identifier: Mortezazadeh Dorostkar, Mohammad  (2019) CityFFD – City Fast Fluid Dynamics Model for Urban Microclimate Simulations.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In recent years, due to the rapid population growth and the preference to live in urban areas, urbanization has intensely increased. Currently, based on a United Nation report, 55% of the population live in the cities and the number is expected to reach about 68% by 2050. Urban microclimate has significant impacts on human life and health, and building energy performance. Urban microclimate information, such as wind velocity, temperature, humidity, pollutant dispersion levels, and local precipitation, are often important for accurate evaluations of building energy performance, indoor and outdoor human comfort, extreme events, and emergency situations. For example, it was reported that indoor temperature estimated with the microclimate information could be at least 5 °C different from that without it, which could be significant for the evaluations of indoor thermal comfort. The study of urban microclimate includes both observational and numerical approaches. The observational study is often related to field measurements, satellite imagery, and laboratory tests, e.g. in wind tunnels. The numerical approach is often based on computer models, such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics), for high-resolution and relatively small computing domains, compared to larger scale regional climate models, such as WRF and GEM-SURF. The latter two models are mostly used to model the domain size of 1~10 km with the resolution more than 100 m so they are not developed for urban microclimate and building-level simulations. In comparison, CFD has been applied to the urban microclimate of less than 1 km with a resolution less than 10 m down to the building level. However, conventional CFD solvers often perform unsatisfactorily for microscale and complicated problems because of numerical constraints such as stability issues associated with CFL condition, which is a necessary condition for convergence while solving certain partial differential equations (usually hyperbolic PDEs) numerically. Thus, conventional tools are often computationally expensive for modeling microclimates and consequently impractical for urban-scale problems. Recently, there are an increasing amount of efforts focusing on developing faster and accurate CFD techniques such as based on Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) methods. A FFD method relies on semi-Lagrangian and fractional step methods. FFD methods is fundamentally an explicit method without the CFL constraint so it is unconditionally stable even under large time steps and coarse grid resolutions, which are common for urban microclimate problems. In the meantime, the conventional FFD methods are often dependent on low-order interpolation schemes and thus with high numerical errors, which are the main drawbacks of this approach.
The main objective of this thesis is to develop a fast and accurate CFD solver with a series of new computing algorithms based on semi-Lagrangian approach for modeling urban/city scale microclimates. The new solver with the name of CityFFD (city Fast Fluid Dynamics), is designed for tackling the challenges of large domain, coarse grid, and/or large time step, which are typical for urban microclimate simulations, without a heavy reliance on computer resources, such as the possibility of running on personal computers. First, a novel high-order interpolation scheme is proposed to significantly reduce the numerical errors of conventional semi-Lagrangian solvers. The new interpolation scheme enables the possibility of obtaining fast and accurate results even on coarse grids. The second algorithm focuses on the simulation accuracy associated with the time step of the semi-Lagrangian method. A new scheme of an adaptive time step is developed to adjust the time step dynamically according to local truncation errors. To improve the estimation of the characteristic curves, a new algorithm is proposed by considering the acceleration of the flow particles inside the computational domain which can provide highly accurate results and capture the complicated flow fields even by using a large time step. The fourth algorithm is to speed up the simulation by eliminating the need for solving the Poisson equation, which is often the most time-consuming operation of conventional semi-Lagrangian models. The new scheme is based on the concept of the artificial compressibility of solving incompressible flows and makes it easier to implement parallel computing techniques, such as the NVIDIA GPU CUDA and the OpenMP. The last feature of CityFFD is adding Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model to capture the turbulence behavior of the flow in urban environments. In this section, a parallel OpenMP geometry reader is developed to read the city scale geometries in a fast manner. At the end, the proposed CityFFD model is demonstrated by a case study: the modeling of an extreme weather event, the snow-storm of the century in Montreal, for evaluating building resilience during the storm, to show the importance of urban microclimate and its impact on human health and indoor environment.


identifier: Li, Lin  (2019) Calculation of two-dimensional pulse electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) signals using Stochastic Liouville equation and application to a system of coupled electron spin ½ and nuclear spin ½ in a malonic acid crystal.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

type: Thesis NonPeerReviewed

abstract:
This dissertation is devoted to the subject of computations for pulse EPR by solving the Liouville von Neumann equation in Liouville space in the presence of relaxation, providing a comprehensive theoretical treatment, including a detailed description of relaxation processes.
The algorithm is illustrated here to simulate SECSY and echo-ELDOR signals for an electron-nuclear spin coupled system (electron spin S=1/2; nuclear spin I=1/2) in an irradiated malonic-acid crystal, taking into account spin-phonon modulation. The simulated results so obtained are compared with the experimental results of Lee et al. (1993). The experimental and simulated spectra are found to be in reasonably good agreement.
In addition, the developed algorithm is used to simulate the spectra for a specific case of the electron-electron dipolar interaction of two nitroxide radicals, each with electron spin S=1/2, nuclear spin I=1/2, for a proposed experiment, intended for distance measurements. The Pake doublets in the Fourier transform of both the signals calculated with and without relaxation correctly indicate the spacing of 10 MHz of dipolar coupling as assumed in the simulation.
This algorithm is also extended to calculate the effect of relaxation due to fluctuation of spin-Hamiltonian parameters by phonon modulation (Freed and Fraenkel, 1963; Slichter, 2013). From a comparison of the Figures showing the simulated SECSY and echo-ELDOR signals for an electron-nuclear spin-coupled system (S = I = ½) in an irradiated malonic acid crystal as calculated for  τ_c=〖10〗^(-5),〖10〗^(-6),〖10〗^(-7) and  the fluctuation ∆(SHP)=〖10〗^ %,1%,0.1% of their static values as fitting parameters  with the experimental results of Lee et al. (1993), it is seen that for the two cases considered (SECSY and echo-ELDOR) the best agreement is obtained for the following ranges: τ_c=〖10〗^(-6) s - 〖10〗^(-7) s and ∆(SHP)=0.1 % - 1.0 %. The value of τ_c~〖10〗^(-7) s as calculated by Freed (1965) is found to be in the range of values found here that provide a good agreement of the calculated spectra with the experimental ones. In the light of these observations, it appears that the fluctuation model considered here, may indeed be refined further to reproduce the simulations to be in satisfactory agreement with the experiment.


identifier: Lederhendler, Lucie C. E.  (2019) Of Ice Shields, Oceans, and Train Yards: Research-creation towards mythological contact with a feral terrain.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This artistic research project is a speculative account that reflects on the artist-as-witness to the de-enchantments and re-enchantments of a feral terrain in post-industrial Montreal, Canada. Taking advantage of the confluence of this research and a renewal in the city's interest in the site, called the Falaise Saint-Jacques, the project calls into question the stark binaries that the idea of a separate "nature" implies. It builds on the work of art educators and academics who have resisted the siloing of art, focusing on the merging of public policy and place histories into an environmental art project. Content provided by implicated community members, the author's own experience, and scholarly and archival research coalesce into mythologies, articulated through visual arts. Artworks, used in this way, act as filters through which the viewer's understanding of geological scale may be shaped, translating the stories of millennia into decades, years, or moments. Finally, following from Indigenous Canadian knowledge, this research aims to model how mythologies that foreground connections to the land may offer a literal framework for seeing and relating to urban forms of nature. A field guide and zoetrope installations function as an analogue augmented reality machine that superimposes geological and mythological time onto the immediate present, literally and figuratively animating the landscape for the viewer, and creating a space for a mythological contact that introduces different, even opposing, conceptions of time to one another.

Keywords: Research creation, Anthropocene, deep time, urban nature, environmental art, mythology, zoetrope, fieldwork


identifier: Zhang, Ya  (2019) The Relationship Between CFO Characteristics and Firm Performance.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This paper focuses on the relationship between Chief Financial Officers’ (CFO) characteristics and firm performance. Using a sample of S&P 500 firms, the evidence found suggests that the demographic and experience-related characteristics of CFOs as well as their compensation can be associated with their firms’ market valuation, profitability and risk level. The reported results indicate a negative relationship between the presence of female and firm valuation as well as profitability. Firms with an experienced CFO tend to have better performance and lower risk levels. CFOs with a master or higher educational degrees seem to have better risk management skills than their counterparts. Interestingly, some limited evidence indicates a negative relation between the CFO’s age and firm performance. In addition, being a CFO with a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) designation has not been found to significantly affect firm performance.


identifier: Zhi, Han  (2019) Hedging decreases in temperature: a comparison of the hedging effectiveness of frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ), natural gas and heating degree days (HDD) futures contracts.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Weather is an important fundamental factor which affects almost every sector of the economy. Previous research on the effect of weather focused on temperature effects and the use of weather derivatives to hedge. This thesis provides an alternative view on hedging against decreases in temperature by comparing the hedging effectiveness of futures contracts on commodities whose prices are influenced by temperature, which are the frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ) and natural gas futures contracts, to that of a futures contract designed to hedge decreases in temperature, which is the heating degree days (HDD) futures contract. The results indicate that the HDD futures contract performs better than the FCOJ and natural gas futures contracts, in hedging against decreases in temperature in Orlando.


