UWSpace

UWSpace is the University of Waterloo’s institutional repository for the free, secure, and long-term home of research produced by faculty, students, and staff.

Depositing Theses/Dissertations or Research to UWSpace

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Recent Submissions

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    Making sure things really add up: Ways to assess research impact responsibly
    (Canadian Association of Research Administrators, 2024-05-13) Bredahl, Laura Megan; Milligan, Ian; Chambers, Thane; Conte, Erica
    University administrators love the numbers. The idea of having data to measure, compare, support decision making, and to understand initiatives and invested resources is something we strive for. The idea of using bibliometric data to assess research and benchmark institutional success/lack of success has been a long-standing modus operandi in academic institutions. However, when this type of analysis is done, it often feels like it’s missing something. The data doesn’t always appear to accurately reflect what we know is happening at our institutions, and the impacts that are observed both in our communities and across research disciplines. In this interactive session, we will explore how responsible ways of measuring research, that include quantitative and qualitative assessments and choosing the right indicators, can provide more meaningful data. Through this and thoughtful reflection on the challenges of measuring impacts at large institutions we can more fully reveal the stories of the research being done at our institutions. The session organizers include librarians and research offices, representing the collaborative approach we believe is necessary for institutions to meet these challenges. We will discuss initiatives at Canadian institutions that advocate for the responsible use of research impact metrics. And with the audience, we will explore ways in which these types of assessments can be used at other institutions to change what and how things are measured around research so that more accurate, more holistic, and more meaningful data can be gathered.
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    Building Momentum in Open Science through Persistent Identifiers: The Final Outcomes of the ORCID Implementation Pilot at the University of Waterloo
    (Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) Online Conference 2026, 2026-05-13) Bredahl, Laura; Ochana, Mary
    Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are foundational to advancing open scholarship, improving research visibility, and enabling interoperability across systems. In 2024, the University of Waterloo launched an ORCID Implementation Pilot to strengthen researcher identity management and streamline workflows for researchers and staff. This initiative began as a collaboration between the Library, Office of Research, and Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (GSPA), aligning institutional priorities with national and international momentum for PID adoption. Our presentation will share the story of this pilot as a momentum-building collaboration. We will outline the project’s objectives, including integrating ORCID into institutional systems, supporting researchers in creating and maintaining ORCID, and leveraging ORCID to reduce redundancy and improve the consistency and reuse of researcher information. Key highlights will include our success metrics, lessons learned from user engagement, technical and organizational challenges, and strategies we developed for fostering buy-in as we strive toward ORCID becoming embedded in everyday academic and administrative processes.   We will demonstrate how a single pilot can contribute to collective progress toward a sustainable, interoperable research ecosystem. We will discuss future directions and how emerging faculty partnerships serve as proof-of-concept for how ORCID enabled reporting can scale as ORCID has the potential to reshape how researcher information is collected, maintained, and reused across the whole institution. Attendees will gain practical insights into planning and executing ORCID adoption initiatives, as well as how leveraging cross-institutional collaboration can support project success. This session aligns with the conference theme of Creative Collaborations, Collective Momentum by showcasing how partnerships within and beyond an institution can drive meaningful change in research infrastructure and open science practices.
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    Position Paper: Measuring Research Outputs with Bibliometrics, 2026 Update
    (University of Waterloo, 2026) Bredahl, Laura; Carson, Jana; Chan, Wai Yin Winnie; Collins, Nancy; De Gomez, Wendy; Feltracco, Annamaria; Ferrer, Ana; Hale, Jordan; Hirst, Jenny; Kariyapperuma, Kumudinie; Marques, Antonio; Milligan, Ian; Muszycka-Jones, Martha; Santi, Selena M.; Stirling, Peter; Walgate, Jon; University of Waterloo Working Group of Bibliometrics
    This current Position Paper is an update from 2016. The inaugural paper provided a high-level review of issues relevant to understanding bibliometrics, and practical recommendations for how to appropriately use these measures. Since first publishing the original paper, there have been consistent questions about; how to better serve the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in bibliometrics and research impact, the role of alternative metrics in analyses, the intersection of equity, diversity and inclusion and bibliometrics, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and practical guidance on the responsible use of metrics. There was also interest in looking at the impact that COVID has had on research and related outcomes. This update incorporates reflections, lessons learned and the modern context into its existing form.
