed when the cerebrospinal
uid increases in the ventricular system. This
procedure is most often performed in the emergency room or intensive care unit and
thus without a navigation system to help surgeons locate the ventricles. Surgeons
instead use anatomical landmarks on the face and skull to determine the best location
of the burr hole and trajectory for moving catheter through the brain to the ventricles
to drain excess cerebrospinal
uid (CSF) and decrease intracranial pressure (ICP).
Freehand ventriculostomy has an associated catheter misplacement rate of over 30%
which can lead to a number of complications including mortality and morbidity.
In this dissertation, we propose an augmented-reality pipeline for ventriculostomy
using an optical-see-through head-mounted device, the Microsoft HoloLens. Our system,
projects a 3D constructed model of the patient's skull and ventricles directly onto
the patient's head to guide the surgeon to locate a target on the ventricle. As part
of this pipeline, we implemented an API to send real-time tracking information from
the optical tracker to the the HoloLens, provided a manual gesture-based registration
method, as well as a colored-based depth visualization to help users understand the
spatial relationship between the patient's ventricular anatomy and surgical tool.
In a study with 15 subjects, we found that the proposed gesture-based registration
has an accuracy of 10:75 millimeters and target hitting accuracy of 12:28
millimeters. In terms of usability, our developed system received a score of 74.5
on the System usability scale (SUS), indicating that the system is easily usable.
Our preliminary results suggest that augmented-reality systems can be helpful for
neuronavigation procedures that require target localization.


identifier: Samlali, Kenza ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8390-5221 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8390-5221>  (2021) Integrating droplet and digital microfluidics for single-cell analysis.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The motivation to engineer biological systems through standardization and abstraction sparked the development of technological advances in automation of life sciences since the early 2000’s. Now, robotics are performing high-throughput tasks with increasingly higher precision and control over the environment of precious biological samples. At the same time, a different set of hardware has emerged in the life-sciences: while robotics enable for high-throughput automation, microfluidics - the discipline of handling fluids on a micro scale - allows researchers and clinicians to perform experiments they could not have imagined before. These highly controlled devices can purify proteins, engineer cells, gain insights to single-cell ‘omic’ information, or filter out a patient’s cancer cells in a fully automated fashion. In this work, we are focused on designing novel microfluidic devices for single-cell analysis. Currently, the use of single-cell analysis microfluidic devices open up the possibility of gaining detailed insights in heterozygosity of cell populations when coupled with next-generation sequencing technologies. We propose the design of a microfluidic setup that has improved control over single-cell operations within droplet-in-channel microfluidic architectures compared to current systems. Expanding these ’droplet digital’ tools, we have developed a microfluidic system for binary sorting of droplet libraries, on-demand droplet generation, droplet mixing, droplet storage and release, and deterministic encapsulation of single-cells . We propose new methods to sort cells, such as filamentous fungi libraries based on enzyme production, yeast based on growth rate and mammalian cell single-clones based on gene-editing efficiency. This work involves the development of novel hardware and software, and the integration of our microfluidic device within an automation system to operate dropletdigital microfluidics. Such systems are expanding the toolbox of those who are ‘engineering biology’.


identifier: Tarbu, Ioana  (2021) Cultural Intimacy and Family Ties in the New Romanian Cinema.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
After the fall of communism in 1989, Romania emerged as the country with the most prolific film industry in Eastern Europe. Directors like Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Radu Muntean and several others have won numerous prizes at international film festivals, including the Cannes’ Palme d’Or, and their films are now referred to as the “New Romanian Cinema”. They are known for the documentary realism and the focus on everyday incidents and ordinary people, set in powerful stories of the communist past or of the postcommunist transition period.
Looking at Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016) and Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada (2016) I explore the sense of shared cultural intimacy which captures “those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (Herzfeld, 3). The relation between family membership and national belonging is used to create a measure of shared awkwardness and vulnerability that functions as a bond of cultural kinship for the Romanian viewer. The exploitation of the rather unflattering and vulnerable aspects of the Romanians’ way of living and behaving shows a complicity between filmmaker and the audience that is created in the very act of castigating these realities. My analysis shows how these films offer a feeling of cultural intimacy as an artistic compensation for the crisis of filial and collective intimacy to a nation seen as a “community in anonymity”, to use Benedict Anderson’s formulation, finding its bearings during the postcommunist transition period.


identifier: Sinno, Serena  (2021) VARIATION IN FLOWER MORPHOLOGY ENHANCES WILD BEE DIVERSITY IN URBAN ECOSYSTEMS.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Urbanization is a leading threat to biodiversity, but scientifically informed management of urban ecosystems can mitigate negative impacts. For wild bees, which are declining worldwide, careful consideration of flower choice in private and public green spaces could help preserve their diversity. While floral density and species richness are both linked to wild bee diversity, the mechanisms underlying these relationships remain poorly understood. Here, I tested two hypotheses relating the influence of floral trait composition to bee species richness, which I have termed the floral trait diversity and optimal floral trait hypotheses. To test my hypotheses, I assessed whether within-site variation in bee richness relates to variation in floral trait composition in urban green spaces across the city of Montreal, Canada. In addition to surveying flower species richness and floral density, I measured two floral traits which relate to pollinator feeding success, nectar sugar concentration and corolla length, as feeding is the main use of flowers by bees and therefore likely to impact their communities. After accounting for variation in floral density, I found that bee richness was positively related to community-wide variation in corolla length, supporting the floral trait diversity hypothesis. These findings suggest that although flower abundance and richness affect wild bee richness in urban ecosystems, the composition of flower morphologies can further shape pollinator communities. I conclude that an understanding of these mechanisms can positively impact conservation of urban wild bee communities.


