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Improving Model-Based System Architecture Specification to Enable Fault Tree Analysis
Get PDFThe aviation industry explores innovative aircraft technologies and concepts aiming to reduce its emissions and meet environmental targets. The advanced technologies result in high complexity in aircraft systems, necessitating novel system architecting and safety assessment methods. Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) presents a promising approach, offering more efficient systems development than document-centric methods. At the same time, safety assessment is an integral part of the system development process and can also benefit from a model-based approach. Model-Based Safety Assessment (MBSA) emerges to enable the analysis of the system architecture from a safety perspective and automate segments of the process, and by doing so, it improves efficiency by reducing development time and errors. The objectives of this thesis are to integrate MBSE and MBSA to construct a system model with an architecture specification that can help build safety models for fault tree analysis (FTA). This thesis focuses on the transition from system to safety models and explores various methods to enhance architecture specification in support of MBSA. The approach presented in this thesis utilizes the Capella workbench and extends the logical architecture levels of the Architecture Analysis and Design Integrated Approach (ARCADIA) to represent the system architecture at the appropriate level of granularity to support MBSA. The presented methodology involves enriching a system specification model by integrating safety properties into Capella elements with the help of the property values management tools (PVMT). The flap system is selected as a test case, and a system model of the flap control and actuation system is developed and used to construct safety models in the AltaRica 3.0 language. Specific failure scenarios are introduced by adding observers to the safety models, enabling FTA with AltaRica 3.0. The minimal cutsets and failure rates of the FTA are examined to validate the results of the safety analysis, ensuring the transition between the system and the safety model is correct. Overall, the presented thesis helps to improve coherence and collaboration between system and safety engineers designing complex systems, such as advanced flight control system architectures
Traditional Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) Meet Dynamic App-Device Interactions for IoT-specific Threat Intelligence
Get PDFWhile enjoying widespread popularity, IoT faces numerous threats with both traditional (e.g., Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs)) and IoT-specific (e.g., device-application interactions) attack vectors. Therefore, gathering threat intelligence for an IoT environment is equally essential if not more (compared to many other IT environments). However, extracting threat intelligence from an IoT deployment poses several unique challenges. First, most IoT implementations are not logging threat-related information and even if they are, their logging mechanisms require significant additional effort to turn those logs to a threat intelligence. Second, there is no clear definition of IOCs (indicators of compromise), which are the key inputs to threat intelligence, in the context of IoT; including how to combine IoT-specific IOCs including that are involved with the dynamic app-device interactions. In this thesis, we propose IoTINT, a solution to obtain IoT-specific threat intelligence while addressing the above-mentioned challenges. Specifically, our key ideas are to first enable logging in IoT devices and apps without requiring any code instrumentation (in contrast to existing approaches), then iteratively finding dynamic interactions between IoT devices and their apps that are defined by automation rules and result in various security threats, and finally, combine both app-device interactions with traditional IOCs (such as, CVEs and CWEs) to build a comprehensive
threat intelligence for IoT. We implement IoTINT for Samsung SmartThings, a major smart home platform, and evaluate its performance (e.g., 100% coverage in extracting threat intelligence within 11 seconds for 10 realistic IoT attack scenarios)
Development and analysis of two innovative physical and chemical co2 absotprion systems to achieve a more effective ccu process
Get PDFHuman activities have caused a continuous increase in global temperatures due to high global
greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated
that to reduce these emissions carbon capture and utilization (CCU) must be implemented, despite
its energy-intensive nature. In this project, various innovative approaches have been developed to
improve the performance of solvent based absorption systems and their integration with CCU. The
reduction in energy is achieved by hydrogen injection into the CO2 removal separators to act as a
stripping agent. Nine configurations (4 physical, 5 chemical) are simulated and analyzed.
Furthermore, the proposed approaches are tested for two scenarios: 1) CO2 capture from the flue
gas of a cement plant. 2) revamping the CO2 capture unit of the synthesis gas stream of an existing
ammonia plant. The results for physical absorption revealed that around 48%-77% reduction in
the net energy consumption for flue gas and syngas are achievable respectively compared to the
base case capture process and the traditional processes available in the market. As a result, the
capture cost has decreased by 10%-25%, for flue gas and syngas respectively (29.43 from
39 per tonne CO2). In the chemical case, the proposed concept is integrated with the use
of high-temperature heat pump. According to our results, a 13% improvement for flue gas and 5%
for syngas in the coefficient of performance of the heat pump is achievable. The results of this
project can be used to improve the overall performance of the CCU technologies and to be
compared with other emerging technologies
The Evolution of Apocalyptic Determinism
Get PDFThat determinism occupies an integral place within apocalypticism’s notional architecture is routinely acknowledged in scholarship. However, examinations of determinism’s conceptual structure and function within Jewish and early Christian apocalypticism are lacking. Moreover, where determinism has been treated within this context, it is frequently framed by the language and definitional constructs of contemporary philosophical and popular discourse. The effect of this approach is to obscure the conceptual coherence which underlies the texts.
