By diagnosing oral premalignant lesions that might progress to cancer and making better clinical decisions, clinicians can significantly lower the mortality rate, increase quality of life with earlier and less traumatic surgery and reduce healthcare costs.

Toronto-based ProteoCyte Diagnostics Inc. developed a new diagnostic testing system, Straticyte^TM, which can accurately and objectively identify premalignant oral lesions that have a high risk of becoming cancerous, allowing patients to undergo early treatment to ensure survival and improved quality of life.

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.   

Rogers Raising the Grade uses the appeal of technology and dedicated space provided in Tech Centres designed exclusively for participating clubs, quality online resources, alongside 1:1 mentoring to re-engage youth in learning and the commitment to finish high school. 

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.

They can be maneuvered around refinery stacks or high voltage power lines for inspections without risk to pilots, and survey crops or mining operations using a fraction of the fuel needed for a normal airplane or helicopter.

But for a UAV to be effective, it must be able to capture high quality photos and video while being controlled remotely.

Bojan Ramadanovic, a postdoctoral fellow at the Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences (IRMACS) Centre at Simon Fraser University, specializes in mathematical modeling of complex social systems, including the spread of disease and delivery of healthcare. Through Mitacs-Accelerate and working under his academic supervisor, Dr. Alexander Rutherford, he partnered with pharmaceuticals company Merck Canada Inc.

Originally from Poland, Dr. Kaminska moved to Canada in 1986 and held a professor position at Polytechnique de Montréal for fourteen years, before heading to the United States with her start-up company OPMAXX.  After the company’s acquisition, she returned to Canada and was awarded a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair. She has been based at School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University since 2005.

Dr. Kaminska found Mitacs Accelerate as the perfect fit to advance her own research and apply it in an industrial setting.