Innovative Projects Realized

L’expérience gestionnaire dans le Réseau de la Santé et des Services Sociaux (RSSS) du Québec

Un personnel valorisé et en nombre suffisant représente une condition essentielle à l’accomplissement de la mission première des établissements du RSSS : offrir une expérience usager positive, agréable et de qualité. Or, la pénurie de main d’oeuvre qui sévit actuellement au sein du réseau ainsi que l’essoufflement des gestionnaires et du personnel à pied d’oeuvre constitue des éléments qui fragilisent l’accomplissement de cette mission. Comment rendre le RSSS plus humain et performant tel qu’énoncé dans le plan santé du MSSS? C’est à cette question que cette étude souhaite répondre en s’appuyant sur les piliers du réseau : les gestionnaires et employés qui le font vivre au quotidien. Plus spécifiquement, ce projet compte brosser le portrait de facteurs organisationnels, psychosociaux et personnels qui composent l’expérience au travail de gestionnaires et employés du RSSS. Par le biais de groupes de discussion focalisée, les gestionnaires et employés de l’établissement partenaire sont invités à partager leurs perceptions des pratiques de leadership en place et de certains facteurs psychosociaux (p.ex., soutien psychosocial, latitude décisionnelle, charge de travail) de l’environnement de travail. Une approche qualitative (analyse de contenu) sera privilégiée afin de poursuivre l’atteinte de l’objectif visé.

Sustainable development of solid waste management in the Riding Mountain National Park

Riding Mountain National Park is a national park in western Manitoba and managed by Parks Canada. The populations of Riding Mountain National Park and Wasagaming town are seasonal and fluctuate drastically throughout the year. During the peak season, which generally runs from May to October, Riding Mountain National Park is a very popular tourist destination, receiving nearly 400,000 visitors in a season. Parks Canada provides waste and recycling collection, transportation, processing, and disposal services for the majority of the Riding Mountain National Park area. The fluctuating population influence waste generation. The project aims to study the current waste management system, provide a better understanding of the generated solid waste in peak season and off-peak season, and develop a sustainable waste management system at the Riding Mountain National Park area.

Multi-modal Defect Detection of Fillet Joints in Gas Metal Arc Welding

Failure in pipelines may have financial and life-threatening consequences. High-quality weld joints in pipelines can avoid these consequences and improve the company’s productivity and reputation. To improve the weld quality, an efficient solution is to detect the defects. A collaboration of human and robots can provide an accurate, robust defect detection system. This system requires sensors to observe and record the information during the welding process. It also requires an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to distinguish the defective and normal data. This project aims to develop an appropriate AI model to detect the defects in fillet joints during Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) process. We will use a collaborative welding robot to collect sufficient training data including the welding images, sound signals, and welding parameter. Then we will label the data and use transfer learning and fusion learning rules to train an AI model on the prepared dataset.

A Study on the Durability and Service Life of Concrete Gravity Base Structures (Phase 1, 2)

The project focuses on the development of some HPC mixtures using concrete materials available in Newfoundland. The developed HPC mixtures can be successfully used by concrete suppliers in Newfoundland area especially for the construction of marine and offshore structures. The project also aims to provide data-based analysis on the service life of some local concrete mixtures to be used in gravity base structures. The data-based analysis will give the designers/engineers a vision about the expected service life time of some common concrete mixtures and can assist decision makers to address uncertainty regarding the decommissioning of offshore structures especially if the reuse decision was favored.

Local Black History Internship Program

The Local Black History Internship Program will provide an undergraduate student from the University of Windsor with a unique opportunity to conduct research with a university professor and develop a museum exhibit for the Amherstburg Freedom Museum. This position will offer the intern insights into how the study of the past is conducted by professional historians, as well as valuable hands-on experiences in the fields of public history and museum studies. The program will furnish the Amherstburg Freedom Museum with support to further develop their museum offerings, with the hopes of attracting additional visitors to the Museum. Additionally, it will enable the Museum to further showcase the diverse lived experiences of Black individuals throughout the region.

