identifier: Zandi, Kasra  (2018) Computational Design and Experimental Validation of Functional Ribonucleic Acid Nanostructures.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In living cells, two major classes of ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules can be found. The first class called the messenger RNA (mRNA) contains the genetic information that allows the ribosome to read and translate it into proteins. The second class called non-coding RNA (ncRNA), do not code for proteins and are involved with key cellular processes, such as gene expression regulation, splicing, differentiation, and development. NcRNAs fold into an ensemble of thermodynamically stable secondary structures, which will eventually lead the molecule to fold into a specific 3D structure. It is widely known that ncRNAs carry their functions via their 3D structures as well as their molecular composition. The secondary structure of ncRNAs is composed of different types of structural elements (motifs) such as stacking base pairs, internal loops, hairpin loops and pseudoknots. Pseudoknots are specifically difficult to model, are abundant in nature and known to stabilize the functional form of the molecule. Due to the diverse range of functions of ncRNAs, their computational design and analysis have numerous applications in nano-technology, therapeutics, synthetic biology, and materials engineering.

The RNA design problem is to find novel RNA sequences that are predicted to fold into target structure(s) while satisfying specific qualitative characteristics and constraints. RNA design can be modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem (COP) and is known to be computationally challenging or more precisely NP-hard. Numerous algorithms to solve the RNA design problem have been developed over the past two decades, however mostly ignore pseudoknots and therefore limit application to only a slice of real-world modeling and design problems. Moreover, the few
existing pseudoknot designer methods which were developed only recently, do not provide any evidence about the applicability of their proposed design methodology in biological contexts. The two objectives of this thesis are set to address these two shortcomings. First, we are interested in developing an efficient computational method for the design of RNA secondary structures including pseudoknots that show significantly improved in-silico quality characteristics than the state of the art. Second, we are interested in showing the real-world worthiness of the proposed method by validating it experimentally. More precisely, our aim is to design instances of certain types of RNA enzymes (i.e. ribozymes) and demonstrate that they are functionally active. This would likely only happen if their predicted folding matched their actual folding in the in-vitro experiments.

In this thesis, we present four contributions. First, we propose a novel adaptive defect weighted sampling algorithm to efficiently solve the RNA secondary structure design problem where pseudoknots are included. We compare the performance of our design algorithm with the state of the art and show that our method generates molecules that are thermodynamically more stable and less defective than those generated by state of the art methods. Moreover, we show when the effect of fitness evaluation is decoupled from the search and optimization process, our optimization method converges faster than the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA II) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm do. Second, we use our algorithmic development to implement an RNA design pipeline called Enzymer and make it available as an open source package useful for wet lab practitioners and RNA bioinformaticians. Enzymer uses multiple sequence alignment (MSA)
data to generate initial design templates for further optimization. Our design pipeline can then be used to re-engineer naturally occurring RNA enzymes such as ribozymes and riboswitches. Our first and second contributions are published in the RNA section of the Journal of Frontiers in Genetics. Third, we use Enzymer to reengineer three different species of pseudoknotted ribozymes: a hammerhead ribozyme from the mouse gut metagenome, a hammerhead ribozyme from Yarrowia lipolytica and a glmS ribozyme from Thermoanaerobacter tengcogensis. We designed a total of 18 ribozyme sequences and showed the 16 of them were active in-vitro. Our experimental results have been submitted to the RNA journal and strongly suggest that Enzymer is a reliable tool to design pseudoknotted ncRNAs with desired secondary structure. Finally, we propose a novel architecture for a new ribozyme-based gene regulatory network where a hammerhead ribozyme modulates expression of a reporter gene when an external stimulus IPTG is present. Our in-vivo results show expected results in 7 out of 12 cases.


identifier: Nikhat, Shamma  (2018) A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MILLIMETER-WAVE CELLULAR NETWORKS WITH USER MOBILITY.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

type: Thesis NonPeerReviewed

abstract:
Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communications may be the key technology for the realization of 5G networks.  MmWave communications have significantly different propagation characteristics than microwave (μWave) frequencies. The recent studies have determined the performance of cellular mmWave networks using stochastic geometry technique assuming a stationary user. The stationary user model doesn't capture correlation in the blocking of the links as the user moves on. In this work, we have determined the performance seen by a mobile user traveling over a path at constant and varying speeds. We have obtained the cumulative information received by the user as a function of its path length for different blocking intensities and cell sizes. The results show that while the received information rate doesn't vary significantly with mobility, the average path length that the mobile user is associated with a base station without interruption, drops down sharply with increasing blocking intensity. This will cause in high handover rate, which will result in high overhead. In this thesis, we have derived the probability distribution of path length that a user is associated with the same base station without interruption. This work demonstrates the significance of the user mobility on the performance of cellular mmWave networks.
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identifier: Argüello, Carlos  (2018) Tras los pasos de un cuestionamiento a la universidad: Disturbio, de Miguel Ángel Manrique, como novela posmoderna.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The objective of this study is to demonstrate that Disturbio by Miguel Ángel Manrique is a postmodern novel. In order to fulfill this purpose we have opted for the vision of postmodernity as a way of problematizing values and ideological interests of modern projects, the parody being a representative strategy of postmodern poetics. I will prove that the novel calls into question the separation between the high, popular and mass culture promoted by the modern emancipating project through the incorporation of the university institution as a thematic nucleus and the textual strategies of which are parody, satire, and irony, the three being closely related. Disturbio can be understood as a parodic satire which uses irony as a trope in order to question the university institution. In the novel, the university is configured as a center of control that legitimizes and promotes the separations between the high, popular and mass culture, maintaining, in this way, a dominant power structure that rests on the values of the liberal humanism. This is in spite of the fact that the members of this institution and the social space that surrounds it are characterized by a highly hybrid context.


identifier: Laali, Majid  (2017) Inducing Discourse Resources Using Annotation Projection.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
An important aspect of natural language understanding and generation involves the recognition and processing of discourse relations. Building applications such as text summarization, question answering and natural language generation needs human language technology beyond the level of the sentence. To address this need, large scale discourse annotated corpora such as the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB; Prasad et al., 2008a) have been developed.

Manually constructing discourse resources (e.g. discourse annotated corpora) is expensive, both in terms of time and expertise. As a consequence, such resources are only available for a few languages. In this thesis, we propose an approach that automatically creates two types of discourse resources from parallel texts: 1) PDTB-style discourse annotated corpora and 2) lexicons of discourse connectives. Our approach is based on annotation projection where linguistic annotations are projected from a source language to a target language in parallel texts.

Our work has made several theoretical contributions as well as practical contributions to the field of discourse analysis. From a theoretical perspective, we have proposed a method  to refine the naive method of discourse annotation projection by filtering annotations that are not supported by parallel texts. Our approach is based on the intersection between statistical word-alignment models and can automatically identify 65% of unsupported projected annotations. We have also proposed a novel approach for annotation projection that is independent of statistical word-alignment models. This approach is more robust to longer discourse connectives than approaches based on statistical word-alignment models.

From a practical perspective, we have automatically created the Europarl ConcoDisco corpora from English-French parallel texts of the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2009). In the Europarl ConcoDisco corpora, around 1 million occurrences of French discourse connectives are automatically aligned to their translation. From the French side of \parcorpus, we have extracted our first significant resource, the FrConcoDisco corpora. To our knowledge, the FrConcoDisco corpora are the first PDTB-style discourse annotated corpora for French where French discourse connectives are annotated with the discourse relations that they signaled. The FrConcoDisco corpora are significant in size as they contain more than 25 times more annotations than the PDTB. To evaluate the FrConcoDisco corpora, we showed how they can be used to train a classifier for the disambiguation of French discourse connectives with a high performance. The second significant resource that we automatically extracted from parallel texts is ConcoLeDisCo. ConcoLeDisCo is a lexicon of French discourse connectives mapped to PDTB discourse relations. While ConcoLeDisCo is useful by itself, as we showed in this thesis, it can be used to improve the coverage of manually constructed lexicons of discourse connectives such as LEXCONN (Roze et al., 2012).


identifier: Ghiasi Hafezi, Gita ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8296-6674 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8296-6674>  (2018) Canadian Nanotechnology and Equity Challenges: Implications for Pro-Poor and Gender-Inclusive Policy.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Nanotechnology has been hailed as a disruptive technology that would revolutionize existing products and processes, open up new markets and business opportunities, as well as offer socio-economic benefits. Research and development (R&D) in this emerging technology presents great importance to many nations, offering a significant technological advantage that gears towards economic growth. However, despite the immense promise of societal benefits from nanotechnology applications, nanotechnology might expose societies to various forms of inequities. The main objective of this thesis is to examine two priority dimensions of equity concerns related to nanotechnology: the lack of R&D for nanotechnology applications that (predominantly) benefit developing nations (pro-poor R&D) and the scant representation of women in nanotechnology fields. This study adopts a combined use of bibliometrics, social network analysis, and survey results to perform both dimensional and cross-dimensional analysis, providing a better understanding of both issues and of how the two are related. The focus of this study is on Canada, a country who prioritizes nanotechnology research and development in its science and technology strategy, and actively practices gender fairness in the scientific system and is strongly involved in international development through its R&D efforts.
The findings reveal that only a narrow spectrum of Canadian nanotechnology articles and patents reflect pro-poor priorities, and acknowledge the importance of promoting and leading research and innovation in pro-poor areas, as it holds the potential to promote the economic development both within and between nations. However, these pro-poor scientific and innovative efforts tend to be highly male-dominated in terms of the scientific community and the workforce involved. Gender differences in citation and journal impact of papers published in the nano-pro-poor applications reveal the presence of the Matilda effect at the level of first-authorship and a strong selection effect at the level of last-authorship for women. While the majority of male authors and male inventors collaborate exclusively with men, those involved in a mixed-gender team outperform male-only teams. Therefore, it is important that policymakers pay attention to both gender and pro-poor initiatives simultaneously, because practices to promote pro-poor innovation might result in a wider gender gap and adversely affect social development. Furthermore, gender analysis of nanotechnology scientific reward system confirms that the gender productivity gap remains a challenge in the field and that these gaps are reinforced by the fact that the most productive researchers are less likely to collaborate with women. The results also show the amount of extra effort that women must devote to their research to retain their top status in academia, and the extent that their recognition when in top positions is fragile compared to men. This study also confirms the cumulative advantage of creating a gender-inclusive culture that enables women to improve their scientific productivity and impact. The results of this study have strong implications for policy development (or reform) targeting both gender equality and poverty alleviation in emerging interdisciplinary areas, promoting a more equitable and inclusive society.


