Innovative Projects Realized

Resilient Yonge

The COVID-19 pandemic hit Toronto’s Downtown Yonge business area hard. This unique district, normally a centre of tourism, commerce and culture, suffered significant impacts in 2019 and 2020 with the loss of workers, students and visitors to the area. Now, with the re-opening of the province and some of those workers and students returning, businesses in the area are trying to recoup steep losses, and re-attract customers, while they are preparing for further disruptions to come with the planned construction of a new transit station at Queen Street, and the City of Toronto’s YongeTOmorrow revitalization project.

This two-year Business Strategy Internship project will unite the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area (DYBIA) and its members with four interns from Ryerson University with expertise in urban planning, neighbourhood revitalization, and public space activation to develop, implement and evaluate innovations aimed at helping businesses increase social and economic resilience post-pandemic and into the future. The interns will plan their strategies in consultation with local business owners to be informed by available data and reporting. They will work with partners on implementation and then monitor and gauge success using a range of methodologies in an iterative and collaborative framework.

This project will be overseen by Cherise Burda, Executive Director of City Building Ryerson, and Cheryll Diego, Public Realm Experience Manager at the DYBIA, and led by two Academic supervisors at Ryerson University: Victor Perez-Amado (Assistant Professor, School of Urban and Regional Planning), and Dr. Dave Colangelo (Assistant Professor, Professional Communication).

Development of visual perception systems for autonomous trains using deep convolutional neural networks

This project aims to develop a deep learning-based computer vision system of a high-performance visual perception system to support the Autonomous Rail. The developed visual perception system enables extracting rail tracks and objects in typical rail scenes using consumer grade camera and lidar sensors mounted on a moving rail. This visual perception capacity is fundamental to understand a self-ego motion and surrounding environment for supporting the Autonomous Vehicle Recovery (AVR) capability of Level 1 (L1) Autonomous Rail. With the AVR capability, the vehicle moving with a low-speed can make decision and acting as a human operator and successfully drive itself to the next stopping point. For achieving goal, two intern students at York University will closely work with a multidisciplinary engineering team at Thales Canada during eight months. The research outcomes obtained through this project will be evaluated with extensive benchmark data generated by the research team.

Bookkeeper & Funding Research Intern

ASBA is looking to facilitate the current bookkeeping activities at the Zone level by bringing some bookkeeping activities internally. The bookkeeping and funding research intern will also be responsible for assisting in grant and sponsorship research to identify potential funding sources. Part of this process will include to maintain and develop partnerships with potential sponsors and assist in the underwriting of grant applications.At the end of the internship term, the bookkeeper will also be responsible for the delivery of a research document outlining processes for bookkeeping activities at the Zone level.

New Marketing and Product Channels in the Quick Service Space

Due to increased pressures on the restaurant industry, small operations are facing new challenges. This project will identify market trends and market leaders in those trends in online ordering, delivery, operational improvements and menu improvements to help set up operations innovation initiatives.

Predicting Treatment Response to 1st-Line Pembrolizumab in Highly Expressing PDL1 Advanced NSCLC Patients using Artificial Intelligence Models

Late-stage lung cancer patients with non-small cell lung cancers who demonstrate high levels of PDL1 expression have better outcomes when placed on a combined treatment program of both immunotherapy and chemotherapy. There is a subset of patients that respond well to pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, alone as an initial treatment path, but there are no clinical methods or biomarkers able to identify good candidates for this approach. A preliminary study with a simple discriminating model pipeline identified 10 features from CT scans that can identify which patients would respond well to pembrolizumab. We suppose that we can boost the discriminating ability of these radiological biomarkers through more complex AI model architectures. By following strict and transparent reporting guidelines, we explore the clinical relevance of this model as a tool to assist oncologists in providing personalized cancer care.

Health in HIPPY Homes: Exploring the pathways and barriers to wellbeing of refugee mothers during resettlement and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the role of HIPPY in fostering household health and resilience.

The Health in HIPPY Homes project seeks to explore refugee mothers’ and families’ health during resettlement in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the various factors that affect their wellbeing during this period. Additionally, we are interested in better understanding the potential impacts that participating in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program has on the wellbeing of refugee families during resettlement. Finally, in light of the COVID-19 crisis, the project seeks to understand challenges and resilience factors experienced by refugee HIPPY families during the pandemic, as well as the employment experiences of HIPPY facilitators during this unprecedented and challenging time. Data collection for the HHH project took place from November 2020 to June 2021. The intern will work closely with the Mothers Matter Centre, national facilitators of the HIPPY program in Canada, to conduct data analysis and produce both academic and plain-language reports outlining study findings. Findings will be used to enhance the positive impacts of HIPPY on refugee families, and by healthcare and social service providers to better support refugee families during resettlement in Calgary and Canada more broadly.