identifier: Zhang, Chen  (2019) Margin-setting by Central Counterparties of over-the-counter derivatives.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Regulation of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market since the financial crisis of 2008 has had the objective of reducing risks within this marketplace. OTC derivatives are now cleared through central clearing counterparties (CCPs), and one tool of the CCPs is to set adequate margin requirements for their clearing members. In this thesis, I address the obligations of CCPs and the effect of risk management using margin requirements. I develop the methodology of margin setting using a historical simulation and evaluate the resulting risk-based margin requirements for interest rate swaps. I also address an important aspect of margin-setting which is margin procyclicality, under which margin requirements are increased in stressed markets resulting in an increased risk of default on margin calls as well as feedback effects on the underlying assets of clearing members.


identifier: Mohammadrezakhani, Sajad  (2019) A systematic approach to evaluate energy behavior in residential buildings based on mining occupants’ behavioral data.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In this study, a new data mining-based methodology is developed to evaluate energy-related behavior of occupants in residential buildings.
In sections 3.1 and 3.2 Occupant Activity Indicator (OAI) and Residential Energy Intensity Indicator (REII) are introduced as two new definitions which are used in this study. The proposed methodology to evaluate the energy-related behavior of the buildings’ residents is based on the difference between the target REII and actual REII. The dissimilarity, which is found between the target and the actual REII, can be used to calculate the potential energy wastage/saving by occupants in different zones and different times in the building.
The practicality of the proposed data mining framework is tested by applying it to a one-year dataset collected in a three-bedroom apartment in Lyon, France. The methodology applied to all zones of the apartment to evaluate the occupants’ energy-related behavior in different zones. As a result, the time and location for potential energy savings by occupants is identified.
The obtained results show that occupants need to be more cautious about their energy consumption in zones 2 and 3 of the apartment. Moreover, the possible energy-wastage behavior in zones 1 and 4 is less than zones 2 and 3, even though the contribution of zone 4 to the energy consumption is significantly higher than the other zones. Besides, by the developed methodology location and time for the best and the worst energy-related behavior by the building's occupants are defined. Furthermore, the variations of occupants' energy-related behavior in the apartment, are identified by time of day, day of week, and months.
Employing the proposed methodology is beneficial for buildings’ occupants to raise their awareness regarding energy consumption. Also, it gives the decision-makers a practical insight into the system behavior, enabling them to create incentives/charges for residential buildings’ inhabitants to modify their energy-related behavior.


identifier: Cecchi, Matteo  (2019) The effect of foreign institutional investors on corporate governance: evidence from Chinese publicly listed firms.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Compared to the astonishing growth of the Chinese economy in the last 40 years, the development of its capital markets has been lagging behind. Now that the economic system is transforming from an export-based and investment-driven model to a consumption-based and innovation-driven one, an efficient stock market has never been more relevant. To promote the development of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has implemented a range of new policies in the last decade. One of these policies aims at increasing the presence of foreign institutional investors. The objective of this thesis is therefore to analyse if the new influx of foreign investors have performed a monitoring role and improved firm-level corporate governance structures. More specifically, we hypothesise that larger and long-term foreign institutional investments drive corporate governance improvements. We have collected an extensive foreign ownership database and used multiple metrics to measure firm-level corporate governance. Namely, we use a corporate governance index, a transparency disclosure rating, and individual corporate governance attributes. In order to alleviate endogeneity concerns, we performed a variety of empirical tests, such as analysing the effect of lagged, significant changes in foreign ownership on the level of corporate governance. We indeed found that foreign institutional investors have enhanced the development of corporate governance mechanisms in Chinese publicly listed firms. Therefore, our results indicate that further relaxations in foreign ownership restrictions will hasten the development of the Chinese capital markets.


identifier: Chiovitti, Sophia  (2019) The Role of Attractive Employers and Perceived Organizational Support on Employee Motivation and Engagement.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The functions of an employer brand are to attract and retain employees. Previous research on incumbent employees has typically focused on commitment related variables; therefore, it remains unclear whether working for an attractive employer motivates incumbent employees to engage in their work. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the process in which organizational attractiveness leads to employee engagement. Drawing from both signaling and self-determination theory, this study proposes that organizational attractiveness will lead to employee engagement through autonomous motivation. It is also proposed that this relationship would be dependent upon whether the incumbent employee experiences perceived organizational support. Employees (n = 220) from various firms across North America were recruited and surveyed online at two time points. Organizational attractiveness and its dimensions positively predicted employee engagement and autonomous motivation. It was also found that autonomous motivation mediates the influence of organizational attractiveness on employee engagement; whereas the effect appears to be moderated by perceived organizational support. Results showed support for the mediation-moderation model. However, different patterns emerged for the moderating effect of perceived organizational support. It is concluded that brand value dimensions along with organizational support interact to motivate incumbent employees to engage in their work. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.


identifier: Wu, Xiu  (2019) Measuring the Perceived Boundary between Consumers and Brands.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This study develops and validates a measure that captures the perceived psychological boundary between consumers and brands, which is defined as consumers’ perceived demarcation between themselves and a brand. This construct captures both consumers’ separateness from and relatedness to a brand. A seven-point Venn diagram, which has been proved effective and valid in interpersonal relationship and other self-expansion studies, is applied to measure consumers’ perceived boundary with various brands. The reliability and validity of the boundary measure are assessed with 44 brands. This study finds that consumers’ boundary with brands is significantly correlated with brand-related consumer responses. The discriminant validity and convergent validity between the boundary and self-brand connection, self-brand attachment, and BESC scales are validated. Masculinity incongruence and femininity incongruence between consumers and brands are shown to have a significantly negative relationship with boundary, thus supporting the concurrent validity. In a nomological network, a significant mediation effect of boundary on the relationship between brand-consumer gender identity incongruence and brand-related consumer responses is observed.


identifier: McAskill, Ashley  (2019) The Atypique Approach: Disability Aesthetics and Theatre-Making in Montréal, Québec and Vancouver, British Columbia.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Although there is literature on disability and theatre across central and western Canada, very little scholarly work has been done on Québec. This dissertation explores how theatre companies and programs working with disabled artists in Vancouver and Montréal are changing perspectives of disability and theatre making. Whereas other scholarly work within Canadian contexts has focused on the histories and professional survival of said companies and programs, I will theorize on how they are changing new aesthetic standards and practices for the performing arts. My research uses intensive fieldwork with three case studies- Theatre Terrific (Vancouver, British Columbia), the performance training program Les Muses (Montréal, Québec), and Les Production des pieds des mains (Montréal, Québec). Through my participant observation and ethnographic research of their classes, workshops, and rehearsals, followed with interviews with participating artists and artistic directors, I theorize on how disability is approached and creatively used as a generative tool by my participants. My research explores the personal and ethical complexity of this kind of community fieldwork, and the centrality of the personal relationships I built with my participants. I theorize on the aesthetic politics and practices that emerge from my participants within Anglophone and Francophone cultural contexts. For my Montréal participants, I situate their work within what I call an atypique approach whereby disabled artists and non-normative bodies are artistically privileged and meaningfully socially integrated. I also explore how slowness is used as a way to pedagogically move away from valuing one temporal pace of learning and artistically creating. I then bring slowness and the atypique approach into dialogue with my concept of tenderness- a term I use to articulate how performance and human encounters deformalize static ways of understanding the world. My participants break through the molds of ableism whereby their creative work is still often perceived through medical lenses of being art therapy or overcoming their challenges. Using critical disability studies and community performance studies to frame my arguments, my research extends how disability is a complex lens of how to move in the world that opposes normative standards of time and space. This dissertation lends new language, aesthetic theorization, and pedagogical understanding to disability theatre in Canada.


identifier: McLeod, Dayna  (2019) Ageing Queer Embodiment, Audiences, and Empathy: “Intimate Karaoke” and The Material Conditions of Uterine Concert Hall.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
My research-creation dissertation asks how performance-based practices impact, affect, and intersect with a gendered, middle-ageing, queer body, how that body provokes, enacts, and personifies, and ultimately how the body is at stake in cisheteropatriarchy. I address representational and material concerns about identity and the status of the queer middle-ageing female body; intersubjective and performative concerns with materiality, practice, and collaboration; audience reception and participation; and my embodied method of performance as research. I do this by examining how I use my body in the sound-based, interactive performance installation Uterine Concert Hall (UCH). I track the development of UCH through its multiple iterations, and the knowledge that was generated through hands-on research and performance, knowledge which would not have been possible through non-practice-based methods. I examine how I use my body within this work as a representational concept and as a material object and observe the effects of particular representational strategies on the audience. I also consider age as it factors into modes of representation as well as how age contributes to the work’s aesthetic production.
My thesis addresses a lack of critical engagement with what middle-ageing female bodies mean, how they are represented, and how they are valued in performance art studies and mainstream pop culture. I put UCH in conversation with other artists who use performance-based methods and explicit body practices in their artwork. The goal of this research is to study explicit body performance-based practices and artworks against the backdrop of normative mainstream culture, where the value of female bodies to seduce and reproduce is predicated on youthfulness. Research-creation methodologies that were developed in this dissertation include: “intimate karaoke” as a method of achieving empathy between audience members and between audiences and myself as performer; queer sociality as an affective method of engagement and embodiment to circulate intimacies, vulnerabilities, and empathies through consent; and performative strategies to de-centre essentialist renderings of gender and expectations of what people with uteri are to do under cisheteropatriarchy. How I developed a methodology to perform and stage my body in this work relies on my performance-based experience, which I address throughout my dissertation.


