About MacSphere

MacSphere is McMaster University's Institutional Repository (IR). The purpose of an IR is to bring together all of a University's research under one umbrella, with an aim to preserve and provide access to that research. The research and scholarly output included in MacSphere has been selected and deposited by the individual university departments and centres on campus.

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Students wishing to deposit their PhD or Masters thesis, please follow the instructions outlined by the School of Graduate Studies.

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Littérature égyptienne francophone et écriture des femmes : Identité, marginalité et empuissancement
(2025) Salib, Monika
Cette thèse analyse les stratégies littéraires et discursives de deux écrivaines coptes égyptiennes francophones, Fawzia Assaad et Mona Latif-Ghattas. Inscrite dans une approche postcoloniale et féministe, elle cherche à comprendre la façon dont les femmes d’une minorité religieuse copte, évoluant dans un contexte patriarcal, construisent leur identité. Le premier chapitre interroge la langue et la culture comme instruments de construction identitaire, en montrant comment l’usage du français devient un espace de liberté et de contre-discours. Le deuxième chapitre s’appuie sur la théorie du genre pour examiner les normes patriarcales qui encadrent la sexualité, le mariage et la maternité, révélant ainsi le caractère politique de l’intime. Le troisième chapitre met en lumière la marginalisation des femmes dans les sphères publiques et privées et mobilise l’intersectionnalité afin de démontrer comment le genre, la religion et la classe se croisent pour renforcer l’exclusion et le silence des femmes. Enfin le quatrième chapitre met en lumière les formes de résistance et d’empuissancement qui émergent à travers l’écriture et l’engagement social, que ce soit par la conquête de la voix, le refus du mariage imposé ou l’accès à leur corps. Les œuvres à l’étude soulignent le fait que l’identité copte féminine n’est ni figée ni homogène, mais est plutôt traversée de tensions. Cette recherche révèle comment la littérature devient un espace qui permet aux femmes marginalisées de formuler un discours alternatif et d’affirmer leur subjectivité. This thesis analyzes the literary and discursive strategies of two Francophone Coptic Egyptian women writers, Fawzia Assaad and Mona Latif-Ghattas. Rooted in postcolonial and feminist approaches, it seeks to understand how women from a Coptic religious minority, living within a patriarchal context, construct their identities. The first chapter examines language and culture as instruments of identity construction, showing how the use of French becomes a space of freedom and counter-discourse. The second chapter draws on gender theory to explore the patriarchal norms that govern sexuality, marriage and motherhood, thereby revealing the political dimension of intimacy. The third chapter highlights the marginalization of women in both public and private spheres and applies intersectionality to demonstrate how gender, religion and class intersect to reinforce women’s exclusion and silencing. Finally, the fourth chapter sheds light on forms of resistance and empowerment that emerge through writing and social engagement, whether through reclaiming the voice, rejecting imposed marriage, or asserting control over the body. The works studied demonstrate the Coptic female identity is neither fixed nor homogeneous, but rather marked by tensions. This research reveals how literature becomes a space that enables marginalized women to formulate an alternative discourse and affirm their subjectivity.
A Type System with Physical Units Checked Using Bidirectional Type Inference
(2026) Emami, Maryam Sadat
Physical units are essential to scientific and engineering models. They give meaning to quantities such as time, mass, and frequency, and valid results depend on combining them consistently. However, most programming languages do not enforce unit correctness; units are often treated as informal annotations or external checks. As a result, subtle but serious errors can appear in code when mathematical models are implemented. For instance, a program may mistakenly add a distance to a time variable or mix quantities measured in incompatible frames of reference. Such invalid operations are physically meaningless, yet they are often accepted silently by compilers. Previous type systems for checking physical units have mainly relied on unification, a method that often produces long and confusing error messages. This thesis introduces a type system based on bidirectional type checking. Unlike unification-based systems which attempt to infer all types globally, our approach requires explicit type annotations for function declarations. This design choice transforms the global constraint-solving problem into a series of local verification tasks, resulting in clearer and more localized feedback. This approach makes type errors easier to understand while preserving formal correctness. The system extends ordinary dimensional analysis by distinguishing scalars, vectors, affine points, and displacement vectors, each tied to a frame of reference that may represent a base coordinate system, a uniformly sampled grid, or its dual. By encoding both frames and units into the type system, it ensures that only physically meaningful operations are allowed. A prototype implementation in Elm demonstrates the approach, supporting type simplification, frame normalization, and detailed diagnostic messages that guide users toward resolving errors. A case study in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) shows how the system enforces valid transformations between spatial and frequency domains and prevents common modeling mistakes. This work shows that embedding physical units and frames of reference directly into a bidirectional type system improves the reliability and transparency of scientific software. It helps catch invalid operations at compile time and provides feedback that is understandable to developers and scientists alike.
Exploring Policy Perspectives on Healthy Active Living Practices Among Newcomer Children in Hamilton, Ontario
(2026) Ikenga, Ogochukwu Christian
