Innovative Projects Realized

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.

Conception et validation d’un instrument de mesure de la compétence perçue au hockey sur glace.

La compétence perçue est depuis longtemps reconnue comme un facteur important de l’expérience sportive qui peut contribuer à l’abandon prématuré du sport ou, au contraire, a sa pratique prolongée. De plus, des perceptions de compétences qui diffèrent grandement entre les parents, les entraineurs et les joueurs peuvent mener à l’apparition de conflits qui nuisent aussi significativement au développement sportif. Cependant, aucun outil de mesure validé de la compétence perçue au hockey n’existe présentement pour les intervenants du milieu et certains chercheurs en encouragent l’élaboration.
Le premier objectif de ce projet est donc de concevoir un questionnaire portant sur la compétence perçue au hockey sur glace tandis que le deuxième objectif est de procéder à la validation du questionnaire à l’intérieur du contexte du hockey mineur québécois.

Association feuillus – résineux dans les plantations d’épinettes d’âge intermédiaire de la forêt boréale mixte

Le reboisement résineux est une importante activité dans l’est du Canada. Bien que plusieurs études se soient intéressées aux interactions feuillus-résineux lors de l’établissement des plantations, peu d’études ont évalué celles-ci dans les peuplements intermédiaires. Dans cette étude, nous utilisons un indice de compétition du voisinage (NCI) afin de qualifier et quantifier les interactions feuillus-résineux dans des plantations d’épinettes noires et blanches âgées de 15 à 30 ans. L’étude considère les effets de densité, de distance, d’espèce et de taille du voisinage sur le rendement à l’échelle de l’arbre. Deuxièmement, l’étude vérifie l’hypothèse selon laquelle la composante feuillue augmente la disponibilité en eau par son impact sur les propriétés physiques du sol, diminuant le stress hydrique des plants. L’avancée de ces connaissances permettra d’identifier les conditions où la compétition présente un risque sérieux pour le rendement des plantations de celles où elle est négligeable.

Assessment of Thermionic RF Electron Gun

The Canadian Light Source produces a very bright light which can be used to study DNA, viruses, cells, proteins, and other small-scale structures. To generate this light, the CLS needs a beam of electrons which are generated by an electron gun. In 2018, this electron gun failed, and the facility was unable to function for 6 months while it was replaced. The CLS had purchased a more reliable electron gun which uses different technology to generate electrons. This project aims to make measurements of the new electron gun and develop magnetic systems from those measurements to install the new gun alongside the existing one. By doing this, the facility will be protected against future failures allowing research to continue uninterrupted.

Atlantic Canadian Beef Success and Opportunities

The purpose of this project to empower Atlantic Canadian Beef Producers to understand the unique success factors for beef production in the region and identify opportunities to improve their cost of production while mitigating environmental impacts based on the on-going work of the Beef Cattle Research Centre on the Canadian Cow-Calf Cost of Production (CDN COP Network). The project will implement by reviewing 12 Maritime focus group sessions, conducting interviews, synthesis of international competitors, and Atlantic Canada’s position. It will offer a unique opportunity to identify success factors for small beef farms, level of competitiveness of Atlantic Canadian beef, profit maximization model, and dairy-beef feasibility in Atlantic Canada. The findings will provide valuable information to producers and enhance public trust regarding the use of management strategies about the social and economic benefits to the beef industry and thereby contribute to the improvement of the financial viability of the sector.