identifier: McClelland, Alexander  (2019) Living in a Negative Relation to the Law: Legal Violence and the Lives of People Criminally Charged Due to HIV in Canada.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This dissertation examines the lived experiences of people in Canada who have been criminalized due to allegedly not telling their sex partners that they were HIV-positive. Canada is known as a leading country in the world for punitively criminalizing alleged HIV non-disclosure, exposure, and transmission. This dissertation is the first known qualitative study to centrally focus on the lives of HIV-positive criminalized people and is based on 27 interviews with 16 different people from across Canada who have been charged, prosecuted or threatened with charges for alleged HIV non-disclosure. I mobilize a critical ethnographic approach, or what I call a criminology of the criminalized, one focused from the perspectives of criminalized people, that is grounded in the trajectories of critical social science and institutional ethnography. This approach to research becomes focused on denaturalizing the violence faced by criminalized people and calling attention towards forms of avoidable suffering that they face. When someone is criminalized, their legally safeguarded personhood is deconstituted under the law, they become socially and civilly dead, and can then become subject to forms of intense violence and surveillance. This is a life lived in a negative relation to the law. The outcome of this unique critical ethnography details how a complex intersecting array of legal tools (criminal laws and public health laws), as well as a range of institutions (police, public health, criminal justice, and the media) work to circumscribe the lives of the criminalized. People also come to be the subject of intense forms of violence by state institutions or various actors in their communities. This research moves beyond mere description and addresses the ethical function of such research to act as a form of bearing witness to these forms of violence, suffering, and surveillance faced by criminalized people. The results help render these experiences of violence unacceptable, acknowledging that society is open to change. This critical ethnography is one that seeks justice where no justice had been done, and contributes towards helping realize a life of flourishing for people subject to unjust forms of criminalization.


identifier: Lagum, Abdelmajeed Adam  (2019) A Novel Hybrid MEBR/ANAMMOX Based System to Remove Nutrient and Organic Matter at Various Temperatures.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The conventional wastewater treatment processes in cold–climate regions are not adequately effective; they experience moderate seasonal removal of pollutants, if any, since biological and chemical treatment processes are severely affected by low temperatures. Biomass responsible for the transformation of nitrogen species are usually washed‐out as a result of low-temperature impacts. Chemical processes during low temperatures increase dosage of coagulants, leading ultimately to a substantial increase of operational costs. To overcome these problems, a membrane electro–bioreactor (MEBR) was coupled with an anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) process in this research to improve treatment facilities in cold weather. The main objective of this study is to design and investigate a MEBR/anammox considering variety of temperatures. To achieve the research objective, three research phases were proposed, which included an optimization of operation electrical and biological processes. Furthermore, the characterization of a microbial community structure and bio–stimulation were investigated at temperatures between 8 and 22 oC.
The first phase of this study revealed that the application of DC field to a series of batch tests permitted to define relationships among different current density, temperature variation and microbial growth, phosphorus removal and sludge quality. Tests in Phase II considered a design of an anammox side-stream device enhanced with the submerged electrodes and DC power supply, where rapid anammox biomass enrichment with adequate ammonium removal was achieved. Generated outcomes have been reapplied to continuous flow MEBR/anammox in order to achieve carbon and nutrient removal at a superior level independently on temperature.
 The addition of low direct current (DC) and anammox process inside the MBR in the third-phase study, realizing an anammox membrane electro-bioreactor (MEBR/anammox), increases the effectiveness of the treatment system, improves sludge characteristics and reduces membrane fouling at low-temperature environments compared to conventional treatment systems. At lower operating temperatures, the removal efficiencies of ammonium, total nitrogen, phosphorus and COD in the MEBR-anammox were 94.46%, 88.62%, 95.60% and 90.76%, respectively. The new MEBR/anammox system showed superiority over conventional MBR in terms of membrane fouling, sludge filterability and settleability by 32%, 14.36% and 19.67%, respectively. At lower temperatures, the sludge volume index (SVI) reduced from 362 to 117 mL/g, while time-to-filter (TTF) decreased from 18.2 to 7.3 min. MEBR/anammox system substantially enhanced sludge flocculation, where zeta potential changed from -32 to -12.7 mV. This high performance of the MEBR/anammox system was attributed to the synergistic effects between biological, electrochemical and membrane filtration processes, where COD was removed through biomass oxidation and flocculation, while phosphorous was removed by electrocoagulation process and phosphorus accumulating organisms (PAOs) growth. TN removal was mainly due to the growth of all diverse types of nitrogen-removing bacteria, where a novel MEBR/anammox system allowed to develop simultaneous nitrification, anammox and denitrification (SNAD) processes in the same reactor.


identifier: Davies, Meghan  (2019) Optimization of de novo 10-hydroxygeraniol production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Monoterpenes and their indole alkaloid derivates are plant secondary metabolites valuable to the pharmaceutical and industrial sectors for their bioactivities in humans, cats and insects. The biosynthetic pathway to strictosidine, the central monoterpene indole alkaloid scaffold, proceeds via an industrially relevant intermediate – nepetalactol. The oxidized counterpart of this monoterpene, nepetalactone, is known for its euphoric influence on cats but is also a potent insect repellent. Unfortunately, low in planta levels of these metabolites have resulted in high production costs and environmentally unfeasible cultivation strategies for an industrial product with mass market appeal. Engineering a high-producing nepetalactol or strictosidine yeast would benefit several commercial sectors, however recent studies attempting de novo strictosidine in S. cerevisiae only achieved trace titers (0.5 mg/L). Activity of geraniol-10-hydroxylase, a cytochrome P450, was an identified bottleneck in nepetalactol/strictosidine production. This thesis presents the application of a combination of strategies aimed at overcoming the geraniol-10-hydroxylase bottleneck and improving titres of 10-hydroxygeraniol. Geraniol-10-hydroxylase and cytochrome P450 reductase variants were explored to increase enzyme efficiency, wherein several reductases were shown to beneficially influence hydroxylation activity.  We further demonstrated that a cytochrome P450-reductase fusion increased carbon flux towards 10-hydroxygeraniol by 1.7-fold. Accumulation of a heterologous metabolite, putatively identified as isopulegol, was observed, implying inefficient channeling of carbon into the heterologous pathway. Deletion of two native reductases, oye2 and oye3, resulted in a 4.6-fold increase in carbon channeled to 10-hydroxygeraniol, resulting in a final accumulation of 144 mg/L of 10-hydroxygeraniol. These pathway optimization steps will aid in the development of high yielding monoterpene S. cerevisiae strains.


identifier: Beg, Mohammad Akif  (2019) Generating Embroidery Patterns using Imag-to-Image Translation.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
In many scenarios in computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics, there is a requirement to learn the mapping from an image of one domain to an image of
another domain, called Image-to-image translation. For example, style transfer, object transfiguration, visually altering the appearance of weather conditions in an image, changing the appearance of a day image into a night image or vice versa, photo enhancement, to name a few. In this paper, we propose two machine learning techniques to solve the embroidery image-to-image translation. Our goal is to generate a preview image which looks similar to an embroidered image, from a user-uploaded image. Our techniques are modifications of two existing techniques, neural style transfer, and cycle-consistent generative-adversarial network. Neural style transfer renders the semantic content of an image from one domain in the style of a different image in another domain, whereas a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network learns the mapping from an input image to output image without any paired training data,
and also learn a loss function to train this mapping. Furthermore, the techniques we propose are independent of any embroidery attributes, such as elevation of the
image, light-source, start, and endpoints of a stitch, type of stitch used, fabric type, etc. Given the user image, our techniques can generate a preview image which looks
similar to an embroidered image. We train and test our propose techniques on an embroidery dataset which consists of simple 2D images. To do so, we prepare an
unpaired embroidery dataset with more than 8000 user uploaded images along with embroidered images. Empirical results show that these techniques successfully generate an approximate preview of an embroidered version of a user image, which can
help users in decision making.


identifier: Saini, Himani  (2019) Detecting fashion apparels and their landmarks.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Fashion landmarks are the functional key-points on the apparels that can be used for a more discriminative visual analysis of the apparel images. Such a framework can facilitate apparel alignment in displaying apparel images on the websites or help build a system to ensure dress code in a particular environment. However, challenges such as background clutter, human poses, scales and apparel variation can render such a task difficult. We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for apparels’ landmark detection that can be simultaneously used for apparel classification and localization. In addition to the position of the landmarks in the apparels, we also classify the landmarks as visible or occluded in the same framework. The fashion landmark detection task is similar to joint localization and detection problems like human pose estimation, hence our approach extends stacked hourglass architecture, originally proposed to solve human pose estimation. We perform all these tasks in parallel using multi-task learning. Our proposed convolutional neural network is end-to-end differentiable and simple to train, since all these tasks are performed on the same architecture without any additional parameters to learn. Over the past few years, many modifications have been proposed to improve this architecture. We also compare the performances of some of these different variations of stacked hourglass architectures. These architectures leverage both global and local features captured by the deep convolutional neural networks to better localize the apparel in the image as well as the landmarks in those apparels. We test and analyze our results on DeepFashion dataset. We also weigh the trade-offs of the detecting the landmarks in a category-aware environment, i.e., pre-classified apparels and category-agnostic environment, i.e., unclassified apparels.


