Currently, cellulosic ethanol production is laden with technical challenges, and as a result, not economically viable. The reason for this lies with the toughness of the plant feed material generally called biomass. Processing biomass to allow fermentation to ethanol often requires harsh operations such as extreme heat, pressure, acidity, or a combination of all three. This often leads to the formation of unwanted chemicals that are toxic to organisms that enable fermentation.

Intelligent visual surveillance refers to the use of context rich visual sensors, i.e. video cameras, for the purpose of surveillance. Surveillance systems can be deployed in diverse environments, such as airports, department stores, office buildings, home buildings, conference rooms, parking lots, and hotels for diverse purposes, such as ambient and personal security, information recording, and personal identification.

Surgical education has changed dramatically over the last 15 years as traditional “time served” approaches have given way to objective assessments of efficiency. These assessments are very resource intensive and require a greater level of training for the educators and evaluators. Furthermore they often do not provide timely, meaningful feedback to the trainees. To overcome these difficulties, the Surgical Skills Centre (SSC) at Mount Sinai Hospital is seeking to improve the efficiency of the assessment process and concurrently better integrate feedback into surgical education.

Problems associated with measuring scientific and technological advances make it difficult to determine the impact of R&D on scientific advancement, technical change and ultimately productivity and output. Our research uses new publication-based measures of technical and scientific change to: (1) quantify the importance of R&D and determine the strength of these relationships, (2) document differences between the US and Canada, as well as different regions (states, provinces and mega-regions), and (3) explore whether the variations are linked to regional productivity gaps.

In this project, we attempt to investigate the feasibility of using behavioral synthesis technology for large scale chip project. The project will be completed in Metabacus Inc, an Ontario startup company that develops and markets behavioral synthesis technology, which automatically converts software into chip designs. Although promising, one obstacle for the wide deployment of behavioral synthesis as the next generation chip design methodology is demonstrating the success of the technology on large-scale chip project.

This project is in partnership with AUTO21. This proposal is to help perform knowledge and technology transfer activities to implement the proposed techniques for vehicular communications on real systems and demonstrate their capabilities to our industrial partner. The techniques regard first a scalable solution for authentication and authorization of communicating entities in vehicular networks to secure exchanges of information while preserving the privacy of parties; and second an interference management medium access control for safety message transmission in vehicular networks.

In a Healthcare setting, multiple potential interactions, directions and decisions significantly affect the patientfs path throughout the system. It is difficult to determine which changes would be beneficial to patient flow and care prior to making the decision. A decision support tool will allow the decision maker to assess the consequences and effects of a number of possible choices, before implementation. This will allow creating more informed decisions, where the effects are known and understood ahead of time.

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is a chemical found naturally in the brain that plays a key role in the stress response. CRF is also known to be involved in anxiety and mood disorders, as well as various aspects of drug dependence, including long-term relapse to drug use. Pathological symptoms in the form of mood disorders and substance abuse occur, at least in part, as a result of aberrant activity within CRF systems. From this perspective, CRF is a logical target for drug development in the treatment of these disorders.

The interns will spend time in the company lab to build and test proprietary electronic chemical detectors. These will be tested and undergo quality control measures in Universal NanoSensor Technologies’ lab. Once deemed robust, these detectors will then be used concurrently with present art detectors in a real-world, cutting‐edge, applications‐driven setting so that direct comparison can be made. The interns, under the guidance of the supervisor and other students involved in the lab, will perform head‐to‐head tests using both these detectors in place.

For this project, the mathematical finance intern will assist in the development and implementation of a new Economic Capital system, a method used by society to produce and distribute goods and services. The internship will also look into the development and implementation of appropriate risk management policies and procedures. The intern will manage the performance of operational tasks related to asset and liability compliance reporting and credit reporting as well as oversee the performance of credit and financial assessments of treasury credit counterparties.