19614 research outputs found
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Solving Computationally Hard Problems Using Quantum Computing
Get PDFSome problems are computationally solvable but to complexity of nature of problem, they take a long time to solve. Quantum computers (QC) offer the ability to solve these problems in reasonable time using principles of quantum mechanics. One such hard problem is MaxCut, with various applications like portfolio optimization, drug discovery, and inventory management. This poster dives into solving these problems on QC with introduction to how problems are encoded mathematically (QUBO); converted into quantum language (Hamiltonian) and solved using quantum algorithm (QAOA).The goal of research was to run MaxCut problem on different variants of a quantum algorithms to analyze results.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Europe in the Sahel: Analysing the Failures of Capacity Building
Get PDFDespite 10 years of conflict and foreign intervention, the international community has been unable to bring peace to the Sahel region in Africa by building state security capacities. This paper investigates as to why the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) were unable to build peace in the region through capacity building missions by asking the following question: How do the EU and UN explain their failure to build state security capacities in the Sahel, and to what extent are these explanations similar? To answer this question this paper adopts a qualitative approach, analysing six government documents from the EU and the UN. The findings of this paper suggest that the EU and UN explain their failures differently, with the EU viewing itself as the main actor responsible for program failure, while the UN views local actors as responsible for creating the operational conditions that led to program failure.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
How High School Teachers in Victoria, BC Are Implementing British Columbia’s New Assessment Framework in Their Classrooms
No full textAs a result of changing to a content-based, competency-driven curriculum in 2010, British Columbia’s Ministry of Education and Childcare (BCMECC) has been rolling out a new provincial assessment framework since 2016. Draft provincial documents described the new assessment framework as aligning with standards-based grading, introduced a new provincial proficiency scale, and announced the elimination of percentages or letter grades in the assessment of kindergarten to grade 9 classes. Implementation of this new assessment framework was mandated across the province in September 2023. My study asks how some high school teachers in Victoria, BC had been implementing this new assessment framework in their classrooms prior to the mandate with the idea that their experiences, successes, and challenges would be of value to teachers who would be required to make similar changes, as well as school districts, educational partners, and the BCMECC who could use the data to support teachers with this change. By interviewing four high school teachers, I collected narrative data using a multiple case study model, which I analyzed with thematic analysis. The study finds that the new classroom assessment framework is most authentically implemented when teacher assessment philosophy aligns with the provincial framework, embraces learning as a process, involves students in the assessment process, and keeps students at the centre of decision-making. While the mental and practical work of classroom assessment models requires the undue work and time of teachers, this work is both important and necessary for the emotional and academic student success.Graduat
Writing a Grammar of Inupiaq Emphasizing Language Revitalization, Pedagogy, and Inupiaq Education
No full textIndigenous language grammars in the linguistics field have historically been developed in a linguist-centered model with little regard to the needs of particular Indigenous communities. Moreover, Indigenous methodologies have rarely been considered in developing Indigenous language grammars. This dissertation therefore reflects upon the theory and practice of reframing the concept of what constitutes a “grammar”. Theory and practice are operationalized through the development of a collaborative grammar project documenting and describing King Island Inupiaq (Ugiuvaŋmiutun) grammar and creating language learning resources for the purposes of Inupiaq language revitalization, with a particular focus on adult language learners. The grammar curriculum developed in this dissertation, as a collaboration between a linguist and King Island Inupiaq community members, emphasizes Inupiaq education and values, an adult language learner pedagogy (using a focus on form approach), and community-based research models of language documentation, description, and revitalization. The grammar curriculum produced through this collaborative project thus illustrates a way of approaching grammar writing to reflect the needs of the Inupiaq language community, including the overlapping needs of the development of pedagogical materials, materials for language revitalization, and materials that are grounded in Inupiaq education.Graduat
Reframing crisis: Hope and future-making in contemporary Cuban photographs
