Innovative Projects Realized

TechImpact – Seyed Alireza Damghani

The company is currently focused on building a vibrant and growing Atlantic Canadianeconomy by using technology to unlock our region’s potential. COVID has impacted our day-to-day goals as an organization. As part of one of one of our projects, we want to create a full story around the barriers and opportunities to advancing digital transformation.

Building Online Support for Parents of Youth and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This project aims to provide crucial and much needed knowledge in the area of “innovative social support resources” for parents of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. To
accomplish this, an online parent peer support group, facilitated by experienced professionals, will be established. operated, and analyzed over a four month period, This expertly mediated network will serve as a forum through which parents can offer mutual support to one another via shared experience and knowledge in this domain. A variety of informative resources wilf also be provided on the network to enrich the environment of support and to stimulate further discussion. Successful or unsuccessful outcomes herein have the potential to provide a strong foundation through which social support resources of service providers in this milieu (including the Sinneave Family Foundation) could be meaningfully enhanced.

Effective Leadership in a Pandemic

This project is designed to look at effective leadership in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey will be distributed to investors in the Cape Breton Partnership for dispersal amongst their employees. The survey will be designed to assess the perception of effective leadership among workers on the island. This will allow for a better understanding of what workers on the island see as good leadership. This information will allow the Cape Breton Partnership, and their investors, insight into the types of qualities, training, and troubleshooting organizations need to exhibit in order to instill faith in their employees during times of crisis.

Gander and Area Chamber of Commerce

Develop a Shop Local Campaign for the Gander and Area Chamber of Commerce which will help small/medium businesses in the area.

Unsettled Media & Matt George Solutions – Gladstone Eric d’Souza

What’s most difficult at this time is how to find the signal in all of that noise. Businesses across the region have been forced to innovate. Some have been backed into a corner while others are only now seeing avenues to scale. What will be essential to every business, is finding what makes them different and acquiring the right talent to make up for lost revenue. Paradoxically, for a technology based start-up there is also clear opportunity. We’re looking to scale our operations in a major way and quickly become an industry leader in the region. After building relationships with your MBA program through the Business Immigrant Essentials entrepreneur development program, relationships with your professors and being a judge at your sales pitch events, I’m seeking a highly skilled MBA student with the motivation and drive necessary to scale an early stage technology company. Marketing, business development and a keen eye for relationship building will be critical. We’re looking for someone who is thrilled about the chance to grow an early stage business in the region.

Business Co-op Marketing Student

The project will be looking into the changing marketing environment for the cannabis industry not only in Canada but also in Europe where most of their cannabis is imported from other countries. The partner organization will receive more information about possible avenues to expand their business into and an in depth knowledge of information about different cannabis industries in other locations around the world. The current laws and possible future laws affecting the marketing and selling of cannabis products will also be researched to help provide G & M Family Farm with possible future opportunities or threats in the industry.

Building Performance Evaluation of Leading Energy Efficient Homes in Southern Ontario

The focus of this project is on building performance evaluation (BPE) in residential houses in Southern Ontario. Eight green homes will undergo BPE to see how well they are performing. The project will compare current building performance to the designed building performance. This comparison can help to see whether a “performance gap” exists. A performance gap is a difference between the actual building performance and the designed building performance. It will use on-site testing, collection of existing data, and observations from residents of the homes. If a performance gap exists, causes will be identified and studied.
The project will benefit Sustainable Buildings Canada (SBC) as they work to improve building standards in Canada. SBC can use the project to grow their understanding of the causes of performance gaps in homes. The knowledge gained from the project can be used by design teams to improve building design in the future.

