Innovative Projects Realized

Creative Approaches to Access: Implementing sustainable accessibility at Centre CLARK

This purpose of this research project is it implement creative access affordances at Centre CLARK, an artist-run gallery in Montreal’s Mile End Neighbourhood, to increase the participation of visitors with various disabilities and access needs. Divided into four sub-projects, this research will use interviews, access audits and participatory workshops to find creative solutions to access issues in the categories of curatorial design, structural design, digital interventions, and artist representation at Centre CLARK. This will result in a valuable and sustainable programme of access at Centre CLARK that will increase the number of visitors who will meaningfully engage with exhibits. The broader aim of this research is to increase the participation of disabled individuals in Montreal’s art and culture scenes

Limits to Cryptocurrency Arbitrage

Rapid growth of cryptocurrencies has drawn the attention of practitioners, regulators, and scholars. The trading venues for these digital assets display a number of features that make them a sui generis laboratory for studying price formation and market efficiency. One notable feature of cryptocurrency is high and strongly time-varying yields, whether measured by APRs offered on staking sites, secured borrowing costs, or apparent contango of the futures curve. This study will help understand the nature of these yields-–what drives their levels and variation, and how they can persist despite arbitrage pressures. Drawing on the limits to arbitrage literature, we will explore cross exchange, cross product, and cross time variation in the implied yields of cryptocurrencies. Our preliminary results of a series of event studies suggest that cryptocurrency yields are highly sensitive to changes in market conditions such as shifts in regulatory frameworks and issuance of close substitutes.

Natural Language Processing for Medical Billing Code Prediction

It is extremely challenging for clinicians and health researchers to extract insights from unstructured text
data at scale. Recently, there has been a significant advancement in Natural Language Processing. Large
deep-learning models, most famous of which are the transformers, generate pre-trained embeddings and
are developed to extract insights from massive amounts of text.
This project develops AI models to assist the billing code assignment tasks. We focus on the ability of the
pre-trained embeddings to assist the identification and appropriate assignment of billing codes for the
insurable services defined by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP). Training a model to generate rich
enough embeddings for the automatic coding task has the potential to improve predictive models for other
clinical NLP tasks, such as symptom extraction, cohort analysis, disease tracking, adverse effect
identification.

Trash Is Cash: Applying machine learning to optimize the utilization of crop and forest residues in rural communities

Around 4 billion tonnes per year of crop and forest residues (biomass) are burned in open air, because they are often loose, wet, bulky, and too expensive to collect and centralize for subsequent conversion into useful products. This results in air pollution, and in some cases, exacerbated wildfires. In this project, we are applying machine learning and optimization techniques to coordinate a new class of small-scale, low-cost, decentralized bioconversion systems capable of rural, decentralized deployment. This opens up the possibility of a fleet of roaming biomass conversion systems supporting localized waste-to-value conversion in rural, hard-to-access (and sometimes off-grid) communities, such that these communities are self-sufficient without being reliant on vulnerable international supply chains for their key commodities/chemicals.

Portable Wireless Interface for Implantable Medical Devices

The recording of brain activity through neural Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) has a wide range of applications, such as studying brain patterns for seizure detection or brain stimulation to alleviate motor disorders. Some IMDs communicate with an external interface platform, which offloads the recorded data from, programs, and supplies power to the IMD. However, existing data transfer methods rely on wires fixed to a computer terminal, thus restricting patient mobility, and limiting the total recording time. This prevents physicians from collecting higher quality data that can be gained from longer recording sessions taken when patients are in a familiar environment. This project will develop a portable interface to wirelessly charge neural IMDs and transmit recorded brain activity to an external storage location, to enable continuous neural measurement without restricting a patient’s free range of motion.