No full textFollowing the COVID-19 pandemic, already challenging circumstances in Cuba have significantly worsened, heavily impacting how Cubans envision their lives and futures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic methods, I conducted two months of fieldwork in the summer of 2023 in Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. Using photovoice, photowalks, and semi-structured interviews with eight Cuban young adults, I visually explore life following the worst economic crisis in the island’s history. Following COVID-19, an already fraught political climate has further devolved, migration has reached historic rates, inflation renders many goods unobtainable, and infrastructure and services are challenged. For many, future paths are unclear; they may seek better lives abroad, or fight to improve their conditions on the island, in a tumultuous and polarized political climate. For youth, migration often appears more viable to catalyze change. I employ the theory of radical hope to consider how people produce meaning and futural momentum despite tremendous pressure and uncertainty. Curating images into five key themes, I consider discourses of migration, loss, change, escape, and survival during difficult times. As I argue, these photographs inform a non-generalizable, nuanced image of life during crises, highlighting sustaining moments alongside threats to hope. This centers a more dignified view of life, emphasizing momentum rather than fatalism, individual agency, and the possibility for change without prescribing future paths. By emphasizing possibility alongside critique, I raise questions about these indeterminate trajectories and the role of hope in a seemingly hopeless time, finding that a portrait of contemporary Cuban lives and futures are difficult to characterize with pre-existing ideas.Graduat
Enhancing the well-being of racialized international graduate students at a Canadian post-secondary institution
No full textRacialized international graduate students, a rapidly growing population within Canadian post-secondary institutions, face systemic institutional barriers to their well-being. Despite the significant role that post-secondary institutions can play in promoting international student well-being, the Canadian educational context lacks standardized best practices that direct the quality of care provided to international students. Through a qualitative case study research approach situated within critical race and decolonial paradigms, this study sought to understand how racialized international graduate students understand well-being, and how their well-being is promoted or hindered within the academic and socio-political conditions of the university. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of 22 racialized international graduate students from 16 countries and five continents, studying in 17 programs at the University of Victoria. From a thematic analysis of the interviews, four major themes emerged that reflect different aspects of well-being: Political-Economic Determinants; Academic Institutional Conditions; Socio-Cultural Influences; and Personal Wellness. This research scrutinizes various institutional policies, practices, and actors that play a role in shaping racialized international student well-being, which led to the development of recommendations for institutional-level modifications to enhance the well-being of racialized international graduate students, targeting four key areas: Affordability and Access to Education; Improving Academic and Work Dynamics; Meaningful Inclusion in the Campus Community; and Enhancing Student Services Provision. The findings also uncovered the formal and informal strategies that participants practice to enhance their well-being. While the participants faced challenges in their journey as an international graduate student, they generally felt positively about their experience as it strengthened them and allowed for transformational personal and professional growth.Graduat
Sustainable inventory managements for non-instantaneous deteriorating items: Preservation technology and green technology approaches with advanced purchase discounts and joint emission regulations
No full textThe present article aims to determine the green economic policies of an inventory model for non-instantaneous deteriorating items under practical scenarios. These scenarios involve specific maximum lifetimes for items with deteriorations controllable through investments in preservation technologies, which can affect the period without deterioration. Additionally, carbon is emitted due to energy-related costs, prompting retailers to invest in green technology investments to reduce carbon emissions concurrently under the carbon tax policy and the carbon cap-and-trade policy simultaneously. Meanwhile, when a retailer is required to make a prepayment, the purchase discount policy is contingent on the number of installments offered. This means that the retailer prepays off the entire purchasing cost with a single installment, thereby receiving a maximum percentage of price discount. Otherwise, the retailer prepays a certain fraction of the purchasing cost with multiple installments, and the percentage of the price discount will be contingent on the number of n identical installments. In this context, we present theoretical results for optimal solutions, and a salient algorithm is presented, which is derived from these theoretical findings within a sustainable inventory system. To better illustrate the proposed mathematical problems, several numerical examples are presented, followed by sensitivity analysis for different scenarios.FacultyReviewe
A prototype architecture for interactive 3D maps on the web
No full textVirtual 3D city models offer detailed 3D representations of urban space and serve in various fields, such as urban planning, architecture, navigation, and environmental simulation. With the advancement of technologies such as photogrammetry and laser scanning, the scale of 3D city models has increased significantly, making it a challenge to transmit and visualize such large datasets for sharing purposes. The development of advanced web technologies and the emergence of WebGL has made it possible to render and share large-scale 3D city models on the Internet. In addition, the introduction of game engines has further enhanced the simulation and interactive functions of 3D GIS applications.
