Innovative Projects Realized

The International Dimension of Canada’s Museums

Our proposed research seeks to examine the contemporary role of museums, their agency, and international agendas within a cultural diplomacy framework that recognizes the role of non-state actors in international relations. The purpose of this project is to asses how international cultural work is understood by, and at, cultural institutions in Canada. By documenting and analysing the international activities of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art/Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (MMFA/MBAM) and nine other selected museums and art galleries across Canada, through interviews and archival research, this project seeks to investigate the official, institutional record of international cultural work, as well as the perceptions and understandings of this work throughout the institution. TO BE CONT’D

Moving targets: Marine Protected Areas and Migratory Species in a Changing World

To help protect the oceans and ensure that we can carry out activities such as fishing sustainably in the long term, countries around the world are creating marine protected area (MPA) networks that incorporate the movement of species (connectivity) in their design.

Whilst most MPAs are typically designed around species that stay in fairly small areas, my project focuses on the challenge of creating MPA networks for highly mobile species. Such species move between many different locations throughout their lives, but do not necessarily visit the same locations year in year out. Furthermore, changing conditions in the ocean related to climate change may fundamentally alter where they go. This makes drawing boundaries for MPAs difficult. I will devise MPA network design principles that can mobile species under our changing climate. This may include both static measures (continual protection of a fixed location) and dynamic protection measures (protection that may shift in space and time).

Assessing the Potential for Bike Parking at Park-and-Ride Lots

This project examines the business case for implementing secure bike parking at park-andride lots in Metro Vancouver, and identifies a set of generalizable criteria for assessing the viability of secure bike parking at park-and-ride lots and other transit interchanges. There is growing evidence that combining cycling and transit can increase access to and use of both modes. Metro Vancouver’s transit agency, TransLink, like many transit agencies in North America already has a number of park-and-ride spaces. Many of these are in low-density suburban areas that are difficult to reach by walking, but cycling may be an option. This project benefits TransLink by providing a practical assessment of the business case for installing bike parking at its park-and-ride lots, providing site assessments for bike parking at Metro Vancouver park-and-ride lots and delivering a set of criteria for helping to plan bike parking at park-and-ride lots in the future.

Développement de mycofiltres à partir de déchets textiles pour la décontamination des eaux de surface polluées par les hydrocarbures pétroliers

Au Canada et au Québec, la contamination de l’eau par les hydrocarbures pétroliers représente un problème environnemental actuel et sérieux. Un autre problème est l’accumulation des matières résiduelles des textiles rendus à la fin de leur vie utile, un des éléments importants des déchets urbains au Québec. Cette étude évalue la faisabilité de l’utilisation de déchets de textiles pour la production de mycofiltres afin de décontaminer les hydrocarbures polluants des eaux de surface. Le produit résultant pourrait constituer une solution combinée pour les deux problèmes environnementaux mentionnés.
L’entreprise à but non lucratif Certex gère les déchets textiles. Les méthodes conventionnelles incluent le transport vers des sites d’enfouissement, le recyclage ou l’incinération. Cependant, d’un point de vue environnemental et probablement économique, la biodégradation est la solution la plus acceptable.
Les espèces fongiques peuvent décontaminer l’eau par la percolation de celle-ci à travers un réseau de mycélium fongique. TO BE CONT’D

Development of an Auxetics Smart Textile for Applications in Healthcare Products

Smart wearable biomedical technology has a wide range of application in health monitoring during life activities or in traumatic situations. This technology can provide a practical and convenient solution for continuous health monitoring of elderlies, and patients suffering from different types of dementia like Alzheimer’s Disease. Additionally, the technology can facilitate trauma medicine by providing compact, portable, and easy to use devices to monitor patients in traumatic situations and can help emergency management by real-time data transfer. Comfort is an important factor for smart wearable biomedical devices. Auxetic materials, a novel type of material with counterintuitive deformation behavior, has attracted great attention in the field of medical devices. These materials exhibit improved mechanical characteristics and are in high demand for various applications in the field of medical textiles which can benefit most people. However, very few types of auxetic materials have been implemented for practical applications. TO BE CONT’D

Few-Shot Image Recognition with Device-Cloud Collaboration

Deep learning has shown great success in a variety of tasks with large amounts of labeled data in image classification. These achievements have relied on the fact that optimization of these deep, high-capacity models requires many iterative updates across many labeled examples. This type of optimization breaks down in the small data regime where we want to learn from very few labeled examples. In this project, we are interested in the few-shot learning problem. In particularly, we focus on two challenging scenarios which are 1) to deploy on both the device side (e.g., mobile phones) and the cloud side collaboratively, and 2) to deploy on end devices only. The intern will work closely with Huawei Canada to develop advanced algorithms and delivery prototypes.

