Innovative Projects Realized

3D printers-oriented supply chain management paradigm

3D printers are supposed to bring many innovations to the industrial world. These products promise to change the way we do business and collaborate with supply chain partners, since the mass production process will have to change to a widely distributed, highly flexible, small-scale manufacturing. Some researchers believe that first-order implications will cause businesses all along the supply, manufacturing, and retailing chains to rethink all their strategies and the way operations are managed. And a second-order implication will have even greater impact, but we still do not know exactly what is possible. In this project the intern will have the opportunity to analyze how 3D printers can change the traditional supply chain management paradigm. Awaiting more information from the professor. Please check back soon. Do not contact Globalink Research Internships.

Green supply chain management practices in small and medium-sized enterprises

Green Value Chain Management (GVCM) parading is a way to change the supply chain into a value loop for saving environmental resources and assuring a business’s long-term prospects. Nowadays this phenomenon is attracting worldwide attention, particularly in large companies. Unfortunately, much evidence suggests that Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are still struggling to implement GVCM practices and obtain the expected gains. This seems to be the reality in Canada and particularly in Quebec. In order to acquire a better understanding of the adoption process of GVCM practices as well as the results obtained in Quebec and discover possible tracks for fostering the adoption process and improve obtained performance, this project aims at mapping the main practices related to supply chain logistics that can leverage the environmental performance of SMEs. In order to do so, the intern will first perform a literature review on the domain and after that she or he will support the research team in collecting field data from SMEs in the province of Québec. Awaiting more information from the professor. Please check back soon. Do not contact Globalink Research Internships.

Role of caspase-7 in colorectal cancer

Many diseases, including cancer, afflict the intestines. This is in large part due to the continuous renewal of epithelial cells, and the exposure to toxins from the diet and to infectious agents. Inflammation also contributes to the genesis of cancer, as illustrated by the link between chronic and ulcerative colitis and colorectal cancer (CRC). Caspases, a family of cysteinyl peptidases, play a crucial role in both inflammation and cancer avoidance via cytokine productions and apoptosis (cell death), respectively. A growing body of evidence suggests that caspases play on all fronts to regulate inflammation and promote apoptosis whenever necessary. Recent studies showed that caspase-7, initially assigned to apoptosis, also contributes to inflammatory mechanisms. For instance, CASP7 gene ablation in mice causes resistance to endotoxic shock induced by bacterial lipopolysaccharides. This phenotype is recapitulated in animals carrying an amino acid substitution in the multifunctional enzyme poly(ADP ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP) gene that renders this protein resistant to caspase proteolysis. Moreover, a functional link between caspase-7, PARP and inflammation has been established. Thus, caspase-7 contributes to both inflammatory and apoptotic processes. Gene expression profiling revealed that caspase-7 mRNA levels are the highest in the intestines, but significantly diminished, or even abolished, in CRC compared to healthy tissue. These data suggest that caspase-7 could be a tumor suppressor, but this hypothesis must be verified. We propose studies that will determine the role of caspase-7 in the genesis and progression of CRC, and shed light on the underlying mechanisms. To this end, we propose three aims:
Aim 1: Analyze caspase-7 expression and activity in different model cell lines of CRC
We propose to compare the protein and gene expression of caspase-7 in non-immortalized intestinal epithelial cells and in a panel of human CRC cell lines that have distinct and well-defined tumorigenic and metastatic characteristics, as well as known genetic alterations. If detected, we will establish the functionality of the caspase in apoptosis induced by clinically relevant CRC chemotherapeutics.
Aim 2: Define the contribution of caspase-7 to CRC progression
We will evaluate the impact of the gain and the lost of function of caspase-7 on the phenotypes of cell lines identified in Aim 1. Caspase-7 expression will be restored by ectopic expression or ablated using shRNAs using lentiviruses. Proliferation, soft-agar and suspension growth assays, cellular migration, and cell invasion phenotypes will be assessed.
Aim 3: Analyze caspase-7, its regulators, and PARP expression in human CRC tumors
We will determine the expression of caspase-7 and key proteins in tumor and healthy colon samples from patients with CRC. These studies will help validate the mechanism of regulation and role of caspase-7 in CRC.
Conclusion: The high expression level of caspase-7 in the intestines is puzzling. The close relationship between caspase-7 and inflammation set the stage for novel and interesting discovery. This research will provide a solid ground to investigate the role of caspase-7 in CRC, and potentially lead to new treatment or diagnostic tools.

