The Overall goal of these internships is to assist LEAF with capacity development concerning data collection, analysis and spatial visualization. Specifically, the internship wil focus on studies that complement my Ph.D dissertation topic ‐ Developing a Spatially Explicit, Multi Criteria Decision Making Approch to Urban Forest Management in the Greater Toronto Area ‐ while at […]

  Rapid diagnostic tools represent a significant growth industry in agriculture. Current antibody based approaches have implicit limitations due to the cost and performance of the antibodies. The use of single stranded DNA (aptamers) as mimics of antibodies has the potential to overcome many of these constraints. A key disadvantage to the use of aptamers is […]

  The intern is to improve the image recognition software of Semacode Corporation that is intended to automatically detect barcodes in images taken using the camera of a mobile phone, such as the iPhone or Blackberry. The improvements will include: adding the ability to detect and read 1D barcodes such as UPC and EAN codes, automatically detecting the […]

  This project targets a major research gap of the recently proposed Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI), which is a North American “green rating system” for landscapes; scheduled to be released in 2011. Our research will focus on establishing the characteristics of urban trees that affect their ability to “provision habitat” to urban biodiversity (insects and birds) […]

  The overall objective of the proposed project is to conduct long‐term performance analysis and evaluation of major renewable energy and advanced mechanical systems installed in the two TRCA‐BILD Archetype Sustainable houses located at Kortright Centre in Woodbridge. Ontario. The facility will be served as an education, demonstration, training, and research infrastructure for sustainable housing technologies in the […]

The generation of agricultural biomass is a key component of Ontario’s emerging bioeconomy. Miscanthus, a warm-season, perennial grass is being considered as a bioenergy crop due to its high yield potential and favourable combustion qualities. One of the primary obstacles to commercializing and establishing miscanthus in Ontario is the poor cold tolerance of some of the genotypes under consideration. Research […]

Wind Power Generation is one of the major sources for clean energy around the world in the industrialized countries or regions.  It is well known that the WPG has the following characteristics: the input is uncertain; the volatility is high with jumps and lags; the correlation between its output and demand is most likely zero; […]

For the past decade, I have been researching new types of biofilters for treatment of livestock odours.  Although I anticipate the fabrication of a prototype biofilter by April 2011, I do not expect the design team to have time to evaluate the functioning of the biofilter.  It is my intention to recruit a student during […]

Our overall project objective is to determine factors to optimize removal of nutrients and organic micropollutants (e.g., pesticides, and pharmaceuticals and personal care products aka “drugs”) in rural municipal sewage lagoons, through manipulative experiments with bench-scale and field-scale constructed wetlands.  This work will provide sound science on how best to remove such contaminants from wastewaters […]

It has been a common practice to discharge water, wastewater and industrial effluents into open channels such as rivers and streams.   Such discharges, in the form of jets, often enter shallow bodies of water typically found in rivers and coastal bays.  In contrast to the existing body of knowledge on unconfined turbulent jets in which […]

The exponential growth in high-bandwidth applications and devices used in backbone networks has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in power consumption, and there is a growing recognition of the need to be more energy efficient [1].The proposed research project will investigate a number of techniques for energy-efficient optical network design. These include: Applying traffic […]

The project deals with the better indexing of text fields in the database. It explores an idea of on-line maintenance of an inverted index, which is built for the tokens of the text content in the database. The on-line update of such an index is currently considered impractical. We try to overcome this inverted index […]