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Recent Submissions

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    Mass Timber High-Rises: Integrating Form, Structure, and Dwelling Typologies
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) BABALOLA, OLUWATOBILOBA OLUWASEUN
    This thesis explores mass timber not only as a sustainable material, but as a spatial and conceptual framework for reimagining vertical urban housing. It treats mass timber as massing, a modular and volumetric system that organizes structure, form, and inhabitation through stacking, subtraction, and spatial play. Moving beyond material or structural efficiency, the project frames mass timber using a grid and modular based kit of parts as both constraints and opportunity as an architectural language for adaptable, community-oriented high-rise housing that responds to the environmental and social challenges of urban living. Drawing inspiration from Adrian Wong’s explorations of modular systems and spatial adaptability, the research adopts a process of modular arrangement, like assembling and rearranging blocks, where modular volumes are assembled, layered, and reconfigured to generate diverse typologies and shared communal spaces. The project asks: How can the modular logic of mass timber inspire new forms of high-rise housing that balance environmental responsibility with social and spatial richness? The study focuses on how a repetitive volumetric modular unit can be transformed into lively, varied living environments through deliberate acts of aggregation and void-making through subtractive and additive massing. In addressing Canada’s housing crisis and the global demand for low-carbon, rapidly deployable construction, this thesis positions mass timber’s prefabricated modularity as a key strategy for delivering affordable, efficient, and low-embodied-carbon housing construction that also inspires diverse spatial possibilities. Its lightweight nature reduces on-site labor, and the capacity for off-site fabrication enables faster assembly, minimal waste, and lower emissions compared to conventional concrete or steel systems. Through digital modeling and speculative design studies using Autodesk Revit, the research develops a catalogue of spatial strategies that demonstrate how mass timber’s modular volume can act as both structure and medium for spatial play, producing architecture that is sustainable, adaptable, and deeply human, uniting environmental performance with expressive form and social value.
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    Decoding QAnon: Building an Adaptive Alternative Reality at the Crossroads of American Conspiracism, Cultic Commodification, and Schizogenic Hyperreality
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) Martin, Chris
    QAnon has grown beyond a single conspiracy theory to become a self-perpetuating conspiracist alternative reality, one whose impact on the American political and cultural landscape will long outlive the influence of its cryptic figurehead. As bizarre as the practices of QAnon and its decoding rituals may seem, this dissertation argues that QAnon is a reflection of the techno-cultural milieu of its creation, an emergent consequence of the intersection of three key techno-cultural trends: America’s deeply entrenched cultural tradition of conspiracist narrativization, the commodification of culture under neoliberalism, and the predatory affordances of corporate media platforms optimized for the attention economy. Drawing from an array of interdisciplinary research and discursive examples drawn directly from the QAnon community, this dissertation presents a framework that can explain QAnon’s viral success within the American techno-cultural context and offer insight into the ongoing renaissance in hyper-individualistic reactionary conspiracism that QAnon has catalyzed. Only by understanding how these three trends have mutually reinforced and influenced each other can we begin to understand QAnon’s uniquely protean narrative structure and decipher the symbolic map of cultural dysfunction it represents.
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    A Speculative Design Exploration of Voice User Interfaces to Support Storytelling Among Older Adults
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) Andratis, Alexandra
    Reminiscing and more broadly, storytelling is an inherent part of what it means to be human. We reminisce through stories to form connections, share life wisdom, or remember significant events in our lives. Current technologies can act as a catalyst for documenting and sharing various life stories. Older adults have lifetimes of stories to tell, though they have unique and diverse needs in using advanced technologies. This research aims to understand how older adults view current Voice-User Interfaces (VUIs) such as Voice Agents (VAs) and speculate on their future role in supporting storytelling through reminiscence. Using semi-structured interviews involving speculative design and questions from Dignity Therapy (DT), nineteen older adults aged 70-96 shared their experiences with storytelling, reminiscence, and using technology. Reflexive thematic analysis brought forward overarching themes of autonomy and agency in technology usage, understanding storytelling as a learned skill, and connections to memory, and meaning-making. While most VUI technologies focus on supporting care or assistance, the themes from this work help reframe voice technologies as a potential tool for narration led by older adults, for other older adults. In speculating on the upper limits of current VUI capabilities and the seemingly endless potential of Artificial Intelligence, participants also call for simplicity and high utility value needed to adopt a new technology into daily life. This offers insights into creating dignified and meaningful interactions around reminiscence in this final stage of life.
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    Progress towards FrAg molecules for nuclear CP violation
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) Lagno, Andrew
    Ultracold francium silver is a promising experiment that has the potential to set a new upper bound on nucleon electric dipole moments. In working towards making francium sil- ver molecules, our short term goal is to develop the knowledge and ability to evaporatively cool francium and silver. This entails finding the scattering properties of francium and silver using photoassociation spectroscopy and developing the ability to sub-Doppler cool silver. In this thesis, I talk about my work towards this goal, including attempting pho- toassociation at TRIUMF during francium beam time, work at the University of Chicago towards photoassociation and gray molasses in silver. Even though these efforts weren’t successful, the next steps are clear. Additionally, I talk about what I’ve accomplished at Waterloo when I’m not working on the francium silver project. This includes working to- wards better control over and stabilization of lasers and experimental optics and beginning optimization of the Cs Zeeman slower.
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    Robust 4D Millimeter-Wave Radar Perception in Adversarial Environments
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-21) Liu, Zhenan
    This thesis investigates the robustness of 4D mmWave radar perception for autonomous driving, emphasizing real-time, point-cloud-based object detection in adverse and enclosed environments. Unlike conventional radar studies that rely on range--Doppler or heatmap representations, this work leverages the native 4D radar point cloud as the sole sensing modality. This design enhances compatibility with modern 3D perception architectures, reduces computational overhead, and enables seamless integration within existing autonomous driving stacks. The study begins with a comprehensive analysis of perception sensing modalities---camera, lidar, and radar---to contextualize their relative strengths, limitations, and degradation mechanisms under visibility-challenged conditions. A system-level characterization of 4D radar measurements is presented, highlighting their unique spatio--temporal properties, the preprocessing pipeline, and the effects of dust, multipath interference, and metallic reflections in operational environments. Two complementary perception pipelines are developed. The first, a model-driven approach, integrates adaptive noise filtering, unsupervised clustering, and rule-based 3D classification. It demonstrates strong real-time performance in harsh indoor environments but reveals a limitation: the inability to detect fully static pedestrians, inherent to Doppler-reliant sensing. The second, a learning-based framework, adapts lidar-style 3D detectors through a radar pillar feature encoder, enabling effective pretraining on public datasets and fine-tuning on custom indoor scenarios. The fine-tuned model achieves a substantial gain in pedestrian detection accuracy, confirming the advantage of data-driven radar perception. Together, these results establish a unified and robust framework for standalone 4D mmWave radar perception, illustrating both its feasibility and its remaining challenges toward deployment in safety-critical autonomous and industrial applications.