Self-Optimization of service-oriented architectures for Mobile and Cloud Applications

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that is becoming broadly adopted as it offers the ability to develop low-cost, flexible, and scalable distributed systems by composing legacy services. This architectural style allows developers to build a wide range of Service-oriented Distributed Systems (SDS), from business systems to Cloud-based systems through mobile systems—Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, NetFlix, and FedEx being representative examples of this kind of distributed systems. Nonetheless, the emergence of such large systems raises several scientific challenges. Indeed, like any other complex software system, SDS have to continuously evolve in order to fit new user requirements and new execution contexts. The changes made to accommodate new user requirements and execution contexts may degrade the design and, consequently, the Quality of Service (QoS) of these systems. This often results in the appearance of design defects, also known as anti-patterns. Whereas design patterns are good solutions to common recurring design problems that software engineers face when designing and developing systems, anti-patterns are bad solutions to common design problems and correspond to defects related to the degradation of the architectural properties of SDS. Moreover, anti-patterns resulting from these changes hinder the maintenance and evolution of SDS, not only contributing to the technical debts but also incurring additional costs to the project.

Furthermore, in the case of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and mobile apps, the presence of antipatterns inevitably leads to resource leaks (CPU, memory, battery, etc.), thus preventing the deployment of sustainable solutions. The detection and correction of these defects are thus critical activities to improve the design and the QoS of SDS, in order to ease and speed up both maintenance and evolution tasks assigned to software engineers. However, current methods and techniques for the detection and correction of anti-patterns in SDS are still in their infancy, as one can assess the

MEMS-based Optical Transceiver

The goal of the project is to develop an affordable integrated optical system to perform channel selection in high performance passive optical networks using wavelength division multiplexing, which can provide terabit connection speed in metropolitan networks on inside data centers. The device will be based on a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) mirror and, in addition to the cost limitations, it must have a low power consumption and be small enough to be integrated with the required control electronics in a standard package. The challenges of this project include the definition of a microfabrication platform that can simultaneously satisfy the optical and mechanical requirements and the design of a system capable of working over a large number of channels to minimize the number of different parts in a network. To facilitate design, modeling of the optical system and the MEMS device will be carried out with beam propagation and finite element software packages.

Moreover, this research project is conducted in collaboration with an industrial partner and therefore the resulting device must not only satisfy the performance criteria but also be amenable to large scale production. It is critical that the device maintains its functionality despite the variability of the fabrication process. Since this project requires expertise in multiple areas, it is conducted by a multidisciplinary team and will offer students the opportunity to gain experience in optics, MEMS and electronics.

The University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM) is home to the only undergraduate program in microelectronic engineering in Canada. The research in engineering at UQAM is centered on the design and fabrication of novel integrated systems. The professors working in this area are regrouped in the Research Center on the Co-design and Fabrication of Microsystems (CoFaMic), which has received over 4 million dollars to expand its facilities in the last five years. Finally, the campus of the Faculty of Science of UQAM is located at the heart of Montréal were many world renowned festivals take place, such as the Montréal Jazz Festival and Just for Laughs.

Low-Power and High-Sensitivity Interfaces for Integrated Sensors

Signals outputted from microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) transducers are often very weak, and the sensing interface circuits must exhibit very low noise levels to enable a large dynamic range of detection. Capacitive sensing interfaces exhibit high temperature stability, low power consumption, low noise, and are appropriate to implementations in CMOS. Different methods, such as switched capacitor charge integration and continuous-time current or voltage sensing circuits are potential implementation candidates. In addition, frequency sensing can be used with resonant transducers, such as MEMS resonators. Such a sensing interface involves circuitry such as phase-locked loops or counters. The purpose of this project is to design a multi-sensor interface that supports different sensing schemes in order to accommodate a wide range of micro-transducer types.
The market for low-power sensing interfaces is growing since smart phones and other portable electronics embed more sensing function (e.g., motion, environmental etc.). As such, novel low-power and/or high-sensitivity interfaces tailored to mobile applications with support for multiple sensor and transducer types are expected to have a significant impact in the sensing business.
This project involves creating a CMOS integrated circuit which can be used to convert different (e.g., capacitive, frequency, resistive) transducer signals (either in parallel or sequentially) to the digital domain with very low power specifications. Another aspect of this project pertains to the testing of the interface with available commercial transducers requiring some more elaborate test benches. The circuitry will be simulated and will be fabricated through our partner foundry. The fabricated circuit will then be tested with state-of-the-art equipment available in our laboratories. Different MEMS transducer models will also be implemented in order to allow for their simulation with the designed interface circuit.

Influence of forest management on snags, cavity trees and cavity nesters in Northern hardwoods

Deadwood, being standing (snags) or fallen, represents a key structural element in forest ecosystems. Many flora and wildlife species are directly associated to deadwood for establishment and growth in plants and feeding or nesting in animals, including cavity-tree nesters (primary excavators and seconday users). Some living trees are also important for wildlife as part of their crown is dead or because they bear natural of excavated cavities used by a vast network of associated species.

