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Development and modelling of an integrated electrified membrane reverse-water-gas shift (EM-RWGS) reactor to improve the performance of CCU processes
No full textThe alarming rise in CO₂ emissions contributes significantly to global temperature increases, even
with the global use of sustainable technologies like solar and wind energy. These efforts, while
helpful, are not enough since industrial processes and human activities continue to release a lot of
carbon dioxide. To tackle this issue, carbon capture and storage or utilization (CCUS) technologies
have become important strategies for reducing emissions. Carbon capture and utilization (CCU) is
particularly gaining attention for its environmental and economic benefits, as it allows us to turn
CO₂ into valuable products. One promising option is the transformation of CO₂ into syngas, which
is a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be used to produce methanol,
hydrocarbons, and other industrial chemicals. A key part of this method is the reverse water-gas
shift (RWGS) reaction, which helps convert CO₂ into CO. This reaction plays an essential role in
using CO₂ for sustainable fuel and chemical production. This study focuses on the development
and modeling of an integrated electrified reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reactor aimed at
enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of carbon capture and utilization (CCU) processes. In
the first section of this study, a novel membrane-assisted RWGS reactor is developed for efficient
CO₂-to-syngas conversion, with CFD modeling conducted at 250 °C and 5 bar using H₂ sweep
(∼3% error vs. reference). Coupled with RSM (R² ≈ 99%), the model evaluates the effects of
GHSV (1–100), membrane selectivity (S = 2–1000), sweep ratio (Rf = 0.1–10), and feed ratio (Rc
= 1–4) on CO₂ conversion and pressure drop in co- and counter-current flows. Conversion
improves with higher Rc, Rf, and S, but declines with increasing GHSV. Pressure drop rises with
GHSV but drops with Rc, Rf, and S. Optimization yields a syngas SN of 2.2 for methanol synthesis,
with counter-current flow achieving higher conversion (90%) than co-current (78%). In the second
section of the study, we developed an electrified reverse water-gas shift (E-RWGS) reactor to boost
CO₂ conversion efficiency by integrating a heating element into various reactor types: PBR, PBRS, and PBMR. While PBMR offers the highest conversion due to water removal, it suffers from
notable heat loss. Adding a heating rod reduces this loss, improving CO₂ conversion by 5–10%
across all cases. Molar energy intensity (MEI) analysis shows that E-PBMR and PBMR deliver
the highest energy efficiency across temperatures, demonstrating the effectiveness of
electrification in enhancing RWGS-based CO₂ utilization
‘Our Dreams on Life Support’: Exploring Signs of Integration, Post-Traumatic Growth and Resilience Among Quebec’s Marginalized Immigrants
No full textThis study explores the integration experiences of immigrants who hold intersecting identities—such as being of color, queer, from marginalized ethnic and/or socioeconomic backgrounds. Quebec’s context presents additional challenges compared to other jurisdictions, including non-recognition of foreign credentials and strict secularism and language laws, such as Bill 21 and Bill 96. Through a phenomenological ethnographic research design, this study addresses aspects of sociology, psychology and education and aims to provide insights regarding the subjective experiences of these individuals. The project also allows for a creative output generated by the research itself.
A review of prior research literature addresses linguistic challenges faced by newcomers, the impact of imposed acculturation processes, gender inequality in immigrant integration, and challenges posed by discriminatory policies of the host land.
The study reflects these trends and themes with a focus on ten individual stories that give human voices to the voiceless statistics that underpin the study of immigrant integration.
The research ultimately reveals that true integration is unattainable for many due to factors like race, language fluency, and religious or sexual identity, especially within Quebec’s distinct identity and historical response to immigration. The findings suggest that systemic barriers, integration challenges, inadequate support for trauma and language acquisition hinder newcomers' successful integration. The dissertation presents recommendations for policymakers and educators, including removing systemic barriers to credential recognition, supporting inclusive cultural integration, and enhancing emotional support services for immigrants.
