Please join the Computer Science Department for the upcoming thesis defense:

Presenter: Austin McCutcheon

Thesis title: Large-Scale News Headline Quality Analysis: Clickbait Trends, Binary Classification, and AI-Generated Content

Abstract: Online news can be characterized by massive volumes of news content spanning a spectrum from high-quality professional journalism to low-quality articles. This thesis presents four empirical studies that employ methods to analyze, classify, and evaluate quality-varying news headlines at scale.

The first two studies apply Interrupted Time Series (ITS) analysis to examine associations between clickbait prevalence and major events. Analysis of 451 million headlines from worldwide news websites (2016-2023) revealed statistically significant associations for three of five events, each showed slight pre-event decreases followed by sustained post-event increases in clickbait levels. A complementary analysis of 7.4 million headlines from Canadian news websites (2017-2023) found similar patterns.

The third study benchmarks twelve machine learning and deep learning models for binary classification of perceived news quality on a balanced dataset of 57.5 million headlines labeled according to website-level expert consensus ratings. Results demonstrated that a CPU-based Bagging Classifier achieved 88.1% accuracy with stability across cross-validation folds, while a fine-tuned DistilBERT model achieved the highest accuracy at 90.3% but required substantially greater computational resources.

The fourth study evaluates fourteen accessible Small Language Models (SLMs) for their willingness to generate fake news headlines when explicitly prompted and tests whether the trained classifiers from study three generalize to synthetic content. Minimal resistance to generating false news headlines was found, with models refusing requests less than 1% of the time. Both classifiers showed substantially reduced performance on AI-generated headlines (54-63% for DistilBERT, 35-48% for Bagging), with systematic misclassification of AI-generated “high-quality” content as “low-quality,” indicating that human-trained classifiers do not generalize effectively to current AI-generated text.

This thesis contributes the application of ITS methodology to clickbait analysis at web scale, comprehensive benchmarking of model architectures for large-scale headline quality classification, and empirical evidence that quality classifiers trained on human-authored content exhibit reduced performance when applied to SLM-generated headlines.

Committee Members:
Dr. Chris Brogly (supervisor, committee chair), Dr. Xing Tan, Dr. Xingwei (Nancy) Yang (Toronto Metropolitan University)

Please join the Department of Computer Science for the upcoming thesis defense:

Presenter: Huixiang Zhang

Thesis title: A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Architecture for Combinatorial Decision Optimization in Networked Systems

Abstract: Combinatorial decision optimization problems arise widely in modern networked systems, where limited communication, computing, and service resources must be efficiently allocated under complex operational constraints. Representative examples include supply-demand matching in data markets, topology control in self-organizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms, and microservice scheduling across the cloud-edge continuum. These problems are typically NP-hard, and as system scale increases or operating conditions evolve rapidly, traditional Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations often become difficult to solve within real-time decision windows. As a unified binary optimization framework, Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) provides a common way to map diverse combinatorial problems to quantum annealing and quantum-inspired solvers with the potential for significant computational speed advantages. However, the practical use of QUBO in real networked systems still faces three major barriers. First, QUBO modeling remains manual, expert-dependent, and error-prone. Second, standard QUBO formulations are inherently static and therefore not well suited to time-varying environments. Third, the binary representation of QUBO does not naturally align with the continuous resource allocation requirements of real systems. To address these limitations, this thesis develops a hybrid quantum-classical optimization methodology for networked systems. It first formulates and validates domain-specific QUBO models for representative applications. Then it generalizes these efforts through two-stage hybrid frameworks that combine offline combinatorial optimization with lightweight online decision-making for dynamic UAV topology control and robust microservice scheduling. Finally, it investigates large language model driven automation of the MILP-to-QUBO pipeline and integrates Benders decomposition to improve scalability for larger problem instances. Overall, this thesis shows that QUBO can serve not only as a problem-specific solution form, but also as a transferable modeling layer that connects heterogeneous network optimization tasks with near-term quantum hardware, thereby providing a practical pathway toward quantum-enhanced decision-making.