In light of this gap in scholarship, I examine determinism and human moral agency within four Jewish historical apocalypses: the biblical book of Daniel chaps. 7-12, The Animal Apocalypse, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch. This analysis eschews the framework of contemporary philosophical and popular discourse in an effort to understand the way in which apocalyptic determinism coheres with conceptualizations of human moral agency within the texts themselves. From this analysis, it is my contention that: 1) a stable, conceptual core of an “early Jewish apocalyptic determinism” persists across the four apocalypses, which together correspond to a period of approximately 300 years; 2) 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch reflect two distinct developmental directions for “early Jewish apocalyptic determinism;” and 3) across the four apocalypses, “early Jewish apocalyptic determinism” contributes to the texts’ social function in a consistent manner
Impact of Linguistic Anti-patterns on Program Comprehension
Get PDFUnderstanding a software system is a major activity during the maintenance and evolution of the system. Researchers studied how developers understand source code and which factors reduce program comprehension. They reported that shorter identifier names have a negative impact on program comprehension. The use of short identifiers is a symptom of a broader naming problem. Consequently, researchers introduced linguistic anti-patterns (LAs) to describe bad practices in the naming, documentation, and implementation of code entities, which can have a negative impact on program comprehension. In this study, we make the hypothesis that LAs have a small impact on program comprehension because they can be easily recognised by developers. To test our hypothesis, we conducted an empirical study to investigate whether the occurrences of LAs do indeed affect code comprehension by asking participants to perform comprehension tasks on code containing or not occurrences of LAs, with and without prior knowledge of LAs. We also examined whether participants could recognise LAs by identifying them in various code snippets and assessed the ease of LA recognition with and without prior knowledge. We also evaluate the impact of knowledge of LA on program comprehension and LA recognition. We measured participants’ performance (1) in comprehension tasks using the correctness of their answers, time spent, and perceived effort and (2) in recognition tasks also using correctness. Our findings indicate that, while LAs do impact program comprehension, this impact is small or negligible because LAs are recognised by developers. They also show that learning about LAs can mitigate their negative impact by improving their recognition rates. We thus conclude with the possible negative result that linguistic antipatterns may not actually function as antipatterns, given their minimal impact on program comprehension
Ultrasonic vocalizations induced by appetitive or aversive clitoral stimulation: foundations for an anticipatory-based model of female sexual reward and clitorodynia.
Get PDFAdult rats make ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) that exhibit acoustic characteristics indicative of an immediate emotional state and its underlying neural activation. As an integral part of the rats' behavioral repertoire, USVs can be translated to human behavior, including clinical models of human diseases and disorders. Although female rats are used as predictive models of sexual function and dysfunction in women, their USVs have not yet been incorporated into existing preclinical behavioral paradigms. Female rats reliably emit USVs in response to the application of temporally-distributed, manual clitoral stimulation (CLS). It is unclear, however, whether the emissions are reflective of the hedonic properties of CLS or those of general arousal. Thus, the experiments in the thesis aimed to characterize the acoustic properties of CLS-elicited USVs to clarify their communicative function. The experiments described in Chapter 2 determined that female rats emit hedonic USVs when distributed CLS is delivered with a soft-bristle paintbrush. The ovarian hormones estradiol and progesterone modulated the acoustic parameters of hedonic USVs whereas chronic administration of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine attenuated their emission concurrently with decreases in sexually appetitive behaviors like solicitations. The experiments described in Chapter 3 explored whether altering the tactile quality of distributed CLS alters its hedonic value and its capacity to serve as a reinforcer in partner-preference conditioning. Compared to CLS applied with a soft-bristle brush, CLS applied with a hard-bristle brush elicited distinct subtypes of low frequency USVs associated with aversion. The experiment described in Chapter 4 found that the tactile quality of distributed CLS also altered the pattern of Fos protein expression in brain areas involved in sexual reward, aversion, and sensory integration. Exposure to a neutral odour previously associated with rough-bristle CLS increased the number of neurons expressing Fos protein in brain regions subserving aversive responses and decreased expression in regions subserving reward. An opposite pattern was expressed in response to the same odour associated with soft-bristle CLS, whereas the odour associated with sham CLS did not alter Fos expression in those areas. Taken together, the data show that CLS-induced USVs can be used as a measure of both appetitive and aversive sexual affect, as well as provide a foundational model of anticipatory-induced clitorodynia
Juvenalia or Birdsong for Sheyne Meydelech
No full textJuvenalia or Birdsong for Sheyne Meydelech, a collection of short stories, is a new existentialist riff on the complexities of the feminine coming-of-age in a postmodern society. These stories explore the tradition of the Bildungsroman in a postmodernist context. The coming-of-age experience in the twenty-first century is innately fragmented. Childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and past, present, and future are weakly linked by memories of before and after: before the internet, before phones, before dating apps, before COVID, before hook-up culture, before this. My collection is an exploration of the experience of contemporaneity through the eyes of a young woman. The stories are unified by their treatment of alienation. My collection identifies alienation as the primary effect of the rapid evolution of technology and its equally rapid integration into our lives.
