Innovative Projects Realized

Technology to enhance Farm Decision-Making

Livestock ranch operations balance complex production efficiencies with economics, resources and climate and could benefit from automation or implementation of new technology. However, the practical details of using technology on the ranch need to be further investigated to determine their true value. Often, on-farm scenarios with live animals introduce additional issues causing technology to function in a less than ideal manner. Tracking livestock on expansive pasture land with GPS tags enables herd inventory and location data capture during the critical summer breeding season; but only if the tags function in the environment as expected. Under this application, we intend to employ a business strategy intern capable of assessing the resource requirements (time, labour, cost etc.) necessary to implement a GPS cattle tracking technology system on the ranch to improve management decisions. Partners will benefit by having evidence informed strategies that address the specific challenges of remote northern ranches. The new knowledge discovered will aid in process determination and development that may enhance beef ranch productivity.

Megh Patel – Online Remodeling and Design Platform for Homeowners and Contractors

The intern’s capstone project will be to develop an Online Remodeling and Design Platform for Homeowners and Contractors. The goal is that these homeowners will gain the knowledge required to support their remodelling endeavors, and encourage local contractors to focus on building an online presence to market aspects of their business and services. This platform creation will require in-depth research and understanding of the Canadian construction ecosystem, and available resources; it will become an important case study to Cansbridge and other fellows who choose to start their own business each year. The platform and it’s construction community will aim to help homeowners pursue their ideas to start their own remodelling projects, think innovatively, and provide them the necessary resources to do so. The intern will facilitate this community of interested homeowners in their learning in the hope that they not only inspire their communities, but also work together toward building our economy and encourage more skilled trades. This relationship between Cansbridge and entrepreneurship across Canada will foster talented, driven fellows that will become the future of the fellowship and continue to innovate as past fellows have done.

Sara Assaf – Improving Canadian’s Digital Literacy through increasing Accessibility of Digital Marketing Education

Digital marketing is more prevalent than ever, however only 60% of all Canadian businesses stated that they utilize marketing strategies. Of that, a hearty 75% of Canadian companies reported they were more successful after investing in content marketing (Made in CA,2023). Which poses the question – what makes Canadian businesses stray away from investing in marketing, and how can we convince them of its value? My project is: The Digital Marketing Resource Hub (DMRH). I seek to research tried-and-true marketing strategies and combine them into a set of marketing deliverables – consisting of guides, tools, and industry-standard resources, that can be combined into one, user-friendly, widely accessible Hub, that can be viewed on a website.The DMRH will be tailored to those seeking to expand their digital marketing knowledge at large. Students with limited knowledge on the practice of digital marketing, entrepreneurs who are looking for ways to scale to new markets, millennial professionals who may be looking to switch career paths and branch into tech – all of these groups stand to benefit from the existence of an all-inclusive, easily accessible collection of resources, found on the DMRH.

Anoushka Sinha – Social Entrepreneurship Modules For Post Secondary Instructors

This project aims to aid instructors at the post secondary level and provide them access to simplified tools in form of modules to faciliate the learning geared towards social entrepreneurship for young youth entrepreneurs. These modules will cover a diverse range of topics so as to ensure that a multidisciplinary number of organisations and individuals such as institutions, instructors and students benefit from it.

Municipal Community Garden Strategy

St. Alberts municipal development plan, Flourish: Growing to 100K, identifies community gardens as important to Urban Agriculture and Local Food Production in advancing the goal of Community Well-being. Historically, St. Albert provides ad hoc support to community gardens. Public interest in community gardens has increased in the past 5 years. St. Albert requires a strategy that will allow it to make purposeful planned investments which will maximize support for community gardens either on civic lands or private property, while balancing a range of variables including municipal space limitations, competition for space, and financial prudence. Developing a community garden strategy will require: 1) public engagement with a variety of interested citizens, groups, and organizations to identify community values, interests and needs, 2) review of governing documents, 3) review of strategies and lessons learned from other municipalities, 4) development of strategy, and 5) identification of resource required to implement and support the strategy. This project will help to define the municipal role in supporting community gardening, and provide St. Albert with a foundation for future actions and resourcing, in relation to its role.

Nashwaak Watershed Restoration and Outreach

The Nashwaak Watershed Association Inc. (NWAI) was founded in 1995 as a non-profit organization dedicated to promote, conserve, and restore the Nashwaak ecosystem by using science-based methods, community collaboration, and advocacy for the watershed and its inhabitants. The organization’s vision is to see “people caring for a clean, healthy, and beautiful Nashwaak River watershed that supports and connects people and wildlife for years to come.”

The overarching objective of the project is to improve the natural infrastructure in the lower Nashwaak Watershed to enhance the capacity of the floodplain to contribute to improved freshwater quality (reduced sediment and contaminants, improved fish habitat, reduced bank widening due to erosion, etc.), and mitigate climate change impacts. Community education and outreach about the importance of watersheds will take place at public volunteer events, through school programming, and community workshops.

This project will build on our past restoration efforts, as we continue reforestation efforts on two municipal properties that are owned by the City of Fredericton and are largely composed of retired hayfields. Restoring these areas to natural floodplain forest will include the planting of 1500 live willow stakes and approximately 10,000 native tree seedlings, some as part of public planting events.