identifier: Jager, Krista  (2021) Prion Propagation and Loss in Single Bacterial Cells.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Originally discovered in the context of fatal neurodegenerative diseases, prions are proteins that can exist in two conformations: a normal one and a self-propagating form that can convert native proteins to the prion form. Surprisingly, prion proteins can also act as a stable, non-pathogenic epigenetic switch. The propagation of prion aggregates appears to be conserved across all domains of life, with extremely rare spontaneous transitions between the two conformations. The long timescales involved in prion conversion and loss have limited previous studies, leaving the underlying molecular mechanisms of these transitions still poorly understood. We set up a microfluidic platform that enabled tracking thousands of individual cells using quantitative time lapse fluorescence microscopy as they propagated and lost the prion state in Escherichia coli over hundreds of cell divisions. We focused on the recently discovered prion-forming domain in the single-stranded DNA binding protein (SSB) of the bacteria Campylobacter hominis, and observed two modes of prion propagation: small aggregates and an ultra-stable large aggregate located at the old pole of the cell. While cells harbouring the large aggregates maintained the prion state, the small aggregate sub-population lost the prion state following exponential decay. We further showed that, in this system, partitioning errors are the main cause of prion loss, and subsequently corroborated these results using orthologous prion domains. As many prion proteins have unknown function, we investigated the general physiological impact of the presence of prions in bacteria. We found that the prions imposed a small cost to the growth rate; however, our preliminary results suggest that they could also provide increased resistance to proteotoxic stresses. Our results emphasize the strengths of using a bacterial model system and our microfluidic setup to study the molecular mechanisms of prion propagation.


identifier: Trapid, Adam  (2021) The Effects of Parasite Stress Levels on Conspicuous Consumption and Neophobia.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In addition to the classical human immune system, aspects of human behaviour act as a form of behavioural immune response. When faced with a higher perceived likelihood of contracting parasitic/infectious disease, humans respond with behavioural changes which are adaptations that allow for stronger fitness, a measure of the likelihood of one’s genes being carried on to the following generation. The increased fitness can be achieved through a stronger likelihood of survival, having more offspring, or a combination of the two. The behavioural changes tested were conspicuous consumption and neophobia, both of which have implications on consumer behaviour. Examples of conspicuous consumption include men’s purchase of visible brands that display wealth and/or social status, and women’s consumption of products or services related to beauty. Neophobia is the fear of new things, whether it be social interactions or the purchase or adoption of new products. Together, conspicuous consumption and neophobia map onto the reproductive and survival Darwinian modules. The current research tested changes in behaviour based on perceived vulnerability to parasites. This was achieved by conducting a cross-cultural survey and an experiment using visual cues to illicit a change in perceived vulnerability. This study provided evidence that perceived vulnerability to parasites can cause increased levels of conspicuous consumption, general neophobia and, to a smaller effect, food neophobia. The changes in behaviours demonstrated in response to a perceived vulnerability to infectious disease may have an effect on types of consumer behaviours such as purchasing decisions with regards to brands and status as well as new product adoption.


identifier: Bamba, Madiara  (2022) An urban political ecology of flood control and population relocation in Ouagadougou - Burkina Faso.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Globally, the number of people at risk from flooding has been increasing since 2000, with the population from the South being more vulnerable. Millions of households are displaced by disasters every year. In 2009, the city of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso experienced its most disastrous flood ever recorded. As a response, the government designed a permanent relocation plan in Yagma, a village located outside the city of Ouagadougou. The relocation plan disrupted the livelihoods of the households that were affected by the flood, leading many of them to return and rebuild their houses in flood prone areas. This paper contributes to a body of literature analyzing the heritage of postcolonialism on the flood vulnerability on the poorer communities in Ouagadougou. Using a political ecology frame, the thesis attempts to understand how the government of Burkina Faso and flood victims understand land and belongings, and how that understanding shaped the relocation program. After interviewing flood victims and government officials, an analysis revealed that contrasting views are at work. A perspective based on technical calculations and a neo-colonialist vision of development, on the one hand, and a grounded perspective based on relationships to the land and each other, on the other.


identifier: Vemuri, Ravi Teja  (2021) Fully Bayesian Learning with Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods for Asymmetric Generalized Gaussian Mixture and Hidden Markov Models.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: A unique and efficient Bayesian learning framework is proposed for the learning of asymmetric generalized Gaussian mixtures and hidden Markov models. This framework is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling with hybrid Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs sampling as the fundamental learning algorithm. The algorithm is integrated with the reversible jump MCMC (RJMCMC) technique to achieve a fully Bayesian learning framework for proposed models. A fully Bayesian learning framework allows self-adaptive learning where the two major challenges of mixture modelling, parameter estimation and model selection, are done automatically thereby making the learning process autonomous. Furthermore, feature selection is explored and incorporated in the learning process to enhance the capability of the models to weight and pick relevant features in multi-dimensional data. The proposed framework is tested through a wide range of applications: activity recognition, speaker recognition etc., and its performance is evaluated with multiple performance metrics to display the robustness of the approach.


identifier: Abedini, soodeh  (2021) Development of an electrochemical device for converting greenhouse gases to fuel and add-value products in wastewater treatment plants.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The rapid increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere generates several consequences; one of them is global warming. One of the most obvious effects of global warming is the increase in temperatures around the world and changes in climate. Several sources which produce carbon dioxide, methane and, nitrous oxide at a high level are recognized. Some of these sources are transportation, industrial sources, chemical production, petroleum production, agriculture, and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). WWTPs are recognized as one of the more extensive sources of GHG emissions such as CO2, CH4, and N2O. Due to biological microbial anaerobic and aerobic respiration processes
Thus, conversion of CO2, CH4, and N2O generated in the WWTPs into added-value products without the utilization of fossil fuels is so important to control global warming.
The main objective of this study is the production of added-value products from biogas and simultaneously mitigating the emission of GHG. For this reason, a novel electrochemical device has been proposed to convert biogas to the fuel and simultaneously produce the valuable by-products (such as struvite, fungicide) and remove impurities from the effluent used as an electrolyte. The investigations were conducted in the lab and a wastewater treatment plant in three phases and several stages. In phase 1, a novel electrochemical device was designed based on sustainable development principles. Phase 2 focused on the generation of the optimal operation conditions for an electrochemical device to be able to convert CO2, CH4, the mixture of CO2, and CH4 into fuel and valuable by-products. The influence of gas input time, gas flowrate, the configuration of the electrochemical device, temperature, and electrical potential on by-product production were investigated. The removal of N2O and its impact on the properties (the WWTP effluent used as an electrolyte) were also studied.
In Phase 3, the possibility of using real effluent as an electrolyte was investigated at a WWTP. The study focused on the conversion of biogas to the fuel and production of some by-products such as struvite from contaminated effluent.
The study described the impact of gas input duration, its flowrate, temperature fluctuation, electrical potential, and device configuration on methanol production.
The results showed that methanol is the main product of interest. Its production from pure biogas reached 84 ppm, while from real biogas it was 2.8 times less (30 ppm) at a lower temperature.
The result showed the maximum methanol production from real biogas was about 30 ppm at a temperature between 13 and 18 ◦c, 80.5 V cathodic potential, 30-minutes gas input time, and 10 cm distance between electrodes.
Besides the device was able to produce copper (II) hydroxide and copper (II) sulphate, respectively, in ambient temperature using only 8V/cm.
Application of on-site WWTP effluent as an electrolyte, permitted efficient removal of nitrate (88%), phosphate (98%), and sulphate (79%). Hence, this system besides depletion of GHG, production of methanol, struvite, and fungicide can improve the quality of effluent and better protect water resources. Furthermore, considering the circular economy, produced methanol at the WWTP on-site, can be returned to the influent as an extra carbon source for the nitrification process and decrease N2O generation.
Finally, an analytical model was used to investigate the effect of operational parameters on the methanol production efficiency. For this purpose, the Modelica V.17 based EMTtype simulation tool has been used.
The model demonstrates how different gas input durations, and the faradaic efficiencies of different products influence methanol production. Modeling shows good accordance with experimental results, particularly during the initial supply of gas, later differences could reach 25% - 31%.
This research results show the capability of the proposed device to convert biogas to methanol based on sustainable development principles. The electrochemical device can be introduced to a municipal wastewater treatment plant in order to mitigate greenhouse gases and reuse effluent as an electrolyte, but also it can be used in many industrial sectors.