Committee Members:
Dr. Mahzabeen Emu (supervisor, committee chair), Dr. Thiago E Alves de Oliveira (co-supervisor), Dr. Xing Tan, Dr. Elif Ak (Memorial University)

Please contact grad.compsci@lakeheadu.ca for the Zoom link. Everyone is welcome.

Save the date, and plan to attend this event to support Kinesiology and Psychology students presenting their research! This is now taking place in the CASES Atrium.

Please join us for Lydia's PhD dissertation proposal defense. This is a hybrid defense, should you wish to attend in person, it will take place in ATAC 3004.

Title: Exploring First Nations-led, culturally-based resources to support wellbeing across regional and national contexts

Supervisor: Dr. Chris Mushquash

Second Reader: Dr. Alex Drawson

GSC Chair: Dr. Amanda Maranzan

Please contact admin.psych@lakeheadu.ca for Zoom link and passcode.

Please join us for George Drazenovich's PhD dissertation defense. This is a hybrid defense, should you wish to attend in person it will take place in ATAC 3004.

Title: The Linguistic Signature of Human Rights: Constructing and Testing a Cognitive Framing Model with Historical and Psycholinguistic Methods

Supervisor: Dr. Mirella Stroink

Second Reader: Dr. Josephine Tan

GSC chair: Dr. Beth Visser

Come decorate your own Easter eggs, load them up with candy, and learn about how Easter is celebrated around the world.

Lakehead University's Student Juried Exhibition and Honours Graduating Show will open to the public on the afternoon of Friday, March 27 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. 

The Department of Visual Arts invites you to join us for the opening and award ceremonies on March 27 at 7 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

The Juried Student Exhibition will run until April 5. The honours exhibition will run until April 12. 

More information can be found here: https://theag.ca/tc-events/2026-lakehead-university-juried-student-exhibition/.

The Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies proudly presents Dr. Grant Zazula, Paleontologist with the Government of Yukon, for the talk, "Frozen woolly mammoths and Ice Age megafauna from the Yukon permafrost".

Frozen fossils of woolly mammoths, cave lions, giant bears and other incredible Ice Age megafauna have been unearthed from the permafrost in the Traditional Territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in by Yukon gold miners for over a century. These fossils provide evidence of how populations of ancient animals responded to past periods of climate change and how present-day ecosystems were established in the North. This presentation will discuss the relationships between Klondike gold miners, First Nations communities and scientists in the collection, study and interpretation of internationally significant, Ice Age fossils from the Yukon. Recently uncovered, permafrost preserved mummified bodies of ancient animals will be highlighted for their role in how palaeontology is advancing reconciliation efforts with Yukon First Nations.

About the Speaker
Since 2006, Dr. Zazula has played a key role in advancing the understanding of Ice Age ecosystems in northwestern Canada, specifically Ice Age Beringia. He has also brought attention to the role of climate change impacts on northern environments in Canada and beyond. His research has been fundamental in unravelling major research questions surrounding Ice Age Beringia. With over 80 published papers in top scientific journals, his work has provided crucial insights into the extinctions, extirpations, and functioning of northern Ice Age ecosystems during the Late Pleistocene. Dr. Zazula is committed to sharing his knowledge with the public. His work in exhibit development, including the redevelopment of displays at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in 2023, public presentations, popular books, and media interactions have helped bring complex scientific concepts to diverse audiences. He has received multiple awards for his research, including the 2024 Bruce Naylor Award from the Alliance of Natural History Museums in Canada.

The exhibition is part of a course titled Sexual Activism and Politics, where students examine how social movements related to gender and sexuality have used art, storytelling, and public expression as tools for advocacy and social change. As part of the coursework, students translated their learning into creative pieces that communicate messages about inclusion, dignity, and feminist social justice. It provides a platform for people to reflect on issues related to sexuality, identity, and human rights through art. The exhibition invites members of the campus and broader Thunder Bay community to engage with students’ perspectives on activism, belonging, and social change.

Join us for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities’ Graduate Speaker Series!

MA History student, Joshua Wetendorf presents "Propaganda at the Lakehead: Ukrainian Canadian Political Rivalries in the Thunder Bay Press During the Second World War".

Date: Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Location: Graduate Student Lounge (CASES Building)

Don’t miss this presentation followed by Q&A period. Refreshments (coffee and cookies) provided.