The main challenges in bioconversion of lignocellulose arise from our limited understanding of the heterogeneous chemistry of the substrate and poor accessibility of enzymes within dense wood cell walls. It is clear that our limited appreciation of enzyme penetration into cell walls and catalysis dynamics is partly due to the constraints of the techniques employed […]

The Toronto and Region Area of Concern (TRAOC) has been one of the most polluted sites in the Great Lakes posing health risks to millions of people. The Remedial Action Plan (RAP) has made significant progress towards restoring the system and meeting the delisting targets. Yet, several critical questions still need to be addressed, such […]

One of the proposed benefits of adopting electronic health records is the development of a comprehensive database which can be used for epidemiological, clinical, and health services research. The main purpose of this project is to develop strategies and provide case examples of how data from these extensive electronic databases can be used to improve […]

Pulse shaping devices are the key elements for optical signal processing that are capable of reshaping the temporal waveform of optical pulses.  The applications of pulse shaping devices include ultrahigh-speed optical telecommunication, ultrafast all-optical computing and information processing, biomedical imaging, and electronic and photonic signal/device characterization and monitoring. For these applications, ultrafast optical waveform shapers […]

Solar power is one of the most promising renewable energy sources and its terrestrial abundance is several orders of magnitude higher than world’s consumption. Conventional solar cells, however, collect only a portion of solar energy – mostly visible sunlight. Our technology is capable of collecting the entire solar energy spectrum by using semiconducting nanocrystals (NCs) […]

Ecoatra is applying new developments in nanotechnology to solve the long-standing problem of hazardous substance use in the wood industry- one of our oldest and largest industries. Ecoatra’s formulation uses nanotechnology to enable deeper and more uniform penetration into wood, versatile application,  increased performance and potency at lower material quantities translating to reduced costs, multifunctional […]

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has indicated that driving while drowsy is the cause of 22 to 24 percent of car crashes, and results in a four- to six-times higher crash/crash risk compared to driving while alert. Therefore, the use of assistive systems that monitor a driver’s level of vigilance and alert the […]

Word segmentation in handwritten document is a difficult task because inter-word-spacing (i.e. the space between parts of the same word) is sometimes wider than the intra-word-spacing (i.e. the space between two consecutive words). Many different approaches to segmenting words have been proposed so far. However these segmentation approaches usually use some parameters that are manually […]

Real-time systems are built as sets of components interacting with their environment. In most cases (including robotics, traffic control, manufacturing and industrial applications, etc.), these applications must satisfy "hard" timing constraints. If these constraints are not met, systems decisions (even correctly computed) can lead to catastrophic consequences for goods or lives. The development of real-time […]

Geometric Networks typically are a sparse subgraphs of  a complete graph defined over a set of points embedded in the plane (or space). There are several algorithms which take a complete graph and compute a sparse subgraph satisfying various constraints, e.g.  low diameter, constant degree and fault-tolerant. In our recent work, we have designed algorithms […]

Hydrocarbon-based fuels have been the primary source of energy for mankind for centuries. However, during the last century there has been an exponential increase in the utilization of such fuels and the demand for energy is growing continuously. Hydrocarbon fuels are the primary source of greenhouse emissions which are severely affecting the global climate and […]

The pervasive ubiquity of parallel architectures and memory hierarchy has led to the emergence of a new quest for parallel mathematical algorithms and software capable of exploiting the various levels of parallelism: from hardware acceleration technologies (multi-core and multi-processor system on chip, GPGPU, FPGA) to cluster and global computing platforms. In this project, we propose […]