Background: An increasing number of newcomer children in Canada are developing cardiometabolic diseases, despite arriving in Canada in better health compared to their Canadian peers. Healthy Active Living has been identified as an effective way to address these cardiometabolic diseases in this population. This study explored the perspectives of municipal policy makers on how municipal policies and programs shape and influence newcomer children’s participation in Healthy Active Living. Methodology: This qualitative study, embedded within the broader SCORE! project, a multicomponent intervention aimed at increasing newcomer children’s participation in healthy active living practices, recruited three policy makers who were members of the Policy Roundtable of the SCORE! project, using a purposive sampling method. Data was gathered using semi structured interviews and subsequently analyzed using the Six Area of Focus of ‘A common Vision’, Canada’s leading national physical activity policy guide. Results: Participants identified various policy and program barriers that influence how newcomer children engage in physical activities and offered insights on approaches to addressing them. Participants highlighted continuing difficulty in connecting newcomer families to the services they need, with difficulty navigating available services being a major issue facing newcomers. They also remarked the need to encourage adoption of healthy active living-related micro-habits, to complement more structured and formalized physical activities. Challenges in designing and offering programs that newcomers are able to connect with were also raised. Other areas identified as presenting barriers were with parks design, which were described as not being supportive to equity-deserving groups. Other participants mentioned newcomer families concerns of their children getting exposed to culturally unfamiliar social contents involving gender including on areas bordering LGBTQ. The need for better partnerships across city departments was identified. There was also a lack of navigation support to help newcomer families find the resources and programs they need. Participants also highlighted weak program evaluation and feedback mechanisms on current programs. Conclusion: Newcomer children fall behind in participation in healthy physical activities due to multisystemic interplay of policies and program barriers. The study findings recommends strengthening interdepartmental collaboration, working closer with community through navigators and other partners in program design and enhancing program evaluation and feedback mechanisms.
COMPRESSION AND COMPUTATION METHODS FOR COMPUTER-GENERATED HOLOGRAPHY
(2026) Shima Rafiei
Holographic displays provide an immersive visualization of three-dimensional scenes by reconstructing light wavefronts that preserve both amplitude and phase information. Computer-generated holography enables the numerical creation of holograms without complex optical setups, offering scalability for 3D content generation. However, conventional Computer-Generated Holography techniques face critical challenges in balancing computational cost, storage efficiency, and visual quality, hindering their use in real-time and resource-constrained applications. The first method employs a Haar wavelet decomposition to generate multilevel hologram representations. By incorporating object saliency, the approach emphasizes perceptually important regions while significantly reducing computation time during offline dataset generation. The second method explores the capability of Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder with hierarchical latent spaces to effectively encode complex-valued holograms, achieving high-fidelity compression through training on the diverse InterfereI dataset. This framework provides a compact and robust hologram representation suitable for holographic applications. Building upon these advancements, the third contribution introduces our Rate Adaptive Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder framework, designed to achieve flexible compression within a single network. Our proposed network delivers high-quality reconstructions in real-time for phase-only hologram at both low and ultra-low bit rates, outperforming a state-of-the-art method on the natural image dataset of Div2K with a BD-Rate reduction of $-33.91% and a BD-PSNR improvement of 1.02 dB. The proposed method paves the way toward practical and scalable holographic systems for next-generation 3D display technologies, such as virtual reality near-eye display.
SAFETY ENHANCEMENT OF AI-ENABLED AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ARCHITECTURES VIA ASSURANCE CASE DESIGN ANALYSIS
(2026) Faron, Arthur
The exponential advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities in recent years have sparked rapid integration of this technology within the automotive industry via the addition of numerous autonomous vehicle control features. Despite these features being touted for the safety improvements they provide, AI-enabled feature development remains largely focused on performance with less research being done on corresponding safety systems. This work makes use of an existing Connected & Automated Vehicle (CAV) architecture designed and developed for the EcoCAR EV challenge - a collegiate vehicle engineering competition sponsored by the United States of America (USA) Department of Energy (DOE), General Motors (GM), and Mathworks. The CAV architecture makes use of AI-enabled perception algorithms without appropriate mitigation strategies required in safety-critical systems to cover hazards inherently introduced by AI as this was beyond the scope of the competition. An assurance case is used to argue the safety of the vehicle within the context of the competition, and to identify perceived points of failure from a system safety perspective. A modified CAV architecture inspired by the Perception Simplex architecture [Bansal et al., 2024] is proposed which introduces a parallel perception safety layer using the same sensor data and comprised exclusively of deterministic algorithms. The safety layer compares its output to that of the high-performance AI-powered layer and overrides vehicle control commands if discrepancies are found. This proposed architecture was designed to meet the constraints of the EcoCAR competition. A second assurance case was constructed to outline the assumptions and supporting evidence required to demonstrate the safety of the proposed architecture. This thesis aims to document the feasibility of rendering existing AI-enabled systems fault-tolerant, the usefulness of assurance cases as tools to guide the iterative design process of complex safety critical systems, and the practicality of using assurance cases to justify the safety of these systems throughout their development timeline.

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