Projets novateurs réalisés

Enjeux et potentiels socio-économiques de la transformation numérique dans certaines filières du secteur bioalimentaire québécois

Le secteur biolimentaire québécois doit faire face à des problématiques de concurrence internationale forte, de manque de relève, de rendements non-optimaux et d’un besoin urgent de réduire son impact environnemental. La littérature scienti-fique met en évidence l’importance d’une transition numérique du secteur, soit l’utilisation des nouvelles technologies, qui permettrait au secteur d’améliorer ou résoudre ces problématiques. Ce projet a pour but d’estimer et de documenter le potentiel socio-économiques et les retombées financières potentielles des investissements pour la transition numérique du secteur en fonction du niveau de technologie utilisé. Pour ce faire, une enquête sera effectuée pour consulter les différents acteurs du secteur et des études de cas de l’utilisation de certaines technologies dans des secteurs définis seront réalisées. Les résultats et documents obtenus permettront d’accompagner les politiques publiques et les investissements dans l’utilisation de nouvelles technologies et de l’IA dans certaines filières du secteur bioalimentaire.

AI Model White Space Analysis for SR.ai’s Investment Research Platform

The field of responsible investing is rapidly expanding, with even greater attention on the importance of responsible investment in 2021, as seen in the aftermath of the hugely impactful COP26 summit. Directing our financial resources in a sustainable direction has the potential to have a massive impact on helping us meet the Sustainable Development Goals set forth by the UN. Though the importance of better alignment between finance and sustainability is clear, and now has a very strong consensus around it, investors still lack the right tools to support their research process in terms of sustainability. They rely on high level data that is largely known not to be reliable, which leads to massive misallocations of capital. The mission of SR.ai is to bring more rigour to the world of responsible investment, using our technology backed by peer-reviewed research in sustainable finance, produced through collaboration with the University of Toronto RiskLab quantitative finance research center, led by our CEO Alik and his PhD Supervisor Luis Seco.

The mission of SR.ai is to help the responsible investment industry in directing global financial resources towards sustainable and socially responsible companies and initiatives.

Adapting data infrastructure for process improvement on legal & financial service teams

North America is about to experience the greatest wealth transfer in human history. Estate planning and settlement can be enormously stressful and cumbersome processes involving lawyers, accountants, trust services, and loads of paperwork–often when least expected. The time and financial burden of planning or settling an estate presents a demanding problem to the average Canadian at a time when many are emotionally taxed and grieving. At the same time, businesses and consumers alike are seeing a need for digital transformation in historically slower-moving industries such as legal services and healthcare. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has added fuel to the speed of that transformation, but organizations must figure out quickly how to make sense of all the data now being brought online with it. Data infrastructure and business intelligence projects in transforming industries such as legal and financial services present a clear opportunity to positively impact organizations and the people they serve. Improvement of service and reduction of time requirements are both commercially and socially valuable, as they reduce the emotional and financial burden of estate planning and settlement.

Treatment of Statistical Data in the Aircraft DeicingIndustry

Every year, all planes must be deiced prior to airbourne when outside temperatures hit the cold seasons (fall to spring), in order to ensure a safe takeoff. Currently, trends in the deicing industry are still leaning towards having all operation informations logged down on paper slits. This approach is consuming in terms of time, material and cost, given that it can be done more efficiently with today’s advanced technology. Wiseleap Solutions Inc. is a firm specialized in application development and analytics solutions that has developed an application to respond to this business need: Deicing Manager is an online tool that streamlines the capture, storage and analysis of all information needed to manage deicing operations. However, in order to measure the advantages its technological product brings, Wiseleap must not only identify the advantages of the product like unabling paperless operations, but also needs to quantify all cost and time savings generated by it in terms of decrease in deicing fluid waste used, human error reduction, increased quality control, etc. The project research intern is mandated to bring in his/her knowledge and expertise in statistical data analysis to respond to this problematic Wiseleap is faced with.

Seleste UVic

Seleste is developing an app to integrate with our smart glasses hardware. For this project we need interns to help us develop this app which includes two major components. First is the React Native app where interns will develop features like user authentication and improving our database structure. There will also be a big focus on our interface which will be unique from most since our users are visually impaired and it is incredibly important to create an interface that is simple, accessible and easy-to-use with a screen reader. Throughout this summer we are developing many features for the app and will also require a project manager whose in charge of managing the successful completion of these features and making changes to the requirements and implementation as needed. This is needed to make sure we are developing features that are useful for our customers and that we are on-track in development. The second part of the app is developing our innovative data transfer infrastructure where interns will optimize our video-stream where data is sent from the glasses to the phone over Wi-Fi and then from the phone to the guide using LTE.

