Projets novateurs réalisés

Foundational Models for Drug Discovery

A foundation model (FM) is any model that is trained at scale on a broad dataset and can be adapted (e.g., fine-tuned) to a wide range of downstream tasks; current examples include BERT, CLIP and GPT-3. In this project, we investigate the challenges of building foundational models for drug discovery: capturing multi-modal information, explainability, and rapid adaptation to new lab experiments. Addressing these challenges will allow us to build robust foundational models that we can apply to downstream drug discovery tasks. In particular, we seek to leverage these foundational models to learn biochemistry fundamentals from biochemical interaction data. Biochemistry is the central discipline in the discovery of new medicines. Hence, a biochemistry foundational model will have great significance in tasks such as function prediction in proteins, binding prediction in chemical-protein interactions and antibody discovery. We will evaluate our biochemistry foundational model on several biochemistry datasets in the open-source domain.

Developing rapid and portable detection technology for monitoring manganese in drinking water systems

Manganese (Mn) is a contaminant of emerging concern in drinking water as a growing body of epidemiological evidence has identified adverse cognitive, neurodevelopmental and behaviour effects in children. Canada has been a global leader in advancing the regulatory framework for Mn in drinking water, and in 2019, Health Canada published a new drinking water guideline. For the first time, Mn is now regulated on a health-basis (i.e. Alberta and Nova Scotia). The World Health Organization published proposed Mn standards in 2020, with a health-based value, lower than Health Canada’s, providing a powerful policy signal that Mn management will be a new treatment and management priority. Currently Mn monitoring is reliant on periodic grab sampling with analysis by specialized equipment in certified labs. There is no reliable on-site monitoring technique. Our project team at Queen’s University and MANTECH Inc will work together in developing new portable approaches for detecting Mn species.

Titan Platform Marketing Internship

This Marketing Project will be undertaken in order to assess current strategies, improve current processes, and brainstorm new strategies. The successful candidate will first be educated on our industry, our project, and our potential clients by the CEO and CTO. The main goal of this project is to strengthen the marketing (including messaging and branding) of the company, and in an efficient manner. We welcome a candidate whose recent training and energy will bring our company a fresh perspective.

To develop a culture-centric application for a modern matchmaking service

The main project objective is to develop a culture centric matchmaking application that would cater to the unique needs and preferences of African relationship seekers in Canada and diaspora.

Our research showed that the online dating industry (ODI)s does not cater to African relationship seekers’ unique needs and preferences. Only 2% of African respondents stated they had a good experience, while none met anyone seeking a serious relationship while using these western online dating apps. Qunuby aims to fulfil the needs of this heavily underserved market.

The project would include the following streams of activities to ultimately design and build a web and mobile matchmaking application to would cater to the needs of the target market. These activities include:

1. Conduct in-depth research and analysis on the online and offline relationship matching industry: This involves conducting primary and secondary research to re-validate the existing Lean model and marketing strategy before application development.

2. Use knowledge to design an innovative matchmaking application that meets the vision and requirements of the target market: This involves developing prototypes for both web and mobile platforms in line with the research findings and design requirements of the team. In addition, selecting a technology platform would meet the short and long-term needs of the project.

3. Build the solution for web and mobile usage: Develop the software application using the agreed platform.

4. Launch and Testing: conduct testing with a release of the beta II version and champion subsequent lessons learnt and bug management for continuity management

Natural Language Processing for automatically checking novelty of ideas

XLScout uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Innovation/Scientific principles to deliver actionable intelligence and accelerate innovation by analyzing large patent and research databases. The company is eliminating the pain of manually going through document and quickly providing relevant information to support data-driven strategic decisions. Presently XLScout hosts a data vault of over 130 million patents and 200+ million research publications occupying approximately 8TB of storage. Effectively searching these documents is time-consuming and it commonly requires advanced strategies that a novice searcher may not be familiar with. Moreover, as the database is so large, it is difficult to distill relevant information just by using keyword-based searches. XLScout already has different machine learning techniques for extracting information from these databases, and this project is seeking to make these systems smarter, efficient and scalable by utilizing state-of-the-art deep learning-based models.

Detours: Location intelligence for Inclusive mobility in disruptive sidewalk conditions

Temporary disruptions in the pedestrian environment, such as construction or snow, make it difficult for people with disabilities (PWDs) to reach destinations in their community. Cities struggle to communicate alternate routes that are accessible to everyone when these disruptions occur. Grounded in a context of data valorization and transfer for the development of smart and inclusive cities, the present project aims at addressing the challenges of the mobility of people with disabilities in a dynamic and changing environment (e.g., construction sites, social events, snow, etc.) to provide them with the information on accessible itineraries based on their personal profile, capabilities and preferences in outdoor environments in close collaboration with “Quartier de l’innovation de Montréal” (QI), the city of Quebec, as well as the “Réseau de transport de la Capitale” (RTC) and community partners such as ROP 03 (Regroupement des organismes de personnes handicapées de la région 03).

