Innovative Projects Realized

Traitement de décarbonatation électrochimique et de désinfection simultanée des eaux des tours de refroidissement

L’objectif général de ce projet est de développer un équipement électrolytique à l’échelle du laboratoire et d’optimiser son fonctionnement, en développant les procédés électrolytiques appropriés pour réduire voir éliminer les phénomènes d’entartrage-corrosion et de croissance microbienne et ce, sans ajout de produits chimiques. Ce travail se fera en se basant et en se comparant avec les résultats préliminaires obtenus par la Cie Magnus avec la première génération de machine brevetée et pour laquelle la compagnie Magnus possède un accord de commercialisation. Ces résultats seront mis à notre disposition par la Cie Magnus afin de servir de point de départ dans ce projet. Ce projet permettra de proposer un bdesign de réacteur mieux adapté à la décarbonatation (augmentation de la cinétique de précipitation des carbonates) et à la désinfection simultanée des eaux des tours de refroidissement par l’optimisation des conditions opératoires.

The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: The Social History of the Making of Cultural Goods and “Literary Giants”

This project aims to examine — through “la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, the French publishing world’s most prestigious book collection made of Bible paper, leather cover, and gold — the relation between the choices made to publish some literary works and the formation of “literary giants”, considered authors that achieve the status of being called “classics”. Although it pledges to democratize reading, this book series counts only two authors of Afro-European descent. It also has a smattering of works by female authors: of the 250 authors in la Pléiade, 15 are female writers (only 6%). Therefore, it appears crucial, on the one hand, to study the Pléaide’s editorial policy to understand the reasoning behind the choice of authors to publish and the perpetuation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the eternal masculine” in the creation of “literary giants”. On the other hand, it is important to explain the consequence of the systematic exclusion of the “Other” (non-white-male writer) by the literary canon.

Development of an effective antifog solution

The use of mask during the pandemic induces more fogging of the eyewear and demands effective alternatives that can be used by everyone. Currently, there are two categories antifogging mechanisms avaialble:1) changing the environmental factors such as surface temperature, relative humidity & surrounding air flow, and 2) reducing the surface tension of the water droplets so that they spread out in sheets and enhance the wetting behavior. The second option is preferred2 because the application of these procedures represents a more attractive option with an easier and more manageable nature, ecofriendly without the need of manipulating the heat, better cost-effectiveness, and longer-lasting anti-fogging performance. This research addresses the second category, particularly focusing on the antifogging sprays that are effective on a variety of eye glass and goggles.
As the largest supplier of optical goods and accessories in Canada, McCray is acutely aware of the phenomenal demand of antifog both within the eyewear industry and also general demand as a whole. The requirement for basic antifog has increased over a thousand times based on their own sales of existing antifog products to the point that antifog raw materials are back-ordered globally.
To fulfill the current and future demands TOBECONT’

Indigenous-led food security pandemic response analysis and knowledge sharing

This project aims to challenge unjust systems and policies and support Indigenous people in their efforts to establish their food systems and adapt to the new CV-19 world. It will explore ways to address long-term pandemic-related food security challenges led by Indigenous organizations. The intern will gather information from experiences and existing research across Indigenous communities about existing challenges and potential opportunities to achieve food security and food sovereignty. Using this research, the intern will support the creation of an Indigenous-led knowledge sharing platform

Développement d’outils pour la détermination de l’état émotif d’un individu dans un groupe

L’adaptation des techniques de mesure d’états émotifs à des situations où l’on peut, rapidement, évaluer un individu dans un groupe de façon non-invasive, tout en lui permettant de vaquer librement à ses occupations demeure un défi de taille et un enjeu de première importance pour de multiples industries. Ce projet consiste à évaluer les techniques d’analyse vidéo dans un contexte de mesure de la douleur chez la souris et éventuellement l’étude de difficultés comportementales chez l’humain.
Les applications de la mesure de ces paramètres ne s’arrêtent pas à l’étude de la douleur, on entrevoit des applications dans une multitude de domaines dont l’éclairage intelligent, la sécurité des travailleurs, les diagnostics en santé mentale et en urgence, la détection de conduite avec facultés affaiblies, la sécurité dans les endroits publics et, sans compter, l’émergence des robots collaboratifs, ceux prodiguant des soins ou interagissant avec le public.

SCIO Strategic Business Plan for Mediation Services at Cortree

Spinal Cord Injury Ontario (SCIO) is a registered Canadian charity founded in 1945. Our vision is people with spinal cord injuries living the life they choose in a fully inclusive Ontario. We launched Cortree, a social venture owned by SCIO, in 2019. Cortree monetizes select educational products and services for audiences outside our non-profit core membership, building on our expertise in serving people with disabilities and their families. We started in 2019 with Cortree Disability Education Centre, an online learning environment for people with disabilities and families. You can learn more about Cortree here: https://www.cortree.com.
At this time we have three active revenue streams under the Cortree Services umbrella: Mediation Services, Personal Support Worker training, and elearning services (which includes custom content as well as hosting). Revenue in each stream has been affected by COVID-19. Mediation Services is down, and PSW training and elearning are stronger than anticipated.
We are proposing a projects to develop a business plan for Mediation services. This service was launched in response to customer demand. We currently have two organizational clients and we want to grow provincially and eventually nationally. Neither service existed when we initially created the business plan for Cortree.

