Innovative Projects Realized

Building Social Community Integration

This work facilitates point-of-impact field research and iterative prototyping toward the continued development of a production-quality social media environment – as part of a larger, ongoing program of research and development – with Iter, an electronic resource facilitating the work of a community focused on medieval and renaissance culture and its artefacts via the ‘knowledge management’ of that community, comprised of academic researchers, those in the cultural and heritage sectors, and beyond.

Automated Generation of Reference Links from Media and Parliamentary Documents to Legislative and Regulatory Artefacts

In the modern era, online news and media platforms have grown significantly. It is hard for organizations to keep track of discussions or mentions on regulatory or legislative documents online. With the rapidly growing amount of information available online, it is important to have the ability to monitor and track news and media online in efficient and automated ways.
Gnowit provides a platform to track Canadian media and political discourse to companies that are impacted by changes in Government policies, laws and regulations. The government of Canada publishes documents including news, discussions, updates on regulations and legislations. The goal of this research is to design and implement and evaluate a set of natural language processing methods and tools that can identify and track any mentions or discussions of regulatory or legislative documents in news and media online.

Étude comparative des droits canadien et suisse sur la religion au travail

Dans la culture juridique européenne il est admis que face aux revendications des salariés qui réclament le respect de leurs pratiques religieuses, il est généralement loisible à l’employeur d’accéder à celles-ci, sans jamais n’y être tenu. Cette vision s’inscrit à rebours des aménagements ou accommodements raisonnables qui prévalent au Canada et commandant à l’employeur de modifier l’environnement de travail pour l’adapter à la situation de la personne discriminée. En droits suisse et européen, l’aménagement raisonnable est un concept plutôt méconnu des lexiques juridiques et culturels. Il n’est reconnu que pour le seul motif du handicap et souvent limité à des applications sectorielles, telles que la fonction publique. Le concept n’est donc pas applicable au motif de la religion. Là où certains préconisent justement de l’étendre à la religion, d’autres y voient une avancée à pas de loups d’une individualisation encore plus poussée du droit travail, qui risque de provoquer à son tour une communautarisation croissante de la société et un effritement du « bien vivre ensemble ». Ma thèse de doctorat porte sur la religion dans les rapports de travail en droit suisse, européen et accessoirement canadien.

Development of gait detection algorithms for individuals with multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is a lifelong disease that affects the nerves of the body and causes lifelong disabilities including walking disabilities. This project aims to use smart insoles to provide clinicians with information about how patients impacted by multiple sclerosis walk. To do so, we will develop and test algorithms that use walking data from the insoles to extract meaningful information. The walking data will then be used to create personalized models using artificial intelligence to describe and study how people with multiple sclerosis walk. As a final product, objective information will be provided to clinicians to track the personalized progression of the disease in their patients to have a more targeted treatment.

Identification des paramètres géotechniques clefs et développement d’une application faisant le lien entre chantier, laboratoire et bureau pour les rapports de forages

Groupe ABS fait aujourd’hui appelle à de nombreux sous-traitants dans le cadre de leurs forages pour connaitre la
nature des sols sur les chantiers. La procédure suivie sur chantier pour la collecte des données de foration se
repose principalement sur une fiche papier, et les résultats sont transmis ensuite par le biais de la plateforme de
l’entreprise Géotech, experte en technologie de recensement géophysique. Le Groupe ABS a pour volonté de se
détacher de cette dépendance envers l’entreprise Géotech, et de moderniser le processus de rédaction des
rapports de forages en développant une application interne. Cette application ferait le lien entre les chantiers, les
laboratoires et les bureaux, en permettant aux géologues de chantier de rentrer les résultats des forages, aux
techniciens de laboratoires de consulter ces informations, et aux chargés de projets d’accéder aux données et d’en
faire la validation.

Dissecting signaling pathways mediated by plant immune receptors

Plants utilize their sophisticated innate immune system to fight against pathogens. They have abundant immune receptors to detect the pathogen attack and initiate defense. However, the molecular mechanisms of how these receptors signal downstream of pathogen recognition are largely unknown. Recently, modern metabolomics approach has been developed that allows for unbiased identification of substrates and products of uncharacterized enzymes. This technology opens new avenues of plant immunity research as a portion of plant immune receptors exhibit enzymatic activity upon pathogen recognition. My proposed research project will reveal the substrate and products of these receptors and elucidate how the molecules activate the downstream signaling and defense. My research into the signaling pathways of the immune receptors will contribute to the understanding of the complicated plant immune signaling network.