identifier: Zhang, Jie  (2018) Effects of Quantitative Easing on Financial Market Integration and Hedging Efficacy.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis consists of three essays. The first essay (chapter 2) examines the correlations between bond markets, stock markets and currency forwards during the quantitative easing (QE) programs launched by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Using DCC-GARCH models, we document a spillover impact of QE on the international financial markets and find that these correlations differ by QE period across developed and emerging countries. Our findings provide new insights into the impact of unconventional monetary policy regimes on the relationships between various international financial asset markets.
    The second essay (chapter 3) examines the effectiveness and performance (E&P) of hedging international portfolios of bonds from developed and emerging countries. The excess returns and the variances of these portfolios are significantly lower during the QE versus pre-QE period. During the QE period, excess return and variance sensitivities are positive and negative with the Fed’s MBS holdings and become less positive and less negative with the Fed’s holdings of Treasuries. Hedging E&P during the QEs depend on the chosen hedging strategy and level of economic development. Results are robust using other hedging E&P measures and excluding countries with their own QEs.
    The third essay (chapter 4) finds that the integration of international bond and stock markets in 31 countries are affected significantly by U.S. quantitative easing (QE). After conceptually linking variations in the QE effects on bond and stock market integration to six transmission channels, we find that the actual effects depend upon the Fed holdings (MBS or Treasuries), channel considered, asset type (bond or stock), and the economic development categorization of the countries (developed or emerging). Cross-border banking flows as our proxy for the risk-taking channel significantly increase bond and stock market integration during each QE period for both developed and emerging countries.


identifier: Dan, Liu ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3730-2139 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3730-2139>  (2018) Identifying Cyber Predators by Using Sentiment Analysis and Recurrent Neural Networks.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Recurrent Neural Network with Long Short-Term Memory cells (LSTM-RNN) have impressive ability in sequence data processing, particularly language model building and text classification. This research proposes the combination of sentiment analysis, sentence vectors, and LSTM-RNN as a novel way for cyber Sexual Predator Identification (SPI). There are two tasks in SPI. The first one is identifying sexual predators among chats. The second one is highlighting specific sexual predators’ lines in chats. Our research focuses on the first task.

An LSTM-RNN language model is applied to generate sentence vectors which are the last hidden states in the language model. Sentence vectors are fed into the LSTM-RNN classifier, so as to capture suspicious conversations. Hidden state makes a breakthrough in the generation of unseen sentence vectors i.e., the system can score a sentence never seen before in the training data. Fasttext is used to filter the contents of conversations and generate a sentiment score to the purpose of identifying potential predators. IMDB sentiment review task is introduced to provide an intuitive measurement of the combined method. The model identified 206 predators out of 254. The experiment achieved a record-breaking F-0.5 score of 0.9555, higher than the top-ranked result in the SPI competition.


identifier: van Reenen, Catherine  (2018) Toward a Media History of the (Digital?) Wunderkammer: A Case Study of Samuel Quiccheberg’s 1565 Proposal for an Ideal Wunderkammer.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The Wunderkammer—a collection of wonders peculiar to the late Renaissance in Europe—has recently become a popular metaphor for new digital media for its ability to challenge modern categories of knowledge. Given that very little has been written on the Wunderkammer—and virtually nothing from the perspective of media history—its newfound popularity in contemporary scholarship on digital media warrants a closer look at its history. This thesis examines the classification techniques and representational strategies of the late Renaissance Wunderkammer through a case study of a proposal for an ideal collection written by Samuel Quiccheberg in 1565. The case study serves as a point of entry into an analysis of the conditions that made the Wunderkammer an effective method of producing knowledge for sixteenth-century collectors, as well as provides an opportunity to identify historical discontinuities between phenomena now considered ‘media’. I conclude by outlining a number of ways in which future media histories of the Wunderkammer might proceed.


identifier: McGurk, Thomas  (2018) Indigenous Online Mapping in Canada - Decolonizing or Recolonizing Forms of Spatial Expressions?  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Digital cartography technologies have expanded the tool base for Indigenous communities in Canada as a means of representing their lands and the contestation of space. However, critiques of digital technologies question if these tools are a new system of technological colonialism. This study addresses the question of how this technology is being used today and what impact it is having on Indigenous mapping content. Additionally, I ask if the web as cyberspace can be conceptualized as “a third space,” a decolonialized space of communication, recognition, and reconciliation (Soja, 1996; Bhabha, 2004). I theorize that Indigenous ways of knowing and constructions of space align with Lefebvre’s idea of first space, while Western ways of knowing and mapping practices align more closely with his concept of second space. A mix of quantitative and qualitative methods is used to investigate this theory. The former involves content analysis of 26 Canadian Indigenous web mapping sites using a decolonialized methodologies perspective. The qualitative dimension consists of 10 semi-directed interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous cartographers, technicians, scholars, and the producers and consumers of online mapping websites. Triangulation of these data sets identified narrative as an emergent theme, including its strong links to Indigenous cultures and processes of decolonialization. I conclude that while online mapping is a potential medium of
decolonization, it has not yet fulfilled this possibility. It currently offers a hybrid space for the examination and reclamation of knowledge production but falls short of being a primary location for discussion, communication, and nexus due to a lack of feedback mechanisms.


identifier: Rahbardar Mojaver, Hassan  (2018) Fabrication and Physics-Based Modeling of Polar AlGaN/GaN and AlInGaN/GaN HFETs.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Since their advent, polar AlGaN/GaN hetero-junction field effect transistors (HFETs) have drawn a great deal of attention especially in high frequency/high power applications. However, the superb prospects of these transistors are affected by a few drawbacks such as aging/crack formation under strain, presence of high gate-leakage, and challenging realization of enhancement-mode (normally-off) devices.
Quite recently, study of quaternary AlInGaN barriers has been presented as a promising avenue for fulfilling various design demands including: lattice matching, polarization matching, and positive shifting the inherently negative threshold voltage of AlGaN/GaN HFETs. However, thus far only a limited scope of theoretical studies on AlInGaN/GaN hetero-structure characteristics has been reported. As part of this thesis, the two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) characteristics of gated metal-face wurtzite AlInGaN/GaN hetero-junctions as function of physical and compositional properties of the hetero-junction are theoretically evaluated using the variational method. According to this study, a considerable shift in the positive direction for the threshold voltage of AlInGaN/GaN HFETs can be achieved by engineering both the spontaneous and the piezoelectric polarization (using a quaternary AlInGaN barrier-layer of appropriate mole-fractions). Succeeding this study, a novel quaternary lattice-match layer structure based on employing a bilayer barrier for improving the carrier confinement in the channel of enhancement-mode AlInGaN/GaN HFETs is for the first time proposed. It is shown that while the proposed layer structure substantially improves the carrier confinement in the GaN channel layer, it also upholds the merits of employing a lattice-match barrier towards achieving an enhancement-mode operation.
One of the most important device characteristics of AlGaN/GaN HFETs which is often poorly understood is the gate-leakage current. As part of this thesis, reverse gate-leakage of AlGaN/GaN HFETs is studied over a wide range of lattice-temperatures. While unveiling an obscure path for gate leakage through the mesa sidewall, a model considering different leakage paths, including the identified sidewall leakage, is presented. It is illustrated that the sidewall path to the 2DEG is associated with the Poole-Frenkel electron emission.  The novel contribution of the present analysis is that it postulates that in absence of absolute uniformity, Fowler-Nordheim (FN) tunneling takes place through only a small portion of the surface of the barrier, which boasts the highest electric field or the smallest Schottky barrier height. This consideration, allows the model to avoid unrealistic values for quantities such as effective electron mass (that has plagued many of the existing models).
Also as part of this thesis work, process recipe for microfabrication of submicron gate AlGaN/GaN HFETs using electron beam lithography was developed at McGill’s nano-tools micro-fabrication facilities. The results of DC characterization of the fabricated transistors along with the results of the DC stress test are presented.


