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2017 — Nora's Transformative Journey: From A Doll's House and The Little Mermaid to The Way HomeAbstract
This critical engagement paper employs the practical work and research conducted for my MFA graduating installation performance The Way Home. For decades, domestic violence researchers analyzed abused women coping with abuse based on their psyche, which portrayed them as having certain needs that abuse fulfils. The assumption that there is something about abused women that makes them want to be abused overlooked major stress and obstacles that occur when choosing to leave an abusive relationship. While the pursuit of breaking the cycle of violence remains an important issue, I argue for giving more value to women's thoughts and feelings as … Read more
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2018 — Flexible Appointments: Rules for Appointed and Not Appointed Outpatients with Random Arrival TImesAbstract
Among the most critical and troublesome difficulties when managing systems of appointments for outpatients, are those related to the pattern of arrivals: walk-in patients, early patients, late patients, and patients that do not show up. This work addresses these challenges in a multi-server system, with one station through a proposed approach named Flexible Appointment Rules (FAR). These rules are flexible in the sense that they involve the use of a ‘window of punctuality’ for scheduling appointments; they release the constraint of simultaneous appointments when more than one server (physician) is available, they allow the presence of patients without a previous … Read more
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2013 — Atmospheric Concentrations of Selected Insecticides and Current Use Herbicides in SaskatchewanAbstract
Atmospheric samples were collected during 2007-2010 at Bratt’s Lake, Saskatchewan. Samples were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry in negative ion selected ion monitoring mode. Atmospheric concentrations of three high usage pre-emergent herbicides (triallate, trifluralin, and ethalfluralin) in the Canadian prairies showed increasing atmospheric concentrations in spring-early summer when they were recommended for application for weed control. Atmospheric concentrations of triallate during 2007-2010 remained in a similar concentration range (maximum concentration >5000 pg/m3) to the previous measurements. In 2010 the increase in concentration of triallate was higher during the fall than previous years with a maximum concentration of 3183 pg/m3 on … Read more
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2020 — Three-Dimensional Model Development for Buried Pipeline: Applied Loadings and Fluid Structure InteractionAbstract
Pipeline systems are widely used to transport water, sewage, oil, natural gas, and other valuable fluids. The buried pipelines can run over long distances in different soil behaviours and climate conditions. Pipelines should be designed in such a way that they remain functional even when they are subjected to high-intensity soil movements, excessive fluid flows, and different loading conditions. This thesis will illustrate the main parameters that cause failure in buried pipelines, starting by giving an overview of the piping system, that includes pipeline materials, pipeline design procedure, soil properties and pipeline interaction, soil and traffic loading on underground pipelines … Read more
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2017 — On THe Theory of Pricing of Discrete Time Options of European TypeAbstract
The contemporary nancial market appears to be a part of human activity where ideas of Stochastic Analysis, in particular Martingale Theory and Stochastic Ito's integral, have been implemented in a most complete matter. Creating a link between the theory and practice of nance generates new problems in the Theory of Probability and the Financial Mathematics investigating them. Financial markets consists of two main (primary) assets (securities), bonds (rick- less) and shares (risky). Bonds are debentures issued by a state government or a bank with a goal to accumulate capital. As an example we can consider a bank account or government … Read more
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2021 — An Intelligent System Approach for Predicting Air Traffic Demand Based on Socio-Economic ParametersAbstract
Over the last five years, emerging countries around the world have advanced slowly but gradually towards greater economic independence. Aviation sector has had a significant impact on this contribution for the last ten years. That is why it is indispensable to forecast potential need for air travel to enable a long-term commitment to the economies of emerging countries. In history, the most commonly employed and suggested tool for the supply of passenger demand was the multiple linear regression-based modelling techniques. In recent years, however, a wide variety of disciplines have been subject to the latest artificial intelligence-based forecast approaches, including … Read more
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2023 — Digital twin framework development for apparel manufacturing industryAbstract
