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UWSpace

UWSpace is the University of Waterloo’s institutional repository for the free, secure, and long-term home of research produced by faculty, students, and staff.

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Recent Submissions

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    An Assessment of the Utility of Academic Research to Intelligence Professionals in Canada: A Case study in Knowledge Mobilization
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-07-14) Majthenyi, Sandra
    Over the years, scholars in the field of terrorism research have suggested that there is a disconnect between the academic community (AC) and the intelligence community (IC) that is preventing information-sharing that might help to advance knowledge in the field. It has been suggested that closer relations between these two communities might address some of the problems that each community faces. While the AC may experience some difficulty gathering primary data in the field of terrorism, the IC may be lacking sufficient resources to thoroughly analyze all of the data that they hold. Therefore, it is thought that combining skills and knowledge might benefit both communities while also improving research on terrorism and potentially preventing intelligence failures. Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) theory also tells us that advancing knowledge in a field requires both research (explicit knowledge) and the experience of practitioners (tacit knowledge) that informs if and how research may be applied to practice. As a basic measure of the researcher - practitioner relationship, KMb studies have examined the use of academic research by practitioners in different fields. These studies have identified common factors that affect the researcher - practitioner relationship and lead to some level of disconnect between these communities in most fields of study. When it comes to information-sharing with intelligence organizations, there are additional factors that uniquely impair the development of co-operation between the AC and the IC. While much has been speculated about a disconnect between the AC and the IC, and the factors involved, the research literature lacks empirical data capturing the perspective of members of the IC. To address this deficiency, this study uses the methods and findings of KMb research to gather input directly from current and former members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) about their use of academic material (AM) on terrorism and the potential for future collaboration with the AC. Through questionnaires, interviews, and a focus group, forty-two intelligence professionals revealed that their use of AM is limited, because of a general sense that the research is largely not relevant to their work. Determining the relevance of AM to IC work involved factors in the organization and the AM itself, as identified by KMb studies. However, respondents also identified misperceptions and a lack of trust that add to the disconnect between the AC and the IC. The majority of respondents supported the idea of closer AC - IC relations but there was considerable skepticism about whether it was possible given each community's concerns about the other. While this study examines a number of information-sharing strategies that could be implemented to improve the relationship between the AC and the IC, and makes recommendations for future action, in the end members of the IC suggested that efforts could start at the level of individual relationships, rather than waiting for larger organizational change in the IC.
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    Assumption Stress-Testing for Machine Learning Security
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-07-14) Kassis, Andre
    Security is guided by the principle that a system is only as strong as its weakest link. Despite the undeniable benefits brought by the growing integration of machine learning (ML) into nearly all aspects of modern life, decades of research and real-world deployment have established a broad consensus that systems oblivious to malicious behavior are fundamentally unsafe. In practice, ill-intended users can abuse access to powerful generative models to create harmful deepfakes capable of facilitating fraud and impersonation, or instigating societal chaos. At the same time, the rapid adoption of ML in high-stakes settings such as online moderation, media authenticity verification, and biometric authentication introduces the risk of these mechanisms being manipulated or bypassed through carefully crafted inputs with potentially catastrophic consequences, as repeatedly demonstrated in practice. This thesis approaches these threats from an assumption-driven perspective, arguing that critical failures in ML security do not arise from isolated weaknesses of individual models, but from flawed or insufficiently scrutinized assumptions underlying broader robustness concepts. To study this problem, the thesis advances the perspective of assumption stress-testing, a framework for systematically analyzing the assumptions on which security mechanisms rely and constructing targeted approaches that subject them to worst-case behavior. Across four projects spanning multiple ML security domains, the thesis demonstrates how violating these assumptions can make the underlying concepts themselves inapplicable, causing entire classes of mechanisms built upon them to fail regardless of how they are instantiated. Specifically, the thesis investigates the robustness of voice authentication and image watermarking technologies designed to support media authenticity, revisits the reliability of a state-of-the-art defense paradigm against adversarial examples, and explores the constructive use of assumption-aware analysis to devise systems whose robustness remains meaningful under rigorous evaluation.
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    The returns to flexible postsecondary education: The effect of delaying school
    (University of Waterloo, 2014-03-03) Ferrer, Ana M.; Menendez, Alicia
    We compare the returns to education between graduates of post secondary institutions who delayed their tertiary education for some time and those that proceeded with no delays. Using a unique survey that collects information on a representative cohort of graduates, we are able to estimate the effects of delaying school among successful graduates abstracting from specific macroeconomic conditions at the time of graduation. Our results show that graduates that delayed their education enjoy a premium relative to graduates that did not, even after considering other factors such as experience or labor market connections. These estimates are robust to the possibility of selection in the decision to delay school.
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    Immigrants and demography: Marriage, divorce, and fertility
    (University of Waterloo, 2014-01) Adsera, Alicia; Ferrer, Ana
    In recent years, developed countries have seen the number and diversity of their foreign born populations increase at a rapid pace. As shown in Table 1, foreign-born individuals represented by 2010 over 10 percent of the population in the major receiving developed countries and this share stood at over twenty percent for Australia and Canada.
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    Departure and promotion of U.S. patent examiners: Do patent characteristics matter?
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-12) Langinier, Corinne; Lluis, Stephanie
    Using data from patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, we ask whether, and if so how, examiners' career outcomes relate to aspects of the patent review process. Exploiting longitudinal information about all the patents granted by a group of examiners between 1976 and 2006 and their yearly mobility outcomes (departure and promotion) between 1992 and 2006, we find consistent evidence from static, dynamic and duration models of the importance of patent characteristics, granting experience in specific technological fields, repeated interactions with the same inventor and self-citations in predicting an examiner's departure or promotion.