In tone, the stories are rosy and sad, cynical but earnest; tragicomedy is the only mode through which I might dutifully reproduce my experience of postmodern life. These stories are concerned with plot, particularly its capacity to serve as a microcosm for the competing forces of self-determination and destiny. I enact metafiction as a tool to argue against the existence of free will as a factor in the life of the twenty-first century woman. Technology has proliferated in such a way that life now holds an infinitude of possibilities and appears as infinitely fragmented. Furthermore, absurdism and surrealism emerge as the only lenses through which a young woman might perceive a world still replete with wonder and the hope for narrative coherence.
Just as the collection’s fragmented world precludes its narrative cohesion, so too does the routine immersion of our consciousness into the internet preclude the possibility of an exclusively realist mode. As such, the collection operates predominantly through realist narratives which invariably branch into softly magic realism, surrealism, or fantasy. At their heart, these stories boil down to the problem of alienation and the desire for connection; they are informed by pain but reach for levity
Age Verification in Canada: The Need for an Evidence-Based, People-Centric Policy
Get PDFThe Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) invited experts to join a national conversation on Canada’s long-term innovation strategy by sharing insights and solutions for reversing Canada’s declining innovation performance
Gaby Says | Gaby Dit: Experimenting with with generative AI for library information services
Get PDFThis presentation focuses on Gaby, an experimental AI chatbot developed to improve library information services at Concordia University. The project explores various techniques, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and fine-tuning. It also evaluates different LLMs, such as OpenAI and Llama 2. Developing evaluation techniques has been a key aspect of this project, alongside assessing Gaby's usefulness, accuracy, and ethics. This research aims to understand how AI can enhance user interactions with library resources while identifying areas for improvement and future development
Reading the Room: Lessons on Pedagogy and Curriculum from the Gender and Sexuality Studies Classroom
Get PDFThe contemporary post-secondary classroom has become a flashpoint in public debate on gender and sexuality, giving rise to controversies over gender-inclusive policies, “trigger warnings,” and “cancel culture” that have been misrepresented by opportunistic and divisive voices within and outside of the education sector. However, gender and sexuality studies scholars have long engaged in these debates over pedagogy, and closer study of gender and sexuality classroom practices reveals constructive and transformative ways of learning that grapple with power, conflict, discomfort, and safety in the classroom.
Reading the Room collects candid discussions on classroom experiences from instructors and students throughout Canada to provide guidance to educators on often-fraught issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and decolonization. Working from a place of coalition building, this volume is a frank, insightful, and pragmatic invitation to share different pedagogical practices with educators in a range of academic disciplines.
Contributors to this volume discuss an array of topics including asymmetrical power relations between students and teachers, how students and professors learn from each other, how to negotiate conflict in a classroom, and how to be self-reflective about methods of teaching and learning. They also consider debates around trigger warnings and students’ expectations, discuss methods for curriculum selection and pedagogical practices, reflect on what it is like to embody a subject one teaches, and show how university equity, diversity, and inclusion work is often offloaded to overburdened racialized students and precariously employed staff.
A thoughtful and generous work, Reading the Room shows how teachers and students can navigate the difficulty and discomfort of contentious topics and learn more from each other