title: Optical Co-Orbital Measurements in Low Earth Orbit

abstract:
The increasing access to the space domain has led to the growth of the on-orbit object population, as well as the evolution of space surveillance capabilities. With the increased public attention paid to spacecraft proximity and rendezvous operations, is an opportunity to examine what and how current space surveillance capabilities can contribute to this field.
This thesis examines the feasibility and challenges associated with re-purposing an existing on-orbit space surveillance capability, the NEOSSat microsatellite, to perform proximity operations. The ability of NEOSSat to collect a sufficient number of accurate optical observations to determine the relative orbit of a target spacecraft is explored. A variety of observation events are explored with a collection of spacecraft to generate relative orbits using inertial orbit determination techniques. These practical results, to the author's knowledge, are the first in the field of relative orbit determination using inertial techniques between two co-orbital Low Earth Orbit satellites.


title: "I'm a Mountain Biking Vampire Witch From the Future!":  Queer Decolonial Killjoys in Queer Studies and Politics

abstract: This thesis asks how queer scholarship and politics will maintain a radically queer critical edge, specifically an unsettling, decolonial approach that does not take for granted the continuance of queer liberal and settler colonial structures. A longstanding debate in queer studies and politics is the tension between queer assimilation vs queer radicalism. However, even the radical unsettling approaches that discuss radical queer futurity (Muñoz, and Edelman) often do not centre the important context of settler colonialism, even while critiquing normativity and imagining better futures. So how do we locate examples of imaginings of queer decolonial futures: ones that account for settler colonialism? To find out, I chose to examine selected performances in specific popular "silly archives of unhappy feelings," and found complex examples of uncanny, at times monstrous, performances by artists (Trixie Mattel, Katya Zamoldchikova and Miss Chief Eagle Testickle). These artists, I argue, exemplify and embody the characteristics of what I call "Queer Decolonial Killjoys" (QDKs). Building on Ahmed's concepts of "Feminist Killjoys," and "Unhappy Queers," I demonstrate that the artists I discuss not only unsettle gendered, sexualized, and racialized norms (à la Ahmed), but that they also act as Decolonial Killjoys because they use complex performative strategies to also critique settler colonialism and queer liberalism. Their performances, I suggest, also gesture to important possibilities of queer and decolonial futures. Finally, I argue that the performances of QDKs can remind queer studies scholars to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable/unsettled, and may help us to learn how to begin imagining radical queer decolonial futures.


title: Investigating History Through Exhibition Design: A Case Study On Wim Gilles

abstract: The project centres on an archive left at Carleton University's School of Industrial Design (SID) by its founder, Wim Gilles. Gilles passed away in 2002, having come to Canada in 1972 to establish SID. Reviewing the literature on Canadian design history, few sources mention design educators. The archive provides an opportunity to resolve a gap in design history and to learn more about design. Latour and Sanders offer a means to develop an exhibition of materials openly and collaboratively to respond initial research questions, who was Wim Gilles, why did he come to Canada and what was the outcome. Interviews with Gilles' colleagues provided further information, and their participation in surveys about materials from the archives informed the first of two exhibitions. The project demonstrates that creating an exhibition from an archive can address research questions and develop design history to establish a design culture in Canada.


title: Incremental Change Propagation from Software to Performance Models

abstract:
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) enables the automatic generation of performance models from software design models by model transformations. The performance models are used for performance analysis of the software under development, to guide the design choices from an early stage and to ensure that the system will meet its performance requirements. The software model evolves during development, so inconsistencies may appear between the software and performance models. This research aims at keeping the software and performance models synchronized.
An important concept in model transformations is the mapping between the source and target (meta)models, which can be specified in a reusable manner with the help of mapping patterns. In this research we propose a subclass of such patterns, called containment-based mapping patterns. used to map a group of containment-related source model elements into a group of target model elements. We focus on these patterns because the containment relationship is frequently found in metamodel specifications. The containment mapping patterns are applied in the context of a non-trivial transformation from UML software models extended with MARTE performance annotations into Layered Queueing Network (LQN) performance models. We show how the mapping patterns can be applied for designing the transformation rules for a batch transformation implemented in a specific language. (The complete implementation of the batch transformation was done in separate work). In this research, we extend the batch transformation to generate, beside the target model, a traceability model between the mapped source and target elements. After solving the generated LQN model with an existing solver, the performance results are fed back to the software model by following the cross-model trace links.
The next objective of the research is to design (based on the mapping patterns), implement and evaluate an incremental change propagation (ICP) approach to re-synchronize the software and performance models. During the development process, when the software model evolves, we detect the changes with the Eclipse EMF Compare tool, then incrementally propagate them to the LQN model. The proposed ICP is implemented with the Epsilon Object Language (EOL) and is evaluated by applying it to a set of case studies.


title: The host specificity of the candidate biological control agent Diadromus collaris (Gravenhorst) (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae)

abstract: Diadromus collaris (Gravenhorst) (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae), a solitary pupal endoparasitoid of Plutella xylostella (Linnaeus) (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), is a candidate for introduction into Canada as a biological control agent. It is important to assess the parasitoid's host specificity before its release. To maximize the wasp's expressed host range, I tested five variables to determine which experimental conditions would motivate D. collaris to oviposit. Of these variables, wasp diet, exposure length, and the presence or absence of diamondback moth cocoons resulted in statistically significant differences in D. collaris emergence or diamondback moth mortality. To determine the parasitoid's fundamental host range, I exposed pupae from eight species of non-target Lepidoptera to female D. collaris in a series of no-choice tests. Three species, Plutella armoraciae, Plutella porrectella, and Acrolepiopsis assectella, were suitable hosts for D. collaris development. The results from this study provide insight into the suitability of the parasitoid for introduction into Canada.


title: Experimental and Modeling Study of Sliding Wear Performance for Selected Molybdenum Stellite Alloys

abstract: This thesis presents an experimental and modeling study of wear performance of molybdenum-containing Stellite alloys. Wear testing conditions are pin-on-disc type using a tungsten carbide ball against the Stellite alloys in dry-sliding mode at ambient temperature. Three variables are explored: (i) two rotational speeds, (ii) two normal loads, and (iii) various time durations (up to 60 hrs). A continuous test and an interrupted test at various intervals are introduced. The wear loss reduces across each of the alloys under all conditions for the interrupted test. Phase evaluation is studied using SEM, EDX and XRD techniques. Evaluation of the volume fraction of carbides reveals Stellite 21 to have ~4%, Stellite 720 to have ~70%, and Stellite 728 to have ~21%. A general model is developed for the alloys using the wear testing data and Archard's equation, which reveals Hardness is a significant factor in the wear of molybdenum Stellite alloys.


title: The Politics of Decarbonization Pathways: Responses, Conflicts, and the Transition to a Low-Carbon Energy Future

abstract:
This thesis explores the politics of decarbonization pathways, with a particular focus on the responses to and conflicts surrounding the transition to a low-carbon energy future. As part of this, the dissertation: (1) scrutinizes how the concept of "pathways" is understood within climate-energy policy and analysis; and (2) attends to the struggles involved in pursuing potential pathways to carbon-neutral energy systems. Two overarching and interrelated research questions orient this work. First, how are pathways understood in the context of the low-carbon transition? And second, how are the socio-technical responses that help make up these pathways contested and shaped through politics?
The introductory chapter of this thesis lays the groundwork for interrogating these questions, providing background on the subject of climate change, outlining the role of energy in this challenge, raising issues around the governance of low-carbon transitions, identifying research aims and questions, and discussing relevant research perspectives and approaches. Drawing on transition and discursive perspectives, chapters 2 through 4 then present three studies that take up the research questions by exploring different political aspects of decarbonization pathways. A concluding chapter reflects on the contributions of this work and potential future directions.
The three studies forming the core contributions of this dissertation have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The first article elucidates the way in which diverse actors construct meaning around the concept of "pathways" in the context of the low-carbon transition. The second article uncovers ideational conflicts surrounding a historical episode of low-carbon change: the phase-out of coal-fired power in Ontario. The third article reveals tensions and alignments around an unfolding episode of low-carbon change: how different energy systems (electricity, transport, and heating) and their affiliated actors are interacting around expanded societal electrification and electricity trade. Broadly, the three papers developed here underscore that ideas matter in transitions. These ideas relate not only to the concepts and categories used to frame the climate challenge (such as "pathways") but also the narratives linked to possible responses (alternative innovations and institutional arrangements) that are advanced by contending interests.


title: Representation Learning  for Information Extraction

abstract: Distributed representations, predominantly acquired via neural networks, have been applied to natural language processing tasks including speech recognition and machine translation with a success comparable to sophisticated state-of-the-art algorithms. The present thesis offers an investigation of the application of such representations to information extraction. Specifically, I explore the suitability of applying shallow distributed representations to the automatic terminology extraction task, as well as the bridging reference resolution task. I created a dataset as a gold standard for automatic term extraction in the mathematical education domain. I carefully assessed the performance of the existing terminology extraction methods on this dataset. Then, I introduce a novel method %DI it is one method or several? I changed to one method since the next sentence says algorithm at singular not plural %Ehsan: noted, thanks. for automatic terminology extraction for one word terms, and I evaluate the performance of the novel algorithm in various terminological domains. The introduced algorithm leverages the distributed representation of words from the local and global perspectives to encode syntactic, semantic, association, and frequency information at the same time. Furthermore, this novel algorithm can be trained with a minimal number of data points. I show that the algorithm is robust to the change of domain, and that information can be transferred from one technical domain to another, leveraging what we call anchor words with consistent semantics shared between the domains. As for the bridging reference resolution task, a dataset is built on the letter portion of the Open American National Corpus and I compare the performance of a preliminary method against a majority class baseline.