Forecasting and optimizing staffing at an expanding family medicine clinic

The objective of the internship would be to forecast staffing and optimize staffing. Having the right number and type of staff, and making sure they have the optimal mix of skills and training would prevent over expenditure on human resources, and also make sure that services run smoothly as the scale of operations increases

Pitting behavior of a novel stainless steel for additive manufacturing

The last twenty years have seen whirlwind advancement in production of metallic parts via additive manufacturing (AM). This technology has surpassed its origins in manufacturing titanium parts; additive manufacturing is now applicable to a vast range of alloys, including stainless steels. The principal advantage of constructing parts layer by layer is to afford the capacity to produce geometries that cannot be generated by material removal processes. An additional benefit of additive manufacturing is rapid, low-volume production without any tooling investment.
The production of parts that incorporate internal cooling channels is greatly facilitated by the relaxed constraints on achievable geometries that are afforded by additive manufacturing. With additive manufacturing, fine channels may readily be integrated into monolithic designs. Naturally, applying such capability does imply new challenges. Formally, what corrosion behaviors in aqueous media are exhibited by new additive manufacturing alloys? Indeed, the emergence of additive manufacturing as a competing technology has required the development of novel alloys. The limited information available on the chemical and mechanical behaviors of these new alloys introduces uncertainty regarding the durability of these materials in corrosive environments.
The proposed research project is to study the corrosive deterioration of a new stainless steel.

Exciton-Induced Aggregation in Novel Guest Emitters for wet-coated OLEDs

The promise of low-cost fabrication via “wet” processes, such as inkjet printing, in manufacturing flat panel displays and solid-state lighting has long been one of the main motivations behind the pursuit of Organic Light-Emitting Devices (OLEDs). The vast majority of OLEDs in commercial products are still fabricated by costly “dry” vacuum-deposition methods however. A primary reason is the significantly lower electroluminescence (EL) stability of devices made by wet-coating in comparison to their vacuum-deposited counterparts. Recent work at the University of Waterloo (UW) has revealed that the stability gap is caused by molecular aggregation driven by exciton-polaron interactions during electrical stress; a previously unknown phenomenon that is now understood to play a major role in OLED EL loss over time and to affect wet-coated materials more readily. More recent work has shown that the phenomenon affects the guest emitters in OLED host-guest systems highlighting the necessity of adopting new molecular architectures and design strategies in developing these materials.

The goal of the project is to develop and fabricate optimized OLED architectures for testing these novel emitters and using electrical electroluminescence and photoluminescence measurements to study and compare their photophysical and electroluminescence properties and their dependence on the fabrication method.

Sentiers de randonnée : Attentes et besoins des personnes en situation de handicap

Ce projet de recherche mené avec notre partenaire, l’Association Québécoise pour le Loisir des Personnes Handicapées vise à développer une classification de l’accessibilité de sentiers naturels (urbain) en partant d’indicateurs qualitatifs (motivation, attentes, besoins, satisfaction, équilibre défi-compétence, etc.) et quantitatifs (capacité fonctionnelle, force, endurance, etc.). Le présent projet se structure, d’une part, autour d’une démarche de recherche dans une perspective complémentaire afin de documenter l’influence de la qualité de l’expérience sur l’adoption de la pratique de randonnée en sentiers naturels. D’autre part, ce projet vise aussi à documenter la satisfaction de personnes en situation de handicap suite à une expérience de plein air en fonction notamment de l’équilibre défi-compétence selon les aspirations des participants. L’apport de ce projet est considérable considérant l’influence de la qualité de l’expérience pour susciter l’adoption d’une pratique pérenne de la randonnée pédestre et de la marche et ainsi contribuer à l’intégration d’un mode de vie plus actif propice à leur santé physique et mentale des personnes en situation de handicap.

Valorization of protein-rich liquid waste from tunicate cellulose extraction into biofertilizer

Presently, tunicates pose a serious challenge for the mussel aquaculture industry in PEI and Atlantic Provinces, which leads to a dramatic increase in the cost of production for both growers and processors. Although tunicate can be applied as the feedstock for the preparation of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), an abundant amount of protein-rich liquid stream is often generated. To optimize the tunicate cellulose extraction process and improve the overall economy, this protein-rich liquid stream must be collected and valorized. Therefore, in this project, the liquid by-product obtained from cellulose extraction from tunicate will be used as the raw materials to prepare value-added biofertilizer, which helps ameliorate the problem caused by the tunicate, especially clubbed tunicate, in PEI and surrounding provinces.

Employee Engagement Research

The internship project investigates the market feasibility of a new service/product offering and the existing organizational capacity to enable such a change to occur. Assist with the strategy and business plan development for what form this offering should take shape, either as an intrapreneurial initiative or a separate entity. The project will also adapt and advance lean startup methodologies (e.g. Lean Launch Pad) and design thinking for comparative scenario analysis and strategic planning.

Climate Investment Impact AI Model

The internship project will contribute to Baastel’s overall ambition to use AI modelling techniques in the monitoring and evaluation of international development projects, specifically in its climate change and disaster risk reduction practice. Baastel’s objective is to increase the amount of public and private funds available for climate change mitigation investments, in order to help advance Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations, and to meet the commitments made by different countries to the reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GhG) emissions. With an increasing number of climate change projects, and the need for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, Baastel is developing a decision-support model that can aid in identifying successful investments in a less time-consuming and more accurate manner.