identifier: Loader, Alison Reiko  (2018) Willful Spectacles: The Splendid Camera Obscuras & Popular Observatories of Miss Maria Short.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Histories of old media generally locate women on view and in the audience, but rarely position them as owners or operators in control of a screen. An archival study of the forgotten founding of Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura by Maria Theresa Short addresses this shortcoming and explores a device that is itself marginalized by media scholarship. Whereas most accounts abstract the camera obscura as a teleological forerunner and foundational component of inscriptive optical media, or as a metaphor of disembodied and distantiated vision, they overlook its use as a nineteenth-century exhibition apparatus, especially in connection to women and scientific spectacles. Yet one of the foremost and oldest purpose-built attractions in Edinburgh boasts an extraordinary history that speaks directly to such absences. In a towertop walk-in optical device, spectators stand in the dark around a touchable tabular screen while operators manipulate the capture and projection of a live, vivid and moving image of the city, which they present as a virtual guided tour. My research, pursued from a perspective of feminist media studies, explores how an unknown but willful spinster came to display this splendid apparatus and exhibit “the sublime truths of science” before the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of public museums and in defiance of municipal leaders, who would see to the demolition of her first venture. It comprises an in-depth inspection of Scottish archives that details the tactics, tensions and controversies surrounding the mysterious Miss Short and her popular observatories, and uncovers a history of scientific ambition and struggle that helps illustrate the culture in which they operated. Like the optical devices it investigates, “Willful Spectacles” reveals a complex and miniaturized monad that stands in for a shifting world where public space, its views and viewers were gendered, classed, and open to contestation.


identifier: Alhamdan, Ahmad  (2018) Shrinkage Behaviour of One and Two Part Alkali-Activated Mortars: Factors and Mitigation Techniques.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Alkali-Activated Binders (AABs) are promoted as sustainable alternatives to ordinary Portland cement (OPC) due to their promising characteristics and ability to reduce the global greenhouse emissions of construction materials. Despite many years of research, volumetric stability (i.e. shrinkage) of AABs, which has been scarcely investigated, is hindering their wider implementation in the construction sector. Hence, the initial attempt of the current study is to fully characterize and understand the shrinkage behaviour of AABs considering different factors. These factors included precursor materials, activator types and concentrations, and curing temperatures. Moreover, the effectiveness of shrinkage reducing admixtures (SRA) as a shrinkage mitigation technique and its interaction with AABs were evaluated. Two preparation methods for AABs, namely one-part (i.e. powder binder-powder activator) and two-part (i.e. powder binder-liquid activator), were also tested for comparison. Fresh properties including workability, setting behaviour, and heat evolution along with hardened properties (i.e. compressive strength) were explored. Results revealed that shrinkage for fly ash-based alkali-activated mortars was the lowest followed by blended fly ash/ slag, while alkali-activated slag-based mortars exhibited the highest values. Regardless of the preparation method, the higher the activator concentration, the higher the shrinkage. There is a strong link between AAB’s matrix rigidity and shrinkage behaviour. For both preparation methods, SRA was more effective in reducing shrinkage strains for slag-based alkali-activated mortars at different temperatures. Similar to OPC, SRA addition had induced a reduction in the compressive strength for all tested ABBs mixtures. However, the reduction in AABs mixtures strength was significantly lower than that for OPC mixtures.


identifier: Gadi, Zakariya  (2018) Measuring the Impacts of Climatic Exposure to Pavement Surface Deterioration with Low Cost Technology.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Pavements play a significant role in social and economic development. Canada spent approximately 12 billion dollars annually on pavements. However, roads are exposed to climatic changes and truck loads which affect their serviceability and reduce their lifespan. Most of Canada is exposed to freeze-thaw cycles which have a drastically impact on the pavement structure. A large portion of the deterioration occurs during the spring thaw period.
	This research uses a smartphone to estimate pavement roughness on a weekly basis during 30 weeks in an attempt to test if such indicator can be used to identify the beginning of the load restriction and the overall damage experienced after one environmental cycle. A pavement section located on highway 20 near Montreal was visited during 2016 and 2017 season. The studied segment is about 8 km long. A pavement roughness index (RI) was estimated before, during, and after the winter season. The air temperature was registered in order to characterize the number of freeze thaw cycles experienced. It was impossible to use the RI measurements to identify the beginning of the thawing period as RI reflected the wheel-path driven and in many occasions changed were imperceptible. It was only after taking dates with larger time separation that overall decay in roughness condition was observed.
	One day during Fall, Winter, and Spring selected as an excellent case to present the freeze-thaw cycle effect and to show the variations in the pavement surface condition. It has been found that the freeze-thaw cycle impacted the subgrade soil layer which reflected on the pavement surface. The average RI value before the frost season was found to be 3.99 m/km in average, while during winter season was 4.52 m/km, and in spring season was 5.30 m/km on average. The pavement deterioration was increased by average of 1.31 m/km. The results of RI change were then transferred into other Canadian location with dissimilar freezing index and annual precipitation, and annual impact of expected roughness decay estimated for various cities.


identifier: Seghaier, Ibtissem  (2018) Surrogate based Optimization and Verification of Analog and Mixed Signal Circuits.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Nonlinear Analog and Mixed Signal (AMS) circuits are very complex and expensive to design and verify. Deeper technology scaling has made these designs susceptible to noise and process variations which presents a growing concern due to the degradation in the circuit performances and risks of design failures. In fact, due to process parameters, AMS circuits like phase locked loops may present chaotic behavior that can be confused with noisy behavior. To design and verify circuits, current industrial designs rely heavily on simulation based verification and knowledge based optimization techniques. However, such techniques lack mathematical rigor necessary to catch up with the growing design constraints besides being computationally intractable. Given all aforementioned barriers, new techniques are needed to ensure that circuits are robust and optimized despite process variations and possible chaotic behavior. In this thesis, we develop a methodology for optimization and verification of AMS circuits advancing three frontiers in the variability-aware design flow. The first frontier is a robust circuit sizing methodology wherein a multi-level circuit optimization approach
is proposed. The optimization is conducted in two phases. First, a global sizing phase powered by a regional sensitivity analysis to quickly scout the feasible design space that reduces the optimization search. Second, nominal sizing step based on space mapping of two AMS circuits models at different levels of abstraction is developed for the sake of breaking the re-design loop without performance penalties. The second frontier concerns a dynamics verification scheme of the circuit behavior (i.e., study the chaotic vs. stochastic circuit behavior). It is based on a surrogate generation approach
and a statistical proof by contradiction technique using Gaussian Kernel measure in the state space domain. The last frontier focus on quantitative verification approaches to predict parametric yield for both a single and multiple circuit performance constraints.
The single performance approach is based on a combination of geometrical intertwined reachability analysis and a non-parametric statistical verification scheme. On the other hand, the multiple performances approach involves process parameter reduction, state space based pattern matching, and multiple hypothesis testing procedures. The performance of the proposed methodology is demonstrated on several benchmark analog and mixed signal circuits. The optimization approach greatly improves computational efficiency while locating a comparable/better design point than
other approaches. Moreover, great improvements were achieved using our verification methods with many orders of speedup compared to existing techniques.


identifier: Omer, Mohamed  (2018) Peak Load Shaving and Power Quality Improvement for the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel in Montréal.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel is one of the major access points to the island of
Montreal, and in conjunction with the bridge, it is the longest underwater tunnel-bridge in Canada.
Recent reports estimate that around 130,000 vehicles commute through the tunnel daily. High
operational standards are required to ensure the safety of commuters. Hence, high-stress levels are
reflected on the electrical grid. The high tension levels on electrical power grids and the expensive
price of peak power demand have prompted both the consumer and the utility to adopt Energy
Storage Systems (ESS) for peak load shaving.
In this thesis, a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is sized and controlled to reduce
the constraints imposed on the electrical grid by the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel by means
of peak load shaving. The peak load reduction is attained through peak load shaving by utilizing a
BESS, and also through energy and peak load shaving by using BESS in conjunction with
Photovoltaics solar cells (PV). Also in this thesis, a control scheme is developed for Voltage
Source Inverters (VSI) used in peak shaving applications. The developed control first allows the
VSI to interface peak shaving systems with the grid reducing stress levels imposed on the grid,
and secondly, play the role of power factor correction for reactive power compensation, and
finally, to implement the capabilities of active harmonic filters and harmonic mitigation techniques
to suppress the harmonic content in the line current.


identifier: Bourgeois, Leanne  (2018) Development and application of the Landing Pad platform: A synthetic CRISPR/Cas9 platform for multi-copy gene integration in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: To accelerate the construction of superior yeast strains producing high-value chemicals, we developed a modular CRISPR/Cas9 integration platform in S. cerevisiae that accommodates marker-less, multi-copy gene integration. Our engineering strategy introduced a series of synthetic DNA parts, called Landing Pads (LP), into the S. cerevisiae genome to act as modular anchors for heterologous gene integrations. The LPs have been designed to accommodate the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system and to facilitate multi-copy gene integration of one, two, three and four copies in a single step. First we designed ten synthetic gRNA targeting sequences and evaluated their targeting specificity, integration efficiency, and possible off-target effects. We also surveyed 16 genomic loci for landing pad integration by evaluating the integration efficiency and gene expression profiles at each site. The results gleaned from our preliminary tests informed the final configuration of the LP platform strain. To demonstrate the utility of our LP integration system, we used the platform to screen ten variants of norcoclaurine synthase (NCS), a notoriously inefficient enzyme that catalyzes the first committed step in the production of high-value benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIA). The platform enabled rapid integration of each NCS variant in one, two, three and four copies in parallel, yielding 40 strains total. LC/MS analysis identified two variants, NdNCS and ScNCS that produce higher concentrations of the BIA scaffold (S)-norcoclaurine by increasing copy number, suggesting that the proposed strategy may help alleviate enzyme inefficiencies in pathway engineering.


