Innovative Projects Realized

Characterizing commercial off-the-shelf electronics components for space applications

Radiation effects in the space environment is of particular concern to electronics, often causing them to fail either due to ionization or from particles directly damaging components through collision. The goal of the project is to study the radiation effects of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and digital-to-analog converters (DAC) to evaluate their performance for use in space instrumentation. Demonstrating suitable radiation performance in modern commercial electronics will open the door to higher performance devices when compared to traditional radiation-hardened devices based on older technology. The Intern will use the Co-60 radiation chambers at the University of Saskatchewan and TRIUMF proton irradiation facility to screen variety of commercial electronics. The validated COTS components and the low-cost screening strategies will provide Xiphos with its significant opportunity to reduce the cost of next-generation avionics used in low Earth orbit by several orders of magnitude.

New technologies for low frequency photoacoustic imaging

This project is focussed on developing an optical imaging technology called photoacoustic imaging. Photoacoustic imaging is able to distinguish healthy tissue from cancerous tissue during breast surgery and could one day eliminate the need for repeat surgeries. The technology uses a pulsed laser to selectively build up pressure in some tissues and microphones to listen for sound as the pressure dissipates. After reconstruction, the sound recordings are converted back into a pressure map representative of the tissues. The project funds will support two PhD students. The first student will study a hand-held photoacoustic probe that surgeons can one day use to image tissue during surgery. The second student will study a new type of sound recorder that could revolutionize how photoacoustic images are captured. Advancements made by both students could one day make photoacoustic imaging a routine method to screen for cancer and aide its removal during surgery.

Change detection and assessment of destroyed urban infrastructure using remote sensing analysis

Detecting changes in a building using remote sensing images has been an essential research topic in Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) and used for characterization and quantification of change detection on footprints of buildings or buildings’ rooftops.
The purpose of the research project includes the choosing and testing RS and GIS methods based on aerial and satellite imagery data to detect changes in urban objects (mainly the footprints of buildings) that destroyed due to military events in Ukraine.
1. What methods of manual and automated remote sensing (RS) and spatial analysis with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are suitable for detecting rapid changes in the footprints of buildings as a result of military destructions?
2. What is an effective RS and GIS methodology using digital surface model (DSM), extracted from orthophotos, to delineate changes and assess and level the severity of damage to buildings (destroyed, partially destroyed, damaged, unchanged etc.)?
3. What are the RS techniques and their variables for determining the type of destructions (bomb, artillery/rocket, mortar shells etc.)?
4. How to create a GIS database to store city features with attributes such as building type, intended use, percentage damage severity, destruction type, estimated cost, and recoverability?

The Workers Speak

In 1845, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote “I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none”. Working-class women poets of the eighteenth-century have been ignored by scholars for over 200 years. My project aims to reconnect these poets with their ‘granddaughters’ of today. I will be working in an interdisciplinary way, contributing across multiple platforms in the Concordia English department, particularly working with Dr Danielle Bobker, associate professor of English. Dr Bobker’s expertise exactly corresponds to my own doctoral research on space in eighteenth-century literature. Under her supervision, I will be drafting an article for publication on two women poets. I will also be assisting Dr Bobker with the organisation of the Canadian Eighteenth Century Studies 2023 conference. I will deliver creative and scholarly engagement across multiple platforms, including the creative writing faculty. Just one example is creating a recording for the Spoken Web project with Jason Camlot. I aim to bring fresh scholarship and leave a lasting legacy at Concordia.

Graph Feature-Engineering for Scalable Fraud Detection in Commercial Banking

The goal of the research project is to enhance ATB’s fraud detection by incorporating new graph based features. Initially, the project will be focused on figuring out how to use ATB’s data to build graph features. Once the data is processed, these additional graph variables will be used to improve the existing fraud detection machine learning algorithms ATB is currently using. The benefits to ATB will be more proactive fraud prevention and improved customer lifetime value.

Planification de la distribution en contexte de livraisons quotidiennes sous contraintes defenetres de temps Year Two

Le premier objectif de ce projet est de developper un algorithme de resolution du probleme de planification de tournees de livraison a un niveau fonctionnel. Par fonctionnel, nous entendons integrer toutes les contraintes operationnelles du secteur industriel du partenaire afin que l’algorithme soit exploitable dans un contexte concret. Pour ce faire, une collaboration tres etroite entre le partenaire et le chercheur est necessaire. Une fois l’algorithme developpe, l’objectif suivant est de supporter l’integration de celui-ci dans un logiciel de planification developpe par le partenaire industriel en collaboration avec le chercheur.

