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This thesis presents an activity mode intent recognition approach for safe, robust and reliable control of powered backbone exoskeleton. The thesis presents the background and a concept for a powered backbone exoskeleton that would work in parallel with a user. The necessary prerequisites for the thesis are presented, including the collection and processing of surface electromyography signals and inertial sensor data to recognize the user’s activity. The development of activity mode intent recognizer was described based on decision tree classification in order to leverage its computational efficiency. The intent recognizer is a high-level supervisory controller that belongs to a three-level control structure for a powered backbone exoskeleton. The recognizer uses surface electromyography and inertial signals as the input and CART (classification and regression tree) as the classifier. The experimental results indicate that the recognizer can extract the user’s intent with minimal delay. The approach achieves a low recognition error rate and a user-unperceived latency by using sliding overlapped analysis window. The approach shows great potential for future implementation on a prototype backbone exoskeleton.

The traditional construction practice used in masonry buildings throughout the world is limited to walls with rectangular cross sections that, when reinforced with steel bars, typically accommodate only single-leg horizontal ties and a single layer of vertical reinforcement. This arrangement provides no confinement at the wall toes, and it may lead to instability in critical wall zones and significant structural damage during seismic events. Conversely, the development of a new building system, constructed with reinforced masonry (RM) walls with boundary elements, allows closed ties to be used as confinement reinforcement, thus minimizing such instability and its negative consequences. Relative to traditional walls, walls with boundary elements have enhanced performance because they enable the compression reinforcement to remain effective up to much larger displacement demands, resulting in a damage tolerant system and eventually, more resilient buildings under extreme events. Research on the system-level (complete building) performance of RM walls with boundary elements is, at the time of publication of this dissertation, nonexistent in open literature. What little research has been published on this innovative building system has focused only on investigating the component-level performance of RM walls with boundary elements under lateral loads. To address this knowledge gap, the dissertation presents a comprehensive research program that covered: component-level performance simulation; system-level (complete building) experimental testing; seismic risk assessment tools; and simplified analytical models to facilitate adoption of the developed new building system. In addition, and in order to effectively mobilize the knowledge generated through the research program to stakeholders, the work has been directly related to building codes in Canada and the USA (NBCC and ASCE-7) as well as other standards including FEMA P695 (FEMA 2009) (Chapter 2), TMS 402 and CSA S304 (Chapter 3), FEMA P58 (FEMA 2012) (Chapter 4), and ASCE-41 (Chapter 5). Chapter 1 of the dissertation highlights its objectives, focus, scope and general organization. The simulation in Chapter 2 is focused on evaluating the component-level overstrength, period-based ductility, and seismic collapse margin ratios under the maximum considered earthquakes. Whereas previous studies have shown that traditional RM walls might not meet the collapse risk criteria established by FEMA P695, the analysis presented in this chapter clearly shows that RM shear walls with boundary elements not only meet the collapse risk criteria, but also exceed it with a significant margin. Following the component-level simulation presented in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 focused on presenting the results of a complete two-story asymmetrical RM shear wall building with boundary elements, experimentally tested under simulated seismic loading. This effort was aimed at demonstrating the discrepancies between the way engineers design buildings (as individual components) and the way these buildings actually behave as an integrated system, comprised of these components. In addition, to evaluate the enhanced resilience of the new building system, the tested building was designed to have the same lateral resistance as previously tested building with traditional RM shear walls, thus facilitating direct comparison. The experimental results yielded two valuable findings: 1) it clearly demonstrated the overall performance enhancements of the new building system in addition to its reduced reinforcement cost; and 2) it highlighted the drawbacks of the building acting as a system compared to a simple summation of its individual components. In this respect, although the slab diaphragm-wall coupling enhanced the building lateral capacity, this enhancement also meant that other unpredictable and undesirable failure modes could become the weaker links, and therefore dominate the performance of the building system. Presentation of these findings has attracted much attention of codes and standards committees (CSA S304 and TMS 402/ACI 