title: Inulin-Monoglycerides Emulsion Gel as Potential Fat Replacer and Effect of Inulin to Delay Lipid Oxidation

abstract: Inulin (oligo/polysaccharide) has gained increased interest due to its functionality and health benefits. This research was aimed to investigate potential applications of emulsion gel incorporating Jerusalem artichoke (JA) inulin to replace/reduce fat in food products as well as effect of JA inulin on lipid oxidation. Physical characteristics of emulsion gels with purified JA inulin (1%) were characterized by both light and cryo-environmental scanning electron microscopes. Incorporation of JA inulin developed a smaller fat globule size compared to the control. JA inulin could inhibit oxidation of aqueous dispersion of linoleic acid with active concentration range of 0.08-0.33 mg/ml. It was concluded that JA inulin had a positive effect on emulsion gel, which could potentially act as a fat replacement and could delay lipid oxidation.


title: EFFECT OF VEHICLE CONNECTIVITY ON THE SAFETY PERFORMANCE OF FREEWAY ACCELERATION SPEED CHANGE LANES

abstract: One of the major concerns at the freeway entrance ramps is merging conflicts at the entrance ramp areas, which are highly prone to crashes according to past research. Ample length of speed change lanes (SCL) could provide enough time to SCL drivers, to search for a suitable gap and to adjust their speed to perform the merging action. In this research, two merging maneuvers were examined by considering the capabilities of connected vehicles (CVs) to make the merging process more comfortable, and thus safer. Probability of non-compliance (PNC) which is a measure of probability of SCL driver's uncomfortable merging was calculated considering the gap searching and acceleration behaviour in a connected vehicle environment. Variations in the PNC values when compared with regular vehicles and safety benefits of CVs were examined. Sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the effect of change in each input parameter on the output PNC.


title: The Baloch Movement: a Study of Ethno-nationalist Conflict

abstract: The Baloch movement is a diffuse and splintered ethno-nationalist movement oriented against the Pakistani state and broadly aimed at attaining political autonomy for Baloch peoples. This project traces the history of the Baloch movement, assessing how key variables have played out at local, state and international levels and affected the movement's evolution. A complex Baloch ethnicity built on a fractious tribal social base, a fluctuating supply of resources, broader state and international politics and actors, and a colonial legacy that manifests through a power-centralizing Pakistani state are all key factors that have affected the evolution of the Baloch movement. This project contributes to literature on ethno-nationalist conflict by emphasizing how these factors must be dynamically assessed together at local, state, and international levels in order to explain how ethno-nationalist movements evolve.


title: Electrospun PEDOT:PSS Electrolytic Capacitors Electrodes for Microelectronic Energy Storage

abstract: With a growing demand for autonomous sensors, the development of on-silicon supercapacitors is becoming a promising energy storage solution. Electrospinning is used as an additive fabrication method to deposit porous ultrahigh surface area PEDOT:PSS electrodes for use in electrolytic capacitors for microelectronic circuits. The electrospun fibre mats are utilized as both the anode and cathode with Lithium Perchlorate (LiClO4)/ Propylene Carbonate (PC) as the electrolyte. This work investigates the electrochemical operation, charge storage metrics, and lifecycle through cyclic voltammetry, DC charging, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Results demonstrate non-faradaic charge storage dominates up to 1.1 V with a maximum achieved areal capacitance and energy storage of 5.25 mF/cm2


title: Procedural Generation of Three-Dimensional Game Levels with Interior Architecture

abstract: Procedural Content Generation can help game developers by automating the creation of content that is costly and tedious to develop by hand. We present a system to generate 3D game levels based on interior spaces such as buildings and dungeons. Our system generates individual rooms by using a shape grammar to recursively subdivide rectangular blocks. Multiple rooms can be joined to form a larger level layout. Our system searches for a good layout based on a fitness function specified by a human designer. We tested three search algorithms for this purpose and found that in almost all cases an evolutionary algorithm produced the best results. Once a level layout has been selected, architectural details are added to the layout by placing modular meshes such as columns and wall segments. The final level can be loaded in Unreal Engine 4, a widely used game engine.


title: Enhancing Winter Sport Activities: Improving the Visual Perception and Spatial Awareness of Downhill Winter Athletes with Augmented Reality Headset Displays

abstract: Strong spatial-awareness and visual perception skills can improve an athlete's performance, enhance training and reduce the potential for injury. This research study looks to investigate the barriers and design requirements for developing an augmented reality headset for downhill winter athletes, which may improve visual perception and spatial-awareness. This research used a variety of human-centred-design methods, including surveys, experience-simulation-testing, user-response-analysis, and statistical analysis. 34 participants with experience skiing, or snowboarding at different skill-levels, wore an augmented reality headset and evaluated the visual perception of an icon, while a slope changing platform system simulated a downhill skiing experience. The results revealed various levels of athletes may benefit differently from access to athletic data during an activity, and indicated some expert level athletes can train to strengthen their spatial-awareness abilities. The results generated icon colours, locations within the field-of-view, and alert methods which could be utilized to optimize the design of headset displays.


title: Catalysed Hydrothermal Carbonization of Woody Biomass and Recycling of Process Liquid

abstract: The research introduces catalysed hydrothermal carbonization (CHTC) as a treatment method for woody biomass to produce solid hydrochar as well as value-added compounds (VACs). The hydrochar had higher heating values (HHV) of 28.3 MJ/kg and H/C and O/C ratios similar to coal, when using the liquid:biomass (L:B) ratio of 12:1 for the process. Densified CHTC hydrochar pellets were 97% durable, and hydrophobic when compared with wood pellets and torrefied wood pellets. CHTC has the potential to produce VACs such as glycolic acid, formic acid, acetic acid, levulinic acid, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, and furfural, from the process liquid effluent. Recycling the process liquid at L:B of 5:1 increased the concentration of the VACs and energy yield of the hydrochar. The production yields of the VACs were dependent upon the L:B ratios, they increased parallel with L:B ratios.


title: Effects of Geometric Nonlinearities on the Fidelity of Aeroelasticity Loads Analyses of Very Flexible Airframes

abstract: The intensive design optimization process of airframes has the effect of decreasing the structural stiffness, inducing large deformations that can have significant effects on the flight loads and the trimming configuration of aircraft. Such changes in the dynamic response of airframes are captured by considerations of geometric nonlinearity effects in the formulation of the aeroelastic solutions. In this thesis, a number of methodologies to model structural geometric nonlinearity, ranging in complexity, are studied at length to assess their effectiveness and accuracy in aeroelasticity simulations. The adopted methodologies are also benchmarked against wellestablished commercial Finite Element Method (FEM) solution sequences, namely, MSC Nastran and ASWING.


title: Biopsychological Effects of Social Participation on Aging: The Role of Identity-Affirming Music and the Arts

abstract: It is well-known that social participation contributes to health. Emerging evidence also suggests that musical and artistic groups uniquely promote emotional well-being, socialization, and engage multiple cognitive functions. In this regard, the intervening and preventative capacities of artistic social groups ought to be considered to a greater extent, especially in light of increased population aging. The present research examined three artistic interventions among complex-care patients, individuals with dementia, and their caregivers. Three larger studies were also conducted to determine associations among different social groups, social identities (e.g. artistic, sport, religious), and various well-being outcomes, and to explore the potential moderating role of genetic polymorphisms in the relationships between groups and health. In Study 1, complex-care patients who listened to personalized music playlists reported fewer negative emotions, increased life satisfaction, and greater self-esteem over time compared to controls. Among people living with dementia and their caregivers in Studies 2 and 3, an artistic reminiscence program and music-making intervention strengthened relationships between carers and their care recipients, encouraged socialization between group members, and supported well-being. Studies 4 and 5 further investigated differences across social group types and revealed that artistic and educational social groups explained the greatest amount of variation in depression, memory, and executive functioning compared to other social groups. Yet, in Study 6, for retirement home residents and students, social identification was more strongly correlated with well-being than social participation alone. Moreover, overall group identity was positively correlated with telomere length among older adults. Interestingly, there was a positive association between group memberships and perceived social status for homozygous carriers of an IGF-1 SNP (rs7136446). Among older and younger adults, there was also a positive correlation between group identification and health among carriers of the BDNF Met allele (rs6265), and an inverse relationship between group identification and depressive symptoms among carriers of an FGF-2 SNP (rs1048201). Taken together, participating in social groups, notably those involving music or the arts, appeared to confer health benefits among older adults. Knowledge of these associations can be used to help personalize future social interventions for older adults with the aim of maximizing their benefits.


