The 2nd Annual 3MT Competition
The 2nd Annual 3MT Competition was held as a part of the 7th Annual Gradaute Students Research Colloquium. The event showcased 12 presentations.
The event featured a prestigious panel of judges which included Dr. Annette Trimbee, President & Vice-Chancellor, the University of Â鶹´«Ã½; Scott Sinclair, Assistant Deputy Minister, Advanced Learning Division; and Terry MacLeod, CBC/RadioOne Host.
Winner:
Mamneet Manghera —BioScience, Technology & Public Policy
Silent no more: Augmented IFNγ signaling re-activates Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K
Retroviral-derived sequences called human endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) comprise a large proportion of the human DNA. Re-activation of the youngest endogenous retrovirus, ERVK, has been implicated in the neuropathology of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Unfortunately, the signals that re-activate ERVK remain unclear. ALS is marked by augmented levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine Interferon-γ (IFNγ), which is a potent activator of HIV – another retrovirus. Using real-time polymerase chain reaction and western blot, we show for the first time that IFNγ enhances ERVK gene transcription, polyprotein expression, and promotes cleavage of the polyprotein into reverse transcriptase (RT) subunits in human astrocytic and neuronal cell lines. This coincides with an increase in cellular RT enzymatic activity. Fluorescent imaging further reveals markedly enhanced cytoplasmic, perinuclear, and nuclear RT staining in IFNγ stimulated cells. These newly established in vitro models of ERVK re-activation will permit further examination of ERVK biology in the context of neuroinflammatory disease.
Manghera went on to compete at the Western Regional Three Minute Thesis Competition. To read more, please visit: Student Feature: Sheena Manghera.
2015 Presentations
Heba Abd El Hamid — Peace and Conflict Studies
The Normalization of Sexual Harassment Within the Street of Cairo
This paper shall examine under what conditions women experience sexual harassment within public space in Cairo prior and post the 2011 Revolution, at a cross-generational level. Throughout the past three decades sexual harassment has increased drastically within Cairo, with little focus on its implications. Existing scholarship examine issue of sexual harassment within the workplace or academia, however little is written about sexual harassment within public spaces. Thus the purpose of this research is to understand how different generations of Egyptian women have experienced street safety and its contributing factors. Research findings are based on semi-structured interviews with women who have lived under different Egyptian regimes and ethnographic studies of women participation in public space. The broader implication of this research is that it helps to understand critical issues hindering women's participation in society, women’s rights and development, and will attempt to fill a gap within literature on sexual harassment.
Adel Compton — Theology
What Â鶹´«Ã½ Needs Right Now: An Emerging Aboriginal Young Adult Co-Creative Leadership Model
Who gathers their community every week to create safety and non-violence? Aboriginal Youth Opportunities (AYO). Where do they gather? Every Friday evening a megaphone and bell ringing announce the weekly Meet Me at the Bell Tower (MMBT) event at the corner of Selkirk and Powers. What difference does it make? In a city MacLean’s tags as the most racist in Canada, young Aboriginal leaders are creating safe space for Â鶹´«Ã½’s North End. They see new possibilities for Aboriginal children and youth. They partner with others to make positive outcomes happen. And, it’s working. Crime rates have been dropped. North End spirit is rising. What can MMBT teach Â鶹´«Ã½? Aboriginal youth leaders demonstrate the power of love to encourage non-violence. They model the strength of compassion and respect for all our neighbours as the way of hospitality, the way forward for Â鶹´«Ã½.
