A social-ecological systems perspective analyzes the connections between human impacts and ecological components. Regime shifts are rapid changes in an ecosystem’s structure and function. They are often difficult to anticipate and either extremely costly or impossible to reverse. A gendered lens is crucial in analyzing these shifts as gender roles have been constructed by society, […]

The majority of hydrocarbon in Canada is produced from the unconventional reservoirs characterized by ultra-low matrix permeability. Hydraulic fracturing is a common stimulation technique used in oil and gas industry to release hydrocarbon trapped in the rock making the hydrocarbon recovery economical. The ability to model this process may lead to the efficient hydraulic fracturing […]

The crew pairing problem begins with a time table of flights and a fleet of available aircraft. The time table is created from considerations such as available slots at airports, available aircraft, aircraft specifications, airport limitations, projected load factors and passenger demand. After the timetable has been set and aircraft have been scheduled to that […]

The goal of this project is to design computationally-efficient solvers that can be used for autonomous vehicle control developments. Because autonomous cars have complex mathematical models, it is usually hard to perform their necessary control computations on-line and when the vehicle is running. Therefore, it is required to come up with much faster solvers for […]

The research will look at the use of community-managed marine protected areas (MPAs) to deal with abrupt and long-term environmental and social changes taking place in the Ria Lagartos Biosphere Reserve, Merida, Mexico MPAs have long been used to protect marine species and ecosystems, but their social considerations have yet to be fully studied Information […]

Nanoscale gas sensors have a many potential applications such as toxic gas sensing, air quality monitoring, early disease detection and point of care diagnostics. Recently a novel gas sensing design based on a nano-mechanical membrane has been developed, known as the membrane-type surface stress sensor (MSS). The membrane is coated with a gas sensing material […]

Network operators ubiquitously deploy hardware middleboxes such as firewalls, proxies, WAN optimizer, intrusion detection and prevention systems to realize different network services. These middleboxes are vertically-integrated, expensive, and proprietary hardware appliances with limited or no programmability and require specially trained personnel for deployment and maintenance, resulting in increased capital and operational expenditure for the network […]

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) represent a global water quality issue of increasing importance. HABs, often dominated by cyanobacteria, produce unsightly growth, noxious compounds, and toxins that impair aquatic ecosystems for recreational and drinking water use. The drivers of HABs are not well characterized, which has led to the minimal success of management efforts to date. […]

Monitoring is fundamental to network management. Accurate and timely statistics at different granularities (e.g., per-user, per-device etc.) are essential for many network management applications (e.g., traffic engineering, failure detection etc.). Contemporary monitoring solutions (e.g., Cisco Netflow) are proprietary, inflexible, and incur a large up-front licensing and setup cost. Alternatively, dedicated hardware devices for monitoring can […]

Under Ontario’s regulations, facilities generating thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per year must report their emissions, and industries are motivated to reduce GHGs through ‘Cap-and-Trade’ regulations. Based on the Power-to-gas concept, this research will develop a techno-economic-environmental model for hydrogen-based energy systems that include electricity from the utility grid and distributed renewable […]

The current picture of structure formation in cosmology suggests that initially over-dense regions of dark matter collapse to form halos. These halos also host most of the luminous matter like galaxies. However, we cannot trace the dark matter directly since it does not interact with light. Therefore, the relationship between the underlying cosmic density and […]

Weak lensing, the subtle distortion of galaxy shapes due to matter along the line of sight, is an effect that can be used to measure the mass of galaxies and clusters. The effect is sensitive to both stellar and dark matter, which makes the technique extremely valuable for constraining cosmological parameters. Through observations of weak […]