identifier: Di, Ye  (2018) The Effect of Staggered Boards on Firm Value for Real Estate Investment Trusts.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effect of staggered boards on firm value for real estate investment trusts (REITs). We argue that REITs are highly regulated firms in an environment where the takeover market is inactive. We investigate whether takeover devices function well and whether corporate governance hypotheses hold for REITs. We hypothesize that the inefficient management hypothesis does not hold for REITs and that staggered boards have no negative impact on firm value. We collect data for all REITs listed on Compustat and merge them with information from CRSP, BoardEx and company fillings from the SEC’s EDGAR database over the period 1990 to 2016. We conduct an event study to test whether takeovers discipline inefficient managers in the real estate sector and estimate a logistic regression to examine whether staggered boards resist takeovers after controlling for prior firm performance, firm financials and board related variables. In addition, we estimate an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to explore whether staggered boards enhance internal monitoring effectiveness and positively affect firm value. The results indicate that the market for corporate control in the real estate sector fails to discipline inefficient managers, however lower prior firm performance increases a firm’s probability of becoming a takeover target. The results also reveal that staggered boards have a negative effect on shareholders’ wealth regardless of takeover probability.


identifier: Longo, Patricia  (2018) Oil Sands Entanglements: Indigenous Media and Movements from the Front Lines of Canadian Industrial Development.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis explores how First Nations and Métis peoples in northern Alberta and northern British Columbia create and negotiate media in connection to industrial bitumen development and oil pipeline proposals. It follows previous communication studies of Indigenous media making and media representations, and adds to the growing fields of the environmental humanities and petroculture studies. The term oil sands entanglements is offered as a conceptual framework for situating Indigenous and non-Indigenous engagements with oil and understanding how communities are affectively and economically tied to ongoing development.
With a focus on media practice over content, this thesis is an alternative media study that undertakes media analysis, ethnographic study, interviews, social media mapping and archival research. It is organized into two parts: the 2014 Tar Sands Healing Walk and the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal. The thesis concludes by elaborating oil sands entanglements as multi-directional, located in many places, and imbued with settler-colonial and extractivist politics. It closes with a brief discussion of emergent Indigenous networks that take oil pipelines as a starting-point for advocating fossil fuel divestment and resisting further development. This effort, and other avenues toward disentanglement, demand further media study, particularly as processes of communication. They also exemplify the potentially activist ethic of oil sands entanglement: as a framework, it is not meant to merely survey or map out connections, but to account for what oil and oil sands do in communities, and how this can foster change.


identifier: Brais, Hannah  (2018) Policy and the Corporate Landlord: The Geography of Private Rental Housing in Canada.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: While the geography of private rental real estate investment knows no boundaries, the Canadian policies that oversee the management of these properties remain province-specific. Thus, while corporate landlords operate under national investment strategies, they naturally come into conflict with provincial policies that dictate what these companies can or should do. This thesis examines the relationship between these policies and private rental investment corporate strategy. It focuses on three large-scale property companies, and traces how their investment and management decisions are shaped by the distinct private residential rental policies of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia. Studying the annual reports of these companies while extensively interviewing tenant advocates in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, the findings demonstrate that these landlords make a conscious use of differing policies in the three case study cities. The policies most used by corporate landlords are grouped and described in detail as follows: rent increase measures, eviction, and building and maintenance. This work demonstrates that corporate strategy for these companies is informed by the nuances, administration, and effective implementation of provincial rental policies. Additionally, this research provides a starting point for a comparative analysis of provincial landlord-tenant policies, in describing their use by corporate landlords.


identifier: Li, Zhiyuan  (2017) Improved upper bounds and lower bounds on broadcast function.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Given a graph G=(V,E) and an originator vertex v, broadcasting is an information disseminating process of transmitting a message from vertex v to all vertices of graph G as quickly as possible. A graph G on n vertices is called broadcast graph if the broadcasting from any vertex in the graph can be accomplished in \lceil log n\rceil time. A broadcast graph with the minimum number of edges is called minimum broadcast graph. The number of edges in a minimum broadcast graph on n vertices is denoted by B(n). A long sequence of papers present different techniques to construct broadcast graphs and to obtain upper bounds on B(n). In this thesis, we study the compounding and the vertex addition broadcast graph constructions, which improve the upper bound on B(n). We also present the first nontrivial general lower bound on B(n).


identifier: Boily Valois, Judith  (2018) Judith par Judith : Exposition identitaire présentée à travers une éducation muséale créative.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Judith par Judith, ça ne fait pas un peu égocentrique?
D’abord, qui est Judith? Et pourquoi cette dualité au niveau du titre?
Dès notre plus jeune âge, nous avons soif d’histoire. Nous aimons nous faire raconter le passé, vivre le présent et raconter ce présent au futur. En tant qu’individu, nous sommes constamment à la recherche d’histoires; nos histoires, vos histoires… des histoires à raconter. Judith par Judith est une introspection que je vous partage et qui m’aida certainement à mieux comprendre l’éducation muséale. Je vous amènerai dans mon univers, mais aussi dans celui d’une autre Judith. Une Judith que vous découvrirez sous peu. Le but de ce projet de recherche créatif était de m’outiller afin de saisir davantage l’expérience esthétique et les apprentissages effectués par un visiteur lors d’une visite au musée. À travers ce projet identitaire, je vais vous transporter dans une exposition particulière afin de vous aider à explorer les facettes entourant l’éducation muséale.

Bienvenue dans mon monde,
Judith Boily Valois


identifier: LI, JIAYE  (2017) How to Trigger Employees' Proactivity in Competitive Climates? A test of competing hypotheses.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Employees’ proactive behaviors are increasingly important for organizational development and they are highly influenced by the employees’ working atmosphere, such as
its level of competitiveness. However, the implications of competitive climates for employees’ proactive behaviors remain unclear to date. This study aims to examine whether
employees will engage in more or less proactive behaviors in a competitive working environment. To add more nuance to this investigation, I (a) differentiate the outcome of employees’ proactive behavior as self-beneficial (e.g., self-development) or organizational-beneficial;
and (b) explore whether the relationship between competitive climates and
proactive behavior is moderated by individual (learning goal orientation) and organizational factors (procedural justice). The results of this research show that competitive climates can indeed increase employees’ proactivity, for the benefit of both the organization and the individuals themselves. As expected, employees with high perceptions of procedural justice engaged in more organizational beneficial proactivity under high competitive climate, instead of more proactive behaviors targeting their own development. Contrary to expectations, the results indicate that employees with a high learning goal orientation become less motivated to engage in proactive behavior aimed at both the organization and themselves under
competitive climates compared to employees with a low learning orientation. These results and their implications are discussed to encourage more research as well as supportive organizational practices for increased proactivity.

Keywords: proactivity; competitive climate; learning goal orientation (LGO); Procedural Justice.


identifier: Le Gallais, Jacob  (2017) Dead or Alive: Animal Bodies in the Museum.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The purpose of my thesis is to explore the strange, seductive, and often complicated world of museum taxidermy. More specifically, the research aims to examine what roles art-making (in the form of participatory in-museum practice and subsequent studio-based research-creation) can play in conversations around taxidermied animals, and how these acts of art-making contribute to the generation of knowledge about the cultural display of animal bodies and wider discourses surrounding animal issues. This thesis has been realized in two distinct phases, firstly a participatory/collaborative art making museum intervention at the Redpath Museum at McGill University. The second phase of this research has been centred on the creation of a series of research-creation artworks, embodying and reconstructing the museum intervention and surrounding scholarship. Both phases have centred on four specimens of zoological museum taxidermy on display at the Redpath; a polar bear, a gorilla, a whooping crane, and a beaver diorama. Overall, the intervention at the Redpath Museum resulted in engaging a myriad of discourses around animal bodies activated as social objects. These discourses were then re-constructed and further disseminated through a process of research-creation in the form of eight mixed-method watercolour paintings/collages. These paintings/collages re-conceptualized the Redpath Museum itself as functioning as a kind of diorama, in order to highlight the differing contexts involved in the cultural display of animal bodies in museum spaces versus the lives of animals in the wild.


identifier: MacDougall, Hana L.  (2018) low back pain treatment by athletic trainers and athletic therapists: biopsychosocial or biomedical?  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Low back pain’s (LBP) continues to burden society and the individual through high rates of recurrence and chronicity. Recent evidence suggests that the way a clinician thinks about pain influences treatment practices and rehabilitation outcomes. Our study characterized the way American Athletic Trainer’s (AT) and Canadian Athletic Therapist’s (C-AT) think about LBP by measuring treatment orientation. 273 ATs and 382 C-ATs completed a questionnaire containing demographic questions and the Pain Attitudes and Beliefs Scale for Athletic Trainers/Therapists (PABS-AT/C-AT), which classifies treatment orientation as biomedical or biopsychosocial. We noted that overall ATs and C-ATs reported a stronger biomedical orientation than biopsychosocial. In addition, treating more LBP patients per year was associated with a decreased AT’s and C-AT’s biomedical orientation. Age and experience was associated with a decreased C-AT’s biomedical orientation, and primarily treating the general public was associated with a stronger C-AT’s biopsychosocial orientation. Further research is needed to determine the impact AT’s and C-AT’s biomedical orientation has on rehabilitation outcomes since this orientation in other clinicians has been predictive of poor rehabilitation outcomes in LBP patients.