identifier: Stacey, Rebecca L  (2022) The Luck of the Irish: Catholicism & Luck Egalitarian Influence on the Order of LGBT & Reproductive Rights Acquisition in the Republic of Ireland.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In Catholic-majority countries, same-sex marriage is often legalised prior to the legalisation of on-demand abortion services. This thesis investigates the observation that Irish reproductive rights activism brought chance-based circumstances requiring pregnancy termination to the forefront during the Repeal the 8th referendum campaign instead of using a framework that revolved around the language of choice. Due to a resemblance between some proponents of Catholic doctrine and the philosophical tradition of Luck Egalitarianism, this thesis posits that Ireland’s Catholic-majority status may have predisposed the country to favour a chance-based framing of rights issues. There is a continuity of a chance-based framing of sexual orientation – same-sex attraction is generally accepted as not an individual’s choice. However, because abortion is typically framed as a privacy matter and a personal choice, a chance-based framework had to be developed to secure the legalisation of abortion in Ireland. Because chance-based perspectives have a long association with sexual orientation, while a chance-based framework for abortion had to be developed, same-sex marriage activism had a slight advantage in Ireland, which may have contributed to the order of rights acquisition.


identifier: Fazlollahi, Atefeh  (2021) Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Shallow Mixing Layer.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
When two nearly parallel streams of different velocities join together at a river confluence, a mixing layer develops along the joining interface. The mixing layer is termed a shallow mixing layer (SML) when the flow has a small depth and thus is significantly influenced by riverbed friction. SML has impacts on the riverine environment, river ecosystems, and hydraulic engineering design. The effects of the velocity ratio (Vr) between the two incoming streams on SML characteristics have not been addressed adequately from both Lagrangian and Eulerian perspectives. This study employs the Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches to explore the SML. Specifically, this study aims to answer these main questions: How does SML behave under different ratios of incoming flow velocities? How does the shear caused by the velocity gradient influence the fluid particles in SML?  To what extend previous relations proposed to determine mixing layer width are practical? What factors control the pairing of adjacent eddies and the growth of large-scale coherent structures? How are the fluid mass and momentum exchanges affected by Vr?
The dye visualisation and particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) techniques were used in the laboratory experiments of SML. In the dye visualisation technique, a tracer’s motion is recorded using a single camera. PTV is considered an optical flow measurement technique in which neutrally buoyant particles are tracked in consecutive image frames. PTV provides the essential means for Lagrangian studies of SML. For numerical simulations of SML, the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model was used. SPH is considered a Lagrangian CFD method in which a continuum is discretised using a set of material points or particles. Laboratory experiments of SML were conducted at three velocity ratios: Vr = 1, 1.14, and 1.5, and PTV measurements were made from the region between the joining location (x = 0 m) and 0.3 m downstream (x = 0.3 m) in the confluence. The dye visualisation experiments consisted of the same three velocity ratios, and the visualisation covered the region of x = 0–1.2 m. The SPH simulations included three velocity ratios: Vr = 1.14, 1.5, and 3; the domain covered x = 0–1 m.
The PTV measurements show that the boundary layers, which develop on the sidewalls of a splitter plate used to separate the two incoming streams before joining, and the wake effect cause a velocity deficit in the confluence and limit the mixing layer growth. The SPH results reveal that a smaller velocity ratio results in a more visible velocity deficit in streamwise velocity profiles due to the relative importance of the wake versus velocity gradient in the SML. PTV application for SML investigation has been found to require special technical considerations, some of which were introduced in this study. The technical measures in the data acquisition and the Python script developed for particle trajectory analysis improved the PTV technique in studying SML. Finite-time Lyapunov exponents (FTLE) results indicate that for particle trajectories located inside the mixing layer, a divergence was evident with a positive value of FTLE. However, for the particle trajectories out of the mixing layer, both positive and negative FTLE can be observed. The dye visualisation results show that turbulent instabilities still form in the absence of velocity gradient (Vr = 1). When the velocity gradient exists (Vr > 1), the instabilities persist, and a pairing of eddies is observed. The intermittency of SML is observed with a lack of a temporally fixed pattern in the vortex arrangement at a fixed location. The dye visualisation results show a linear relation between eddy spacing and downstream distance, with the most frequent eddy spacing being 0.42x.
A new approach to the determination of mixing layer width was proposed based on the boundary layer definition. Results show that for smaller velocity ratios, the mixing layer width determined by the boundary layer method is smaller than those from existing empirical relations. A pairing process of vortices occurs less often when Vr is as small as 1.14, compared to that for Vr = 1.5 and 3. The results also show that pairing activities in SML are affected mainly by the average vorticity magnitude of two neighbouring eddies rather than their relative distance. The Okubo-Weiss parameter of SML indicates that the general form of an eddy in SML consists of an inner vorticity-dominated region at the core and an outer region, which is strain-dominated and surrounding the inner region. The strain-dominated boundary of the eddies performs such a barrier for the particles inside the eddy until the eddies decay or are paired with other eddies. Smaller velocity ratios result in lower mass transfer with a constant rate from the tip of the splitter plate to the downstream whilst for Vr = 3, the mass transfer rate increases moving downstream due to the larger eddies and more profound pairing process. In the SML, the intermittent crests and troughs in momentum transfer indicate the evolution of eddies.