identifier: Ernest dit Alban, Edmond  (2019) Le recyclage comme moteur de la fabrique de l’espace social (et piéton) du sanctuaire féminin otaku d’Otome-Road à Ikebukuro, Tokyo.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: La culture populaire japonaise otaku tend à être étudiée à travers ses attributs visuels issus du manga, des séries d’animé, ou du jeu vidéo. Ce travail entreprend d’étendre les champs disciplinaires environnant la production des cultures de fans au Japon vers la question de la fabrique d’un espace quotidien de circulation d’images, médias et piétons. Aujourd’hui devenus partie intégrante du paysage nippon, les sanctuaires otaku (quartiers spécialisés) nous servent de base pour reconceptualiser les théories et méthodes d’approche des sous-cultures d’un point de vue piéton : nous analysons depuis les rues du sanctuaire d’Otome-Road à Ikebukuro, (Tokyo) un ensemble de pratiques, imaginaires et structures de l’espace social fondé sur le recyclage (réutilisation, ou réappropriation) des images. Les piétonnes nous apprennent que le moteur de la production culturelle otaku est aussi celui de la fabrication d’un nombre croissant de territoires où des groupes infra-politiques peuvent se faire entendre de l’industrie des loisirs et des autorités étatiques. À la fois symptôme de la conquête réelle de l’espace local, régional puis national japonais par la circulation otaku et opportunité intellectuelle de découvrir les enjeux spatiaux des cultures contemporaines, le cas otaku nous invite à envisager un cadre théorique et méthodologique qui rend ses territoires et sa mobilité aux mouvements socioculturels actuels. Nous explorerons la construction de la trivialité du quotidien otaku comme un ensemble de dialectiques négociant la visibilité de groupes minoritaires féminins utilisant divers registres de mobilité pour donner corps, vie et espace à leur agentivité sociale.


identifier: Mihov, Brian  (2019) Student-Centered Learning in Undergraduate Level Science Post-Secondary Education and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: This meta-analysis assesses the overall impact on undergraduate level science post-secondary student achievement outcomes of instructional environments that are more student-centered versus less student-centered (more teacher-centered). It also considers in which of four instructional events (dimensions) – Pacing, Teacher’s Role, Flexibility and Adaptation – the application of more student-centered pedagogy is more optimal for increasing student achievement outcomes, as well as considers the strength of student-centered pedagogy in each of these four instructional dimensions. Additionally, this meta-analysis considers the impact of a set of instructional and demographic moderator variables – technology use, subject matter, and treatment group class size – on student achievement. Out of an initial pool of 9759 abstracts, 96 full-text sources were chosen for analysis, yielding 141 independent effect sizes. The random effects model weighted average effect size was   = 0.34, k = 141, SE = 0.04, z = 8.58, p < .001, suggesting that on average more student-centered classroom studies produce better results on achievement outcomes than do less student-centered classroom studies. However, the non-significant meta-regression result (p = 0.40) compromises the strength of this conclusion. Of the four instructional dimensions, based on simple meta-regression, only Flexibility produced a significant (negative) relationship ( = -0.09, p ≤ .05). Mixed moderator variable analysis yielded the subject matter of chemistry ( = 0.23, p = 0.03) as the best predictor of effect size; studies in which both groups used technology had a significantly lower average effect size ( = -0.18, p = 0.04) than the reference group of studies in which both groups did not use technology; and in studies in which the treatment group used technology and the control group did not, the result was not significantly different from studies in which both groups did not use technology ( = 0.07, p = 0.53). Recommendations include attending to more nuanced moderator variables when introducing student-centered strategies.


identifier: Baskharon, Mariam  (2019) Numerical Modeling for Shallow Foundation near Slope.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Often developers build luxury buildings near shores, where foundations are built in or near slopes. Designers in this case face not only the determination of the bearing capacity and the settlement of the foundation but also the stability of a system made of foundation and slope. Design of foundation under these conditions is complex and the studies available in this regard are limited and concerned mostly about determination of the reduction of the bearing capacity coefficients associated with the presence of the slope except for Meyerhof who was a pioneer in developing a theory in 1957 to determine the ultimate bearing capacity of a foundation near a slope. However, the theory was independent of the slope inclination.

This thesis presents a numerical model using finite element technique together with RS2 9.0 software to simulate the case of a foundation near a slope, in terms of examining the bearing capacity of the foundation for given slope features, soil characteristics and geometry conditions and extends to determine the distance required to achieve reasonable factor of safety.

It’s found that the theory of Meyerhof, 1957 has underestimated the effect of the distance to the slope which the bearing capacity is independent of the inclination of the slope. Design guidelines and design charts are presented for practicing purposes.


identifier: Ma, Shuai  (2019) State-Augmentation Transformations for Risk-Sensitive Markov Decision Processes.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a mathematical framework for modeling sequential decision making (SDM) where system evolution and reward are partly under the control of a decision maker and partly random. MDPs have been widely adopted in numerous fields, such as finance, robotics, manufacturing, and control systems. For stochastic control problems, MDPs serve as the underlying models in dynamic programming and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.

In this thesis, we study risk estimation in MDPs, where the variability of random rewards is taken into account. First, we categorize the reward into four classes: deterministic/stochastic and state-/transition-based. Though numerous of theoretical methods are designed for MDPs or Markov processes with a deterministic (and state-based) reward, many practical problems are naturally modeled by processes with stochastic (and transition-based) reward. When the optimality criterion refers to the risk-neutral expectation of a (discount) total reward, we can use a model (reward) simplification to bridge the gap. However, when the criterion is risk-sensitive, a model simplification will change the risk value. For preserving the risks, we address that most, if not all, the inherent risk measures depend on the reward sequence (Rt). In order to bridge the gap between theoretical methods and practical problems with respect to risk-sensitive criteria, we propose a state-augmentation transformation (SAT). Four cases are thoroughly studied in which different forms of SAT should be implemented for risk preservation. In numerical experiments, we compare the results from the model simplifications and the SAT, and illustrate that, i). the model simplifications change (Rt) as well as return (or total reward) distributions; and ii). the proposed SAT transforms processes with complicated rewards, such as stochastic and transition-based rewards, into ones with deterministic state-based rewards, with intact (Rt).

Second, we consider constrained risk-sensitive SDM problems in dynamic environments. Unlike other studies, we simultaneously consider the three factors—constraint, risk, and dynamic environment. We propose a scheme to generate a synthetic dataset for training an approximator. The reasons for not using historical data are two-fold. The first reason refers to information incompleteness. Historical data usually contains no information on criterion parameters (which risk objective and constraint(s) are concerned) and (or) the optimal policy (usually just an action for each item of data), and in many cases, even the information on environmental parameters (such as all involved costs) is incomplete. The second reason is about optimality. The decision makers might prefer an easy-to-use policy than an optimal one, which is hard to determine whether the preferred policy is optimal (such as an EOQ policy), since the practical problems could be different from the theoretical model diversely and subtly. Therefore, we propose to evaluate or estimate risk measures with RL methods and train an approximator, such as neural network, with a synthetic dataset. A numerical experiment validates the proposed scheme.

The contributions of this study are three-fold. First, for risk evaluation in different cases, we propose the SAT theorem and corollaries to enable theoretical methods to solve practical problems with a preserved (Rt). Second, we estimate three risk measures with return variance as examples to illustrate the difference between the results from the SAT and the model simplification. Third, we present a scheme for constrained, risk-sensitive SDM problems in a dynamic environment with an inventory control example.


identifier: Chraiti, Mohaned ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8846-2087 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8846-2087>  (2019) Enabling Technologies for 5G and Beyond: Bridging the Gap between Vision and Reality.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
It is common knowledge that the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks will come with drastic transformation in the cellular systems capabilities and will redefine mobile services. 5G (and beyond) systems will be used for human interaction, in addition to person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications, i.e., every-thing is connected to every-thing. These features will open a whole line of new business opportunities and contribute to the development of the society in many different ways, including developing and building smart cities, enhancing remote health care services, to name a few. However, such services come with an unprecedented growth of mobile traffic, which will lead to heavy challenges and requirements that have not been experienced before. Indeed, the new generations of cellular systems are required to support ultra-low latency services (less than one millisecond), and provide hundred times more data rate and connectivity, all compared to previous generations such as 4G. Moreover, they are expected to be highly secure due to the sensitivity of the transmitted information.