Apparel manufacturing, being a labor-intensive industry, is evolving into a more complicated, challenging, and dynamic business as a result of fast-changing fashion trends, increased variety, and increased personalization of product demands. Quick and optimized decision-making is extremely important to overcome these barriers. It is necessary to have a mechanism that can ensure real-time visibility of the production process and provide assistance in decision-making. Digital Twin (DT) provides real-time visibility. It keeps all production data sources in connection, allowing for fast analysis without affecting physical setup. Although most DT ‘research focused on the machine level and automated industries, this has the … Read more
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2016 — Conditional Preference Networks: Learning and OptimizationAbstract
The last two decades have shown a great body of work in the eld of Arti cial Intelligence (AI) addressing issues related to representing, reasoning and learning preferences. One of the main models for graphical representation of preferences is that of Conditional Preference Networks (CP-nets). A CP-net de nes a partial order over the set of outcomes or alternatives by providing a concise set of small preference statements. Since their introduction, CP-nets have been intensively studied and applied in various problems involving preferences. This thesis is concerned with two main issues related to CP-nets: learning and optimization. Concerning the learning … Read more
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2020 — LA PLACE DE L’INSTITUT FRANÇAIS DANS LA DIFFUSION ET LA PROPAGATION DU FRANÇAIS AU NIGÉRIAAbstract
In today’s world, speaking more than one international language has become a necessity as a result of globalization. More and more people around the world engage in learning foreign languages in order to have an edge and become more competitive in the employment market, both home and abroad. In an English-speaking West African country surrounded by only French-speaking countries like Nigeria, the political decision by the government to make French a second official language is understandable and highly commendable. However, poor implementation of the policy has generated many other problems and challenges, including the lack of qualified teachers. Yet, the … Read more
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2017 — Evaluation of ionic Liquids Performance in Improving Medium Oil Recovery FactorAbstract
In Saskatchewan, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques were applied in many light and medium oil reservoirs in order to improve oil recovery. One of the most efficient EOR methods is chemical flooding. This research studied the efficiency of introducing various types of Ionic Liquids (ILs), 1-Ethyl-3-Methyl-Imidazolium Acetate ([EMIM][Ac]), 1-Ethyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride ([EMIM][Cl]), 1-Benzyl-3- methylimidazolium chloride ([BenzMIM][Cl]), and Trihexyltetradecylphosphonium chloride ([THTDPh][Cl]), on the recovery factor (RF) of medium oil, (Weyburn oil, 30.25 oAPI),at room conditions. The main focus of this research was to investigate the effects of IL concentration, Slug Size (SS), and IL + brine slug initiation time on the (RF). … Read more
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2023 — Novel synthesized transition metals liquid catalysts for heavy oil recoveryAbstract
The effectiveness of oil recovery operations can be increased through the use of chemical-assisted enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which has recently attracted a lot of interest. Due to the high viscosity and high asphaltene concentration of heavy oil, which makes production technically difficult, new recovery techniques are frequently tested and used on a lab scale. This dissertation contributes to general progress in this area by synthesizing three metallic liquid catalysts (LCs) in the lab and applying it to enhance heavy oil recovery for the first time. A number of sand-pack flooding experiments, data collection on viscosity, density, interfacial tension (IFT), … Read more
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2024 — Pulsed electric field pretreatment of lignocellulose biomass for maximum fermentable sugar yieldAbstract
The utilization of lignocellulosic biorefinery processes holds great promise for the production of biofuels and biochemicals. Lignocellulosic biomass, which includes materials such as plant straw, chaff, various grasses, sawdust, soft and hard woods, tree leaves, and paper waste, represents an abundant resource. However, these materials possess tough cell walls and bonding structures that restrict enzyme accessibility during hydrolysis, leading to a reduced yield of fermentable sugars. Numerous pretreatment methods have been explored to address the recalcitrance of lignocellulosic biomass. However, many of these methods are either costly or environmentally harmful due to their substantial energy or chemical consumption and waste … Read more
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2013 — Majorization and the Schur-Horn Theorem.Abstract
