Innovative Projects Realized

Financial policy implications of large deposits for Indigenous Credit Unions

The project seeks to understand how the financial regulation of large scale cash transactions negatively impacts Indigenous communities. As well as, the time and cost associated with the regulatory burden of tracking large scale transactions for small, Indigenous credit unions. The partner organization, Me-Dian Credit Union, will benefit from cost savings and regulatory changes by allowing them to become more competitive with payday lenders.

Is this natural language?

The partner provides software that uses natural language processing techniques to store and analyze documents of different firms. This includes their widely used smart document storage software. The techniques suffer performance when they use text that is not written in well-formed “natural language”, such as tables and labels. The intern will be designing and implementing a model to classify given text as being well-formed or not. The model will then be included in existing software to detect if given text is well-formed or not and the text that is not well-formed will not be considered. This should improve the performance of existing software and future software that analyze text.

Parcours Hubble- Voir loin. Rêver grand.

Au Québec, seulement 64% des adolescents obtiennent leur diplôme d’études secondaires. Le décrochage scolaire entraîne des conséquences importantes chez le jeune et la société. Puisque ce phénomène est le résultat de difficultés personnelles, mais aussi familiales, scolaires et sociales, y répondre nécessite une approche coordonnée. Ce projet de recherche permettra de mesurer l’impact d’une intervention sur le décrochage scolaire d’adolescents provenant de milieux défavorisés. 30 élèves participeront à un bootcamp de deux jours organisé par Éducaide qui favorisera le contact avec des réalités différentes et la diversification de la notion de réussite. Ils rencontreront ensuite mensuellement un mentor afin d’établir des cibles de développement. L’intervention sera mesurée à l’aide de questionnaires et d’entrevue individuelle. Les partenaires développeront de nouvelles façons d’augmenter la motivation et l’engagement scolaire des jeunes à risque de décrochage scolaire.

Connecting the ecosystem

The Tribe Network seeks to connect entrepreneurs within the BIPOC ecosystem to funding, mentorship and coaching. The project will help bring more BIPOC entrepreneurs onto a single platform to help collaborate and create sustainable businesses to help create jobs and improve the finances.

Industrial Health and Safety Data Management and Training Mobile Platform

Accidents can be predicted and avoided with the use of health and safety data management software. (Guzman 2013) While a variety of IT health and safety management solutions have been developed for Fortune 500 companies, few of these solutions meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. One that does is Business2Mobile’s (B2M) Web API Data Management platform, which can help small and medium size companies to keep track of health and safety data. This research will help to measure market size and competitors, and will identify gaps within the marketplace. The project scope is to analyze market scenarios and trends, give recommendations and develop a market penetration strategy. Intern will use different research methodologies, including internet research, interviews, surveys, and case studies, to collect information that will assist B2M in improving their products and services. Further, they will benefit from the strategic plan intern develops, which will have recommendations for the expansion of their products and services.

DevOps of Descriptive and Predictive Analytics for Efficient Energy Supply and Work and Asset Management

NS Power is modernizing the electricity grid as a step closer to achieving a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable energy future for Nova Scotia. Smart meters are the standard in electrical meters. They are sophisticated, digital devices that record electricity use and send it to the company through a safe, secure wireless connection. These smart meters have now started providing a large amount of data streaming from every household in the province. While managing such a large amount of data is a challenge, the company is excited about the wealth of information that can be extracted from the dataset. The preliminary experimentation with the data helped us develop a proof of concept that consisted of various features such as stakeholder dashboards, power usage analytics, electricity consumption patterns, etc. The proof of concept is now in place and it has been tested with different datasets. This process helped us develop heuristics for data cleaning and creating configurations. However, this proof of concept now needs to be converted into a prototype that can be deployed and implemented as a full-fledged system at NS Power.

Non(Sleep)Social: Reclaiming the silent night

The project focuses on the benefits of wakefulness at night through listening, and listening collectively, in the context of public programs for exhibitions.

(NON)SLEEP SOCIAL challenges ideas around sleep and sleep ‘disorders’ such as insomnia as unwanted wakefulness during the night. The project focuses on the potential of all night cultural events within the context of the 24/7 city for an awareness of a diversity of life rhythms.

This application is the research phase of the project that will result in the curation of an overnight public program as part the Sociability of Sleep exhibition at the Agora Hydro Quebec in July 2023 involving McGill’s campus community radio CKUT.