530/ASCE 5) in Canada and the USA, as it resulted in a paradigm shift on how the next-generation of building codes (NBCC and ASCE-7) should be developed to address system-levels performance aspects. Chapter 4 introduced an innovative system-level risk assessment methodology by integrating the simulation and experimental test results of Chapters 2 and 3. In this respect, the experimentally validated simulations were used to generate new system-level fragility curves that provide a realistic assessment of the overall building risk under different levels of seismic hazard. Although, within the scope of this dissertation, the methodology has been applied only on buildings constructed with RM walls with boundary elements, the developed new methodology is expected to be adopted by stakeholders of other new and existing building systems and to be further implemented in standards based on the current FEMA P58 risk quantification approaches. Finally, and in order to translate the dissertation findings into tools that can be readily used by stakeholders to design more resilient buildings in the face of extreme events, simplified backbone and hysteretic models were developed in Chapter 5 to simulate the nonlinear response of RM shear wall buildings with different configurations. These models can be adapted to perform the nonlinear static and dynamic procedures that are specified in the ASCE-41 standards for both existing and new building systems. The research in this chapter is expected to have a major positive impact, not only in terms of providing more realistic model parameters for exiting building systems, but also through the introduction of analytical models for new more resilient building systems to be directly implemented in future editions of the ASCE-41. This dissertation presents a cohesive body of work that is expected to influence a real change in terms of how we think about, design, and construct buildings as complex systems comprised of individual components. The dissertation’s overarching hypothesis is that previous disasters have not only exposed the vulnerability of traditional building systems, but have also demonstrated the failure of the current component-by-component design approaches to produce resilient building systems and safer communities under extreme events. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Linear conjugated polymers have attracted significant attention in organic electronics in recent decades. However, despite intrachain π-delocalization, interchain hopping is their transport bottleneck. In contrast, two-dimensional (2D) conjugated polymers, as represented by 2D π-conjugated covalent organic frameworks (2D c-COFs), can provide multiple conjugated strands to enhance the delocalization of charge carriers in space. Herein, we demonstrate the first example of thiophene-based 2D poly(arylene vinylene)s (PAVs, 2DPAV-BDT-BT and 2DPAV-BDT-BP, BDT=benzodithiophene, BT=bithiophene, BP=biphenyl) via Knoevenagel polycondensation. Compared with 2DPAV-BDT-BP, the fully thiophene-based 2DPAV-BDT-BT exhibits enhanced planarity and π-delocalization with a small band gap (1.62 eV) and large electronic band dispersion, as revealed by the optical absorption and density functional calculations. Remarkably, temperature-dependent terahertz spectroscopy discloses a unique band-like transport and outstanding room-temperature charge mobility for 2DPAV-BDT-BT (65 cm2 V−1 s−1), which far exceeds that of the linear PAVs, 2DPAV-BDT-BP, and the reported 2D c-COFs in the powder form. This work highlights the great potential of thiophene-based 2D PAVs as candidates for high-performance opto-electronics.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:08:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 RicardoWO.pdf: 3213751 bytes, checksum: 8d8983eff6f68357e2e660b4041a5b84 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-03-19 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / In the present study we elaborated algorithms by using concepts from percolation theory which analyze the connectivity conditions in geological models of petroleum reservoirs. From the petrophysical parameters such as permeability, porosity, transmittivity and others, which may be generated by any statistical process, it is possible to determine the portion of the model with more connected cells, what the interconnected wells are, and the critical path between injector and source wells. This allows to classify the reservoir according to the modeled petrophysical parameters. This also make it possible to determine the percentage of the reservoir to which each well is connected. Generally, the connected regions and the respective minima and/or maxima in the occurrence of the petrophysical parameters studied constitute a good manner to characterize a reservoir volumetrically. Therefore, the algorithms allow to optimize the positioning of wells, offering a preview of the general conditions of the given model s connectivity. The intent is not to evaluate geological models, but to show how to interpret the deposits, how their petrophysical characteristics are spatially distributed, and how the connections between the several parts of the system are resolved, showing their critical paths and backbones. The execution of these algorithms allows us to know the properties of the model s connectivity before the work on reservoir flux simulation