Détection et évitement d’obstacles pour un drone nautique autonome avec utilisation d’un échosondeur multifaisceaux

Un embarcation nautique autonome doit pouvoir naviguer en utilisant les données qui lui sont disponibles. Dans la plupart des cas, une telle embarcation utilise seulement un GPS pour connaitre sa position. Toutefois, ceci ne lui permet pas d’éviter les obstacles flottants, et encore moins les obstacles sous l’eau comme les hauts-fonds. Un système de navigation est donc requis pour pouvoir éviter ces obstacles imprévisibles tout en naviguant adéquatement pour la prise de données. Un capteur SONAR et des caméras seront ajoutés à une embarcation nautique servant à prendre des relevés bathymétriques afin de lui permettre de naviguer plus aisément et rapidement sur l’eau sans avoir à se soucier des obstacles.

Growing the Impact Field in Canada with Independent Media

My research seeks to explore the growing field of Impact Producing in Canada. Impact Producing is
defined as the labor of maximizing a documentary film’s potential for social change. This field often
involves creating partnerships between documentary films and existing social movements and the
nonprofit sector. My research will explore the methodologies and development of a 15 ??week impact
producing cohort. This program will train 5 additional people to have the skills and knowledge required
to be Impact Producers. This will contribute to the partner organization’s goal of growing this field in
Canada.

Smart Parking Garage

This study will determine the applied wind loading on the steel structure of the novel Electric Vehicle Automated Parking (EVAP). It will develop proper design guidelines for steel helical piles to support EVAP considering gravitational (self-weight of EVAP and cars) and environmental loads (i.e. wind, snow and earthquake). EVAP is the world’s first integrated parking system offering residents of the “Electric Vehicle Enclave” (EVE), London, fully-automated EV pick-up and parking. This concept will demonstrate novel parking and charging infrastructure for autonomous vehicles and address the lack of high-density EV charging in parking-restricted urban environments. EVAP will autonomously dispatch community-shared EVs to resident’s doorsteps on command, thereby reducing the need for car ownership within the community. EVAP will contribute to annual direct GHG reductions of 201 t CO2e by 2030, which can aid Canada in achieving its goal of reducing green gas emissions. This technology will also be used in the USA, which will further increase its positive impact.

Multivariate random effects model for Integrated measurement of green veneer thickness and roughness

Thickness and surface roughness are the two main veneer quality criteria affecting material recovery, plywood glue bond quality, and glue consumption. At present, on-line green veneer thickness and surface roughness are generally not measured, which causes difficulty in assessing overall veneer quality for a better control of log conditioning and veneer peeling process. In this project, we will investigate the feasibility and operational conditions of a laser-based real-time approach in the pilot plant to jointly measure those two important quality criteria and subsequently develop a statistical model for accurately predicting such two dimensional measurements. A pilot plant test will be conducted at FPInnovations, followed by a production trial in an interior BC plywood mill. The pilot plant test is aimed to assess the operational conditions, gather samples for preliminary data analysis, and get correct sample size for the mill trial. The mill trial is aimed to collect real-time data on green veneer thickness and surface roughness in real production mode. Based on the data acquired, final phase of the project is to develop statistical models to predict overall veneer quality for a better process control. The models will be applicable to all other plywood mills in BC.

Validation of PeCOD in Strategic Applications, Freshwater and Wastewater

MANTECH’s has business strategy is to complete direct experimental validation of the PeCOD patented technology in strategic sites in the Western Provices, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. In Manitoba, this includes working with the University of Manitoba at the International Institute of Sustainable Development’s Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA), in Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Research Council on the Protection of Freshwaters, in British Columbia, winery wastewater and in Alberta, multi-faceted work. In Alberta, compliance environmental testing is privatized which provides MANTECH the opportunity to experiment in two areas. 1. PeCOD as the new alternative Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) method and as a Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) estimator. The current method for COD requires 3 hours using mercury, dichromate and acid chemicals heated at 150 degrees Celsius for 2 hours. PeCOD compltes the test in 10 minutes utilizing a photocatalytic nanotechnology. The University of Waterloo Institutes of Nanotechnology is working with MANTECH to futher develop the PeCOD nanotechnology. BOD takes 5 days to comple, thus not useful for any impact.

This project will build upopn the University of Waterloo’s research by working with the western provincial and municipal Governments, and third part environmental and soil testing laboratories,to ensure the proposed green method meets their requirequirements for accreditation and reporting.

Sustainable Desktop Program Creation/Renewal

We are looking for two interns to help reproduce a sustainable desktop program intended to track and store client database. Our current program (CMP) will no longer be supported but the program creator is accessible and can assist in supervising/answering questions. The current program contains all the code for the features required for our business. There was discussion about creating a new program that is based off the current program which may involve “translating” the current code. Additionally, importing the information from the current program to the new program would be an additional task that we can provide.