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UNB Scholar is an institutional repository initiative of UNB Libraries intended to collect, preserve, showcase, and promote the open access scholarly output of the UNB community. Use UNB Scholar to explore specific collections, or search all content in the repository. Material submitted to the repository will also be freely discoverable online through Google and other major search engines.
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Recent Submissions
Exploring children’s experiences in the digital environment: A narrative inquiry based on an interdisciplinary approach to child rights
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-06) Joudaki, Shiva; Vaghri, Ziba; Downes, Daniel
The research explores young people’s experiences in the digital environment, emphasizing their perception of children’s digital rights. Children participated as advisors and interview subjects to share their online communication narratives. A Child Advisory Board, consisting of 14 local children, collaborated with this research and collectively discussed their digital rights. Next, five members voluntarily participated in one-on-one interviews. Implementing narrative inquiry, the research identifies risk and protective factors in children’s digital experiences and potential interventions to improve them. Balanced risk exposure, mitigated by protective factors like parental or peer guidance, can build online resilience. The study reveals that resilient children are better equipped to handle challenges than those who are overly protected. Understanding children’s experiences is a prerequisite for planning any interventions to safeguard them and uphold their rights. Interdisciplinary collaboration among politicians, digital platform industries, and child rights experts is crucial for promoting online safety without compromising children’s rights.
Advancing VTR flow: Integrating ABC9 via Yosys for enhanced technology mapping and optimization
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-06) Jafarof, Navid; Kent, Kenneth B.
This thesis delves into optimizing the Verilog-to-Routing (VTR) flow, which is crucial in open-source Computer-Aided Design and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) architecture research. It utilizes ODIN II and Parmys for synthesis, ABC for technology mapping, and Versatile Place and Route for packing, placement, and routing. ABC9 optimizations are implemented as a pass within the Yosys Open SYnthesis Suite, which is utilized in the Parmys front-end, besides the partial mapper of ODIN II. Integrating the ABC9 pass enhances technology mapping and optimizations in the VTR workflow, surpassing the conventional ABC tool and improving results for large and complex designs. The ABC9 pass optimizes timing behavior in complex multi-clock designs and incorporates a delay model for hard blocks in the target FPGA architecture. Various benchmarks evaluate the workflow’s efficacy across diverse designs, including small-scale and large-scale ones with hard blocks, soft logic, and digital signal processors (DSP). This ensures a comprehensive assessment across different complexities and FPGA utilization scenarios.
The role of religion in fostering peaceful relationships between Christians and Muslims in Egypt
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-06) Hariz, Ibrahim; Valk, John
While religion is often seen as a source of conflict and tension between Egyptian Muslims and Christians, the teachings of Islam and Christianity have historically and in the present been sources of mutual tolerance and coexistence. Political speeches, religious teachings, practices, rituals and ceremonies, social gatherings, and institutions all play a role in demonstrating religious influence on peaceful relations.
My research shows that the teachings of Islam and Christianity can promote peace. It also focuses on how the teachings on peace, which are foundational to both Muslims and Christians worldwide, have also influenced the relationship between Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelical, and Protestant) and Muslims (Sunnis) in Egypt in the period c. 1950–2019. Further, it investigates the influence of those teachings on politics, socio-cultural behaviour, and religious education in Egypt by examining political speeches, religious practices, and institutions that encouraged tolerance and cooperation during the study period c. 1950-2019. It will be concluded that, conflicts notwithstanding, the teachings of Islam and Christianity have played an overall positive role in promoting peace between Christians and Muslims in Egypt.
Resilience against APTs: A provenance-based dataset and attack detection framework
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-06) Ghiasvand, Erfan; Ghorbani, Ali; Ray, Suprio
The IIoT devices integrate different intelligent sensors, advanced analytics, and robust connectivity within industrial processes. IIoT is susceptible to various attack vectors, with APTs posing a particularly grave concern due to their stealthy and targeted nature. However, existing cybersecurity datasets often lack crucial attributes for APT detection in IIoT environments. The first contribution of this research is to propose CICADA-IIoT, a novel APT dataset in the IIoT setting that includes essential information for the APT detection task. To achieve this, a testbed for IIoT is developed, and over 20 attack techniques frequently used in APT campaigns are included that create some of the invariant phases of an APT campaign. In addition, a self-supervised machine learning-based framework utilizing the heterogeneous nature of the provenance graph data for APT detection is proposed.
Understanding population dynamics using the predictive ability of models
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-06) Gebreyohannes, Demissew Tsigemelak; Houlahan, Jeff
The investigation into what determines population dynamics persists as a central and unresolved issue within the field of ecology. One of the key areas of discussion is the relative importance of density dependent versus density independent factors. The concept of density dependence implies that current abundance is determined by historical abundance. I developed four models – two density dependent (Gompertz and Logistic) and two density independent ('Mean' and 'Trend’) - to predict population size one year beyond the training set and used predictive performance on more than 16,000 populations from 14 datasets to compare the understanding captured by those models. If density dependent population regulation is common then we expect that the Logistic and Gompertz models will, on average, make better predictions than the ‘Mean’ or ‘Trend’ models. I concluded that there is a weak evidence of density dependent population regulation. I also conducted further assessment of the predictive ability of two density-dependent models with covariates (Gompertz and Logistic, incorporating environmental factors such as temperature, precipitation, salinity, pH, and interspecific competition index) and two density-independent models ('Mean' and 'Trend,' also considering covariates and interspecific competition). I concluded that there was limited evidence that incorporating interspecific competition and/or environmental covariates led to improved model predictive ability, corroborating that there is weak evidence of density dependent population regulation. I further interrogated the predictive abilities of cutting-edge models, ARIMA and EDM (Empirical dynamic modelling), on population data. Within the ARIMA models, the low-dimensional parametric ARIMA model - specifically, one treating the mean of the most recent observations as the prediction - yielded the most accurate predictions across the majority of datasets. In EDM, employing an approach that resembles the mean of the previous 2 – 6 years yielded the best predictive ability. Overall, I presented evidence indicating that widespread density-dependent population regulation is weak, particularly based on the performance of density-dependent models, and I also evaluated the predictive abilities of cutting-edge models, implying weak supporting evidence for density-dependent population regulation.