identifier: Alsaedi, Muneera  (2019) Computer-aided Cytological Grading Systems for Fine Needle Aspiration Biopsies of Breast Cancer.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer is the world's most commonly diagnosed and deadliest form of cancer in women. A major determinant of the survival rate in breast cancer patients are the accuracy and speed of the malignancy grade determination. This thesis considers the classification problem related to determining the grade of a malignant tumor accurately and efficiently. A Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA) biopsy is a key mechanism for breast cancer diagnosis as well as for assigning grades to malignant cases. Carrying out a manual examination of FNA demands substantial work from the pathologist which may result in delays, human errors, and consequently lead to misclassified grades. In this context, the most common grading system for microscopic imaging for breast cancer is the Bloom and Richardson (BR) histological grading system which is based on the evaluation of tissues and cells. BR is not directly applicable to FNA biopsy slides due to distortion of tissue and even cell structures on the cytological slides. Therefore, in this thesis, to grade FNA images of breast cancer, instead of the BR grading scheme, six known cytological grading schemes, three newly proposed cytological grading schemes, and five grading systems based on convolutional neural networks were proposed to automatically determine the malignancy grade of breast cancer.

First, considering traditional Machine Learning methods, six cytological grading systems (CA-CGSs) based on six cytological schemes used by pathologists for FNA biopsies of breast cancer were proposed to grade tumors. Each system was built using the cytological criteria as proposed in the original CGSs. The six considered cytological grading schemes in this thesis were Fisher's modification of Black's nuclear grading, Mouriquand's grading, Robinson's grading, Taniguchi et al's, Khan et al's and Howell's modification in mitosis count criteria. To fulfill this task, different sets of handcrafted features using customized image processing algorithms were extracted for classification purpose. The proposed systems were able efficiently to classify FNA slides into G2 (moderately malignant) or G3 (highly malignant) cases using traditional machine learning algorithms. Additionally, three new cytological grading systems were proposed by augmenting three of the original CGSs by adding the low magnification features. However, the systems were not sensitive enough with regards to G3 cases due to the low number of available data samples. Therefore, a data balancing was performed to improve the sensitivity for G3 cases. Consequently, in the second objective of this work, data sampling and RUSBoost methods were applied to the datasets to adjust the class distribution and boost the sensitivity performance of the proposed systems. This enabled a sensitivity improvement of up to 30% which highlights the significance of class balancing in the task of malignancy grading of breast cancer.

Additionally, due to the considerable time and efforts required for handcrafted features-based cytological grading systems in order to achieve efficient feature engineering results, a deep learning (DL) approach was proposed to avoid the aforementioned challenges without compromising the grading accuracy. Thus, in this thesis, five different pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models, namely GoogleNet Inception-v3, AlexNet, ResNet18, ResNet50, and ResNet101, combined with different techniques to deal with unbalanced data, were used to develop automated computer-aided cytological malignancy grading systems (CNN-CMGSs). According to the obtained results, the proposed CNN-CMGS based on GoogleNet Inception-v3 combined with the oversampling method provides the best accuracy performance for the problem at hand.

The results demonstrated that the proposed CGSs are highly correlated since they share some of the cytological criteria. Further, the overall accuracy of the CGSs is roughly the same and overall, the handcrafted features-based CGSs performed best even in the absence of class distribution rebalancing. Overall, for case classification, the best results were obtained for computer-aided CGSs based on the modified Khan et al.’s and Robinson’s schemes with accuracies of 97.77% and 97.28%, respectively. Meanwhile, for patient classification, the overall best results were obtained for computer-aided CGSs based on the modified Khan et al.’s and modified Fisher's schemes with accuracies of 96.50% and 95.71%, respectively. These results surpass previously reported results in the literature for computer-aided CGS based on BR histologic grading. Moreover, in clinical practice, Robinson’s typically has the best diagnostic accuracy with the highest reported experimental accuracy rate of 90%. Thus, the obtained results demonstrate that computer-aided breast cancer cytological grading systems using FNA can potentially achieve accuracy rates comparable to the more invasive histopathological BR-method.


identifier: Al-Alem, Yazan  (2019) Low Cost High Gain Millimeter Wave Planar Antennas.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

type: Thesis NonPeerReviewed

abstract:
The advent of the fifth generation of wireless communication systems mandates the use of high gain antennas for transceiver front ends. The use of high gain antennas is very vital in order to compensate for the high path loss of the propagating signals at millimeter wave frequencies. There are many methods to implement high gain antennas; many of those solutions are expensive and complicated in terms of its fabrication process. Here, we emphasize 60 GHz high-gain antennas based on the low cost planar printed circuit board technology. The proposed solutions are low cost with high performance metrics. The proposed antennas suit short range, low power applications, such as wireless personal area networks (WPAN). Nonetheless, the study provided for the proposed structures reveals new physical insights, and new methods for the design procedure, where the design procedure becomes very straightforward.
The first proposed structure utilizes the radiation losses in microstrip line discontinuities to implement an efficient high gain radiator at 60 GHz. The second proposed structure utilizes the diffracted fields from the edges of metal sheets as secondary radiating sources to boost the gain of the element. Also, an increased distance between the antenna elements can be achieved without generating grating lobes; this can be comprehended by visualizing each element as a subarray of radiating sources. Such a concept has a significant implication on the relaxation of the design of feeding networks. The single antenna element realized gain goes up to 11.5 dBi, the 10 dB return loss bandwidth covers the 60 GHz ISM band, and the radiation efficiency goes above 90%.
A Magneto-Electric (ME) dipole is usually designed by superimposing electric and magnetic current elements orthogonally on each other. A new design procedure is proposed, which can transform the radiation characteristics of an electric or magnetic current element to a Magneto-Electric dipole characteristics. The proposed procedure doesn’t require the orthogonal combination of the magnetic and electric current elements. Hence, the procedure possesses a significant advantage, where it avoids the need for a quarter free-space wavelength spacing between the current element and the metallic ground plane. In addition, the proposed design increases the antenna gain dramatically, where the proposed structure has a boresight gain of 11.5 dBi, and a relative bandwidth of 13% centered at 60 GHz. The antenna element has been employed in a planar antenna array to achieve a gain of 22 dBi.
A novel technique is proposed to enhance the gain of a Dielectric Resonator Antenna (DRA) over a wideband range of frequencies. The proposed antenna structure has a relative bandwidth of 27.5% in the 60 GHz band, and a peak realized gain of 12.5 dBi. The peak of the total antenna radiation efficiency is 96%.  The proposed antenna is suitable for high data rate short range personal area networks applications. Printed Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) technology is used to feed the antenna to eliminate any parasitic radiation from the feed line. The characterization of 60 GHz antennas is very challenging. The end launch connector used to feed the antenna at such frequency is relatively large compared to the antenna dimensions, and that consequently affects the accuracy of the characterization of the antenna, especially if it is in the vicinity of the antenna. EBG surfaces have been used to resolve such characterization impairments.
In a 5G network, the data is communicated at mm-wave frequencies between various communicating entities. The communicated high frequency signal is processed internally within the communicating entity itself. Thus, the data is communicated through electrical interconnects between several chips or between several sub-circuits within the chip. In such a way, those electrical interconnects between various sub-circuits within an Integrated Circuit (IC), or between several adjacent ICs, play a vital role in defining the performance limits of any system. As the frequency of operation gradually increases, the design of interconnects, whether within the IC environment (intra-chip) or between several adjacent ICs (inter-chip), turn into a more challenging task. As the frequencies of operation increase, the proper interconnect guiding structure dimensions become infeasible to realize, or it might exhibit a high level of losses, and large intrinsic RC time delay. Moreover, by the increase of the number of interconnects, the mutual coupling between the interconnect structures become more severe, not to mention the complexity, and associated cost of such design. The wireless interconnects concept (wireless intra-chip/inter-chip communication) emerged as a suggested remedy to the high frequency interconnect problem. We provide a study of several aspects of wireless inter-chip communication between adjacent ICs at mm-wave frequencies. The symmetrical layers concept is introduced as a general approach to eliminate the destructive interference and redirect the wasted radiated energy to free space towards the receiving antenna. In addition, the use of hard/soft surfaces and EBG structures to focus the radiated energy towards the receiving antenna is studied thoroughly. The use of such concepts has tremendous advantages, in focusing the energy towards the receiving antenna and eliminating the spherical spreading losses introduced by the radiated spherical wave nature. The incorporation of the symmetrical layers with hard/soft surfaces led to novel compact, low-cost wireless inter-chip structures with enhanced link budget performance.


