Stroke is the leading causes of permanent disability in adults in the world. However, rehabilitation can be a long process requiring hard labor with high cost. This project proposes to develop a rapid and easy to record indicator of motor performance for individuals with neuro/motor conditions. The team intend to develop an electroencephalography (EEG) based […]

Lichens are a symbiosis of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. Lichen substances have been reported to show a wide array of biological activities including antiviral, antioxidant, antitumor action. This project aims to establish a reliable way to prepare (?)-acaranoic acid, a lichen substance isolated in 1895, from commercially available chemicals. The proposed synthesis of this […]

The overall objective for this project is to support the research of two master’s students who would help advance the methods for modelling energy-climate policies, a field in which EMRG in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at SFU is one of the leading research units in the country and in which Navius Research […]

According to evolutionary biology, adaptation of a population to a new environment results from an equilibrium between various trends. Adaptation is shaped by selection forces, such as fecundity, mortality and competition for resources, by migration, and by the generation of diversity at reproduction. The type of reproduction, whether it is mainly clonal (asexual) or it […]

Manchuria, or Northeast China, was a migrant society in which the majority of the population came from Shandong and Hebei during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. However, Manchuria’s migration history in the period of Manchukuo, a puppet state controlled by Imperial Japan from 1932 to 1945, is a […]

Speech separation – isolating different speech sources from a given mixed input signal – is a fundamental task in speech processing. It is a fundamental step in many applications, such as automatic speech and speaker recognition. However, speech separation is also among the most challenging tasks in speech processing. Recent studies involving deep models to […]

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is an important global health problem afflicting 384 million people and causing 3 million deaths worldwide each year. Currently, there are no effective therapies for COPD patients. In this proposal, we are developing a novel technology that will both monitor the severity of disease in COPD patients, and allow researchers […]

Canadian urban populations are increasingly aware of climate change and generally support mitigation strategies. But understanding how urban form impacts energy use and emissions is challenging. We propose to design, deploy and evaluate digital media tools that support collaborative exploration of urban design scenarios where some participants are joining from remote locations. Key elements of […]

There is some evidence that people’s beliefs about how someone is ‘supposed to sound’ may affect how they perceive someone’s speech –to the extent of them hearing an accent that isn’t there. This response time study investigates in what ways “expected” and “unexpected” combinations of speaker ethnicity and accent can affect how speech is processed […]

Down syndrome (DS) is caused by the presence of three copies of chromosome 21, leading to dementia in later life of the patients. DS patients develop characteristic Alzheimer’s pathologies, including the amyloid-beta plaque formation, tau hyperphosphorylationto form neurofibrillary tangles and abnormal synaptic function and plasticity. Growing evidence has shown that impaired insulin signaling plays a […]

This study will examine the relationship between language and communication in newborn infants. In the past, it has been found that newborns are able to imitate the facial expressions of adults. It has also been found that newborns generally prefer the sound of their mother’s native language(s). This study proposes to explore the connection between […]

Due to the huge data volume in the big data era, the dimension of feature parameters and the size of datasets continue to increase. This trend induces a paradigm shift for the learning networks from the centralized in-cloud learning ones to the distributed on-device learning ones. Benefit from the parallel computation and local training, the […]