Innovative Projects Realized

Evaluation of a home transfer pole during assisted sit-to-stand in older adults with mobility limitations

Mobility in the home is a difficult task for older adults with mobility limitations and is associated with a risk of injury from falling. However, it is a requisite for maintaining independence. A number of assistive technologies have been developed to help a number of different activities of daily living, one in specific is the transfer pole – a vertically oriented pole that pressure fits between ceiling and floor and helps the user stand-up. Three common configurations include a single vertical pole, a single pole with a horizontal grab-bar, and two vertical poles. The purpose of this study is to 1) determine the best configuration based on biomechanical and balance testing on older adults with mobility limitations and 2) optimize the design of the transfer pole to support forces safely and conform to the home environment. The anticipated benefit for Toronto Rehab is the capacity to recommend the safest transfer…….

Development of Artificial Intelligence Powered Technologies in Computational Pathology to Enable Automated Slide Screening in Whole Slide Imaging – Year two

Advances in Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) and Machine Learning (ML) open new opportunities to create innovative solutions in healthcare and in particular digital pathology to increase efficiencies, reduce cost and most importantly improve patient care. This project envisions the creation of new automated ML tools including the design of a custom Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architecture for whole slide imaging in digital pathology. The custom CNN will be trained to learn different representations of histology tissues so that it can separate healthy from diseased tissues. A substantial database of labeled healthy tissue will be used to assess the performance of the proposed solution. A limited validation of the engineering prototype developed through this project will take place at St. Michael’s hospital in Toronto. The technologies developed through this project have the potential to be integrated in an automated screening process in pathology to improve pathologist time efficiencies and reduce errors in diagnosis of disease. The outcome of this research will be of great benefit to the industrial partner since it serves as a pilot project for developing an advanced, data-driven, digital pathology solution that complements its current line of pathology scanners.

Development of Artificial Intelligence Powered Technologies in Computational Pathology to Enable Automated Slide Screening in Whole Slide Imaging

Advances in Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) and Machine Learning (ML) open new opportunities to create innovative solutions in healthcare and in particular digital pathology to increase efficiencies, reduce cost and most importantly improve patient care. This project envisions the creation of new automated ML tools including the design of a custom Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architecture for whole slide imaging in digital pathology. The custom CNN will be trained to learn different representations of histology tissues so that it can separate healthy from diseased tissues. A substantial database of labeled healthy tissue will be used to assess the performance of the proposed solution. A limited validation of the engineering prototype developed through this project will take place at St. Michael’s hospital in Toronto. The technologies developed through this project have the potential to be integrated in an automated screening process in pathology to improve pathologist time efficiencies and reduce errors in diagnosis of disease. The outcome of this research will be of great benefit to the industrial partner since it serves as a pilot project for developing an advanced, data-driven, digital pathology solution that complements its current line of pathology scanners.

Long-Term Prevention of Catheter Infections Using Chemical Coatings – Year two

Urinary tract infections caused by indwelling catheters (CAUTIs) employed for the treatment of urinary flow are very common. Almost 100 million of these devices are sold on an annual basis with around 25% of these being marketed in the USA. In addition to the cost of catheters and their insertion, hospital treatment of CAUITs runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The infections are caused by adherence of bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus aureus with attendant formation of a biofilm to the surface of polymeric materials used for fabrication of the device. Left untreated, these infections can lead to death. Over several years many attempts have been made to produce anti-microbial surfaces to prevent bacterial adhesion with very limited success. The present MITACS application for funding is designed to build on dramatic preliminary results achieved with regard to the complete prevention of bacterial adhesion via use of ultra-thin surface modification of polymers conventionally used for catheter fabrication. This sub-nanometer modification reduces adherence and biofilm formation by over 90%, and is highly stable to conventional sterilization protocols.

Spaces, People, Things: Entanglements within Congregate Living

This project explores how one congregate living environment in Edmonton Alberta supports their residents through the use of the material environment including designed spaces and objects created by architectural and interior designers. The web of person-environment relationships and interactions that is complicated, dynamic, messy, and riddled with shifting agency is unpacked revealing how humans depend on things, things depend on things, and things depend on humans. This project takes on theory and practice by conducting research that is directly applied to the renovation, operation and programming of the congregate living complex studied. In sum, this project is informed by and contributes to scholarly research on material culture, architectural and interior design; directly impacts the re-visioning, re-design and re-programming of one congregate living environment; and develops essential in-depth case study research to inform design practitioners in the future.

Long-Term Prevention of Catheter Infections Using Chemical Coatings

Urinary tract infections caused by indwelling catheters (CAUTIs) employed for the treatment of urinary flow are very common. Almost 100 million of these devices are sold on an annual basis with around 25% of these being marketed in the USA. In addition to the cost of catheters and their insertion, hospital treatment of CAUITs runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The infections are caused by adherence of bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus aureus with attendant formation of a biofilm to the surface of polymeric materials used for fabrication of the device. Left untreated, these infections can lead to death. Over several years many attempts have been made to produce anti-microbial surfaces to prevent bacterial adhesion with very limited success. The present MITACS application for funding is designed to build on dramatic preliminary results achieved with regard to the complete prevention of bacterial adhesion via use of ultra-thin surface modification of polymers conventionally used for catheter fabrication. This sub-nanometer modification reduces adherence and biofilm formation by over 90%, and is highly stable to conventional sterilization protocols.

