21090 research outputs found
Sort by
Lavender Shadows: An Analysis of the Role of Lesbian Feminism in the British Columbia Federation of Women
No full textThis thesis examines the Rights of Lesbians Subcommittee (ROLSC) of the British Columbia Federation of Women (BCFW), an umbrella organization that brought together diverse feminist groups from 1974 to the late 1980s. The ROLSC provides a lens through which to analyze the paradox of lesbian feminist politics in Canada: how could a feminist movement claim to fight for all women while continually marginalizing women who loved women? Through archival research at Simon Fraser University, the University of Ottawa, and other collections, this study reconstructs how lesbian feminists negotiated inclusion, contested heteronormativity, and reshaped the Federation from within.
This thesis challenges historiographical narratives that portray lesbian feminism as separate from, or oppositional to, the broader women’s movement. Instead, the experience of the ROLSC demonstrates an alternative trajectory of integration, in which lesbian feminists strategically leveraged their position inside the Federation to achieve systemic change. By situating the ROLSC within Canadian feminist and queer historiography, this thesis shows that lesbian feminists did not merely occupy the shadows of the women’s movement. Their activism reconfigured its very terms, ensuring that feminism in Canada could not remain solely about gender but had to grapple with sexuality, heteronormativity, and the politics of self-determination
Learning Human-Aware Strategies for Legible and Predictable Robot Navigation
No full textA challenge in human-robot interaction, particularly in dynamic and crowded environments, is to design navigation that is both legible and predictable. For people to feel comfortable in the same environment as robots, their movements must be legible - ensuring quick understanding of the robot’s intentions - and predictable, meaning they align with human expectations.
In this thesis, we introduce a learning-based navigation system that leverages a vector reward function to capture the dual objectives of legibility and predictability. Rather than relying on manually designed transitioning rules or fixed weighting parameters such as alpha and beta, the reward function is learned from expert demonstrations generated by a planner (LPSNav) that blends between these objectives using a continuous parameter. Our approach does not attempt to replicate the planner’s handcrafted logic, but instead generalizes the emergent patterns in its trajectories through a supervised learning framework inspired by the structure of maximum entropy IRL.
The proposed architecture includes:
an LSTM-based Robot Motion History Encoder,
a CNN-based Environment Encoder,
an LSTM-based Human History Encoder,
and a two-channel Reward Analysis Engine.
The system was evaluated both in simulation using the nuScenes dataset and in real-world trials using the Clearpath Jackal robot. In the user study, participants interacted with the robot in predefined navigation scenarios, and their feedback was used to assess the perceived clarity and predictability of the robot’s actions.
Results show that our method generates more human-like trajectories and outperforms baseline models in scenarios requiring socially acceptable motion, such as intersections, sidestepping, and close-proximity passing. We provide both quantitative metrics (e.g., ADE and FDE) and qualitative visualizations demonstrating smooth and socially-aware navigation behavior.