identifier: Barker, Marianne  (2018) Teaching Critically Within Closed Border Spaces: Localized Critical Pedagogy for EFL Teachers in Turkey.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Turkey’s political climate has become increasingly tense. A failed military coup in July 2016 compelled president Erdoğan to implement six consecutive ‘states of emergency,’ giving him unprecedented power. Extreme polarization of political ideologies makes political discourse pervasive, even in ESL classrooms in a university language preparatory program that hires international staff from the USA, Canada, and the UK. Students enrolled in this program are often vocal about their discontent with the current direction of the country. Using a critical theory framework, this qualitative study explores whether international teachers, as outsiders, can engage students in a critical inquiry to challenge the status quo. Data collected from in-depth interviews with seven teachers revealed that the language classroom is a complex site of cultural negotiation, one not quite conducive to border crossing, where all but one teacher failed to see themselves as critical pedagogues. The study thus proposes a form of localized critical pedagogy particular to Turkey’s EFL context. This requires teachers’ creation of a counter-culture, or a safe space in the classroom, where students can safely voice their opinions. The discussion delineates implications and conditions required for international teachers in such educational settings to utilize a localized critical pedagogy.


identifier: Farheen, Nafila  (2018) Detection and Removal of Cycles in LDPC Codes.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Information technology, at present has thrived to great aspects and every day more beneficiary of this blessing is being connected to the modern invention and technology. With the swift growth of communication networks, there has been a high demand for efficient and reliable digital transmission and data storage system. LDPC is one of the channel codes for error correcting that have been developed for competent systems that require higher reliability. For low-end devices requiring a limited battery or computational power, low complexity decoders are useful. For LDPC codes, the presence of short cycle in the parity-check matrix lower the decoding threshold making it less efficient. In this research, a method has been developed from an existing algorithm that finds out the exact position of potential bits forming cycle-4 in the parity check matrix that might create decoding failure after transmission in binary erasure channel. Once the short cycles are detected, it can be removed by puncturing method to obtain capacity achieving codes. The code obtained by the method has a threshold 0.42 and rate 0.5, which is asymptotically close to the mother code. Simulations show that for less number of iterations and in the presence of same channel erasure the decoder block error probability close to 10-6 is achievable. As no other additional decoding algorithm is employed, the proposed scheme does not add additional computational complexity to the decoder. Furthermore, as an extension to the method a scheme has been proposed to generate rate-compatible LDPC codes using 0.5 rate regular code with puncturing method varying puncturing fractions. By the proposed method of generating different rate code, same amount of information can be sent with less parity.


identifier: Rajib, Md. R. U. D.  (2018) Optimal Power Allocation for Energy Efficient MIMO Relay Systems in 5G Wireless Communication.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Wireless communication has undergone a significant growth to meet the unexpected demand of wireless data traffic over the past two decades. As manifested by the revolution of the third and fourth generations and long-term evolution advanced (LTE-A), engineers and researchers have been devoted to the development of the next-generation (5G) wireless solutions to meet the anticipated demand of 2020. To this end, cooperative relay communication has been introduced as an enabling technology to increase the throughput and extend the coverage of the broadband wireless networks. Decode-and-forward (DF) has been known as an effective cooperative relaying strategy for its outstanding features. On the other hand, merging massive multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) with cooperative DF relay is considered as a key technology for 5G wireless networks to improve the quality-of-service (QoS) in a cost-effective manner. The objective of this thesis is to establish and solve a power allocation optimization problem for energy efficient multi-pair DF relay systems integrated with massive MIMO.

The first part of the thesis is focused on a constrained optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power for each transmission phase of the DF relay. Due to the non-convexity characteristic, the objective function is approximated as a convex function by means of complementary geometric programming (CGP) which is then solved by a sequence of geometric programming (GP). A lower bound of average SINR is also introduced by adopting the MMSE channel state information (CSI) to relax the constraint functions in the standard GP form. Finally, we proposed a homotopy or continuation method based algorithm to solve the optimization problem via popular CVX optimization toolbox. MATLAB simulations are conducted to validate the proposed algorithm.

In the second part, another optimization problem is presented for the entire two-hop transmission of the DF relay to improve the global energy efficiency (GEE) under different channel conditions. Here, we estimate the channel by maximum likelihood (ML) criterion and investigate a closed-form expression of GEE. Further, GEE is approximated in a convex form by applying CGP due to the difficulty arising from the non-convexity and a lower bound of the average SINR expression is also derived to relax the constraint functions in the GP problem. Numerical results showing a detailed comparison of GEE under ML and MMSE channel estimation conditions and the performance improvement from the proposed algorithm are provided.


identifier: Rahman, Musfiqur ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8443-8082 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8443-8082>  (2018) Analyzing the Predictability of Source Code and its Application in Creating Parallel Corpora for English-to-Code Statistical Machine Translation.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Analyzing source code using computational linguistics and exploiting the linguistic properties of source code have recently become popular topics in the domain of software engineering. In the first part of the thesis, we study the predictability of source code and determine how well source code can be represented using language models developed for natural language processing. In the second part, we study how well English discussions of source code can be aligned with code elements to create parallel corpora for English-to-code statistical machine translation. This work is organized as a “manuscript” thesis whereby each core chapter constitutes a submitted paper.
The first part replicates recent works that have concluded that software is more repetitive and predictable, i.e. more natural, than English texts. We find that much of the apparent “naturalness”
is artificial and is the result of language specific tokens. For example, the syntax of a language, especially the separators e.g., semi-colons and brackets, make up for 59% of all uses of Java tokens in our corpus. Furthermore, 40% of all 2-grams end in a separator, implying that a model for autocompleting the next token, would have a trivial separator as top suggestion 40% of the time. By using the standard NLP practice of eliminating punctuation (e.g., separators) and stopwords (e.g., keywords) we find that code is less repetitive and predictable than was suggested by previous work. We replicate this result across 7 programming languages.
Continuing this work, we find that unlike the code written for a particular project, API code usage is similar across projects. For example a file is opened and closed in the same manner irrespective of domain. When we restrict our n-grams to those contained in the Java API we find that the entropy for 2-grams is significantly lower than the English corpus. This repetition perhaps explains the successful literature on API usage suggestion and autocompletion.
We then study the impact of the representation of code on repetition. The n-gram model assumes that the current token can be predicted by the sequence of n previous tokens. When we extract program graphs of size 2, 3, and 4 nodes we see that the abstract graph representation is much more concise and repetitive than the n-gram representations of the same code. This suggests that future work should focus on graphs that include control and data flow dependencies and not linear sequences of tokens.
The second part of this thesis focuses cleaning English and code corpora to aid in machine translation. Generating source code API sequences from an English query using Machine Translation (MT) has gained much interest in recent years. For any kind of MT, the model needs to be trained on a parallel corpus. We clean StackOverflow, one of the most popular online discussion forums for programmers, to generate a parallel English-Code corpora. We contrast three data cleaning approaches: standard NLP, title only, and software task. We evaluate the quality of each corpus for MT. We measure the corpus size, percentage of unique tokens, and per-word maximum likelihood
alignment entropy. While many works have shown that code is repetitive and predictable, we find that English discussions of code are also repetitive. Creating a maximum likelihood MT model, we find that English words map to a small number of specific code elements which partially explains the success of using StackOverflow for search and other tasks in the software engineering literature and paves the way for MT. Our scripts and corpora are publicly available.


identifier: Jan, Emily  (2014) still life.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

title: still life

abstract: "still life" is the companion volume to the installation "After the Hunt." It was written in 2014 and printed in an edition of 25, revised and reprinted in 2015 in an edition of 50, and has been printed in a third edition of 100 (with generous support from Hamilton Artists Inc and the Canada Council for the Arts).


identifier: LeBlanc, Louisane  (2018) Sites Web municipaux dans un Canada bilingue : évaluation de la qualité de la traduction, de la localisation et de l'accessibilité.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Nous avons créé une grille d’évaluation de la qualité de la traduction et de la localisation à laquelle nous avons ajouté des critères d’évaluation de l’accessibilité du Web, et ce, dans un contexte traductologique. La création de cette grille s’est révélée être un défi puisque très peu de recherches jumelant traduction, localisation et accessibilité du Web ont, à ce jour, été menées. Pour y arriver, nous avons distingué l’évaluation de la traduction de l’évaluation de la localisation : ces deux disciplines connexes sont évaluées distinctement. Ainsi, la grille comporte un volet de critères linguistiques qui s’attarde à la traduction. Vient ensuite un volet numérique dont les critères se penchent sur la localisation des pages Web retenues. Finalement, le dernier volet d’évaluation est axé sur l’accessibilité du Web. Les critères de ce volet sont numériques et linguistiques : ils portent sur le respect des protocoles d’accessibilité du Web (W3C), mais aussi sur la convivialité des images et la simplicité du langage utilisé.
Ce mémoire présente nos observations. Notre grille d’évaluation a été testée afin de mesurer la qualité de la traduction, de la localisation et de l’accessibilité de six sites Web bilingues (EN et FR) de municipalités canadiennes. Nous avons, entre autres, découvert que l’accessibilité et la localisation du Web partagent plusieurs points communs, que les règles de grammaire et la sémantique de la langue de la minorité sont malmenées et que les principes et les règles de l’accessibilité du Web pour les internautes aveugles et amblyopes sont relégués aux oubliettes, et ce, même si la plupart des maires affirment que le site Web de leur ville est l’outil à privilégier pour communiquer avec la municipalité.
Mots clefs : évaluation de la qualité, traduction, localisation, accessibilité du Web, Internet, site Web, amblyope, aveugle, cécité, déficience visuelle, éthique, municipalité, ville, bilingue, Canada, Ottawa, Montréal, Sherbrooke, Québec, Administration régionale Kativik (ARK), Moncton.