identifier: Cossette, Isabelle  (2019) Savoir reconnaître les présences du manque : La non-traduction du sikhisme au Québec.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Les occurrences du terme « non-traduction » en traductologie peuvent être de quatre catégories : partielle ou totale, envisagées toutes deux quant à la production traductive ou d’un point de vue théorique. Cette classification permet d’établir que la non-traduction renvoie à une distorsion de ce qu’est ou devrait être l’objet « traduction », ou alors à une absence surprenante de celle-ci. L’idée de non-traduction (partielle ou totale) avant, pendant ou après la production peut être employée pour traiter des manifestations de la non-traduction, soit de la distorsion et de l’absence, dans le cas du sikhisme au Québec. Deux angles d’approche sont ici proposés : les livres religieux et le discours médiatique contemporain. Pour le premier, une étude de la situation permet de conclure à une non-sélection d’ouvrages à des fins de traduction et à diverses formes de distorsions et d’absences marquant les livres publiés eux-mêmes et le traitement de ces livres post-publication. Pour le second, la non-traduction est envisagée surtout comme une distorsion ou une absence de la traduction inter-référentielle et citoyenne de Basalamah telle que celles-ci se trouvent dans de grands quotidiens québécois, et se manifeste de plusieurs façons ayant principalement comme conséquence de discréditer le sikhisme et ses pratiquants. Dans l’ensemble, les cas relevés donnent l'occasion de constater la variété de la non-traduction, un objet traductologique peu connu, mais riche pour réfléchir aux présences matérielles du manque.


identifier: Di Labbio, Giuseppe ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1452-9074 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1452-9074>  (2019) On left ventricular fluid dynamics associated with progressive chronic aortic regurgitation.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Unnatural dynamics of the notorious vortex in the left ventricle is often associated with cardiac disease. Understanding how different cardiac diseases alter the flow physics in the left ventricle may therefore provide a powerful tool for disease detection. This experimental in vitro work investigates the fluid dynamics within a model left ventricle in the case of progressive chronic aortic regurgitation, a valvular disease characterized by a leaking aortic valve and consequently double-jet filling within the elastic left ventricular geometry. The experiment consists of simulating different severities of the disease on a novel left heart simulator and the corresponding flow fields are acquired by time-resolved planar particle image velocimetry. Progressive diastolic vortex reversal was observed in the left ventricle accompanied by an increase in viscous energy dissipation. The corresponding material transport phenomena were strongly determined by the motion of the counter-rotating vortices driven by the regurgitant aortic and mitral jets. Particularly, the overall particle residence time appeared to be significantly longer with moderate aortic regurgitation, attributed to the dynamics resulting from the timing between the onset of the two jets. Increasing regurgitation severity was shown to be associated with higher frequencies in the time-frequency spectra of the velocity signals at various points in the flow, suggesting non-laminar mixing past moderate aortic regurgitation. Furthermore, a large part of the regurgitant inflow was found to be retained for at least one full cardiac cycle. Such an increase in particle residence time accompanied by the occurrence and persistence of a number of attracting Lagrangian coherent structures presents favourable conditions and locations for activated platelets to agglomerate within the left ventricle, potentially posing an additional risk factor for patients with aortic regurgitation. In view of the lack of available fluid dynamics data in the literature regarding aortic regurgitation and even healthy left ventricular flow, this dissertation constructs reduced-order models of the acquired data using the proper orthogonal and dynamic mode decompositions. The performance of the two methods in reconstructing the intraventricular flows and derived quantities was evaluated, and the selected reduced-order models were made publicly available.


identifier: Eghan, Ellis Emmanuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0186-9173 <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0186-9173>  (2019) Dependency Management 2.0 – A Semantic Web Enabled Approach.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Software development and evolution are highly distributed processes that involve a multitude of supporting tools and resources. Application programming interfaces are commonly used by software developers to reduce development cost and complexity by reusing code developed by third-parties or published by the open source community. However, these application programming interfaces have also introduced new challenges to the Software Engineering community (e.g., software vulnerabilities, API incompatibilities, and software license violations) that not only extend beyond the traditional boundaries of individual projects but also involve different software artifacts. As a result, there is the need for a technology-independent representation of software dependency semantics and the ability to seamlessly integrate this representation with knowledge from other software artifacts.

The Semantic Web and its supporting technology stack have been widely promoted to model, integrate, and support interoperability among heterogeneous data sources. This dissertation takes advantage of the Semantic Web and its enabling technology stack for knowledge modeling and integration. The thesis introduces five major contributions: (1) We present a formal Software Build System Ontology – SBSON, which captures concepts and properties for software build and dependency management systems. This formal knowledge representation allows us to take advantage of Semantic Web inference services forming the basis for a more flexibility API dependency analysis compared to traditional proprietary analysis approaches. (2) We conducted a user survey which involved 53 open source developers to allow us to gain insights on how actual developers manage API breaking changes. (3) We introduced a novel approach which integrates our SBSON model with knowledge about source code usage and changes within the Maven ecosystem to support API consumers and producers in managing (assessing and minimizing) the impacts of breaking changes. (4) A Security Vulnerability Analysis Framework (SV-AF) is introduced, which integrates builds system, source code, versioning system, and vulnerability ontologies to trace and assess the impact of security vulnerabilities across project boundaries. (5) Finally, we introduce an Ontological Trustworthiness Assessment Model (OntTAM). OntTAM is an integration of our build, source code, vulnerability and license ontologies which supports a holistic analysis and assessment of quality attributes related to the trustworthiness of libraries and APIs in open source systems.

Several case studies are presented to illustrate the applicability and flexibility of our modelling approach, demonstrating that our knowledge modeling approach can seamlessly integrate and reuse knowledge extracted from existing build and dependency management systems with other existing heterogeneous data sources found in the software engineering domain. As part of our case studies, we also demonstrate how this unified knowledge model can enable new types of project dependency analysis.


identifier: Thomas, Jerry George  (2019) Anomaly Detection from Textual Content in Financial Records.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Most financial institutions mainly use numerical statistics to detect anomalous (malpractice) activities. The textual content in financial records however contains precious information which to date has not been effectively used for detection of anomalous behavior by users. One reason could be that the text elements in these financial records are often unintelligible, cluttered with abbreviations, numbers and symbols, which makes it difficult to build a framework system that can coherently understand and draw conclusions. Rule-based techniques have been proposed but such systems are easy to elude, as they are difficult to generalize and do not scale up. In this thesis we address the problem of detecting anomalous activity using the textual content in financial records. Given the low intelligibility and clutter in such data, we treat this as a classification problem and explore various deep learning based solutions. Specifically, we propose four solutions. In the first technique, we treat all financial records of a user as a single document represented as a set of words, and use a deep learning classification network to distinguish between normal with anomalous behavior. In the second technique we treat these financial records as a time series and use a sequence based deep learning network for classification and in the third technique, we propose a simple convolutional neural network that learns the behaviour from the sequential textual data. In the fourth technique we use the transfer learning method Universal Language Model Fine-Tuning (ULMFiT), to use language modelling to perform unsupervised pre-training, followed by a supervised fine-tuning step. The results of our experiments using real data convincingly indicate that use of the textual content in financial records yields greater accuracy in anomalous behavior detection. They also suggest that deep learning is a viable and effective solution approach for real time anomaly detection by financial institutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use deep learning solutions for addressing this problem.


identifier: Burton-MacLeod, Naomi  (2019) A Case Study of a Microlearning Follow-Up Initiative to Support Training Transfer.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Microlearning, a method of providing short, focused, stand-alone information, is trending in professional discussions of workplace training. It is suggested to support training transfer, but empirical evidence of its application and effectiveness is lacking. A mixed-method single case study was designed to answer the question: How do professionals in the early training transfer period following a workshop on a non-routine complex skillset, engage with a microlearning follow-up initiative, where microlearning is provided either as a timed push or by a voluntarily accessed repository? Microlearning was provided after a workshop, either once per week (timed push), or all at once (repository access). Over eight weeks, eight nurses at a tertiary-care hospital participated in various aspects of the data collection through surveys, usage reports and interviews on microlearning use, individual, environmental and design factors. Nurses demonstrated strong engagement with the microlearning regardless of demographics or transfer opportunities. They used microlearning predominantly at work, in a moderately-weak transfer climate. Nurses receiving timed access reported greater ease finding time to use the microlearning than nurses with repository access who tended to use the microlearning all at once. They identified the microlearning duration and its interactive and targeted design as helpful features that prompted recall, active processing and non-formal learning. Nurses’ intent to transfer learning was strong both at the time of the workshop and at the end of the study but fluctuated in between, demonstrating a dynamic transfer process. This microlearning initiative demonstrates potential for support of complex, intermittent skillsets in healthcare professional development.