This work represents a step toward safer and more intuitive human-robot coexistence, offering a practical solution for real-world robotic deployment
Distracted Desire: Extending the Study of Non-Erotic Thoughts to the South Asian Context
No full textPurity culture is characterized by sexual norms emphasizing premarital abstinence, modesty, and positioning women as sexual gatekeepers. To date, purity culture has primarily been studied within Evangelical Christian communities. However, similar sexual values may operate across other cultural contexts, including South Asian communities where sexuality is often framed as procreative, within marriage, and as a source of familial honour or shame. This thesis investigated whether purity culture provides a useful framework for understanding the sexual experiences of South Asian diasporic women, focusing specifically on non-erotic thoughts (NETs)—intrusive cognitions during sexual activity that interfere with sexual enjoyment. NETs were selected as the focus because they are viewed as a central mechanism in several influential theories of sexuality, including Masters and Johnson's concept of spectatoring, Barlow's cognitive-affective model, and Brotto's mindfulness framework. Despite widespread recognition that sexuality is culturally embedded, no research has examined whether NETs differ across cultural groups. Through two studies, this thesis explored cultural differences in NETs and their underlying mechanisms among South Asian and White women in North America and the United Kingdom. Study 1 (N = 301) compared the frequency and anxiety associated with NETs between second-generation South Asian women and White women. Results revealed significant cultural differences: South Asian women endorsed greater thoughts and anxiety related to moral concerns, shame or guilt, pain, pregnancy and sexual health, and their partners' emotions, while White women endorsed greater concerns about body appearance. Study 2 (n = 284) replicated these findings and tested a series of mediational models examining factors theorized to influence the occurrence of NETs and their influence on sexual outcomes. Results identified shame as a significant antecedent for both South Asian and White women and internal conflict over one’s identity as an antecedent to NETs for South Asian women. In these mediational models, NETs subsequently predicted lower sexual satisfaction and higher sexual distress. Contrary to expectations, purity culture endorsement did not directly predict NETs, suggesting that cultural influences on sexuality may operate through more proximal psychological mechanisms. These findings demonstrate meaningful cultural variation in sexual cognitions, highlighting the need for culturally sensitive models of sexuality and clinical interventions that address the intersection of cultural identity and sexual well-being
Progress towards FrAg molecules for nuclear CP violation
No full textUltracold francium silver is a promising experiment that has the potential to set a new
upper bound on nucleon electric dipole moments. In working towards making francium sil-
ver molecules, our short term goal is to develop the knowledge and ability to evaporatively
cool francium and silver. This entails finding the scattering properties of francium and
silver using photoassociation spectroscopy and developing the ability to sub-Doppler cool
silver. In this thesis, I talk about my work towards this goal, including attempting pho-
toassociation at TRIUMF during francium beam time, work at the University of Chicago
towards photoassociation and gray molasses in silver. Even though these efforts weren’t
successful, the next steps are clear. Additionally, I talk about what I’ve accomplished at
Waterloo when I’m not working on the francium silver project. This includes working to-
wards better control over and stabilization of lasers and experimental optics and beginning
optimization of the Cs Zeeman slower
Advancing the measurement and use of daily life heart rate using wearable technology: applications to Parkinson's disease
No full textMeasures of heart rate (HR), including those conducted during resting conditions and in response to physical activity, have been shown to relate to risk of adverse health outcomes and can provide insight into the function of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). However, HR measures have conventionally been conducted at a single point in time and in controlled settings, such as during clinical or laboratory visits. Alternatively, when HR has been measured in uncontrolled, free-living settings, there has been a lack of standardization in the methods used and most have not provided sufficient behavioral context to support the interpretation of HR in daily life. Use of wearable technology, and specifically, a multi-sensor and -device approach, presents a unique opportunity to measure HR continuously in the context of daily life behaviors, and advance understanding of ANS function and context-dependent HR responses. This may be particularly relevant to individuals living with Parkinson’s disease (PD), who can experience ANS dysfunction that may manifest with altered diurnal HR profiles and who can have diverse movement characteristics that may affect the HR response to physical activity.
The overarching goals of this thesis work were to 1) advance the development of standard approaches to assess HR from continuously collected data over multiple days and behavioral contexts, and 2) apply these approaches to advance understanding of ANS function and characterization of daily life physical activity profiles among individuals with PD. All studies were based on a collection protocol that instrumented participants with a portable, chest-worn electrocardiography device and two limb-worn inertial measurement units (wrist and ankle) that continuously collected data across a week-long period in daily life. In the first study, HR was measured across accumulated periods of sedentary behavior and sleep within a cohort of adults without PD (“control”), and the high levels of within-participant variability in HR that were observed within a given resting condition led to recommendations being put forth for standardizing the measurement of HR outcomes during resting conditions in daily life. In the second study, standards suggested in Study 1 were applied and extended upon in a cohort of adults with and without PD, and revealed no differences between cohorts in resting condition-specific HR outcomes (e.g., minimum HR during sleep) or in measures of nocturnal HR dipping in daily life. However, a significant association was observed between nocturnal HR dipping and a clinical measure of ANS dysfunction in PD. In the third study, resting HR was used as a reference when quantifying the relative intensity of the HR response to daily life walking across the same cohort of adults with and without PD. While no between-cohort differences were observed in the average relative intensity of daily life walking, there was considerable variability in the between- and within-participant HR response to continuous, longer walking bouts (≥ 30 seconds), which were not consistently associated with walking cadence or bout duration.
