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Research

In most graduate programs, the student completes original scholarly research as part of the graduate program. The generation of new knowledge through scholarly research is one of a university's main functions in society. In most cases, the research is reported in a thesis which is presented and defended at the end of the program.

In some Master's programs, the research component is more limited in scope and the work constitutes a project or two extended essays, which are presented and examined, either through a formal defence or a review of the written work, at the end of the program. In some other Master's programs, a research component is contained in the course work and there is a final Field Examination based on the areas covered by the coursework.

Students have an obligation to make the results of their research accessible (above and beyond distribution of the thesis) to an appropriate audience through publication. The form of publication will vary according to the discipline and level of the program but may include books, journal articles and conference presentations.

In exceptional circumstances, the results of the research may be withheld temporarily because of pending patents or licences or because of financially sensitive information. In no case may the results be withheld indefinitely. Please see Graduate General Regulation 1.11.3 and University Policy R10.01: External Research Grants and Contracts, clauses 4.6-4.8.

Research Support

Financial support for a student's research is usually provided by the student and/or by the Senior Supervisor, through research grants and contracts.

The major granting councils — the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) — encourage such use of grants received by faculty members under their research grants programs; both the costs of the research itself (e.g. equipment, supplies, travel) and research assistantships for the student may be supported. Faculty members are encouraged to apply to external funding agencies for grants to support their research and the research of students working under their supervision.

Some departments have modest programs of awards to support travel by graduate students to perform research and/or to attend conferences to report on their research.

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Defences and Events

  • Joshua Newman, PhD Thesis Defence, Political Science
    5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
    May 22, 2013
    Location: SFU Harbour Centre, The Repap Policy Room (1425) Title: The Governance of Public-Private Partnerships: Success and Failure in the Transportation Sector Abstract Since the economic crises of the 1970s, the political climate in many developed countries has been reoriented from a focus on the public provision of goods and services to an emphasis on curbing government spending, reducing taxes, and limiting bureaucracy. As a consequence, alternative service delivery arrangements, in which non-government entities and private sector corporations are involved in public service delivery, have become increasingly popular in the last 30 years. The term “governance” is now commonly used to signify this shift away from a traditional hierarchical mode of government to a more horizontal environment of policy formulation and implementation. For many supporters of alternative service delivery, increased freedom for the private sector is regarded as the key to successful governance. Public-private partnerships (P3s) are a family of alternative service delivery mechanisms that allow the private sector to finance, own, and deliver goods and services to the public through long-term contractual arrangements with governments and other public sector agencies. P3s fit comfortably into the logic of alternative service delivery, which implies that by removing some – but not all – elements of the public sector and replacing them with some – but not all – aspects of the private sector, a balance between public sector accountability and private sector efficiency can be struck. However, this presents an inherent conflict, as the public sector is viewed simultaneously as the problem and as the solution to improving public service delivery. This inherent conflict in governance arrangements can sometimes lead to governance failure, a phenomenon that is not sufficiently understood. First, I show that governance failure can have negative consequences for the state and society. Then, I examine two case studies in P3 delivery of transportation infrastructure, the Canada Line in Vancouver, Canada and the Sydney Airport Link in Sydney, Australia, to determine how governance failure occurs and how it can be avoided. These two cases have similar technical parameters and political motivations, but in the Canadian case, where the public sector demonstrated policy leadership through the fostering of policy networks, through bounded-rational policy learning, and through a collaborative institutional approach to project implementation, successful governance was achieved. By contrast, the Australian case, in which the government was not substantially engaged in the partnership, resulted in governance failure. From an analysis of these two cases I conclude that public sector policy leadership is essential to the prevention of governance failure.
  • Adhi Susilo PhD Education Thesis Examination
    10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
    May 30, 2013
    No Description
  • Haiyang Wang, Phd defence, Comp Sci
    11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
    May 30, 2013
    Ph.D. Thesis DEFENSE HAIYANG WANG Master from Tongji University, CHINA 2005 Thursday May 30th, 2013 11:30 a.m. TASC1 9204 West FROM PEERS TO CLOUDS: DISTRIBUTED RESOURCES FOR CONTENT DELIVERY AND USER COLLABORATION In this thesis, we tackle the problem of content delivery and user collaboration with emerging Internet technologies. Our investigation starts from peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing with social relations to contemporary cloud computing with flexible resource provisioning. We seek to leverage distributed resources for efficient sharing and collaboration, which leads to a hybrid system design that seamlessly bridges users' local resources to public datacenters. We first explore social-network-based optimizations in peer-to-peer content delivery. We give solid evidences that long-term social relations can be found and applied to enhance the sharing efficiency in peer-to-peer networks, and present practical implementation strategies for the popular BitTorrent system. We then investigate the performance of cloud-based file synchronization applications and identify the bottlenecks in their system design, in particular, the task interferences. We propose an interference-aware provisioning algorithm, which effectively mitigates the problem. We further examine the users' interactions in state-of-the-art cloud-based distributed interactive applications. We find that, despite the benefit in terms of cost savings and better scalability, the cloud-based deployment greatly increases the users' interaction latency. We demonstrate that a smart assignment algorithms for virtual machines can remarkably reduce such latency. Finally, we present a real-world system design that effectively bridges users' local resources to enterprise cloud platforms. Our measurements as well as system analysis indicate that it serves as a complement of great potentials to enterprise cloud services. Ph.D. Examining Committee: Dr. Jiangchuan Liu, Senior Supervisor Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda, Supervisor Dr. Qianping Gu, Internal Examiner Dr. Kui Ren, External Examiner Dr. Steven Pearce, Chair

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