title: Understanding the Experiences of Justice-Involved Youth at the Intersection of the Criminal Justice and Mental Health Systems

abstract:
In this dissertation, I examined the psychosocial effects of progressing through the youth criminal justice system. The studies presented here are tied together by the shared goal of promoting a welfare-based youth criminal justice system that adopts an extended responsibility of care toward justice-involved youth beyond reducing recidivism.
Study 1 examined how clinician-derived diagnoses and recommendations are determined in a forensic context when youth provide information about their mental health that is consistent, or inconsistent, with information provided by their caregivers. Clinicians weighed information from youth more heavily when making internalizing-spectrum diagnoses such as mood or anxiety disorders, whereas information from caregivers was more heavily weighed when making externalizing-spectrum diagnoses such as conduct disorder, and clinical recommendations.
Study 2 examined changes in the mental health, self-esteem, and perceived social support, of justice-involved youth as they transitioned through the adjudication period of the youth criminal justice system process. Mental health and self-esteem were significantly different across time, with greater negative changes associated with longer adjudication times. Youth who committed sexual offences reported significantly greater negative changes in mental health and self-esteem compared to youth who committed non-sexual offences. Using a mixed-methods approach,
Study 3 examined if, and how, justice-involved youth experienced stigma associated with criminal justice system involvement (offending-based stigma). Justice-involved youth experienced moderate internalized offending-based stigma, with greater internalized stigma associated with greater mental health symptoms, and lower self-esteem. The qualitative findings indicated justice-involved youth construct themselves as devalued members of society because of their offending status. Using an intersectional lens, how youth took up their offending status depended on how they also took up their race, masculinity, and class.
This dissertation applied a broad inter-disciplinary lens, drawing on several fields of study, including correctional policy, criminogenic risk, developmental criminology, developmental psychopathology, forensic assessment, forensic mental health, human rights, intersectionality, legal discourse, and stigma. The conclusions presented in this dissertation build on the empirical foundation provided by these works to further demonstrate the youth criminal justice system in Canada must move away from a strict focus on reducing recidivism among justice-involved youth.


title: You've Got Mail, But Is It Important And/Or Urgent?: An Investigation into Employees' Perceptions of Email

abstract:
This thesis presents three papers linked together by their investigation into two social/psychological predictors of email use: the end user's assessment regarding the importance and urgency of the email. The first paper presents a study designed to help us better understand the cues employees use to identify the two constructs of interest: important email and urgent email. The research takes an emic perspective and uses a qualitative research methodology. The study makes three significant contributions. First, knowledge workers define an email's importance by considering its salience as described in the stakeholder literature. More specifically, an important email comes from a stakeholder with power and/or pertains to an issue/stakeholder that has legitimacy. Second, knowledge workers evaluate an email's urgency in terms of its time-sensitivity and importance. Third, we found that context is critical to the email evaluation process.
The second paper reports on the development and validation of measures that can be used by researchers and practitioners to quantify the important email and urgent email constructs. Buss and Craik's Act Frequency Approach, which uses a mixed-methods "imposed etic-emic-derived etic" approach to scale development was used in this study. The important email and urgent email scales were both found to be reliable and valid measures.
The third paper is informed by Karasek's buffer hypothesis and investigates the relationship between email demands (i.e., objective: email volume and hours spent in email; social/psychological: important email and urgent email) and email strain (i.e. email overload). It is hypothesized that work control moderates the relationship between email demands and email overload. This paper also investigates the relationship between email overload and perceived stress. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling analysis confirmed that all four email demands predicted email overload and that email overload was a predictor of perceived stress. Control over work moderated the path between urgent email and email overload. This study contributes to the email and well-being literature by demonstrating that: email overload is a distinct type of role overload, social/psychological demands imposed by email should be investigated in the literature, and negative email outcomes can be mitigated by increased control over urgent email.


title: Three Essays in Banking and Finance

abstract:
This thesis is a collection of three essays with a common theme on the riskiness of banks. The first essay (Chapter 2) examines how banks' discretionary accounting practices affect banks' stock trading liquidity and stock price crash risk. Bank managers can use discretionary loan loss provisioning practices to obscure information on banks' performance and riskiness, thus elevating information uncertainty among investors. We find empirical evidence confirming that banks with greater opacity, as measured by the discretionary loan loss provisioning (DLLP) practice, are associated with greater stock trading illiquidity and higher stock price crash risk.
The second essay (Chapter 3) examines depositors' tendency to apply financial discipline to banks that adopt discretionary accounting practices. We find that uninsured deposit growth is negatively associated with banks' DLLP. The findings suggest that depositors punish banks' discretionary accounting practices. We also find that within the non-too-big-to-fail (non-TBTF) banks, depositors react sensitively to DLLP during both the 2008 financial crisis and non-crisis periods. However, for those so-called too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks, depositors react sensitively to DLLP practices only during the non-crisis period, but not during the crisis period. In addition, banks subject to U.S. government bailout actions during the 2008-2009 crisis period received less depositor discipline than other banks.
The third essay (Chapter 4) examines whether tail risk for respective real (i.e., non-financial) sub-sectors appears to be affected by risk emanating from the financial sector. We use the Conditional Value-at-Risk ("CoVaR") approach to examine which real sub-sectors are more vulnerable to risk emanating from the financial sector by measuring the change in CoVaR in each real sub-sector when the financial sector moves from a normal state to a stressed state. We find that the spillover effect from the financial sector to real sub-sectors reached the highest levels in our sample period before the 2008 financial crisis and dramatically decreased once the financial crisis had started. By comparing the back-testing results of our VaR and CoVaR estimations, we also find that the CoVaR measure can be a more reliable indicator of risk during very volatile market periods than the traditional VaR measure.


title: Smart Grid Data Communication and Analytics

abstract:
With the popularity of smart electrical appliances and home energy management systems, there have been a massive amount of data generated about the electricity consumption. This data can be beneficial for the utility companies as it provides the behaviour patterns of customers, and thus useful decisions can be made to optimize the load on the grid. In this work, we propose and implement a two-way communication system between the transformer agent (TA), attached to a neighbourhood’s electric transformer, and its customer agents (CAs), attached to each house in that neighbourhood. Once data is collected at the TA, it is communicated to the utility which can control and suggest any changes in consumption behaviours. In our system, CAs form a self-healing mesh network with the TA using IP-based Wi-Fi, while TAs communicate with the utility headquarters using the LTE network. Our system is implemented in compliance with the IEEE 2030.5 standard requirements, also known as smart energy profile 2.0. We have performed several tests across the Carleton University campus. We have also tested and implemented this system in real neighbourhoods in Ottawa, including Sandcherry and Viewmount sites to prove the system’s operation and reliability.
The data obtained from the communication system is stored in a database hosted by IBM Cloud services. Our aim in this work is not only to communicate the data but ii to further process it and help the utility companies design better demand side management (DSM) programs to ensure efficient transmission and distribution of energy. This solves the problem of balancing electric demand and supply at the grid and also reduces peak demands, which helps lower the electricity bills for the consumers. In this context, we analyze the household electricity consumption data to forecast energy consumption for short-term (hours/days ahead) and long-term (weeks/months ahead). To this end, we use and compare seven different machine learning models predicting the energy consumption: linear regression, polynomial regression, support vector regression (SVR) using linear kernel, SVR using Gaussian kernel(SVR-G), SVR using the polynomial kernel, feed-forward neural networks (FFNN), and recurrent neural networks (RNN) using long-short-term memory (LSTM) neurons. To measure the accuracy of these models, we compute three different error metrics: the normalized mean absolute percentage error (NMAPE), the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), and R2 also known as the coefficient of determination. We then propose a novel approach for short-term load forecasting by combining the power of multiple models and evaluate its performance on a real energy consumption dataset that is publicly available by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Results show that our proposed model performs better than existing models for time series energy forecasting.


title: Crystallisation of metamorphic garnet: mechanisms and rates from the inverted Barrovian sequence in the Sikkim Himalaya

abstract:
The compositional zonation, three-dimensional spatial distribution, and morphologies of a metamorphic garnet population represent an integrated record of the population's nucleation and growth history over changing metamorphic conditions. While previous inferences drawn from such datasets have proven diverse, their continued collection is key to better understanding the mechanisms and processes that control porphyroblast crystallisation, rates of intergranular element transfer, and the extent to which chemical equilibrium persists across a rock volume during metamorphism. This thesis utilises such datasets from the inverted Barrovian metamorphic sequence in the Sikkim Himalaya, India, where the record of recent orogenesis provides an ideal natural laboratory in which fundamental rock-forming processes can be investigated.
Compositional analyses of a representative population of garnet porphyroblasts from a garnet-grade metapelite indicate a strong correlation between garnet crystal size and composition with respect to both major end-member and trace element components. Numerical simulation of progressive nucleation and growth using an equilibrium approach and multicomponent diffusion reproduces the sizes and major element zoning of the entire garnet population along a rapid heating trajectory (>100 C/Myr). Given the correspondingly rapid rates of garnet growth (~1.4 mm/My) and negligible departure from equilibrium, major element transport is inferred to have been non-limiting, with growth rates controlled by interfacial processes.
In contrast, trace element zoning in the same population is indicative of persistent disequilibrium with respect to rare-earth elements, yttrium and chromium. Oscillatory zoning may reflect incorporation of chemical heterogeneities and minor fluctuations in the garnet growth rate not resolvable in major element zoning, and annuli are not demonstrably relatable to some rock-wide event. Elements that do not equilibrate across garnet surfaces document continuous spiral zoning, which permits estimation of syn-crystallisation strain-rates, on the order of 10^-11-10^-12 /s.
Microstructural data from across the Barrovian sequence reveal garnet populations that are partially characterised by their grade, with changing crystal size and abundance interpreted to reflect the combined effects of bulk chemical variations and ripening with increasing pressures and temperatures. Deviations from this trend reflect populations in which garnet crystallisation was controlled by a highly heterogeneous spatial distribution of nucleation sites and transport-limited growth.