This dissertation provides recommendations for, and illustrates the importance of, adopting standardized approaches to measure resting and activity-dependent HR in daily life. Findings from the studies in this thesis suggest that context-based ambulatory HR monitoring has the potential to improve characterization of daily life behaviors and provide insight into clinically relevant outcomes in individuals with and without PD. Continued research in larger, more heterogenous populations, which includes robust clinical profiling and continues to attend to the importance of high data quality, is necessary to determine generalizability and advance understanding of within- and between-participant drivers of variability in context-dependent HR measures. This type of future work is required before context-dependent HR monitoring can be integrated and evaluated as a tool to support self-management or clinical health care decision making
Robust and Hierarchy-Aware Classification
No full textThe BIOSCAN project, led by the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) Consortium, is an international, multi-year, and multidisciplinary effort seeking to catalogue all multicellular life on Earth by 2045 to enable the global-scale study of changes in biodiversity, species interactions, and species dynamics. Access to this information has the potential to inform strategies to mitigate the damaging ecological effects of climate change. In the near term, the goal is to catalogue all insects. Each sample is imaged, genetically barcoded, and taxonomically classified by domain experts, a time- and resource-intensive process that is becoming increasingly impractical as collection rates surpass five million samples annually. Addressing such needs is among the foundational motivations for the research of this thesis.
This thesis presents several contributions motivated by the challenges of the BIOSCAN project. Over five million insect samples were organized into a machine-learning-ready dataset, and a deep neural network classifier was developed to establish a baseline for image-to-taxonomy classification performance. To mitigate the harmful impacts of mislabelled samples in training data, a study of neural network architecture robustness was conducted alongside the development of two novel loss functions: Blurry and Piecewise-zero loss. Blurry loss de-weights and reverses the gradient of samples likely to be mislabelled, while Piecewise-zero loss disregards these samples. These improvements strengthen model robustness and enhance label error detection, enabling the referral of suspicious samples for expert review and correction. Additional work investigates the hierarchical structure of biological data and its integration into classification models, specifically through Hyperbolic neural networks, and measures the benefits of doing so in comparison to using conventional architectures. Finally, this thesis explores aligning image, genetic, and taxonomic representations in a hierarchy-aware manner to improve retrieval across modalities.
The contributions of this thesis advance the application of machine learning to facilitate the ongoing global-scale cataloguing of insect life. As challenges such as label errors, hierarchical structures in data, and incomplete annotations are present across many domains, the contributions are valuable to both the machine learning community and the global network of BIOSCAN collaborators
Canada's Deteriorating AI Position: A Comparative IP Perspective
No full textUtilizing patent data, this paper will attempt to show a portrait of the world's AI patent landscape and explain what happened to Canada's apparent lead in the field. It will build upon methodology from previous reports to collect patent data, then identify current trends in cross-border AI patenting ownership flows, to finally evaluate the adequacy of current Canadian policy and chart a path forward, a path informed by a digital economy where knowledge rents reign supreme and wages stagnate
Experiencing Land-Based Nourishing: An Indigenous Evaluation of Urban Land-Based Food Education in the Waterloo Region
No full textBackground: Across Canada, Indigenous communities have sustained their health and wellbeing through cultural practices enacting their knowledges and intimate connection with the Land. As a health promotion strategy reflecting these concepts of wellbeing, many communities are using Land-based learning models to situate culturally-therapeutic and educational experiences that foster pathways towards wellness. However, few studies have evaluated these activities to determine their success, particularly in urban community contexts and with Indigenous children.
