Innovative Projects Realized

A Novel Bone Anabolic Treatment for critical size defects in rats

Often fractures don’t heal properly or large defects must be repaired in the bone due to accidents or disease. The drugs and treatments that are currently used to repair fractures are only partially effective. Mesentech Inc has developed a new drug that has shown a strong effect on bone formation in rats. In this project, we will test the effect of this drug in a rat model of normal healing and challenging healing. We will assess the effect of this drug, to accelerate normal healing and enhance challenging healing. We expect that the new drug will make the bones heal faster and better. This will open new treatment approaches to improve fracture healing.

Stock Investment Model

Investing has never been easier, but the majority of individuals still are reluctant to invest and those that do still face a fundamental problem. “What should I invest in?” It’s because the investment journey for a retail investor is broken and Utradea is proven to solve it.

For an average investor, prior to making an investment, they would conduct the following steps: ideation, comprehension, validation, and execution from different platforms – each servicing a specific need and is overcomplicated for the average user. On top of that, it would take months before someone found their suite of tools, platforms, and brokerages they’d like to work just to place one confident trade.

Investors require investment models to support their investment decision and investment process. Models should be automated to an extent, allow investors to spend time review the results, as opposed to trying to source the data and calculate in outcomes themselves. This investment model will help retail investors have a better understanding of investing, investment strategies, and will improve their investment outcomes.

Innovative Investment Education

Innovative Investment Education

Investing has never been easier, but the retail investment journey is broken. This is even more difficult to answer because investors are overwhelmed with information, don’t trust most online sources, and it feels like it is a solo endeavor. An intuitive platform that supports retail investors through their entire investment journey, from ideation to validation to placing a trade. Utradea is a self-sustaining and balanced ecosystem of curated content, investment analytics, and social engagement

Overview: What is the innovation project about?
Developing an innovative model to educate investors through their investment process. We want to develop an educational model that provides new and intermedia investors with the information they need t feel confident through their investment journey. This will eb done through several touchpoints and features on the Utradea platform

What is the main goal of the company (a final product, software, knowledge in a specific area, etc)?
Create an intuitive and engaging model that provides investors with information they need to become better investors. It will be components and features throughout the platform that support this journey.

Innovation: We are leveraging learning/educational techniques and playing it to financial concepts in a way that is engaging and intuitive especially for new investors.

What methodology/techniques are to be used?
Feature Driven Development (FDD) – This is an agile approach to development It is customer-centric, iterative, and incremental, with the goal of delivering tangible software results often and efficiently.

Authority Score Optimization

For an average investor, prior to making an investment, they would conduct the following steps: ideation, comprehension, validation, and execution from different platforms – each servicing a specific need and is overcomplicated for the average user. On top of that, it would take months before someone found their suite of tools, platforms, and brokerages they’d like to work just to place one confident trade.

One of Utradea’s main value proposition is the ability for users to share investment ideas and content on the platform with other users. When a user contributes investment content to the platform, they are eligible to receive monetary compensation for their contribution. This is like YouTube where people can post videos and receive payouts based on the number of views, etc. Utradea has developed a proprietary payout model to reward these users, know as contributors, for their investment information contribution to the platform. The main component of this model is known as the Authority Score. The Authority Score tracks a number of metrics related to contributor and their content (i.e. length of content, quality of content, number of views, directional correctness, etc.) The Authority Score determines the payout a contributor is eligible to receive.

The purpose behind this model is to find a balance between incentivizing contributors to contribute content to Utradea, while reducing the total payout. The Authority Score model is preliminary in nature and needs to be tested, refined, and optimized to find the ideal balance between contributor regards and payout reduction.

Guys’ Healthy Living Atlantic Canada: Bridges Institute and Public Schools in Atlantic Canada

Bridges Institute is a counselling centre in Nova Scotia with a mission to help people practice healthy, loving and respectful relationships with their partners and families. Bridges seeks to prevent domestic violence. Changing traditional male role norms may not only increase healthy help-seeking behaviours but may play an upstream role in the prevention of domestic violence (Flood, 2019). Bridges Institute, in partnership with Nova Scotia’s Status of Women, and a faculty member from St Francis Xavier University, share a commitment to prevent domestic violence. This work has been supported over the last three years by Nova Scotia’s action plan to prevent domestic violence, with an understanding that engaging men and boys in normalizing help-seeking and building healthy masculinity and relationships can contribute to preventing violence against women and girls. A recent school-based pilot intervention successfully dropped traditional adolescent male norms for more than 100 boys in public schools across Nova Scotia. This partnership continues today with the roll out of a series of interventions for grades 5 to 12 boys’ in Nova Scotia. Our work is a direct opportunity to overcome the challenges described above and increase the positive mental health of boys from grades 5 to 10, increase the capacity and long-term sustainability of Bridges staff and school-based staff to successfully facilitate boys’ intervention programming, and potentially reduce domestic violence long-term. The intern’s key role will be to work with Bridges Institute and their partners to create a best practice model and manual.