Structural testing of Basalt Fibre Reinforced Precast Concete Sandwich Panels

A new load-bearing precast concrete wall panel system has been proposed that uses composite materials instead of steel for reinforcement to reduce the level of heat loss through them and increase their R-Value. The panels will undergo destructive structural testing to determine how well the composite material system compares to a similar wall design that uses steel reinforcement. Bending tests, axial tests, and combined bending/axial tests will be preformed. The test results will allow for the development of a design aid for engineers that will tell them the bending strength of the wall under various axial forces. The partner organization, through the course of the internship, will learn the fabrication process for the walls and can then apply this process to future mass production. The resulting wall design aids can be presented to consulting engineers and customers that wish to use this system as promotional material.

Organizational Marketing Strategy Development-Standard Rail Corporation

Standard Rail is one of the leading participants in the Rail Service industry. We place the highest importance on ensuring employee safety and delivering quality customer service and pride ourselves on high-quality railcar and locomotive services across North America. This project would give the company the financial resources to branch out its service portfolio and market its service portfolio appropriately to build a niche reputation for itself in the market and help provide the necessary resources to support its marketing efforts.

Data Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer

1) Recommender System : With most modern services and products now being offered predominately online, it can be hard to get to know your customers. Unlike running a local store where you get to see each person, online businesses can struggle to understand their users’ expectations.
The project’s goal is to improve the customer experience by offering what they are looking for, thereby improving the conversion rates for retailers. To achieve these goals, the company plans to develop a Recommender system that predicts whether a particular user would prefer an item or not based on the user’s profile. Here the Recommender System draws on advances in machine learning to deliver personalized recommendations that suit each customer’s tastes and preferences across all your touchpoints.
2) Canada, a resource-rich country, garners a significant portion of the GDP from mining. With that said, most mines are still using legacy technology and facing the growing need to drive operations deeper underground.
Moreover, the industry faces volatile commodity prices and a decline in productivity despite continuous improvements in mining.
While artificial intelligence is still an emerging technology, it enables mining companies to become insight-driven enterprises that utilize data to pinpoint ores and lower costs. The project goal is to use machine learning to deliver value by instantly collecting data and deriving on-site insights that have the potential to vastly improve safety and streamline the workflow and develop an AI model that leverages the data captured from various sources and predicts the locations for ore mining.

Smart Textiles for Monitoring Aerobic Function using Artificial Intelligence

Physical activity is a crucial part of cardiovascular disease and prevention. Some of the most important clinical measurements relate to how effectively the body is able to consume and use oxygen to fuel muscles. However, these clinical measurements require complex technologies that make it only feasible in a laboratory environment. New technologies will be needed in the next 5-10 years for supporting remote monitoring. In this project, we propose to develop new fabric technologies with embedded sensors (“smart textiles”) that, paired with artificial intelligence, can monitor oxygen uptake continuously during exercise. These smart textiles will be evaluated in a clinical rehabilitation clinic to determine the feasibility of monitoring patients during prescribed exercise. Outcomes will produce new commercializable textile technologies for cardiovascular disease monitoring.

Information Extraction from Data Visualizations

Regulatory agencies publish several documents that outline the approval process of drugs. These contain valuable information on a drug’s safety, efficacy, etc. along with the feedback of reviewers from the agencies. Current technologies apply machine learning techniques to extract and categorize the unstructured text found in these documents. However, it does not accurately capture information from data visualizations such as tables, graphs, charts, etc. The data present in these elements are important for drug development teams to decide what clinical trial designs to use, which safety and efficacy data to gather for approval, etc. If solved, this can lead to quicker and more accurate decision-making by regulatory professionals, and in turn, result in faster drug approval and lowered drug development cost.

Development of a tele-health rehabilitation system to provide automatic assessment of patients’ performance, improve patients’ adherence and enable remote rehabilitation-(market and competitor analysis, regulatory & software design)

Poor physical recovery, especially in remote rehabilitation, is the problem that will be addressed in this project.
This project is Phase I of development of Fun-exercise module. Fun-exercise system uses gamification to boost patients’ adherence to their prescribed home-exercises. To achieve this goal, Fun-exercise will use mentally stimulating and customizable games paired with a set of wearable sensors to provide feedback to ensure activities are being done correctly. In phase I, patient study and conceptual design of the Fun-exercise module will be undertaken. Patient study determines and characterizes the target exercise and patient groups. This project will help the partner organizations to drive innovation and technology development in Canada. The work conducted by intern will inform the broader community about industry trends, the impact of different present and emerging technologies on various industries, as well as foster the growth of innovative technologies within the Canadian economy.