title: What's in the Box? Punishment and Insanity in the Canadian Jury Deliberation Room

abstract: There is a longstanding culture of hostility toward the insanity defence in Canada, where jurors may be hesitant to find defendants Not Criminally Responsible on Account of Mental Disorder (NCRMD) in a criminal trial. While this hesitancy is in part attributable to misinformation about the defence, it might also be seated in moral intuitions about fair punishment. Researchers have made gains in understanding individual juror decision-making in insanity cases, but the jury deliberation room remains a black box. In this mixed-methods study, Canadian jury eligible participants (N = 83) completed attitudinal measures, read a fictional murder case involving a claim of NCRMD, then took part in 45-minute deliberation sessions. Study 1 examined the relationship between punishment orientation, insanity defence attitudes, and individual verdict decisions, and addressed the utility of a hypothetical self-exclusion question (i.e., Challenge for Cause). The Challenge for Cause question was not a useful gauge of individual verdict decisions. However, punishment prone orientations were correlated with higher confidence in a guilty verdict. In Study 2 two independent coders were trained to assess each individual utterance for the presence or absence of categories listed in a codebook that was created a-priori, which yielded fair inter-rater reliability. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that punishment-prone mock jurors were less likely to defer to the authority of the psychiatrist testifying for the Defence. Those who were more punishment-prone also had a lower frequency of Defence position-taking utterances. Finally, in Study 3, a qualitative description of key-word flagged utterances (using the Moral Foundations Dictionary) demonstrated that mock jurors relied on moral intuitions about authority, harm, and fairness in justifying their positions. Study 3 also revealed five general categories with respect to what would happen to the defendant after the trial: the effectiveness of prisons, the conditions of prisons, the jury's duty in considering punishment, desires for rehabilitation, and desires for incapacitation. Overall, findings imply that mock jurors' decisions stem partially from moral conceptualizations of insanity rather than from evidence alone.


title: State and Self-Regulation of Civil Society Organizations in Context: A Case Study of Kenya

abstract:
Much was made of the global associational revolution beginning in the 1980s, as civil society organizations (CSOs) increased in number worldwide. Since then, a paradox of competing trends has emerged. On one hand, considerable stock is held in the promise of civil society whereby CSOs are recognized as critical actors in economic, social, and democratic development. Governments have sought ways to enable vibrant and diverse CSO sectors through regulation, reflecting a diffusion of pro-CSO norms globally. Deviating from this trend, an associational counter-revolution has arisen whereby governments use regulation to constrain the space for CSO operations.
Advancing CSO accountability is a key rationale for many intensified forms of both enabling and constraining state regulation, and self-regulation. Theory suggests there is a trade-off between state and self-regulation, from which cycles of regulatory waves unfold.
This dissertation contributes to the CSO regulation literature, which has tended to focus on high-income countries, by developing and applying a conceptual framework of regulatory change drivers to a lower-middle income country, Kenya. Beginning in the late 1980s Kenya was the first African country to significantly address CSO regulation and self-regulation, and has since undergone four phases of CSO regulatory change, sometimes more, sometimes less enabling of the sector. The dissertation draws from primary data in the form of 63 interviews, legislation, regulation, and media sources. Its conceptual framework can help anticipate state and/or self-regulatory change; the state and self-regulation interaction; their relationship to accountability; and the associational counter-revolution paradox.
This dissertation finds that the most important driver of regulatory change in Kenya's lower-middle income context is government's political agendas, hand-in-hand with the types of activities CSOs engage in. Donor country governments are also an important direct and indirect driver of regulatory change. While regulatory change occurs in 'waves', rather than interplay between state and self-regulation, it is the drivers of regulatory change and their interplay that move and shape the waves. Regulatory change may be turned to as a technical solution to various issues reflected in the drivers, even as it may not necessarily be the best, the only, or sufficient means to address them.


title: Small Area Estimation: Informative Sampling and Two-fold Models

abstract:
Small area estimation (SAE) has become a dynamic field of research over the last couple of decades. The increasing demand for small area estimates in both public and private sectors has opened the door to further investigation of more applied problems. In this thesis, we consider three problems in the context of small area estimation: (i) small area estimation under informative sampling, (ii) small area estimation under unmatched two-fold subarea models, and (iii) variable selection under two-fold subarea model.
In survey sampling, often samples are drawn with unequal probabilities to improve the statistical efficiency of the sampling strategy. When the selection probabilities are correlated with the variables of interest, even after conditioning on the auxiliary information, the sampling scheme is called informative. Under informative sampling, the population model does not hold for the sample. Hence, to avoid biased results, the selection effects should be accounted in the inference procedures. To address this problem, we propose a semi-parametric approach by including a P-spline term of selection probabilities in the model.
The basic area-level model assumes that a linear model relates the small area means to area specific auxiliary information. However, in some SAE applications that deal with logit relationships the associated function is non-linear. In this situation, the linking model and the sampling model do not match and cannot be combined to produce the basic area-level model. We propose an empirical best unbiased predictor approach to estimation of small subarea parameters under a two-fold subarea-level model consisting of a sampling model and an unmatched linking model.
The main assumption behind standard variable selection methods is that the variable of interest is observed, which is not the case for small area models, where dependent variables are not directly observed, due to the sampling errors. In particular, for a matched two-fold subarea level model, direct estimates of subarea means are measured as proxies for the unknown variable of interest. Applying the standard regression model selection naively may result in inefficient model selection methods. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-step adjustment to the standard variable selection method.


title: Towards Effective Behavioural Biometrics for Mobile Devices

abstract: Mobile devices store immense amounts of sensitive data, making them attractive targets for attackers. The first line of defence against attacks is authentication --- verifying the identity of an agent accessing the device. We examine behavioural biometrics as an effective authentication mechanism on mobile devices. Behavioural biometrics model an agent's behaviours to establish their identity. We construct an authentication system based on profiling the device sensors (touch screen, accelerometer and gyroscope) during a swipe, defined as a quick, simple movement across a touch screen. In addition, we explore the relationship between problem setting and evaluation methodology in authentication systems, producing a list of requirements necessary for accurate evaluation. Finally, we perform a user study to ascertain the effectiveness of our behavioural biometric mechanism. We conclude that this system is resistant to attacks which trivially bypass standard mechanisms such as PINs, while also potentially lightening the usability load imposed by authentication.


title: Centroidal Particle Dynamics: An Explicit Model of Pedestrian Personal Space for the Simulation of Short-Range Collision-Avoidance and Emergent Motion Patterns in Dense Crowds

abstract:
Computer simulation of dense crowds is finding increased use in event planning, congestion prediction, and threat assessment. State-of-the-art particle-based crowd methods assume and aim for collision-free trajectories. That is an idealistic yet not overly realistic expectation, as near-collisions increase in dense and rushed settings compared to typically sparse pedestrian scenarios. We propose Centroidal Particle Dynamics (CPD), a method that explicitly models the compressible personal space area surrounding each entity (~0.8m-1.0m radius) to inform its local pathing and collision avoidance decisions. While personal space has traditionally been modeled as a fixed radius, the reality is that it often changes in response to the surrounding context. For instance, in cases of congestion, entities tend to share more of their personal space than they normally would, simply out of necessity (e.g. passing through a crowded gate or boarding a train). Likewise, entities travelling at higher speeds (e.g. strolling, running) tend to expect a larger area ahead of them to be their personal -unoccupied- space. We illustrate how our proposed agent-based method for local dynamics can reproduce several key emergent dense crowd phenomena at the microscopic level (e.g. emergent lane formation in bidirectional flow and arching near congested gateways) with higher congruence to real trajectory data and with more visually convincing collision avoidance paths than the existing state-of-the-art.
We further show how CPD can be efficiently computed on consumer-grade graphics hardware (GPU), achieving interactive frame rates when simulating thousands of crowd entities in the scene, thus making it suitable and ready-for-use in our target applications of entertainment and interactive media projects (i.e. film, gaming, and educational media). Lastly, we discuss crowd motion validation, and how to increase confidence in CPD, potentially making it also suitable for use in safety-critical applications, including urban design, evacuation analysis, and crowd safety planning.


title: Machine Learning in Audiology: Applications and Implications

abstract: Recent mobile and automated audiometry technologies enable non-experts to deliver hearing tests. The problem remains that a large number of such users are not trained to interpret audiograms. In this work, we outline the development of an intelligent audiogram classification system. More specifically, we present how a training dataset was collected, the development of the classification system relying on supervised learning, as well as other tools designed for the analysis of audiograms in large databases. Using the Rapid Audiogram Annotation Environment developed in this study, we collected hundreds of audiogram annotations from three licensed audiologists. Our analysis demonstrates that inter-rater reliability is substantial or better for classification of hearing loss configuration, symmetry, and severity. Our classification system achieves a performance comparable to the state of the art, but is more flexible. Finally, we demonstrate qualitatively that Gaussian mixture models are useful for the detection of potential reliability issues in audiograms.


title: High Fidelity and Efficient Computations of Dynamic Loads for Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of Flexible Transport Aircraft

abstract: The current state-of-the-art design optimization of airframes is tightly wounded to its loads analyses as the process is usually conducted employing a deterministic set of critical load cases. The sheer number of scenarios required to estimate the critical loading conditions prevent these two processes from integrating. In this thesis, we address the problem of an efficient estimation of critical dynamic aeroelastic loads. The method is based on the Kriging metamodeling technique and the Expected Improvement Function, known formally as the Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) algorithm. Furthermore, different inexpensive metrics, based on the concept of Modal Contribution Factors, are investigated as indicators to determine if a substantial change in the loads has occurred during the design optimization, triggering the re-exploration of the design space. A case study is presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, where a reduction of 84 percent in the total time of execution was achieved.