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    A High-Resolution Frequency-Division-Multiplexed Single-Photon-Counting CMOS X-Ray Imager
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-05-22) Yalcin, Refik
    Spectral X-ray imaging based on single photon counting (SPC) has clear benefits for reducing radiation dose and improving tissue contrast in medical imaging. However, fitting the spectral readout electronics into a small pixel area in order to provide high spatial resolution is still challenging in readout integrated circuit (ROIC) design. This thesis covers the modeling, design, and measurement of a CMOS SPC X-ray imager intended for mammography and computed tomography (CT) that implements, for the first time, frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) readout to achieve high spatial resolution. Reducing pixel dimensions to 50 x 50 µm² is critical to leveraging the "small-pixel effect", which is a phenomenon that minimizes the impact of slow charge trapping in some X-ray sensors to drastically improve energy resolution. However, this stringent area constraint renders conventional per-pixel digitization architectures impractical. The proposed architecture, therefore, uses FDM, which allows the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to be moved outside the pixel so that one ADC can serve an entire column of pixels. This architectural change helps mitigate the area and count-rate limitations inherent in X-ray imagers with in-pixel ADCs. In our proposed ROIC, each pixel contains a charge-sensitive amplifier (CSA) followed by a CR-RC shaper, which then feeds a mixer driven by a local oscillator. The shaped pulses are modulated onto orthogonal carrier frequencies, summed using a transimpedance amplifier (TIA), and then digitized by a shared 8-bit 200 MHz pipelined ADC. Measurements from our ROIC, fabricated in a 1.8-V 180-nm CMOS process, confirm that our proposed multi-carrier FDM readout scheme functions as intended. The ADC achieves a 7.28 bit effective number of bits (ENOB), providing a theoretical maximum of 176 distinct energy bins. In addition the average equivalent noise charge (ENC) is measured to be 96 e- per pixel, and 306 e- per column. Our experimental results demonstrate that FDM is a viable approach for spectral X-ray imaging and point toward a scalable path for future high-resolution SPC imagers.
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    Multi-Connectivity and L4S in 5G Radio Access Networks: Throughput Enhancement and Low-Latency Delivery
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-05-22) Ghasemi, Amirmohammad
    This thesis presents two complementary works addressing different aspects of 5G radio access networks: one focused on improving the received throughput through multi- connectivity, and the other on achieving low-latency delivery through L4S marking mechanisms. Multi-connectivity is anticipated to provide more reliable, higher data rate con- nections for cellular network users by leveraging all available radio resources across base stations within one or multiple radio access technology(ies) (RAT). It aims to improve user mobility through multi-RAT connections or mitigate quality of service (QoS) degradation when users connect to congested cells through load-balancing traffic among base stations and distributing the user’s flow across multiple links. Many studies have investigated the benefits of multi-connectivity across various network deployments using analytical models or simulated environments. In this work we critically assess these reported gains, particularly regarding system throughput. We argue that multi-connectivity’s advantages are primarily restricted to scenarios with a low user-to-base station ratio and that dense networks are less likely to benefit. We formulate the user-to-base station association and resource allocation within a Proportional Fair (PF) setting across varying user densities to examine this. Our findings show that multi-connectivity offers no superiority over the PF single-connectivity baseline in dense networks. Furthermore, in sparse networks, we show that while multi-connectivity can potentially enhance system throughput, it does not significantly improve individual users’ QoS, as the PF single-connectivity scheme can offer sufficient resources to every user. Complementing this throughput-oriented study, the second part of the thesis addresses low-latency delivery in evolving mobile networks, where many emerging services, such as cloud gaming, are highly latency-sensitive. In this context, the sender must react quickly to congestion, and its response must be adapted to the extent of the congestion. Otherwise, the link will be either underutilized or suffer from excessive latency. By integrating Low Loss Low Latency Scalable Throughput (L4S) into a disaggregated 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), we demonstrate its strong potential to simultaneously achieve low delay and high throughput for real-time mobile applications. We introduce a novel 3GPP-compliant marking scheme tailored for RAN, and compare it with the state-of-the-art RAN marking solution, L4Span. Our experiments suggest that our approach is superior in mitigating tail latency. We further examine the impact of our design on our L4S-compliant Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) stack using SCReAMv2, a congestion control algorithm designed for WebRTC media. Our results show substantial reductions in frame delays compared to non-L4S solutions, while also revealing practical limitations of SCReAMv2, including sender-side packet drops that can cause decoder stalls and video perceptual quality degradation.