Projets novateurs réalisés

Measuring What Matters in Education

The central goal of this research project is to broaden measurement of school performance across Canada by developing, collecting, and measuring data on six performance indicators as follows: academic achievement, physical health, social-emotional development, creativity, citizenship, and school climate. Having developed competencies in these areas during phase one of the project, the current phase aims to begin the process of measuring the indicators of interest and reporting on results. Survey data will be collected and integrated with existing government data sources. The intern will perform data analysis tasks, including organizing, cleaning, integrating, and synthesizing data. Following these analyses, the intern will participate in writing research reports and attending relevant-conferences to present the results of the research project. By employing the intern, People for Education will bolster its data analysis capacity and enhance the overall quality of its reports on the six indicators.

Device-free and device-oriented approaches for people’s activity identification by using Wi-Fi signals

Sensing technologies require the deployment and maintenance of complex and large infrastructures. This research proposal is focused on people’s activity recognition technologies though existing Wi-Fi infrastructures. The information gathered by this technology can be applied to different industries like home automation, security systems, etc. In the future, this technology will powered applications in the home automation industry as the one described next. Mary comes home and leaves her cellphone on the couch. As the system recognizes her, no alarm is activated. Given the time of the day and her habits, the platform understands that she wants to prepare dinner. Cooking is a defined profile for her so the kitchen starts to react based on her presence and activity profile (turning on lights, changing temperature, turning on cooking music). If Mary wants to sleep, the system gathers the necessary information again and changes the whole environment. This project is bringing a new technology to the partner organization and to the Canadian Industry.

Building on an Innovative Platform: Tuning Guanine Quadruplex Recognition for Anticancer Applications

Beyond the well-known double-stranded helical duplex, DNA can adopt many unusual architectures, including guanine quadruplexes (G4), which in recent years have been implicated in cellular processes that lead to the development of cancer. It has been shown that these processes can be switched off by maintaining the folded quadruplex architecture using chemical compounds known as G4 binders. Good G4 binders can be identified by screening a large number of candidates using high-throughput techniques such as the one pioneered by the Mergny research group at the Institut Européen de Chimie et Biologie in France, which rapidly provides a yes/no outcome. With the support of Mitacs Globalink Research Award – Campus France funding, I could not only screen a library of second-generation G4 binders synthesized in the Petitjean lab, but also conduct a range of experiments to determine (i) the selectivity of these binders for quadruplex vs. duplex DNA, (ii) the binding strength and number of binders to G4 involved in binding events, and (iii) the structural aspects involved in G4 binding. With the expected outcomes of this research, we aim to lay the groundwork for the commercialization of a novel G4 binder for clinical use in targeted anticancer therapies.

La perception du Canada dans l’opinion publique française : une étude de la Gazette de France entre 1701 et 1763

Colonie française depuis le début du XVIe siècle, la Nouvelle-France est cédée à la Grande-Bretagne à l’issu de la guerre de Sept Ans (1756-1763). Chez les Britanniques, une volonté de conquête du Canada est clairement exprimée dans l’opinion publique. Dans le cadre de ce projet, nous souhaitons voir au-delà des « quelques arpents de neige » mentionnés par Voltaire au sujet du Canada et de voir comment se construit la

perception du Canada chez les Français par l’intermédiaire de l’analyse d’un discours écrit dans la presse. Par le fait même, nous souhaitons comprendre comment évoluent les intentions exprimées par la France envers cette colonie nord-américaine dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Nous souhaitons donc démontrer, par le biais de la presse française, comment les arguments pour le maintien et les investissements au

Canada ont évolué vers un retard dans l’envoi des troupes pour la sauvegarde de ces territoires en Nouvelle-France.

Influence de l’environnement moléculaire de complexes métalliques sur leurs propriétés de luminescence

Ce projet de recherche vise à mieux comprendre comment la luminescence de certaines molécules est influencée par leur structure et environnement. La présence d’interactions intermoléculaires peut modifier considérablement les spectres de luminescence. Dans les complexes étudiés, des interactions se produisent entre le métal du complexe et un hydrogène d’un complexe voisin. En modifiant le métal et la masse du noyau de l’hydrogène, il est possible d’explorer l’effet de l’interaction intermoléculaire sur les spectres de luminescence à pression variable. L’impact de ces changements sur l’énergie d’émission est significatif. Des différences structurales pourraient expliquer le phénomène, et donc, des structures précises à différentes conditions doivent être mesurées. Ce projet vise à acquérir ces structures et leurs variations, afin d’étudier de manière plus complète le lien entre leurs interactions intermoléculaires et les variations de leur luminescence. Les conclusions tirées à la suite de ces mesures permettront une meilleure compréhension des facteurs à considérer pour la conception de matériaux luminescents, tels que des senseurs et des diodes électroluminescentes (LED).