Researchers from both academia and industry have been concerting significant efforts to develop new technologies that aim at enabling the new generation of cellular systems (5G and beyond) to realize their potential. Much emphasis has been put on finding new technologies that enhance the radio access network (RAN) capabilities as RAN is considered to be the bottleneck of cellular networks. Striking a balance between performance and cost has been at the center of the efforts that led to the newly developed technologies, which include non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), millimeter wave (mmWave) technology, self-organizing network (SON) and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Moreover, physical layer security (PLS) has been praised for being a potential candidate for enforcing transmission security when combined with cryptography techniques.

Although the main concepts of the aforementioned RAN key enabling technologies have been well defined, there are discrepancies between their intended (i.e., vision) performance and the achieved one. In fact, there is still much to do to bridge the gap between what has been promised by such technologies in terms of performance and what they might be able to achieve in real-life scenarios. This motivates us to identify the main reasons behind the aforementioned gaps and try to find ways to reduce such gaps. We first focus on NOMA where the main drawback of existing solutions is related to their poor performance in terms of spectral efficiency and connectivity. Another major drawback of existing NOMA solutions is that transmission rate per user decreases slightly with the number of users, which is a serious issue since future networks are expected to provide high connectivity. To this end, we develop NOMA solutions that could provide three times the achievable rate of existing solutions while maintaining a constant transmission rate per user regardless of the number of connected users.

We then investigate the challenges facing mmWave transmissions. It has been demonstrated that such technology is highly sensitive to blockage, which limits its range of communication. To overcome this obstacle, we develop a beam-codebook based analog beam-steering scheme that achieves near maximum beamforming gain performance. The proposed technique has been tested and verified by real-life measurements performed at Bell Labs.

Another line of research pursued in this thesis is investigating challenges pertaining to SON. It is known that radio access network self-planning is the most complex and sensitive task due to its impact on the cost of network deployment, etc., capital expenditure (CAPEX). To tackle this issue, we propose a comprehensive self-planning solution that provides all the planning parameters at once while guaranteeing that the system is optimally planned. The proposed scheme is compared to existing solutions and its superiority is demonstrated. We finally consider the communication secrecy problem and investigated the potential of employing PLS. Most of the existing PLS schemes are based on unrealistic assumptions, most notably is the assumption of having full knowledge about the whereabouts of the eavesdroppers. To solve this problem, we introduce a radically novel nonlinear precoding technique and a coding strategy that together allow to establish secure communication without any knowledge about the eavesdroppers. Moreover, we prove that it is possible to secure communications while achieving near transmitter-receiver channel capacity (the maximum theoretical rate).


identifier: Pelletier, Catherine  (2019) Impact of anthropogenic noise on the welfare of zoo-housed animals.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: An increasing number of studies on animal welfare have been performed in zoos in the past decades. Some assessed the impact of noises on animals, but only considered sound frequencies within the human hearing range. Yet, most other animals’ have a wider hearing range. This thesis analysed the effects of sounds and visitor attendance on the welfare of the five feline species of the Panthera genre at Zoo de Granby, Granby, Canada. Activity budget and space use collected with the focal sampling technique were compared to average sound levels, measured with an acoustic recorder, and visitor attendance. The results show that sound levels and visitors had effects on the felines’ behaviors, but this varied between species. For example, during summer, an increase in sound levels increased more resting time for two species, but decreased resting time for the three other species. The sound levels’ effects differed between seasons, calling for animal welfare management adapted to season (e.g. the two largest species of feline had opposite trends during winter when compared to summer for all their behaviors). Based on the “heat maps” of the specific locations the studied animals used, we believe the felines’ space use was influenced by the enclosures’ design and location of resting and shady areas rather than sounds and visitors. Noises and visitors had on some occasion opposite effects on the same behavior and species, suggesting these two factors should be monitored separately when assessing animal welfare. Overall, we did not find strong evidence of poor welfare for any feline species, with the exception of some individuals that showed signs of fearfulness. In an additional study, we evaluated the soundscape of the same Zoo by recording sounds in various locations in cycles of 24 hours. The 24h sound levels of most locations were not considered problematic for animal welfare, except some noisy indoor areas and near the water park. Ultrasounds were rare and not considered problematic to animal welfare, contrary to infrasounds that were loud and variable. Human activity increased sound levels and variability of noises, suggesting they could be detrimental to animal welfare. The soundscape did not change between seasons, meaning mitigation of noise pollution should be implemented at all time. More research is needed on the soundscape of zoos and its effects on animal welfare in a variety of taxa, with all sound frequencies that are in the hearing range of the studied animals.


identifier: Nouri, Alireza  (2019) Revolution and International Tension.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

title: Revolution and International Tension

abstract: Revolutions have a tremendous impact on international relations, yet the relationship between the two has not been studied sufficiently. This thesis attempts to shed light on this issue. It explores the weaknesses in the pre-existing literature and recommends a new approach and mechanism on how revolutions cause international tension. Through the study, a revamped definition and categorization of revolution is offered for a better understanding of the revolution. The proposition is that revolutions that affect the balance of threat significantly or have social revolution characteristics, and inflict considerable misery to a country are likely to generate significant tension with other countries and, ultimately, war. Sixty revolutions are examined both quantitatively (by an OLS regression) and qualitatively to test the hypothesis. The regression illustrates that the model has substantial correlation value and the qualitative study of the sixty cases, confirm the quantitative findings more in-depth.


identifier: Ghasvareh, Pooya  (2019) fairness comparisons of matching rules.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

title: fairness comparisons of matching rules

abstract:
This thesis consists of three studies in matching theory and market design. Its main focus is to compare matching rules according to normative criteria, primarily fairness, when objects have priorities over agents.

In the first study we analyze one-to-one matching and prove that in general we cannot find a strategy-proof and Pareto-efficient mechanism which stands out uniquely in terms of fairness when using fundamental criteria for profile-by-profile comparison. In particular, despite suggestions to the contrary in the literature, the Top Trading Cycles  (TTC) mechanism is not more fair than all other mechanisms in this class. We also show that while the TTC is not  dominated, if the priority profile is strongly cyclic then there is not much scope for TTC to dominate other matching rules in this class.

In the second study, which focuses on many-to-on matching, I provide a direct proof that Ergin's cycle (Ergin, 2002) is  stronger than Kesten's cycle (Kesten, 2006), due to different scarcity conditions for the quotas on objects. I also prove that when there is a Kesten cycle there is no strategy-proof and Pareto-efficient mechanism which uniquely stands out in terms of the fairness criteria. Moreover, I use simulations to show that as the number of Kesten cycles increases, there are more fairness violations and fewer preference profiles at which the TTC mechanism is fair.

The third study compares three competing many-to-one matching mechanisms that are strategy-proof and Pareto-efficient but not fair, namely the TTC,  Equitable Top Trading Cycles (ETTC) and Clinch and Trade (CT) mechanisms. Although one would expect that ETTC and CT are more fair than the TTC, I demonstrate the opposite for specific preference profiles and compare the aggregate number of fairness violations using simulations. I find that ETTC tends to have fewer priority violations in the aggregate than the other two mechanisms across both different quota distributions and varying correlations of preferences. Finally, I show that all three mechanisms become more efficient when the commonly most preferred object has the highest quota, and demonstrate that the more unequal the quota distribution,  the more fair and efficient the three mechanisms become.


identifier: Minayhashemi, Seyedmohammadamin  (2019) Automated Mathematical-Based Rigging Design System for Heavy Industrial Modules.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Modular-based heavy industrial construction projects typically involve the use of mobile cranes to lift and place large heavy prefabricated modules. These modules must be lifted vertically, raised evenly, and maintained in a level position during the lift in order to prevent them from deflecting and, more importantly, to mitigate safety issues regarding potential rigging failure. In this respect, a comprehensive crane lift study at the planning stage of the project is required to ensure the lifts are successful and to improve safety and productivity. One of the most tedious and time-intensive tasks involved in conducting the lift study is the design of the rigging assemblies, which are the link between the crane hook and the module. In practice, however, this task is performed manually and relies heavily on guesswork, which is error-prone and time-consuming, especially when the center of gravity is offset from the center of the module. Poorly designed rigging assemblies are only detected at the job site when the module does not raise evenly at the beginning of the lift, which then results in wasted time and productivity loss as the assembled components have to be unrigged and properly adjusted. To overcome these limitations, this thesis proposes an automated mathematical-based rigging assembly design system that consists of: (i) the solver analysis, which calculates the sling angles and performs the calculations required to balance the module; (ii) the rigging assembly designer, which determines the required capacity of the rigging components and selects the suitable riggings from the database; (iii) the 3D visualizer, which creates a 3D model of the designed rigging assembly. This framework enables lift engineers to create rigging assembly designs more precisely and expeditiously. The methodology is validated in a case study.


