Innovative Projects Realized

Optimisation d’une phéromone sexuelle pour piéger la punaise terne dans des cultures de fraises

La punaise terne (Lygus lineolaris) est un insecte causant de lourds dommages aux récoltes de fraises, entre autres. Pour limiter les dommages, il faut détecter les infestations d’insectes rapidement. Ainsi, l’agriculteur appliquera un traitement efficace, si nécessaire. L’utilisation d’une phéromone sexuelle (substance émise par les femelles afin d’attirer les mâles pour l’accouplement) permet de piéger certains insectes sélectivement. À l’été 2020, le stagiaire MITACS optimisera la préparation au laboratoire, de la phéromone sexuelle de l’insecte. Cet appât sera utilisé dans des pièges placés en milieu de culture fraisière et l’efficacité des captures sera comparée à des pièges témoins, sans phéromones. Dans ce projet collaboratif, le Prof. Chapdelaine trouve une application aux petites molécules organiques, le CRAM développe de nouveaux dispositifs de détection des infestations et enfin, l’étudiant développe des expertises variées : chimie organique et analytique, comportement animal et agronomie.

Real-time acoustic detection on mobile devices to support the deaf and hard of hearing with situational awareness

Hearing loss individuals face apparent as well as subtle, systematic, and safety challenges every day in a world predicated on hearing. Traditional hearing assistive solutions are not readily available in some environments. Hence, Lisnen is exploring opportunities to leverage available tools, such as mobile devices, to act as a hearing assistive device to provide situational awareness. These devices will identify relevant and vital sounds, both indoors and outdoors spaces using deep learning models. However, running deep learning models, while continuously streaming audio input at the same time, increases energy consumption. For this project, we want to explore ways to improve the performance and design networks that reduce mobile GPU power consumption.

Equity Research Intern

COVID-19 has significantly impacted our business and we have taken the following steps to mitigate this impact:
applied to and received funding from the government’s CEWC (Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy) program; decreased
full-time, permanent headcount; eliminated non-essential expenses, and; prioritized planned new hires, rescinded offers,
and delayed start dates.

Interns are important to the future success of our company as they will contribute to the workflow and output necessary to
fulfill an influx of client requests, ultimately reducing customer churn during uncertain financial and economic times.

Scope: Work directly with Analysts across sectors and gain in-depth knowledge of the financial markets in the US and Canada

Key responsibilities & activities:
· Gain broad sector knowledge through our smallcap generalist team
· Create detailed financial models on both existing and new coverage and update current financial models for new results
· Conduct historical financial statement analysis and future period forecasting
· Work to improve current models and create summary output sheets for company comparison purposes
· Coordinate, generate and maintain research reports, presentations and database
· Preparing documentation for analysts and portfolio managers to explain how we handle adjustments, non-GAAP results, restatements, and other accounting principles
· Identifying inconsistencies in accounting across the database and implementing processes to correct them

Key activities to restore/modify business ops: Interns will be part of our strategic plan to increase the amount and degree of support, we’re providing existing clients, and offering to potential clients in order to increase the growth of ARR (after a significant decline in that growth as a result of COVID).

Doggy Bathroom Internship

The project will combine aspects of strategy, business development, and marketing. Research will include conducting market research and analysing past financial statements in order to help elaborate on a five year growth strategy plan that the company will be using. Additionally, marketing strategies will be researched and implemented during the project. Results will then be measured in order to determine success. These marketing ideas will help the company grow and maintain customer loyalty.

Assistive Applications for Smartphones

The proposal is for two projects designed in conjunction with Nokia and CanAssist in the
research theme of assistive applications for smartphones. The first project focuses on support
for the growing senior population/ designed to help seniors retain independence for as long as
safely feasible. The second focuses on support for individuals with visual disabilities/ designed
to use smartphones to convert the visual information into voice information for way finding
and navigation.

Business Strategist

ScalableHR needs assistance with the commencement of its new and confidential subsidiary that is scheduled for launch by September 2020. It requires recommendations on its marketing, pricing, resourcing and strategic business plan as it will be an industry-changing business that will cause disruption to how competitors operate.

Can deep learning algorithms be trained to automate the classification of information held in historical and repeat photographs?

Repeat photography is a valuable tool for evaluating long-term ecological change. Historical photographs used for repeat photography often predate conventional remote sensing data by decades, and the oblique perspective of the photographs capture details of the landscape absent in nadir imagery. To date, most approaches to quantifying landscape change using repeat photography have involved manual classification techniques (i.e. demarcating land cover categories by hand), which are time-consuming, expensive and difficult to reproduce consistently. The objective of this proposed research project is to develop a new approach that automates the classification process using deep learning models. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning in artificial intelligence, and has previously been used to dramatically improve the performance of tasks such as speech recognition, visual object recognition, and object detection. This project will configure and train a deep learning model to classify photographs, and assess the accuracy of these results using existing land cover data.