identifier: Fanelli, Lydia Nicole  (2021) ᐅᑎᕈᒪᔪᖓ Utirumajunga (I Want to Return): A Look at Situations of Homelessness Among Inuit Women in Montreal.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Homelessness among Inuit in urban settings is a topic that has, until recently, largely been ignored. Academic research strictly focused on Inuit women who leave their northern home communities due to a lack of critical resources and move to southern cities despite not having permanent housing there has yet to be written. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, it seeks to answer the question of how Inuit women navigate situations of homelessness in Montreal, Quebec. Further, it explores whether their decision to relocate to Montreal is directly related to the challenges Inuit women experience in Inuit regions. This thesis draws on three interviews with Inuit women living without permanent housing in Montreal. Two overarching categories with five respective sub-themes were identified through a thematic analysis of the qualitative data. These themes account for the similarities regarding the women’s experiences with homelessness in Montreal and their living conditions within Inuit Nunangat. Finally, the transition back and forth from their northern communities to Montreal, and the conditions that prompt this phenomenon, are explored. Taken together, these results provide an account of homelessness among Inuit women in Montreal and the northern circumstances that led them to their current situation.


identifier: Parisay, Mohsen  (2021) Computational Analysis of Eye-Strain for Digital Screens based on Eye Tracking Studies.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Computer vision syndrome (CVS) is composed of multiple eye vision problems due to the prolonged use of digital displays, including tablets and smartphones. These problems were shown to affect visual comfort as well as work productivity in both adults and teenagers. CVS causes eye and vision symptoms such as eye-strain, eye burn, dry eyes, double vision, and blurred vision. CVS, which causes severe vision and muscular problems due to repeated eye movements and excessive eye focus on computer screens, is a cause of work-related stress. In this thesis, we address this problem and present three general-purpose mathematical compound models for assessing eye-strain in eye-tracking applications, namely (1) Fixation-based Eye fatigue Load Index (FELiX), (2) Index of Difficulty for Eye-tracking Applications (IDEA), and (3) Eye-Strain Probation Model (ESPiM) based on eye-tracking parameters and subjective ratings to measure, predict, and compare the amount of fatigue or cognitive workload during target selection tasks for different user groups or interaction techniques. The ESPiM model is the outcome of both FELiX and IDEA, which benefit from direct subjective rating and, therefore, can be applied to assess the ESPiM model's efficacy. We present experiments and user studies that show that these models can measure potential eye-strain levels on individuals based on physical circumstances such as screen resolution and target positions per time.


identifier: Turner, Laurent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0493-579X <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0493-579X>  (2021) The Effects of Obesity Interventions, Age, and Age of Obesity Onset on Adipose Tissue Characteristics and Markers of Cardiometabolic Health.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In recent years, the prevalence of overweight and obesity has risen dramatically worldwide affecting individuals of all ages. This increased prevalence has far-reaching consequences on health as individuals with obesity are more likely to develop cardiometabolic diseases, cancer, and other associated comorbidities. However, being extremely complex and heterogeneous, obesity does not present the same way in every individual as some develop diseases while others do not. As such, it is essential to further understand the mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity of obesity which may in part explain the ineffectiveness of obesity interventions in some individuals with obesity. This thesis aims to demonstrate how obesity interventions, age and age of obesity onset affect adipose tissue characteristics and ultimately disease risk. Chapter 1 discusses the impact of dietary fatty acids, exercise, and bariatric surgery on the mechanisms that affect adipose tissue macrophage presence and phenotype in obesity. We find robust evidence suggesting that with or without weight loss, exercise, dietary fatty acids, and bariatric surgery result in immunomodulation via the amelioration of adipose tissue characteristics. Chapter 2 aims to determine whether differences in regional adipose tissue characteristics vary with age and age of obesity onset, and whether these differences are associated with the markers of cardiometabolic health. We show that older adults with childhood-onset obesity are particularly vulnerable to the cardiometabolic effects associated with perturbations in adipose tissue characteristics. Collectively, this thesis demonstrates that indeed obesity interventions, age and age of obesity onset impact adipose tissue homeostasis and health making adipose tissue a potential therapeutic target. However, as age and age of onset should be recognized as risk factors for obesity-associated comorbidities, their impact on the effectiveness of obesity interventions, whether it be exercise, dietary interventions, or bariatric surgery, are unknown. More research is needed to further explore the mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity of obesity and its effects on the efficacy of weight loss interventions.


identifier: Holt, Cimminnee ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0379-6780 <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0379-6780>  (2022) A Cabal of Outsiders: Negotiating the (Virtual) Boundaries of the Church of Satan.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This dissertation is a qualitative digital ethnography about members of the Church of Satan (CoS) and how they negotiate the boundaries of modern religious Satanism in public virtual landscapes. The Church of Satan emerges from 1960s American countercultural movements within the social and political turbulence of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, hippies, and the so-called witch revival. The founder of the Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey (née Howard Stanton Levy 1928-1997), developed a codified religion best understood as emerging from and responding to the popular discourses of his time, embracing the infamous symbol of rebellion—Satan—and positioning his new religion of Satanism in calculated tension with both the ubiquitous Protestant ethos of American society and its radical counterculture.