Co-creation of a roadmap for data and information infrastructure for youth homelessness prevention

The research project aims to co-create a roadmap for data and knowledge infrastructure that contributes to youth homeless prevention in Canada. A roadmap will be created through collaboration between researchers, policymakers, service providers, and people with lived experience of youth homelessness. Based on the stakeholders’ concerns, priorities and needs identified in the initial phase, the intern will join the PolicyWise Team to lead environmental and jurisdictional scans of youth homelessness services and resources. The intern will also design and conduct stakeholder consultations to identify options that address needs and concerns related to youth homelessness in Canada. During the roadmap co-creation, the intern will design a strategy to access and consolidate a range of stakeholder input and feedback. The roadmap is expected to facilitate timely access to data insights for informed decision making and coordinated service delivery and research collaboration in the youth homelessness sector. PolicyWise can benefit from the intern’s expertise working with hard-to-reach populations applying the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion approach.

Embedded FBG sensor system for cylindrical roller bearing condition monitoring

Rolling bearings are widely used in products and machinery with rotational motion due to their low rolling friction. Recently, integrating advanced sensor units in the bearings is in a rising demand due to the market requirements. In addition, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged the real-time monitoring of connected equipment and machinery. However, there are still limitations for the current smart bearings, such as, lacking sensitivity considering the fault prediction, complicated structure, and so on. In order to meet the market demands, our project is going to develop a smart bearing by embedding the FBG optical fiber into the outer ring of the bearing, which can sensitively detect the strain data, thus realize high sensitivity for real-time fault diagnosis. Meanwhile, the structure of the embedded FBG bearing is simple and feasible for manufacturing. FBG optical fiber can collect information including temperature, rotation speed, strain/force, and so on of the bearings simultaneously. Currently, our smart bearing project is under lab test and simulation stage. The results meet our expectation so far. We plan to fulfill the embedded FBG optical fiber smart bearing design as a single unit and check the manufacturing feasibility for the next stage.

Evosep One LC optimization and absolute quantitation of proteins in human and mouse plasma using Multiple Reaction Monitoring and Parallel Reaction Monitoring-Mass Spectrometry

Proteins are sub-cellular molecules that provide important information of how well the body is functioning at a given time. Abnormal increase or decrease in the level of proteins can be indicative of the presence of a disease. Hence, developing tools to accurately measure protein levels in the human body is of utmost importance. Over the past few decades, a specialised instrument called the Mass Spectrometer (MS) has been used for this. The MS instrument can be used in a targeted and untargeted manner. In the untargeted mode, the instrument provides us information on what kind of protein is present in a sample, whereas in the targeted mode, scientists tell the instrument what it needs to look for. When used in the targeted mode, the MS can be used as a validation tool that re-confirms the presence of certain proteins in the sample. Additionally, it also provides information the exact amount of protein present
Although the targeted mode works very efficiently, it is time consuming and unreliable when the protein concentration is very low in the patient sample.

Developing and Implementing Testing Protocols for Large-Scale Hydrogen Storage in Lotsberg Salt Formation

This project will develop and implement laboratory protocols to evaluate the possibility of large-scale H2 storage in salt caverns in Canada. Proof of concept experiments will be conducted on core samples from the Lotsberg Salt Formation to identify and unlock challenges related to containment, contamination, and consumption of stored H2 in salt caverns. The laboratory protocol developed in this research will be used to analyze the core samples and to obtain the optimum design and operational parameters. Field-scale implementation of the developed protocols will facilitate transfer the knowledge to other companies to make the technology broadly used in other salt formation in Canada.

Application of a Novel 3D Centerline Extraction Algorithm for Automated Coronary Artery Mapping and Quantification

Clinical radiology and medical imaging research are beneficiated from the increased effectiveness of modern computer vision and image processing technologies. In order to automatically extract 3D centerlines from complex 3D images, our lab recently created a novel image processing technique. We will demonstrate its clinical utility using real-world medical imaging data. Therefore, the objectives of this project are to: 1) use an open-access algorithm evaluation framework to both quantify the accuracy and demonstrate the utility of our method using a real-world medical imaging benchmark; and 2) improve the computer code into an intuitive software suite to perform automated quantification of blood vessel diameter and cross-sectional area along the segmented coronary artery branches to highlight significant areas that need closer inspection.