identifier: Cooper, Neesha  (2019) "Some Old, Some New, Some Borrowed": Conversations with a Small Sample of Trinidadian Parents about their Childrearing Practices.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Research on childrearing in the Caribbean has primarily focused on parents’ use of physical punishment (Brown & Johnson, 2008; Roopnarine, Wang, Krishnakumar, & Davidson, 2013; Payne, 1989; Smith & Mosby, 2003) and little is known about the other practices that parents in the Caribbean use to discipline their children. The present qualitative study used a developmental niche model to examine the childrearing practices, especially the disciplinary strategies which parents in Trinidad use to correct their children’s misbehaviour. Six mothers and one father residing in various locations throughout Trinidad, participated in a 1-hour to 1.5-hour semi-structured interview regarding the childrearing practices, especially the disciplinary practices, which they used to guide their 3 to 17-year-old children. Participants reported that their discipline practices included repeated explanations, taking away privileges, fixed eye-contact, the naughty corner, and only an occasional slap or spanking; as most of the participants were not in favor of physical punishment. The findings provided insight into the various practices, which Trinidadian parents used to discipline their youngsters.


identifier: XIONG, YILING ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7612-2547 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7612-2547>  (2019) Modeling of Self-Assembled Quantum Dot Lasers.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The study of active region structure for semiconductor lasers began in the 1960s. Most recently, quantum dot (QD) based lasers have attracted increasing attention. Modeling is crucial for the design of semiconductor QD-based lasers. Many attempts have been made to the macroscopic and, particularly, the microscopic modeling of III-V semiconductor QD as well as its applications during these decades. However, these proposed approaches use a very similar but outdated way to calculate the elastic strain field, referred to as one-step model, without rigorous consideration of the influence of the growth interruption in double-capping procedure, as the latter is currently used in epitaxial self-assembly for the control over the size of QDs. This thesis aims to contribute to the design improvements of QD-based laser applications through more accurate modeling.
    In this thesis, we have focused on improving the modeling accuracy by elaborately analyzing the elastic strain and quantum confinement potential. By applying this accurate modeling methodology, not only the general semiconductor QD-based lasers but also the structures with an interlayer/sublayer or tightly coupled QD ensemble can be numerically modeled, giving rise to the possibility for predicting the behavior and even structural design of lasers, paving the way to potentially novel applications. The following work has been done in this thesis.
    Firstly, we propose an accurate method of modeling a single QD, including a thorough so-called two-step elastic strain analysis, by considering the influence of growth interruption. A series of settings in terms of the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of QD and surrounding matrix are considered. The 3D confinement potential profile is found significantly different compared with the counterpart using the conventional one-step model. The electronic band structure is then calculated by using the strain-dependent eight-band k ∙ p method. The simulation results by using the two-step model are found in better agreement than one-step model in comparison with measurements. Moreover, the impact of the quaternary compositions of barrier material is, for the first time, systematically studied.
    Secondly, the two-step model is further extended to three- and multi-step analysis to model the structures with additional GaP ultrathin layer above or beneath the QDs. It is found that, instead of preventing the As/P exchange, the main impact of GaP interlayer/sublayers is enhancing the quantum confinement and thereby blue-shifting the emission peak. Based on the ability to efficiently shifting the spectrum, a new vertically chirped multi-layer structure is proposed. By simultaneously optimizing the interlayer/sublayer thickness and double-capping settings, a total gain spectral bandwidth of 245.7 nm (i.e. 30% increase) is predicted, and peak wavelength is shortened to 1510 nm (i.e. 70 nm blueshift, in comparison to the case without interlayer/sublayer).
Thirdly, laterally and vertically coupled QDs are modeled to investigate a variety of coupling effects in the active region of lasers. In particular, multi-step strain analysis is applied to the modeling of closely stacked QDs to reproduce a more realistic unidirectional compressive strain accumulation, evidenced by the morphological observation of cross-section images obtained from measurements. A “quasi continuum band” formed by the mixing of bonding and antibonding states is found, giving rise to the possibility of emission at excited state (ES) instead of the ground state (GS). Using this feature, a new laser structure allowing two-state lasing under continuous wave (CW) electrical pumping is proposed for the first time and characterized through the simulation of spectral linewidth and relative intensity noise (RIN). The new structure exhibits lower (i.e. −130 versus −110 dBc/Hz) integrated RIN compared with the conventional counterpart under relatively high CW current injection.
    Overall, this thesis sheds light on new device physics and provide guidelines to realize QD-based lasers with new features, and would be interesting to the scientific community.


identifier: Siblini, Fatina  (2019) Three Essays on the Labour Costs of Caring for Elderly Parents in Canada.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
This dissertation consists of three chapters on the labour costs that workers face from caring for an elderly parent in Canada. The first chapter investigates the causal effect of weekly hours of care provision on the probability of being employed and work hours of children caregivers. I use the General Social Survey (GSS 2012) of Statistics Canada and restrict the sample to parental caregivers and non-caregivers. To start, I treat caregiving as exogeneous. However, an endogeneity bias may arise if some individual’s unobserved characteristics are correlated with the hours of care variable and the employment outcomes at the same time. For instance, individuals, who prefer working as opposed to caring for elderly parents, are expected to provide less care hours.
On the contrary, it can be also caregivers’ ability to balance both work and care that
induce a positive relationship between care hours and work. I use instrumental variable techniques to resolve endogeneity issues. Results show that a 10% increase in hours of
care per week is associated with a 9.8 percentage points reduction in the probability of working for women caregivers compared to their counterparts’ non-caregivers, whereas for men sample, the reduction is 11.6 percentage points. Results also suggest that care
hours reduce the estimated weekly hours of work, for both men and women. A 10% increase in weekly care hours is associated with a decrease in weekly hours of work by 9.8% for men, and 1.6% for women sample.
The second chapter re-examines the same question in the context of two different types of informal care: personal and intense care. Helping frail parents with daily personal activities such as eating, bathing or toileting may require larger time commitments than helping them with chores. Moreover, personal care tasks are non-shiftable by nature because they are provided at specific times of the day. In contrast, chores such as cleaning the house and shopping or other organizational activities, can be done through the day or week. Using the same cross-sectional dataset as the first chapter, the study restricts the sample to parental and non-parental caregivers. To control for potential endogeneity bias, I consider three commonly used instruments in the literature; the distance to care-receiver, the health status, and age of the respondent’s care
receiver. Findings show that women and men who provide at least 15 hours of weekly care are less likely to be employed than other caregivers. Moreover, only women who help their parents with personal care are likely to reduce their employment probability.
Findings also show that helping with both personal and intense care has no significant impact on estimated weekly hours of work.
The third chapter investigates the impact that parental caregiving has on retirement behaviour of caregivers in Canada and across Canadian regions based on Longitudinal International Study of Adults (LISA) from 2012-2016. The panel structure of the data
allows me to use fixed-effect method to control for potential sources of endogeneity that arise from time invariant unobserved heterogeneity like preferences to care or work, ability to balance both activities, level of altruism and other hidden costs. To have
a deeper look about the impact of parental care on retirement probability, I estimate two different intensities of care. Results show that only women who provide at least 20 hours of care are 5 percentage point more likely to retire than their counterpart parental
caregivers who provide less than 20 hours of care and non-caregivers. Moreover, results indicate that the association between parental care and the probability of retirement varies across Canadian regions. The findings of the paper show that in regions like British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario, where home care expenditures as a percentage of health care expenditures are lower than the national average, parental caregivers are more likely to completely or partially retire. Care provision increases the probability of retirement of parental caregivers living in Quebec by 6%, the effect is 5% in Ontario and 9.8% in British Columbia. Moreover, in-home parental care increases the probability
of retirement by 10.5% in Quebec and 18.8% in British Columbia.
Finally, the results of this dissertation suggest that helping a frail elderly parent at home carries considerable costs that should be considered by policy makers when designing and funding public long-term care programs.


identifier: Farhat, Fadwa  (2019) Maternal and Paternal Teaching in a Naturalistic Home Environment.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: Research comparing maternal and paternal teaching styles is very limited and most previous literature addressed mainly the mother-child relationship with little attention to the father’s role. In addition, most studies done in this domain are older and have used mainly semi-structured settings, whereas little research has addressed mothers’ and fathers’ teaching of their young children during ongoing, naturalistic interactions at home. Thus, the aim of this study is to address and compare paternal and maternal teaching as they are applied with their preschool children in a naturalistic home environment. The data was originally collected by Hildy Ross in Waterloo, ON in 1986; it includes 39 middle-class dyads observed over a 2-year period in early childhood during ongoing interactions in the home setting for six 90-minute sessions at both times. In the current study, only the data from Time 2 when the children were aged four and six was used. The sequences of mothers and fathers teaching their children were identified first and then coded for teacher/learner roles, context (game, contingent activity, conflict), teaching strategies (e.g., direct instruction, labeling, demonstration, explanation) and child response (no response, rejection, compliance, and active involvement). Mothers and fathers did not differ significantly in the proportion of their teaching. Fathers taught significantly more in the game context than mothers and mothers taught significantly more in the conflict context. Moreover, parents were mostly directive in teaching their children and mothers and fathers did not differ in the proportion of teaching strategies used except in explanation in which the mother used such statements more than the father. Parental differences in teaching initiation, teaching frequency, teaching across context, teaching strategies, teaching across age dyads and differences in children’s responses were further examined and discussed.


