phd defence uwaterloo

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[data-colorid=fxd02vzr4x]{color:#2b2b2b} html[data-color-mode=dark] [data-colorid=fxd02vzr4x]{color:#d4d4d4}[data-colorid=i3zs82244d]{color:#2b2b2b} html[data-color-mode=dark] [data-colorid=i3zs82244d]{color:#d4d4d4} where an online defense session starts.

WebEx virtual rooms can facilitate the thesis defense, including its participants and their roles: Chair, candidate, and committee members. This concept is not new, it has been used for hybrid defenses, with some participants online and others in person, so we have lessons to draw on.

WebEx platform is a good platform to use for this type event, the Meeting rooms are easy to create, and share and invite uWaterloo as well as external people.

Preparations

Perhaps most important is effective communication between stakeholders.

• The local coordinator (Faculty or department) is key to communications.
• the supervisor
• committee members
• external examiner
• IT support (UW and at any remote sites where the external examiner resides)
• Date, actual time of event, supervisor’s name, students name, external examiner’s name, IT support personnel’s name

Next is to iron out the technical detail. Some of the suggestions apply even if you are not using the WebEX platform, but anything above this line is very important in order to keep on track.

Let us look at what the scenario is and how WebEx fits in.

The group of people are all online somewhere in the world, and while in attendance want to hold conversations in public or in private among themselves, to have Q&A, and see the presentation by student.

WebEx platform has:

            Meetings is for holding meetings

            Events is for offering webinars

            Training is for having live classrooms

The best module for defense and examination sessions is WebEx Meetings. The following functions of WebEx Meeting room will serve a graduate exam well

• It provides two way audio and video, participants can mute or unmute their camera and mic
• The student can present their slides or documents

Note, given the nature of this event being online, some limitations exits and should be given some thought. I.e. annotation is not as natural(i.e maybe slides presentation should be such to minimize the need for annotation.  Or, sharing animation and videos may not be as smooth for viewers

• WebEx has this nice function called Move to lobby and Admit . This is very useful for when the committee asks the candidate to leave the room so they can hold a private discussion, and then have the candidate re-enter by using Admit
• You can pass the presenter and host role as needed, and assign privileges as needed
• You can invite someone on add a new participant, or someone who is late for the meeting
• You can transfer files. (Not the recommended way to share anything significantly important during the session)
• You can add polls, share multimedia(this is the best way to share online videos)

Next step - Testing  

An early test will prove invaluable in this process. Test what you think you are going to do on the day of event, and make a note what you did. On the day of event just execute what you tested.

Things to test and consider :

• Audio, video, presentation, and knowing the interface of WebEx.
• Bandwidth, test your audio when you are sharing a document, do an audio number count. I.e. each person counts 1 to 20
• During the test and the events day, ask others in household not use your shared internet connection for watching videos or playing network games.
• Make sure everyone knows what their role is and what they should do on the day of event. i.e. Is someone managing the session? Is that the host of Webex, or the supervisor, etc.
• Determine everyone’s role. I.e. who is the WebEx host, and who manages the session. Will there an IT person present during the session
• Make sure during this call you run only necessary applications to maximize performance of your computer. Make sure other people in the household are not using bandwidth heavy applications such as Netflix or online games.

Going over these steps and checking each one set you up with a code of practice that you should make note of and make sure everyone understands and notes.

On The day of event

The person with WebEx Host access right should start the advertised session at least 15-20min earlier, and as participants enter they should do a quick test as above to make sure everything is still in place according to the code of practice you established on the testing day.

The chair person starts the introduction according scheduled o fevent and directs the choreography and procedure of the event.

• It is your choice if want to use video or just use audio during the defense session. If your bandwidth is showing some weakness, maybe turn off your videos.
• A good practice is after introduction everyone mutes their microphones except the speaker.