Machine Learning for Particle Detection

The overall goal of the project is too improve the precision of CMS, a detector used in particle physics experiment. The project will focus on two aspects: improving photon and electron detection and improving jet detection (a shower of particles). In the detector, multiple particles are detected at the same time. Photons and electrons are detected in the same section of the detector, making it hard to distinguish their signal. As a solution, a new machine learning algorithm has been created to replace the current algorithm. The intern is to evaluate the performance of this new algorithm and compare it with the older one. It is expected that the algorithm will be more successful than the previous one. If this is the case, we will then use our improved photon energy readings as a reference to compare signals from particle jets which should have the same energy. This will allow to determine a correction factor for the jets energy readings.

Epictrode – Customizable Printed Medical Tattoo Electrodes for Bio-signal Acquisition

The proposed research project is focused on customizable medical tattoo electrodes used on patients in different clinical settings. These electrodes are placed in specific places on the body and are connected to medical signal acquisition systems to collect different medical signals. The signals can include ECG (heart) signals and EMG (muscle) signals, and these signals can be used to diagnose or simply monitor the respective systems (cardiac and skeletomuscular) in the body. This project is part of the Lab2Market program. Therefore, the main goal is to gain insights into the market for the developed medical tattoo technology, which will help translate the technology from the academic lab to market.

Automated Video Content Chaptering via Machine Learning

The research will focus on building a deep learning model to analyze video and audio streams of input video material, essentially creating something like a table of contents, for example:
* Minutes 0-3: Introduction. Our topic is binomial coefficients.
* Minutes 3-4: Problem source.
* Minutes 4-6: Details of the mathematics. Calculations of values.
* Minutes 6-7: Conclusions. Applications of binomial coefficients. Further reading.

Video chaptering involves deducing cues, possibly from the transcript (word choices, such as “to begin”, or “in conclusion”), the audio (clapping, pauses), or the video itself (movement, scene cuts). Such video analysis is a very large challenge, because of the huge data volumes, and so the internship will be undertaken in concert with existing video-chaptering research being conducted in the Vision & Image Processing group at the University of Waterloo. The key goal will be the construction of small, efficient networks, to see which key features emerge as having significance in the chaptering process. The intern will gain expertise in both machine learning and statistical analysis, and be expected to contribute to research in both areas.

Post-Wildfire Stand-Type Shifts in the Western Boreal

We tend to think of wildfire as resetting the biological clock back to zero; forest types always come back to whatever was there before it burned. However, new evidence reveals that this is not always the case and fire can also cause changes to forest types. For example, very hot fires can kill seeds stored in the soil, while cool fires leave behind a significant amount of stored seed in both underground and in seed cones in surviving tree crowns. Fire can thus also function as a vegetation reset button in response to environmental conditions such as droughts or changes in wildfire frequency. Understanding the details of how, why, and where such changes have occurred in the past are necessary for us to be able to predict where the boreal forest might be heading in the future under climate change scenarios. For forest managers, this knowledge will also provide some guidance on how to manage post-harvesting forest types in service of creating healthier, more resilient, and potentially more productive landscape ecosystems.

Implementing a principles-focused evaluation at the New Canadians Health Centre (NCHC)

This project will support the New Canadians Health Centre (NCHC) in implementing an internal evaluation to assess its impact on refugee communities. As a health centre that is grounded in five principles, the goal of the project is to assess whether the principles are being upheld, and how they influence refugees experience with healthcare and enhance equity and social inclusion. The NCHC will be able to use the evaluation findings to inform its practices and services to better serve refugee communities. It will support the NCHC in its continued development and in sharing evidence on refugee health within a supportive learning environment.

Functional Brain-Computer Interface (f BCI)

As brain computer interface (BCI) is an emerging technology, this project attempts to understand the functionality of this technology from the user’s perspective. To achieve this goal, a BCI-based application is developed, and users’ ideas are collected from pre- and post-experience surveys. The previous study dealt with functionality of BCI in technical level and this project is more about the user experience.

Healing the Land, Healing Ourselves: Indigenous Land Stewardship and Educational Resurgence – Youth and Schools Program

This project will explore the strengths of one existing Indigenous-led school-based ecocultural restoration program, PAPAKEN HAUTW, and support the program in dreaming and designing of a larger and more sustainable youth land stewardship/land-based learning program within the tribal school where it is currently housed and beyond, to the community and Greater Victoria School Board-SD61.