identifier: Zargoush, Mojtaba  (2019) Effect of Preventive Strategies on Influenza Transmission during a Commercial Flight.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Every day Infectious diseases lead to hospitalization and the death of many people all over the world. Among these diseases, influenza has been a big concern to governments and health authorities. This dangerous disease is influenced by developing worldwide transportation networks during the 20th century.
In this study, we are investigating influenza transmission in an airplane cabin (Boeing 787 model in Air Canada Airline) during a commercial flight. Many factors influence the transmission of an infectious disease in an aircraft such as flight duration, ventilation system, interior design of the cabin, and behaviors of passengers and crew members. Along with these factors, several preventive actions can be taken to reduce influenza transmission in this environment, such as vaccination, wearing face mask, performing hand hygiene, and keeping distance from infected passengers.
Many studies have assessed the effect of performing such protective strategies in different settings like hospitals or schools that have the potential of providing a higher chance of getting infected.
Here we are using the Agent-Based-Model approach to simulate the spread of influenza in an airplane cabin. By using this flexible approach, we are showing the effect of performing one protective action or a combination of different actions on influenza transmission. Results show that all preventive strategies can be affected by different levels of efficiency and combination of different preventive strategies has the most effectiveness. In addition, we have concluded that participation of infected individuals in protective actions will increase the efficiency of each strategy more than other individuals.


identifier: Prévost, Vincent  (2019) Laboratory Electrical Model of the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Tunnel.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine tunnel is defined as a critical infrastructure as it represents a major transportation link connecting the island of Montreal and the South Shore. Consequently, the daily operation of the tunnel is highly dependent on the stability of the electrical grid to maintain a proper power supply. Moreover, the changing electrical profile of the tunnel throughout the year is reflected differently on the grid. Hence, the scope of this work is to emulate and model a scaled-down version of the electrical system of the tunnel Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine based on different operational scenarios. The system that is considered is simplified to the main electrical loads, which are the heating (purely resistive), lighting (mostly resistive) and ventilation fans. The modeling of the electrical profile is achieved using measurement-based data. To achieve the emulation of the ventilation fan, a drive system for a 2-hp induction motor is modeled in the MATLAB/Simulink environment and validated experimentally using open-loop voltage-over-frequency control under no-load condition. The results show proper speed control with the flux maintained constant under rated frequency in addition to accurate response to speed command change. To illustrate the changing operational profile of the tunnel throughout the year, the scaled-down electrical system is simulated and adapted to the corresponding profile of a summer day, a winter day and during an emergency event (diesel generator supply). For each distinctive day, the power characteristics at the point of common coupling are evaluated in regards to the respective electrical loads connected to the system. The analysis of the scaled-down simulated system has shown that the nature of the loads solicited in their respective scenarios has different impacts on the supply system. Through this research work, the scaled-down model of the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine tunnel electrical system showed similar power characteristics to what is observed on the actual system.


identifier: Goel, Anish  (2019) Efficient Real-Time Architectures and FPGA Implementations of Histogram-Based Median Filters for High Definition Videos.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Digital filtering plays an important role in many signal processing applications. Filtering is performed to recover the original signal from its corrupted version. Median filter is a non-linear digital filter that replaces a sample in a given window by the median value of the samples in the window. For images corrupted with impulse noise, median filter provides a very high quality of filtered images. Several modifications of median filters have been proposed and implemented to achieve high image quality compared to that provided by conventional median filters. When these filters are implemented on hardware platforms such as FPGAs, the performance parameters, namely, the area, power and operating frequency should be taken into consideration in addition to the quality of the filtered image. Therefore, efficient implementation of median filters on FPGAs for image and video processing algorithms has been a topic of much interest.
	The existing hardware-based median filters for high definition video formats do not always satisfy the real-time throughput requirements or are inefficient with respect to hardware performance parameters, such as the area and frequency. This is due to the fact that most of the existing techniques use sorting-based median calculation, which results in a low hardware performance. In this thesis, architectures that use histogram-based median computation, which is a non-sorting-based operation, are designed with a view of efficient hardware implementation. This is carried out in two parts. We design and implement efficient architectures that satisfy the real-time throughput requirements of full high definition (FHD) videos in the first part and that of ultra high definition (UHD) videos in the second part.
In the first part, an efficient real-time histogram-based median filter that uses the concept of bit-plane-slicing and adaptive switching median filter (ASMF) is designed and implemented on FPGAs. We term this architecture as hybrid architecture for median filtering (HAMF). The proposed HAMF computes an approximate median, since it uses only the most significant B-bits of the pixel values for median calculation. As a result, the algorithmic level implementation of the proposed HAMF results in a slight degradation in the filtered image quality compared to that provided by ASMF. The proposed HAMF provides a significant improvement over ASMF in terms of the area and operating frequency, when implemented on different generation FPGAs. Analysis of the different parameters, such as the number of bit-planes used in the computation of the median and the number of pipelining stages, is carried out to study the trade-off between the quality of the filtered image and hardware performance.
	Although the FPGA implementation of the proposed HAMF provides a very high operating frequency, the quality of the images filtered by its algorithmic level implementation decreases with increasing window size and noise density. This filter may be suitable for applications that require FHD filtering with cost constraints, but not for applications where the output image quality is as important as the hardware performance. Hence, in the second part, we design an efficient and real-time architecture of the hierarchical histogram-based median filter (HHMF). The proposed architecture is designed using a full synchronous pipeline, a synchronous accumulate-and-compare unit, and is scalable. The FPGA implementation of the proposed architecture of HHMF can perform real-time filtering of 4K and 8K UHD videos. The quality of the image filtered by HHMF is not compromised as in the case of HAMF, since HHMF uses all the bit-planes and computes the actual median. Although the FPGA implementation of HHMF results in more area utilization, the proposed implementation is more economical than a GPU-based HHMF implementation and provides a better throughput.


identifier: Akbar, Muhammad Ali  (2019) Shunt Connected Power Conditioner with Energy Storage for a Hydrogen Fuel Cell System Supplying a DC Nanogrid.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
DC power distribution systems (especially DC nanogrids) are becoming a great area of interest for researchers that can lead to better integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and supplying local loads in a more efficient way compared to AC systems. As a power source for DC power distribution systems, the use of renewable energy source is increasing every day. When considering renewable energy sources, one can think of the most popular ones like photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy, but another environment-friendly power source that is gaining popularity is the hydrogen fuel cell (FC). DC nanogrids for Net-Zero Energy Homes (NZEHs) are expected to include a number of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). FCs are an interesting choice as supplemental/dispatchable power sources because they can operate as co-generators supplying electricity and heat for NZEHs. The output voltage of the FC changes with the electric power demanded by the load (if the hydrogen injection in the FC is kept constant). Besides, if there is an instant change in the load current demand, it can also damage the FC. Therefore, to protect the FC and supply the load with a regulated voltage, a DC-DC converter is often employed as an interface for the FC. In such a case, load demand variations will lead to variations in the output power of the FC, which is at the maximum power point, when it is supplying a given amount of power at a given current.
   This thesis discusses the realization of a control scheme that enables a FC system to operate at the maximum power point by using an Energy Storage System (ESS) based on a super capacitor (SC) and another power electronics interface as a supporting unit. The output of the ESS is connected in shunt with the output of the FC system to the DC (load) bus. The ESS is current controlled to force the FC system to supply a constant current. In this way, the FC will supply an ideal, maximum power point, current even as the power demand by the electric load varies. Besides, the ESS can also provide the load with more power than the rated value of the FC system. Moreover, an additional control scheme is also implemented in the ESS to keep the voltage at the SC within safe and useful values.
   Finally, the proposed scheme is verified with hardware experiments. Experimental results with power electronics interfaces showing the voltage regulation in the DC (load) bus, FC current control and the regulation of SC voltage are presented. It is demonstrated that the FC can be operated at its maximum power point, using a SC-based ESS with injected current and SC voltage control loops.


identifier: Arab, Babak  (2019) Vibration Analysis of Thickness-Tapered Laminated Composite Square Plates Based on Ritz Method.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: The abstract of this item has been embargoed until 2021-09-01.


identifier: Abuobidalla, Omar  (2019) A Study on Routing and Scheduling of Hazardous Materials in Railway Transportation.  PhD thesis, Concordia university.