is started / No presente estudo foram elaborados algoritmos, utilizando conceitos da teoria da percola??o, que analisam as condi??es de conectividade em modelos geol?gicos elaborados para reservat?rios de petr?leo. A partir de seus par?metros petrof?sicos, tais como: permeabilidade, porosidade, transmissibilidade e outros, gerados por qualquer processo estat?stico, ? poss?vel conhecer qual a por??o do modelo onde ocorre o maior n?mero de c?lulas conectadas, quais s?o os po?os que est?o conectados entre si e qual o caminho m?nimo entre injetores e produtores. Permitindo, assim, classificar o reservat?rio segundo os par?metros petrof?sicos modelados. Podendo determinar, tamb?m, qual a porcentagem do reservat?rio a que cada po?o est? conectado. De uma forma geral, as regi?es conectadas e os respectivos m?nimos e/ou m?ximos da ocorr?ncia dos par?metros petrof?sicos estudados, constituem uma boa forma de caracterizar volumetricamente um reservat?rio. Os algoritmos permitem, ent?o, otimizar o posicionamento de loca??es de po?os oferecendo uma vis?o antecipada das condi??es gerais da conectividade de um determinado modelo. A inten??o n?o ? avaliar modelos geol?gicos, mas mostrar como as jazidas s?o interpretadas, como suas caracter?sticas petrof?sicas se distribuem espacialmente e como as conex?es entre as diversas partes do sistema s?o resolvidas, mostrando seus caminhos cr?ticos e backbones . A execu??o desses algoritmos permite que as caracter?sticas relativas ? conectividade do modelo sejam conhecidas mesmo antes de se iniciar o trabalho de simula??o de fluxo do reservat?rio

In this work, we are interested in Growth of Galton-Watson trees under two different models: (1) Galton-Watson (GW) forests with lifetimes and/or immigrants, and (2) Galton-Watson forests with mutation, which we call Galton-Watson-Clone-Mutant forests, or GWCMforests. Under each model, we study certain consistent families (Fλ)λ≥0 of GW/GWCM forests and associated decompositions that include backbone decomposition as studied by many authors. Specifically, consistency here refers to the property that for each μ ≤ λ, the forest Fμ has the same distribution as the subforest of Fλ spanned by the blue leaves in a Bernoulli leaf colouring, where each leaf of Fλ is coloured in blue independently with probability μ/λ. In the first model, the case of exponentially distributed lifetimes and no immigration was studied by Duquesne and Winkel and related to the genealogy of Markovian continuous-state branching processes (CSBP). We characterise here such families in the framework of arbitrary lifetime distributions and immigration according to a renewal process, and show convergence to Sagitov’s (non-Markovian) generalisation of continuous-state branching renewal processes, and related processes with immigration. In the second model, we characterise such families in terms of certain bivariate CSBP with branching mechanisms studied previously by Watanabe and show associated convergence results. This is related to, but more general than Bertoin’s study of GWCM trees, and also ties in with work by Abraham and Delmas, who study directly some of the limiting processes.

This work was aimed at developing novel tools that utilize HINT, an empirical forcefield capable of quantitating both hydrophobic and hydrophilic (hydropathic) interactions, for implementation in theoretical biology and drug discovery/design. The role of hydrophobicity in determination of macromolecular structure and formation of complexes in biological molecules is undeniable and has been the subject of research across several decades. Hydrophobicity is introduced, with a review of its history and contemporary theories. This is followed by a description of various methods that quantify this all-pervading phenomenon and their use in protein folding and contemporary drug design projects – including a detailed overview of the HINT forcefield. The specific aim of this dissertation is to introduce our attempts at developing new methods for use in the study of antibacterial drug resistance and antiviral drug discovery. Multidrug efflux is commonly regarded as a fast growing problem in the field of medicine. Several species of microbes are known to have developed resistance against almost all classes of antibiotics by various modes-of-action, which include multidrug transporters (a.k.a. efflux pumps). These proteins are present in both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria and extrude molecules of various classes. They protect the efflux pump-expressing bacterium from harmful effects of exogenous agents by simply evacuating the latter. Perhaps the best characterized mechanism amongst these is that of the AcrA-AcrB-TolC efflux pump. Data is available in literature and perhaps also in proprietary databases available with pharmaceutical companies, characterizing this pump in terms of the minimum inhibitory concentration ratios (MIC ratios) for various antibiotics. We procured a curated dataset of 32 β-lactam and 12 antibiotics of other classes from this literature. Initial attempts at studying the MIC ratios of β-lactam antibiotics as a function of their three dimensional topology via 3D-quantitative structure activity relationship (3D-QSAR) technology yielded seemingly good models. However, this methodology is essentially designed to address single receptor-ligand interactions. Molecules being