Keywords: Quebec, immigration, integration, francisation, assimilation, acculturation, credential recognition, Bill 21, Bill 96, immigrant trauma, Queer, BIPOC, systemic barriers
“Séparez-vous donc!”: Marital Breakdown, Legal Patriarchy, and Women’s Agency in Montreal, 1866-1916
No full textThis thesis provides an in-depth examination of the process of separation of bed and board in Montreal between 1866 and 1916 based on 121 cases from the Superior Court of Quebec for the Montreal Judicial District. Women were the overwhelming majority of the plaintiffs who filed, most frequently on the grounds of their husband’s abuse, alcoholism, and failure to provide. Even though the 1866 Civil Code of Lower Canada deemed married women as legally incapacitated figures, they were allowed to request separation of bed and board. However, they had to overcome many obstacles to do so, which reveals the tensions of structure and agency at the core of my analysis. Separation of bed and board also acted as a way for individuals to protect their individual and/or family honour, which reveals the emotional aspect behind proceeding with a formal trial. I will also analyze the minority of cases initiated by men in order to compare and contrast how separation varied according to gender. Overall, a thorough examination of these cases and relevant secondary source literature reveals that the definition of the family and the critical place it held in Quebec’s society were changing throughout the time period under observation. This took the form of a shift towards a more individualistic understanding of marriage centered around notions of love and companionship under the growing influence of liberalism
Security Auditing for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Microservices
No full textAdvancements in virtualization technologies and frameworks have profoundly transformed the deployment and management of networks and applications. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), for instance, has revolutionized the networking landscape by decoupling Network Functions (NFs) from dedicated hardware, offering enhanced flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. In parallel, the microservice architecture has transformed cloud application development by structuring it as a collection of small, loosely coupled services. This design enables independent development, deployment, and scaling of individual functionalities, promoting agility and resilience in modern cloud environments. However, despite their benefits, NFV and microservices introduce novel security and privacy challenges. For instance, attackers could exploit inconsistencies across different system layers to bypass security mechanisms, resulting in cloud-level breaches that remain
undetected by NFV tenants. Similarly, the distributed nature of microservice architectures expands the attack surface and complicates the management of data privacy across multiple independent services. To facilitate their adoption, robust security auditing solutions are crucial for ensuring compliance and detecting potential breaches. However, existing security auditing solutions face significant challenges. They often fall short in verifying NFV
security because they focus on individual levels, which can lead to overlooking cross-level inconsistencies or vulnerabilities. As a result, potential breaches may go undetected, since issues at one level might not be visible or addressed by audits focused solely on other levels. Moreover, verifying each level separately would be both expensive and impractical. Additionally, the complexity and scale of these virtual environments can render verification solutions, such as formal security checks, prohibitively expensive. This could lead to delays in detecting misconfigurations, creating a significant window of vulnerability where services or infrastructure remain exposed to potential attacks. Moreover, the distributed nature of microservices, combined with privacy concerns, makes it difficult to centralize data for security verification using existing solutions. This thesis presents novel solutions for security verification in virtualized environments, addressing the aforementioned challenges. Firstly, it introduces NFVGuard+, a cross-level security verification approach that efficiently ensures security throughout the NFV stack by conducting resource-intensive verification at one level and then propagating the results to other levels using relatively lightweight consistency checks. Furthermore, its practicality is ensured by automating key verification processes by leveraging a novel Entity-Relationship (ER) model of the NFV stack. Secondly, it presents MLFM, an approach that combines the efficiency of Machine Learning (ML) with the rigor of Formal Methods (FM) to enable fast and provable detection of security violations in large NFV environments. The core idea is an iterative teacher-learner interaction, where FM (the teacher) progressively refines verification results to generate representative training data, while ML (the learner) utilizes this data to build increasingly accurate models. This interaction allows a relatively small subset of configuration data to train an effective ML model, which can then be used to prioritize verification efforts on configurations most likely to contain security violations. Finally, it introduces FLFM, a Federated Learning (FL)-guided Formal Method (FM) approach for the security verification of microservice-based cloud applications. FLFM enables scalable and decentralized verification while preserving privacy by eliminating the need for applications to share their sensitive local data
The Museum is Weaponized: Countering Ethnic, Gendered and Religious Representations by the Visual Complex of Pakistan’s Military Regimes
No full textThe dissertation examines three museums in Pakistan as case studies through the lens of spectacular modernity and critical visuality studies to establish a connection between cultural production and military regimes. It emphasizes how museums operate not only as persistent symbols of modernity for a global audience and allies but also as stalwart institutions that perpetuate colonial thinking about former native-turned-citizen subjects. By focusing on the socio-political context in which these museums emerge, the dissertation underscores that they are a product of unique circumstances and crises, thus highlighting their ajaibness (trans. uniqueness). The dissertation makes a case for rethinking the postcolonial dimensions of museums established in newly emergent nation-states, which were required to perform modernity in order to establish their sovereignty.
