Projets novateurs réalisés

Invasive Plant Risk Mapping

Invasive species are one of the major threats to biodiversity in Canada and globally. It can be challenging to identify where and under which circumstances landscapes will be most susceptible versus resistant to invasive species, and not having this information can hamper conservation efforts. The objective of this Master’s project is to model and map current and future invasive plant species distributions and spread in Canada in relation to landscape connectivity and climate change. This will allow for the forecasting of the future burden of invasive plants to resident communities considering multiple facets of global change. The project’s results will be useful for determining where conservation actions should be targeted to sustain resilient landscapes.

Validating and improving Large Language Models for procedural tasks

Engineering organisations like Thales rely on large quantities of technical knowledge. When resolving a technical
problem, for example, users have to follow a multi-step procedure in which the steps are described with various
levels of detail, may not be up to date, or may not target the exact problem they are facing. Recent progress in
Large Language Models (LLM) showed capabilities for these models to reason over procedural knowledge but it
is still very difficult to evaluate if these models will be able to support users in executing complex, procedural tasks
in various scenarios. This project will address this research question by creating evaluation tasks for procedural
knowledge in order to test the performance of LLM, namely ChatGPT. These tasks are expected to form the
foundation of an API for LLMs applied to procedural knowledge, and will generate performance metrics that will
enable us to identify gaps in LLM abilities. These gaps will be addressed in a subsequent project.
7.3. Participant

Equal Access to an Education?: A Study on School Travel for Families Living with Childhood Disability

The project proposes to unpack the student transportation system through a comprehensive examination of legislative frameworks, in tandem with the lived school travel experiences of families living with childhood disability and school travel practitioners. The research aims are:(1) To understand how policy frameworks (e.g., international, federal, provincial, and municipal) shape school travel experiences for families living with childhood disability; (2) To demonstrate how disabled children and their families access and experience school travel; and (3) To identify tangible interventions to advance more equitable and inclusive school travel and education access for disabled students. To accomplish the latter, the following research question will serve as a guide: How does school travel materialize norms of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness (e.g., a preference for able-bodied, ‘neurotypical’ people)?

During their visit to Manchester, the intern will work closely with Dr. Cristina Temenos to analyze and interpret the data from the comprehensive content analysis of school travel policy, in addition to interviews with families/children living with disability and school travel practitioners. Dr. Temenos’ expertise in qualitative research methods, policy mobility and critical studies will be highly beneficial to this work.

Cell-specific mRNA design yielding highly efficient and safe gene editing in human epithelia

Gene therapies have the potential to help many patients with currently untreatable, severe, and life-threatening diseases. A certain type of gene therapy may even provide a cure for patients with genetic diseases. A key component of these gene therapies often is RNA. However, we are still lacking a good understanding of how RNA should ideally be designed and manufactured, especially when striving for an application beyond vaccination. Here, we are particularly interested in the lung as the target organ as several lung diseases would potentially benefit from an effective and safe gene therapy – many of them are poorly treatable to date.
Also, we currently do not know how RNA should be designed to exert especially powerful effects in specific cell types while maintaining good biocompatibility. Hence, in this project, we aim to understand the impact of RNA design and modifications when targeting the human lungs. We will generate a variety of RNA variants, assess the effect of these different structures on the efficacy and tolerability in the lungs, and develop criteria for other researchers how to effectively design safe and efficient RNA molecules for lung applications…

Indigenizing the Blue Economy

The project will pursue research that evaluates the potential benefits/ consequences of implementing eco-certification programs in Indigenous fisheries as an approach to improve the benefits Indigenous fish harvesters can obtain from their Treaty rights and/or commercial fisheries. In New Zealand, Maori scholars at theTe Kotahi and Ngai Tahu Research Centre are currently working with Maori fishers to understand how increased economic value from fisheries might be directed to Maori communities via certification and marketing. This internship will support this work, and also identify how initiatives underway in New Zealand can support Mi’kmaq and other First Nation’s development in Canada. The outcome of this partnership will assist the intern in developing a final research paper, as a requirement of the interns current masters degree at the home institution.

