Innovative Projects Realized

IoT, AI and Analytics for Smart Urban Water Systems

The Advanced Data Analytics Platform for the Transformation (ADAPT) developed herein integrates quality assurance, quality control and Artificial Intelligence techniques to identify trends and relationships in water networks data. The importance of this information for fostering utility communications and business processes is demonstrated through a visualization dashboard built based on ADAPT. These tools will provide insights regarding constantly generated utility data streams, increase staff effectiveness, identify benchmarks for judging the quality of new data, and embody a foundation on which to evaluate urban water management decisions and set expectations for performance. They will reduce economic losses by improving asset efficiency, and by improving usability of data, assuring that investments in sensor networks are well spent. The integration and assimilation of data from ADAPT, and next generation telemetry, industrial and IoT, will support utility management needs such as in predicting sewer overflows, water supply flows and quality, and optimal sensor placement.

Association automatique entre symboles et textes dans des documents d’ingénierie

La plupart des documents d’ingénierie comportent des symboles pour caractériser les systèmes qu’ils représentent. Ils comportent également des annotations (identifiants, notes, spécifications) sous forme textuelle pour préciser certaines propriétés importantes ou identifier les composants. Si l’association entre les symboles et les composants est intuitive pour un expert humain, il en va autrement pour un ordinateur. Ce projet vise à permettre la découverte automatique de tels liens d’association par un ordinateur, en utilisant des techniques d’apprentissage automatique. Une telle avancée pourrait permettre des gains d’efficacité significatifs et une gestion simplifiée pour les compagnies exploitant des infrastructures présentement documentées manuellement.

Study of the performance of borehole thermal energy storage systems for provision of renewable heating

Thermal energy storage (TES) systems are suitable to bridge the existing mismatch between demand and supply. In current study, borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) is selected due to its advantages. The performance of the BTES can be affected by several factors in different patterns including design, operation, and geological and material properties. Although it has been proven that the BTES systems can be effectively dealt with the seasonal energy intermittency issues, the heat transfer mechanisms involved in these systems has not been thoroughly and systematically studied in previous explorations. Therefore, this research aims to conduct the thermal performance analysis of the innovative concept of coupling the thermal solar collectors to a BTES system to store surplus solar energy and provide upgraded heat when heating demand is raised on a Canadian residential building.

Design of Reliable Resource Management Solutions in Cloud Environments for Medical Analytics and Beyond

While cloud-based medical analytics is important for facilitating efficient, patient-centric smart healthcare services, the reliability of the cloud is often under question because of many cloud failures and outages. In this project, how to reliably assign the resources and tasks to the cloud through virtual machine and medical service migration will be investigated, modeled, and evaluated through simulations and experiments. This will provide practical and adaptable solutions for health caregivers. The model will serve as a guide to caregivers and caregiving facilities for the achievement of reliable resource management. The effectiveness of the model will be evaluated and tested using both mathematical optimization and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models. Journal publications in high impact factor IEEE transactions and/or journal(s) will be targeted to report the adopted methodology and experimental findings.

Sales Coordinator

a) Working in collaboration with the Commercial Teams to ensure a customer centric approach on all innovation/renovation
projects “own the customer side of the 4Ps” (including but not limited to Listing objectives, List Price recommendations,
MSP/FSP, merchandising and shelving objectives)
b) Collaborate with Brand partners on the publication of any launch decks to ensure customer facing approach (lead a
commercial mind set)
c) Managing and supporting customer portal process (e.g. Article workflow, Sobeys Partner
Portal, Whole Foods VIP, Walmart Retail link, Precima)
d) Supporting the sales teams in the creation of business presentations and reviews

Characterization and numerical simulation of precipitation in the climatic wind tunnel at Ontario Tech

Climatic wind tunnels (CWTs) can repeatedly control variables such as temperatures, humidity, rain, snow, etc., that cannot be controlled outdoors. This allows tests to be performed faster, in weeks instead of years, thus speeding up the product development cycle. However, generating realistic precipitation in a CWT is still a challenge, because it is not well understood and it is difficult to create repeatable precipitation as desired by industry. The objective of the proposed research is to characterize the precipitation in the CWT at Ontario Tech, and develop a numerical precipitation simulation model. The study will involve physical experiments to obtain parameters such as liquid water content, mean volume diameter, droplet number concentration, and particle size distribution are essential for precipitation characterization. They are essential for precipitation characterization and will also serve as validation data for the development of the numerical simulation model. Further, they will provide insight in the quality of precipitation generated in the CWT. The industry partner will gain insight in applying its analytics tools to precipitation data. This collaboration will also help the interns gain industry relevant skills.