Objectives: The purpose of this dissertation research is to examine whether Land-based learning approaches to food education for children within an urban setting enhances participant food literacy. Collaborating with two urban Indigenous organizations in the Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada, this examination extends across three studies that address more specific questions concerning this phenomenon. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to: develop a culturally and locally responsive evaluation framework for WONAA and WC’s Land-based learning programs with a focus on food education; document and evaluate the process and outcomes of a Land-based learning program among urban Indigenous children; and, synthesize findings across studies to renew the initial co-constructed program theory, examining key lessons from implementing a Land-based food program towards reconceptualizing food literacy within an urban Indigenous context.
Methods: Using a community-based Indigenous evaluation approach, the articles of this dissertation use diverse qualitative methods informed by relational Indigenous methodologies and realist philosophy to co-construct a culturally responsive program theory, assess a Land-based pilot program, and synthesize findings to put forth a reconceptualization of food literacy as a community-determined, context-specific health promotion concept. Iterative group discussions, participant observation, and photo elicitation methods were used with purposive samples of Indigenous community experts, program facilitators, and child program participants.
Results: Findings from Study 1 report a novel methodological approach using iterative sharing circle conversations with diverse, partner-identified community experts to co-construct a culturally and contextually appropriate program theory as the first step in the wider evaluation project. Guiding conversations through four thematic topics were found to concurrently support the planning of both the program and its evaluation through theory co-construction. An initial program theory is presented as a theory of “Land-based nourishing”, which portrays a nascent process of becoming well with food instead of pre-determined or predictable outcomes to be anticipated at the outset of a program. This iterative conversational method also enabled a reframing of evaluation itself as a cycle of responsibility, which reflects the values of Indigenous organizational partners. These insights were applied in Study 2 to identify the context, mechanisms, and outcomes of Sweetwater Camp, a children’s Land-based pilot program. Evaluation results highlight an emergent program context characterized by a process of “giving over to the land,” in which facilitators responded to unpredictable natural conditions in positively adaptive ways that acknowledged more-than-human actors as program co-facilitators. Key mechanisms delineate “the strength of relational implementation” where Camp activities and participant behaviours established ways of learning through collaborative facilitation and meaningful connection by engaging in risky play and fostering a sense of belonging among child campers. Program outcomes were found to be “whatever, however we were gifted, happened,” denoting the inconclusiveness of early indicators of program impact including participant development of new skills and knowledge and the formation of deepened relationships with all program participants in ways that could not be planned for. The results of Study 3 synthesized findings from the prior two studies to demonstrate the limited relevance and applicability of the conventional term, ‘food literacy’. Rather, participants from both preceding studies renewed the initial conceptualization of “Land-based nourishing” proposed in Study 1. Aggregated data clearly articulate the meaning of this contextual health concept with symbolic representation gleaned from child-produced photographs. Land-based nourishing, as such, was understood as a personally unique process of developing a dignified sense of wellbeing through practicing key relational principles, engaging in a variety of skills and knowledge that respect the Land as the greatest teacher, and cultivating a spiritual link with food itself. Together, these studies chronicle an evaluation journey of co-creating an organizationally distinct Indigenous evaluation approach that captures the strengths of Land-based food programs for urban Indigenous young people. The final article, a discussion paper, reflects on this process by considering current ethical guidance around relational research conduct. In this reflection, several taken-for-granted assumptions and ethical dilemmas are explored and followed with suggestions for navigating and preventing some relational challenges that could be encountered when trying to do Indigenous research ‘in a good way’.
Conclusion: The articles included in this dissertation make several methodological, theoretical, and substantive contributions to the literature as well as public health practice and policy by reporting the creation and implementation of a distinct Indigenous evaluation approach. This research used a unique program theory co-construction methodology, assessed an urban Land-based children’s program, and concurrently reconceptualized a nutrition promotion concept reflecting shared community values and context. Jointly, these works demonstrate that relationships matter to nourishing wellness with and through food
Microfluidics meet predictive modeling: spatiotemporal characterization of antagonism in bacterial communities
No full textMicrobial habitats (e.g. in the mammalian gut, in soils) are strongly spatially heterogeneous: diffusion limits, advection, and porous structure generate micron-scale gradients in
nutrients, oxygen, pH, and antimicrobials. As a result, immediate neighbors can experience
different exposures over time, so population-level behavior emerges from local interactions
rather than averages. To explain community assembly, stability, and responses to perturbations, we therefore need to characterize interactions among bacterial populations at
single-cell, spatially resolved scales. Within this landscape, antagonistic interactions (diffusible bacteriocins, contact-dependent inhibition, and competition for space/resources)
are major determinants of fitness and composition, but their efficacy depends on cell-tocell variability in production, receptor status, and exposure paths. This thesis bridges
single cell based experiments and predictive modeling to make those dynamics measurable
and modelable at scale.