Mahsa Hooshmandi — BioScience, Technology & Public Policy
A GIS Based Habitat Suitability Model for Poweshiek Skipperling (Oarisma poweshiek) in Manitoba: Focus on Microhabitat Characteristics
Field research is in progress in the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in southeastern Manitoba to develop a habitat suitability model for the endangered Poweshiek skipperling, Oarisma poweshiek (PS). Twelve study sites were characterized based on adult skipperling density and classified into three categories (high, medium and low). Within each site microsite plots were established where PS adults have been observed landing, basking, nectar feeding or egg laying. Within each plot vegetation was inventoried and soil samples were collected to analyze EC, P, N, Mg, compaction, soil moisture, ph, OM, Ca, and soil texture. In addition each plot was assessed for % bare ground, depth of duff layer and distance to shrubs, trees, and swamps. Soil and vegetation data will be placed in GIS layers and combined to develop a ranking system that will be incorporated in a model to predict which sites provide optimal habitat for PS.
Qianjia (Shy) Huang — Applied Computer Science & Society
Cyber Bullying Detection Using Social Networks Analysis
Cyberbullying is an important social challenge that takes place over a technical substrate. Thus it has attracted research interest across both computational and social science research communities. The social science studies conducted via careful participant selection have shown the effect of personality, social relationships, and psychological factors on cyberbullying. Computational approaches on the other hand have defined multiple automated text-based models for detecting cyberbullying. Unifying the two perspectives, this research investigates a holistic (social + text) approach for understanding and detecting cyberbullying. By analyzing the social relationship graph between users in an online social network and deriving features such as number of friends, network embeddedness, and relationship centrality, we find that: (1) multiple social characteristics are statistically different between the cyber bullying and non-bullying groups, thus supporting the results found in previous psychological studies; and (2) analyzing such social network features can yield significant improvements for the cyberbullying detection models.
Kumudu Jayarathne — BioScience, Technology & Public Policy
Phosphorus release from surface and sub-surface Manitoba soils under prolonged flooding
Reduced conditions resulting from flooding often lead to an enhanced release of phosphorus (P) from soils to overlying water. In a laboratory study using soils collected from flood-prone areas of Manitoba, we compared the magnitude of P released from 12 surface and 12 sub-surface soils under reduced conditions. Soil redox potential (Eh) and concentration of dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP) in floodwater were measured weekly for eight weeks under simulated flooding. Soil redox potential values varied between +500 and +300 mV initially and dropped to +85 to -100 mV with flooding. Initial DRP concentration in floodwater varied between 0.05-0.3 mgL-1 and significantly increased up to 0.5-1.7 mgL-1 in ten surface soils. In contrast, DRP concentrations in floodwater increased with flooding in only three sub-surface soils. Results suggest that removing surface soil and exposing sub-surface soil during land reclamation or wetland restoration would be effective in minimizing P loading into fresh water.
Kanwarpreet Kaur — Applied Computer Science & Society
Measuring the nearness of layered flow graphs: Application to Content Based Image Retrieval
Rough set based flow graphs represent the mathematical flow of information for a given data set where branches of these could be constructed as decision rules. However, in the recent years, the concept of flow graphs has been applied to perceptual systems where they play a vital role in determining the nearness among disjoint sets of perceptual objects. The flow graph layer order is determined by the order of probe functions, and the nodes of the flow graph serve as real valued probe functions for a given feature. In our research, we have provided a practical implementation of flow graphs induced by a perceptual system, defined with respect to digital images, to perform Content-Based Image Retrieval. Results are generated using the SIMPLicity dataset, and our results are compared with the tolerance nearness measure.
Tanis Kolisnyk — Theology
Indigenous Anglicans in Canada: A New Agape and the Path to Self-Determination
The encounter between Indigenous peoples and settlers in North America is rife with challenges, missed opportunities, and marred by colonial domination. The Anglican Church of Canada is part of this history and is working to find ways forward in healing and reconciliation for Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Anglicans. The journey toward self-determination of Indigenous Anglicans within the present structure of the Anglican Church of Canada has not been without struggles and decades of work to reach new goals. What are the internal and external barriers that are impeding self-determination of Indigenous Anglicans in the Anglican Church of Canada? The path to self-determination is reviewed in chronological order, with reference to a variety of church documents including A New Agape, outcomes from Sacred Circle gatherings, interviews with ACIP members, and exploration of new pathways in Anglican Indigenous leadership development.
