After moving to London, Ontario seven years ago, Roberta was intrigued by some of the older Victorian buildings near the downtown area and on historic Dundas Street. She wondered why such beautiful architecture had been neglected and what the significance of these heritage buildings had once been. With help from Jenn McLean, Mitacs Business Development Director, Roberta approached the City of London with an idea to investigate these buildings’ histories as part of a larger cultural revitalization project with the City of London’s Culture Office.

Having completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Dr. Haleh Vahedi was excited to make new, local connections to advance her career.  During her Mitacs Elevate fellowship, Haleh was supervised by Dr. Tony Chan Carusone of the University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to design an electrical circuit for data transmission at 28 gigabits per second without loss of signal quality or reception.  The circuit she designed could easily be added to existing Snowbush hardware, improving signal integrity without adding complexity to the system.

Sonomax Technologies Inc. is a Montreal-based business that specializes in manufacturing hearing protection products. The company developed a unique type of high-performance, custom earphones that provide noise isolation with hearing protection. This allows users to listen to their portable music player at a lower volume adjust to compensate for noise in their surroundings. But before introducing this new product to the market, the company needed to go through the prototyping stage.   

Literacy rates in New Brunswick are among the lowest in Canada.  Half of the population lives in rural areas and because the province is bilingual, minority language children can find it difficult to develop early language skills.

Through a Mitacs Accelerate internship with Mariner Partners Inc., Erin’s research discovered that children could improve their reading skills through short video lessons four times per week over just five weeks.

Yaser was a PhD candidate under the supervision of Drs. Amir Hossein Banihashemi and Ioannis Lambadaris at Carleton University, and a Mitacs Accelerate intern who undertook a research project on HTML5 security problems and possible solutions. He was introduced to Irdeto Canada by Justin Moores, Director, Business Development at Mitacs, while pursuing his graduate studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carleton University where he also worked as a Mitacs Globalink student advisor.

Can you tell us a bit about the research you did through Mitacs Accelerate that led to you winning the Mitacs Award for Outstanding Innovation – Post Doctoral?

The professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is bringing together research students from nine universities as part of the Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (SAVI) Network. 

SAVI was set up to examine the future of cloud computing and software-defined networking, and Mitacs-Accelerate is helping to make the huge collaboration possible.  By using Accelerate clusters, multiple students are being matched with 20 company partners for a total of 50 internships over two years.

AWE Company is currently using the technology to take tourists back in time to the Canadian historical site of Fort York, the birthplace of Toronto’s urban center, which served as the city’s primary defense from the mid 1700s to late 1800s.

The Time Tablet™ utilizes a camera to blend virtual objects with real environments providing users with the unique experience of being virtually transported to Fort York in its prime.

But GPS has one major drawback which limits its use – it doesn’t work accurately indoors.  Because it relies on signals from satellites, accuracy is also compromised when trying to navigate between tall buildings in urban areas, or under dense foliage.

Calgary-based Trusted Positioning Inc. set out to change this by developing software that would allow for accurate and continuous positioning of a device in any location, be it inside, underground, or in the heart of a dense urban city.