We’re in the midst of another industrial revolution: Industry 4.0. Coined at the 2011 Hannover Fair in Germany, Industry 4.0 is a high-tech strategy that marries computerized manufacturing and the Internet of Things to create so-called “smart factories.”  In the Industry 4.0 age, factory robots communicate with each other and with humans using cyber-physical systems, internet-enabled communications, and cloud computing.

While most smartphones are adept at capturing close-range speech, noisy environments like rock concerts pose a different challenge. Screaming crowds drown out the music, leading to poor playback quality on the phone.

LG turned to ESS to develop audio-amplifying microchips that can distinguish between the melody and “malarkey” in a concert venue.

Developed by an Ontario company, eSight glasses have the potential to help hundreds of thousands of Canadians with severe vision impairment to see better in daily life. The glasses use a real-time camera-to-screen set-up and look much like today’s virtual reality headsets, except they do much more.

This is what McGill University PhD student researcher, Derek Albert, set to find out.

Created by heating a mixture of sugar, lemon juice, and water, sugar pastes are then cooled to a putty-like consistency. The mixture is non-toxic and used at room temperature without requiring any special solvents for cleaning.

Treefrog, based in Newmarket, Ontario, knows all about social media for businesses. It provides a variety of marketing services to clients, including ‘traditional’ social media strategy. But a series of ongoing conversations between Sean Stephens, Treefrog CEO, and Laurie Baker, then an anthropology PhD candidate at York University, sparked a shift in how the company approaches social media.

Ontario organizational development consulting firm ODScore asked just that. Except that instead of using actual video games to engage their clients’ employees, they use the principles that make video games engrossing to engage employees at work.

So when they wanted to develop a new service to tackle bigger organizational changes, ODScore turned to the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute for renewed expertise.

At a meeting with Professor Neil Randall, the company learned that what they thought was a technical challenge, was really one of human relations.

Professor Lorna Butler and her team at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Nursing and the International Centre for Northern Governance and Development aim to address this issue through a research partnership with the International Mineral Innovation Institute (IMII) and Mitacs’ Accelerate program.

When I told my business mentor that I was looking for a unique opportunity that aligned well with my studies, he said, “Why don’t you go abroad then?” Before I could answer him, he told me about the Mitacs Globalink Research Award — it didn’t take long before I was infatuated with the idea.