Innovative Projects Realized

Western Canada Supply Chain Research

The purpose of this project is to gather information from Food Centre clients and other stakeholders to address the barriers of the current supply chain development and access for food processors. I will look at how COVID – 19 has affected the supply chain and local producers directly. I will explore the option of an online supply chain network hub and gauge the interest of current stakeholders and discuss if this would help address current barriers. I will work to identify key stakeholders and supply chain participants in the Canadian food industry; design a data collection tool to gather insights; and collect input from stakeholders and participants. Based on the analysis of collected data I will then identify key requirements and interest in a supply chain network; research and identify similar initiatives in North America; research requirements and cost of developing an online food processing supply chain hub; and write a report for use in communicating with stakeholders and potential funding agencies.

Long-term Monitoring Protocol and Analysis Template for American Eel (Anguilla rostrata)

In 2012, the American Eel were recommended by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada to be upgraded to Threatened from Special Concern. American Eel are important to Aboriginal people, and recreational and commercial fishers. Research from a four-year-study (2009-2012) occurring in a near pristine watershed, looked at habitat selection and population estimates of American Eel. Data from this study will be analyzed to provide a framework for commercial harvesting with regard to recommending a detailed sampling protocol for adult eels that is transferable to other impacted watersheds. This will provide a roadmap to long-term sampling of adult eel within multiple watersheds should this be warranted for commercial purposes. These sampling protocols and procedures should provide an efficient pathway to enable long-term monitoring of adult eel populations to help with conservation of this species and simultaneously allow commercial enterprises to continue.

Community Energy Profiles and the CASES Toolkit

The Community Energy Profiles and the CASES Toolkit project is part of a larger partnership involving 15 communities and 16+ private and public sector partner organizations in 4 countries. Co-led by Drs. Greg Poelzer and Bram Noble, the project includes 7 interns with interest in the areas of energy policy, impact assessment, economics, energy systems modeling, social innovation, and capacity building with Indigenous communities, industries, and governments. The benefits of the internships to our Canadian partner organizations are multiple and extend beyond the internships. Our partner organizations are the drivers behind the CASES initiative, are interested in helping train the next generation of energy planners and analysis to expand renewable energy networks across the North. Partner organizations will especially benefit from community energy profiles and assessment toolkits to support local renewables transition planning and management; access to and participation in the project’s data sharing and knowledge exchange platform; and learning from the collaborative approach of both CASES and internship opportunities, ensuring opportunities to learn from other utilities, industry partners, and communities about energy innovation solutions, governance, and ownership models.

Adapting Retail Practices to the Post-Pandemic Landscape

We will work with Alimentation Couche-Tard (ACT) to adapt retail practices to the post-pandemic world. Consumer behaviour has dramatically evolved due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers are spending less time shopping and they aim to minimize physical contact. This shift in purchasing behaviour will generate unique data that may allow us to develop new ways to predict consumer demand. Looking at data before, during, and after the pandemic, we will investigate how to properly adapt some of the existing demand-forecasting methods and tailor these to the new, post-pandemic landscape. We aim to collect detailed customer data through our McGill Retail Innovation Lab (in partnership with ACT). This will allow us to analyze various customer shopping behaviours (e.g. where in the store they spend more time, which products catch their attention), and use these features to develop new demand forecasting models and evaluate their accuracy. We will also explore how these features can give rise to different customer profiles that can be used for personalization purposes (e.g. customized marketing and product offerings). Our hope is to identify key features related to purchasing behaviour that can help retailers better predict customer demand in the current uncertain times.

Development of a Rapid Point of Care (POC) test for Food and Water Safety

The project involves the development of a rapid detection test kit that will enable food processors to
measure the absence or presence of potentially harmful pathogenic organisms prior to shipment to
the general trade. The interns’ main objectives will be to dramatically reduce the assessment time for
the tester- currently ranging from 4 to 5 days- to an elapsed time of minutes. The kit will benefit the
food processor to reduce microbial risk and potential cost from a recall, while the consumer will have
safer foods. On the other hand, the industrial partner will possess this unique technology, which
completes the entire process of safe foods production, that being pre-operative sanitation, in process
food safety interventions and lastly the validation of food security through the test kit protocols.

Tastet

Tastet s’est joint en mars 2020 à l’incubateur d’Intelligence artificielle NEXT AI. L’objectif est de s’assurer de mettre le bon consommateur dans le bon restaurant. Tastet veut créer un moteur de recommandation parfait pour faire correspondre les meilleures adresses locales avec le bon consommateur,devenir le Netflix ou Spotify du monde de l’hospitalité. Dans le cadre du projet Next AI, Tastet a conçu un outil de notation avec 250 critères pour chaque adresse que nous actualisons chaque semaine afin d’éventuellement construire un moteur de recommandation AI. Tastet a également créé un profil commercial pour toutes les adresses locales afin qu’elles puissent facilement gérer elles-mêmes les informations quantitatives en cas de changement.

