Innovative Projects Realized

AWE Technology Development Project – The Virtual History of Fort York

The intern will provide research support and analysis to assist Divani’s entry into the Augmented Reality industry, where Divani may play the role of technology supplier, service provider, or provider of creative AR products. The intern will investigate existing AR technologies, products, and services that currently available or in development. This insight will be used to identify potential business opportunities in industries that are investing in AR as well as industries that may have practical use for AR products or services but are currently untapped or being underserved. Potential competition will also be identified. The research and analysis conducted by the intern will draw on business methods and approaches that are commonly practiced in early stages of product innovation, notably ideation and concept testing, scoping, voice of customer, and competitive analysis.
The intern will also be responsible for assistance in the development of a commercialization plan…TOBECONT’D

Integrated Amino Analyzer

Develop and design a fully automated and simple to operate amino acid analyzer capable of detecting with high degree of sensitivity the broadest range of amino acid metabolites or molecular structures found in living cells and chemical compounds. Analyzing the makeup of these structures is often the core to understanding the cause of human health conditions.

The project objective is to design an affordable and easy to use analyzer thereby making it more accessible to a larger human health sciences community and research laboratories. Current solutions are costly and require specialized skills which limits the research and advancement to that of the few large well funded organizations or research institutions.

Increasing accessibility of amino acid analysis will increase the research into existing and emerging human health issues thereby enhancing our knowledge and accelerating potential cures.

Effect of neuromuscular electrical stimulation using the StimaWELL 120MTRS system on multifidus muscle morphology and function in patients with chronic low back pain

Chronic low-back pain (CLBP) is a significant health issue in North America. CLBP patients demonstrate structural changes to and reduced function of the multifidus muscle, which is important to low-back health. Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) is a treatment used to improve pain and function in low-back pain patients, but is frequently painful. Our partner has developed a device (the StimaWELL 120MTRS Stimulation Mat) that is less painful for patients, but its effects on multifidus structure and function are unknown. Therefore, our research goal is to determine whether this device can improve the structure and function of the multifidus in CLBP patients. Our partner will benefit by having access to the ultrasound and MRI measurements that we will provide, and by having the efficacy of his device evaluated in a clinical trial.

Automatic matching of service offers to calls for tenders

The process for responding to tenders is very long, arduous and involves many repetitive tasks. Among these, it is necessary to read the invitation to tender in order to find the different requirements, important dates, legal obligations, constraints of presentation of the response, etc. All of these factors are used for the prequalification of a tender and for the drafting of the tender. These requirements are generally expressed in the form of free text. Automating the task of identifying these requirements cannot therefore be done easily using keywords and rather requires more complex linguistic analysis, thanks to automatic language processing.
The main objective of this research is to automatically extract the requirements of a call for tenders to speed up and simplify the process of responding to calls for tenders.

Growing Healthy Bodies: The development of a healthy body score-card for Canadian children and youth Part 2

This project represents the second step in the development of a “Healthy Body Scorecard” which will allow for more
comprehensive and holistic approach to measurement and classification of health in children. This particular
project will involve a questionnaire study designed to obtain expert opinion on the development of the scorecard
as well as a focus group of experts to further guide the development of the scorecard. This project as a whole
will be of significant benefit to the Sandbox Project and McDonalds Restaurants of Canada, the industry partner
for this research. The Sandbox Project is a not for profit organization that is designed to improve the health of
Canadian children. The Sandbox Project brings together industry partners, government, academics, policy
makers and community members. The industrial partners involved include leading companies such as
McDonalds Canada, Telus, Microsoft, General Mills among others. This project directly addresses the stated
goals of the Growing Healthy Bodies group within the Sandbox…TOBECONT’D

Data Visualization of GIS Data at Scale

Access to private or leased land is currently not a simple problem. Landowners would like to know who is on their land, when, and for what purpose. Getting permissions from landowners is often not a straightforward task which often leads to obtaining permission being bypassed. Some landowners do not want hunters, but do not mind artists or photographers accessing their land. Western Heritage is building the SaskLander Platform that provides an easy to use interface for landowners and those who would seek permission to access that land. Saskatchewan Polytechnic will be working with Western Heritage to provide a scalable visualization of GIS data that offers high level detail that can be drilled down to every piece of land across multiple provinces.