Mariner Innovations Cybersecurity Health Check Process Automation

Mariner has a team of over 350 people serving our clients across four lines of business. Mariner provides core IT and strategic advisory services, has globally commercialized six technologies and invests in the development of enterprise product offerings leveraging the capabilities of emerging technologies like Big Data and Analytics, Internet of Things, Cloud and Security. Due to surge in sophisticated threats, organizations like Mariner Innovations, need to constantly improve their security posture while balancing related costs with their business goals. So, Mariner’s Cybersecurity Health Check provides a comprehensive view of an organization’s overall security posture that examines the cyber security (based on the NIST Cyber Security Framework), Corporate Security, Supply Chain (based on both supply chain guidance and recent government decisions in both Canada and the USA), Interconnected systems, and Automation Systems. These provide a view of the programs that allow for a holistic approach to both security program monitoring and risk management.

Open-source software objects for modelling blood collection and production processes

We propose a project to port an existing blood clinic simulator to an open-source platform. We anticipate implementation of the newly redesigned model into the production environment. Once the model is established with Canadian Blood Services (CBS), we will survey the IE user group (IEUG) in CBS to determine usability, identify issues and solicit enhancements to the software objects. We will then determine a minimal set of objects needed to represent a donor clinic. These will be packaged and released for external users via PyPI or Git. We anticipate a release to both CBS personnel and to a wider user group.

The technology developed for this project will form the basis of a larger effort to refine existing open source simulation software in Python (Simpy). At present, Simpy lacks features common in more established simulation packages. In addition, Simpy is difficult to use and error prone, making model development burdensome in this environment. Thus, there is a need for open source elements to convert Simpy into a modern, transaction-oriented simulation package.

Immunotherapy of inoperable and locally advanced hepatocellular carcinoma

There are 768,000 new cases of liver cancer and 730,000 deaths worldwide every year. Only 15% of the cases are operable, and the median survival is generally <1 year. The close numbers of new cases and deaths indicate that liver cancer is a high mortality disease and urgently needs a new therapy. Approved therapies for inoperable liver cancer include chemotherapy (platinum, 5-FU, doxorubicin), targeted therapy (sorafenib, bevacizumab), immunotherapy (atezolizumab), and combination of the above. Recently, immunotherapy has become the front-line treatment for advanced and inoperable liver cancer. The patient’s immune system is suppressed within the liver by the tumor, and consequently the tumor cells are invisible to the patient’s immune cells. We are developing a new treatment that will wake up immune cells in the liver to specifically kill the liver tumor. This immune activating effect will be localized in the liver without global stimulation of the immune system in the patient, and thus will be effective but cause little toxicity. Our strategy is to develop a nanoparticle formulation that can localize an immune boosting drug in the liver, without the drug being absorbed into the blood stream to induce non-specific side effects.

Building Food Sovereign Campuses: A Practical Approach

Universities can be leaders in sustainability by building food sovereign campuses and communities. Instead, universities across Canada are contributing to unsustainable and unjust food practices by hiring multinational corporations (Aramark, Sodexo, Chartwells-Compass) that externalize social and environmental costs. The intern will continue the research from their Ph.D. dissertation about building food sovereign campuses and work with the Concordia Food Coalition to establish a viable alternative approach based in social economy. The Concordia Food Coalition has made agreements with the Concordia Student Union and Concordia administration to create a feasibility study to make the case for a social enterprise to take over the foodservice contract in 2026. This project will work with campus-community food organizations to build the internal structure that will mobilize personnel and resources to establish the social enterprise. The intern will also conduct research with other ‘alternative’ community-based university foodservice organizations to understand best practices in governance, finance, labour and structure. The information will be used to develop the new social food enterprise, to contribute to scholarly debates in the field of food studies and create a manuscript for a book about building food sovereign campuses.

Développer des outils pour cribler les activités antivirales d’alcaloïdes végétaux.

La pandémie de coronavirus a été un rappel brutal des dommages que peuvent causer les maladies virales. Actuellement, il existe des traitements antiviraux contre le SARS-CoV-2, mais l’émergence continue de variants demande une diversification constante de ces molécules. À cela, s’ajoute à un risque d’exposition aux agents infectieux déjà augmenté en raison de la mondialisation et du changement climatique comme des maladies décrites à l’origine comme tropicales i.e. causées par le virus Zika (ZIKV) et le virus de la dengue (DENV), de la famille des flavivirus. Il n’existe pas de traitement antiviral contre DENV ou ZIKV et donc la nécessité de découvrir de nouveaux composés antiviraux, est grande. Plusieurs molécules végétales, y compris du groupe des alcaloïdes, ont des propriétés antivirales. Les alcaloïdes des Amaryllidaceae sont un groupe de molécules à large spectre d’activités pharmaceutiques. Le projet proposé permettra de développer des outils viraux pour le criblage d’activité antiviral d’alcaloïdes.

Modeling and simulation for predictive building control using high-resolution climateforecasting

The state-of-the-art of building energy management systems uses model predictive control to compare alternative control strategies prior to implementation. Climate conditions dramatically influence the control strategy selection. These rely on conventional climate forecasting that provides coarse resolution with respect to both time and space (e.g. 1 hour, 50 km). The industrial partner Green Power Labs Inc. (GPLI) and Dalhousie University propose to use high-resolution climate forecasting at the sub-hourly and building level resolution (e.g. 15 minute, 5 m) to enhance the accuracy of the forecast utilized in predictive building control. In this project, the Post-Doctoral Fellow, in collaboration GPLI, will carry out advanced building performance simulation to determine the energy/cost/greenhouse-gas-emission performance of such technology applied to a range of commercial buildings in a range of climates. This project will benefit GPLI by defining performance and optimal markets as they rollo-out the new high-resolution forecast and predictive building control technology