Towards the Development of a Prognostic tool for Harmful Algal Blooms – Year two

The Laurentian Great Lakes and many Canadian inland waters have experienced a resurgence of cyanobacteria-dominated harmful algal blooms (cHABs), which negatively impact recreational uses, aesthetics, taste and odor in drinking water. The presence of toxins can also have dire repercussions on aquatic wildlife and human health. The factors that influence the occurrence and magnitude of algal blooms and toxin production (e.g., nutrient enrichment, climate change) vary in space and time and are poorly understood. Thus, our ability to predict cHABs is currently limited and represents a major challenge for the management of our water resources. Founded upon cutting-edge machine-learning and Bayesian inference techniques, this research project aims (i) to identify the factors that regulate the occurrence of cHABs; (ii) to provide predictions of cHABs under different land-use and climate change scenarios; and (iii) to obtain a probabilistic mapping of areas around the Great Lakes that are characterized by an excessively high risk of cHAB formation. To showcase this modelling framework, the intern will use data collected from the Bay of Quinte (Lake Ontario, Ontario, Canada), a system that has been experiencing water quality issues, and where the elimination of cHABs represents one of the major challenges of eutrophication management.

Towards the Development of a Prognostic tool for Harmful Algal Blooms

The Laurentian Great Lakes and many Canadian inland waters have experienced a resurgence of cyanobacteria-dominated harmful algal blooms (cHABs), which negatively impact recreational uses, aesthetics, taste and odor in drinking water. The presence of toxins can also have dire repercussions on aquatic wildlife and human health. The factors that influence the occurrence and magnitude of algal blooms and toxin production (e.g., nutrient enrichment, climate change) vary in space and time and are poorly understood. Thus, our ability to predict cHABs is currently limited and represents a major challenge for the management of our water resources. Founded upon cutting-edge machine-learning and Bayesian inference techniques, this research project aims (i) to identify the factors that regulate the occurrence of cHABs; (ii) to provide predictions of cHABs under different land-use and climate change scenarios; and (iii) to obtain a probabilistic mapping of areas around the Great Lakes that are characterized by an excessively high risk of cHAB formation. To showcase this modelling framework, the intern will use data collected from the Bay of Quinte (Lake Ontario, Ontario, Canada), a system that has been experiencing water quality issues, and where the elimination of cHABs represents one of the major challenges of eutrophication management.

Politique linguistique & Valadas Occitanas : l’analyse d’un occitan périphérique

Ma recherche de maîtrise effectuée dans le Massif Central (France) avec le dialecte nord-occitan auvergnat, s’est appuyée sur un terrain en terres marginales de l’Occitanie (extrémité nord) et sous l’influence d’une politique française unilinguiste. J’aimerais ici réaliser une analyse comparative avec d’autres régions marginales d’Occitanie. En cela, les vallées occitanophones situées en Piémont (Italie) forment un terrain d’étude fascinant : elles disposent d’une politique linguistique représentée par le gouvernement italien, avec un statut semi-officiel pour l’occitan. La diglossie est de plus un phénomène sociolinguistique connu de longue date en Italie, qui s’oppose à la position française centralisatrice.
Je m’intéresse donc aux concepts de statuts en politique linguistique, à la standardisation, à la dialectologie et aux zones dites « marginales » d’un espace régional et linguistique occitaniste dont les frontières, structures et ramifications, apparaissent toujours discutables et modifiables. L’objectif sera donc de réaliser des observations dans les communautés qui pratiquent la langue (lieux publics, évènements socioculturels, pratiques éducatives, etc.) et d’animer quelques entretiens avec des “représentants” de la culture ou de la vie linguistique locale. Ces données permettront de confronter les données déjà obtenues en Massif Central, TBC

The influence of cloud-technologies and other technological advance on the print industry

Cloud-based technologies are being used more and more in industry to benefit from the large data-sets that are being created so these data-sets can be analyzed to get a better overview on the effectiveness of processes and how to optimize current processes. The print industry is starting to see the benefits of cloud-based technologies. Since the print industry is just starting to use cloud-based technologies this project will analyze what is currently offered and assist with developing further cloud-based solutions that will enable the print industry to become more efficient in the utilization of their equipment, analysis their workflow systems, and leveraging automation through the computing power of cloud-based technologies.

A low complexity face recognition for consumer devices

Due to the rapid growth of consumer grade devices and corresponding application market, the incorporation of

vision capabilities into embedded systems has gained significant attention from researchers lately. Similarly to

the human visual system, embedded computer vision systems analyze and extract information from visual

content in a wide variety of products. Face recognition has been one of the most successful applications in this

field. A cost effective implementation of reliable face recognition (FR) solutions can be useful for a wide range

of applications, such as identity authentication, entertainment, and content based retrieval system. However,

embedded system based face recognition solutions often suffer from not only common problems such as

variation in illumination (pose variation does not appear to be a problem for face recognition at a short distance),

but also relatively low quality input face images, and limited computational resources. Although many

researchers have attempted to develop robust FR algorithms, relatively few initiatives have been undertaken to

adapt FR solutions………………………………………

Fly-By-Wire INDI-Based Generic Control Laws for Flexible Civil Transport Aircraft

On the one hand, new generation of civil transport aircraft can present aeroelastic coupling between flight mechanics and structural dynamics. The lower-frequency flexible dynamics can be perceptible by a fly-by-wire (FBW) controller. This requires control law design that takes into account the flexible dynamics.
On the other hand, recent developments on feedback linearization by means of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamics Inversion (INDI) allow considering the design of generic control laws that can be applied to several aircraft with a minimum effort of adaptation and tuning.
Bombardier developed linear and nonlinear civil transport aircraft dynamics models that take into account the flexible dynamics. Bombardier also developed a prototype INDI-based CLaws with promising results demonstrated on a rigid aircraft model. This project aims to improve this prototype CLaws so that it can also manage the aircraft flexible dynamics.
Based on literature review and previous Bombardier researches, the student will conduct a conceptual design of these enhanced INDI-based CLaws functions and will validate the proposed solution by simulation using Bombardier high fidelity simulator and performance assessment tools.