Real-time surrogate safety analysis solution using Lidar technology powered by artificial intelligence

The safety of intersections, interchanges, and other traffic facilities is most often assessed by tracking and analyzing police-reported motor vehicle crashes over time. Given the infrequent and random nature of crashes, this process is slow to reveal the need for remediation of either the roadway design or the flow-control strategy. This process is also not applicable to assess the safety of roadway designs that have yet to be built or flow-control strategies that have yet to be applied in the field. In this project, we are building an automated surrogate safety analysis platform that uses real-time traffic data generated by BCT Lidar-based traffic monitoring system and converts them into safety metrics such as near-misses, time to collision, etc. These metrics will be available to the city planners using a dashboard in real-time. This project speeds up the development of BCT’s SaaS platform that generated a new stream of revenue along with its standalone sensor sale. Additionally, this analysis will automate the process that currently BCT is doing manually to generate safety reports for its customer.

Broken Promises: Museum Exhibit Development during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Broken Promises is the capstone output of Landscapes of Injustice, a multi-year, intersectoral project exploring the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s. The project illustrates the violation of human and civil rights at a time of perceived insecurity; measures taken in the name of national defence; the enduring harm of mass displacement, and loss of home and property; and human resilience. The traveling exhibit is one of the major research outputs of the project. Adapting to new requirements for museums during Covid-19, this research will enable the launch of the LOI museum exhibit at the Nikkei Museum in September 2020, by developing interactive displays in line with new museum guidelines, and innovative digital resources that extend the reach of our exhibit. Working with the Nikkei National Museum, and University of Victoria, this project advances knowledge on this important history, and represents new research on museums adapting to Covid-19.

Design and simulation of robotic assembly cell for mass timber offsite construction facility – Phase 1

In this project, a key research project for the robotization of the timber building construction is proposed. By developing a full-scale robotic cell for mass timber walls and showcasing its benefits compared to current manual situations, in terms of safety, quality, productivity and so forth, we expect to support the introduction of robotic cells in offsite construction facilities. For this, we plan on researching two key areas: 1) how to transfer the necessary information from BIM models (most popular software platform for building design and development) to robotic programming environments; and 2) design the necessary robotic cells, tools, and support systems to create a fully operational assembly line in a simulated environment. With both outputs, this research will provide a clear understanding on the capacity of robotic systems for mass timber building construction.

Towards an Elastic and Reliable Cloud Resource Management

This work is a holistic automatic methodology for cloud resource management system, which is a corner stone to build any cloud system. Cloud players rely on this to reduce management effort and cloud running cost, by enabling dynamic service access to cloud clients with cheapest price for customer, and high revenue for cloud providers. Customer requirements must be achieved based on their service level agreement like availability of the service. Now a days with new lifestyle conditions due to the pandemic (covid19), accessing online resources and performing tasks virtually increase the demands on cloud resources and services in different levels. These requirements must be dynamically handled by cloud management system, the way to provision resources keeping safe access to data, service availability and service performance under user expectations.

Evaluation of terminal complement cascade inhibitors using in vitro and in vivo models of age-related macular degeneration and in Alzheimer’s Disease

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of blindness that is estimated to affect over 6 million people globally. There are currently no approved treatments for dry AMD, the most common form of the disease. Various lines of inquiry suggest that dysregulation of a part of the innate immune system called complement plays a key role in the progression of AMD. This research project aims to (a) further explore the underlying causes of the disease, and (b) evaluate potential treatments in pre-clinical studies. Interns will conduct laboratory experiments using model systems and investigational drugs. Research results will help guide the partner organization’s drug development program.

Accelerated development of a recombinant protein vaccine against COVID-19 by integrating the SARS-CoV-2 S-protein antigen with a new delivery system

The objective of this proposal is to develop a new candidate recombinant protein vaccine for the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) based on a novel protein delivery and adjuvant technology, iPDT. If successful, this research will advance another COVID-19 vaccine candidate(s) to the pipeline toward clinical use. The causative agent of COVID-19 is SARS coronavirus (CoV)-2. The spike (S) protein of CoV protrudes from and covers the surface of virus particles and interacts with host cell to initiate infection. We will test if the S protein derivatives induce protective antibody responses when delivered in conjunction with iPTD. In prior studies, we observed that a protein modified by iPTD elicited an earlier and stronger antibody response in mice compared to the commonly used adjuvant, alum. We are expecting that the SARS-CoV-2 S protein with iPTD delivery system can be adopted as a strategy to quickly generate a vaccine for COVID-19.