Innovative Projects Realized

Flood mapping and high water flood modelling for Indigenous communities at risk in the Winnipeg River Drainage basin

In 2014, the dams of Treaty #3 territory were overwhelmed by major continuous snowmelt and rain, causing mass flooding throughout the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed. To mitigate the damage that would be dealt to the Indigenous communities of the watershed by such events in the future, we will use remote sensing technologies and GIS to conduct a Flood Vulnerability Study and produce a major report and a number of digital resources that will be provided to the client communities. After the scope of the project has been determined, data compilation will be undertaken by interviewing community members, sourcing aerial photography, etc. A report will be produced along with several flood simulation models, videos and maps that showcase before/after scenarios with regards to flooding in areas of concern.

Scalable and modular power electronics based on GaN devices for electric mobility

Validation of a 3D virtual environment for investigating social exclusion

Development of a Hardware-in-the-Loop environment for thermal test bench by means of MATLAB&LabView

Development of a low-cost tool for skin cancer screening

The proposed research project is intended to develop an educational tool for the general public to be able to perform self-screening of their skin lesions. For this, a melanoma-detection mobile application will be developed to analyze lesion images acquired using a low-cost dermoscope attached to a smartphone. This product helps public or students to learn more about skin cancer and increase their self-awareness for early skin cancer prevention and treatment. The application automatically finds a lesion in a captured image. After lesion analysis, it displays different irregularities may exist in the lesion. It then explains for the user what these irregularities are and how these concepts are related to skin cancer. The partner organization will benefit from the product as there is huge interest in buying such educational, self-health and self-awareness application. Furthermore, the project can pave the way to higher goals and more expert systems in the future

Wave Rotor Reformer

Hydrogen offers the potential to decarbonize much of our society from clean transportation, to heating homes and businesses, to manufacturing. However, it must rely on a production method that does not release carbon itself. Steam methane reforming, the most common production method today, releases large quantities of CO2. The present project will study the production of methane in a completely new way. It is proposed to utilize shock waves heating to achieve the high temperatures necessary for the thermal decomposition of methane into hydrogen gas and carbon back. The later is able to be easily separated in solid form thereby producing a carbon-neutral hydrogen source. To achieve this shock compression of methane, a wave rotor design will be developed and tested in a series of developmental steps over the course of the project.

Adaptive Biofilm-Based apparel (ABBA)

Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in “smart” clothing with advanced properties that can enhance their comfort and performance. The next-generation of “smart” textiles can be fabricated by integrating living cells into the textiles that make up our clothing. For users of fitness apparel, living cells can endow clothing t-shirts or yoga pants with the ability to respond to changes in temperature, to the presence of sweat or to excessive stretching of the fabric. Working together, Lululemon and McGill engineers, aim at pioneering this field and demonstrating that “living textiles” can grow and adapt to the user and the environment. By incorporating harmless bacteria in textiles, the researchers will create some prototypes of “smart” textiles that can release fresh scents when soaked in sweat, “self-heal” after a tear or become more breathable in hot and humid environments. This project will position Canada as a leader in the emerging field of “smart living wearables”.

Digital Humanities, research-creation, and emerging hybrid media publication platforms: reimagining Public Journal

Academic journals rarely feature research-creation projects: as such, they are often limited by conventions inherited from print publishing. Recent efforts to create digital and/or online journals can potentially result in new publishing opportunities for scholars and artists. This project will examine how international online f journals in art history, visual studies, and film and media studies deal with hybrid media and research-creation. Public, a Canadian journal known for featuring both scholars and artists, is currently looking to increase its digital presence and to launch a new website that will enable it to better integrate research-creation projects and hybrid media scholarship. This project will enable Public to look at best practices and to design an effective digital publication strategy.

Development of an Information Sharing Platform for a Virtual Manitoba Oil Museum

This research project will organize and develop museum exhibits for a virtual Manitoba Oil Museum, using materials collected over the years by the museum as well as the dissemination of a PhD thesis on the Place of Oil in Manitoba. There is very little information in Manitoba broadly about the oil extraction that has been occurring since the 1950’s so this virtual museum would provide a site for sharing stories to a broader audience. This project plans to share a diversity of perspectives and experiences of living with oil extraction, to provide a more nuanced view into the struggles, benefits and costs of those in south-western Manitoba, particularly as dialogue around climate change and energy transition (including divestment from oil and gas extraction) becomes more important. The benefit to the partner organization, the Manitoba Oil Museum, will be to have a full-time coordinator to arrange and bring into being a site for sharing these stories and artifacts.

Simulation-based decision support system for data analytics deployment

Data has been recognized as one of the most valuable assets of modern business. The capacity to gather, store, analyze and interpret data in great quantities can determine to a large degree the ability of a company to achieve goals and adapt to largely volatile environments. This is especially true for financial institutions where data is directly connected to profitability. In the presence of a large number of relevant solutions to support automatic data analytics, implementation of analytics tasks and their deployment on computation infrastructure, as in cloud, involve complex decisions that can often lead to suboptimal results. Besides accuracy of analytics, this lack of optimality may lead to misused or wasted computation resources and loss of productivity for data scientists. In this project, our objective is to model this variety of alternative options by capturing their performance, such as latency and throughput, as well as their business aspects, including ROI and productivity. Based on this model, we will build a simulation engine capable of replaying what-if scenarios and guide data scientists towards more optimal solutions.

One-Shot Learning Based 3D Object Picking

Automation of processes is becoming more popular within logistics and material handling industries. As the amount of transferred objects grows there is a continuously increasing need for high efficiency, reduce cost, and of course reliability. With this project, we are utilizing the latest machine learning technology to improve the automation rate to a new level. This project is focusing on how to learn new object picking with limited training samples. In this way, our picking system is able to adapt to new scenarios easily. Meanwhile, since deep learning is more robust to shape or color changes of the object, we are able to apply this system to the warehouse, logistics, and agricultural industries.

Spraying of CO2-emulsions for the production of small droplets