identifier: Williams, Christopher ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3910-7070 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3910-7070>  (2019) Towards the Design of Robust High-Speed and Power Efficient Short Reach Photonic Links.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In 2014, approximately eight trillion transistors were fabricated every second thanks to improvements in integration density and fabrication processes. This increase in integration and functionality has also brought about the possibility of system on chip (SoC) and high-performance computing (HPC). Electrical interconnects presently dominate the very-short reach interconnect landscape (< 5 cm) in these applications. This, however, is expected to change. These interconnects' downfall will be caused by their need for impedance matching, limited pin-density and frequency dependent loss leading to intersymbol interference. In an attempt to solve this, researchers have increasingly explored integrated silicon photonics as it is compatible with current CMOS processes and creates many possibilities for short-reach applications.
Many see optical interconnects as the high-speed link solution for applications ranging from intra-data center (~200 m) down to module or even chip scales (< 2 cm). The attractive properties of optical interconnects, such as low loss and multiplexing abilities, will enable such things as Exascale high-performance computers of the future (equal to 10^18 calculations per second). In fact, forecasts predict that by 2025 photonics at the smallest levels of the interconnect hierarchy will be a reality. This thesis presents three novel research projects, which all work towards increasing robustness and cost-efficiency in short-reach optical links. It discusses three parts of the optical link: the interconnect, the receiver and the photodiode.
The first topic of this thesis is exploratory work on the use of an optical multiplexing technique, mode-division multiplexing (MDM), to carry multiple data lanes along with a forwarded clock for very short-reach applications. The second topic discussed is a novel reconfigurable CMOS receiver proposed as a method to map a clock signal to an interconnect lane in an MDM source-synchronous link with the lowest optical crosstalk. The receiver is designed as a method to make electronic chips that suit the needs of optical ones. By leveraging the more robust electronic integrated circuit, link solutions can be tuned to meet the needs of photonic chips on a die by die basis. The third topic of this thesis proposes a novel photodetector which uses photonic grating couplers to redirect vertical incident light to the horizontal direction. With this technique, the light is applied along the entire length of a p-n junction to improve the responsivity and speed of the device. Experimental results for this photodetector at 35 Gb/s are published, showing it to be the fastest all-silicon based photodetector reported in the literature at the time of publication.


identifier: Nabi, Mina  (2019) Automating the Upgrade of IaaS Cloud Systems.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The different resources providing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service may need to be upgraded several times throughout their life-cycle for different reasons, for instance to fix discovered bugs, to add new features, or to fix a security threat. An IaaS cloud provider is committed to each tenant by a service level agreement (SLA) which indicates the terms of commitment, e.g. the level of availability, that have to be respected even during upgrades. However, the service delivered by the IaaS cloud provider may be affected during the up-grade. Subsequently, this may violate the SLA, which in turn will impact other services rely-ing on the IaaS. Our goal in this thesis is to devise an approach and a framework for automat-ing the upgrade of IaaS cloud systems with minimal impact on the services and with respect to the SLAs.
The upgrade of IaaS cloud systems under availability constraints inherits all the challenges of the upgrade of traditional clustered systems and faces other cloud specific challenges. Similar challenges as in clustered systems include the potential dependencies between resources, po-tential incompatibilities along dependencies during the upgrade, potential system configura-tion inconsistencies due to the upgrade failures and the minimization of the amount of used resources to complete the upgrade. Dependencies of the application layer on the IaaS layer is an added challenge that must be handled properly. In addition, the dynamic nature of the cloud environment poses a new challenge. A cloud system evolves, even during the upgrade, according to the workload changes by scaling in/out. This mechanism (referred to as autoscal-ing) may interfere with the upgrade process in different ways.
In this thesis, we define an upgrade management framework for the upgrade of IaaS cloud systems under SLA constraints. This framework addresses all the aforementioned challenges in an integrated manner. The proposed framework automatically upgrades an IaaS cloud sys-tem from a current configuration to a desired one, according to the upgrade requests specified by the administrator. It consists of two distinct components, one to coordinate the upgrade, and the other one to execute the necessary upgrade actions on the infrastructure resources. For the coordination of the upgrade process, we propose a new approach to automatically identify and schedule the appropriate upgrade methods and actions for implementing the up-grade requests in an iterative manner taking into account the vendors’ descriptions of the in-frastructure components, the SLAs with the tenants, and the status of the system. This ap-proach is also capable of handling new upgrade requests even during ongoing upgrades, which makes it suitable for continuous delivery. In case of failures, the proposed approach automatically issues localized retry and undo recovery operations as appropriate for the failed upgrade actions to preserve the consistency of the system configuration.
In this thesis, to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed upgrade management framework we present a proof of concept (PoC) for the upgrade IaaS compute, and its application in an OpenStack cluster. In this PoC, we target the new challenge of upgrade of the IaaS cloud (i.e. unexpected interference between the autoscaling and the upgrade processes) compared to the clustered systems. In addition, the prototype of the proposed upgrade approach for coordinat-ing the upgrade of all kinds of IaaS resources has been implemented and discussed in this thesis. We also provide an informal validation and a rigorous analysis of the main properties of our approach. In addition, we conduct experiments to evaluate our approach with respect to SLA constraints of availability and elasticity. The results show that our approach avoids the outage at the application level and reduces SLA violations during the upgrade, compared to the traditional upgrade method used by cloud providers.


identifier: Zhang, Lin  (2019) Narratives of Chinese Children: The Effects of Age and Genre.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Children's ability to narrate real or fictional events is important for communication as well as for academic success and literacy. Children’s narratives have thus been studied widely and a developmental path of narrative development has been outlined. There is, however, evidence that development in this area may be influenced by cultural factors as well as by the genre of narrative a child is asked to tell. This study explores narrative development further by examining both personal and fictional narratives by Mandarin-speaking Chinese children aged 5 years (n = 12) and 8 years (n = 12).
The narratives were examined in terms of length, narrative pattern (i.e., the overall structure of the narrative) and narrative elements comprising the pattern, using high point analysis. The findings showed that the stories by 8-year-olds were significantly longer than those by 5-year-olds, as expected. The narrative pattern scores (obtained by assigning a numeric score to each pattern) showed that the classic pattern increased significantly from ages 5 to 8 years, for both narrative genres. The 5-year-olds produced a variety of narrative patterns and more complex patterns in the fictional story than in the personal story. They did not include any direct quotes or reported speech in their personal narratives, or appendages in their fictional narratives. The classic pattern was most common for the 8-year-olds, and they provided more evaluation and resolution than the 5-year-olds, as well as more orientation in both narrative genres. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for education and cross-cultural studies of narrative.


identifier: Abdollahi Vayghan, Leila  (2019) Kubernetes as an Availability Manager for Microservice Based Applications.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The architectural style of microservices has been gaining popularity in recent years. In this architectural style, small and loosely coupled modules are deployed and scaled inde-pendently to compose cloud-native applications. Microservices are maintained and tested easily and are faster at startup time. However, to fully leverage from the benefits of the archi-tectural style of microservices, it is necessary to use technologies such as containerization. Therefore, in practice, microservices are containerized in order to remain isolated and light-weight and are orchestrated by orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source platform that defines a set of building blocks which collectively provide mecha-nisms for orchestrating containerized microservices. The move towards the architectural style of microservices is well underway and carrier-grade service providers are migrating their lega-cy applications to a microservice based architecture running on Kubernetes. However, service availability remains a concern. Service availability is measured as the percentage of time the service is provisioned. High Availability (HA) is a non-functional requirement for service availability of at least 99.999%. Although the characteristics of microservice based architec-tures naturally contribute to improving the availability, Kubernetes as an orchestration plat-form for microservices needs to be evaluated in terms of availability. Therefore, in this thesis, we identify possible architectures for deploying stateless and stateful microservice based ap-plications with Kubernetes and evaluate Kubernetes from the perspective of availability it provides for its managed applications. Our experiment’s results show that the healing capabili-ties of Kubernetes are not sufficient for providing high availability, especially for stateful ap-plications. Therefore, we propose a State Controller which integrates with Kubernetes and allows for state replication and automatic service redirection to the healthy microservice instance. We conduct experiments to evaluate our solution and compare the different archi-tectures from an availability perspective and scaling overhead. The results of our investiga-tions show that our solution improves the recovery time of stateful microservice based appli-cations by 55% and even up to 99% in certain cases.


identifier: Harrison, Makayla Catherine  (2019) Artificial wetlands in the Saint Maurice River, Québec, Canada, a hotspot for mercury methylating microorganisms.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Mercury (Hg) is a nonessential trace metal that occurs in aquatic environments through both natural and anthropogenic deposition. When mercury undergoes methylation, it is transformed into methylmercury (MeHg), a neurotoxin capable of bioaccumulating in food webs. This process is facilitated by methylating microorganisms (e.g. sulfate-reducing bacteria, iron-reducing bacteria, and methanogens), all of which contain a hgcAB gene pair. High levels of methylmercury have been recorded in local fish populations near run-of-river hydroelectric dams along the St. Maurice River in Québec, Canada. In order to investigate the source MeHg levels, periphyton biofilms were collected from three sampling sites upstream of the dam, a natural, flooded and artificial wetland site. Using periphyton biofilm samples, we compared the microbial community composition within and between periphyton biofilms, assessed the natural diversity of mercury methylating microorganisms within periphyton biofilms, and quantified the abundance of mercury methylating microorganisms at each sampling site in relation to mercury methylation and demethylation. Different rates of mercury methylation were observed in all three sampling sites, the highest rates seen in the artificial wetlands. This was supported by 16S rRNA analyses, which revealed lineages associated with mercury methylating microorganisms being present at all sites, with the greatest abundance observed in the wetlands. Additionally, the presence of mercury methylating microorganisms was later confirmed through the presence of potential hgcA and hgcB genes found within the metagenomes at the wetland sampling site. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of the artificial wetlands and subsequent flooding following the construction of the Chute-Allard hydroelectric generating station, as being important contributors to increased MeHg levels and its bioaccumulation in local fish populations.