title: The Impact of Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapy on Cognitive Performance in People Living with Multiple Sclerosis

abstract: In Multiple Sclerosis (MS), cognition is directly affected by neural integrity and secondary disease characteristics (anxiety, depression and fatigue). Mesenchymal stem cell therapy (MSCT) has been recently studied due to its potential for neural repair in MS. It is hypothesized that cognitive improvement will be seen after MSCT. The change in cognition is expected to be correlated with changes in secondary disease characteristics and neurophysiological measures (neural conduction time). Ten participants received MSCT. Cognition, secondary disease characteristics, and conduction time were evaluated pre- and post- (12 month) therapy. Eight participants demonstrated cognitive improvement in at least one test. Secondary disease characteristics and conduction time were not associated with cognition in our sample. In conclusion, MSCT appears to be safe with regards to cognition and does not worsen secondary disease characteristics. Future efficacy studies have the potential to show greater cognitive improvement than the current preliminary study.


title: Violence, Compensation, and Settler Colonialism: Adjudicating Claims of Indian Residential School Abuse Through the Independent Assessment Process

abstract: Under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) was established to provide financial compensation for sexual and physical abuse that took place in Indian Residential Schools - boarding schools designed to assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian settler society. In my dissertation I centre my analysis on settler colonial power to investigate how the IAP, which I theorize as a response to and a product of settler colonial violence, constitutes survivors of abuse and how it is simultaneously constituted by survivors' agency. I explore how various actors within the IAP, including lawyers, adjudicators, and health support workers, engage in performative labour that mobilizes discourses of victimization and victimhood to construct representations of survivors' experiences through hierarchies and ordering mechanisms. I argue that the IAP constitutes a settler colonial legal process that inflicts violence on survivors, revictimizes and disempowers them, and perpetuates settler colonial denial. I also evaluate the compensation chart, which is used by IAP lawyers and adjudicators to calculate IAP awards, as a discursive tool that transvalues abuse and harm for money and guides survivors' interpretations of their experiences. Finally, I examine how survivors mobilize agency and engage in transgressive politics that resist the settler colonial logics of the IAP, challenge the scope of the individual financial compensation model, and re-establish themselves as Indigenous subjects.


title: Three Essays in Industrial Organization with a Focus on Innovation, Advertising, Welfare, and Firm Performance

abstract:
This thesis is comprised of three essays on the economic impacts of market structure, R&D and advertising activities. The first studies the impact of cooperative R&D on innovation, welfare, and profitability in vertically related industries where products are differentiated. The model incorporates two vertically related industries, with horizontal spillovers within each industry and vertical spillovers between the two industries. Upstream firms produce a homogeneous intermediate good. Downstream firms provide differentiated products. Three types of R&D cooperation are studied: no cooperation, horizontal cooperation, and vertical cooperation.
The second area of focus is the impact of cooperative R&D and advertising on innovation and welfare in a duopolistic industry. The model incorporates two symmetric firms which produce differentiated products. Firms participate in R&D and advertising activities in the presence of R&D spillovers and advertising spillovers. Advertising spillovers may be positive or negative. Four types of cooperative structures are studied: no cooperation, R&D cooperation, advertising cooperation, R&D and advertising cooperation.
Lastly, the effectiveness of R&D and advertising on market share is examined. Advertising and innovation are two major functions to beat the competition and boost profitability. Surprisingly, however, the importance of the qualitative characteristics of the industry and its strategic initiatives has not yet been adequately addressed in the literature. This chapter empirically examines the critical role of innovation and advertising in the marketing strategy of advanced technological companies. The analysis considers a key marketing metric (market share). The focus of the empirical setting is Network and Internet industry in the U.S. including 150 U.S. manufacturing and nonmanufacturing companies over a 10-year time period.


title: Building Strong Families: The Role of Parent-Educator Partnerships

abstract: This collaborative qualitative project with Andrew Fleck Children Services (AFCS) identifies the role of parent/teacher partnerships in supporting family resilience, the characteristics that parents and teachers attribute to strong families and how parents and teachers define what family resilience means. The data stems from semi-structured interviews conducted with 11 parents and 10 early childhood educators for a total of 21 participants from AFCS licensed childcare centers and licensed home childcare centers. Interviews were analyzed using thematic data analysis and a software package called Nvivo. The study is exploratory but the data findings add to the literature a diverse and culturally relevant perspective on what family resilience means to Canadian childcare workers and parents as well as how the parent-educator partnership helps facilitate family resilience. Additionally, it provides AFCS with modified and relevant ways of providing support to the families they serve.


title: Looking Beneath the Surface: The Personal and Family Consequences of Occupational Injuries

abstract: To date, the individual and familial consequences that may ensue following a workplace injury have not been fully examined. In this research, I examine how mental and physical workplace injuries influence personal and family outcomes, within a military organizational context. The results of Study 1 (N = 888) indicate that occupational injuries are related to psychological well-being, relationship with spouse, and relationship with children. Study 2 (N =1836) examines the relationship between injuries of military members and the well-being of military spouses. The results indicate that having an injured military member spouse is related to psychological distress, relationship satisfaction and emotional intimate partner violence. Furthermore, it appears that some of these effects are buffered when spouses have financial stability, a higher sense of organizational support, and satisfaction with the organization. This research contributes to the broad understanding of workplace injuries, and has implications for future research and practice.


title: Un/Settlement:  Counter-Memories of Migration and Railways in Southern Mexico

abstract: The Ferrocarril Panamericano (Panamerican Railway) has long served as a space of livelihood, exchange and integration for the communities of the Pacific Coast of southern Mexico. Nevertheless, in recent decades, the historic vitality of this railway, its passengers and communities has been buried under narratives of migrant criminality, terror, and victimhood. As a means of lightening the contemporary weight of security imaginations, this dissertation draws on archival and interview data from diverse locations in Mexico to offer a series of counter-memories of migration on the Ferrocarril Panamericano in southern Mexico. Each counter-memory aims to foreground memories that have been buried and to reconnect historical knowledges that have been separated from one another. It reconnects studies of migration and governance with histories of settlement, transport and state-making. It also highlights the expulsions and dispossessions of today in connection with the transit migration phenomena.


title: Differential Contributions of NMDA Receptor Subtypes to Lamina II Synaptic Responses Across Juvenile Spinal Cord Development

abstract: NMDA receptors are heteromeric complexes crucial to the regulation of excitatory synaptic transmission, including in the spinal cord. The presence of specific subtypes of GluN2 subunits determines the kinetic properties of receptor activity. The Hildebrand lab has demonstrated that slow-decaying GluN2B and GluN2D dominate NMDAR responses at lamina I adult spinal synapses, which is unlike the fast GluN2A-dominated synapses found throughout most of the mature CNS. The functional contribution of specific GluN2 subunits is less characterized for synaptic NMDAR responses in lamina II neurons. We performed whole-cell patch clamp recordings of mEPSCs in the presence and absence of subtype-specific NMDAR pharmacological blockers. We observed a relatively equal and stable contribution of GluN2A and GluN2B throughout lamina II development, contrasting the shift in contribution from GluN2B to GluN2A commonly observed during postnatal development in the brain. We also identified a slower synaptic NMDAR component that is blocked by a GluN2D antagonist.


title: The Rise of "Doll-Mommies" and "Doll-Daddies" in China: Chinese Youth Meet BJD Culture

abstract: This thesis focuses on the contemporary Chinese youth group, "doll-mommies/ daddies," who are involved in Ball-Jointed Doll (BJD) culture. The thesis is based on a content analysis of popular social media, specifically BJD Bar and BJD Tsukkomi Bar on Baidu. I have also incorporated reflections of my own experience as a BJD player as a supplementary source of data. I contend that the BJD culture in contemporary China has become a virtual space for "doll-mommies/daddies" to explore and understand self-representation, social stratification, Chinese culture, and gender and sexuality. The thesis contributes to the sociology of toys and studies of youth culture with a focus on analysing the BJD culture in China. It also contributes new insights to China studies, providing a window to understanding Chinese youth culture and contemporary Chinese society, which has experienced profound changes due to the government's introduction of market economy, globalization, and information technology.


title: Persuasive Content Generator The Design, Development and Validation of Persuasive Contect Generator Based on Social Media Profiles

abstract: Providing content and experiences to users in order to influence their thoughts and opinions is essential in many fields such as marketing, education, and politics. With advances and the growing availability of the Internet and Web technologies, posting documents online has become an effective means of communicating to large audiences. However, given individuals' different respective interests, characteristics, and abilities, shared documents will not likely be equally persuasive to all users. To communicate persuasively, the categorization of users according to factors like age, marital status, education, and occupation is becoming increasingly prevalent, as is providing users with content specific to their categories. This approach assumes individuals within a category are similar, which is not necessarily true. Persuasive communication should recognize differences at the individual level and personalize—rather than categorize—the content. However, a systematic software solution that tailors and prepares separate persuasive content for individuals does not yet exist. Given the increasing popularity and usage of social media, social-network extractable data can potentially provide a tremendous source of insight and background about individuals. Inspired by the Yale Attitude Change approach, this thesis proposes a multi-layer model called Pyramid of Individualization and the related software framework to generate persuasive content based on initial author input and audience social-media data. Preliminary results show the proposed system can create personalized information that (a) matches reader interests (attention), (b) is tailored to reader ability to understand the information (comprehension), and (c) is supported by a trustable source (acceptance).


