Energy and emissions reduction through local municipal planning tools in Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe

Municipalities across Canada have declared climate emergencies but are they able to deliver solutions and make change in their communities? What is the role of municipal land use planning tools, such as zoning, green performance standards, and urban design guidelines? Which tools are poised to have the highest impact? Climate change policies related to energy […]

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Bioinspired Unconventional Decontamination (BUD®)

Canada is the third largest exporter and the fourth largest producer of oil in the world. Thus, oil is a very important part of the Canadian economy. Oil is a cleaner fuel than coal, but it still has many disadvantages. For example, oil spills that occurs during transport and drilling can cause great environmental damage. […]

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Health equity, road safety and the built environment (BE): Examining barriers and facilitators to BE change decision-making, the impact of Vision Zero, and COVID-19

The goal of this proposed project is to increase the safety of vulnerable road users (pedestrians & cyclists) by examining factors that help or hinder the process of making changes to the built environment (BE) for this purpose. By examining data collected from municipal, transportation, police services, public health, NGOs, and schoolboard sectors in the […]

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Modeling Fetal Heart Rate and Fetal Circulation during Labor

Recent progress in the development of computer algorithms for detecting pathological changes in fetal heart rate (FHR) variability (fHRV) and electroencephalogram (EEG) points to a potentially groundbreaking technology for detecting fetal acidemia and inflammation during labour. Using FHR and EEG as a diagnostic tool is an attractive option because they can be acquired noninvasively. Despite […]

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Norman McLaren Revisited

This project will examine the work of Scottish-Canadian experimental animator Norman McLaren through close analysis of the film production infrastructures and cultural programme of nation-building in Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Understanding McLaren as a complex figure caught between contradictory political, aesthetic and social conditions, this project will look at the strategies of complicity and […]

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Developing Mixed-use Affordable Communities: Identifying Opportunities for more Sustainable and Affordable Suburban Development in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA)

This research project builds on a strong partnership with Parallel Architecture, an architecture and planning firm interested in exploring the role of private city-builders in redressing the housing affordability crisis and finding progressive ways of leveraging current federal, provincial, and local policies. This project seeks to examine: (1) how can new mixed-use suburban development meet […]

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Participatory Cities Every One, Every Day: Toronto

This proposal details an approach for evaluating a planned project led by SII called Participatory Cities: a new inclusive, system-based approach to stimulating and supporting dense networks of practical ‘participation culture’ in cities around the world. With proof of concept developed and tested in London, UK, by the Participatory City Foundation, the model will now […]

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Digital Humanities, research-creation, and emerging hybrid media publication platforms: reimagining Public Journal

Academic journals rarely feature research-creation projects: as such, they are often limited by conventions inherited from print publishing. Recent efforts to create digital and/or online journals can potentially result in new publishing opportunities for scholars and artists. This project will examine how international online f journals in art history, visual studies, and film and media […]

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Parking Occupancy Inference With LiDAR Sensors

Parking is a cumbersome part of auto travel in urban areas, primarily due to lack of information on the location of available spots. Sensors can be deployed to detect occupancy, but they often fail due to their high costs and detection inefficiencies in outdoor spaces. This project pursues a feasibility study of using LIDAR sensors, […]

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Derisking GNSS use in the design of a train autonomy system

Thales Canada, Transportation Solutions has a long history of developing automated train systems. The company has designed a new autonomous train system that contains a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), e.g., GPS, sensor input using corrected GNSS measurements. Thales and York University’s GNSS Laboratory are proposing in this Mitacs Accelerate proposal that one senior doctoral […]

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