This project aims to test and fully develop a collaborative and adaptive root-cause analysis (CARCA) tool. Designed as an educational technology, the goal of this tool is to enhance learning and retention of knowledge and skills of Health, Safety, Environment, and Regulatory professionals in their incident/accident investigations. The project will extensively test the tool for […]

Fast pyrolysis followed by hydrodeoxygenation upgrading is the most popular way to produce bio-oil from biomass. A two-step process can be combined together as hydropyrolysis treatment. This approach usually involves continuous hydrogen flow and high operation pressure (15~100 atm), resulting in significantly increased capital and operational costs. Compared to hydrogen, which is not naturally available […]

This project studies efficient online optimization algorithms for large-scale data transfer among data centers in a geographically-distributed cloud system, as well as their SDN (Software Defined Networking)-facilitated implementation. Big data analytics, content distribution, and various web applications (social networking, search engine) have become dominating applications on today’s cloud platforms. Moving bulk volumes of data from […]

Too many people drive cars for commuting to work. If people used more active and sustainable transportation options this would reduce the impact on the environment and likely increase people’s physical activity and well-being. Our project partner Sustainable Alberta Association (SAA) is a not for profit organization that organize a Canadian annual wide competition called […]

The knowledge and skills of long-term employees are vital to the success of any business. When they leave, retire or are no longer available to perform their functions new employees are hired to take on their job functions. Somehow the skills of the departing long-term employees have to be transferred to the newly hired. The […]

Canada owns the largest heavy oil and bitumen reserves in the world. Unfortunately, extracting these hydrocarbons is difficult due to their high viscosity. Currently, the most popular strategy is to heat the bitumen using steam, but steam injection can be inefficient and is not suitable for all reservoirs. Radio frequency heating offers a flexible and […]

Black carbon (BC), generated from incomplete combustion of carbonaceous fuels, is one of the two major airborne pollutants that drive climate change and degrade regional air quality. With a warming potential second to CO2, BC contributes the most uncertainty to climate modeling due to its short retention time in the atmosphere and poorly understood mixing, […]

Biobased products, mostly derived from plant biomass, have the potential to improve the sustainability of Canada’s natural resources and environmental quality while competing economically. Plant biomass, composed primarily of cell walls and modification of cell wall properties has the potential to improve biomass conversion to biobased products such as biofuels. Progress towards achieving this goal […]

Cities emit approximately 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. It is therefore important to study how urban energy infrastructures can be transformed to lower carbon emissions. But this transformation is not simple for two reasons: (1) it involved variousactors with conflicting interests and visions on what the energy transition should be, […]

Endospores of thermophilic, sulfate-reducing bacteria (TS-SRB) are widespread in the marine rare biosphere and have been proposed as model organisms for studying microbial dispersal. Hot subsurface oil reservoirs could potentially be ‘deep biosphere’ source environments for these organisms, whereby TS-SRB are transported into the cold seabed through natural hydrocarbon seeps. Thus these endospores could be […]

Our intended research will be focused on rumor spreading protocols, also known as randomized broadcasting. In the randomized rumor spreading problem, the goal is to broadcast a message that is initiated at one node to all nodes in a given network, by means of nodes choosing uniformly at random a neighbor and exchanging the message […]

This project explores the design of different manual and semi-automatic instruments to support interaction with token-based physical data visualizations (or physicalizations). The recent advance in digital fabrication has made data physicalization – encoding data in the geometry or material properties of a physical artifact – a growing research interest in the information visualization community. However, […]