title: A Search for the Neutrinoles Double Electron Capture of 36Ar and a Measurement of the Specific Activity of 39Ar in Atmospheric Argon with the DEAP-3600 Detector

abstract: The DEAP-3600 Dark Matter detector, located 2 km underground at SNOLAB, uses up to 3600 kg of natural atmospheric argon as its detection medium. The isotopes 36Ar and 39Ar are present in small quantities in argon found in the atmosphere, and so are present within DEAP-3600. These isotopes can be examined in data collected for a Dark Matter search. 36Ar could undergo an exotic decay process called neutrinoless double electron capture. This decay violates lepton number conservation and its observation would provide a clear indication of physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Three modes of this decay with different final states could be detected with DEAP-3600 if they occur. A search for this decay was performed on an isotopic exposure of 6.67 kg-years with the DEAP-3600 detector. A fit to this data has yielded lower limits on the half-life of 36Ar of T > 4.78e20 years. 39Ar is a beta-emitting isotope and is a major background for DEAP-3600 and other argon-based dark matter experiments. A measurement of the specific activity of 39Ar in natural atmospheric argon has been performed on a total argon mass exposure of 2200 kg-years taken over a period of 12 months; 185 individual measurements were made. The specific activity is determined to be (0.953 +/- 0.028)Bq/kg, corresponding to a concentration of (7.6 +/- 0.2)e-16 g(39Ar)/g(atmAr).


title: A Comparative Analysis between Centralized Routing and Distributed Routing in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

abstract: A growing desire for granular network control, automation, virtualization and much more, has contributed to the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a prominent research area. Though originally developed for wired networks, benefits of the centralized routing approach are now being leveraged for wireless network applications. These include SDN-based Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWNs), as potential alternatives to traditional MWNs. This thesis presents a Software Defined Multi-hop Wireless Network (SDMWN) solution, with standard centralized routing characteristics and full mobility capabilities, evaluated against distributed routing in an equivalent traditional MWN architecture. Our emulation results, obtained with Mininet-WiFi, demonstrate a good degree of potential for SDMWN, when operating under controlled (mobile) network conditions. By guaranteeing the availability of potential links between every node, SDMWN outperforms the traditional MWN, by about 15% and 65 ms, for Ping Success Rate and Round-Trip Time respectively. However, this comes at a relatively high cost of overhead.


title: The Influence of Stressors and Strain on Alcohol Use in Canadian Armed Forces Members

abstract: Historically, alcohol consumption in the military has been widespread, especially post-deployment, which causes concern for the leadership of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) in the post-Afghanistan deployment era. In order to shed light onto this important issue, two studies assessed the impact of multiple stressors and strain on alcohol consumption utilizing a stressor-strain-alcohol consumption model (SSAC model). Moreover, generational differences in alcohol consumption as well as various elements of the SSAC model were examined. In Study 1, an initial model identified the influence of pre-military service life stressors on alcohol consumption in recently enrolled members and found that increases in Negative Life Events and Exposure to Violence in their pre-service lives were associated with increases in alcohol consumption, and that these associations were mediated by posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (PTSD). Interestingly, Millennials were found to consume more alcohol than both Gen Xers and Late Baby Boomers, and they also demonstrated weaker associations between Childhood Neglect/Depression, Childhood Neglect/PTSD, and alcohol consumption/Negative Life Events than did Gen Xers. Equally noteworthy, Gen Xers and Late Baby Boomers consumed alcohol to the same degree. In Study 2, a revised model was tested in the post-deployment context with Combat Exposure as the stressor. Also, baseline information from pre-enrollment (Time 1) was controlled in the post-deployment SSAC model (Time 2) to further elucidate the impact of Combat Exposure on strain and alcohol consumption. Results indicated which stressors, namely Negative Life Events and Childhood Adversity, and strain (i.e., Depression and PTSD), had cumulative, long-term effects on members' alcohol consumption. Generations did not differ significantly on alcohol consumption, but it was noted that Millennials demonstrated weaker association between Time 1 and Time 2 alcohol consumption than did Gen Xers. This thesis bridges the gap in our understanding of alcohol consumption in a highly relevant and high-risk environment, thereby providing the CAF with insight into current alcohol consumption trends and precursors to alcohol consumption across generations.


title: Intra-Migrant Economy: Chinese Restaurant Entrepreneurship and Zimbabwean Migrant Workers In South Africa

abstract:
South Africa is "home" to the two largest populations of foreign nationals on the African continent. Its Chinese population numbers at least 300,000, and its Zimbabwean population, the largest outside of Zimbabwe, numbers at least one million. Many of these migrants end up working in Chinese restaurants as this is, by and large, a low-wage, low-skill, and low-barrier-to-entry sector. Based on original ethnographic research conducted in Johannesburg for fourteen months, this dissertation explores the cultural politics of diasporic entrepreneurs and migrant labourers, what I call the "intra-migrant economy," among everyday racialized insecurities in urban South Africa. I use the term "intra-migrant economy" to refer to the employment of one or more group of migrants by another group of migrants as an economic strategy outside the mainstream labour market. With little capital, Chinese restaurant owners are able to maximize profit through cheap Zimbabwean labourers, while Zimbabweans can easily obtain jobs without having proper documentation. Through exploring the structure of this sector, and the complex economic realities of and working relationships between Chinese and Zimbabwean migrants, I examine how the migrant and economic flows are negotiated and localized in South Africa's market, which also provides a concrete case study of intercultural communication.
Anthropologists have paid attention to how economic practices are intertwined and embedded in historical, political, and cultural systems. This dissertation suggests that not only are these factors intertwined but they also reinforce each other. The intra-migrant economy is thus more than a story about migrants' economic hardships; it is also a reflection on two migrant groups who are linguistically and culturally different, the social structures that create their exploitation, and how they construct informal labour relations and cope with wider forms of uncertainty in one of the most notably racialized states in history.


title: Municipal Biosolids Capillary Barrier Covers for Reactive Mine Tailings

abstract: This project investigated the use of municipal biosolids as a low-cost, low-permeability material in capillary barrier covers (CBC) for reactive mine tailings. The biosolids exhibited low saturated hydraulic conductivities (k = 4.21 x 10 -7 cm/s @ e = 4.01) and an air-entry value of approximately 400 kPa. During laboratory column testing, biosolids layers within the CBCs remained highly saturated, acting as a barrier to oxygen diffusion and water flux. Pore water samples in the tailings of the monolayer cover show elevated concentrations of nitrate, potassium, and sodium relative to CBC columns. No significant change in pH was observed in any of the columns. Numerical models showed reduction in water flux at the tailings surface by 98% and a reduction in oxygen diffusion by up to three orders of magnitude when using biosolids CBCs relative to uncovered tailings. Cover function was not significantly impacted by the characteristics of the underlying tailings.


title: The Politics of Austerity and Social Citizenship Rights: A Case Study of the Impact of the 2008 Financial Crisis on the Welfare State in Portugal

abstract: This dissertation focuses on the process and degree of welfare retrenchment under the paradigm of austerity following the 2008 financial crisis. It provides a detailed account of the austerity measures on cash benefits of social citizenship rights - minimum income, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions - adopted in Portugal between 2010 and 2014. This dissertation also offers a comprehensive framework for defining the rights of social citizenship in 21st century capitalist market economies derived from two theoretical approaches: Marshall's social citizenship framework and Esping-Andersen's approach on welfare provision and redistribution. The author puts forward the thesis that the austerity measures adopted in Portugal between 2010 and 2014 have considerably eroded the degree of decommodification of the public welfare provision of cash benefits which are part of social citizenship rights in Portugal. It is argued that the reduction in public spending and the cumulative effect of multiple policy changes in exchange for a €78 billion financial bailout were very damaging to the entitlements of social protection. Furthermore, the dissertation also confirms that EU policies of balanced budgets that constitutionalize lower public deficits undermine the constitutional principles of social citizenship fulfillment between the state and its citizens. The austerity measures, either proposed or fully adopted by the Portuguese authorities between 2010 and 2014, were based on certain ideological assumptions and economic beliefs that do not serve the interests of the most vulnerable and working-class people. The recommendations explore both, directions for policy, as well as for future research. A more egalitarian redistribution of cash benefits for citizens from European member states within the Eurozone, like Portugal, is being proposed because questions of public debt, sustainability of public expenditure, inflation, budgetary consolidation and unemployment, will continue to arise within the European Union.


title: Computation and Modelling of Convection Heat Transfer of Supercritical Fluids

abstract:
Current literature suggests that large spatial gradients of thermophysical properties, which occur in the vicinity of the pseudo-critical thermodynamic state, may result in significant variations in forced-convection heat transfer rates. Specifically, these property gradients induce inertia- and buoyancy-driven flow phenomena that may enhance or deteriorate the turbulence-dominated heat convection process. Understanding of these inertia/buoyancy-driven mechanisms has not been sufficiently established to date. Consequently, the full set of dynamic similarity parameters remains to be identified. Through direct numerical simulations of turbulent boundary layers and channel flows, the present study investigates the characteristics of the flow structures of turbulence in heated flows of supercritical water under buoyant and non-buoyant conditions.
In the absence of buoyancy forces, notable reductions in the density and viscosity in close proximity of the heated wall are observed to promote an increase in the wall shear stress, with resultant loss of coherence of the new near-wall flow structures. This leads to the dominance of larger-scale structures in the wall-normal thermal mixing process that comes at the expense of the smaller-scale thermal mixing, and yields a net reduction in the overall thermal mixing.
Under the influence of wall-normal gravitational acceleration, the wall-normal density gradients are noted to enhance ejection motions due to baroclinic vorticity generation on the lower wall of the channel, thus providing additional wall-normal thermal mixing. Along the upper wall, the same mechanism generates streamwise vorticity of the opposing sense, causing a net reduction in thermal mixing. In the case of downstream-oriented gravitational acceleration, baroclinic vorticity generation driven by spanwise density gradients causes additional wall-normal thermal mixing by promoting larger-scale ejection and sweep motions.
Based on the results of the foregoing direct numerical simulations and complemented by relevant information in the published literature, dynamic similarity criteria for heated flows of supercritical fluids are proposed. Particular consideration is given to the influence of spatial gradients in density in the form of baroclinic forces on such flows. The proposed similarity criteria are successfully validated using data from multiple working fluids, and are used as a basis for a new criterion for the onset of deteriorated heat transfer.