Related articles

• Page: Student Guides
• Page: Instructor Guides
• Page: How to download WebEx ARF files on Windows
• Page: When to choose OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, or SharePoint Online
• Page: Frequently Asked Questions and Support Resources for Teams

Contact the IST Service Desk at  [email protected]  or 519-888-4567 ext. 44357.

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

College of engineering, ph.d. dissertation defense - kuchul jung, related links.

Title :  Application of Machine Learning in RF Systems: A Hardware Acceleration Approach

Dr. Saibal Mukhopadhyay, ECE, Chair, Advisor

Dr. Shaolan Li, ECE

Dr. Shimeng Yu, ECE

Dr. Visvesh Sathe, ECE

Dr. Celine Lin, CS

Biostatistics Graduate Program

Julia thome dissertation defense – june 21.

Posted by duthip1 on Friday, June 7, 2024 in News .

PhD candidate Julia Thome will defend her dissertation on Friday, June 21, at 10 a.m. Central Time. The defense will be held in the department’s large conference room on the 11th floor (suite 1100, room 11105), at 2525 West End Avenue. Her advisor is Bryan Shepherd . All are invited and encouraged to attend.

Assessing the Impact of Health Policies: Advancements in Causal Inference Methodology and Real-World Application

This dissertation details the methodology and application of analytical methods using observational data to assess the impact of health policies. We first focus on the difference-in-differences (DID) method and its extensions, particularly in the context of staggered treatment adoption over multiple years. We describe these concepts within the context of Medicaid expansion and retention in care among people living with HIV (PWH) in the United States. We highlight the identification and estimation of the average treatment effect among the treated, emphasizing the necessary assumptions for valid estimation. We then introduce an extension of the DID method capable of estimating average, quantile, probability, and Mann-Whitney treatment effects among the treated under a single approach and a universal parallel trends assumption. Our approach uses a semi-parametric cumulative probability model (CPM) to handle complicated, often difficult-to-model outcome distributions. We demonstrate our approach with a simulation study and an application to Medicaid expansion and CD4 cell count at enrollment into care among PWH in the United States. We then shift away from DID and focus on a real-world application to assess the impact of COVID-19-related stay-at-home orders on the reporting of child maltreatment and whether this impact was modified by socioeconomic characteristics. We find that the numbers and rates of reporting after versus before the stay-at-home orders vary by county-level poverty, unemployment, median annual household income, health insurance coverage, and education. These results offer insights for policymakers on how pandemic-related policies may have varied effects across different socioeconomic groups.

Tags: causal inference , child abuse , child maltreatment , COVID-19 , defense , health policy , HIV , Medicaid , real-world applications , socioeconomic

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PhD Defence • Artificial Intelligence • Graph-Based Mapping for Knowledge Transfer in General Game Playing

Please note: this phd defence will take place in dc 3317..

Joshua Jung, PhD candidate David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor : Professor Jesse Hoey

General game playing (GGP) is a field of reinforcement learning (RL) in which the rules of a game (i.e., the state and dynamics of an RL domain) are not specified until runtime. A GGP agent must therefore be able to play any possible game at an acceptable level given an initialization time on the order of seconds. This time restriction promotes generality, precludes the use of the deep learning methods that are popular in the RL literature, and has led to the widespread use of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) as a planning strategy. A typical MCTS planner builds a search tree from scratch for every new game, but this leaves usable information on the table. Over its full history of play, an agent may have previously encountered a similar game from which it could draw insights into its current challenge. However, recognizing similarity between games and effectively transferring knowledge from past experience is a non-trivial task.

In this thesis, we develop methods for automatically identifying similar features in two related games by finding an approximated edit distance between the graphs generated from their rules. We use that information to guide MCTS in one game with general heuristics initialized via transfer from a previously played game. Despite the computational cost of doing so, we show that the more efficient search granted by this approach can lead to better performance than either UCT (a standard method of MCTS) or a non-transfer MCTS agent with access to the same general heuristics. We examine the circumstances under which transfer is most effective, and also identify and create solutions for the cases where it is not.

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