identifier: Apaloo, Marie  (2019) Examining the effects of cross-linguistic awareness on the acquisition of English possessive determiners: The case of Brazilian Portuguese.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Research shows that English possessive determiners (PDs) such as his and her are a challenge for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White, Muñoz, & Collins, 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer effects.
To address this issue, the present study investigated the PD interlanguage of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers. Unlike previously studied L1 groups, BP has a PD system that is similar to English in that grammatical gender of the PD is determined by the possessor (BP: o carro dele/dela, English: his/her car). The research questions we addressed were: (1) How does the PD interlanguage development of BP speakers compare with that of other L1 groups (as outlined in White’s (1998) framework)? (2) Are BP-speaking learners who are aware of the connection between dele/dela and his/her are more accurate in their use of English PDs than those who are not? and (3) Do teachers use learners’ L1 knowledge in their teaching of PDs? Adopting some of White’s (1998) methodology, the following instruments were used to answer these questions: two written (e.g., fill-in the blanks with his/her) and two oral tasks (e.g., picture descriptions) to assess students’ PD performance, stimulated recall interviews with learners to measure cross-linguistic awareness, and interviews with teachers to determine their pedagogical approach. The results showed that BP speaking learners exhibited advantages in their acquisition of his and her in comparison to previously studied L1 groups. Furthermore, students with awareness of the cross-linguistic dele/dela rule outperformed those who were unaware of the rule on two of the three tasks that were compared, although teachers negated any use of cross-linguistic pedagogies to teach PDs. These findings contribute to the research suggesting that pedagogical approaches that build awareness of L1/L2 similarities could be effective for supporting language learning


identifier: Arsenault Cooper, Evelyne  (2019) A New Music Therapist’s Reflections Upon Experiences of Emotional Awareness: A Heuristic Self-Inquiry.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

format: text audio

abstract: The purpose of this research was to examine and reflect upon the researcher’s own experiences of emotional awareness when she engaged in free improvisations on the piano. Research and other scholarly literature cite the importance of self-reflective inquiries for music therapist researchers as it allows them to assume a participant role and experience a personal process that may be similar to that of their clients. Research that examines a music therapist’s personal experiences of emotional awareness could not only enhance that individual’s personal insight but also deepen their understanding of emotion-based interventions as a result of their own lived experiences. The data collection and analysis processes of this research were conceptualized using Moustakas’ six stages of heuristic inquiry. Following Neuman’s open coding procedures, the data was organized into four overarching categories relating to the primary research question: the researcher’s development of awareness; her understanding of musical elements in her improvisations; her rediscovery of the piano; and the roles of her identities within the improvisation context. Themes emerged within these categories using Neuman’s axial coding procedures, leading to further interpretations. A creative synthesis symbolizing the research findings emerged in the form of a piano composition, which was performed and audio recorded by the researcher. Personal, professional, educational and research implications are presented as well as limitations.


identifier: Albert, Nathalie  (2019) Musicothérapie et intervention musicale auprès d’enfants atteints du trouble déficitaire de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité : une recension des écrits.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Le trouble déficitaire de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité (TDAH) est le trouble le plus diagnostiqué chez les enfants et l’une des principales raisons pour lesquelles un enfant est référé en soins de santé mentale. Les musicothérapeutes et les intervenants en psychologie, en neurosciences, en éducation et en d’autres domaines ont développé des interventions et des méthodes d’évaluation qui utilisent la musique en tenant compte des caractéristiques complexes de ce trouble qui affecte les fonctions cognitives et psychologiques, la motricité et les comportements. Cette recension des écrits inclut 23 études parues en anglais et en français entre 1998 et 2018 : 11 articles de recherche publiés et révisés par les pairs, huit thèses de doctorat et quatre mémoires de maîtrise. Elle rassemble des connaissances au sujet de l’utilisation de la musique auprès des jeunes âgés de 4 à 18 ans, présentant un TDAH. Les études portent sur des interventions en musicothérapie, sur des interventions musicales non musicothérapeutiques, sur des tests de perception musicale ainsi que sur les effets de l’écoute musicale durant une tâche et durant la pratique musicale. Sur un total de 23 études, cinq études (22 %) témoignent des bénéfices d’une intervention spécifique à la musicothérapie auprès d’enfants ayant un TDAH tandis que 17 autres (74 %) démontrent des bénéfices par l’utilisation de la musique. Une étude n’a pas identifié de bénéfices. Les résultats démontrent que la recherche informe et guide les musicothérapeutes dans leur pratique auprès d’enfants ayant un TDAH, mais que plus de recherche est nécessaire pour bien saisir l’impact des interventions en musicothérapie.


identifier: Hastings, Laura  (2019) Practices and Perspectives of Music Therapists Working With Infants in Canadian Neonatal Intensive Care Units.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This qualitative descriptive research investigated the current practices and perspectives of certified music therapists (MTA) working in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in Canadian hospitals. The Canadian context is important to consider because of this country’s unique healthcare landscape, and because the use of NICU music therapy in Canada is relatively new. Three individual interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed according to qualitative content analysis procedures. Results include nine overarching categories containing multiple themes. These categories include: weekly workload, referrals, assessment, evaluation, music therapy interventions, challenges of the job, rewards of the job, evolution of NICU music therapy practices, and recommendations for advancing Canadian music therapy practices. Implications for the music therapy profession, practice and continuing education, as well as implications for Canadian hospitals and recommendations for research are presented. Limitations of the study are identified. It is the researcher’s hope that this study will help to promote the development of Canadian NICU music therapy programs, thus increasing Canadians’ access to this type of innovative service.


identifier: Akbarnozari, Ali  (2019) Diagnostic Methods and Parameters to Characterize Droplets and Particles in Suspension Plasma Spray.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Suspension plasma spray (SPS) is an emerging coating process for making surfaces with superior properties. In the SPS process, ceramic particles are mixed with water or ethanol to form a suspension. A plasma torch provides the heat and momentum to evaporate liquid phase of the injected suspension, melt the coating particles, propel the in-flight particles toward a substrate, and eventually form a coating layer. However, the SPS process relies strongly on the coupon test and trials to find optimum spray conditions for plasma, suspension injection, and substrate location. At the end, an optimum spray condition set in a spray booth may not reproduce the same coating result in other booths. An effective control over the spray process improves the reproducibility of the spray conditions and consequently coating structures. Therefore, monitoring systems are employed to better understand and control the required spray condition. The monitoring included accessing state of droplets after the atomization of suspension and state of in-flight particles near the substrate. For further development of the SPS process, the suspension can be injected by an effervescent atomizer. This research aims to contribute in further improving the process and developing the diagnostic tools in SPS.
For a further improvement of the SPS process, an effervescent atomizer was investigated as an alternative way instead of the current methods of injection of the suspension in the plasma jet. Performance of the effervescent atomizer was investigated at room temperature by phase Doppler particle anemometry (PDPA). Size of droplets and shape of the atomized spray in a crossflow configuration was almost independent of the suspension concentration. Size of droplets depends on the atomization at the exit of the orifice and the breakup in the crossflow. Velocity of droplets at downstream is the velocity of the crossflow. It was found that the shape of spray was conserved in the crossflow and relatively smaller droplets were enveloped by the larger droplets.
As a contribution to adapt a diagnostic system for SPS, a two-color pyrometer was modified and investigated to measure temperature of in-flight particles. The in-flight particles are released after evaporation of the liquid phase of suspension droplets. A high cooling rate of the in-flight particles in terms of distance from the torch and radiation of plasma are main challenges for temperature measurement. To remove these limitations, the temperature was measured by a single-point measurement system based on thermal emission which equipped by readjusted bandpass filtering. The result of online temperature and velocity measurement was in a good agreement with the offline validation by collecting the splats and analyzing the samples. Moreover, the measurement condition has an impact on temperature, and the impact can be minimized by elimination of the stray radiation.
As a fundamental research work to develop a diagnostic system for SPS, a light diffraction (LD) system was adapted and investigated to measure size of in-flight particles. Refraction of the laser in the measurement volume and radiation from plasma were two main challenges of the size measurement. A shield of an optimized aperture was employed to control the condition of measurement volume. By applying a narrow bandpass filter at a right wavelength and selecting a right angle to collect the scattered signal from the in-flight particles, the size of particles was measured. A good agreement between the result of online measurements under the plasma condition and studying the feedstock particles in the wet cell unit in the room condition validated the size measurement.


identifier: Fiset, Jean-Sebastien  (2019) Effects of Turning Radius on Skid-Steered Wheeled Robot Power Consumption on Loose Soil.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This research highlights the need for a new power model for skid-steered wheeled robots driving on loose soil and lays the groundwork to develop such a model. State-of-the-art power modeling assumes hard ground; under typical assumptions this predicts constant power consumption over a range of small turning radii where the inner wheels are rotating backwards. However, experimental results performed both in the field and in a controlled laboratory sandbox show that, on sand, power is not in fact constant with respect to turning radius. Power peaks by 20% in a newly identified range of turns where the inner wheels rotate backwards but are being dragged forward. This range of turning radii spans from half the rover width to R', the radius at which the inner wheel is not commanded to turn. Data shows higher motor torque and wheel sinkage in this range. To progress toward predicting the required power for a skid-steered wheeled robot to maneuver on loose soil, a preliminary version of a two-dimensional slip-sinkage model is proposed, along with a model of the force required to bulldoze the pile of sand that accumulates next to the wheels as it they are skidding. However, this is shown to be a less important factor contributing to the increased power in small-radius turns than the added inner wheel torque induced by dragging these wheels through the piles of sand they excavate by counter-rotation (in the identified range of turns). Finally, since a direct application of a power model is to design energy-efficient paths, time dependency of power consumption is also examined. Experiments show reduced rover angular velocity in sand around turning radii where the inner wheels are not rotated and this leads to the introduction to a new parameter to consider in path planning: angular slip.


