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Recent Submissions

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    Negotiating Restoration through Representation: The role of visualization in the public process of Riverside Dam
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-14) Polera, Jordana
    As climate change intensifies ecological uncertainty and infrastructure risk, low-head dam removals have become sites where environmental, cultural, and political tensions converge. This thesis examines the case of Riverside Dam in Cambridge, Ontario (2008-2019), to explore how visualization acts not only as a tool of communication but as an active agent in shaping negotiations over the whether to remove, rebuild Riverside Dam. The Municipal Class Environmental Assessment (EA) for Riverside Dam including consultant drawings, City reports, and community responses based on eight “preferred alternative” designs for the dam. Visual materials play a decisive role in how potential futures are understood, aiding in understanding, participation, and decision-making. Drawings are political tools that can include or exclude voices, clarify or obscure impacts, and build or erode public trust. By closely studying the Municipal EA process for Riverside Dam, this thesis examines how values, trade-offs, and potential designs are communicated through visualizations and contested. Drawing from literature on landscape architecture visualization studies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and environmental design, the thesis proposes a framework for negotiated design to better support engagement with the community. Negotiated design in this thesis is an approach to environmental planning and restoration that prioritizes structured dialogue and collaboration among diverse stakeholders with often competing interests. This framework is a call for transparency, accessibility, and legibility in architectural drawings in so that the public is aware of what is at stake with each “preferred alternative” within the Environmental Assessment process. Within the proposed framework, this thesis lays out four visualization principles including: 1) contextual clarity, 2) embodied perspectives, 3) temporal layering, and 4) making conflict visible. Engagement principles also emphasize the use of physical space, co-creation, and writeable, decision-oriented drawings. Rather than producing an original design proposal, this thesis reinterprets three existing shortlisted design options (or “preferred alternatives”) for the Riverside dam: rebuilding, removing and naturalizing, and building an offline dam and naturalizing the river. Through different forms of visualization, the framework developed in the thesis are applied to visualize trade-offs, reveal biases, and imagine the realities of each design to best engage and educate the public. These River drawings are not final answers but rather invitations for further negotiation. By centering legibility over resolution, this work positions visualizing ecological projects as a collaborative and evolving act. It contributes to broader conversations on climate resilience and adaptation, decolonial landscape practice, and the role of design in environmental governance.
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    Beyond the Reason-Emotion Divide: Philosophical Theories of Autonomy from a Neuroscience Perspective
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-14) Drecun, Darlene
    This dissertation explores how recent neuroscience research might bear on philosophical theories of personal autonomy, with a special focus on the work of Christine Korsgaard and Harry Frankfurt. A central question within the personal autonomy literature is what gives our actions self-governing authority? Many approaches have answered this question with requirements about how we ought to reason or feel about our desires. One prominent way of dealing with this question of authority is a requirement of reason being “in control” of our emotions, presenting the relationship between reason and emotion as competitive processes fighting for control over our decisions. However, by examining recent neuroscience research related to the concept of autonomy, I argue that this research paints a different picture, where reason and emotion function cooperatively rather than antagonistically. Furthermore, the research suggests a prominent role for emotion in many different autonomy-related processes. In order to widely capture the many processes that underlie autonomy, I discuss the neuroscience of decision-making, self-control, voluntary action, and the conscious feelings related to agency and ownership over our actions. I examine some of the emerging trends in cognitive neuroscience that suggests that complex behaviours like decision-making and self-control emerge from large-scale neural networks located across widely distributed areas of the brain, where cognitive, emotional, and motivational information are deeply integrated at the neural level. I argue that this new notion of cognitive, emotional and motivational information as integrated in various processes, such as decision-making and control, has a direct impact on the concept of personal autonomy. First, this integration suggests that cognitive, emotional and motivational information all cooperatively contribute to autonomy processes, rather than competing. Second, the research suggests a larger role for emotion and motivation in processes like decision-making and self-control than is commonly assumed in philosophical theories of autonomy. Therefore, I argue that this integrated neuroscientific perspective highlights some important tensions between the neuroscience research on autonomy processes and philosophical theories of personal autonomy, like those of Korsgaard and Frankfurt. I examine the possible implications that the neuroscience of decision-making, self-control, voluntary action, and conscious feelings of agency may have on the autonomy theories of Korsgaard and Frankfurt. I point out several key tensions between the neuroscience research and how these theories of autonomy understand desires as motivating our actions, the role of emotion in decision-making and self-control, and whether we ought to rely on our conscious feelings of agency and control over our actions when determining whether our actions are autonomous. I suggest overall that an integrated neuroscientific understanding of the processes that support autonomy-related behaviours can provide a novel approach to understanding the concept of personal autonomy.
