The goal of this project is to conduct research into the development of writing assistance software for advanced adult non-native writers of English. I intend to approach the project in as language-general a way as possible so that the method can be easily extended to French. At the end of the project we expect to have prototype software that can do the following:

1. Build a lexicon of good (native English) collocations from a large internet corpus

2. Distinguish native and non-native texts based on the presence or absence of these collocations

For so many years, industries that are heavily reliant on geospatial data have been working with paper maps unfolded on tables. Some of these companies are still using paper maps to analyze huge amounts of data despite the current availability of geographic information system (GSI) for storing and managing geospatial data. Data management tasks using these traditional methods are asynchronous and very tedious. Delays in updating these maps can pose a safety risk for field workers who may be guided based on outdated information.

Mozilla is a software development organization known internationlly for the open source Firefox web browser. This Mitacs Elevate postdoctoral fellowship aims to extend the Mozilla mandate for openness into the realm of digital literacy programs for youth. Mozilla has begun to develop collaborations known as Hive Networks involving libraries, museums, and other organizations. The Hive Network members strive to scaffold digital literacy into their programming and allow the youth to determine their own learning directions.

In many industrial and engineering applications, process control plays a central role. Among the possible control strategies, model predictive control (MPC), also called receding horizon control (RHC) , stands out for its excellent ability to handle constraints. While MPC has been successfully applied to many industrial applications, further developments are limited when it becomes necessary to solve many large on-line optimization problems. To overcome this situation, parametric optimization is often used such that most of the computation burden is pushed to an off-line phase.

Knowledge-intensive industries accumulate content at a rate and volume that is impossible for humans to manually organize and retrieve. A typical search engine based on keywords is not effective, because the user must provide the exact words contained in the text of the document or description of an entity and cannot filter search results based on the implicit context of the search. The search capabilities of the search engine can be extended by content metadata in the form of tags. However, manually adding metadata to each content element has prohibitive cost.

While Alzheimer's disease (AD) is irreversible, strategies to slow functional decline associated with the disease have demonstrated effectiveness. A critical aspect of the recommended model of care is accurate and regular assessment of patient behaviour in everyday life, such as physical function and sleep quality. However, current clinical assessments rely heavily on patient or caregier observations to recall everyday behaviour, which may be unreliable and subject to bias.

While Alzheimer's disease (AD) is irreversible, strategies to slow functional decline associated with the disease have demonstrated effectiveness. A critical aspect of the recommended model of care is accurate and regular assessment of patient behaviour in everyday life, such as physical function and sleep quality. However, current clinical assessments rely heavily on patient or caregier observations to recall everyday behaviour, which may be unreliable and subject to bias.

The population age distribution is undergoing an “inversion” and the dependency ratio, i.e., the proportion of older adults who are not working over the number of adults who are working, is increasing. This has an effect on a society’s ability to deliver community-care services and the underlying national economic capacity to pay for their needs. Advances in ICT (information and communications technologies) promise to provide support for affordable systems of care that enable human resources to be used more effectively.

Millions of people post information on social media sites about their interests, preferences, opinions etc. on a daily basis. LeadSift mines this data stream in real-time to generate incredibly accurate and targeted sales leads. Given the short text and ambiguity around a social post, it gets very difficult to accurately identify intent. This project will explore different Natural Language Processing techniques to analyze the inherent semantic structure of social posts. Due the real-time nature of the social data, the algorithms need to be extremely efficient and scalable.

The main objective of the project is to develop a software system to expertly capture an electronic health profile of a client with physical and/or cognitive disabilities to determine their level of functional ability, mobility and cognitive ability. Using the profile, the system will expertly assess the client’s ability to live either independently or with the assistance of a caregiver, and recommend the necessary changes. The proposed system requires integration of multiple software modules, such as from Functional Independence Measure (FIM), DGIClinical, VIDex, Invacare, etc.