We study majorization in Rn and some of its properties. The concept of majorization plays an important role in matrix analysis by producing several useful relationships. We find out that there is a strong relationship between majorization and doubly stochastic matrices; this relation has been perfectly described in Birkhoff's Theorem. On the other hand, majorization characterizes the connection between the eigenvalues and the diagonal elements of self adjoint matrices. This relation is summarized in the Schur-Horn Theorem. Using this theorem, we prove versions of Kadison's Carpenter's Theorem. We discuss A. Neumann's extension of the concept of majorization to in_nite dimension … Read more
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2018 — Virtue at Hogwarts: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Through The Lens of J.K. Rowling's Sorting SystemAbstract
Exploring how Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is reflected and developed through the Sorting System of J.K. Rowling’s magical school of Hogwarts in her Harry Potter series, this paper considers each house and its characteristic virtues individually. Alongside a comparison of a particular virtue as presented in Rowling’s work to Aristotle’s account, each chapter includes a dissection of the students who represent and problematize these accounts. This format allows an exploration of how the literary text converses with an ancient account of moral virtue. The first chapter considers Gryffindor House and its virtue of courage, the first virtue that Aristotle himself considers … Read more
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2014 — Transdiagnostic Internet-Delivered Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy for Recent Cancer Survivors: A Feasibility Trial and Examination of Clinician PerspectivesAbstract
Increased attention has been drawn to the challenges faced by cancer survivors following treatment completion. Although most survivors adjust well to these challenges over time, a subset of individuals experience clinical levels of anxiety and depression. Cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) has been shown as effective in reducing anxiety and depression among individuals who have received a cancer diagnosis. Despite the availability of this treatment, a large proportion of cancer patients and survivors do not seek treatment for emotional distress due to reasons such as geographical distance from providers, and the stigma of seeking help for mental health problems. Internet-based CBT (ICBT) … Read more
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2018 — Data Reduction in Smart GridAbstract
The advancement of the electric grid has led to tremendous growth in data generated from the installed sensors. With this huge amount of data, the electric grid faces a big data problem. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a data reduction technique that would not only curtail the exponential data growth, but also be able to make smart decisions with the reduced data.This thesis deals with two data reduction techniques; data compression and dimensionality reduction. Some of the state of the art compression algorithms exploit the characteristics of load pro le data, where consecutive data samples have very small di … Read more
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2025 — Experimental characterization and machine learning optimization of polymer nanocomposite membranes for carbon capture systemsAbstract
The study aimed to characterize the CO2 capture capabilities of Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanocomposite membranes by reinforcing them with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) and silica (SiO2). These membranes were made using the electrospinning manufacturing method. The nanoparticles were functionalized using Gum Arabic (GA) to improve nanoparticle distribution, which further improved the capture efficiency. The morphological techniques were used to examine the nanoparticle structures after functionalization to optimize the functionalization parameters. Experimental results showed that increasing nanoparticle concentrations enhanced CO2 permeability while maintaining stable N2 permeability, resulting in favourable CO2/N2 selectivity ratios. The 4 wt. % MWCNTs nanocomposite membrane exhibited the best … Read more
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2020 — Lived Experiences of Sexual Violence in Tondo, Manila, Philippines Envisioning Change Through Body MappingAbstract
This thesis addresses a gap in research about sexual violence (SV) in low-middle income countries. It explores women’s lived experiences of SV in Tondo, a community in the Filipino capital Manila. Using a transnational feminist lens and the arts-based methodology (ABR) of body mapping, the study sought to answer the research question: What can we learn about sexual violence prevention in the Philippines from women living in Tondo, Manila as they envision their community without sexual violence? Findings provide detailed information about prominent forms of SV in Tondo, the social contexts in which these incidents occur, and how women perceive … Read more
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2013 — An Examination of Misconduct in Canadian PrisonsAbstract