identifier: Harrigan, Camille  (2018) Storied Stones: St. Patrick's Basilica - History, Identity, and Memory in Irish Montréal, 1847-2017.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This thesis will explore the history of a segment of the Irish Catholic population of Montréal by engaging in a micro-study of St. Patrick’s Basilica, one of its religious meeting grounds. In researching St. Patrick’s as a historical, diasporic, ethnic and memory space, this thesis will examine the past and the present incarnations of a community that has dealt with evolving notions of identities and memories. It is the experiences of Irish Montrealers outside Griffintown, the “lace-curtain” Irish, which will be under analysis here. An investigation into the particulars of St. Patrick’s Church - now a Basilica - provides the perfect nexus to glimpse how this Irish community “above the hill” was formed, fractured, and evolved over the course of a hundred and seventy years.
From attempts at procuring a church in the 1820s to the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in 2017, episodes of institutional construction at St. Patrick’s illustrate how identities and memories were formed and transformed “above the hill,” within the storied stones of St. Patrick’s. In researching the Basilica’s history, one inevitably contends with its role in fostering Irishness in the city. An analysis of the Church’s prominent role in fashioning the ethnic and class identity of its constituents will form a large segment of the analysis. Irish identities in ideological transition, from Irish-Canadian to Canadian-Irish, will also be uncovered by unveiling the Basilica’s history.
This thesis will finally focus on the church as a physical manifestation of Irish presence in Montréal. Despite the changing demographics, and the arrival of new English-speaking Catholics in Québec, the enduring presence of St. Patrick’s Basilica as an Irish landmark in Montréal speaks to its importance as an ethnic monument and a place of pilgrimage for generations of Irish-Quebecers. The church can therefore be read as a memoryscape revealing of the changing identities of the Irish community of Montréal. Exploring the church as a lieu de mémoire, this research will uncover how the Irish community of Montréal has reflected and remembered itself over time.


identifier: Macdonald, Isabel  (2018) Picturing Aid in Haiti: Reflections on the making of a work of graphic reportage.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

format: text other

abstract: This research-creation PhD thesis contributes to recent debates about what journalism could (or should) be in today's fast-changing media landscape by focusing on graphic reportage, a journalistic approach that relies on the drawn medium of comics. In order to assess how working in this drawn form might affect the practices that journalists use in their work, I reflect critically on my process of making Picturing Aid in Haiti, a work of graphic reportage about humanitarian interventions in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. I carried out fieldwork for this graphic project in 2013 in Port-au-Prince, where I recorded a series of interviews with Haitians who lived for more than three years in a displacement camp. During this fieldwork, I also interviewed humanitarian workers and local landowners, and I documented what I observed through notes, photographs and sketches. Based on this research, I wrote the script for a graphic book, and I began illustrating and designing sample panels and pages of graphic reportage. In my research for this graphic project, I consciously sought out information and points of view often neglected in international news coverage of humanitarian interventions in places like Haiti. Reflecting on the interviews and observational research I carried out in Haiti, I show in this thesis that the approach of graphic reportage facilitated this process. Discussing specific excerpts from my graphic project, which serves as a platform for the words, stories and images that different interviewees contributed to this project, I demonstrate that this drawn form of journalism can open up space for exploring the perspectives of people like displaced Haitians whose voices, agency and histories are often missing or negated in the news. Through specific examples from Picturing Aid in Haiti, which also foregrounds some of the complex dynamics involved in my own process of researching, writing and visually representing aid in a Haitian camp, this thesis also shows that graphic reportage has the potential to encourage greater reflexivity in journalism.


identifier: Sharma, Avinash ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8045-0332 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8045-0332>  (2018) Dynamic Programming based approach for Energy Trading.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Bi-directional Energy Trading is going to play an essential role in facilitating the increased usage of distributed renewable energy sources. The smooth transition towards these clean sources of energy would require opening up of the energy markets to allow for a two-way electricity trade. The study proposes a dynamic programming based energy trading framework (called Dynamic Battery Charging (DBC) Algorithm) from the end-user perspective. Using the proposed energy transfer model the framework finds out the optimal battery charge state at the consumer end. To further improve the performance of the framework, the original DBC algorithm is clubbed together with a capacity fading based battery cost model. For testing and validation purpose, a case study of three different load profiles (different in scale) in three energy markets is done. The simulation results show the profitability of the proposed strategy in all the tested scenarios.


identifier: Madani, Masoud  (2018) Dynamic Facility Location with Stochastic Demand and Congestion.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In this thesis, we study a multi-periodic facility location problem with stochastic demand to determine the optimal location, capacity selection and demands allocation of facilities within distinct time periods, while, each facility contains a server with a limited capacity. It causes facilities to experience a period of congestion, when not all arriving demands can be served immediately. Customers that arrive in this period might await service in a queue. This thesis perspective incorporates customers waiting costs as part of the objective. In this case, facilities do not utilize whole of the established capacity to ensure a maximum waiting time of the allocated customers. Firstly, a mathematical model is presented for a dynamic facility location problem with stochastic demand and congestion. The problem is setup as a network of spatially distributed queues and formulated as a nonlinear mixed integer program (MINLP). To transform the nonlinear congestion function to a piecewise linear, a linearization method is adapted. This method adds a set of inequalities to the model. We show that lifting this set of inequalities, with keeping generality of the method, reduces CPU times up to 3.5 times, on average. Moreover, a decent heuristic is proposed to solve the problem. Computational experiments indicate that the heuristic results in less costly solutions than them obtained by CPLEX algorithms, in 58% of relatively-difﬁcult test problems.


identifier: Rouville, Cloé  (2018) Tentation et tentative du retour au pays natal dans Pays sans chapeau et L'énigme du retour de Dany Laferrière.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Ce mémoire présente, à partir d’une réflexion inspirée de deux romans de Dany Laferrière, Pays sans chapeau et L’énigme du retour, les différentes possibilités d’entreprendre un retour au pays natal pour un héros-narrateur alter ego de l’auteur depuis une posture exilique. Laferrière rédige ce qu’il appellera son « Autobiographie américaine », un projet littéraire constitué de dix romans dressant un portrait d’Haïti et de Montréal, où il aborde les thèmes du passage de l’enfance à l’adolescence, de son départ, de son exil ainsi que les stratégies littéraires liées à son retour au pays. Le narrateur plonge dans la réalité haïtienne et amène son lecteur vers une forme singulière de réalisme (teinté de mythologie créole) qui trouve ses bases dans une mémoire autobiographique. Ainsi émerge un projet d’autoreprésentation fictionnelle. Le personnage principal des œuvres à l’étude, à travers ses rencontres et par le biais de l’imaginaire, permet la création d’un univers polyphonique. Ce retour permettra-t-il de clore l’errance exilique et constituera-t-il un nouveau départ pour le narrateur ?

Le concept de paratopie de Dominique Maingueneau sert à bien cerner la topique du lieu et la réappropriation du territoire de l’enfance par le narrateur. Dans le discours littéraire de Laferrière, le personnage-narrateur est un personnage paratopique, voire « hors-lieu », qui tente de se réintégrer à la société haïtienne lors de son retour en Haïti. Nous étudions de près la notion de mouvance identitaire et les figures d’altérité du narrateur. Dans les deux romans à l’étude, les questionnements identitaires poussent le personnage vers une identité assumée. Haïti est donc le lieu central de cette double temporalité, car il constitue à la fois le lieu imaginé et celui, inévitable, d’un retour qui s’avère peut-être impossible à l’écrivain de l’exil.