title: Performance Estimation and Fault Diagnostics for the Starter of Auxiliary Power Unit

abstract: An electric starter provides initial power to run the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) during the starting process. As the starter degrades, its output power declines which, as a result, affects the APU starting performance, and eventually leads to the starting failure. Therefore, a reliable starter health condition monitoring system is necessary to estimate the starter's degradation, diagnose its fault, and prevent its malfunction. Some research works have been reported in the literature for starter performance estimation and fault diagnostics, however, these prior works typically employ statistical analysis and data-driven methods, which are not physically interpretable and in some cases, are not reliable. Accordingly, the objective of this thesis is to develop a physics-based diagnostic scheme for the starter performance degradation estimation to improve fault diagnostics reliability.


title: Inhibitory Effects of Hydrolyzed Oat Bran Proteins on Human LDL Oxidation and Their Bile Acid Binding Capacity

abstract: The aim of this project was; 1) to produce and characterize various hydrolyzed proteins from oat brans; 2) determine their antioxidant, metal binding and bile biding capacities as well their ability to inhibit low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidation. Medium oat bran samples treated with (cellulase and viscozyme) were digested with five proteases protamex, alcalase, flavourzyme, pepsin and pepsin+pancreatin. VPI-pepsin better scavenged ROO• radicals (496.77±5.83 μM(TE)/g) while VPI-flavourzyme and VPI-pepsin had better quenching for HO• (27.95 ±1.580 and and O2•- (45.31±6.6%) radicals, respectively. VPI-protamex exhibited the best Cu2+ chelating capacity (59.83±1.40%). All hydrolysates protected human LDL against Cu2+ mediated oxidation by reducing the concentration of hydroperoxides from 158.4 to 74.4-97.7 μMH2O2/mg. There was a binding of up to 46.3% for taurodeoxycholate and taurocholate. VPI alcalase proteins displayed the highest activity in the most assay and consequently separated into eleven fractions (F1-F11) (HPLC).


title: Women Offender Assessment: Can Gender-Informed Variables Improve Prediction of Institutional Outcomes?

abstract:
The Custody Rating Scale (CRS) is utilized by Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) in classification of women offenders; it is gender-neutral. The purpose of the study was to examine if gender-informed domains predict misconducts in women offenders. Gender-informed items that were predictive were used to create the Gender-Informed Version 1 Continuous, Gender-Informed Version 2 Continuous, Gender-Informed Version 1 Trichotomized and Gender-Informed Version 2 Trichotomized scales. The scales were tested to determine if they yield incremental predictive validity beyond the CRS. A sample of 1,528 federally sentenced women was analyzed. Results found addition of gender-informed variables improved the incremental predictive validity of the CRS. This was found for non-Indigenous offenders, but results for Indigenous offenders were mixed. Findings supported the inclusion of gender-informed factors to the CRS. Implications for CSC and future research directions are discussed.
Keywords: gender-informed predictors, classification, institutional misconduct


title: The Effect of Object Selection and Operator Movement on Situation Awareness in Virtual Reality

abstract: Virtual reality provides an immersive visual environment that has been used in airborne surveillance tasks. The way in which operators interact with a virtual environment has been seen to influence their situation awareness and physical stress. The present work examines three aspects of interface design within a virtual space: object selection, operator movement, and search method. In two experiments, participants were immersed in a virtual environment and completed a search task and a recall task that mimicked operations seen in airborne surveillance to get measures of situation awareness and physical stress. Additionally, in the second experiment, measures of mental workload were incorporated through a peripheral detection task to examine available cognitive resources. Although all interface designs showed associated advantages and disadvantages, results from the experiments indicated that operator situation awareness and/or physical stress are benefited by a head-gaze selection method, a teleportation movement, and an origin-based search method.


title: Spacecraft Pose Estimation Using a Monocular Camera

abstract: Spacecraft pose estimation is an essential input to the Guidance, Navigation and Control process. Pose estimation based on monocular camera images does not require modifications to the target vehicle and has fewer resource requirements than LIDAR systems. We provide a comprehensive investigation and novel contributions in foreground recognition and extraction, image feature generation, and pose estimation. We evaluated $12$ image feature detector and descriptor performances and proposed a new biologically inspired image descriptor. We also assessed the bag of visual words codebook technique for object localisation and evaluated linear, non-linear and non-parametric classifiers. We tested the ResNet and Inception-ResNet convolutional neural networks on target localisation. We developed compact semantic segmentation autoencoders based on AlexNet, U-Net and VGG. We made several new contributions in the image saliency generation. First, we developed a novel principal component analysis based formula for graph manifold ranking Optimal Affinity Matrix inversion which reduces computation time and stabilises the ranking inversion process. We developed a novel weighted gradient orientation histogram feature for monochromatic image superpixel identification and provided three enhanced versions of the graph manifold ranking tested on $32,536$ images. Our technique out-performs the state-of-the-art saliency method in precision and our fastest method is $12{\times}$ faster than the original graph manifold ranking technique. We introduce an innovative false-coloured high-frequency salient feature image to enhance foreground and background pixel histogram distinction. We propose a novel space background classification scheme using pixel statistics to detect Earth passage. We evaluated appearance based pose matching using principal components analysis, SoftPOSIT and $e$P$n$P for pose estimation. We propose a novel homography transform projection method that simplifies the perspective-$n$-point correspondence. We introduce improvements to the SoftPOSIT initiation to reduce the effects of local minimum trapping using centroid matching. We developed region-based pose estimation using level-set segmentation and pixel statistics. Our tests show the region-based method out-performs the appearance-based and point-based methods in speed, precision and stability.


title: Fair and Efficient Resource Management in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments

abstract:
Cloud computing has become increasingly popular as it provides a cost-effective alternative to proprietary high-performance computing systems. As the workloads to data-centers housing cloud computing platforms are intensively growing, developing an efficient and fair resource allocation/scheduling mechanism which guarantees quality-of-service for different users has become increasingly important. Fair resource management (i.e. allocation or scheduling) in such a shared computing system is particularly challenging because of the following reasons: (a) the presence of multiple types of resources, (b) diversity in the users' resource demands, (c) heterogeneity of servers, and (d) placement constraints. On the other hand, efficiency may have different implications in a cloud environment depending on the underlying deployment (public vs private clouds). E.g., in a small-scale private cloud one may need to maximize resource efficiency (utilization). However in a large-scale public cloud (with substantially varying operational costs across different servers), one may need to minimize the operational costs at the same time in order to achieve an efficient resource allocation.
To address the above complexities, we fifirst consider a single-resource private setting wherein we study fair scheduling of users onto multiple heterogeneous servers in the presence of placement constraints. Next, we study efficient and fair allocation of multiple types of resources in an environment of heterogeneous servers in the presence of user placement constraints in private clouds. Towards this, we formulate the multi-resource allocation problem as a game among different servers, where each server strives to maximize a per-server objective, which governs resource efficiency and fairness at the same time. Such a server-based approach not only results in a fully distributed implementation but also is shown to satisfy several fairness-related properties which are generally deemed desirable. Finally, we study cost-efficient and fair allocation of resources which can be desirable for a public cloud service provider. Again, we follow a server-based approach wherein a local metric is used to allocate resources at each server. Here we propose two different ways to incorporate the impact of operational costs into the per-server objectives/metrics, each providing fairness in a different sense. In addition to analytical results, we also employ numerical experiments to show the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism in each case.


title: Communicating the EU in Europhile and Eurosceptic Spaces: An Examination of European Parliament Information Offices in the Republic of Ireland and Greece

abstract: This thesis examines the communication strategies of the European Parliament (EP) in member states through its information offices in EU capitals. To address the gap between public perceptions of the EP as a weak body and its real impact in EU decision-making, the ways in which it communicates itself to citizens through its offices is investigated. This is combined with an analysis of journalists' coverage of the EP and their cooperation with EP information offices. This examination is based on qualitative interviews with EP officials and journalists from Greece and Ireland. Despite the shared experiences of the two countries during the Eurozone crisis, they have diverged significantly socio-politically and in their attitudes to the EU. This thesis concludes that even though the mission of the EP is expressed quite similarly across both states a lot more specification and political will is necessary for an effective communication strategy to be established.


title: Children and Adults' Perception of Signal Colours, Symbols, and Words in the Context of Cybersecurity Warnings

abstract: Research has shown that online security warnings are frequently ignored or misinterpreted by even experienced adult users. Children may be particularly vulnerable because they are not always aware of the risks associated with online threats. Existing work relating to cybersecurity warnings has been done with adults and there are few recommendations for children. We explore this research gap through two user studies with 22 children aged 10-12 years old and with 22 adults. We compare children and adults' perception of warning design parameters (signal colours, symbols, and words) in the context of cybersecurity warnings. Our findings suggest that while there are many similarities in how both groups interpret the signal items, differences exist which should be taken into consideration when designing for children. We adapt existing warning design guidelines by Bauer et al. to provide recommendations for warnings that effectively communicate risk to children.


