Projets novateurs réalisés

Summer Intern – Dawson Group

The Dawson Group is a construction and transportation company that ranges between 600 to 700 employees seasonally – depending on the companies’ workload (awarded projects, seasonality with highway construction, winter snow plowing) and also normal turnover, we have many onboards and offboards in our organization each year. With many employees coming and going, it places a challenging burden on Support Services to manually ensure that all employees are consistently and completely onboarded. Though we have some processes in place, there are still occasional items missed on some employees and a lot of time and effort spent ensuring that onboards and offboards occur smoothly. The company’s Corporate division wishes to streamline and simplify the onboarding process, to lead to better outcomes for the business, and to free up support services’ time to focus on higher-value activities. Our business strategy includes Preparing for Growth, and bolstering Employee Engagement. By making improvements to our employee onboarding process, we believe we will run more efficiently and create a more positive experience from Day 1 with new employees joining (or re-joining seasonally) our company. Through innovation, we wish to apply workflow automation and a software tool that can allow the coordinated delivery of onboarding across multiple teams in our Corporate Services division – the requirements, design and development of such software innovation will be the focus of this intern project.

Developing MRI Biomarkers for the Differential Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder associated with death of dopamine-producing neurons. This results in structural changes to the striatum, substantial nigra (SNc), and ventral tegmental area (VTA). Motor symptoms of PD are extremely heterogeneous causing a high rate of misdiagnosis of similar disorders (e.g. Essential tremor; ET) as PD. This study aims to identify objective indicators of PD with MRI, to help physicians differentiate PD patients from healthy people, and ET patients. 60 participants from each group will be recruited. The MacDonald and Khan labs recently developed a novel MRI technique to identify structural changes in the striatum and SNc/VTA by parcellating these regions into sub-regions based on connectivity, which reliably differentiates PD patients from healthy controls with unprecedented accuracy. This study will test the ability of this technique to differentiate PD from other movement disorders with the hopes of providing physicians an accessible and reliable diagnostic tool.

Summer Analyst – Impact Investing, Acceleration, and Advisory – Queen’s University

The Social Innovation Academy will be working with a network of Mitacs interns to develop national-scale backend infrastructure resources for incubation and acceleration organizations across Canada. These resources may include (but are not limited to): initiatives for advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion; impact measurement frameworks; In addition, interns will provide marketing, research, and financial analysis for social purpose organizations over the duration of the 14-week internship.

Glacier weather planning decision aid – MDS AeroTest

The Glacier test facility was established to conduct testing of aircraft turbofan engines under icing conditions. Engine manufacurers from across the globe use the Glacier facility to earn airworthiness certification for their products. A range of icing conditions is prescribed by airworthiness authorities, and required air temperature is produced under naturally occurring conditions. Air temperature tolerance for certification test may be quite small. However, the facility is not close to or located at an available observation and forecast station. Hence, the forecast and actual observed temperatures for the station can differ from the facility. The intent of the present work is to develop a Glacier Weather Dashboard to be used as a decision-aid in test planning.

Summer Analyst – Impact Investing, Acceleration, and Advisory – Red River College

The Social Innovation Academy will be working with a network of Mitacs interns to develop national-scale backend infrastructure resources for incubation and acceleration organizations across Canada. These resources may include (but are not limited to): initiatives for advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion; impact measurement frameworks; recruitment of entrepreneurs. In addition, interns will provide marketing, research, and financial analysis for social purpose organizations over the duration of the 14-week internship.

Shared Cybersecurity Services for Regional Public-Sector Organizations

The objectives of this project are to increase the capability of cybersecurity products, services, and practices available to the public sector group of CW-E stakeholders. Connecting Windsor-Essex (CW-E) is a non-profit, shared-service organization which provides technology services for public sector organizations, small- and medium-sized businesses, and other community-oriented organizations.

CW-E has a mandate for promoting technology use in the region through collaborative partnerships, knowledge sharing, the leveraging of collective investments, and service facilitation. An important aspect of networking technology is cybersecurity. Whenever there is a device or piece of technology that is connected to a network, that connection must be protected from potential threats. One of the long-term objectives of CW-E is to be recognised as a ”Centre of Excellence” for cybersecurity, being able to offer services and expert advice for organizations to implement cybersecurity best practices within their own operations. This project represents a first-step in the development of this overall initiative. The shared services model allows CW-E to improve services for its stakeholders. Specifically the organization has been able to use the aggregated demand of the organizations it represents to attract competition for various services, thereby improving the overall quality and reducing the cost of those services. It also allows for the sharing of relevant information, allowing organizations to work collaboratively and learn from each other.

Integrating the ReJoyce Workstation into the ProMote Tele-Rehabilitation 2.0 Platform

Patients when they are discharged from hospital following a stroke can benefit greatly from a program of rehabilitation to help restore function. Often one of the patient’s arms is affected and this affects many activities of daily living. For patients who live in rural areas it is often very difficult to get access to expert rehabilitation assessments and treatment. Travelling frequently to urban centres is usually out of the question. Rehabtronics has developed a workstation called ReJoyce that has the potential to be used as part of a virtual care program for patients who have had a stroke that affects one of their arms. The University of Alberta team has developed a virtual care platform that the ReJoyce workstation could be linked to enabling virtual rehabilitation sessions to be held. The intern in for this project will establish the regulatory requirements that need to be met to enable the ReJoyce workstation and a sensor the UofA team has developed, so that they can be introduced into routine clinical practice.