identifier: Stein, Jessie Lauren  (2019) Dancing Difference: Migrants, Affective Politics, and the Party Space as a Site of Intercultural Connection.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis examines the political possibilities of spaces in which there is both a confrontation with the reality of heterogeneity as well as a genuine bid for the rights of presence of migrant populations through an ethnographic case study of an intercultural party series in Munich, Germany. Developed amidst anti-migrant sentiment at the height of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’, at Plug in Beats, an attempt is made to treat a space shared by established locals and recent migrants democratically.  The crowd selects the music, with each partygoer sharing a song of their choice for the DJ to play. The format of the dance party, in combination with an active inclusion policy, aims to create a non-hierarchical safer-space for meaningful intercultural exchange.  Drawing on participant observation and interviews with party organizers and attendees, I evaluate the strengths and limits of inclusive intercultural space and investigate how the sharing of space at the party influences participants’ imaginings of themselves and each other.  While the party itself cannot address exclusion or inequity at the root, it can provide a place for connections, and a platform for practicing new forms of social negotiation.  The party format generates an affective politics which disrupts the stability of fixed judgements and relations.  While the immediate transformative value of these kinds of events may be small, this thesis argues that this awareness-building process can act as a foundation for a broader political struggle.


identifier: Pu, Fangwei  (2019) Optimizing storage tank size in rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems based on daily demand and supply matching.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Under current published guidelines for Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) systems, sizing procedure for rainwater tanks is based on annual climate data, which might underestimate the performance of RWH system and lead to oversized tanks. The aim of this study is to promote compact sizing of RWH systems such that RWH systems could be deployable for more situations.
To effectively evaluate the optimal size of rainwater storage tanks, this study proposes to consider the matching of demand and supply on a daily basis. A performance evaluation method, based on daily climate conditions, is developed. The approach and its effectiveness are demonstrated by various water demand scenarios for residential buildings.
The comparison between fulfillment rates for RWH systems with rainwater tanks sized using the annual method and those sized using the daily method showed that the annual method may oversize rainwater storage tanks of RWH systems. The performance analysis with consideration of extreme climates illustrates the daily method can be adopted to size the tanks for extremely wet areas.
The scope of this study is limited residential buildings with a wide variety of water consumption patterns. The uncertainty of the sizing approach reduces for office buildings, where the water consumption is more predictable.
By adopting this method, oversized rainwater tanks and biased performance evaluation of RWH systems can be largely avoided, and more practical recommendations on RWH systems at initial design stage can be offered.


identifier: Alhachami, Hassan Hamed  (2019) Electro-Adsorptive System for Removal of Pharmaceutical Products from an Aqueous Solution.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Commonly used pharmaceutical products present in sewage cannot be removed by conventional wastewater treatment plants. Therefore, they can be found in effluents discharged to aquatic systems. Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) are among these releases into the environment. For example, 17α-ethynylestradiol (EE2) is a synthetic compound extensively used by the population, which is released into an environment. Thus, it can cause a negative effect on the endocrine system of aquatic biota and human.
To protect the aquatic system against an impact of EDCs comprised in the effluent, a novel system for their removal was proposed. A steroidal estrogen, EE2, was assumed to be a target compound in this investigation. Then, the objective of this study is to develop a sustainable system for EE2 removal. The methodological approach combining an adsorption with electro-kinetic phenomena has been proposed. Sustainability is supposed, based on revalorization of wasted materials and minimizing of energy use. Six phases of investigation were proposed, namely, phase 1: Manufacturing procedures; phase 2: Upgraded adsorption system; phase 3:  Experimental protocol; phase 4: Electro-adsorptive system; phase 5: Electro-adsorptive system comparison; phase 6; cost-effectiveness increase and energy saving proposal. The study has been advanced, where waste generated by fisheries and forestry demonstrated already excellent materials to build an electro-adsorptive system. Application of a low direct current (DC) has also demonstrated a sufficient effectiveness of the system. In focus, to understand the partitioning of EDCs (EE2) between liquid and solid phases, eight types of adsorbents made from New Adsorptive Materials were initially used to remove EE2 from an aqueous solution. Afterward, these adsorbents were enhanced with New Adsorptive Materials (chitin) to increase EE2 removal from an aqueous solution. These adsorbents were then enhanced with New Adsorptive Materials (chitin) to increase EE2 removal from an aqueous solution.
The analytical test showed that adsorption phenomena using these types of adsorbents adequately reduces EE2 in the aquatic solution. The obtained results of the analytical test were initially sorted based on the adsorbent type: 1. Adsorbent made from New Adsorptive Material (softwood) showed 42% removal of EE2; 2. Adsorbent made from New Adsorptive Material (hardwood) showed 47% removal of EE2.

As a competitive removal capacity with cost- effectiveness increase, it was proposed to enhance the best adsorbent which was shown by the primary results using chitin. This method (adsorbent enhancement method) showed 92% EE2 removal. It was a great removal capacity, but it was still far away from the research objective. Therefore, it was proposed to establish an electrical system able to support adsorption phenomena. A combination technique was the choice. This technique was established by a combining a direct current (DC) field phenomena and adsorption phenomena (Electro-Adsorptive System). In this phase, various configurations of electrokinetic reactors were tested: 1). Electrode materials iron, aluminum, and carbon; 2) Constant voltage of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30V; 3). Time of applied electrical field from 9h to 24h; 4). Different types of synthetic adsorbents. Finally, an experimental comparison was conducted between synthetic and commercial adsorbents.

The results from the analytical tests were as follows: 1) 82 % removal of EE2 at pH between 7 to 10 using the individual formulated adsorbent from thermally treated hardwood residues (H1T1) (far from the objective with some disadvantages); 2) 99.99% removal of EE2 using the adsorbent made from chitin in electro-adsorptive system regardless electrodes types, which are a good indicator for electrode flexibility use but the disadvantage of this removal method is remaining particles of adsorbent in an aqueous solution; 3) 79% removal of EE2 using the commercial activated carbon adsorbent (CACA) made from coconut shell; 4) 99.99% removal of EE2 using the enhanced adsorbent made from NAM (H1T1)+chitin (ENAM) in electro-adsorptive system (the best method).
This study has shown the possibility of the EE2 removal by 99.99%. It is expected, that the developed system would be applied to water treatment facilities or to polish effluents before discharge into aquatic systems.


identifier: Zak, Matthew Robert  (2019) Classification of lung diseases using deep learning models.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Although deep learning-based models show high performance in the medical field, they required large volumes of data which is problematic due to the protection of patient privacy and lack of publically available medical databases.
In this thesis, we address the problem of medical data scarcity by considering the task of pulmonary disease detection in chest X-Ray images using small volume datasets (<1000 samples). We implement three deep convolution neural networks pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset (VGG16, ResNet-50, and InveptionV3) and asses them in the lung disease classification tasks transfer learning approach. We created a pipeline that applied segmentation on Chest X-Ray images before classifying them and we compared the performance of our framework with the existing one. We demonstrated that pre-trained models and simple classifiers such as shallow neural networks can compete with the complex systems.
We also implemented activation maps for our system. The analysis of class activation maps shows that not only does the segmentation improve results in terms of accuracy but also focuses models on medically relevant areas of lungs.
We validated our techniques on the publicly available Shenzhen and Montgomery datasets and compared them to the currently available solutions. Our method was able to reach the same level of accuracy as the best performing models trained on the Montgomery dataset however, the advantage of our approach is a smaller number of trainable parameters. What is more, our InceptionV3 based model almost tied with the best performing solution on the Shenzhen dataset but as previously, it is computationally less expensive.


identifier: Kruidenier, Stijn  (2019) Temporary Institutions: The dynamism of beer regulations in Brazil before, during and after the 2014 World Cup.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The purpose of this study is to present the phenomenon of temporary institutions. Institutional theorists generally describe institutions as permanent and resistant to change. However, in practice, temporary institutions exist and challenge the perceived stability that scholars suggest institutions to have. By presenting temporary institutions, we explain how they are conceived from transnational organizations and can have lasting effects on a host nations endemic institutional framework. We further justify that the phenomenon is inadequately explained by related theories and therefore is a unique construct. Via an inductive case study design we present a temporary institution by observing and analyzing the institutional framework using institutional indicators (regulative, normative, cognitive) to evaluate changes in beer consumption laws in Brazilian football stadia before, during and after the FIFA World Cup 2014. Our findings support our initial propositions surrounding temporary institutions. First, FIFA as a transnational organization implemented a temporary institutional framework in Brazil replacing previous beer consumption laws in football stadia to support its sponsor, Budweiser. Second, after the World Cup key figures in states of Brazil questioned the institutional framework surrounding beer consumption in football stadia that existed before the World Cup. Finally, we observe that our findings cannot be described by related theories suggesting its uniqueness in institutional studies. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.


