Time spent in homes and in transport micro-environments contribute significantly the exposure to air pollutants. Air quality is significantly impacted by the increased green house gas emissions and effects of climate change. However, concentrations in many of these are poorly quantified and challenging to monitor due to limited space, power and Wifi accessibility. This project […]

Cyanoborate anions, negatively charged B–CN compounds, have been well established as important building blocks in metal organic frameworks, room-temperature ionic liquids (RTIL’s), and part of metal complexes. RTIL are particularly important in green chemistry, because of absence of any toxic vapours, and in photovoltaic cells, to name only a few applications. Certain cationic species, such […]

Our galaxy the Milky Way and our orbiting companion Andromeda are the dominant members of a small collection of galaxies, the Local Group, which is about 3 million light years across. Recently, it was recognized that the Local Group is simply a mass concentration in a thin “Local Sheet” of galaxies spanning 35 million light […]

With rapid population growth worldwide, major cities around the world are seeing an upsurge in high-rise building construction. At the same time, there is an increased awareness about the importance of designing buildings so that they will have limited damage due to strong earthquake shaking. An innovative structural system is proposed that utilizes an outrigger […]

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for robotic grasping has been actively studied in recent years. Each DRL needs a reward function to interact with its environment and figure out how desirable or suitable the actions it takes in each state are. The reward formulation of DRL is usually a linear summation of the reward components, which […]

Heavy metal toxicity has been a cause for public health concern for decades. There are a variety of industries that both produce heavy metals as a byproduct, or use them directly in consumer products or practical applications. In particular, cadmium (Cd) is one such toxic metal that is known to induce negative effects not only […]