Farine et Basilic – FSA UL

Farine et Basilic Inc. a démarré à la fin d’octobre 2020. L’entreprise est une cuisine de production pour les restaurants situés à Québec. En raison de la situation actuelle, nous avons dû réaligner notre mission ; nous nous concentrons beaucoup plus sur les consommateurs privés que ce que nous avions prévu initialement. Avec ce changement fondamental de stratégie, nous voulons étendre notre présence en ligne. Nous souhaitons ainsi augmenter nos ventes au détail et créer un avantage concurrentiel par rapport à des entreprises similaires (Les Pâtes Cortina, Papilotte et Cie, Pasta Si!, etc.).

Accounting Co-op Student

The objectives of this project are to determine scope for future developments of financial compmenets of our software. We want to meet the potential needs of our clients across various jurisdictions. The intent of the software is to simplify the work of municipal staff that are working in finance roles. This project will enable MuniSight to cross sell with existing clients, and more importantly, sell products in “frontier” regions thus expanding the geographical client base.

A Leadership Development Model for Youth in Urban Communities

This internship will extend a research partnership between For Youth Initiative (FYI) organization and the Applied Social Welfare Research and Evaluation Group at the School of Social Work, York University. The internship project will build a comprehensive leadership development model that articulates best and promising evidence-based practices for engaging and building the leadership capacity of youth and youth-led organisations in urban communities. This model will be attentive to the structural constraints that youth in marginalized urban communities experience. Secondly, the internship model will develop an evaluation strategy and tools so that FYI can understand the outcomes for youth and youth-led organisations of its leadership development activities. The intern will conduct a comprehensive review of the literature, analyze and review FYI’s database to understand effective programs, and integrate the findings from these to develop a leadership development model for youth.

Dynamic, real time quality optimization of streamed video

Twitch is a video live streaming service and a subsidiary of Amazon. Twitch primarily focuses on video game live streaming, broadcasts of esports competitions, music and creative content. Twitch clients upload their encoded video to Twitch’s servers. The user generated content (UGC) is then transcoded. Transcoding is the process of decoding UGC, making alternations to it, and then encoding it again. During transcoding, video will be encoded at a lower bit rate or its resolution might be lowered. Transcoding is a resource-intensive process, but it is necessary since streaming solely at a high bitrate and resolution might inadvertently prevent a sizable number of audiences from watching the streamed video. The goal of this project is to develop a computationally efficient learning-based approach to make a run-time decision on resolution and encoding recipe during transcoding to achieve the best quality for a given bit rate.

Benefits and Challenges of using a Digital Health Platform for Remote Delivery of Allied Health Provider Services

The proposed research is aimed at understanding and predicting the adoption rate for a proposed commercialized platform, based on the HQB Prototype, and for providing essential insights into the user experience by both user groups of the HQB Prototype that will be included in the design specifications for the commercialized product.

HealthQB has been researching indications of the parasympathetic nervous system and wellbeing of chronic pain patients in allied health since 2018. The company established a formal relationship with the UBC Vision Lab directed by James Enns, by funding a MITACS project that employed Dr. Veronica Dudarev, PhD, full-time to study heart rate variability (being the indicator of parasympathetic nervous system activity) and subjective reports of wellbeing in chronic pain patients. As a pilot study, patients were recruited through the multidisciplinary allied health clinic Fit To Train, located in downtown Vancouver. The allied health practitioners involved included Greg Elliott (Kinesiologist), Jessica Reigh (Physiotherapist) and Shoko Nagai (RMT).

Life-long learning in game development processes

In the game industry, software projects extend over several years: for instance, a typical AAA game is developed for 3 to 5 years. To make the development process easier for the developers, tools are put at their disposal to help with, for instance, the artistic creation process or code integration. Those tools are based on machine learning (ML) models and learning processes, trained on historical data.
While such ML models might work accurately right after training, their predictions might lose relevance as time goes by, since the project’s development objectives change over time, becoming progressively different from those at the time of model training. The phenomena of models and dataset aging are referred to as concept drift in the literature.
Through this research, we want to study concept drift in the game industry using the years of historical data and tool performance Ubisoft has gathered over time. Better understanding of concept drift would allow game tool creators to decide strategically when to update learning processes, and with which dataset, in order to maximize the performance (accuracy, precision, recall) of the tools over a long period of time.