Proof of Concept for Automated Mushroom Harvesting

Mushrooms for the retail environment are grown in climate-controlled indoor environments. The crop develops very quickly and must be harvested over a period of three or four days. Harvest yield depends to a large extent on the skill of the harvester; if the right mushroom is picked at the right time, a new mushroom can grow in the same place, yielding up to three generations of mushroom from a single seeding. In this project, we will investigate technologies for identifying and gripping mushrooms as a first step towards the development of an automated system for picking mushrooms at the optimal size and ripeness for picking. We will develop a novel gripper design, most likely based on smart materials, and a sensor fusion-based approach to mushroom recognition, using some combination of visual, thermal and hyperspectral imagers.

Assessing how Differences in Implementation Technologies and Platforms Affect Application-level Mobile Device Quality of Experience Measures

With the growth of mobile device platforms such as smartphones and tablets, users now primarily
experience the wireless networks they uses, whether cellular or WiFi based, through the context of
the apps that they use. Hence, a heavy 8kype user may perceive a given network to be of
substantially different quality than would be perceived by a heavy text-messaging user. This reality
has lead to a growing interest in quality-ot-experience (OoE) measures as a compliment to’ more
traditional network-level quality-of-service (008) measures. This internship will study how QoE
measure are affected by changes in mobile device technologies, with the popular Android and i08
platforms servicing as the exemplar platform technologies. Quantifying and understanding how QoE
changes with platform changes is -important as, particularly for cellular and cable operators, it goes
directly to the core issues such as how operators would use these new types of measure to improve
their services to their customers, how to design and improve -better apps.

Utilization of Malting Company Waster Water for Hydrogen Production and Water Cleaning

Malting company waste water contains high concentrations of many valuable nutrients such as sugars and proteins. Those compounds have to be removed before discharge the waste water. The removal of those compounds costs a lot of money to the company. But we have bacterial strains which can grow in the waste water and produce hydrogen. Bacteria also clean the waste water after using the nutrients for their growth. So our technology can clean the waste water and produce valuable biogas hydrogen.

Healthy and Sustainable Housing in Indigenous Communities

Healthy and sustainable housing is a critical social determinant of health and well-being. In Indigenous communities, decades of ineffective government housing and land policy have created abysmal, often culturally inappropriate housing conditions. Through partnership with First Nations, we will explore and uncover solutions to answer these questions: What if we could co-create Indigenous homes to be sources of health, wealth and connection in tune with culture and the environment? How would that change things for future generations? How can we co-create this future together?
This project will serve as part of a case study in developing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) and IPCA Villages that can be applied in other communities across Canada. While the focus is on Indigenous communities, the lessons learned can be applied to all communities Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

MRI Estimates of Repeated Demyelination and Tissue Injury as Markers of Progressive Multiple Sclerosis – Year two

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) can be divided into three clinical phenotypes: relapsing remitting (RRMS), secondary progressive (SPMS) and primary progressive (PPMS). RRMS is characterized by episodic worsening followed by full or partial recovery, whereas SPMS and PPMS are characterized by steady accrual of disability.

Progressive MS remains poorly understood and generally fails to respond to therapies that are effective in RRMS. This may be related to fundamental differences in the biology that underlies relapsing vs. progressive disease.

Quantitative MRI techniques sensitive to evolution of new MS brain lesions and subtle changes within existing lesions will be obtained in people with MS. Characterizing repeated episodes of damage in existing MS lesions may reveal pathological distinctions between relapsing and progressive MS that are critical for understanding differences in the biology and evolution of these two components of MS. Assessment of injury and repair in repeat lesions may be critical for research, development and validation of drugs targeting processes important for the progressive (degenerative) stage of disease.

The proposed project will investigate new potential imaging biomarkers of neurodegeneration and repair important for progression in MS, and integrate these biomarkers into the NeuroRx analysis environment, enabling NeuroRx to perform these analyses in future clinical trials.

MRI Estimates of Repeated Demyelination and Tissue Injury as Markers of Progressive Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) can be divided into three clinical phenotypes: relapsing remitting (RRMS), secondary progressive (SPMS) and primary progressive (PPMS). RRMS is characterized by episodic worsening followed by full or partial recovery, whereas SPMS and PPMS are characterized by steady accrual of disability.

Progressive MS remains poorly understood and generally fails to respond to therapies that are effective in RRMS. This may be related to fundamental differences in the biology that underlies relapsing vs. progressive disease.

Quantitative MRI techniques sensitive to evolution of new MS brain lesions and subtle changes within existing lesions will be obtained in people with MS. Characterizing repeated episodes of damage in existing MS lesions may reveal pathological distinctions between relapsing and progressive MS that are critical for understanding differences in the biology and evolution of these two components of MS. Assessment of injury and repair in repeat lesions may be critical for research, development and validation of drugs targeting processes important for the progressive (degenerative) stage of disease.

The proposed project will investigate new potential imaging biomarkers of neurodegeneration and repair important for progression in MS, and integrate these biomarkers into the NeuroRx analysis environment, enabling NeuroRx to perform these analyses in future clinical trials.