Innovative Projects Realized

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.

Business Strategy Internship – Sustainable Hamilton Burlington

Marketing strategy.

Piloting an Emerging Model for Community Music Education in the Time of COVID-19

Piloting an Emerging Model for Community Music Education in the Time of COVID-19 is a collaborative, community-engaged research-creation project that builds on existing relationships to establish a new partnership to respond in a crucial and timely manner to needs expressed by Black and Indigenous groups in Canada and Mali, people whose daily challenges resulting from histories of racism and colonialism are now exponentially compounded by COVID-19. Our goal is in 2 parts: (1) challenge systemic racism and inequalities in music education through collaborative research that serves Black and Indigenous communities and musics; (2) establish a new operating model to foster the growth and long-term viability of Association Foli-Lakana, our not-for-profit partner (their mission is to facilitate the vitality of musics, youth, and communities in Bamako, Mali). Our project leverages resources and infrastructure contributed by multiple stakeholders and brings together, as co-researchers, members of Foli-Lakana with leading community music education scholars and ethnomusicologists who specialize in applied, practice-based research; youth and educators in organizations that serve African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw youth; as well as Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. We are supported by CBU’s Centre for Sound Communities, an arts-led social innovation lab whose Director, Ostashewski, has been collaborating with Malian, African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw community-based team members since 2014. Our project will result in multiple concrete academic and non-academic outcomes (a new music education model and accompanying learning resources, academic conference paper, journal article) to support recovery and resilience in the face of the pandemic, for all participants.

Manufacturing / sourcing strategy for depth and hybrid electrodes

Neuraura Biotech Inc., (“Neuraura”) is a seed stage Calgary-based company focused on the field of neuroscience / neurotech, formed as a spin-out of the University of Calgary in 2017. Neuraura is developing a brain monitoring platform for intra-cranial pre-assessment of epilepsy surgery patients comprised of cortical, depth and (novel) hybrid electrodes, a wireless EEG hardware system and EEG trace and 3D visualization software. This project will define the sourcing / manufacturing strategy for the depth and hybrid electrodes, taking into account a wide variety of technical, commercial and regulatory factors.

Songs, Stories and Sacred Fire Partnership: Strategies for Success in the Context of COVID-19

Songs, Stories and Sacred Fire: Fostering Reconciliation through Collaborative Research in Unama’ki is a multi-faceted program that established a new partnership between an existing collaborative research group based at the Centre for Sound Communities (CSC) comprising multiple generations of researchers from Membertou First Nation and Cape Breton University– and the Atlantic Memorial Park Society. The overall goal of our project is to build on existing relationships and established methodologies in the context of this new partnership, to provide direction for the development of the Park’s Indigenous content and interpretation. Our original research plan has been carried out; a final report, with accompanying short documentary films, is being finalized. However, in light of new COVID-19 related challenges, we require additional data to complete an additional section of the report. More specifically, we need to collect data to support the development of recommendations to ensure the Park will be successful in the new COVID era. What are the mechanisms by which the Park’s Indigenous research, development, content and interpretation can be fully realized and successful in new COVID-19 realities, in the face of pandemic-related challenges?

TechImpact – Bushra Siaj

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

Long-term forecasting of optical Quality of Transmission

The purpose of this project is to investigate long-term forecasting of optical quality of transmission (QoT) based on deep neural networks (DNNs). QoT refers to the properties of the optical channel such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which define the level of service provided by the optical channel. DNNs are a compelling technology, but their usability beyond scenarios outside of image, speech or text pattern recognition is mostly unproven. In the forecasting context DNNs have been used succesfuly for short-term forecasts, which are not useful for management of optical networks. As the scope of use of DNNs is fairly limited at the moment, we plan to investigate new DNN architectures for the purpose of long-term forecasts in optical network management.
In this project, we intend to: (1) investigate the use of DNNs on field data that Ciena has collected from its customers’ networks and evaluate the ability of DNNs to forecast QoT far into the future and (2) develop algorithms that enable estimates of QoT relevant to how service level agreements (SLAs) are specified.