Adaptive Chaotic Map Selection to Reduce Overfitting in Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become a widely used machine learning tool in many different and broad fields of application. ANNs may be trained from training examples to perform various prediction or classification tasks. However, one of the problems exhibited by ANNs is that they typically overlearn the training examples and perform poorly on new inputs they haven’t been trained on. As a result, the ANN does not generalize well to novel data. The neuroscience field has shown some evidence that human cognition exhibits some form of chaotic behaviour. In our research, we use a mathematical tool called a chaotic strange attractor to generate chaotic sequences of values to inject into an ANN to reduce overfitting. While there are many different kinds of chaotic strange attractors, we propose a novel method of adaptively choosing a single or a subset of strange attractor(s), based on the nature of the training data, as well as on the nature of the distribution of possible solutions in the solution space. To assess the efficacy of our method, we propose to use three common data sets for training and testing and we propose to compare our method to the baseline ANN, dropout (DO)

Seeing the forest for the bees: pollinator and plant diversity across a chronosequence of harvest in managed boreal forests in Newfoundland, Canada.

This project aims to understand plant-pollinator relationships and species diversity in Corner Brook Pulp and Paper (Kruger) managed forests; and determine how these relationships may change under continued climate warming.

Temperature Sensitive Mat Device for Home-based Detection and Prevention of Diabetic Foot Ulcers

Eleven million people are living with diabetes or prediabetes in Canada. As many as 15% of people with diabetes develop a foot ulcer, usually due to neuropathy, a lack of pain feedback, which would otherwise allow a person to recognize areas of high pressure or friction on the foot. These foot ulcers can develop infections, and in severe cases require amputation, leading to a significant loss in quality of life for the patient and impose a large economic burden on the healthcare system. The prevalent methodology to prevent the formation of these ulcers is for patients to monitor their feet visually. However, this is difficult for many patients who may not have the flexibility or social support for another individual to check their feet. Spinal cord injury persons with lived experience are also at risk of developing foot ulcers, especially if they are able to walk with the support of crutches or otherwise with little to no sensation in their feet..

Drainage des sols agricoles compactés

Les sols agricoles du Québec présentent des problèmes de compaction de plus en plus importants. Elle réduit la capacité de l’eau à s’infiltrer, ce qui provoque le manque d’oxygène aux plantes et des pertes de rendements. Ces problèmes engendrent également des conditions d’anaérobies dans les sols ce qui favorise la production de N2O un gaz causant le réchauffement climatique. L’amélioration de l’infiltration de l’eau réduirait l’émission de ce gaz. Ce projet de recherche vise à comparer différentes méthodes de drainage des sols compactés dans le but d’en trouver qui améliorerait le drainage à long terme. Les parcelles d’essais seront composées des pratiques utilisées fréquemment par les producteurs soit le sous-solage et la densité de drains sera augmentée. La mise en place de drains verticaux est une pratique courante dans plusieurs secteurs et sera appliquée en agriculture dans cet essai. L’expertise obtenue lors du projet de recherche permettra d’offrir un service-conseil avec des solutions adaptées pour les producteurs faisant face à des problèmes de sols compacts.

Human Tele-ultrasound using Mixed Reality: Validation and Optimization

In remote and especially indigenous communities, access to expert healthcare is often lacking. Human Teleoperation is a novel framework in which the input and actuation are carried out by people, but with robot-like precision. This is achieved by having a follower wearing a headset follow a virtual tool that is projected into their scene and controlled in real time by a remote expert. We are developing a tele-ultrasound system in which the virtual tool is an ultrasound transducer. By tracking the position and force of the virtual transducer with their real one, a person without medical experience (the novice or “follower”) can perform ultrasound procedures efficiently, controlled by an expert – a sonographer or radiologist (the expert or “leader’). By partnering with Rogers, we can leverage their communications expertise, infrastructure, and outreach programs to ensure successful translation of our technology to practical use for remote and indigenous communities across Canada.

Aguatineau

Développement d’un système informatique pour générer des rapports quotidiens, mensuels et annuels pour les usines de production d’eau potable de la ville de Gatineau. Le système existant doit être revu pour tenir compte de nouvelles exigences règlementaires sur de tels systèmes.

The Transformation of Audience Interest in Academic Explanatory Journalism Post-Pandemic

The Conversation Canada is an independent journalism organization that collaborates with scholars to create research-based journalistic articles that are accessible to the wider public. In COVID-19, this form of “news-you-can-use” spiked in popularity, as people searched for understandable, but research-based, information to navigate the uncertainty of the first wave of the pandemic. This research was undertaken to understand how the value of “news-you-can-use” has changed post-pandemic, by asking what forms, topics, and authors do Canadians value in explanatory journalism in 2023, and what do they seem to steer clear from? This research will help The Conversation Canada further develop engaging explanatory journalism by uncovering the core themes that their audience values.