Dynamical modeling of vortex-induced vibration using frequency-constrained autoencoder neural networks

In most flows around a structure or object, the flow behind the object is characterized by a region of unsteady reverse flow. This unsteady fluid motion in the object wake induces a force upon the object or structure, which can cause flexible structures to vibrate. An ongoing engineering challenge is to understand how the wake and structure interact, and how to minimize these vibrations. This project proposes a novel method for developing simplified models, also known as Reduced Order Models, which capture the underlying mechanisms of these interactions using a combination of statistical and neural network methods. These methods find a simplified representation for the velocity in the structure wake, and then find equations that model how it changes in time. These equations can be used to understand the physics of the interactions, and to design better methods to reduce the vibrations.

Using Machine Learning to locate geological deposits

Saskatchewan Polytechnic (SP)’s Digital Integration Centre of Excellence (DICE) and geological experts at Peter Lucas Project Management Inc. (PL) will collaborate on the development of a digital system to locate aggregate sources with a large gravel content. Gravel is a non-renewable resource that is used in almost every aspect of construction. The identification of sources of gravel and the corresponding management of it is important to many different industries. The project will examine the use of machine learning (ML) and or neural network algorithms to determine the probability of a location on a map containing gravel. This resulting technology can help find more sources, will increase supply, save costs, and reduce greenhouse gases due to minimized hauling. The work done in this project expands on previous collaborations between SP DICE and PL that have shown promise.

Television formats and cultural representations at Netflix: the case of Criminal

The project I will undertake at the University of Amsterdam is part of my joint doctorate with Université de Montréal. During the proposed period of project, I plan on:

1) interviewing subjects in the context of a reception study (i.e., a number of viewers of Netflix’s Criminal; the television content I selected as my thesis’s corpus) and a production study (i.e., writers and directors from Criminal’s four local versions in Europe)

2) continue on with my research on recent European audiovisual media policies on on-demand audiovisual services and their impact on one of Netflix’s European local-language original productions specifically.

The expected outcome of this project is to better understand how a service like Netflix—which negotiates global and local components in order to reach a worldwide basis of viewers—can shape these components through its usage of abstract television formats in a way that is economically optimal for them and how this affects the locality of European content like Criminal.

Particle Size Classification for Gravel Aggregate

McIntosh Sand and Gravel Ltd. (McIntosh) is a Saskatoon based company that performs gravel crushing and processing for industry and municipalities throughout Saskatchewan. McIntosh’s mission is to disrupt the aggregate industry through the application of new technologies that will help decrease costs and streamline processes. Saskatchewan Polytechnic will work with McIntosh to develop a digital method to determine gravel source particulate size. This is traditionally done through a sieve analysis that takes a significant amount of time and cost for each analysis. The application of machine learning and image processing through a low cost, portable system will help to decrease waste, delays in production and reduce analysis costs.

MPC based Transfer learning for HCCl Optimization

The growing demand for mobility worldwide and the mass use of internal combustion engine drive systems poses major challenges for today’s society. Currently, the CO2 content in the atmosphere is continually increasing and the concentrations of pollutants in many areas exceed the maximum permissible limits in many urban centers. Additionally, these engine emissions contribute significantly to global warming. The proposed research looks to reduce these engine out emissions with the implementation of optimal control, in this case model predictive control (MPC). The research will focus on designing and implementing an MPC controller at RWTH university on a single cylinder research engine. The controller will be tested at various operating conditions. The second phase of the proposed project is the transfer learning of the engine controller that will allow the controller developed in Germany to be used on a different engine in Canada.

Le potentiel subversif de la pratique de la boxe contre l’essentialisation de la violence des femmes. Ethnographie dans deux clubs de boxe à Tunis

À travers l’étude de la pratique de la boxe par les femmes, mon travail vise à interroger le caractère dépossédant de l’essentialisation de la violence féminine, particulièrement l’assignation des femmes à l’a-violence, et à reconnaître en elles des actrices capables de mobiliser leurs corps pour se défendre, voire agresser. Ma recherche vise également à questionner le lien entre féminité, boxe et violence/autodéfense, au niveau des pratiques et de la représentation. Je me demanderai quel rapport entretiennent avec leurs corps des boxeuses à Tunis et comment leur pratique agit sur leurs comportements au quotidien. Comment, outillées pour réagir à la violence, elles réagissent de fait à celle-ci? À quel point la pratique sportive impacte-t-elle leur rapport avec leur entourage, leurs corps et leur mobilité? Quel est le potentiel subversif de la boxe pour les femmes, au niveau des représentations, du corps et des pratiques ?
La trajectoire biographique des boxeuses sera au cœur de mon travail, ce qui me permettra de comprendre ce qui les a poussées à s’adonner à cette pratique et leur conception, ainsi que celle de leur entourage, de la violence et de la féminité.