Rarefaction of these attributes has been targeted as ecological issues by many instances because management tend to reduce their availability. Even if forest cover is maintained at all times in many partial harvesting systems, northern hardwoods don’t escape this trend. Snags are frequently cut, often for safety reasons, thus reducing their availability and preventing them from decaying further. Selection cutting also target low quality and/or low vigour trees. These trees often constitute the deadwood mid- and long-term recruitment reserve and their harvest might imply a reduction in future deadwood availability. Finally, selection cut reduce the availability of very large trees that have a particularly high ecological value, being alive or death.

The objectives of this project is to evaluate 1- the availability of snags and cavity trees in unmanaged forests, 2- the impact of past forest management activities on these structural elements, 3- the network community of cavity users.

The area under study covers two administrative regions of southern Quebec located north of Montréal city (Laurentides and Lanaudière). Many data sources will be used as part of this project. Forest inventories from the Quebec’s ministry of Natural resources will be used as background data and forest inventories will be carried on in the Laurentides and Lanaudière regions in order to get more precise data.

Thinking and Speaking Politics in the Everyday Life: The Experience of Ethic Communities in Montreal / La politisation au quotidien : l’exemple de groupes ethniques à Montréal (Nouveau)

The present research project examines how recent immigrants think and speak politics. It adopts an approach that understands the political as being constructed through individual interactions that form part of broader political and cultural systems, but which are also at least in part determined by previous experience with public institutions. The objective is to capture the political categories constructed by recent immigrants, and contrast them with categories used in political philosophy.

My previous research project titled The Polarisation of the Everyday Life serves as a point of departure for the present study. In this work, I accompanied day-to-day activities of four citizens committees, two in France, two in a multiethnic neighbourhood of Montreal (Parc-Extension). One of the findings was that citizen committees were largely unsuccessful in the recruitment of non-Canadian born residents, in spite of deliberate efforts in this sense. The parsimonious explanations for this phenomenon is that immigrants are overburden by economic challenges and therefore do not have time to partake in volunteer activities, or that they fear politics due to previous experience with authoritarian regimes. The Montreal municipal electoral campaign in 2013 has led me to question these assumptions. Several members of these citizen committees were candidates in the political race, and throughout the electoral campaign they came in contact with politicized and organized immigrant communities.

While quantitative studies identify immigrant communities as having a particular, passive political behaviour that needs to be explained, the qualitative approach I adopt focuses on understanding how immigrant communities construct their political world. A considerable portion of quantitative research in this field aims at either understanding racism and the prejudices that individuals face when trying to participate in political life, or at mapping their participation and choices in elections. Notwithstanding the valuable contribution these studies make, the present study poses a different type of question: How do immigrant communities build a relationship to the “political world”? How, where, and when do they think and speak politics?

Several questions guide this project. Are immigrants not interested in politics or are they primarily interested in the politics of their country? What is the role of the view of politics acquired in their country of origin on their view of politics in Canada? How do they conceptualize the political and the exercise of power? How do they define community and more specifically the political community? Finally, where do people express themselves politically, in face-to-face encounters with elected officials or in informal and allegedly less political settings? And why? In order to address these questions, researchers in this project will attend meetings of immigrant organizations in the capacity of observant participants, and carry one-to-one semi-structured interviews with a sample of members from each community. We will work with the Pakistani, Turkish and Lebanese communities. I have chosen these communities since they are divided in their own country about the definition of the political, and this division is visible in community organization in Montreal. Thus, by design, we will avoid treating ethnic communities as homogenous and harmonious, which is a common shortcoming in the literature. In contrast, I want to understand how these different points of views guide the conception these immigrant have of Canadian politics.

I adopt a qualitative approach based on the observation of different groups, participation in their activities, and semi-structured interviews.