Throughout this thesis, highlighted claims from LaVey, the Church of Satan, and its members are presented in terms of their respective social and historical contexts to demonstrate that, despite the CoS Administration’s claim to being apolitical and somewhat indifferent to modern concerns, the body of the Church of Satan viewed via the lens of its members’ lives online is deeply political, heavily invested in social discourses, with CoS members re/negotiating a Satanic identity via the demands of the modern world. The tripartite model is organized by delineating between: LaVey’s authored texts and interviews; the Church of Satan Administration’s official statements and policies; and the body of the membership in their own words expressed via their published works, public online content, and supplemented with data from a circulated questionnaire. This thesis examines modern religious Satanism as a highly individualistic religion that exalts the notion of a “true self” to reveal that each member of the Church of Satan absorbs Satanic literature and official policies and doctrines, and interprets them according to their own idiosyncratic experience, extending their identities as Satanists outward into their respective virtual spaces. The variety of Satanic interpretations can and often do conflict with one another, which this thesis argues is a deliberately constructed tension to avoid homogeny within internal CoS culture.


identifier: Sabri, Tarek  (2021) Albumin Conjugated Upconversion Nanoparticles for Photodynamic Therapy Applications.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is the least invasive therapeutic procedure that can exert a selective cytotoxic activity toward malignant cell. The procedure involves administration of photosensitizer, a light absorbing molecule, that upon irradiation by a specific wavelength will produce reactive singlet oxygen that induces cell death or tissue damage. Major limitations include poor selectivity of photosensitizers toward tumors, and radiation using visible light that weakly penetrates tissues. Hence, effectiveness of PDT is limited to superficial treatments, and its validity to treat deeper tissues is very limited.
Lanthanide upconverting nanoparticles (Ln-UCNP) are efficient energy transducers that can absorb light efficiently in the near infrared (NIR), while emitting via the process of upconversion in the UV-VIS-NIR regions of spectrum. NIR light excitation permits light penetration deeply in tissues, without causing any photodamage to biological entities. However, any foreign entity entering the body are coated by group of serum proteins (coronas). This will result in aggregation that might induce toxicity or change circulation fate of the nanoparticles lowering PDT efficacy. Albumin (ALB) the most abundant protein in serum, has been approved as a passive drug delivery loading modality. Herein, A modified version of desolvation method was developed to render Ln-UCNPs (NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+) dispersible in biological relevant media and biocompatible for PDT. The approach generated a uniform ~2 nm thick shell with approximately 112 molecules of ALB were present to cover 15290 nm2 area of single NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+. Additionally, Rose Bengal (RB) photosensitizer was structurally modified, and energy transfer of different RB loaded on NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+ surface was studied under 980 nm irradiation. Further, in vitro studies using human alveolar lung cancer cells (A549) showed that RB presence solely allowed cellular internalization of ALB coated NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+. Also, cellular toxicity was induced under 980 nm excitation within a period of 10-minute exposure time.
New model of ALB conjugated to Ln-UCNPs is also developed. Bifunctional linker possessing maleimide group grafted on NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+ surface, and employed to target thiol group present on ALB cysteine 34. Albumin presence rendered Ln-UCNPs biocompatible and dispersible in aqueous environment and permitted the loading of different RB concentrations. Spectrophotometric analysis of the RB photoreaction processes identified both type I & II energy transfer mechanism, through the release of hydroxyl radical (HO•) , and 1O2 respectively.
In vitro evaluation of the cellular activity of ALB presence on NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+ revealed a substantial selective cellular internalization effect using glioblastoma tumor cells (U251N), in comparison to A549 cells. Further, cellular toxicity assay of the nanoconstruct using U251N irradiated with 980 nm, revealed an intense cellular toxicity effect as a result of the enhanced cellular uptake, and the release of various toxic reactive oxygen radicals. Thus, RB modified ALB-NaGdF4: Yb3+, Er3+ provided biocompatible surface coating, targeting and cytotoxicity capabilities that all enhance PDT efficacy.


identifier: Ding, Zhiyi  (2021) A Network Simulator-based Method of Dynamic Traffic Generation for 5G Network Slicing.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
While machine learning models and algorithms are now often used for various network design, planning, provisioning, etc, not much 5G data is available. A Dynamic traffic generator is a valuable tool for evaluating and testing network performances.
In this thesis, we present a novel traffic generation framework that meets some of the most important 5G network requirements.
One of the distinctive features in 5G is the use of network virtualization, which allows network operators to partition the network into multiple "independent slices", each of which can carry different types of traffic, services, or applications such as enhanced Mobile Broadband, Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications, massive Machine Type Communications, VoIP, etc .
To meet the new 5G requirements a novel framework that addresses the key related problems is designed, i.e., modeling virtual network functions, allowing end-to-end measurement of the key performance indicators, with a realistic network traffic modeling. The results and evaluation show that our framework is a powerful traffic generator for the time being to test 5G networks.


identifier: Elsayed, Hisham Shehata Galal ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9904-8386 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9904-8386>  (2021) Privacy-Preserving Protocols on Blockchain.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Blockchain is an evolving technology with the potential to reshape various industries.  It is an immutable append-only distributed ledger that maintains the integrity and availability of its transactions. With blockchain, mutually distrusting parties can finally make transactions without relying on a trusted third party. Nevertheless, many organizations are reluctant to adopt it due to several issues such as privacy. More precisely, the inherent transparency of transactions in blockchain comes at the cost of privacy despite the use of pseudonymous identities. We design cryptographic protocols to improve the privacy of a set of decentralized applications utilizing blockchain.

The rapidly growing number of digital assets deployed over blockchain requires a convenient trading mechanism. Sealed-bid auctions are powerful trading tools due to their privacy advantages compared to their open-cry counterparts. However, the inherent transparency on the blockchain makes designing a sealed-bid auction a challenging task. We propose three protocols utilizing zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, and smart contracts to publicly verify the correctness of the auction winner while maintaining users' privacy.

In the first protocol, the auctioneer utilizes zero-knowledge proof of interval membership to prove the correctness of the auction winner without revealing the losing bids. However, this protocol is expensive in verification cost and scales linearly with the number of users. To reduce the verification cost, we design a second protocol where the auctioneer utilizes an advanced zero-knowledge proving system with a constant verification complexity. Both protocols offer partial privacy as the auctioneer gets to know the actual values of bids. The third protocol provides complete privacy by utilizing a trusted execution environment to determine the auction winner without revealing the losing bids to any party. Furthermore, since this protocol relies on simple cryptographic primitives, it achieves the lowest verification cost with a constant complexity regardless of the number of bids.

Extending the work on sealed-bid auctions, we tackle a privacy problem in lit markets where all the information about bids and offers in the order book is visible to the public. While transparency helps the price discovery, it hurts financial institutions that trade large bulk orders. Therefore, we design a privacy-preserving periodic auction that hides limit-orders during the submission phase while preventing front-running and ensuring the correctness of market-clearing prices.