Orion Business Development Plan

SkyIT is an innovator within the rapidly changing fleet management world. SkyIT has developed Orion as an enterprise fleet management solution specialized within the aviation industry. The SkyIT-Orion Software has leveraged its privileged access in the global aviation market to create a one-of-a-kind system that focuses on environmental impact mitigation and changing regulatory environments while reducing costs for fleet operators. SkyIT is the only providers of such a unique platform that match specific organizational challenges while putting Governance, Environment, and Sustainability at the center of the decision for our clients. SkyIT’s Orion technology has been engineered to be one of the most reliable integrated software systems on the market, optimizing and progressing fleet performance in the aviation industry. Orion’s primary goal is to increase efficiency through innovative and forward-thinking technology at a reduced cost. This is all made possible by actively responding to altering environmental regulations by monitoring and measuring GHG emissions.

SlicerAR: software platform for augmented reality medical visualization

The project’s aim is to develop SlicerAR, free open-source software infrastructure for rendering native scenes (medical images, anatomical structures, etc.) on the augmented reality devices within the 3D Slicer (www.slicer.org) medical image analysis platform, to allow end-user applications to display anatomical models overlaid on the real-world view.

Closing the (Para)diplomatic Gap: Explaining Variation in Global Paradiplomat

The research project seeks to understand why some regional governments (the governmental level below central states) are more internationally active than others, a phenomenon known as paradiplomacy. I hypothesize this variation is influenced by the presence/absence of a patron state. A patron state is a foreign state which acts as an advocate of a region’s paradiplomacy, opening doors to other foreign partnerships and opportunities for more intensive international activities.

To test this theory, I compare two regional governments (Flanders and Wallonia) with different levels of international activity and different approaches to foreign patronage: Flanders clearly has a patron (the Netherlands), while Wallonia has an absent or unidentified patron (likely France).

To investigate the link between the theorized cause (foreign patronage) and effect (the intensity of a region’s international activities), I will spend the research internship gathering and analyzing primary data from two main sources: (1) semi-structured interviews with Flemish, Walloon, Belgian, Dutch, and French policymakers connected to paradiplomacy; (2) archival material from the Belgian, Dutch, and French national archives. I expect to find evidence suggesting Flanders’ and Wallonia’s international activities are influenced by their different approaches to foreign patronage.

Development of natural antimicrobial topical product from traditional Philippine medicinal plants

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when antibiotic drugs and products stops working, making it difficult to treat infections and diseases which could lead to further health complications and death. Therefore, development of antibiotic products is needed to control the increasing cases of AMR. Medicinal plants are a great source of natural antibiotic compounds to make antibiotic drugs and products. This project evaluates the potential to develop a topical antimicrobial product that incorporates medicinal plant extracts from the Philippines which have been found to have antibiotic properties. Market potential of the product will also be researched by contacting customers, experts, and potential investors in the field. Findings will be published once appropriate data is collected.

Exploration of an executive digital twin application

The workplace is evolving at the frontier, people and machines work side by side. In factories and industries, the trend for the past two-hundred years has been to provide mechanical devices to assist in manual labour. The benefit for people is that workplaces are more equitable and accommodating to people with disabilities. The future will see people and machines work side-by-side on problem-solving tasks of increasing complexity. This project prepares for that future by showing how camera vision and digital twins can augment the senses available to people engaged in intrinsically human enterprise.

Visual Analytics for Financial Risk

Project 1: The objective of this project is to design a Visual Systemic ‘Risk Map’ as one possible prototype to address some of the issues of risk identification and analysis in the context of global financial systems. We propose the design concept of the ‘Risk Map’ using principles of Cognitive Systems Engineering (instrumental papers in this field are Rasmussen et al. 1994; Vicente and Rasmussen, 1990; Woods and Roth, 1988), which is suited to engineering for complex systems. Cognitive systems engineering addresses the issue of analyzing and designing process control systems from a human factors perspective. It diverges from the more common engineering approaches to designing process control systems by distinguishing between the physical system, sub-systems and their components, from what the operator or organization needs to do with the system to accomplish the purpose of the system; but at the same time creating user interface designs that integrate information that enables the operator to observe how failure in achieving desired system goals are propagated through the system to sub-system to components.

Porous noble metal nanosponge plasmonic photocatalysts

Plasmonic catalysis is an emerging technology which holds the promise of utilizing light to facilitate a chemical transformation. Plasmonic materials interact with incident light through the excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance producing highly energetic electron-hole pairs. These hot electrons and holes are very active and get adsorbed to the materials in their surroundings through a series of chemical reactions, providing desired products. The optical properties of these plasmonic metal nanoparticles (Au, Ag, etc.,) varies with their shape, size, arrangement, and surrounding dielectric medium. Since the materials interact with light, investigation of how these materials interact with light is crucial. The overall goal of this project is to investigate the interaction of light with the different plasmonic sponge structures (Au, Ag) with various surrounding media (TiO2, NiO) in the first step and investigation of the ability of these materials for solar energy conversion, and production of clean and green fuels such as hydrogen via water splitting, and carbon dioxide mitigation and water treatment in the second step.