I first establish a methodological foundation by benchmarking time-lapse image-processing
software for bacterial populations, creating ground-truth datasets and mapping performance trade-offs to guide tool selection (Chapter 2). I then introduce TrackRefiner, a
post-processing software that identifies and corrects tracking errors in time-lapse images of
rod-shaped bacteria, thereby improving lineage fidelity for downstream analyses (Chapter
3). To bridge experiments and models, I survey and systematize machine-learned summary
statistics for Bayesian parameter inference in systems biology (Chapter 4). Building on
these elements, I present a pipeline that carries data from microfluidic image acquisition to
agent-based model calibration (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 was intended to apply this toolkit
to single-cell antagonism in bacterial communities, characterizing spatiotemporal interactions and developing a predictive model. Because of time constraints, I focused on building
time-lapse microscopy datasets and analyzing them with the methods from Chapters 2 and
3. These analyses also help to understand aspects of the biology of the antagonistic system
we study. I implemented a preliminary agent-based model to capture cell growth and toxin
diffusion/uptake; calibration and validation are left for future work.
Collectively, the thesis delivers (i) validated image processing practices with openly released ground truths for segmentation and tracking, (ii) open-source software that enhances
tracking quality, and (iii) a reproducible calibration workflow for agent based models. To
the best of my knowledge, (iv) it also presents the preliminary single-cell, spatiotemporal
characterization of colicin Ib–mediated antagonism in microfluidic environments. The impact is twofold: experimentalists gain a principled framework to quantify and compare antagonistic strategies at single-cell resolution, and modelers obtain reliable, information-rich
statistics for forecasting community dynamics and evaluating interventions. By unifying microfluidics with inference, the work is a step towards data-driven control and design of
microbial consortia
Coasting of the Fueling Trolley System: Dynamic Modeling and Uncertainty Assessment
No full textStructural health monitoring in industrial systems is challenging due to complex component interactions, limited accessibility, and sparse sensing. In such settings, condition monitoring methods must remain reliable under limited information and significant model-form uncertainty. Bayesian state-space modeling addresses this by representing system interactions stochastically and explicitly quantifying measurement uncertainty. In particular, Kalman filters provide real--time state updates from sensor data while accounting for both process and measurement noise, yielding a practical framework for uncertainty quantification and robust inference.
This thesis develops a physics--based dynamic model of a Fueling Machine Transport trolley to predict the behavior for condition monitoring purposes.
Using the real life coasting data, the unknown model parameters are estimated using the Kalman filter method. Using Kalman filtering with data--driven noise identification, we compare two force estimation formulations: a simplified 1-DOF model that identifies a net resistive force and a 2-DOF model that separates two coupled force components. Numerical studies show that the 1-DOF formulation is more accurate and robust under the single sensor setting, whereas the 2-DOF model exhibits multiple convergences and strong prior sensitivity due to structural unobservability.
The coasting data is collected in the form of Gray code signal via the encoder installed on the trolley. Experimental work decodes Gray-code encoder signals and aligns them with event logs to produce position/coasting trajectories that agree with plant records. The single degree of freedom approach is used to find the resistive force in the system. These findings support deploying the simplified estimator with routine consistency checks and route level trend tracking. Practical recommendations include monitoring Q_F as a health indicator, periodic re-estimation of Q and R, and optional secondary sensing to improve identifiability. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that carefully chosen models, paired with principled uncertainty quantification, can deliver robust, interpretable estimates for SHM under sparse sensing