Sleep is crucial for the formation of novel memories, and it underpins much of our psychological well-being. Unfortunately, millions of Canadians suffer from sleep difficulties, which are especially prevalent among women and populations with low education and income. These difficulties result in poorer cognitive performance and reduced well-being. Finding solutions to these difficulties is often complicated, as pharmacological interventions often have unwanted side effects, and the most efficient intervention (cognitive behavioral therapy) is hard to access for most of the population.

Deep brain stimulation is a treatment method for Parkinson’s Disease, involving implanting an electrode deep into the brain. This procedure has a small but serious risk of complications such as hemorrhage and infection. However, a new stimulation technique, called temporal interference stimulation, may circumvent these risks, and allow for non-invasive deep brain stimulation. Temporal interference stimulation can selectively target deep brain structures in the mouse, however whether it will work in larger animals is currently unknown.

The utility service providers calculate the peak demand charges based on the highest level of power consumption that a facility uses in any interval (usually 15 mins) during the billing cycle. The peak demand charges in facilities such as supermarkets could represent nearly up to 40% of the total utility bill. In supermarkets, besides the building, refrigeration systems could potentially play a major role in affecting the peak demands.

Mining employs ~400,000 Canadians and generates billions of dollars for the Canadian economy. Western University and Troilus Gold Corp. recognize that innovation is central to responsible resource exploration and extraction. Canada is a world leader in mineral exploration and mining technology, but discovery of new mineral resources has declined, despite increasing exploration expenditures.

The most popular type of 3D printing globally uses plastic filament. Historically, this has been done with only one plastic at a time. 3D printers can now use multiple materials and/or colors to be part of a single print. Unfortunately, today multi-material 3D printing results in a lost of waste plastic and the associated environmental problems. Each time a material change happens, waste is produced through nozzle priming and/or purging to get rid of the last material. 3D printing software typically changes the material on each layer meaning that every layer, a lot of plastic is wasted.

With the increasing effects of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions on climate change, there is also increasing interest to alternatives to internal combustion engines for mobility. Battery electric vehicles are one route, and another is fuel cells. There is increasing interest in polymer composites that are not only mechanically strong and lightweight, but also have other properties, such as electrical and thermal conductivity.

Modern machine learning methods are data-intensive processes, requiring massive amounts of training data to achieve a high level of performance. As such, these techniques are challenging to deploy on tasks where datasets are especially difficult or expensive to obtain or where edge cases and other rare events are most relevant and worth learning. In such occasions, data augmentation techniques offer enormous benefits to alleviate the issue of limited training data.

Inaccurate staging of colorectal cancer contributes to poor patient outcomes and increased healthcare costs. The current staging process involves a manual and time-consuming search by pathology staff for lymph nodes (LNs) in surgically removed fatty tissues. These LNs are then investigated to determine if the cancer has spread, which informs treatment decisions. We developed a novel robotic system that leverages ultrasound imaging to automatically scan and mark locations of LNs for dissection by pathology staff.

The proposed research projects will expand the scope of computer algebra systems (CAS) into two areas where much remains to be done: symbolic analysis and polyhedral geometry. One of the proposed research projects will also strengthen CAS in one of their well-established territory, namely symbolic integration. These themes will support applications such as the analysis, transformation and scheduling of computer programs as well as the computation of limits of families of geometrical objects (e.g. tangent cones) algebraic geometry.

Sugars play many important roles in our bodies. For example, they provide a supporting environment around cells and are also involved numerous processes, including viral and bacterial infection. In addition to their natural existence, there is also interest in preparing sugar-based polymers, called “glycopolymers”, in the lab both to better understand biological processes and also to develop potential therapeutics. However, most methods to prepare these molecules are costly and time consuming.