title: Making Modern Self Through White Marriage: Living Together Without Marriage in Tehran,  Iran

abstract: This dissertation uses the phenomenon of "white marriage" among young heterosexual middle class Iranian women and men, who choose to live together without religious and legal documentation, as the focus to provide a window into the transformation of intimacy in contemporary Iran within a globalized world. In addition to explaining theoretical approach and methodology, throughout the first couple of chapters, I contextualize white marriage as in deeper socio-historical layers in relation to freedom of choice. Based on interviews with individuals in white marriages as well as analyses of textual data, this dissertation examines how Iranian middle class women and men in white marriages understand this mode of intimate relationship within the context of Iran's marriage norms and the global dominance of western culture. By investigating the categorization of white marriage, and conceptualizations of commitment, fertility and relationships with extended family, this dissertation offers an account of the different motivations and desires bound up in the making of the modern self through white marriage. I argue that white marriage signifies that sexuality, gender and class are emerging as fault lines in contemporary Iranian society, with notions of intimacy, love, body and self-being constructed by Iranian middle class women and men in reaction to western culture and to marital norms in Iran. Iranians in white marriages formulate their desires and construct their subculture in relation to global cultural forces on the one hand and articulate their understanding of cultural marital norms in Iran on the other. However, media discussions about white marriage, reflected in textual data, demonstrated different understandings of the phenomenon. I have identified three phases in media discussions related to white marriage: the first is silence and denial; the second is a prohibitive approach with religious and moralistic approach and the third is a management approach concerned with health and population. Thus, a diverse set of organized interests come into play to settle the phenomenon of white marriage in a variety of ways.


title: Three Essays on the Survival Time of Firms and Their Growth

abstract:
The first essay in this dissertation uses US iron and steel shipbuilding data (1825-1914) used by Thompson (2005). It proposes a Two-Stage Discrete Finite Mixture hazard model to account for selection effect associated with a high first-year exit rate, and omitted variable bias associated with missing information such as a shipbuilder's pre-entry experience. In the first stage, the model uses a Probit model to explain the selection effect by employing both a firm's production share and production-selection component at the time of entry as exclusion restrictions. The results identify two latent classes as proxies for pre-entry experience used in the Weibull model by Thompson. The model is useful when important factors for new-firm survival, such as human capital, might be missing from databases.
The second essay examines whether starting with different types of bank credit has a heterogeneous effect on the future performance of small business in the Kauffman Firm Survey (2004-2011) (KFS). The analysis uses a structural equation model to account for endogeneity bias, entailing three interrelated equations: one for the firm's survival time, one for its start-up with a type of bank credit, and one for its revenue in 2007. To identify high-quality firms starting with business credit, the model employs three exclusion restrictions: a firm's entry share of tangible assets in its cohort; the entry-selection component of tangible assets, and per-capita state-level secured loans. The results reveal a positive endogenous treatment effect on a firm's future revenue when starting with business credit, and a negative one when starting with personal credit.
The third essay evaluates the direct effect of knowledge spillover on small businesses in the KFS. It investigates whether their entrepreneurs could transform abstract knowledge into economic knowledge. Knowledge spillover can take place when a firm directly collaborates with other institutions or firms. To identify the causality effect, the empirical analysis uses collaboration as a proxy for transformed knowledge. To improve identification, it implements a Combined Difference in Difference approach. The results indicate that firms teaming with other institutions outperform those without such treatment. Teaming induces higher growth in real revenue, employment size, and real wages.


title: The Application of Oligonucleotide Templated Chemical Reactions to DNA Aptamers

abstract:
The ability of an aptamer to catalyze a chemical reaction under selective conditions presents a novel avenue for the exploration of biosensors and molecular payload delivery. To date, limited research exists for pairing oligonucleotide-templated reactions with the selective nature of DNA aptamers. A system can be designed wherein the conformational change in aptamer structure associated with target binding brings two previously spatially isolated reactants into proximity, thereby catalyzing their reaction through an increase in effective molarity. A rationally designed aptamer-mediated SN2 displacement of a sulfonyl-based fluorescence-quencher resulted in an effective increase in fluorescence upon mixing of the aptamer with two appropriately modified complementary oligonucleotides. This increased fluorescence could be slowed by the presence of the aptamer target, permitting the development of an aptamer-based sensor for ochratoxin A with a linear dynamic range of 100 μM to 100 pM and a limit of detection of 1.5 pM.
Similar aptamer-based sensor systems were also developed that could take advantage of the fluorogenic copper catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloadditions between two labelled probes controlled by the aptamer target. This has been demonstrated using the thrombin structure switching aptamer to produce a linear response to thrombin between 100 nM and 10 pM with a limit of detection of 3.9 fM. These fluorogenic click modifiers were also incorporated directly into a structure switching thrombin aptamer such that the G-quadruplex formed upon thrombin binding brings the two modifiers into proximity. This constitutes a turn-on sensor for thrombin, with detection of thrombin between 1 μM and 1 nM possible.
As a final proof of concept, the fluorogenic azide and alkyne modifiers were incorporated on either side of a split aptamer for cocaine, such that the presence of cocaine will result in a detectable fluorescent signal from ligation of the split aptamer sequences. Using this system, a qualitative cocaine sensor in the range of 100 μM to 10 pM was established. This project has demonstrated the first steps towards controlling chemical reactions using DNA aptamers. Having demonstrated preliminary functionality through these applications, future applications in drug delivery, enhanced sensors, and selective chemical synthesis constitute intriguing new avenues in aptamer research.


title: Shielded from Public View: An Analysis of the Media’s Construction of Deaths in Canadian Custody

abstract: This study explores how the deaths of four incarcerated individuals are constructed by Canadian news media outlets. For this research, I conducted a multiple case study concerning the deaths of Edward Snowshoe, Kinew James, Matthew Hines and Adam Kargus, all of whom died while incarcerated in a provincial or federal facility in Canada. Rooted in a cultural criminology framework and, utilizing Brown's (2009) concept of penal spectatorship and Butler's (2004) concept of grievable life, I explore how the media presents the deaths of these individuals in ways that may confer or restrict grievability and how these representations may undermine or reinforce the legitimacy of the prison. The findings of this research suggest that while these narratives may present certain criticisms of the prison, they ultimately rely on a framework, which reinforces the necessity of the prison and subjugates other forms of critical knowledge.


title: Development of a Novel Pressure-Sensitive Mat Using Proximity Sensors

abstract: Pressure sensitive mats (PSM) have been widely used in research for measuring contact pressure. In the field of non-obtrusive patient monitoring, PSM have been used in a number of applications including finding the center of pressure for patients in different positions, monitoring heart and breathing rates of a patient laying on a bed, and monitoring and controlling the amount of time in which a patient remains in the same position, thus avoiding pressure ulcers. However, the cost of such devices remains high, and the deployment of PSMs in clinical practice is rare. This thesis presents the design of a new pressure sensitive mat technology using infrared proximity sensors and evaluates its performance relative to the state of the art. Results suggest that the novel PSM technology can be used in clinical settings for non-obtrusive patient monitoring, with advantages related to low cost, very low noise, and robust linearity of measurements.


title: Fouling Indices for Quantification of Natural Organic Matter Fouling and Cleaning in Ceramic and Polymeric Membrane Systems

abstract: A key challenge in membrane system is to understand how operating pressure and water temperature may impact fouling and subsequent cleaning in relationship to NOM. Further there is limited data to ascertain if ultrafiltration (UF) polymeric and ceramic systems will respond in similar or different manners to NOM fouling which then further impacts how respective systems need to be cleaned. This research investigated the application of the MFI-UF in complement with the UMFI for assessing NOM fouling and cleaning under changes in filtration conditions with both ceramic and polymeric membranes systems. The research showed that all NOM types exhibited higher MFI-UF values, and therefore, higher fouling propensity as pressure increased from 1 to 3 bars and water temperature decreased from 35°C to 5°C indicating the effect of pressure and temperature on the MFI-UF fouling prediction. The NOM fouling potential order was consistent at different temperature which was the highest for the NOM mixture and proteins (BSA) followed by alginate and lastly humic acid. Variation in feed water temperature in polymeric and ceramic membrane systems demonstrated negative impacts on NOM fouling and cleaning. NOM fouling increased as water temperature decreased from 20°C to 5°C while fouling decreased as temperature increased from 20°C to 35°C. The UMFI analysis showed that irreversible NOM fouling ratios increased at cold water condition (5 °C), along with decreased in backwash and chemical cleaning effectiveness of both membrane types. The UMFI results obtained in the polymeric and ceramic UF systems demonstrated useful fit with the MFI-UF prediction for establishing NOM fouling trend and order with temperature. Under an equivalent fouling and cleaning conditions, NOM fouling order of a ceramic UF membrane was found to be similar to their polymeric counterparts. However, the ceramic UF demonstrated better performance in terms of backwashing, thus, lower irreversible fouling. Chemical cleaning of a ceramic UF membrane using O3 CIP for 1 hour at a ratio of 0.50 mgO3/mgC demonstrated higher reduction of irreversible fouling of hydrophobic and hydrophilic NOM fractions and lower sensitivity to water quality conditions compared to 4 hours cleaning using combined NaOCl and NaOH CIP.