Next, we target a privacy problem in inter-bank payment systems. Banks transfer money and securities instantaneously on a gross basis by utilizing Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system. Central banks operate RTGS systems and require access to payment instructions of each local inter-bank. Accordingly, RTGS systems assume unconditional trust given to central banks, and they suffer from a single point of failure. Hence, we propose a  decentralized netting protocol that ensures balance correctness while hiding the transferred amounts and recipients.

Finally, we switch gears to the booming Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) technology and tackle privacy issues with existing systems. NFTs are unique non-interchangeable digital assets verified and secured by blockchain technology. Current NFT standards lack privacy guarantees; hence any observer can trivially learn the whole NFT collection of an arbitrary user. Furthermore, popular marketplaces use public exchanges and auctions for trades which leak information about the trade parties and the payment amount for an NFT. We design Aegis as a protocol that adds privacy to NFTs ownership. More importantly,  Aegis allows users to atomically swap NFTs for payment amounts while hiding the details of the transactions.


identifier: Dong, Weixiao  (2022) Millennials Motivation to Online and Offline Charitable Support on Social Media Platform: Using Aggregated Levels of Self-Determination Theory.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Charities are encountering an unprecedented crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of the charities have moved their service on social media to reach more potential supporters, and thus charity’s online marketing-oriented strategies need more theoretical guidance. The present study aims to examine millennials’ motivations and affective stimuli to online and offline charitable support by using three aggregated levels of Self-Determination Theory (SDT): controlled motivation, autonomous extrinsic motivation, and autonomous intrinsic motivation. Besides, self/other benefits and local/global charities’ Facebook appeals were presented to explore the moderative effects on the relationship between SDT regulations and charitable support intention. The key finding is that millennials in the self-condition are more likely to show offline support with increasing autonomous extrinsic and intrinsic motivation whereas those in others-condition show decreased online and offline support intention with increasing controlled motivation. The result highlighted the stronger relation between autonomous extrinsic motivation and charitable support, indicating that the value, goals, and the practical meaning of charity events, compared to interest and pleasure (intrinsic motivation), better predict millennials’ charitable support. However, we didn’t find any moderative effects of local/global conditions.


identifier: Roy, Éva  (2022) Working Towards Veteran-Friendly Curricula: A Soldier Artist’s Story.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Very little research has been conducted on Soldier Artists, self-taught veterans who use art as an expressive outlet to cope with mild post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Using a NI, case study, and archival research approach (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) the following research examines my father’s artistic journey throughout and after his military career, and then considers how are educational institutions are now accommodating veterans in their career transition by offering creative outlets. Through the lens of six theoretical components (Michel, 2004; Hasio, 2010 & 2011; Trofanenko, 2014; Lawton & La Porte, 2014; Armstrong’s (2019; Lavergne, 2007) and Martin’s oral history prompted by photo elicitation interviews, I have identified five emergent themes and distilled each into clear considerations for the art education field: inclusive creativity; gatekeepers as relationships of trust; withdrawal and sense of (un)belonging: oxymoron; emotional intelligence; and removing the stigma. There is much that we can learn from those who have pledged their lives to serving our country, we only need to be ready to listen to what they have to say.


identifier: Hayot-Sasson, Valerie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4830-4535 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4830-4535>  (2022) Data management without reinstrumentation: How to speed up existing Big Data neuroimaging workflows.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Neuroimaging has entered the Big Data era through the adoption of data sharing practices and improved data collection infrastructure enabling higher resolution imaging. Whereas the pipelines have shifted to become increasingly data-intensive, neuroimaging software has minimally adapted to address this shift. Rather, scientific software has primarily focused on ease-of-use, reproducibility, portability and parallelism. While the goals of Big Data and scientific frameworks differ, their strategies can be combined to make scientific frameworks more suitable for the processing of the increasingly prominent scientific Big Data.

The objectives of this thesis are two-fold: 1) determine whether neuroimaging frameworks benefit from incorporation of Big Data management strategies and investigate how to adapt existing solutions, and 2) develop new tools to enable data management within neuroimaging workflows. Our performance analysis determined that neuroimaging frameworks can benefit significantly from the incorporation of data management strategies, by up to a factor of 5.3X in the most data-intensive case. While we found Big Data frameworks (e.g. Apache Spark) to significantly speedup data-intensive neuroimaging workflows, our analysis on overlay pilot-scheduling with Spark determined that large-scale Spark workflows would be difficult to run on HPC. Furthermore, while alternative hardware solutions, such as Intel Optane DCPMM produce speedups similar to in-memory processing with Spark and could be used as an alternative, it remains inaccessible to many researchers.

To bring data-management solutions to neuroimaging applications, we developed two libraries, namely, Rolling Prefetch and Sea. Rolling Prefetch is our data-management solution for cloud-based applications that enables the sequential prefetching of data located on Amazon S3 storage. Experimental results demonstrate that Rolling Prefetch can speed up experiments by a factor of 1.8X and has a theoretical bound of 2X.

Sea targets the standard neuroimaging workflows executed on HPC. It brings prefetching, data-locality and in-memory computing to POSIX-based command-line tools through the interception of glibc calls. Using this approach researchers can benefit from data-management related speedups by incorporating Sea into their standard analysis. Our results on standard neuroimaging pipelines show that Sea can speed up execution by an average of 11X with large datasets writing to a deteriorated shared file system.


identifier: Cao, Becky Yi Wen  (2022) The Visual Journal as A/r/tographic Inquiry: The Learning Processes Among Art Education Graduate Students Through Artmaking and Discussion Workshops.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
ABSTRACT
The Visual Journal as A/r/tographic Inquiry: The Learning Processes Among Art Education Graduate Students Through Artmaking and Discussion Workshops

Becky Yi Wen Cao

This research investigates the visual journaling experiences of four art education graduate students: Lara, Nancy, Sha, and myself. The multicultural backgrounds of this group have brought unique perspectives on living, artmaking, and art education. I intended to conduct this study in person at the university. Unfortunately, as I prepared my research proposal, the COVID-19 pandemic began to force all academic activities to the online mode. This research illustrates our lives during the pandemic, an unprecedented event, and how we adjusted our daily routines and transformed into new creative beings during this recent phenomenon. The research data consists of six weekly meetings on Zoom. Each session offered an abundance of life stories and art-making experiences based on a creative prompt that served to illustrate our lives as artists, teachers, and researchers. By making art in visual journals independently and collectively, we connected our lives' visual and textual aspects and addressed the importance of community as an active learning sphere.
In summary, my research informs how art educators have lived, created, and connected during the pandemic as a group. Two questions emerged that guided this study: How do we engage with each other virtually? What are the benefits and limitations of online learning?