MOTS-CLÉS : Dany Laferrière ; exil ; retour ; pays natal ; littérature québécoise ; littérature haïtienne ; paratopie ; autoreprésentation ; autobiographie américaine


identifier: Afshin, Mohammadhossein  (2018) Receiver Side Control for Efficient Inductive Power Transfer for Vehicle Recharging.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis presents a new wireless inductive power transfer topology using half bridge current fed converter and a full bridge active single phase rectifier. Generally, the efficiency of inductive power transfer system is lower than the wired system due to higher power loss in inductive power transfer coils. The proposed converter reduces these limitations and shows more than 4% overall efficiency improvement comparing with such system in battery charging of low-voltage light-load electrical vehicles such as passenger cars, golf carts etc. This is realized by synchronous rectification technique of the vehicle side converter. Simulation results obtained from Matlab Simulink are included to validate the analysis and performance of the proposed converter. A scale-down 250 W lab prototype is developed and experimental results are presented to verify the comparative study results.


identifier: Rajnak, Andy  (2018) An Analysis of Contemporary Discourse on Methodological Naturalism: Gregory Dawes and Theistic Explanations.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis explores the topic of methodological naturalism as discussed in the works of three contemporary scholars of religion: Gregory Dawes, Alister McGrath and Christopher Southgate. This thesis focuses on the epistemological issues which are raised when considering theistic explanations. The key question being considered is: Can a theistic explanation be assessed. A methodological naturalist would answer in the negative, arguing that the empirical methods used by present-day scholars and scientists restrict us from considering supernatural explanations such as theistic explanations. This thesis will challenge this point of view and argue instead that theistic explanations are open to empirical assessment. In the first two chapters this thesis engages with the claims and arguments made by Dawes, McGrath and Southgate. In the third chapter the approaches of these three scholars are put into conversation. Here key areas of overlap and disagreement are highlighted. In the concluding chapter it is argued that while methodological naturalism lacks adequate philosophical justification, it is well-suited to serve a contemporary political purpose. Methodological naturalism, in the context of secular universities situated in pluralistic societies, gives incoming students the impression that all theistic claims are equally untestable, thus putting them on an equal playing field: one cannot be said to be more likely or less likely to be true than another.


identifier: Chetia, Deepak  (2018) Validation and Enhancement of a Three-level Inverter for Applications in Real-time Simulations.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The motivation of this thesis is to perform a hardware validation of a three-level inverter in real-time simulation. Real-time simulators enable faster design and prototyping of controllers without the need of building hardware based test benches. But, it is also essential that the virtual models behave the way they were supposed to, and produce equivalent output as the physical setups. Power electronic systems often have very fast switching devices, which are an inhibiting factor for real-time simulation, as the simulator must have the capability to produce high resolution samples of the gate pulses of these fast acting devices. A virtual model for the three- level inverter is available already for real-time simulation. This model had been tested with the outcome of other non-real-time solvers such as the one from Simscape Power System’s Simulink, but not alongside with a physical inverter. Hence, a physical inverter was operated along with its virtual model in a real-time simulator to verify the model.

Real-time simulators use different approaches to model power electronic systems and also make them suitable for such simulations. One such approach is to solve for the nodal voltages and currents using fixed admittance matrices derived from the network. This fixed matrix contains a switch conductance parameter derived from a discrete time model of an ideal switch. The choice of this parameter is very crucial in determining the accuracy of the real-time simulations. A number of ways are used to optimize this parameter, but optimizing a proper value is always a challenge.


identifier: Massimi, Fulvia  (2018) Mosaic Men: Critical Masculinities and National Identities in Contemporary Subnational Cinemas.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The crisis of traditional images of manhood in Western cultures, the disruption of nation-state primacy, and the revival of self-determination movements in the aftermath of globalization and the rise of neoliberal policies have caused a rupture in the stability of such concepts as nation and masculinity. This dissertation investigates the impact of these ruptures on the representation of gendered subjects in the subnational cinemas of Flanders, Scotland, and Quebec—that is film industries and imaginaries located in geopolitical contexts that lack nation-state recognition, but operate along the lines of national-belonging principles. Combining the methodologies of production history, film, and cultural analysis, this work looks at subnational cinemas from the interconnected standpoints of their institutional and representational developments. One the one hand, it maps how film production and funding infrastructures emerged in recent subnational contexts at the convergence of national and transnational interests. On the other hand, it considers how performances of gender and national identity are renegotiated in such complex geopolitical and cinematic scenarios. It is the central contention of this dissertation that subnational contexts, by virtue of their cultural and geopolitical hybridity, offer a significant set of possibilities for revisiting monolithic paradigms of national cinemas, identities, and gender power structures in the globalized era.


identifier: Hamze, Bana  (2018) Integration of Anaerobic Digestion by UASB into a Hybrid Treatment Process of Waste Streams from Paper Recycling and its Potential for Bioconversion of Carbon Dioxide to Methane.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Waste management and renewable energies are both major environmental concerns related to the largest global issue of today, climate change. Anaerobic digestion (AD) systems are able to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) that lead to climate change by producing biomethane gas to use as renewable energy, while treating organic waste. AD systems can also serve as carbon sinks because they are able to biologically convert excess carbon dioxide dissolved in the culture, into additional methane gas. Continuous experiments were conducted with five-litre UASB reactors that focused on simulating full-scale operating parameters at a Cascades’ paper recycling plant, and employed recycling waste streams as substrates. Experiments compared conditions of single and 2 phase anaerobic digestion (2-PAD), liquid and granular sludge beds, influent wastewater and deinking sludge substrates, temperatures between 25-45 °C, hydraulic retention times between 1 to 5 days and organic loading rates between 0.5-5.0 kg COD/m3-d.  Methane yields across all conditions averaged 0.15 m3 CH4/kg CODrmv for total COD and 0.24 m3 CH4/kg CODrmv for soluble COD. Removal efficiencies consistently averaged 90% for all conditions. After feeding 2-PAD systems CO2 infused wastewater, successful bioconversion for soluble COD was observed in all organic loading rate conditions, showing between 5-21% higher methane yields for CO2 conditions, compared to control. Heavy metals from deinking sludge were monitored though no inhibition was observed. Cost analysis showed that adopting AD as a pretreatment could result in up to 1,733,100 CAD/year in additional revenue. Results of this research provide a solid guideline to pursue developing a pilot scale system.


identifier: Morin, Mathieu  (2018) The West Indian Diet: Thomas Dancer, Breadfruit, and Fever Epidemics in Eighteenth Century Jamaica.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis argues that late-eighteenth-century British Caribbean doctors created a West Indian diet as the principal preventive measure against the local disease environment. The mortality rate was very high in this region because newcomers had little immunity against yellow fever and malaria. The three populations inhabiting the island, European settlers, enslaved Africans and British soldiers, were all heavily affected, a problematic situation for the empire because it augmented drastically the cost, in human and economic terms, of maintaining this important colony. Contemporary medicine was ineffective against these diseases, and although doctors did not abandon their remedies, they also turned to alternative cures, one of them being a better diet. We follow in particular the life of Thomas Dancer (1750–1811), a Jamaican doctor and botanist who oversaw the public botanical garden in the town of Bath. His work as a botanist was focused on bringing useful plants to the island, including breadfruit as a food for enslaved people. Breadfruit, Dancer and others believed, would have created a profound transformation in enslaved Africans’ nutrition and their health. Its success could have also given Dancer more transplantation opportunities. But the subsequent refusal of the slaves to eat breadfruit and the failure to sustain interest in botany made these goals impossible. Instead, he had greater impact through his book The Medical Assistant (1801), intended to help European islanders with little access to medical expertise. In it, he offered what he thought was the best example of a West Indian diet, which promised to adapt European bodies to the tropical environment by emphasizing the consumption of indigenous vegetables over meat. Situating his dietary recommendations in broader ideas about the body and the tropics current in the late eighteenth century, enables us to better understand the nutritional paradigm of the time in relation to medicine and environment.


identifier: Aminikia, Roya  (2018) Machine Learning Approach for an Advanced Agent-based Intelligent Tutoring System.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Machine Learning Approach for an Advanced Agent-based Intelligent Tutoring System
Roya Aminikia
Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are digital frameworks that provide curriculum, training
materials, and corresponding assessments to guarantee an effective learning process. Although
these systems are capable of distributing the learning content, they do not support dynamic learning
processes and do not have the capability to communicate with human learners who are required to
interact in a dynamic environment during the learning process. To create this process and support
the interaction feature, LMSs are equipped with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). The main
objective of an ITS is to facilitate students’ movement towards their learning goals through virtual
tutoring. When equipped with ITSs, LMSs operate as dynamic systems to provide students with
access to a tutor who is available anytime during the learning session. The crucial issues we address
in this thesis are how to set up a dynamic LMS, and how to design the logical structure behind an
ITS. Artificial intelligence, multi-agent technology and machine learning provide powerful theories
and foundations that we leverage to tackle these issues.
We designed and implemented the new concept of Pedagogical Agent (PA) as the main part of
our ITS. This agent uses an evaluation procedure to compare each particular student, in terms of
performance, with their peers to develop a worthwhile guidance. The agent captures global knowledge
of students’ feature measurements during students’ guiding process. Therefore, the PA retains
an updated status, called image, of each specific student at any moment. The agent uses this image
for the purpose of diagnosing students’ skills to implement a specific correct instruction. To develop
the infrastructure of the agent decision making algorithm, we laid out a protocol (decision tree) to
select the best individual direction. The significant capability of the agent is the ability to update
its functionality by looking at a student’s image at run time. We also applied two supervised machine
learning methods to improve the decision making protocol performance in order to maximize
the effect of the collaborating mechanism between students and the ITS. Through these methods,
we made the necessary modifications to the decision making structure to promote students’ performance
by offering prompts during the learning sessions. The conducted experiments showed that
the proposed system is able to efficiently classify students into learners with high versus low performance.
Deployment of such a model enabled the PA to use different decision trees while interacting
with students of different learning skills. The performance of the system has been shown by ROC
curves and details regarding combination of different attributes used in the two machine learning
algorithms are discussed, along with the correlation of key attributes that contribute to the accuracy
and performance of the decision maker components.


identifier: Ghadimi, Elnaz  (2018) Inference on Cure Rate Under Multivariate Random Censoring.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In survival studies, it is often of interest to study cure rates. Sometimes the event of interest (such as death or the occurrence of a disease) may not be experienced by individuals under study, and the cure rate is the probability of the latter eventuality. Furthermore, survival times (i.e., the time to the event of interest) may be subject to random censoring due to dropping out or late entry of individuals during the study period. Interestingly, random censoring facilitates the estimation of the cure rate.