Assessment of processes controlling naturally elevated uranium and arsenic concentrations in groundwater and surface water in the Dawson Range, Yukon, Canada

Northern Canada faces great changes from growing resource extraction and global warming, which make a timely understanding of baseline environmental conditions critical. In the Dawson Range, Yukon, naturally elevated concentrations of uranium and arsenic have recently been discovered in groundwater at levels that are susceptible to cause toxic effects in humans and wildlife. This region is also the focus of advanced mineral exploration and falls within traditional territories of several First Nations. Mining activities may enhance uranium and arsenic mobilization through the generation of waste rock and tailings. Melting of permafrost might cause a similar effect by increasing discharge of uranium- and arsenic-rich groundwater. This project’s goal is to understand and communicate the baseline controls on uranium and arsenic mobilization in the Dawson Range. The method proposed includes chemical analyses of water and rock samples collected at field sites and features engagement with local First Nation partners.

Development of Bacterial Semiochemicals for Insect Pest Management

This MITACs proposal seeks funding to establish an internship cluster dedicated to development and testing of novel semiochemical solutions with potential for worldwide distribution and sales. The objective of this three-year project is to enable successful development, testing and commercialization of effective and environmentally-responsible pheromone-based detection and mitigation products that will complement Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies for controlling insect pests in agriculture and forestry within Atlantic Canada and beyond. Specifically, interns will investigate the potential for management and detection of pest species using bacterial volatiles, mating disruptant formulations and multimodal trap prototypes.

Monitoring the genetic variation and population structure of White bear populations in British Columbia to inform ecotourism and resource management

Spirit bears are a valuable symbol of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. These white bears are an economically and culturally important resource that require effective monitoring to ensure their perpetuation. Safeguarding the future continuation of white bears additionally requires understanding both how the white bear allele is perpetuated and how healthy these populations are. One important component of population health is genetic variation. Genetically variable populations are able to adapt to changing threats better than genetically depauperate groups. Using genetic markers, this study will investigate the health of white bear populations on islands in the Great Bear Rainforest. This information will be provided to our First Nation and Ecoutorism partners, and to Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

Impact of Climate Change on Wetlands in Prairie Canada

Prairie wetlands are intricately linked with climate and hydrology. Future climate change, such as warmer conditions, changes in precipitation amount and intermittency, may both benefit and threaten the wetlands over the Canadian Prairies. During the same time, large-scale land use changes have been occurring such as the conversion of natural wetlands to agriculture lands. Understanding the long temporal scales over which land use and climate changes occur, and their impact on wetlands distribution, require sophisticated climate modeling tools that contain a realistic representation of not only climate and weather, land-atmosphere interaction, hydrology, but also wetlands. This is a great challenge to our ability to understand the environmental impacts on/of changing wetlands. TO BE CONT’D

Effects of the porous medium and pressure drawdown on the foamy-oil flow and heavy oil recovery in the CHOPS reservoirs

Western Canada has vast heavy oil deposits in many thin heavy oil reservoirs with less than 10-m main pay zones. The cold heavy oil production with sand (CHOPS) is the primary production process in the heavy oil reservoirs. However, a typical CHOPS process can recover only 5?15% of the initial oil-in-place. As a secondary heavy oil recovery method, waterflooding has had a limited success in the past. The major objectives of the proposed research project are to study the specific effects of the porous medium and pressure drawdown on the foamy-oil flow and heavy oil recovery and more importantly to identify the best primary production and cyclic solvent injection (CSI) processes in many thin CHOPS reservoirs.TO BE CONT’D

Étude de l’erreur humaine dans le processus d’assemblage de moteurs d’avions

Tout au long de l’histoire de l’humanité le progrès scientifique et technique a été un moteur de notre évolution comme espèce. Ce progrès pousse l’humain constamment à reconsidérer ses propres limites tant du point de vue physique que cognitif. Bien que les conséquences des actions erronées des humains soient connues depuis l’antiquité, industrie 4.0 mène à un changement de paradigme de production. Il s’ouvre à nous, entre autres, de nouvelles possibilités pour réduire l’occurrence des dites erreurs via diverses technologies numériques. Notre recherche vise à étudier la problématique de l’erreur humaine dans l’assemblage de moteurs d’avions pour mieux en comprendre les facteurs contributifs et y apporter des solutions novatrices.