In this project, the exploration focused on using and integrating WebGL-based rendering tools to visualize large 3D city models, providing a portal where users can navigate and interact with urban scenarios from different perspectives. The architecture utilized 3DCityDB for tiling and format conversion of 3D models, 3D Web Client/Cesium.js virtual globe for loading large-scale tiled data, and Babylon.js to achieve interactive functions and environmental simulation. A GridMap mechanism was proposed to solve the problem of loading a large number of models with geographic coordinates in the Babylon scene. Test results show that this mechanism can maintain effective loading efficiency. Especially when the size of the dataset grows significantly, loading time and memory consumption will not increase, and FPS can also be maintained at a high level to ensure smooth interaction. This study expands the feasibility of applying 3D GIS data in web-based game engines through enhanced interactivity and simulation.Graduat
FTRL-WRR: Learning-based two-path scheduler for LEO networks
No full textMultipath QUIC is inspired by the resource pooling principle, aiming to make a collection of resources behave as a single pool. However, current multipath schedulers tend to prioritize specific metrics like Round-Trip Time (RTT) or congestion window, often overlooking strategies that enhance overall resource usage and reduce flow completion time. This can lead to resource underutilization in high dynamic settings, such as those involving Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Addressing this challenge requires efficient traffic allocation to maximize bandwidth utilization. In this thesis, we verify that the relationship between traffic distribution and throughput in a two-path scenario resembles a quasi-concave function. Accordingly, we formulate the traffic allocation across two paths as a 1-dimensional optimization problem. To solve the two-path scheduling problem in dynamic environments, we introduce the FTRL-WRR algorithm. This approach integrates a Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL) learner, ADWIN2 distribution change detector, and Weighted Round Robin (WRR) scheduler to enhance bandwidth utilization. We validate the effectiveness of the algorithm through extensive emulation and real-world testbed experiments, demonstrating consistent reduction in completion time across a range of scenarios. Additionally, we discuss the algorithm's limitations and suggest directions for future research.Graduat
Learning from Qʷi·qʷi·diččaq ‘Makah’ story: Collaborative analysis and emergent linguistic lessons
No full textArchival and legacy materials have become important resources for many language revitalization and reclamation programs to support the reawakening of sleeping languages (baird 2013; Baldwin & Costa 2018; Lukaniec 2022) or to maintain relationships with past generations of speakers (Hill 2024). This thesis centers around one such legacy recording in Qʷi·qʷi·diččaq (Makah language) which shares a well-known Makah oral story, “Raven and Crow,” as told by first language speaker, Ruth Claplanhoo.
Working alongside Maria Hita·ʔa·ʔoƛ Pascua in her role with the Makah Language Program and Makah Cultural & Research Center, this research transforms the original story recording into accessible materials that can be adapted for current and future speakers, learners, and teachers while simultaneously addressing the limited availability of analyzed stories and texts in Makah. By developing a method for Collaborative Analytical Storywork (described in Chapter 2), Maria and I were able to create transcriptions, translations, morphological analyses, and time-aligned resources which respond to the variety of interests, challenges, and language-learning goals within the Makah language community (Chapter 1). In Chapter 3, I connect the conversations that emerged through my and Maria’s engagement with the “Raven and Crow” story to existing Wakashan literature and present the lessons about Qʷi·qʷi·diččaq that this story teaches us (or questions that it poses). Chapter 4 offers potential applications of this research in Makah language revitalization and suggests new topics and possibilities for future researchers.Graduat