Increasing digital reach to strategically combat online hate speech in Canada

We have identified three objectives for this intern to complete during the project.
Objective 1: Create and execute a digital reach and content strategy
Objective 2: Grow audience by 25% through the execution of strategic media engagement
Objective 3: Research and write a case study white paper reflecting academic research on our product design mechanisms.

Building an Evidence Base for an Innovative Harm Reduction Program

Grenfell Ministries is a peer-led, Unitarian Universalist faith-based non-for-profit that addresses the needs of people pushed to the margins of our society. A pioneering harm-reduction organization based in Hamilton, Ontario, Grenfell is built and led entirely by people who have experienced substance use disorder and associated struggles with poverty, homelessness, incarceration, and mental health challenges. Having engaged with punitive, infantilizing and barrier-ridden abstinence-based policies and programs, Grenfell’s team built their model with choice, empowerment, and non-judgment at its heart. Their programs empower participants to choose their own path in addressing the challenges in their lives.

Grenfell Ministries partnered with Spark: a centre for social research innovation at McMaster University to rigorously evaluate the impacts on participants lives, and the broader social benefits of helping the socially marginalized improve their lives. Early evidence suggests their work is highly effective and may be appropriate to replicate broadly across locations. The process of building an evidence base that would support replication is long and difficult. This project will help the partners make critical steps to transition from a strong foundational base of evidence to a full randomized-controlled trial (considered a gold standard of evidence for a policy or program) that would allow Grenfell’s model – if proven to be as highly effective as early evidence suggests – to fundamentally alter social services provision for the most socially marginalized across Canada.

Automatisation de protocoles biologiques à l’aide d’un robot collaboratif

La robotique collaborative offre de nouvelles possibilités d’automatisation particulièrement intéressantes pour exécuter des protocoles complexes de biologie moléculaire en utilisant des instruments conventionnels en laboratoire. Ceci permet d’automatiser des protocoles impossibles ou difficiles à l’aide de plateformes robotiques habituellement employées en sciences biologiques, en utilisant plutôt un bras robotique UR3 offrant une liberté de mouvement semblable à celle d’un bras humain. Le stage proposé vise à automatiser un protocole d’évolution accélérée en laboratoire demandant des manipulations régulières s’étalant sur plusieurs jours afin d’optimiser des souches bactériennes utilisées par TATUM bioscience pour développer de nouveaux médicaments biologiques. Une interface graphique simple sera également élaborée pour laisser la possibilité au personnel de laboratoire ne connaissant pas la programmation informatique d’ajuster les paramètres des protocoles. La compagnie TATUM bioscience pourra ainsi évaluer la plateforme robotique pour des applications biotechnologiques difficiles en produisant des souches bactériennes d’intérêt. Cette démonstration ouvrira également la porte à l’automatisation d’autres protocoles de plus en plus complexes, ce qui pourrait s’avérer avantageux dans un contexte généralisé de pénurie de main d’oeuvre.

Prolonged Rat Heart Storage Using Sub-Zero Temperatures and Antifreeze Proteins: Feasibility Assessments

Heart transplantation depends on being able to move a donor heart from the location of harvest to the hospital where it will be implanted, and having the heart work once it is implanted. The time between excision and implantation is called the ischemic time. The safe ischemic time is about 4 to 6 hrs; hearts implanted after this interval have much less chance of survival. This safe ischemic time has not changed in > 30 years. Extending this ischemic time would allow transportation of donor hearts from longer distances, potentially increasing the number of matches between donors and recipients, thus increasing the number of transplants. In this experiment, we propose to test a novel method of storing hearts at sub-zero temperatures which should extend the time dramatically. Preliminary studies with a variety of tissues and cell lines have been very promising. This series of experiments to be supported by this grant will use a standard isolated rat heart preparation. If it proves successful, we will then test it in subsequent studies of more complex systems. The method involves the use of antifreeze proteins and other additives in a solution which will be flushed into the hearts of rats.

Études de makerspaces et centre d’innovation en Europe

Afin de permettre à la Zone Technum de pleinement jouer son rôle de catalyseur d’innovation à Bromont et de co-création de nouvelles technologies, il est impératif d’installer dans son district un espace d’innovation en électronique de classe mondiale. Déjà, le C2Mi brille comme laboratoire de microélectronique et pourrait être un lieu propice à la création d’un espace d’innovation en électronique.
Il serait bon pour ce futur espace prometteur de s’inspirer des bonnes pratiques et tendances constatées au sein des fablabs et des makerspaces qui sont des tiers-lieux de type atelier de fabrication numérique.
Les fablabs et makerspaces foisonnent à travers le monde, mais sont de qualité bien inégale. Certains makerspaces et fablabs ne sont rien de plus que des ateliers glorifiés de fabrication mécanique. Par exemple, leur liste d’équipements varie d’incomplète à peu utile pour la conception et le prototypage de produits en électronique. D’autres, au contraire, sont des moteurs de développement d’entreprises et d’innovation, et propulsent l’essor de leur ville.
L’objectif étant de découvrir lesquels pourraient vraiment servir d’exemple à Technum et au C2Mi.