Automated Equities Trading System

The company will further test and develop their algorithm that will assist a money manager in managing their stock market portfolio. The algorithm chooses the stocks to buy or sell based upon its analysis of the market and a number of other market and stock related data points. The performance of this algorithm will need to be adjusted to meet common return thresholds used by the industry and will also need to be further advance to ensure compatibility with hedge fund managers.

Molecular mechanism of action of anti-fibrotic antibodies

Significant advances in technologies related to antibody discovery and development have allowed therapeutic antibodies to become the fastest growing class of biopharmaceuticals over the last 20 years. Northern Biologics is a biotechnology company that seeks to develop therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer and fibrosis. Together with Dr. Jean-Philippe Julien at SickKids (University of Toronto), the intern will work with Northern Biologics to develop and characterize antibodies against cellular receptors that show aberrant signaling in several diseases including cancer, atherosclerosis, lung fibrosis and kidney injury. Integrative structural biology and biophysical technologies will be used to inform lead selection with the goal of progressing therapeutic candidates for clinical trials.

Chemical Synthesis of Graphene-Based Nanomaterials from Value-Added Carbon Obtained by Catalytic Conversion of CO2

CO2 is a greenhouse gas that impacts climate change. The Carbon Upcycling Technologies has developed a technique to attach gaseous CO2 molecules to graphite. In this project, this graphite will be converted to graphene using chemical oxidation methods. The one-atom thin monolayer graphene oxide will have potential applications in variety of industries, such as waste water treatment, gas separation and reinforcement of plastics.

Policy pricing in the Canadian insurance market

Insurance companies seek methods for optimally pricing their policies to their customers. They must offer good value to their prospective policy holders, and yet remain competitive in a challenging market environment. This project will use modern statistical and data analytic techniques to help them achieve this. Based on policy prices and client-specific information, models will be developed that will help uncover pricing strategies used by companies in the insurance market. These models will then be validated, and then put tested in simulation to ensure good performance.

Enzyme immobilization to enhance the hydrolysis of soluble, biomass derived xylo-oligomers

The proposed research project will conduct feasibility studies on the purification and conditioning of industrial, hemicellulose derived C5 sugars from a number of potentially commercial liquor fractions, derived from lignocellulosic biomass. In the first two Mitacs projects, enzyme hydrolysis showed considerable benefits over traditional acid hydrolysis for S2G’s bio-glycol production. However, relatively high enzyme loadings were still required to achieve fast and efficient hydrolysis! Since the hydrolysis was conducted in a liquid phase and agitation showed no beneficial effects in enhancing enzymatic hydrolysis, the potential of using an immobilized enzyme strategy to further improve enzyme stability while enhancing recycle/reuse of the enzymes could show considerable potential, further reducing enzyme costs.
We would also like to see if an enzyme immobilization strategy might be beneficial, building on the optimized enzyme cocktails derived from project I and II. The end goal of this study is to further reduce enzyme cost for S2G’s sugar-to-glycol process.

Étude du potentiel d’appariement hétérogène entre nuages de points LiDAR et images SAL

Depuis 2011, une plateforme SAL (Synthetic Aperture Ladar) a été développée et testée en laboratoire à l’Institut National d’Optique (INO). L’INO souhaite maintenant évaluer la possibilité d’utiliser un tel système d’acquisition pour des applications réelles de cartographie urbaine, notamment de modélisation 3D intérieure. Actuellement, les balayeurs laser (i.e. LiDAR) sont couramment exploités pour réaliser de telles cartographies 3D. Cependant, cette technologie fournit des nuages de points qui laissent place à des indéterminations de profondeur. Dans ce contexte, l’ajout de mesures SAL pourrait aider à mieux distinguer les objets. Ainsi l’objectif de ce projet de recherche est de vérifier que des mesures SAL et des mesures LiDAR sont complémentaires, de sorte qu’une fois combinées, ces mesures permettront une meilleure capacité de détection dans des applications de cartographie et de surveillance urbaine.

Envisioning an International Community: Proletarian Arts in East Asia

This project explores the relation between internationalism and leftist literature in early twentieth century China and East Asia. A study of internationalism amongst leftist movements offers important insights into technologies and strategies for building coalitions across national, linguistic and cultural boundaries. I propose that examining workers organizations and their literary and cultural links to internationalism in early
twentieth century China and East Asia help us better understand the wider implications of literary practices in modern literatures and societies. My main focus will be on May Day, a festival to celebrate workers around the world; Esperanto, an artificial language used to improve communication between workers; anti-war movements, where workers unite to protest against military aggression by national governments; and the gender
and reproductive politics of medical hygiene. In order to reconstruct these international networks of exchange this project examines yet unexplored archival sources from China and East Asia.