There is a rapidly growing need for voice powered human-machine interaction modalities for varieties of devices. Despite enormous investment in research and development in this area by a number of companies, significant limitations remain which prevent the ubiquitous proliferation of speech recognition. These limitations include poor performance in the presence of noise, inability to handle variability in accents, and not reliably recognizing the speaker.

Measuring customer experiences has historically been based on analyzing traditional structured data, which mainly consists of surveying questions/answers as well as evaluating purchases and returns. However, using this type of inherently constrained data
alone misses the bigger consumer picture. Deeper insights can be derived from unstructured data such as videos of the customers at the store, where tremendous untapped insights exist. In fact, retailers are not just interested in what do customers buy, they also want to know how do customers shop.

Nowadays a corporation’s public image plays a major role in that company’s decisions and financials. This project involves predicting fraud and errors within the financial statements of publicly traded companies. The goal is to incorporate information such as press releases and industry media coverages to provide an insight to these companies under audit and their industries.

Diphtheria is still a disease causing significant morbidity and mortality in people worldwide that did not received vaccination or suffer from incomplete immunization. The disease is due to a powerful toxin produced by the pathogenic bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheria. A good vaccine already exists but its production is rather complex and involves several steps: cultivation of the microorganism, extraction, concentration and inactivation of the toxin followed by extensive purification of the inactivated toxin (toxoid).

Using oral history interviews, this collaborative project will document and explore the social history of the efforts made by the Kingston arts community to preserve the historic Morton Brewery and Distillery and to create the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning, a vibrant community arts hub. Supplemented by archival research, I will interview the artists, cultural organizations, and community members to document this community history and privilege the voices of those who worked so hard to create this space.

Industry 4.0 is the digitization of a company’s physical assets and the company’s integration into digital ecosystems with its value chain partners, from suppliers to customers. It uses smart technology and the use of real-time data to increase flexibility, customization, efficiency and productivity, and to reduce time, costs and innovation cycles. This project will focus on adapting novel concepts to an enterprise to meet these challenges, with an emphasis on smart processes as a means to achieve the transition to Industry 4.0.

Immunovaccine Inc. is developing cancer vaccines using the company’s DepoVaxTM vaccine technology. DepoVax is a patented formulation that displays excellent tumor control and provides a long lasting and specific effect. The way by which this vaccine exerts its effect is unclear but the translational team at Immunovaccine is determined to discover its mechanism of action and why their proprietary DepoVax technology delivers superior responses in comparison to other vaccines.

The proposed research project will focus on understanding the in-vineyard and in-winery mechanisms responsible for the phenomenon of smoke-taint in wines—that is, the tendency of grapes exposed to forest fire smoke to produce smoke-flavoured wines in the absence of any perceptible aroma in the grapes. Of interest here is discerning exactly how the flavoured compounds of smoke are biochemically stored within ripening grapes in addition to how they are released again by yeast enzymes during the fermentation process.