Advanced Recommender Systems for Ecommerce

Numerous studies have recently proposed and highlighted novel techniques for recommendation, motivating the project of building the next generation of recommender systems for ecommerce platforms. This proposal aims at experimenting with one high-potential technique for modelling the recommendation problem, that makes great usage of the complexity of ecommerce data: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). GNNs are increasingly used in recommender systems. However, much work remains to develop versatile and robust GNNs for ecommerce data, since the data is large-scale (often millions of users and thousands of items) and heterogeneous (mixed types of data, including images, textual description and categories of items, as well as sociodemographic and behavorial data of users).
The partner will benefit from transfer knowledge in this nascent domain and a strong scientific approach on GNNs for recommendation tasks.

Impact des modifications de la politique d’aide sociale sur la santé des nouveau-nés au Québec

En 2013, le gouvernement du Québec abolissait le supplément d’aide sociale pour contraintes temporaires à l’emploi chez les familles biparentales d’enfants de moins de 5 ans. Ces familles déjà assez vulnérables (avec un revenu se situant nettement sous le seuil de pauvreté) perdaient ainsi 12% de leur budget habituel. Cette recherche vise à évaluer l’impact de cette mesure sur la santé des nouveau-nés issus des ménages ayant subi les coupures. L’hypothèse de travail est la suivante : la santé des bébés (faible poids à la naissance, prématurité et retard de croissance) qui naissent dans des familles biparentales visées par les coupures à l’aide sociale est relativement moins bonne après les coupures qu’à la période pré-coupure, comparativement aux enfants issus de ménages non concernés par les coupures, notamment les familles monoparentales et les familles biparentales d’enfants plus âgés. Cette hypothèse sera testée sur base d’analyses statistiques portant sur deux bases de données administratives couplées: le fichier des naissances et celui des prestataires de l’aide sociale de dernier recours au Québec.

Guidance and Control of a Tandem-rotor Helicopter Landing on a Moving Platform

The development of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a growing area of interest. An important step in the creation of a fully autonomous flying vehicle is the ability to precisely and smoothly land on a target. The goal of this research is to develop a UAV landing system that is able to track and land on a moving platform. The project will involve developing a guidance and control system that can plan a descent trajectory and track it down to the platform. The proposed system will be robust to strong wind gusts and still provide a smooth touchdown to avoid damage. The advantage to NGC is that this autonomous system would expand the capability of their UAV platform. This system can be applied not only to the current project. but to a variety of different aerospace vehicles and applications.

Of Wine And Roses. La France et le Québec anglophone, 1919-1989

« Vive le Canada français ! Et vive la France ! »

Avec cette déclaration tonitruante du général de Gaulle, lancée depuis le balcon de l’Hôtel de Ville de Montréal en 1967, s’amorçait la plus longue période de froideur entre Ottawa et Paris. Elle ouvrait cependant la voie à toute une tradition historiographique y voyant « l’abandon de l’abandon ». Autrement dit, avec De Gaulle, la France aurait retissé une relation spéciale avec un territoire historiquement français : sa principale émanation serait une diplomatie culturelle vigoureuse, portée par la francophonie.
Un tel discours est problématique : d’une part, il écrase non seulement la complexité des liens franco-canadiens et franco-québécois noués tout au long du XXe siècle. D’autre part, il ne tient pas compte de la diversité des carreaux constitutifs de la mosaïque canadienne tout autant que de la mosaïque québécoise. En effet, une partie significative des élites provinciales, qu’il s’agisse d’élites économiques, financières, culturelles, voire diplomatiques, sont anglophones – et ce depuis le traité de Paris (1763). Elles font donc office d’interlocuteurs privilégiés lorsque le Quai d’Orsay est amené à déployer une politique étrangère vis-à-vis du Québec comme vis-à-vis de la Confédération, y compris jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

Advanced interconnects manufacturing toolbox for the Integrated Innovation Chain for Digital Prosperity

The ever-increasing complexity of integrated circuits and systems, induced by ubiquitous portable electronics, internet-power applications and artificial intelligence (AI), necessitate to increase the number interconnections between the chips in a package level like never before. These advanced packaging approaches in turn require novel patterning technology to define the connecting lines between the microelectronics chips. Thus, we propose to develop processes for an advanced interconnect technological toolbox enabling the fabrication of reliable high-performance metallic interconnections at the device/circuit level and at the system/packaging level for microelectronic chips, molded wafer chips and organic substrates for the next generations of computing systems.
This proposal will leverage the “Chaine d’Innovation Intégrée: Prospérinté par le Numérique” newly acquired state-of-the-art tools located at C2MI and 3IT: a molding system for wafer reconstruction, metal plasma etching tools, a nanolithography e-beam writer and a maskless aligner for direct laser writing. This tool box will be used to target applications such as superconducting devices for quantum computing and neuromorphic chips for efficient AI-based edge computing.