This thesis examines the relationships between inmate characteristics and prison misconduct in Canadian penitentiaries using prison data collected from 18,075 inmates admitted to the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) between January 1, 2006 and August 31, 2009. In a test of importation theory, this research examines the relationships between minor and major prison misconduct and the following individual-level characteristics: gender, age, race, conviction for a violent offence and gang membership, controlling for prior incarceration, need, risk and prison placement (level of security). In order to carry out this research, a series of logistic regression analyses were estimated. Consistent with prior … Read more
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2018 — Affect, Affective Contagion and Decisions in Agile DevelopmentAbstract
During the past decade, research on how affects—including emotions, moods, and feelings—influence software developers’ performance has increased. In software development, this influence has been considered and investigated mostly in terms of individual developers. Agile development, which requires collaboration and communication, can be more prone to the influence of affects on both individuals’ and teams’ decisions. There is a lack of a tested model in the literature that explicitly reflects the influence of developers’ affects when they make decisions in Agile. Furthermore, there is no explicit evidence of the influence of positive or negative affective contagion on software teams’ cooperation or … Read more
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2019 — Summarizing Conditional Preference NetworksAbstract
Preference modeling has been studied extensively in the literature, and has applications in recommender systems and automated decision-making. The eventual objective of working with preference models is to be able to reason about preferences over objects, often referred to as outcomes. In most of the literature, each outcome is described as an assignment of values to a set of attributes. Representing and reasoning about preferences over outcomes calls for efficient preference models. In this thesis, we focus on one such model, Con- ditional Preference Networks (CP-nets). A CP-net is a graphical model that captures the preferences of an individual using … Read more
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2017 — Motor Imagery Based Brain Computer InterfacesAbstract
Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is an emerging technology which enables humans to communicate with external devices using their brain signals. Motor imagery classification is one such area in BCI systems where the goal is to detect and classify the motor related intentions of humans using their brain signals. The desired accuracy of BCI systems cannot be achieved without the preprocessing and the extraction of discriminant features from raw brain signals. To this end, this thesis first develops a novel extension of multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) for the preprocessing of the raw brain signals. MEMD is a mathematical tool that … Read more
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2021 — Automatic Summarization of Financial ReportsAbstract
The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed substantial advancements due to both the development of new algorithms and the increase of computational capacities. As a result, novel NLP techniques have been successfully applied in various fields such as medicine, law, and finance. Companies and corporations publish several financial reports and disclosures every year to meet the requirements and needs of law enforcement entities, analysts, customers, and stakeholders. Processing these materials requires a tremendous amount of time and manual labor, especially with the unwieldy volume of data accumulated throughout the years. This thesis attempts to exploit the potential of … Read more
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2018 — Comparison Study of Liquid CO2 and Water as a Fracturing Fluid for Improved Gas Production in Tight ReservoirsAbstract
Nowadays, Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin’s unconventional tight reservoirs are enjoying technology development like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic fracturing substantially improves production however it is crucial to understand how fracture growth and production comparison when different fluid systems like water and CO2 based systems are being used. In this thesis, based on tight reservoir model in WCSB, firstly we have reviewed how conventional water based hydraulic fracturing damages formation and affects recovery of the fracturing fluid back to surface. Then reservoir simulation software GOHFER coupled with rock geomechanics has been employed to perform dynamic hydraulic fracturing for predicting hydraulic … Read more
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2013 — Zero Forcing Sets for GraphsAbstract