identifier: Sales, Eder da Silva ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7503-0720 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7503-0720>  (2019) Structural Design Using Principal Stress Line for Toolpath-based Additive Manufacturing.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The use of additive manufacturing (AM) has increased considerably in recent years. This technology has been used in many areas due to the possibility of creating complex shapes in an easy, fast, and without wasting material. This creative freedom also allows components to be highly optimized according to their function. Currently, there are advanced algorithms that allow final users to perform topology optimization in the computer-aided design (CAD) phase. However, the optimization results might not be respected or considered during the downstream AM planning processes like slicing hence the optimized structural design may be lost during the actual fabrication process. This work has a focus on topology optimization during the toolpath planning process, instead of only in the CAD phase, by taking into account the toolpath characteristics presented in the AM processes.
For an AM process whose toolpath is a set of lines such as fused deposition modeling (FDM), this thesis develops a line based topology optimization using the principal stress line (PSL) as the guidance in generating optimized toolpaths. The method is efficient, controllable, and able to consider the characteristics of the AM process. The computation results can be directly converted into toolpaths, so that the fabrication will follow faithfully as what is planned. Experimental structural tests were performed on the proposed method and the results obtained demonstrate that the strategy of applying PSL-based optimization in toolpath planning is a promising direction to complement the topologically optimized results from the CAD phase.


identifier: Rondeau, Amélie  (2019) La politique culturelle et les musées d'État; fondement du Ministère des Affaires Culturelles québécois.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Ce mémoire s’attarde sur l’instrumentalisation de la culture par l’appareil étatique. Parmi différents modèles d’invention étatique qui prévalent en France, Angleterre, États-Unis et Canada,
l’État providence, le principe d’ « arm’s length » et du marché libre qui caractérise les modèles anglo-saxons seront analysés. La particularité de l’État providence culturel est l’obligation morale que s’impose dorénavant le gouvernement à intervenir délibérément et directement dans la culture comme un nouveau programme social. En ce sens, un changement de mentalité s’est opéré avec la création d’un Ministère des Affaires Culturelles du Québec, depuis 1961, par le gouvernement libéral de Jean Lesage. Celui-ci demeure dans sa forme administrative unique en Amérique du Nord.

L’étude du caractère national d’une institution muséale d’État, selon les initiateurs possibles (royale, parlementaire, privée et gouvernementale), leur type d’administration et de gestion, permettra de souligner les particularités du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Fondé par le ministère en 1964, il symbolise le paroxysme de la glorification des arts visuels par l’état québécois. Depuis sa fondation, jusqu’en 1984, le gouvernement du Québec a maintenu une mainmise sur ce musée par son administration directe. À partir de constat, ce mémoire analyse ce rapport complexe entre institutions gouvernementale et muséale, et interrogera le rôle de l’État dans la sélection, la gestion et la diffusion d’une collection nationale d’art contemporain au sein d’une institution muséale étatique.

Les enjeux que représentent la sélection et la conservation d’art contemporain seront soulevés en lien avec le message sous-jacent que convie une telle collection nationale du gouvernement à sa population. Malgré le fait que cette administration directe de l’État sur une institution culturelle ne dura que vingt ans, ce cas permet de mieux comprendre l’instrumentalisation de la culture au travers d’une institution muséale nationale par une instance politique contemporaine occidentale.


identifier: Haralanova, Kristina  (2019) Do-It-Together: Feminist Reconfigurations of Hacking in Montreal.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Technological practitioners and observers often depict hacking cultures as fast-evolving spaces for social, political, technological and cultural innovation. While interest in hackerspaces is growing in terms of technological innovation, limited attention has been paid to building inclusive collective real-world spaces for hacking. This dissertation addresses this lacuna in two ways: First, this study looks into the forms of inclusion and exclusion found in traditional hacking spaces, exploring in detail the invisible boundaries formed in and around such spaces. Second, this study foregrounds feminist hacker practices and the alternatives they offer to such limited traditional hacking spaces. It argues that traditional hackerspaces, while empowering a few, encourage segregation within the hacker movement and enforce unwritten norms that relegate a large number of hackers (female, queer, transgender among others) to the margins or even the outside. To this end, this thesis examines two case studies in the city of Montreal: Foulab, a traditional hackerspace, and Femhack, a feminist hacker collective. As a hacker, a feminist and a researcher, I chose to study these communities through an Ethnographic Action Research Methodology, a methodology which helped me to document, contextualize and analyze the local expressions of the hacker movement, while theorizing its real and potential approaches to space, community-building, and learning through technology. By using the advantage of my insider position, this research assesses the democratic limits and possibilities of hackerspaces in Montreal and beyond. It offers four takeaways: 1) The traditional hackerspace model reproduces patriarchal structures that create barriers for women and other minorities, due to an overemphasis on technology and individual achievement. 2) Feminist hackerspaces welcome participants and are actively inviting, not just welcoming in theory. Choosing to invite marginalized hackers in is more powerful than just “leaving the door open” for them. 3) Broadening the definition of hacking to include areas in which men are not already the default experts, creates a more just, diverse, and equitable hacker field of expertise, thus breaking hierarchies and power relationships in this technological field. 4) Feminist pedagogies stressing on collaborative learning and applying in the hacker practice open the barriers set in traditional hackerspaces, creating spaces respectful of participants’ differences and needs. In a nutshell, I suggest that the ideals and practices of the feminist hackerspace examined in this thesis could be the beginning of a movement from a DIY (do-it-yourself) toward a DIT (do-it-together) hacking culture focused on more connected local communities, encouraging sustained engagement and more inclusive participation in the hacker movement.


identifier: Ebrahim NEJAD, Alireza  (2019) Robust Design of Supply Network Subject to Disruptions by Considering Congestion Effects.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis is focused on the supply chain disruptions and it reviews cost-efficient risk mitigation strategies to sustain supply chain functionality when disruptions occur. In particular, we study the robust design of supply flow subject to minor operational risks and major disruptions. The contingent sourcing along with strategic stock is incorporated as risk management strategies. We consider a firm with two suppliers where the main supplier is cost-effective but prone to disruptions and the back-up supplier is reliable but expensive. The back-up supplier can scale up its capacity according to a speed related to its configuration in order to supply the required flow of material when the main supplier disrupts. When minor disruption occurs, the strategic stock can cover the losses. The design problem considered is to determine optimal strategic stock level and response speed of volume-flexible back-up supplier.
The back-up supplier might not provide the required supply level instantaneously due to non-steady production state and congestion during the response time. Therefore, there could be material shortages if the actual level of available capacity during the response time is ignored. The first chapter includes the incorporation of the clearing function into a contingency capacity planning model in order to represent the impact of congestion. The appropriate response speed is selected through a decision tree analysis considering different attitudes of the decision maker towards risk. The results show that considering congestion impact is especially critical for risk-neutral decision makers. The second chapter considers the randomness associated with the available capacity through a two-stage robust optimization model. The results show improvement in the quality of optimal solution by considering the randomness. The objective in the third chapter is to find an equitable solution which has an efficient performance with respect to all plausible scenarios. Therefore, the Ordered Weighted Averaging aggregation operator is incorporated in the objective function of a MIP robust model. In order to address the computational complexity associated with large set of scenarios, a novel clustering based scenario reduction model based on location covering model is proposed. The results show that the proposed methodology provide an accurate reduced scenario set within relatively short computational time.


identifier: Jeirroodi, Khodayar  (2019) Efficient Heuristics for Virtual Machine Migration in Data Centers.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Live migration of virtual machines is one of the essential virtualization technologies which enables the consolidation and load balancing in cloud data centers without interrupting the services.
Main goals for optimizing a single virtual machine live migration is to minimize migration time, transferred data and downtime. Planning multiple live migrations in a data center has an essential impact on feasibility of consolidation and quality of services during migrations, however, optimizing parallel VM migrations has been studies less. Minimizing makespan (total migration time) while reducing energy and service quality degradation caused by using datacenter resources for migrations, are the main objectives of the problem. One of the issues in planning multiple live migrations is to detect and consider migrations order dependency constraints and possible deadlocks caused by lack of enough free resources in servers during the process. In the literature, exact mathematical models are not scalable and heuristics are not optimal and they don't consider the quality of service and energy efficiency of migration process when resources are restricted.
In this work we propose a heuristic algorithm for scheduling the migration of virtual machines in a data center in order to minimize makespan (total migration time) and solve the conflicts (deadlocks) caused by limitation of resources with minimum cost and quality degradation.