In this research, we study cure rates for multivariate survival times under multivariate random censoring. Specifically, three topics have been studied. In the first topic of this thesis, a new non-parametric multivariate cure rate estimator, based on a multivariate Kaplan-Meier estimator, is proposed. The asymptotic normality and an estimator of asymptotic variance of this estimator are obtained. In the second topic, a non-parametric cure rate estimator in the presence of covariates is constructed via kernel smoothing. The asymptotic normality of this estimator is obtained, and the optimal choice of the bandwidth via cross-validation is discussed. In the third topic of this thesis, we develop a test for the presence of immunes, i.e., we test if the cure rate is zero against the alternative that it is positive,
under univariate random censoring. The limiting distribution of the test statistic under the null hypothesis is obtained using extreme-value theory. Theoretical results are supported by simulation studies.


identifier: Burrows, Sarah  (2018) Corporate governance antecedents of top management pay dispersion that undermines firm performance.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Using social comparison and social network theory, I sought to examine the corporate governance antecedents of top management team (TMT) horizontal pay dispersion that may be interpreted as unjustifiable reasons of pay dispersion and therefore undermine firm performance. I therefore examined compensation data from firms appearing on the S&P500 from 2008 to 2013 and ran panel regressions. This paper adds to the existing literature, as it is one of the first studies to explicitly examine the corporate governance mechanisms that affect TMT pay dispersion. I hope these findings can remedy the continuance of ineffective compensation practices which lead to unjustified pay dispersion among executives and in turn harm firm performance.


identifier: Waheed, Sundus  (2018) “Even though we all are different, we’re all pretty much the same”: An Inquiry into Representations of Autism in Children’s Fictional Television Programming.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This qualitative study examines portrayals of autism in children’s television programming by analyzing three television programs – Sesame Street, Mack and Moxy, and Arthur – in terms of the race and gender of the character with autism, the symptoms and personality characteristics exhibited by the character with autism, the setting the character with autism is situated in, the roles of the supporting characters, and the main themes emphasized in
the episodes. A critical analysis pertaining to the above-mentioned categories, as well as a brief comparison of research conducted on portrayals of autism in children’s fictional picture books with portrayals in the present sample, will be offered. The examined programs were found to be successful in representing a variety of symptoms portrayed by the characters with autism and included the more challenging aspects of autism, such as meltdowns, in response to hyper-reactivity. The main themes extracted from the episodes included the ideas of acceptance, diversity, and friendship. The researcher concluded that future depictions of characters with autism should include more female characters as well as characters belonging to various races and ethnicities. While research exploring portrayals of autism in television and film targeting teenage to adult audiences exists, this study fills the gap in research by examining portrayals of autism exclusively in children’s television programming. This research has implications for future television content creators, parents, and educators.


identifier: Song, Chong Hui  (2018) Development of Manufacturing Process and Testing for Thick Curved Thermoplastic Composite Tubes Made by Automated Fiber Placement.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Composite materials have numerous commercial and industrial applications, especially in aircraft and space where the weight-saving could be of significance. One of the important considerations is to make tubular skid landing gears for helicopter by using thermoplastic composite materials. Numerous works have been done to research the possibility of using thermoplastic composites to replace the aluminum, the principal material of landing gears for helicopter. Previous works have shown that straight aluminum tubes could be replaced by straight tubes of thermoplastic composite material. The tubes have shown same strength and stiffness, and the composite tubes have less weight. This research aims to develop an effective and practical way in using Concordia lab facilities to manufacture thick curved thermoplastic tubes that can be used as cross tubes on helicopters.
The curved tubes were tested under three point loading. Strains and displacements were measured at different loads. Finite element analysis was carried out, and the calculated strains and displacements are compared with experimental values.


identifier: Ye, Qiaoyi  (2018) Herd behavior in sales launch: an empirical study of the Chinese residential market.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This paper examines the herd behavior in sales launch decisions by developers in China’s housing market. Using a sample of 6,930 development projects from 1997 to 2009, we find that the propensity of sales launch is positively related to the number of prior sales launches within a certain distance. This effect is more pronounced when the time interval between sales dates is shorter and when the distance is shorter. Furthermore, lead projects that are developed by reputable developers have a greater influence on later developers’ decisions than non-reputable ones. These findings provide evidence of herd behavior in developers’ sales launch decisions and are in line with informational and reputational herding theories.


identifier: Couedelo, Alexandre  (2018) Robust Design of Distribution Networks Considering Worst Case Interdictions.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Multi-echelon facility location models are commonly employed to design transportation systems. While they provide cost-efficient designs, they are prone to severe financial loss in the event of the disruption of any of its facilities. Additionally, the recent crisis in the world motivates OR practitioners to develop models that better integrate disruptive event in the design phase of a distribution network.

In this research, we propose a two-echelon capacitated facility location model under the risk of a targeted attack, which identifies the optimal location of intermediate facilities by minimizing the weighted sum of pre and post interdiction flow cost and the fixed cost of opening intermediate facilities. The developed model results in a tri-level Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation, reformulated in a two-level MIP. Hence, we prescribe solution methods based on Bender Decomposition as well as two variants that enhance the speed performance of the algorithm.

The results reveal the importance of selecting backup facilities and highlight that premium paid to design a robust distribution network is negligible given the benefit of reducing the post-interdiction cost when a disruptive event occurs.


identifier: Ross-Jones, Joy  (2018) Developing a Feminist Pedagogy: A Self-Study of Empowerment through Mentorship.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
ABSTRACT

This research charts the process of empowerment of a young artist, the researcher, through feminist pedagogy and theatre creation, using narrative inquiry as methodology. The research is focusses on the Montreal-based, non-profit theatre production company, Imago Theatre, specifically within the Artista program, Imago’s free theatre mentorship program for young women 16 to 21 years old. The outcome of this narrative investigation is an emerging feminist pedagogy, specific to Artista’s theatre mentorship and training environment. Data manifests as narrative scenes, each inspired by short memories of resistances faced by the researcher in their role as Artista’s Program Director and in their trajectory towards becoming a professional theatre artist and creator. The self-reflexive process of writing these narrative scenes involved the recollection and recreation of memories to make teaching instincts visible, interrogate these habits, and reconsider the pedagogical approach to more effectively empower Artista’s young participants and build an intergenerational community of emerging and established women theatre artists in Montreal. These values of community-building and exchange are inherent to the the mandate of the Artista program. Findings are placed in conversation with feminist theory, critical pedagogy, engaged pedagogy and collective creation practices to arrive at the four pillars of the emerging feminist pedagogy composed of Resistance/Empowerment, Storytelling, Collective Creation and Self-Actualization.


identifier: McLoughlin, Kyle  (2018) Blue Lines, Red Scares, and Black Power: American Police Militarization and the 2016 Republican National Convention.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This thesis examines police militarization in the United States through the lens of counterinsurgency and community policing. Rather than discussing police militarization solely in terms of the policies that enable it, this work builds upon a thorough history of law enforcement in the United States to demonstrate the porous boundaries between war-making and law enforcement. This thesis complicates the traditional analytical framework of policing as law enforcers and situates police in terms of Neocleous’ (2013) concept of pacification. Pacification is the process of maintaining social order to ensure the continued expansion and entrenchment of capital and to preemptively disrupt contenders for social power. This thesis discusses how police militarization and community policing are part of a broader strategy of counterinsurgency which seeks to ensure the ongoing pacification of the United States. This thesis is based on fieldwork conducted at the 2016 Republican National Convention.


identifier: Jagadeesh, Satvik  (2018) Development of Machine Vision Based Workstation for Laser Micromachining.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Today, laser based micromachining technologies enable the most advanced material manufacturing. Since it has wide range of applications in Microelectronics, medical device, aerospace etc., the accuracy of the process is of utmost significance. The current project proposes a machine vision assisted workstation for laser micromachining. The machine vision system not only has the ability to control the Laser path but also has the ability to locate the starting point of machining. The system was designed and developed from basic components, while MATLAB was used to control the laser direction, and to image the specimen.
To analyse the limitations of the developed system, a rectangular shape was machined. Subsequently, known magnitudes of translational and rotational movements were given to the specimen. The images of machined area were captured before and after transformation. MATLAB algorithm was used to process the images to find the initial point of machined area on the transformed specimen. The laser beam is then guided to that point and the machining is repeated. The specimen was measured under microscope to find the error between the former and latter machined paths. Translational and angular errors were measured for various transformations.
In this study, the challenges and corresponding possible solutions that are encountered in machining complex geometries are addressed. The study proposes mathematical function based and image processing based algorithms to find the machining coordinates and function-based approach was found to be more efficient for complex geometries. Furthermore, the effect of process parameters on the overall quality of the manufacturing are discussed. The COMSOL software was used to model all the effect of laser parameters on the roughness, depth and thickness of machined path. To validate the numerical model, experiments were conducted for different process parameters the results are in good agreement with a simulation results.
The simulated model can be used to estimate the effect of the process parameters before the machining. Since the laser beam can be controlled on the geometry of the specimen and the study demonstrates the minimum possible error, this system can be applied to manufacture and repair wide range of microstructures.