Development of a Carbon Calculator forUnderground Utility Construction

Destructive effects of Green House Oas (OHO) emissions on the environment such as climate change
and global warming are some oftoday’s major concerns. According to the “Environmental Protection
Agency” (EPA) U.S 2010, construction is the third highest source ofOHO emission between other
industrial sections. Underground utility construction projects are considered as one of the major areas
of the construction projects. Also Underground infrastructure is aging across North America; hence
rehabilitation or new installation of pipelines and facilities has become inevitable. 1bis raises the need
to study the carbon emissions associated with different underground construction projects.
Furthermore, a local based carbon calculator is required to be developed that would consider the site
specifics, pipeline properties, equipment and specifications used in Edmonton for infrastructure
construction projects. Hence, the objective of this project is to develop a user friendly carbon
calculator, which helps designers to evaluate environmental impacts of each underground construction
methods in the feasibility study phase.

Galileo Partners

Galileo Partners est un cabinet dédié à l’accompagnement de société clientes en matière de mobilité internationale.
Galileo, détenant une expertise dans la mobilité internationale des talents, a choisi d’étendre sa gamme de services pour accompagner les entreprises canadiennes avec l’attraction, l’acquisition, l’intégration et la rétention des talents. Et ce, avec la proposition unique d’une stratégie réfléchie, visant des solutions long terme et intégrant en amont les volets immigration et recrutement.
Pour ce faire, Galileo développera entre autres un outil diagnostic permettant une évaluation des leviers clés en matière de Talent, afin d’accompagner adéquatement ses clients. Le stage sera dédié à la création de cet outil.

Image segmentation of foliage and man-made objects in aerial RGB images

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology has advanced significantly in recent years. With the aerial data, analysis provides solutions to government agencies and industries, including the energy and forestry sectors, as well as urban/rural planning. Among the many aerial data modalities, RGB images play an important role in the analytics process. Our research problem involves segmenting aerial RGB images composed of natural and man-made objects into two categories in real-time as the data, i.e., video frames, are collected. We will begin with an investigation of a combination of state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning methods that work in real-time. This includes discovering training features and determining the correct method for training the model to achieve the best results. Another important objective is to develop a strategy which does not rely on a large training dataset. Improving the model’s accuracy and time performance will be the final focus of the project.

Advanced Statistical Signal Processing Algorithms for Precise Radar Positioning

As the users rely increasingly on GPS/DGPS, there have been increasing concerns about the GPS vulnerability due to unintentional or intentional GPS disruptions. It is suggested that low-cost and reliable backup systems are quite necessary, especially in exceptional situations. We will expand on a previously developed and tested, but little known, radar navigation system of Russell Technologies Inc. Russell’s previously developed radar positioning system was mainly based on the approaches outlined in U.S. Patent 4,533,918 and U.S. Patent 4,990,918. In this project, we propose the use of Kalman filter to increase the estimation accuracy of the radar positioning system and employ kernel Principal Component Analysis to identify significant geographic information. The developed technologies will be important new components of the company’s new product, Precise Radar Positioning System of Russell Technologies Inc.

L’inclusion en emploi des personnes en situation de handicap invisible:une recherche-intervention

Au Québec, les personnes en situation de handicap invisible (PSHI) sont fortement sous-représentées dans les milieux de travail. Pourtant, les recherches confirment qu’elles pourraient offrir une solution novatrice au plein-emploi en plus de démontrer l’importance du travail comme vecteur d’intégration sociale pour ces personnes.

Afin d’aborder cette problématique, plusieurs stratégies visant à inclure ces personnes ont été mises en place. Cependant, les chercheurs et les acteurs oeuvrant dans le domaine de l’employabilité des PSHI remarquent que ces stratégies interpellent majoritairement le soutien individuel de la PSHI et proposent donc, en plus des stratégies existantes, de responsabiliser et de soutenir les organisations de travail.

C’est dans le cadre d’une recherche-intervention, c’est-à-dire, une recherche qui générera à la fois des solutions pratiques et théoriques, que le chercheur-intervenant s’associe à deux organismes partenaires dans le but de : favoriser l’inclusion en emploi des PSHI en proposant des stratégies d’inclusion qui visent la responsabilisation et le soutien à l’employeur et qui intègrent le vécu et le savoir des acteurs oeuvrant dans le domaine de l’inclusion en emploi des PSHI au Québec.

Comparer les engagements extrêmes (Belgique – Québec) : écologie radicale et mouvement pro-vie

Ce projet de thèse doctorale, en cotutelle entre l’Université Libre de Bruxelles (sous la direction de Carla Nagels, Département de criminologie) et l’Université de Montréal (sous la direction de Valérie Amiraux, Département de sociologie), propose une analyse comparée des modalités d’entrée dans des mouvements extrêmes de nature diverses, à partir d’un terrain auprès de collectifs d’écologie radicale et de pro-vie. En prenant distance avec l’approche de la radicalisation pensée à partir de sa trame religieuse, nous proposons de faire de « la radicalisation » un outil d’analyse des engagements extrêmes quel que soit la cause qu’ils
embrassent, en contrastant les situations de deux contextes nationaux que différents aspects politiques et institutionnels rapprochent (fédéralisme, bilinguisme).