University of Waterloo

Revisiting the relation between oral contraceptive use and attentional engagement in everyday life: The role of formulation

Oral contraceptives (OCs) are composed of artificial estrogen (ethinyl-estradiol) and/or progesterone (progestin), which can attach to receptors in the brain and potentially influence cognition. One prior study suggested that OC use was associated with increased mind-wandering –...

Value-at-Risk- and Expectile-Based Systemic Risk Measures and Second-Order Asymptotics: With Applications to Diversification

Abstract. Systemic risk measures play a crucial role in analyzing individual losses conditional on extreme system-wide disasters. In this paper, we provide a unified asymptotic treatment for systemic risk measures. First, we classify them into two families of Value-at-Risk- (VaR-...

Are X-Ray Atmospheres Heated by Turbulent Dissipation? XRISM Constraints

Abstract We evaluate whether dissipation of turbulence injected into hot cluster atmospheres by jets and bubbles can offset radiative cooling flows. No trends are found between atmospheric velocity dispersion, σ v , and either the ratio of kinetic to thermal energy or jet power o...

Pristine Poly(3‐hexylthiophene) as an On‐Demand Conductive Binder and Redox Mediator for Carbon‐Additive‐Free, High‐Volumetric‐Energy‐Density, LiFePO 4 Cathodes without Calendaring

ABSTRACT Poly(3‐hexylthiophene) (P3HT) is introduced as a multifunctional conductive binder and redox mediator to fundamentally improve the performance and volumetric energy density of carbon‐free LiFePO 4 (LFP) cathodes. Unlike conventional Super P (SP):PVDF systems, P3HT can be...

Specialists' Evidence Evaluation and Judgments in Audits

ABSTRACT Audits of complex fair value estimates involve evaluating and challenging key client assumptions. Auditors generally lack the necessary expertise to perform this work, and thus, they often engage valuation specialists to perform this audit work. However, valuation specia...

An improved distributed electro-thermal coupled model for liquid-cooled battery pack based on thermal resistance network

This study develops a computationally efficient distributed electro-thermal model for predicting voltage and temperature distributions in a liquid-cooled battery pack, with potential for real-time application. A pipe network model calculates the coolant flow distribution and loca...

Automated Modernization of Machine Learning Engineering Notebooks for Reproducibility

Interactive computational notebooks (e.g., Jupyter notebooks) are widely used in machine learning engineering (MLE) to program and share end-to-end pipelines, from data preparation to model training and evaluation. However, environmental erosion—the rapid evolution of hardware an...

Fast Bosonic Control via Multiphoton Qubit-Oscillator Interactions

We study the problem of n -fold rotationally symmetric bosonic state preparation, which is of great importance to bosonic quantum error correction, using a multiphoton interaction between an oscillator and an auxiliary qubit. We present an n -photon Law-Eberly ( n LE) protocol th...

Vector symbolic algebras for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) is a generative, few-shot fluid intelligence benchmark. Although humans effortlessly solve ARC-AGI, it remains extremely difficult for even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems. Inspir...

On the Feasibility of Deduplicating Compiler Bugs with Bisection

Random testing has proven to be an effective technique for compiler validation. However, the debugging of bugs identified through random testing presents a significant challenge due to the frequent occurrence of duplicate test programs that expose identical compiler bugs. The pro...

Acyclic list colouring locally planar graphs

A (vertex) colouring of graph is acyclic if it contains no bicoloured cycle. In 1979, Borodin proved that planar graphs are acyclically 5-colourable. In 2010, Kawarabayashi and Mohar proved that locally planar graphs are acyclically 7-colourable. In 2002, Borodin, Fon-Der-Flaass,...

Graph Neural Network‐Guided and Interpretable Discovery of Supercapacitor Electrode Materials

ABSTRACT Discovering electrode materials that combine high capacitance, stability, conductivity, and practical synthesis remains a significant challenge for advancing supercapacitors beyond the energy‐density limits of traditional carbon‐based systems. Here, we introduce an AI‐dr...

Global pandemic preparedness frameworks in the 21st century: A scoping review

Objectives The COVID-19 pandemic exposed profound deficiencies in global health preparedness for infectious disease outbreaks. While progress has been made in creating pandemic preparedness frameworks at various scales, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the similarit...

Embodied harm, normalised suffering: experiences of unpaid care and domestic work among women across the life course in sub-Saharan Africa

Unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW) is an important determinant of women's health and wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While its gendered burden and health consequences are increasingly documented, less is understood about how women interpret these consequences and how the...

Fast-moving consumer goods, slow-moving policy: structures and strategies of China’s e-cigarette industry and global regulatory challenges

Background China is the global centre for e-cigarette (EC) manufacturing. While regulatory responses have increasingly incorporated supply-side enforcement measures, research examining the supply-side dynamics of the global EC market remains limited. Methods Using the tobacco ind...

Smoking‐induced deprivation and subsequent smoking cessation among adults who smoke in four high‐income countries: Trends, correlates and longitudinal associations, 2016–2024

Abstract Background and aims Tobacco smoking substantially contributes to poverty. Smoking‐induced deprivation (SID) occurs when people continue smoking despite financial stress. This study examined (i) trends in SID in Canada, the United States (US), England and Australia from 2...

Information Fragility or Robustness Under Quantum Channels

Abstract Information stored in quantum states naturally decays under noise. Many earlier works have quantified and demonstrated lower bounds on decay rates of quantum relative entropy, showing exponential decay in a wide variety of contexts. Here we study the converse question: a...

Predicting Angle Beam Ultrasonic Inspection Signals with a Physics-Informed Neural Network

Simulation of angle beam ultrasonic inspection supports procedure qualification, probe design, and defect detectability studies, but conventional solvers require a conforming mesh for each configuration and return the solution only at mesh nodes and discrete time steps. Physics-I...

Bootstrap Nonparametric Inference Under Data Integration

ABSTRACT We propose multiplier bootstrap procedures for nonparametric inference and uncertainty quantification of the target mean function, based on a framework of integrating target and source data under a covariate shift scenario with equal target and source mean functions. We...

Rhizosphere Microenvironment-Induced Transformation of Lithium Cobalt Oxide Triggers Singlet Oxygen and Plant Injury

Abstract Lithium cobalt oxide (LCO), a layered lithium-ion battery cathode material, undergoes pronounced chemical and structural reprogramming at the plant interface. Here we show that root-associated conditions convert LCO nanosheets into a high-aspect-ratio needle-like state w...