identifier: Esmaeilzehi, Alireza  (2022) Development of Deep Learning Techniques for Image Super Resolution.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The images to be used in many of the real-life applications, such as medical imaging, intelligent transportation systems and space explorations, are not of a sufficient quality in view of the degradation processes associated with the image capturing devices. In recent years, deep neural networks have emerged as a sophisticated tool for image restoration. However, many of the existing deep neural networks for image restoration employ a large number of parameters for providing high performance, thus prohibiting their deployment in applications with the constraints on memory and power consumption. Hence, the design of high-performance image restoration convolutional neural networks that employ small number of parameters is of paramount importance. As the performance of deep networks is closely related to the richness of features produced by them, the objective of the thesis is to design deep image restoration neural networks that are capable of producing rich sets of features by using only a small number of parameters. In this thesis, this objective is met by using the suitable prior information associated the degradation processes of the image capturing devices. Three specific degradation models, namely, bicubic downsampling, Gaussian blurring coupled with downsampling and JPEG compression blocking, are considered in designing a number of deep light-weight image restoration networks.
With regard to the first degradation model, i.e., bicubic downsampling operation, several image super resolution networks using the different prior information about this operation are developed. Specifically, four different prior information, namely, multi-scale feature generation, guided feature generation, efficient feature fusion and sparsity prior, are used for developing light-weight image super resolution networks. As to the second degradation model, i.e., Gaussian blurring coupled with downsampling, two deep networks, in which the blurred version of the high-quality images are used in the context of global residual learning as the prior information, are proposed. Finally, with respect to the third degradation model, i.e., JPEG blocking artifacts, two information, namely, robust features generated by the maxout activation units and the high-frequency components generated by the fractal neural networks, are used as prior information to propose couple of image restoration networks.
Extensive experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the various ideas and schemes developed in this thesis for improving the quality of degraded images.


identifier: Baghdadi, Ali  (2022) Variational learning frameworks for generative models based on hierarchical Dirichlet and Pitman-Yor processes.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In many unsupervised machine learning algorithms where labelling a large quantity of data is unfeasible and time-consuming, mixture models have been frequently employed as a helpful statistical learning method. Among all the proposed mixture models, the finite Gaussian mixture model is probably the most famous and widely used. However, other approaches, such as mixtures of Dirichlet distributions have recently been demonstrated to yield even more promising outcomes, especially for non-Gaussian data. As a result, we chose to work on Shifted-Scaled Dirichlet (SSD) mixture models that are more flexible than Gaussian and Dirichlet mixture models in fitting proportional data. In this thesis, we propose variational Bayesian frameworks for learning SSD mixture models. This learning approach has some advantages over other techniques, such as tractable learning computations, precise approximations, and guaranteed convergence. First, we propose a novel non-parametric method based on a hierarchical Dirichlet process mixture of SSD distributions. Then, we extend it to a hierarchical Pitman-Yor process mixture of SSD distributions. These Bayesian frameworks present several properties that make the learning process more accurate. Also, simultaneous parameter estimation and model selection (model complexity determination) are possible with the suggested methods. Finally, we propose a novel hidden Markov model (HMM) framework in which the emission density for conventional continuous HMMs is a mixture of SSD distributions. Experiments on challenging applications such as activity recognition, texture clustering, traffic sign detection, vehicle detection, and spam email detection show that our suggested models may deliver effective solutions when compared to existing alternatives.


identifier: Bughio, Myra  (2022) The Role of Exemplar Animal Welfare Charities in Food Supply Chains: An Exploratory Study.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: As consumers become increasingly concerned with the treatment of animals involved in food production, animal welfare charities find their efforts becoming more relevant to stakeholders across the food industry. However, little is known about how exactly animal welfare charities impact food supply chains. This gap is especially important to fill given that exemplar charities, of which there are few, are remarkably more successful at improving animal welfare in comparison to the numerous average charities impacting the industry. I therefore performed an exploratory study to investigate how exemplar animal charities impact the level of responsibility in food supply chains. Using reputational sampling, I selected three top-performing charities for an embedded case study. Based on a systematic literature review and secondary qualitative data, including the charities’ performance evaluations and published reports, I conducted within-case and cross-case analyses which highlighted the primary practices and stakeholders being targeted by the charities’ interventions. The results showed that these interventions targeted five main categories of food supply chain practices: operations, measurement, supplier continuity, learning, and external stakeholder practices. I also found that exemplar charities (a) target multiple food supply chain stakeholders and practices simultaneously, (b) consistently collaborate with other NGOs, (c) use a mix of confrontational and supportive approaches to target stakeholders, and (d) tend to focus heavily on practices associated with establishing measurement across the chain and reforming operations.


identifier: Hongyi, Cao  (2022) A DESIGN SCIENCE ENABLED ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITY STATE MEASUREMENT APPROACH.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Organizational capability plays a critical role in creating and maintaining an organization's competitive advantage. It enables organizations to develop and implement organizational strategies and business models. However, the measurement of the organizational capability to assist the prediction of organizational performance remains a challenging task. It is especially challenging for organizations with limited resources, such as monetary resources, time and the expertise to organizational capability and instrument for measuring organizational capability. The challenge is two-fold. Firstly, organizational capability measurement aims to predict organizational performance rooted in individual performance. However, it is challenging to find a practical framework that links individual performance with organizational performance and guides the organizational capability measurement by considering the individual factors. Secondly, the questionnaire is widely used for measuring individual knowledge, attitudes, emotion and perceptions. However, questionnaire design methods are still very ill-defined processes that the generation of items heavily relies on the experience of experts or the questionnaires designed by other researchers about a similar topic. This research aims to provide an organizational capability state (OCS) model and develop a framework for questionnaire design using a design methodology — Environment Based Design (EBD). The primitive factors for OCS are organizational members’ knowledge, skills and the perception of workload and affect. The questionnaire design framework achieves the OCS measurement by developing a questionnaire for assessing organizational members’ knowledge, skills, perception, affect and goal. With two case studies, the framework of questionnaire design is proved to be effective in questionnaire design. The combination of the OCS model and questionnaire design framework enables a cost-effective and less expert-dependent measurement of organizational capability.


