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.

The idea had its fair share of skeptics at the time, but also some influential champions within the NCE. In 1998, after reviewing a slate of about 80 applicants, the NCE selection committee decided that four would become Networks of Centres of Excellence, including the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems or Mitacs.

Mitacs was created to overcome three main hurdles facing the academic community and the very people and sectors that could benefit most from advanced mathematical and statistical techniques, tools and methodologies.

After completing his PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he worked at IBM before moving to York University to take up a position at the School of Information Technology in 2001 where he is now an Associate Professor.

Dr. Chen has supervised three post-doctoral fellows through Mitacs-Accelerate internships, each lasting for at least 12 months, and is in the process of applying for two more.  He credits Mitacs for helping him secure more funding for his diverse research goals.

Native trees are known to support local ecosystems much more effectively, providing a home and food source for local insects and wildlife.  But the exact benefit of using native trees has never been studied in Canada.