The people-nature nexus: Exploring relational values of sociocultural and biophysical ecosystem services in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas

This research will explore the connections between nature and people in Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs). These values will be articulated by identifying the ecosystem services (i.e. the goods and services provided to people by nature) and determining which of these hold significant cultural values. These values will be compared using a variety of existing ecosystem service valuation tools. The outcomes of this work will benefit the partner organisation by supporting efforts to share knowledge and build capacity for IPCAs, enhance Indigenous leadership in the conservation of biological and cultural diversity, help build sustainable and resilient communities, support the reconciliation between Indigenous and newcomer societies, and provide innovative solutions for (re)connecting people with their environment.

Concrétisation du produit en réalité virtuelle

iFeelvirtuel.io est un premier lieu digital dédié à la communauté de Réalité Virtuelle (VR). L’entreprise produit en ce moment la majorité des captations VR/ 360° d’événements, Live et conférences (pour des artistes et des générateurs de contenus) avec pour but de démocratiser la VR. Nous priorisons la transmission de notre savoir-faire en production, afin de permettre à nos partenaires de produire eux-mêmes, favoriser l’économie régionale et la génération de contenu VR/360°. L’entreprise a actuellement besoin d’un bras contrôlable à distance supportant ses caméras.

Une équipe d’étudiant incluant le demandant, Éliot Gosselin-Beaupré, est arrivé à terme avec un prototype qui doit être assembler selon l’assemblage final.Cependant, ce projet demeure très théorique et plusieurs essais mécaniques doivent être complétés afin de s’assurer de la validité du produit dans l’environnement où il sera utilisé et ainsi lancer la commercialisation.L’objectif est de confirmer que le produit remplis les besoins lors de son utilisation réelle et ainsi évaluer le niveau de la durabilité de ce produit afin de pouvoir mettre sur pied un produit qui présente une bonne longévité. La durabilité est un critère essentielle pour le mandataire iFeelvirtual qui veut afficher un produit qui aura une longue durée de vie, ce qui évite les bris prématurés et donc un problème de surproduction, engendrant le mécontentement des utilisateurs en plus de diminuer l’impact environnemental en terme de fabrication.

Assessing Borrelia infection in dogs to determine the risk of Lyme disease in New Brunswick

To assess people’s risk of contracting Lyme disease in New Brunswick we will test 700 dogs for antibodies to the bacterium that causes the disease. Lyme disease is caused by infection with the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, generally transmitted through a tick bite. Lyme disease is a debilitating disease and the risk of contracting it is increasing in in New Brunswick as well as through the rest of Canada. Because diagnosis of Lyme disease is difficult in humans, we are using dogs as a sentinel species. Dogs mount a robust immune response to infection, and as they live with humans, determining the number of dogs with Lyme disease can help assess the risk of Lyme disease for people living in the same households and communities. Our study will consist of testing dogs with a commercial test kit in both the winter and summer, to determine the peak time for infection, as well as comparative tests of the human and canine Lyme disease test procedures.

Launch: Ideas – KNBA Digital Content Project

Kanata North Business Association is home to over 540 companies and a fully innovative technology park; Hub350. This project will help the partner organization to bring new talent and attraction towards Hub350 while elevating it’s profile. In addition, the project will research and generate digital marketing content that will attract a broader investment community to its technology hub.

Determining the Current Status of Startup Incubation in Canada

This study will, through a survey of the Incubator members of the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) establish a baseline for Incubator activity in Canada and examine the impct that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on both incubators and their member startups and assess to what degree changes caused by the pandemic may have long-lasting effects. The study will include examination of applications, intake, services provided, links to external investment sources and exits.

Nutrition Internship

The objective of this project is to help analyze nutrition data of select ingredients and define how processing methodologies affect nutrition composition.

Penrose Application Proposal

Penrose Partners is a blockchain startup firm that provides transactional, educational, and corporate consulting/material production services to businesses, institutional investors, and disruptive tech companies in the blockchain space. We are the trusted advisor that bridges the gap between businesses with great ideas, and blockchain adoption.