Close analyses of the displays, dioramas, and exhibit labels in the National Museum of Pakistan, Karachi (1970), Pakistan Monument Museum, Islamabad (2010), and Army Museum Lahore (2017) underscore that the controlled depiction of ethnic minorities, gendered bodies and religious minorities perpetuates a politics of divisiveness in the service of the master narrative. The analysis is carried out alongside a study of speeches and writings by and about military dictators and with colonial literature and educational discourse in Pakistan to establish the continued linkages between colonial and postcolonial frameworks that view minorities and gendered bodies through a stereotypical lens. It is these links and representations that become the justification for the imposition of military regimes and the creation of a hierarchized citizenry.
The dissertation also examines how the weaponization of cultural institutions through visual cultural production is not without a counter-public, which challenges the master narrative of the nation-state by centring its narratives and archives on alternate platforms. The analysis brings attention to how these public refuses to fit into these national imaginaries by employing digital platforms and strategies to produce a countervisuality
Actions localement analytiques et application aux représentations associées à des formes surconvergentes
No full textL’objectif de ce mémoire est d’expliquer la preuve d’un théorème de Pan selon lequel les poids de Hodge-Tate-Sen d’une représentation associée à une forme modulaire p-adique surconvergente de poids k sont 0 et k − 1. La preuve repose sur la notion d’action localement analytique d’un anneau sur un espace de Banach p-adique. On montre que l’action d’une certaine algèbre, appelée algèbre de Hecke, sur certains espaces de formes modulaires surconvergentes est localement analytique. Cela nous permet de déduire les poids de
Hodge-Tate-Sen des représentations associées aux formes surconvergentes d’un résultat de Faltings sur les poids pour les représentations associées à des formes modulaires classiques. L’outil principal de la démonstration est la construction des faux invariants de Hasse par Scholze, dont l’existence suit de sa construction des courbes modulaires perfectoïdes et des morphismes de périodes de Hodge-Tate. Les faux invariants de Hasse commutent avec l’action de l’algèbre de Hecke et nous permettent de réduire l’étude de certains espaces de formes modulaires surconvergentes à l’étude d’espaces de formes modulaires classique
PANER: A Paraphrase-Augmented Framework for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition
No full textNamed Entity Recognition (NER) is a critical task that requires substantial annotated data, making it challenging in low-resource scenarios where label acquisition is expensive. While zero-shot and instruction-tuned approaches have made progress, they often fail to generalize to domain-specific entities and do not effectively utilize the limited available data. We present a lightweight few-shot NER framework that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a new instruction tuning template with a simplified output format that combines principles from prior IT approaches to leverage the large context window of recent state-of-the-art LLMs; (2) introducing a strategic data augmentation technique that preserves entity information while paraphrasing the surrounding context, thereby expanding our training data without compromising semantic relationships. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art models on few-shot and zero-shot tasks, with our few-shot approach attaining an average F1 score of 80.1\% on the CrossNER datasets. Models trained with our instruction tuning approach exhibit consistent improvements in F1 scores of up to 17\% points over comparable baselines, providing a promising solution for groups with limited NER training data and computational resources
A Test of the Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism with the Early Childhood Inhibitory Touchscreen Task