For any simple graph G on n vertices, the (positive semi-de nite) minimum rank of G is de ned to be the smallest possible rank among all (positive semi-de nite) real symmetric n × n matrices whose entry in position (i; j), for i x j, is non-zero if ij is an edge in G and zero otherwise. Also, the (positive semi-de nite) maximum nullity of G is de ned to be the largest possible nullity of a (positive semi-de nite) matrix in the above set of matrices. In this thesis we study two graph parameters, namely the zero forcing … Read more
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2013 — An Optimum Vision-Based Control of Rotorcrafts Case Studies: 2-DOF Helicopter & 6-DOF QuadrotorAbstract
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft capable of sustained flight without a human operator on board which can be controlled either autonomously or remotely (e.g., by a pilot on the ground). In recent years, the unique capabilities of UAVs have attracted a great deal of attention for both civil and military application. UAVs can be controlled remotely by a crew miles away or by a pilot in the vicinity. Vision-based control (also called visual serving) refers to the technique that uses visual sensory feedback information to control the motion of a device. Advancements in fast image acquisition/processing tools … Read more
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2017 — A Multiple-Criteria Approach to Support Complex Decisions in Extreme ProgrammingAbstract
The software industry has been growing rapidly in recent decades, demonstrating an increasing need for software. There are several methods that can be used to design appropriate software to ensure high satisfaction levels. One of these is the agile methodology, which allows development teams to design projects in different iterations. This incremental design allows customers to provide feedback during the design stage, thereby increasing the possibility of delivering satisfactory projects. Most customers do not know what they need at the beginning, which makes it difficult to define the system requirements. In the case of traditional software methods, it is costly … Read more
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2022 — Conditional Preference Networks: Constraints and SimilarityAbstract
Conditional preference networks (CP-nets) are increasingly becoming popular in representing ordinal preference relations in an efficient manner. However, one of the main issues with CP-net is that both preferences and constraints influence real-life outcomes. In this thesis, we explore two objectives associated with constrained CP-nets (CCP-nets). Our first objective is to extend the underlying constraint network of the CCP-net to the weighted constraint satisfaction problem (WCSP). We call the Weighted Constrained CP-net (WCCP-net). This new model solving the WCCP-net consists of finding those solutions from the Pareto optimal set related to the CCP-net that maximizes the total cost function of … Read more
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2013 — Economic Evaluation of Capturing CO2 From Natural Gas Power Plant and Injecting CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery as an Integrated SystemAbstract
CO2 is said to be one of the most important greenhouse gas that causes global warming. The most common sources of CO2 emission into the atmosphere are fossil fueled power plants. With the increasing demand of energy in the world, more power plants needs to be built and consequently more CO2 is released to the atmosphere. On the other hand, there is possibility of establishing tax for carbon emission in different countries. One of the popular methods for decreasing the emission of CO2 is using MEA as a chemical solution to capture it and inject it to an oil reservoir … Read more
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2013 — A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experiences of Individuals in Intercultural RelationshipsAbstract
This study employed a hermeneutic phenomenological research design to investigate the lived experiences of individuals in intercultural relationships. In total, six individuals (four female and two male) participated. At the time of the study, each participant was in a romantic intercultural relationship (either common-law or married status) and had been in that relationship for at least 3 years. None of the participants had children and the ages of the participants ranged from 22 to 32 years old. Five of the participants self-identified as Canadian citizens, while one participant self-identified both her heritage and citizenship as Hungarian. Of the five Canadian … Read more
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2022 — Measurement and Prediction of pKa of Linear and Cyclic Amines Using Group-Additivity and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) ModelsAbstract
This research is focused on the estimation of dissociation constants (pKa) of eight amines, namely: 3-(Diethylamino) propylamine, 1,3-Diaminopentane, 3-Butoxypropylamine, 2-(Methylamino) ethanol, Bis (2-methoxyethyl) amine, α-Methylbenzylamine, 2-Aminoheptane, 3-Amino-1-phenylbutane in the temperature range of 293.15K to 323.15K using the potentiometric titration method. The van’t Hoff equation was used to estimate the standard state enthalpy change (ΔH0) and standard state entropy (Δ𝑆0). pKa values were predicted using the Perrin−Dempsey−Serjeant (PDS) functional additivity model, the modified PDS and the Qian, Sun, Sun, and Gao (QSSG) model. The obtained root mean square (RMS) errors for the three models were 0.41, 0.25 and 0.17, respectively. pKa … Read more