Julia Lawler — BioScience, Technology & Public Policy
Manitoba’s Community Timber Allocations: An Opportunity for Increased Aboriginal Involvement?
Government and industry interests have historically dominated the forest sector in Canada, and resulted in the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from natural resource decision-making and benefits. Aboriginal-held forest tenures are one venue for increasing involvement in forestry decision-making and enhancing social and economic benefits. In Manitoba, short-term community timber allocations are currently held by 17 First Nation, Métis, and northern communities. Although these awards present an opportunity for increased Aboriginal involvement, no scholarly attention has been paid to the outcomes of this program and its possible significance to elevating Aboriginal engagement in forestry. Using a community-based approach, this research will determine whether the community timber allocations present an effective way to increase Aboriginal involvement in forestry and identify the outcomes and significance of the program. Key-informant interviews will be used to assess to what degree the program enables decision-making control and local benefits to participating Aboriginal communities.
Saima Siddiqui — Indigenous Governance
Neo-liberal restructuring and impacts on Aboriginal services: Exploring the prospects for indigenous service delivery model for urban-Aboriginal women in Â鶹´«Ã½
One of the bi-products of neoliberal restructuring has been the growth of private, non-government and other third sector organisations (independent; volunteer etc) as delivery agent for social welfare services. For indigenous communities across Canada, the supports and assistance is through government/public funding and partnership with Aboriginal agencies, which have mostly been operated by indigenous women as frontline staff, managers, political and community activists and volunteers. Literature identified, over the years, several challenges due to neoliberal welfare restructuring in shape of reduced federal funding; change in programme priorities; absence of “culturally-appropriate” services; status-blind programmes; lack of access to services due to geographical location of communities. Combining critical feminist and indigenous perspectives, this study further explores the service delivery infrastructure in Â鶹´«Ã½ through responses of Aboriginal women providers to understand the extent to which barriers in social welfare reforms have been influence by colonialism, neoliberal governmentality, power/race/gender relations, oppression and marginalisation. Moreover, how these challenges have addressed and resisted.
Gagandeep Singh — Applied Computer Science & Society
Graph reachability query over large graphs
The Growing popularity of graph databases has created problems for researches to handle large amounts of data. One such problem is label constraint reachability queries. Practical applications of reachability queries are finding relations among people in social network or defining the pathway of conversion from one compound to another in bioinformatics, etc. One solution to this problem is store the reachability and path label information between every two nodes of the graph. Second solution is to follow all paths from the source to the destination or until we reach the end of the search process. In large graphs, the former need a large memory to store the information and the latter has a huge running time. In my thesis we try to figure a solution which stands between these two approaches. We bought the search space to a constant cost at the expense of some memory cost.
Daniel Ikenna Udenwobele — BioScience, Technology & Public Policy
Unraveling the Prognostic Potential of N myristoyltransferase (NMT) in Breast Tumors
PI3K mediates estrogen independent activation of DNA transcription, activation of PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway has been suggested as a mechanism for endocrine resistance in breast tumors. Metformin has been shown to activate AMPK with resultant inhibition of mTOR. Research in our laboratory has shown that an invariant consequence of Akt over expression in HepG2 cells is 50% reduction in NMT activity. Thus, establishing a crosstalk between PI3K/Akt/mTOR/AMPK pathway and NMT mediated signaling. Our preliminary data indicates that NMT is negatively regulated by mTOR. I propose to investigate PI3K/Akt/mTOR/AMPK pathway to unravel the prognostic potential of NMT in estrogen receptor alpha positive breast cancer. Metformin will be used to inhibit mTOR in breast cancer cell lines and the expression profiles of the various mediators in the pathway will be analyzed by Western blotting, immunofluorescence, FACS, qRT-PCR and Western blotting. Data from my in-vitro model will be characterized by immunohistochemical analysis of patient’s samples.
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