Feasibility of Hybrid Ground-Source Heat Pumps for Sustainable Heating in Cold Climates

Using fossil fuels in building heating systems is greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive, leading to global warming. Ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) are cleaner electric alternatives to fossil fuel systems. They utilize and transport heat from the ground to warm buildings. However, prolonged use of GSHPs can lead to a phenomenon known as thermal imbalance, which depletes […]

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Learning to organize and discover biomedical scientific literature

This project will investigate machine learning methods to organize and discover the vast literature on biomedical science. First, it will focus on named entity recognition–the task of finding and classifying entities in text documents–on large collections of abstracts and full-text of research papers and investigate semi-supervised learning methods to leverage large collections of unlabeled research […]

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Plasma activated mist: Characterization and application efficacy

As the demand for healthier and ‘clean label’ food products is ever increasing, there is a need to develop novel food processing methods to address the risks associated with food safety while ensuring sustainability. Cold plasma activated water (PAW) and plasma activated mist (PAM) are gaining attention for potential applications in food products as a […]

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Insights and Recommendation Extraction using advances in Large Language Modeling

Businesses allocate a significant amount of financial resources and time to produce regular financial and managerial reports, which involve analyzing accounting data. These reports play a vital role in evaluating and comprehending the overall performance of the business, thereby aiding in making important decisions. Additionally, businesses often engage industry experts or consultants to derive actionable […]

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Next Generation Fuels and Fuel Additives

There is a need to develop renewable fuels derived from biological sources that have chemical properties that are similar to petroleum-derived fuels. We are investigating the use of chemical building blocks made by bacteria that may be used as fuel additives to improve the cold weather performance of biodiesel, or directly as fuels if chemically […]

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Avalanche awareness among snowshoers and winter hikers on the North Shore Mountains

Snowshoers and winter hikers have received little attention from academic research. As a growing community of backcountry users, it is not well understood to what extent they travel in avalanche terrain, what level of avalanche safety training they possess, and where they get their information for undertaking winter backcountry trips. This study addresses these concerns […]

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Access to Psychologists and Social Workers and Workplace Absenteeism in Ontario

When workers experience poor mental health, it has significant costs for both individuals and the economy. It affects their overall well-being, income, and productivity (e.g., sickness absences). Workers with poor mental health need access to adequate mental health services. Thus, this study examines the impact of seeing a psychologist or social worker for mental health […]

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Harnessing the power of backscatter communication and multi-sensor data analytics for next generation smart building

In this proposal, we provide a smart building communication, configuration, and interaction solution. It includes: 1) a smart building network design with lightweight wireless nodes that can recycle ambient radio energy (visible light and electromagnetic waves) to save energy and do relays for each other as a large-scale robust interconnection; 2) an AI-empowered network node […]

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Optimizing hearing aids for speech intelligibility, sound quality and emotional speech

The lack of correspondence between the clinic setting and real world listening environments may explain, in part, why hearing instruments optimized in the clinic often result in poor adherence of hearing instruments in everyday life. To address the disconnect between communication in everyday listening situations where talkers often speak with emotion and audiology clinics where […]

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