Projets novateurs réalisés

Optimisation de l’ordonnanceur dynamique de la plateforme Notixia

Dans la plupart des environnements industriels, les approches classiques d’ordonnancement sont rarement capables de prendre en considération l’information en temps réel, qui est de plus en plus présent dans différents systèmes de gestion d’entreprise. L’évolution d’une approche statique vers une approche dynamique permet d’améliorer la performance de l’ordonnancement. L’utilisation d’approches métaheuristiques pour résoudre le problème d’ordonnancement dynamique sera privilégiée dans ce projet. À travers ce projet, l’objectif est d’analyser en profondeur les fonctionnalités et les limites de l’ordonnanceur de la plateforme Notixia, et proposer des solutions de nature algorithmique, architecturale et/ou au niveau de l’implémentation, pour améliorer la performance de l’ordonnanceur. Le passage vers un ordonnancement dynamique pour la solution PLM/ERP Notixia permettra non
seulement de maintenir la confiance des clients existants et répondre à leurs besoins spécifiques, mais aussi de réponde à des nouveaux clients dont les aléas sont fréquents.

Gaining Insight from Crash Reports and Bug Reports

This project seeks to address the flood of bugreports and crashreports that software companies must address when they build consumerfacing software. Organizations can easily face 50,000 crash reports per day. Developers cannot manually sift through them all. The goal of this work is to exploit modern search engine technology and crash report representation to enable the fast and efficient querying, clustering, and reporting of crash reports so that developers do not have to group crash report manually. This enables an organization, such as our partner organization, to be aware of new issues arising as well as to efficiently address

issues that endusers are facing during deployment. The same is true of bug reports. Multiproduct bug reports are numerous and hard to address manually. Partner organizations benefit from increased software quality assurance efficiency, Canadian industry benefits from the release of powerful opensource tools, and interns benefit from industrially relevant training.

Optimization of Makeup Water in a Recirculating Aquaculture System

Fish grown in RAS require special water quality conditions to remain healthy and grow. New water is meant to be added to the system only to account for evaporation, splash out, cleaning and flush out of waste materials. However, the amount of makeup water used at the Oak Bay hatchery is excessive when biomass is at its peak; therefore, the main focus of this project is to discover the reasons for excessive water consumption and to determine whether the system can operate at a rate of 350 liters makeup water per kg of feed with the existing equipment. Otherwise, the point at which the target can no longer be met will be identified and based on the bottleneck of the process a modification will be proposed. The project will benefit Cooke Aquaculture Inc. by improving makeup water management and hence lowering water demand and reducing energy requirements.

Solutions intelligentes pour l’efficience et la fluidité urbaine

L’Université Laval, l’Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Thales Recherche et Technologie Canada, le Parc Technologique du Québec Métropolitain et la Ville de Québec ont créé une unité mixte de recherche en sciences urbaines (UMR-SU) visant à améliorer la qualité de vie de la population en milieu urbain. L’UMR-SU propose une vision intégrée de la gestion des différents services urbains comme les transports, l’environnement, la santé, l’éducation et la sécurité. Ce réseau de collaboration s’appuiera sur une infrastructure partagée à la fine pointe afin de fournir des solutions technologiques novatrices optimisant 1) la gouvernance et l’acceptabilité citoyenne, 2) l’efficience et la logistique, 3) le transport et la mobilité, 4) la gestion des eaux et l’environnement, et 5) la sécurité urbaine. Les investissements publiques et privés résulteront en la création d’emploi, et en un effort inégalé de recherche et développement qui générera, entre autres, une meilleure synergie des services urbains et une épargne sur les coûts énergétiques et la gestion sanitaire.

In Vitro Blood Vessel Formation/Immunohistochemistry Protocol Improvement and Development

This internship will involve licensing three smooth muscle cell lines. I will be working with the cell lines and growth factors to promote blood cell formation in vitro (not within a living organism). The company will then have the cell lines licensed, and we will then work to assemble a kit for commercial use. IThe partner company will benefit from the development of an in vitro commercial kit. Furthermore, the internship will aim to develop a particular technique of functional quality control testing, called immunohistochemistry, to Cedarlane Laboratories. The partner organization will benefit from this connection in that they will be able to expand on a particular method of testing, which will allow for the sale and distribution of new products, thereby expanding their market to laboratories that utilize this method.

Improving Models for User-Specific State Assessment: A Real-time Querying and Learning Technique

Advances in wearable physiological sensors can now potentially provide critical information about human functional states in real-time, in order to support performance, learning, and safety in various work, training and leisure-related contexts. It has been observed that models trained for human state prediction in laboratory suffer from drastic performance loss when deployed on subjects unseen by the model. In this project, we propose to use systems made of multiple models, and calibrate decisions made with these pre-trained models on new users. For instance, integration of the models will be dynamically reweighted for a new human subject using the system according to similarity and uncertainty measures. One element of novelty lies in adding the possibility to query users to improve the combination of models. It is expected that this methodology will improve performance over current models for new human subjects. This will make Thales’s human functional state prediction platform more robust and able to adapt
dynamically to new users.