abstract: Railway transportation of hazardous materials including Toxic Inhalation Hazard, is crucial to North American economy. Although railway companies have favorable safety records in moving hazardous materials shipments, the possibility of spectacular events resulting from multicars incidents, however low, does exist, and the consequence can be potentially catastrophic in multiple fatalities. The rail disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, resulted in 47 fatalities and around $1.5 billion damages in 2013, is an example of low-probability high-consequence event. In this dissertation we aim at the development of analytical approaches considering the risk associated with hazardous materials in railway transportation. We study three versions of trip plan problems in the presence of hazardous materials, denoted as hazardous materials trip plan problems. In the first part of this dissertation we incorporate the blocking and train makeup decisions into the hazardous materials trip plan generation process, while limiting the total population exposures and environmental damages below the given thresholds. In evaluating the risk, we use aggregate measures, i.e., population exposures and environmental damages. We propose a non-linear mixed integer programming formulation for the considered problem. The solution of the model is NP hard. In order to solve realistic size problem instances, a heuristic method is proposed by decomposing the problem into freight-to-block and block-to-train assignment problems. We then investigate more realistic hazardous materials trip plan problems by relaxing some of the assumptions. In the second part of this dissertation we incorporate risk-spreading functions into trip plan generation process and train scheduling decisions. For each risk spreading function, we present a mathematical formulation and then we design a heuristic method to solve realistic size problem instances. We continue this study by introducing joint hazardous material trip plan and pricing problems. We also relax the assumption of the information of the customer requests are known in advance. Accordingly, we introduce different categories of customers with the definition of specific treatment for each of them including accept/reject basis and particular delivery and price regulations. In particular, we grouped customer requests into two classes as follows: (a) traditional customers, who sign long term contracts with the carrier, must be fulfilled by the carrier’s own services, and their delivery and price quotations are set in advance and not subject to change; and (b) irregular customers, who make request for a carload moves less frequently and on an irregular basis, maybe outsourced/rejected because of (1) lack of train capacities, (2) additional risk exceeds the given risk thresholds, or (3) service level requirements. We propose two-phase heuristic to solve the considered problem. In the first phase, we solve a deterministic transportation planning and train timetabling problem for the known demands in advance. In the second phase, an optimization-based problem is built and solved at the arrival of the new request. Eventually, the dissertation ends with conclusion and further research recommendations.


identifier: Ashouri Sanjani, Milad  (2019) Data Mining Frameworks for Energy Consumption Reduction of Existing Buildings.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Many technical solutions have been developed to reduce buildings’ energy consumption, but limited efforts have been made to adequately address the role or action of building occupants in this process. On the other side, Building Management System (BMS) monitors the performance of buildings by recording the data to improve the building operation, control systems and maintenance. Usually, BMS produces a large volume of data throughout the year including information with regard to patterns of energy use, occupant behavior, etc. The availability of this huge data has created an opportunity to extract information to improve the building energy performance through leveraging powerful data analytic tools.
The objectives defined in this thesis lie in developing methodologies to find energy saving opportunities by analyzing data coming from occupants’ energy consumption. Three tasks are defined in this thesis. The first task is to provide a recommender system to alert the occupants to take certain measures in order to reduce their energy consumption through end-use loads. Therefore, the quantification of potential savings is provided upon following recommendations. The proposed methodology is also capable to detect the energy saving measures performed by occupants. The second task focuses on a systematic comparison procedure between the buildings to make the occupants aware of their rank among other buildings and hence give them clues on how to improve their performance. The third task focuses on developing a framework to create a reference building acting as a reference for a given building. Therefore, the given building can be compared against its reference building. Potential savings are given to the given building along with directions how to achieve them. The results show successfulness of developed methodologies in finding energy saving opportunities through modifying occupant behavior.


identifier: Belgasem Elaradi, Mohamed  (2019) Integrated Forest Biorefinery Network Design Under Uncertainty.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The Canadian Pulp and Pulp (P&P) industry has been recently confronted by shrinking markets and tighter profit margins. Transforming P&P mills into Integrated Forest Biorefineries (IFBR) is a prominent solution to save the struggling industry and allow diversification towards the promising bioproducts markets. The implementation of such a strategy is a complex process that faces many sources of uncertainty. Therefore, the industry is in need for a planning tool that facilitates the IFBR network design by taking the uncertain market conditions into consideration.
First, we propose a mixed integer programming model to optimize the investment plan in addition to other tactical decisions over a long term planning horizon. We test the model using a realistic case study for Canadian P&P companies, where we perform a set of sensitivity analysis tests in terms of bioproduct demand and energy prices. Our results showcase the potential of the IFBR to help the P&P industry and highlight the substantial impact of the bioproduct demand on its profitability.
Second, we develop a Multi-stage Stochastic Programming model which explicitly incorporates the demand uncertainty. We also develop a simulation platform to validate the model and compare its performance with alternative decision models. We assess the value of incorporating demand uncertainty in the planning process and we also elaborate on the value of flexibility in terms of adjusting the investment plan in response to changes in market trends. Our results demonstrate the significant value of explicitly incorporating the uncertainty in IFBR network design as well as flexibility in the investment plan.


identifier: Robeck, Logan  (2019) CRISPR-Cas9-Based Genetic Modification of the Industrially Useful Fungus Aspergillus terreus.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract: In recent years there has been increased interest in the production of valuable materials through the use of microbes to convert biomass1. The filamentous fungus Aspergillus terreus is already of industrial value through its ability to produce the cholesterol lowering drug lovastatin, and the bulk commodity chemical itaconic acid 2. While itaconic acid already has a market of up to 80,000 tons per year, it can also be used as a replacement for the petrochemical derived acrylic acid, which has a market of 2,100,000 tons, for several applications3. However, additional research is needed to improve production of itaconic acid using A. terreus to lower its production cost to make it more competitive against acrylic acid. Unfortunately, research into itaconic acid production has been hampered by shortcomings in genetic manipulations of A. terreus3. Here, is described the first use of CRISPR-Cas9-based genetic modifications as a means of producing new strains of A. terreus for future study. This study describes the creation of stable strains with genetic changes, opening the door for future investigations into A. terreus that may improve itaconic acid production.


identifier: Nethula, Sowmith ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3924-6177 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3924-6177>  (2019) Single Event Multiple Transient Analysis using Satisfiability Modulo Theories.  Masters thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
Due to the radioactive nature of the space environment, the integrated circuits in space suffer from reliability problems. This threat is due to the presence of high energy ionizing particles like cosmic ray neutrons and their interaction with the semiconductor devices. When a high energy particle strikes a transistor, it induces a transient for a short period of time. This transient temporarily changes the output of its respective combinational gate. This phenomenon is called a Single Event Transient (SET). The SET can propagate through the circuit and could potentially get latched in a state element, causing a soft error. It has lately been discovered that the cosmic ray neutrons cause errors even at ground level.

Moreover, due to the rapid advancements in CMOS technology, the size of the semiconductor devices has reduced significantly. With this reduction in the device size, the radiation particles with lesser energies could cause a soft error. At this smaller technology node size, a single high energy particle can induce transients in multiple combinational gates resulting in Single Event Multiple Transients (SEMTs). Furthermore, rapid technology scaling has resulted in frequent SEMTs and infrequent SETs. This conjointly increases the difficulty in the estimation of the Soft Error Rate (SER). Therefore, there is a need for accurate and cost-effective techniques to study and estimate the reliability of the digital circuits.

This thesis presents a new technique to model the effects of SEMTs on digital circuits based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). The presented technique considers the layout-based adjacencies as SEMT originating sites and includes the effects of logical, electrical, and temporal masking while propagating the SEMT faults in the circuit. The technique is applied to the ISCAS’85 benchmark circuits and the 32-bit SPARC V8 based processor LEON3. The results show the proposed technique achieves an average speed-up of 12.64 while estimating the SER, when compared to conventional HDL based fault injection simulation techniques.


identifier: Chacón Huete, Franklin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7381-8677 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7381-8677>  (2019) Environmentally benign reactions on biomass-derived furans as an emerging strategy for the synthesis of complex value-added materials.  PhD thesis, Concordia University.

abstract:
The high demand and uncontrolled use of petroleum feedstocks has had a tremendous negative impact on the environment. Nowadays, much attention is being paid to biomass as a source of organic starting materials, and the U.S. Department of Energy has highlighted furans derived from hemicellulose as potential building blocks for chemical synthesis, such as 5-hydroxymethyl furfural (HMF 3) and 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA 6). The development of new tools that allow the use of these readily available compounds as starting materials in the construction of
complex molecules is necessary for the transition of industrially scaled productions from a petroleum-based chemistry to a biomass-based alternative. The synthesis of high-value biomass derived 2,5-diaryl furans (190) has been achieved successfully from good to excellent yields with
a wide scope of coupling partners of aryl halides and FDCA (6). Keeping in mind that FDCA comes from the direct oxidation of HMF (3), a route to access 2,5-non symmetric furans (30) was achieved utilizing the latter molecule as starting material. Selective oxidation of the aldehyde
moiety has not been reported under mild and accessible conditions, therefore, a solvent-free mechanochemical assisted selective oxidation was studied to synthesize the required 5-hydroxymethyl-2-furoic acid (HMFA 4) and 2,5-dihydroxymethyl furan (5), in a base-promoted
disproportionation, reducing the reaction times to only 5 min and with an Efactor of only 0.5. Decarboxylative cross-coupling and oxidation of the alcohol moiety allowed access to an alternative substrate for the decarboxylative cross-coupling, achieving the convenient synthesis of
2,5-diaryl non-symmetric furans (30). Additionally, the versatile intermediate 5-hydroxymethyl- 2-aryl furan (216) was utilized to synthesize bis(5-arylfuran-2-yl)methane (223) scaffolds in good to excellent yields. Future work includes efforts to use decarboxylative cross-coupling reactions
between FDCA (6) and dihalide aryl systems (235) to produce conjugated furan co-polymers (236).