transported by the efflux pump must undoubtedly be involved in multiple interactions with the same. Notably, such methods require a pharmacophoric overlap of ligands prior to the generation of models, thereby limiting their applicability to a set of structurally-related compounds. Thus, we designed a novel method that takes various interactions between antibiotic agents and the AcrA-AcrB-TolC pump into account in conjunction with certain properties of the drugs. This method yielded mathematical models that are capable of predicting high/low efflux with significant efficiency (>93% correct). The development of this method, along with the results from its validation, is presented herein. A parallel aim being pursued by us is to discover inhibitors for hemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) of human parainfluenza virus type 3 (HPIV3) by in silico screening. The basis for targeting HN is explored, along with commentary on the methodology adopted during this effort. This project yielded a moderate success rate of 34%, perhaps due to problems in the computational methodology utilized. We highlight one particular problem – that of emulating target flexibility – and explore new avenues for overcoming this obstacle in the long run. As a starting point towards enhancing the tools available to us for virtual screening in general (and for discovering antiviral compounds in specific), we explored the compatibility between sidechain rotamer libraries and the HINT scoring function. A new algorithm was designed to optimize amino acid residue sidechains, if provided with the backbone coordinates, by generating sidechain positions using the Dunbrack and Cohen backbone-dependent rotamer library and scoring them with the HINT scoring function. This rotamer library was previously used by its developers previously to design a very successful sidechain optimization algorithm called SCWRL. Output structures from our algorithm were compared with those from SCWRL and showed extraordinary similarities as well as significant differences, which are discussed herein. This successful implementation of HINT in our sidechain optimization algorithm establishes the compatibility between this forcefield and sidechain rotamer libraries. Future aims in this project include enhancement of our current algorithm and the design of a new algorithm to explore partial induced-fit in targets aimed at improving current docking methodology. This work shows significant progress towards the implementation of our hydropathic force field in theoretical modeling of biological systems in order to enhance our ability to understand atomistic details of inter- and intramolecular interactions which must form the basis for a wide variety of biological phenomena. Such efforts are key to not only to understanding the said phenomena, but also towards a solid basis for efficient drug design in the future.

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the current state of the customer's computer network and his requirements. Then the changes and the way of their realization were proposed. The next part of the thesis are the description of appropriate components, selected technologies and the detailed description of the implementation process, including blueprints.

There are two general ways to introduce functionalities into a polymeric structure: functionalization of the monomeric units before polymerization and postfunctionalization of the preformed polymer. Building libraries of polymers with different functionalities can be completed with significantly less effort by the second method, as each postfunctionalization of a single batch of polymeric backbone can involve as little as one synthetic step. One method of building a polymeric backbone for postfunctionalization involves the synthesis of hyperbranched conjugated polymers (HCPs) from AB2 monomeric units. A polymer formed from n AB2 monomeric units should contain n reactive B groups, which act as sites of functionalization. Utilizing this principle, two different hyperbranched poly(phenylene vinylene-phenylene ethynylene) scaffolds were synthesized and studied in both their inherent properties and functionalization. The first HCP synthesized was compared against a monomeric cruciform model and a linear polymer with a similar structure. The hyperbranched polymer has red-shifted absorption and emission in comparison to the cruciform model and linear polymer. The HCP quenches paraquat more efficiently than the linear polymer by a factor of about two, suggesting a greater rate of energy transfer. The functionalization of HCPs was studied; iodine groups decorating the HCPs were replaced with terminal alkynes by Pd-catalyzed coupling, providing a library of 24 differently functionalized HCPs. Elemental analyses of the postfunctionalized polymers show nearly complete substitution of the iodine groups. The postfunctionalized polymers show increased fluorescence compared to the original iodine decorated polymers, due to the loss of the heavy atom effect inducing iodine groups. The emissions of the postfunctionalized polymers in solution show a strong dependence on the groups attached to the conjugated structures, with emission maxima ranging from 505 nm to 602 nm; quantum yields range from 0.7% to 25%. Solid-state emission studies show stronger and more red-shifted spectra compared to emissions observed in solution.