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2018 — Geographical Considerations for Site Selection of Small Modular Reactors in SaskatchewanAbstract
Saskatchewan is one of Canada’s highest emitters of greenhouse gases, largely due to burning lignite coal to generate electricity. It is also the world’s second largest producer of uranium. Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are the next generation of electrical power, producing less than 300 megawatts (MW) and featuring a basic design that offers enhanced safety benefits on health and the environment than traditional reactors. The purpose of this research is to establish a process of geographical considerations for site selections of SMRs in Saskatchewan. Locating a SMR site is a two stage process: (i) identifying candidate site locations purely based … Read more
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2013 — An Experimental Approach to the Construction of Binary Decision Classes from Card Sort DataAbstract
This thesis presents work done towards understanding the data collected from a card sorting study of facial photographs. In that study, 25 participants sorted 356 photos (178 Caucasian and 178 First Nations) into piles based on similarity. Photos placed in the same pile are deemed to be similar, photos in different piles are deemed to be dissimilar. Looking to establish binary decision classes is reasonable because the underlying question that participants answered was “Are these photos similar or not?”. There may also be more than two decision classes to describe all the behaviours. For example, an initial split into decision … Read more
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2019 — An Automating Interpretation System of Industrial Radiographic Digital Images Used in Nondestructive TestingAbstract
This thesis presents a method for automating the interpretation of industrial radiographic digital images used in nondestructive testing of subsurface defects. The goal of this study is to develop a system for detecting and identifying defects in welding processes from digital radiographic images. The proposed approach consists of three main stages: digital image processing, feature extraction, and pattern recognition. Twelve features were selected in a process to classify welding defects. Three well-known classifiers were applied in the stage of the classification process: Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and artificial neural networks classifiers (ANN). A confusion Matrix was used … Read more
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2021 — Hate and Offensive Speech Detection on Arabic Social MediaAbstract
We are witnessing a proliferation of hate speech on social media targeting individuals for their protected characteristics, including ethnicity, religion, gender, and nationality. Our research focuses on devising effective Arabic hate and offensive speech detection frameworks to address this serious issue. In the first part of the thesis, we aim to improve Arabic hate speech detection systems and present our efforts at building binary and multi-class (3-class and 6-class) hate and offensive speech datasets using four robust extraction strategies that we implement based on the four types of hate: religion, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. Next, we develop several 2-class, 3-class, … Read more
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2020 — Schurian Association Schemes Arising From Abstract Regular PolytopesAbstract
The objective of this thesis is to address Schurian association schemes arising from a string Coxeter group G. We will talk about the problem of when the adjacency algebra of the Schurian association scheme C[G==H] generated by the double cosets of G with respect to a vertex stabilizer subgroup H is commutative. We will show C[G==H] is commutative in every case of a finite string Coxeter group G except one. Moreover, if G is an infinite string Coxeter group with vertex stabilizer H that has the property that every H-H-double coset is self-inverse, then it is clearly the case that … Read more
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2016 — Regulation of competence gene homologs in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium and Escherichia coilAbstract
Many bacteria have the ability to take up DNA from their environment through a process termed “natural competence”. Even though there are numerous bacterial species that are recognized to be naturally competent, competence is undetected or overlooked in many species such as members of the Enterobacteriaceae. Homologs of competence genes and the main regulator of natural competence, Sxy, are conserved in Salmonella and Escherichia coli; however, these genes were found to be silent under all previously-tested conditions. Thus, I carried out molecular studies to investigate genetic induction and regulation mechanisms of natural competence in Salmonella Typhimurium, and E. coli. Despite … Read more