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Dans cette recherche, à travers l’observation de différents groupes de citoyens issus de communautés ethniques, nous souhaitons examiner comment des citoyens d’une immigration récente construisent leur propre catégorie du politique et plus particulièrement celle concernant la «communauté politique». Notre précédente enquête «La politisation au quotidien», menée auprès de 4 comités de citoyens dont certains sont pourtant situés dans des quartiers multi-ethniques de Montréal (Parc-extension), montrent la difficulté pour ces organisations de recruter des populations d’autres origines comme le signalent les écrits. Notre curiosité a été d’autant plus aiguisée que les membres du comité de citoyens Parc-Extension n’ont pas ménagé leurs efforts pour attirer les citoyens immigrants du quartier (porte- à-porte, stands lors des fêtes culturelles). La très large majorité de ces efforts se sont pourtant soldés par un échec. Une hypothèse pourrait être la non-politisation de ces citoyens occupés à améliorer une situation économique plus précaire ou une crainte du politique en raison de pays d’origine soumis à des régimes autoritaires. Notre observation de la campagne municipale de 2013 nous a cependant conduit à questionner ces hypothèses. En effet, deux membres du comité de citoyens se sont portés candidats aux élections. L’intégration dans un parti politique a permis à ces derniers de ‘découvrir’ des communautés politisées et mobilisées lors de différentes activités
de la campagne électorale. Plutôt que de postuler le non intérêt pour la et le politique des communautés immigrantes, il convient de questionner leur rapport au politique et la façon dont ils construisent les catégories du politique (et particulièrement celle de «communauté politique»). Par là notre recherche se démarque également des travaux quantitatifs sur le sujet lesquels interrogent le racisme ou l’exclusion dont sont victimes les communautés ou bien leur allégeance politique.
Dans cette recherche, à l’encontre des précédents points de vue, nous voulons examiner la façon dont s’effectue la formulation du politique au sein de groupes ethniques, à partir d’expériences relevant de la vie civile et quotidienne. En d’autres termes, sous quelles conditions les acteurs opèrent-ils une ouverture sur le monde par des questions formulées politiquement ? Comment des interactions à l’extérieur du système politique contribuent-elles aux modes d’appréhension et de représentation du politique ? Nourrissent-elles l’apathie politique ou contribuent-elles à d’autres visions du politique ? Plus précisément, où les citoyens immigrants tiennent-ils des discours orientés vers l’esprit public, des discussions politiques ? Constate-t-on la même
privatisation du public et publicisation du privé mentionnée dans la littérature ? Des auteurs comme Putnam ont souligné que l’engagement associatif ne jouait en faveur de la politisation que si les membres du groupe étaient liés par des liens de type bridging c’est-à-dire que les membres n’entretenaient pas des liens ethniques ou relevant de communautés primaires pour reprendre un vocabulaire plus durkheimien. Est-ce vérifié dans notre enquête ? Enfin comment le rapport au politique antérieur joue-t-il dans la politisation.

Information and communication technologies in mathematics education (New)

Digital technologies are increasingly present in school, in various forms (specialized software, ipad, online work, reverse class ….). In this project, we will focus on the influence of these technologies on mathematics learning. Research can take many forms depending on the interests of the student:experimentation in the classroom of a particular technology,surveys of teachers and / or students, study of programms and textbooks, analysis of online resources …

Competences and curricula (New)

Around the world, education systems are changing and being reorganized around the concept of competence. This term is so used by authors, in different contexts, that it becomes difficult to know exactly what it means. The purpose of this project will be to analyse definitions and uses of the word in both education and social sciences in order to identify the different uses and different scopes. Depending on the student skills, we can consider using text analysis with technological tools

Functional analysis of candidate genes in encephalitogenic T cell responses.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic degenerative disease in which central nervous system demyelination and white matter inflammation leads to axonal injury and neurological deficit. Canada has one of the highest rates of MS incidence in the world; studying the pathogenesis of MS is of the utmost importance. MS pathology results from myelin-directed autoimmune attack by T cells of the immune system, and the immune components of the pathology can be recapitulated in mice using the experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) model.

We aim to assess the contribution of specific genes (and by extension, specific molecular pathways) to T-cell-driven EAE pathogenesis, exploiting transgenic mouse strains that possess myelin antigen-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. When transferred to naive recipient animals, these cells induce symptoms of EAE characterized by paralysis of the extremities. Transgenic myelin antigen-specific T cells can thus be isolated and manipulated in vitro, before being transferred to naive recipients, to assess the effects of pharmacological or genetic treatments on their pathogenic capacity.

This project will entail the overexpression or knockdown of specific genes in these cells using retrovirally-mediated gene delivery followed by the transfer of the cellsto recipient mice to assess their ability to induce EAE. Our ultimate aim is to identify novel therapeutic targets for the immunomodulatory treatment of MS.

Sustainable distribution management

Recently a new trend related to the study of pollution emissions and environmental impacts
minimization has started in the area of the vehicle routing problem [20]. Most of this literature is related to the pollution routing problem, in which the aim is to effectively route vehicles to satisfy customers demand while taking into consideration traveling speed to minimize fuel consumption and also the actual route traveled to avoid unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions [20-22]. The integration of these concerns within inventory control operations gives rise to a myriad of problems ranging from selection of lot sizing, vehicle routing, delivery quantities and demand management.