Discovering new microbes and metabolisms in deep sea sediments using metagenomic sequencing

Microorganisms living in marine seafloor sediments are of scientific interest for many reasons including their role in cycling nutrients, their metabolic diversity, and the relatively few investigations of their existence due to their habitation of such an extreme and isolated environment. In addition, subsurface microbes can provide insight into their surrounding environment, including signalling the presence of hydrocarbon seeps. Hydrocarbon seepage from subsurface petroleum reservoirs to marine surface sediments alters the immediate microbial community by selecting for and enhancing the growth of microbes that degrade and feed on hydrocarbons. By analyzing the genetic material of subsurface microbes, the types of microbial species present and their potential functions in this extreme environment can be elucidated. Certain microbial species and certain genes can indicate the potential presence of a hydrocarbon seep and thus aid in de-risking offshore oil and gas exploration. In this project two “bioassays” will be established. The first will target microbial species that are preferentially found at hydrocarbon seep sites. The second will target microbial genes that are involved in hydrocarbon biodegradation. Samples to identify these microbial species and genes will be collected in partnership with Offshore Energy Research Association (OERA), on the Scotian Slope, offshore Nova Scotia.

Weakly supervised representation learning for sequential and composite actions.

Camera enabled AI-based personal assistants will need to recognize human actions in order to be safe and effective. Current machine learning approaches for action recognition require extensive datasets of annotated videos that depicting the actions to be recognized. Such datasets are expensive to acquire. The goal of this project is to decrease the annotation required to train viable action recognition systems.

Visualization and Characterization of Novel Coronavirus Structure using Ultrasonic-Atomic Force Microscopy Targeted for anti-COVID-19 Therapeutics

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the current COVID-19 pandemic, displays a coronashaped layer of spikes which play fundamental role in the infection process. Recent structural data suggest that the spikes possess orientational freedom and the ribonucleoproteins segregate into basketlike structures. How these structural features regulate the dynamic and mechanical behavior of the native virion, however, remain unknown. By imaging and mechanically manipulating individual, native SARS-CoV-2 virions with atomic force microscopy, here we show that their surface displays a dynamic brush owing to the flexibility and rapid motion of the spikes. The virions are highly compliant and able to recover from drastic mechanical perturbations. Their global structure is remarkably temperature resistant, but the virion surface becomes progressively denuded of spikes upon thermal exposure. Thus, both the infectivity and thermal sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 rely on the dynamics and the mechanics of the virus.

Development of a lignin biorefinery integrated into a Kraft pulp mill

Integrated lignin biorefineries present opportunities to increase the profitability of Kraft pulp mills through the diversification of product portfolio and improved sustainability. The purpose of this work is to develop optimized lignin biorefinery designs, which would be integrated into a Kraft pulp mill. A methodology combining process simulation, analysis and synthesis is proposed to achieve the purpose. Lignin acid precipitation process will be optimized in terms of chemical usage and yield and will be integrated into Kraft process. The impacts on energy and Na/S balances will be analyzed and quantified. CO2 , H2S04 and water required for lignin precipitation and washing will be provided internally. Finally, strategies to minimize the chemical and energy consumption of integrated lignin biorefinery and Kraft mill will be proposed. Following the method would lead to optimized, sustainable and integrated lignin biorefinery designs, which can be used for process development by the partner organizations’.

Molecular You – myPDx Personalized Health Wallet

Molecular You™ Corporation, a company with a digital health platform driven by data and assisted by artificial intelligence, is focused on empowering individuals to proactively take control of their own health and their own health information.

Privacy and security of consumer data, in particular health data, is a major concern. Almost daily, news outlets report data breaches and mounting consumer distrust of large, centralized platforms that aggregate data and use it for secondary purposes without individuals’ knowledge or consent. However, access to data is also critical for health research and the development of new healthcare solutions that are driven by data analytics. Concerns about health data sharing must therefore be addressed if innovation in healthcare is to continue effectively.

Molecular You is developing My Trusted Personal Data Exchange (MyPDx), a blockchain based solution that aims to address the challenge of protecting the privacy and security of individuals’ health information while still enabling data sharing for research and business purposes. The design of the solution gives users custody and control over access to their personal health data credentials in a manner that fundamentally respects users’ privacy while still allowing for and incentivizing sharing of data.