Improved Monitoring of Arctic Sea Ice from Multi-Frequency Radar Remote Sensing

Sea ice is an integral part of the climate system. To obtain hemispheric-scale information about sea ice and the snow cover on top, satellite radar remote sensing is the method of choice. Microwave frequencies are ideally suited to observe sea ice/snow because they are independent of clouds and penetrate the snow and sea ice. However, snow and its geophysical properties complicate the retrieval of snow depth, sea ice thickness and other critical variables from satellite radar sensors. Therefore, we need high-resolution radar measurements with coincident snow and sea ice geophysical properties. In this research, we propose to utilize high-resolution, surface-based multi-frequency radar measurements of Arctic sea ice at Ka-, Ku-, X-, C- and L-band radar frequencies. Measurements were collected during the 2019-20 year-long MOSAiC International Arctic Drift Expedition: the largest and longest expedition in the Arctic Ocean. Radar data will be analyzed to develop observational and theoretical approaches to improve satellite-based algorithms of snow and sea ice parameters essential to climate research.

Research and development of irinotecan derivative (SN38)-peptide conjugate against Sortilin-positive colorectal cancers

The major aim of this research project is to accelerate the development of the SORT1+ oncology platform. This
novel platform is based on a new proprietary peptide targeting Sortilin, a key scavenging receptor. Sortilin has
been reported to play a role in cell survival and in the progression of human cancers. For instance, Sortilin
expression has been associated with the aggressiveness of breast cancers and was observed in other highly
metastatic types of cancers such as colorectal cancer (CRC), melanoma and lung cancers. Data that will be
generated from this intern will further validate the anti-CRC properties of our irinotecan/SN38-peptide conjugate
in CRC cancer animal models and improve the value of SORT1+ technology. The achievement of milestones in
this project will create significant value for the partner organization and validate SORT1+ technology as a platform.
This will be a key and significant inflexing point for the value of the company that will facilitate the creation of new
partnerships and the development of new research projects.

Town of Vermilion Business & IT Innovation

The Town of Vermilion, in cooperation with Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) propose to take a student team of one Bachelor of Applied Information Systems Technology and one Bachelor of Business Administration to complete a total of four business process innovation projects.
1) Modernization of building security including electronic monitoring equipment and keyless entry
2) Upgrading of information technology networks from the current local server to a more efficient and modern system
3) Digitization of paper based records to further a transition to paperless record retention
4) Implementation of a Tangible Capital Asset records module in Serenic Software from excel records for a more efficient and error proof system

22CAN Inc

22CAN Inc is an AI-enabled Canadian recruiting start-up where we leverage our DigitalTwin recommender platform that match similar (“twin” concept) knowledge professionals to opportunities. Our project focus is: NLP Algorithm Experimentation. This is where we will advance the 22CAN NLP platform through advanced algorithm experimentation.

Graded Rouquier blocks for Hecke and Schur algebras

Perhaps the most basic object in the world of representation theory is the symmetric group, the group of all ways of rearranging a set of size n. Despite the simplicity of this object, it is still very rich, and its category of representations is a remarkable mixture of combinatorial accessibility, and exceptionally difficult questions. Famously, the dimensions of simple representations over the symmetric group over finite fields (and their generalizations, decomposition numbers) are devilishly hard to compute.

In recent years, work of many authors has uncovered a new and surprising property of the group algebras of symmetric groups and their generalizations, Ariki-Koike algebras: they possess a grading. We aim to study this grading in a sector of the representation theory of AK algebras which is relatively simple: the Rouquier blocks. These were introduced relatively recently in the case of AK algebras, and thus much remains to be learned about them.

Optimizing the computation of HPC Clusters and the automation of the instances in the cloud deployment

Effective cloud deployment is a major challenge in the academic community. The rapid scalability and quick workload deployment benefits make it easy to overlook data security concerns and allow for runaway costs as a large workload can be provisioned that is difficult to manage effectively.
This challenge presents an opportunity to develop reusable solutions to this problem that will provide immediate cost optimization and efficiency to services provided to academia in Canada by CMC Microsystems and in the long-term, these solutions can be used freely by academics independent of CMC through the open publication of the methods and publishable portions of any code developed