identifier: MacIsaac, Alexander  (2019) The greenhouse gas climate commitment and reversibility of peak warming from past emissions.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The warming caused by past CO2 emissions is known to persist for centuries to millennia, even in the absence of additional future emissions. Other non-CO2 greenhouse gas emission have caused additional historical warming, though the persistence of this non-CO2 warming varies among gases owing to their different atmospheric lifetimes. Under deep mitigation scenarios or in an idealized scenario of zero future greenhouse gas emissions, the past warming from shorter-lived non-CO2 gases has been shown to be considerably more reversible than that caused by CO2 emissions. Here I use an intermediate-complexity global climate model coupled to an atmospheric chemistry module to quantify the warming commitment and its reversibility for individual and mixtures of non-CO2 greenhouse gases. I show that warming caused by gases with short atmospheric lifetimes will decrease by more than half its peak value within 30 years following zeroed emissions at present day, with more 80 percent of peak temperature reversed by the end of this century. Despite the fast response of atmospheric temperature to the elimination of non-CO2 emissions, the ocean responds much more slowly: past ocean warming does not reverse, but rather continues for several centuries after zero emissions. Further consequences are shown for the land carbon pool, which decreases as an approximately linear function of historical non-CO2 greenhouse gas induced warming. Given that CO2 and non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions share common emission sources, I also explore a set of scenarios where sets of emissions are zeroed according to two broad source categories: (1) fossil fuel combustion, and (2) land-use and agriculture. Using these additional model runs, I investigate the temperature change that is avoided if all CO2 and non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions from a particular source abruptly stops while others are allowed to continue. These results indicate the possibility of land-use change and agriculture activities continuing under deep mitigation scenarios and ambitious climate targets, without leading to exceedance of global climate targets. Though I analyze unlikely scenarios, my work provides baselines from which more realistic mitigation scenarios can be assessed. The reversibility of peak temperature caused by historic non-CO2 gases is a relevant measure for policy frameworks seeking to limit global warming to ambitious targets, such as the 1.5 oC target adopted by the Paris Agreement


identifier: Billa, Cyprian Nkem  (2019) Biogeochemical Evaluation of Major Streams along the Eastern Flank of Mount Cameroon: Implications for Water Quality.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The Eastern flank of Mt Cameroon constitutes one of the richest drainage systems in the world. However, the surface waters on which the surrounding population depends, continues to witness pollution from anthropogenic and in some cases, natural phenomena. The major objective of this study was to conduct a biogeochemical evaluation on the quality of major surface waters (streams, rivers) to ascertain their suitability for human consumption, recreation and for the suste-nance of their aquatic ecosystems. 9 water samples were collected and analyzed from 6 major streams and rivers running through heavily populated areas at the upstream and downstream. With the use of Rockwork software, multivariate statistical techniques were employed to group samples into hydrochemical facies in order to identify potential pollution sources. The results reveal a decreasing order of magnitude for cations: Na+ > Ca2+ > Mg2+ > K+. Meanwhile the anions the trend reveals a decreasing order as follows: HCO3- >> Cl- > NO3- > SO42-. The main water types of the area are NaK- HCO3 and CaMg- HCO3-. While most of the samples have trace metal concentrations well below the WHO guidelines for drinking water, the Stone Quarters Stream (STQ) shows high concentrations of trace elements Fe, Mn and Al from geogenic sources. Most of the samples revealed generally low concentrations for trace metals as the total coliform counts exceeded the WHO guideline of zero (CFU)/100 mL. Rock-water reactions which leads to chem-ical weathering of silicates and human (anthropogenic) pollution which engenders microbial con-tamination are respectively the main culprits of surface water contamination. Most of the waters in their current state, are unfit for human consumption, recreation and ecological sustenance while still safe for irrigation with the exception of the STQ which appears unsuitably hazardous. The study further proposes institutional and technological remedies through which the problem can be addressed and mitigated such as effective stakeholder coordination, improved community awareness and waste collection processes, monitoring and enforcement, allocation of funds to-wards innovative solutions, expansion of sewage and water treatment facilities, water boiling and chlorination, and the provision of water filters.

Key words: Water quality, anthropogenic, contamination, pollution, trace elements, nutrients.


identifier: Hussein, Bahaa  (2019) An Evolutionary Stochastic Discrete Time-Cost Trade-Off Method for Repetitive and Non- Repetitive Construction Projects.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis aims at developing a method for solving the scheduling problem of discrete Time-Cost Trade-off (TCT) in an uncertain context. The method determines the elite execution mode for each project activity to optimize for minimization of the overall project’s cost and/or duration while satisfying a specified Joint Confidence Level (JCL) of both time and cost. In this thesis, each resource allocation to individual activities is referred to as mode, and each alternative solution is referred to as a chromosome.  A new evolutionary method formulation is developed. The method is of two-folds, the first is an experimental module where generations of chromosomes are developed using a design of experiments and blocking techniques based on a novel approach of partitioning the project scheduling network. At each generation, a complete enumeration is performed for a selection of primary activities, and the elite modes are identified and carried forward to successive generations until all elite modes are identified to form the elements of the supreme chromosome solution. To provide flexibility and practicality, the developed method allows for the end-user interactive selection of execution modes. This arises from the bias of project managers in favouring specific modes that may not be optimal. Hence, the second fold of the developed method is a random search module that quantifies the effect of changing a mode within a chromosome on the total project cost and duration under a targeted JCL of both time and cost. The method also accounts for penalties/ incentives as a function of time associated with the late/ early project completion depending on the contract provisions.  The developed method is also extended for repetitive construction projects considering optimization of crew work continuity for typical and non-typical repetitive activities, i.e. those having identical work amounts and those having a deviation in their work amounts and, therefore, different cost and duration in different repetitive units. The supreme chromosome solution and the main effect plots provide the decision-maker a guideline for making well-informed implementation strategies. The performed computational results demonstrate not only the method benefits and accuracy but also its superiority over current methods for stochastic TCT optimization. The method has been fully coded using Google Apps Script, Google BigQuery SQL statements, and in-line JavaScript functions.


identifier: Demers, Kyla  (2019) The prevalence of cranial bone and upper cervical mobility restrictions in post-concussion syndrome.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Introduction: The Centre for Disease Control in the United States estimates 1.7-3.8 million sport concussions annually with twenty percent presenting persistent symptoms requiring targeted clinical assessment. Few studies examine manual therapy in concussions. Our purpose was to investigate cranial bone and upper cervical mobility restriction prevalence in post-concussion syndrome.
Methods: Twenty-one adults with post-concussion syndrome (PCS), 11 with history of concussion (CHx) and 12 controls (Ctl) participated. An osteopath assessed cranial bones and C0-C1-C2 mobility using a standard protocol to determine number of restrictions (NR). An athletic therapist assessed participants on Post-Concussion-Symptom-Scale (PCSS), King-Devick (KD), Tandem Gait Test (TGT), Sensory Organisation Test (SOT), and Vestibulo-Oculo-Motor-Screening (VOMS). Assessments were blinded to group assignment. We used a one-way ANOVA to assess group differences and a Pearson Correlation to assess relationships between variables.
Results: NR was statistically different between groups (F(2,41)= 6.231, p= .004). PCS (8.24±4.25) had a higher NR compared to the Ctl (2.92±3.8) (mean difference 5.321±1.512, p= .003). The NR demonstrated a relationship with PCSS symptom severity (r2=0.333, p= .027) and VOMS vestibular score (r2=0.305, p= .044). Although not significant, there was a trend with number of symptoms (r2=0.283, p= .062), visual (r2=0.267, p= .079) and total score (r2=0.293, p= .054). There was no relationship between NR and KD, TGT and SOT.
Conclusion: NR was significantly higher in the PCS group compared to the Ctl group. NR was associated with the PCSS and VOMS, but not the KD, TGT, SOT. Cervical and cranial mobility restrictions should be investigated in concussions with prolonged recovery.


identifier: Lupino-Smith, Estraven  (2019) Not Your Shock Troops: Queer Artists Disrupting Gentrification in Montreal's St-Henri.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis develops a queer(ed) analyses of gentrification, one that troubles the current analysis of the role of artists and cultural workers in the process. It does so by drawing on critical race, queer, and feminist theory and through empirical research in St-Henri that investigates the nuances of the cultural dimensions of urban redevelopment. Without denying the importance of economic processes in driving gentrification, this research suggests there is a need to think about the way that normativity is entangled with gentrification. In doing so, the research also seeks to uncover queer resistance to these changes in urban space and investigates how certain forms of queer resistance, even when embodied in artists, might disrupt rather than propel gentrification processes.


identifier: An Ran, Chen  (2019) Studying and Leveraging User-Provided Logs in Bug Reports for Debugging Assistance.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Bug reports provide important information for developers to debug user-reported issues. During the debugging process, developers need to study the bug report and examine user-provided logs to understand the system execution paths that lead to the problem. Prior studies on bug reports also found that such user-provided often contain valuable debugging information to developers. In this thesis, we conduct a tool-assisted study to study user-provided logs in bug reports. Our goal is to study any challenges that developers may encounter when analyzing the logs, and how many additional buggy classes can the logs help to identify. In particular, we study both system-generated logs and exception stack traces. Our approach tries to simulate developers' debugging process by 1) identifying the location in the source code where the logs were generated, 2) re-constructing execution paths by finding the call paths are can be traced back from the logs, and 3) studying the additional buggy classes that the re-constructed execution paths identify. We conduct our study on eight large-scale open-source systems with a total of 1,145 bug reports that contain logs. We find that the execution paths cannot be constructed in 32% of the studied bug reports, since many logs can no longer be found in the source code due to code evolution, and users often provide logs that are generated by third-party frameworks. In the rest of the cases, the re-constructed execution paths can identify 15% additional buggy classes in 41% of the bug reports. Through a comprehensive manual study, we find that the main reasons that the re-constructed execution paths fail to identify additional buggy classes are that reporters often only attach logs that describe the unexpected behavior (e.g., stack traces) without additional logs to illustrate the system execution. In summary, this thesis highlights both the challenges and potentials of using user-provided logs to assist developers with debugging. It also revealed common issues with user-provided logs in bug reports, and provided suggestions for future research.