Evaluation of the Elder Abuse Prevention and Response Services Program (EAPRS) of Renfrew County

Elder abuse (physical, emotional, sexual, financial abuse, deprivation, neglect) is a pressing social concern. Approximately 10% of seniors in Canada are victims of some form of abuse each year (Department of Justice, 2004). Elder abuse impacts all social, cultural and economic groups. Prevention programs have been put in place to address the underlying causes of abuse, stop it and reduce the prevalence and incidences of abuse. However, the body of research on the effectiveness of elder abuse prevention and the consequences of abuse is sparse. Needed is research that identifies best practices and lessons learned in preventing elder abuse in Canada, and the proposed study will address this question through a particular focus on Renfrew County.

Transcoder-aided multipoint real-time video conferencing over heterogeneous networks

Often, a mobile terminal has barely enough resources (bitrate and processing power) to support a good quality real-time videoconferencing session with another user. There is a growing need and interest for multi-party videoconferencing but it requires increased resources that these terminals don’t possess. In this project, we investigate the use of a smart transcoder to enable real-time video conferencing between multiple heterogeneous terminals with limited resources. Inserting a transcoder between the end-points is expected to resolve the terminals’ bitrate and processing limitations but at the expense of increased delay making real-time an even bigger challenge. To solve this issue, we will enhance technologies to monitor bitrate and adjust dynamically the various video-encoding parameters to meet the delay constraints while optimizing the quality at each destination terminal. The results of this research will lead to a robust multi-party real-time videoconferencing system between resource-limited terminals; something still lacking today. This will enrich Vantrix’s video product offering and permit a postdoc to extend his PhD research on bitrate estimation and rate control and apply it to a cutting-edge application.

Improved Automated Tracking of Workouts for Fitness Facilities

Fitness tracking is the process of tracking the fitness-related activity and metrics of a person such as heart rate, distance walked, and consumption of calories. Emerging and specialized wireless sensors and devices also enable the tracking of movements performed during workouts in gyms. This project will help improve the motion tracking experience by reporting workout activities to gym customers, in real-time and in usable ways (via new auditory feedback and enhanced user interfaces) on their Android smart phones. Additional features include better handling of background processing on the latest Android operating system as well as event logging enabling continuous improvement of the system. Gymtrack Inc. will benefit from this project as its resulting app for Android will improve the overall user experience and its improvements to the basic infrastructure will simplify the introduction of future features, across platforms.

Development of a novel processing method for stabilization, extraction and bio-refining of value-added functional ingredients from marine by-products for use in feed and food products.

This research will look to extract value from marine food processing by-products through development of green chemistry technologies, to generate valuable bio-products that may be used in a health prevention role in animals and humans. This will benefit existing food processors by addressing underutilized resources, add value in the partner industry and provide tools for Canadians in the future to access affordable functional food ingredients.

Strengthen Your Health: Interdisciplinary Intervention Program for Promoting an Active and Healthy Lifestyle Among Students

There are a number of factors that can impact ones level of physical activity. Interpersonal, intrapersonal, and environmental factors are all important when looking at how active or sedentary an individual can be. For schoolchildren, it is important to promote active behaviors that will lead to a healthy lifestyle. By creating a tool to identify factors that influence sedentary behaviors, it can help to promote interventions to encourage students to be more active and more fit. One of the factors of interest is the relationship between being overweight and screen time, and the factors that mediate this relationship. The analysis of this relationship will provide insight into how these factors are related, and hopefully how sedentary behaviors (including screen time) can be reduced.

Invariant Chain- Influenza A Fusion Adenovirus Vaccine Using M1 Gene

During primary immune responses, dendritic cells (DC) are the principal antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that initiate adaptive immune responses. DCs present pathogenic antigens (such as virus, bacterium and tumour) to induce CD4 and CD8 T cell responses via MHC-I and MHC-II pathways respectively. Recently, our lab has discovered that CD74 molecules not only promote MHC-II but also MHC I-antigen presentation. The MHC I-presentation is essential for CD8+ T cell mediated responses against viruses, tumours, self-antigens and allografts. This study is based on the discovery that CD74 mediates trafficking of MHC-I from the endoplasmic reticulum of DCs to endolysosomal compartments for loading with peptides and therefore CD74 has a critical function in DC presentation for priming MHC-I mediated CTL responses. This study chooses conserved influenza matrix 1 protein (M1) as antigen further CD74-antigen fusion constructs will be produced to further promote immune responses against influenza virus. This proposal will provide a potential influenza vaccine for BioMmune Technologies Inc.