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    Learning to Reach Goals from Suboptimal Demonstrations via World Models
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-14) Ali, Qasim
    A central challenge for training autonomous agents is the scarcity of high-quality and long-horizon demonstrations. Unlike fields such as natural language or computer vision—where abundant internet data exists—many robotics and decision-making domains lack large, diverse, and high-quality datasets. One underutilized resource is leveraging suboptimal demonstrations, which are easier to collect and potentially more abundant. This limitation is particularly pronounced in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), where agents must learn to reach diverse goal states from limited demonstrations. While methods such as contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) show promising scaling behavior when given access to abundant and high-quality training demonstrations, they struggle when demonstrations are suboptimal. In particular, when training demonstrations are short or exploratory, CRL struggles to generalize beyond the training demonstrations, and the resulting policy exhibits lower success rates. To overcome this, we explore the use of self-supervised representation learning to extract general-purpose representations from demonstrations. The intuition is that if an agent can first learn robust representations of environment dynamics—without relying on demonstration optimality—it can then use these representations to guide reinforcement learning more effectively. Such representations can serve as a bridge between noisy demonstrations and goal-directed control, allowing policies to learn faster. In this thesis, we propose World Model Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (WM-CRL), which augments CRL with representations from a world model (WM). The world model is trained to anticipate future state embeddings from past state–action pairs, thereby encoding the dynamics of the environment. As the world model aims to only learn environment dynamics, it can leverage both high and low quality demonstrations. By integrating these world model embeddings into CRL’s framework, it can help CRL more easily comprehend the environment dynamics and select actions that more effectively achieve its goals. We evaluate WM-CRL on tasks from the OGBench benchmark. We explore performance on multiple locomotion and manipulation environments and multiple datasets varying in quality. Our results show that WM-CRL can substantially improve performance over CRL in suboptimal-data settings, such as stitching short trajectories or learning from exploratory behavior. However, we find our method offers limited benefit when abundant expert demonstrations are available. Ablation studies further reveal that success depends critically on the stability of world model training and on how its embeddings are integrated into the agent’s architecture.
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    Sanctuaries of the Heart: Perception, Phenomenology and the Architecture of Salutogenic Healing
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-13) Ahsan, Rabbiya
    The thesis investigates the role of architecture as an active agent of healing by redefining salutogenic design through the lens of spatial phenomenology. It draws from the author’s own lived experience with mood disorders as well as extensive interdisciplinary research. The paper critiques historic, as well as modern healthcare approaches and treatment methods for mental health, with case studies such as Bethlem Royal Hospital and more sterile hospitals of today. In contrast, it studies the ancient healing methods that integrate the mind, body and spirit through spatial symbolism and rituals. Additionally, the project incorporates Maggie Keswick Jencks’ diaries through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis, to understand a patient’s perspective when they navigate healthcare facilities. The thesis further studies the impact of the diaries in the form of a detailed case study of the Maggie Centre. Other case studies also contribute to understanding nature, materiality and sensory experience which combine under the umbrella term of spatial phenomenology and often nurtures positive recovery. Central to this research is salutogenesis, an idea that can be reframed to fit in the architectural narrative. This results in a proposed design of a mental wellness facility, located on the banks of the Grand River, a site with rich history and ecological vitality. The design serves as a manifesto for salutogenic design, choreographing light, sound, scent, texture and time, it dissolves the Cartesian split between mind and body and creates a space which contributes actively in the healing process.
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    A Proteomic Analysis of Biological Sex and Health in Gurat, France
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-01-13) Sellers, Cassidy
    Paleoproteomics, the study of ancient proteins, uses mass spectrometry to identify and characterize proteins by their amino acid sequences. This thesis explores the potential of paleoproteomics to inform bioarchaeological interpretations of biological sex and health in a small medieval population from Gurat, France. Ten milligram enamel samples from six individuals excavated from a rock-cut cave church were analyzed using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to identify proteins in enamel and evaluate their interpretive potential. The primary aim of this project was to test a modified method to investigate its ability to successfully identify amelogenin (amelogenin-X and amelogenin-Y) and immune proteins (C-reactive protein and immunoglobulin-gamma). This method was intentionally modified to reduce analytical costs and resource requirements, while remaining applicable to very small quantities of dental enamel, thereby increasing its feasibility for archaeological and ethically sensitive sampling contexts. The enamel-specific protein amelogenin was successfully identified in all six samples, allowing for proteomic estimations of biological sex to be made. In contrast, one non-enamel-specific immune protein (C-reactive protein) was identified in only one sample, reflecting uncertainty regarding the abundance and preservation of immune proteins in enamel, the immune histories of the Gurat individuals, and the sensitivity of the modified method for immune protein detection. These results highlight both the strengths and limitations of paleoproteomics, offering avenues of exploration in future directions. Above all, this thesis finds that proteomic analyses can complement osteological analyses to offer valuable insight into archaeological populations.