identifier: Bill-Duda, Agnieszka  (2019) Information Management and the Moral Self: A story of uncertainty in chronic illness.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Abstract
This thesis follows the stories of three main interlocutors who are afflicted by chronic illness. The purpose of this ethnographic research is to shed light on the work that patients do to receive care from their health practitioners. Participants use information technologies to assess whether their needs are being met on their terms, whether their diagnoses are believable and whether they are being taken seriously. I argue that, in the context of managing chronic conditions, it is incumbent upon patients to use every means of information available to them to secure the best outcomes for their health and their futures. However, the use of information is mediated by experience, emotion, positionality and responsibility, all of which impact the ‘best good’ outcome for the patient. As such, information and the act of googling produce a moral practice. In the case of my participants, this moral practice also curbs uncertainty as regards their experience of daily pain.


identifier: Matte, Christopher-Denny ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8218-295X <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8218-295X>  (2019) Geometric Simulation and Additive Manufacturing of Multi-Material Soft Robots.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Soft Robots have been an increasingly studied topic due to their ability to deal with unknown situations, their inherent compliance which reduces computational load for control by allowing the robot to conform to complex scenarios without requiring precise movement or actuation when compared to rigid robots, as well as the ability to more safely interact with humans. As such a need to simulate soft robots has also developed. Furthermore, the ability to create robots with varying materials allows for designs with additional degrees of freedom as well as pre-programmed deformations. Soft robots can be thought as deforming through geometric constraints; from the shortening of a cable, or the increase in volume of a pneumatic system. A new framework has been developed to simulate multi-material soft robots using geometric modelling. This frame work provided a 45x increase in computational speed compared to commercial software such as Abaqus. In addition, it provides stable and accurate results past 30% strains which current state-of the art solver such as SOFA can not perform. To be able to take full advantage of the design freedom for soft robots, new manufacturing techniques need to be investigated. Conventional manufacturing techniques for elastomers struggle with complex geometry and multi-material fabrication. Additive manufacturing, in certain cases, has been able to address both those issues. While standard Fused Deposition Method and PolyJetting 3D printing techniques are capable of multi-material fabrication, both have inherent flaws that Digital Light Processing 3D printing can address. Therefore a novel multi-material solution was developed for the DLP process. This printer utilizes an active cleaning solution using a spray to reduce contamination and cleaning time. In addition, an automated storage and retrieval system is adapted to increase the efficiency and material capacity of the printer. When compared to the state of the art, a 3x speed increase is observed while having a build area that is 12 times larger, while also decreasing the cleaning time by 8x and decreasing contamination by 4x.


identifier: Azghandi-Roshnavand, Ali  (2019) Evaluation of construction contract documents to be applied in modular construction focusing ambiguities; A text processing approach.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Modular coordination in building construction has become increasingly popular, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. In Canada, modular construction came to considerable attention over the last decade due to its valuable effect on project constraints, safety, and preventing construction and demolition waste. However, the modular construction industry still adopts the same administrative procedures designed for the conventional construction industry, even though the features of modular and conventional construction are different in terms of construction processes and methods. Due to this trend, ambiguities in administrative documents are widely occurred and are one of the main causes to generate conflict, disputes, and claims between owners and modular suppliers as general contractors. As a first step in the this research to overcome this challenge, the research team focuses on investigating the contents and structures of the current standard contracts and modular RFPs, which are one of the major sources of confusion in modular construction, in order to mitigate and/or remove the ambiguities based on the considering the specifications of off-site construction procedures and system. In this case, this research illustrates a conceptual framework that has two parts: First, classification of the main sources of ambiguities in construction contracts (both Conventional and modular) and second, to identify the similarities and differences between Canadian documents (standard contracts and modular RFPs) and benchmark countries by applying through text processing and readability analysis. We applied text processing to find top terms, including terms with high frequency (TF) in each document, also high TF-IDF terms, which species occur in one document and not others then, we detected manually the three standard contracts and four RFPs and compare them with the output of literature review to identify the major issues that are common. The readability analysis shows the textual complexity of a document and to what extent the documents are difficult to read. The main findings indicate that the modular industry in Canada suffers from a lack of specific standard contract documents for modular construction.


identifier: Ding, Zishuo  (2019) Towards the Use of the Readily Available Tests from the Release Pipeline as Performance Tests. Are We There Yet?  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Performance is one of the important aspects of software quality. In fact, performance issues exist widely in software systems, and the process of ﬁxing the performance issues is an essential step in the release cycle of software systems. Although performance testing is widely adopted in practice, it is still expensive and time-consuming. In particular, the performance testing is usually conducted after the system is built in a dedicated testing environment. The challenge of performance testing makes it diﬃcult to ﬁt into the common DevOps process in software development. On the other hand, there exists a large number of tests readily available, that are executed regularly within the release pipeline during software development. In this paper, we perform an exploratory study to determine whether such readily available tests are capable of serving as performance tests. In particular, we would like to see whether the performance of these tests can demonstrate the performance improvements obtained from ﬁxing real-life performance issues. We collect 127 performance issues from Hadoop and Cassandra and evaluate the performance of the readily available tests from the commits before and after the performance issue ﬁxes. We ﬁnd that most of the improvements from the ﬁxes to performance issues can be demonstrated using the readily available tests in the release pipeline. However, only a very small portion of the tests can be used for demonstrating the improvements. By manually examining the tests, we identify eight reasons that a test cannot demonstrate performance improvement even though it covers the changed source code of the issue ﬁx. Finally, we build random classiﬁers determining the important metrics inﬂuencing the readily available tests (not) being able to demonstrate performance improvements from issue ﬁxes. We ﬁnd that the test code itself and the source code covered by the test are important factors, while the factors related to the code changes in the performance issues ﬁxes have low importance. Practitioners should focus on designing and improving the tests, instead of ﬁne-tuning tests for diﬀerent performance issues ﬁxes. Our ﬁndings can be used as a guideline for practitioners to reduce the amount of eﬀort spent on leveraging and designing tests that run in the release pipeline for performance assurance activities.


identifier: Ebrahimi Koopaei, Neda  (2019) Machine Learning And Deep Learning Based Approaches For Detecting Duplicate Bug Reports With Stack Traces.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Many large software systems rely on bug tracking systems to record the submitted bug reports and to track and manage bugs. Handling bug reports is known to be a challenging task, especially in software organizations with a large client base, which tend to receive a considerable large number of bug reports a day. Fortunately, not all reported bugs are new; many are similar or identical to previously reported bugs, also called duplicate bug reports.
Automatic detection of duplicate bug reports is an important research topic to help reduce the time and effort spent by triaging and development teams on sorting and fixing bugs. This explains the recent increase in attention to this topic as evidenced by the number of tools and algorithms that have been proposed in academia and industry. The objective is to automatically detect duplicate bug reports as soon as they arrive into the system. To do so, existing techniques rely heavily on the nature of bug report data they operate on. This includes both structural information such as OS, product version, time and date of the crash, and stack traces, as well as unstructured information such as bug report summaries and descriptions written in natural language by end users and developers.


identifier: Dumoulin, Rémi  (2019) Integrated Modelling and Analysis of a Heat Pump BIPV/T System with Thermal Storage for Load Shifting.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis presents an integrated model and methodology to quantify and demonstrate
the thermal
exibility potential of a residential building featuring an air-based building integrated
photovoltaic thermal (BIPV/T) system coupled to an air-source heat pump and a
water-based sensible thermal energy storage.
A BIPV/T system is used to preheat outdoor air drawn under the PV with a fan, in
addition to producing solar electricity. The pre-heated air leaving the BIPV/T cavity in the
heating season is sent to the evaporator coil of the air-source heat pump so as to increase
its coe�cient of performance. The condenser side of the heat pump is connected to a water
thermal energy storage from which water is fed to a hydronic air-system used for space
heating. An integration with a thermal energy storage as a means of decoupling the loads
from the source is proposed with the objective of shifting thermal loads and electrical peak
demand so that they are outside the peak demand periods for the grid.
A model was developed and a case study of a residential net-zero energy solar building
was simulated in TRNSYS. Rule-based control strategies and a deterministic electrical grid
state schedule were used to optimize the pro�le of the electric demand of the building. The

exibility potential of di�erent design alternatives and control strategies were quanti�ed using
load matching grid interaction indicators, energy metrics, and di�erent pricing schemes. The
gross energy consumption of the building was reduced by more than 40% during peak grid
events, the overall coe�cient of performance of the air-source heat pump was improved by
22%, and the cost of electricity was decreased by 46% with the implementation of a variable
tari� price structure and a net-metering agreement.