No full textThe bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis posits that bilingual children exhibit stronger executive functioning, particularly in inhibitory control, compared to monolingual children. While several studies have provided support for this hypothesis, most research has focused on school-age children. The present study examined whether this advantage is present early in life with the Early Childhood Inhibitory Touchscreen Task (ECITT). This task offers a reliable method for measuring response inhibition in infants, requiring them to shift their responses from a previously rewarded location to a new one. It minimizes language and memory demands while engaging infants through animations, making it an ideal measure for very young children. A sample of 60 infants (aged 16-24 months) was tested, with language exposure measured on a continuum using the Language Exposure Assessment Tool (LEAT). Vocabulary was assessed using the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI), and a range of executive functions were assessed using the Early Executive Functions Questionnaire (EEFQ), including inhibitory control. The ECITT data replicate previous research, showing that overall performance on this task improves with age. However, inhibition control skills did not vary as a function of the amount of second language exposure nor age. Finally, vocabulary size was positively correlated with inhibition control. The current results suggest that a bilingual cognitive advantage may not develop until the end of the second year
Design and Implementation of a Linear Optical Receiver
No full textRising internet traffic from AI and bandwidth-intensive applications has increased the demand
for fast, low-power optical links in modern data centers. Multi-level modulation schemes such as
four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) improve spectral efficiency and throughput while
relaxing bandwidth requirements. However, PAM-4 imposes strict linearity demands on the optical
receiver’s analog front-end, particularly the main amplifier.
This thesis presents a highly linear, power-efficient main amplifier for PAM-4 and NRZ optical
receivers, implemented in 65-nm CMOS. The design uses a gm/gm topology with interleaved active
feedback (IAFB) to extend bandwidth without passive inductors. Linearity is further improved by
reducing third-order distortion through resistive voltage dividers at the feedback inverters’ inputs
and by increasing their gain. Post-layout simulations show superior bandwidth, linearity, and ver-
tical eye opening (VEO) compared to a conventional Cherry–Hooper amplifier, including a 67%
reduction in total harmonic distortion (THD) at a 500-mVpp output swing.
To mitigate channel impairments, equalization is integrated directly into the main amplifier by
introducing a pole within the active feedback loop. This removes the need for a separate continuous-
time linear equalizer (CTLE), reducing chip area and power. The proposed amplifier is part of a
four-channel differential optical receiver, fabricated with a total chip area of 2 mm × 1 mm. Post-
layout results indicate 10-Gb/s per-channel operation for both NRZ and PAM-4, with about 30 mW
power consumption per channel
Rencontres sensibles au terrain vague : Repenser le design par une démarche de faire-avec et par la création de relations profondes au Champ des Possibles
No full textCe mémoire de recherche-création est un récit de relations et de création in situ au Champ des Possibles, un terrain vague de Montréal. Alors que je me sentais renoncer à la pratique du design industriel, ne prenant plus plaisir à développer de nouveaux produits, j’ai voulu ralentir et passer beaucoup de temps au terrain vague, pour articuler une pratique qui serait sensible au bien-être du lieu et qui permettrait de soutenir les liens entre les communautés humaines, plus-qu’humaines et le territoire. Parfois perçue comme vide ou en attente, la friches urbaine est une réelle utopie, un lieu sauvage où cohabitent 423 espèces vivantes (Les Amis du Champ des Possibles, 2018). En l’explorant lentement et sensoriellement, en l’écoutant, en marchant, en glanant des traces, une relation sensible se crée avec lui. Cette posture de soin envers le plus-qu’humain entre en résonance avec le posthumanisme, le réalisme agentif et les ontologies autochtones, qui mettent de l’avant l’importance de relations interdépendantes et réciproques avec les territoires. Elle s’appuie aussi sur la connaissance située (Haraway, 1988), la place de l’amour (Loveless, 2019) et des processus instinctifs (Manning, 2016) dans la recherche-création. Suite à cette démarche, je réfléchis à des gestes de création qui pourraient prendre place au terrain vague. Je m’inspire de pratiques de crafting-with, de land art et de design en collaboration avec la nature. Par le projet de création, je propose une série de petits objets qui aident à investir les sens et à connecter avec le lieu, trouvant leur place au Champ des Possibles – ils incarnent l’ensemble de la recherche