identifier: Ebrahimi Orimi, Hamid  (2022) Development of a novel laser-induced side transfer process for bioprinting.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Bioprinting technologies enable precise delivery of bio-inks for the fabrication of living constructs. An open challenge in the bioprinting field is to fabricate a vascular network. For this, ability to print a wide range of viscosity, micrometric printing resolution, negligible impact on the cell viability, high-speed and multi-scale printing are required. The current research aims to simulate, develop and validate a novel laser induced side transfer (LIST) technique for bioprinting. The method uses low energy nanosecond laser pulses to generate a transient microbubble inside a microcapillary that contains the bio-ink. Microbubble expansion results in the ejection of the bioink perpendicular to the irradiation axis. We presented a hybrid model to simulate the technique. We investigated the dynamics of the laser-induced bubble in confining geometries, to show the self-limiting effect on the growth of the bubble. Understanding the effect of geometry confinement on bubble dynamics is required to optimize existing and engineer future applications.
We developed LIST setup and determined optimal conditions of bioprinting and investigated the functionality of LIST-printed human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Our investigations show that LIST-printed HUVECs present negligible loss of viability and maintain their abilities to migrate, proliferate and form intercellular junctions. We explored the effect of hydrogel-based matrices on the LIST-printed HUVECs. Our investigation showed that printing Fibrinogen/HUVECs droplets on Matrigel/Thrombin-based matrix provided firm adhesion maintaining the initial printing pattern. This matrix also led the HUVECs to form intercellular junctions. We investigated the effects of pro- and anti-angiogenic factors on sprouting in the LIST-printed lines and in the formation of the tube-like structures. In all conditions, the cells were able to partially create the tube-like formation. However, bone morphogenetic protein9 (BMP9) as an anti-angiogenic factor significantly increased the lumen length.
In the present study, we showed that LIST is capable of printing cells with negligible loss in viability (>93.1 %), with micrometric resolution (165 and 325 µm) and with high speed (potentially 2500 Hz) for bioinks with viscosity upto 300 mPa.s. These features make LIST complementary to existing bioprinting approaches and pave the path to fabricate functional tissues/organs for drug screening and tissue regeneration.


identifier: Al-Makhadmeh, Mu'ath  (2022) Comprehensive study of non-synoptic wind effects on buildings.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The present study examines wind loads on flat roof low-rise buildings under the effect of the simulated wind speed profile of the downburst phenomena. Examination of buildings is necessary since very few studies have examined non-synoptic winds. Indeed, non-synoptic winds have not been considered in the wind provisions of codes and standards. As a result, the interaction between wind and buildings under these phenomena should be investigated as in the case for the assessment of current well-known Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) winds.
Many trials have been carried out at the wind tunnel of Concordia University to simulate the downburst phenomena. Different configurations have been tried to simulate wind speed profile close to the available target full-scale data. The produced wind speed profile and turbulence intensity are presented in terms of comparisons among the target profile, the ABL profile and downbursts profiles of previous studies.
The size of roof pressure zones and the magnitude of pressure coefficients on flat roofs of low-rise buildings have been examined experimentally in the wind tunnel of Concordia University. Two building models were constructed at a length scale of 1:400 with identical plan dimensions (60 m x 60 m) and two building heights (10 m and 20 m). The models were tested for 7 wind directions: 0°, 15°, 30°, 45°, 60°, 75° and 90°. The pressure measurement results have been presented in terms of contours of enveloped local pressure coefficients. The results of the current study have been compared with those of ABL (same model dimensions) and downburst of previous studies.
It was found that the produced downburst wind speed profile of the current study agrees well with the target full scale data. The velocity increases at a low height and decreases going upwards.
The results of the present study show that the wind direction plays a main role in the pressure coefficient distributions, the most critical wind direction is different for the roof corner and the roof edge. In addition, it was found that the higher building heights experience higher wind loads.


identifier: El Tannir, Lara  (2022) New Realities: The Story of an International Art Education Student on the Frontline of COVID-19.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This research investigates how my experience at the front line during a global pandemic has changed me as an artist, researcher, and teacher. Based on my experiences, I shared a description of the adaptation process during the COVID-19 pandemic and translate my story into a graphic novel. This study is an in-depth inquiry, designed to show how art teachers as individuals can adapt to unexpected situations. This research further presents the importance of art in the process of personal and professional adaptation. This study informs art education because of my frontline experience in the community, especially working with seniors, from which I draw out practices grounded in the health and well-being that have a relevance to teaching and learning as part of the new reality going forward. This pathway suggests to me that oscillating between art and health sectors may offer alternate ways of thinking about pedagogic and artistic practice. My story is written in a brief narrative, using accessible language and natural tone to keep the authenticity of the story and invite readers to plunge into my personal experience. Building on my story, I created a graphic novel as an approach to connect my story with the arts and to visually represent my experience. By doing so, I also investigate the importance of art making and promoting the visual aspect of research. I want to explore the importance of art as a space in relation to the chaos of the world around us. Adding to that, I want to share how my experience at the front line has affected my formal/informal learning journey and focus on how the a/r/t/ographic activities has helped me escape and manage the reality of this pandemic.


identifier: Saffarizadeh, Arian  (2022) Whodunit: A Generative Model for Murder Mysteries as an Information Game.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This research focuses on creating a model to generate information for a narrative-based game of
murder mysteries. The literature review aspect of this research will review previous related research
works in the subject of procedural narrative generation, explains the concept information game in
the context of murder mysteries as well as on how the narrative structure of murder mystery stories
in fiction can assist us in constructing a model that can generate information for a game experience.
I developed a proof of concept using the existing knowledge about the structure of murder
mysteries and procedural narrative generation in a way that it can provide information for a murder
mystery narrative-based game. After developing this proof of concept, I tested the prototype using a
human-computer interaction method called Wizard of Oz. I hypothesized that this prototype is able
to provide narrative information coherently for a compelling narrative experience with a believable
cast of characters that can evoke feelings of suspense and surprise. By surveying participants after
the play-tests, we concluded that the proof of concept can create a coherent narrative experience
with a believable cast of characters in a way that it sometimes can create the feeling of suspense for
players, but it was not able to create the feeling of surprise on the revelation of the culprit for most
users. Based on this study, the prototype was also able to create a generally compelling narrative
experience for the users.