Innovative Projects Realized

The Impact of Emerging Technologies on Defense Policy

How technology relates to Canadian national defence policy, strategy, and planning is not well understood. To date, much of the research on emerging technology in the military focuses on concerns over ethics, privacy, human rights, and governance, largely overshadowing equally important research on the way technology intersects with military strategy and tactics, defence recruitment and training, and alliance politics and national policy. Our project is inherently forward looking: its overarching objective is to think creatively about emerging technology and to link developments therein to Canadian defence.

Lay Sisters and Brothers in Medieval German Convents

Medieval nuns were supported by a wide range of people, including lay sisters and brothers who performed much of the physical and manual work of the convent. Yet scholarship has long ignored these members of the monastic community. My research attempts to address this gap by focusing on lay sisters and brothers in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century German convents. I would like to request funding to spend three months in southern Germany next summer, from the beginning of May 2020 through to the end of July 2020. During this time, I will search through archival documents from medieval convents, including deeds, visitation records, account books, necrologies, and convent statutes, to find references to lay sisters and brothers in various archives in southern Germany. I am a third-year PhD student at the Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of Toronto, and this ground-breaking research will help to nuance our understanding of women’s daily lives, religiosity, and the intersections of gender and class in medieval Europe––subjects that have historically been neglected by historians. I believe that undertaking this research next summer will provide me with the remaining research necessary for my dissertation and greatly contribute to the study of female monasticism.

Health Equity and Barriers to LDKT in South Asian Communities

As of 2012, about three million Canadians suffer from chronic kidney disease. Patients with kidney failure need dialysis or kidney transplantation to survive. LDKT (LDKT) is the best treatment option for many patients with kidney failure, however, it is not used as much as it could be. Patients who belong to ethnic minority groups are less likely to receive LDKT compared to Caucasians. Currently, there is limited research to help us better understand what prevents access to LDKT in patients from the South Asian community. The purpose of this research is to engage the South Asian community to understand social, cultural, and religious barriers to LDKT while also raising awareness of kidney disease and LDKT. This research will also engage different stakeholders to help develop a Health Equity Strategy for the South Asian communities in Ontario.

High temperature wear of sand cast and die cast Al and Mg alloys for continuously variable transmission (CVT) and other applications

The project will determine sliding wear behaviour of lightweight Al and Mg alloys for the continuously variable transmission (CVT) bore application and other engine applications. High temperature lubricated wear tests that simulate the actual operating conditions of CVT bore will be carried out. In addition, tests will be conducted at room temperature and under the dry conditions to benchmark wear resistances of different cast alloys and determine the wear mechanisms. Tests will be conducted using a block-on-ring tribometer at the University of Windsor’s Tribology of Materials Research Centre. The project will simultaneously determine the roles of hardness, roughness, porosity as well as tribolayer formation on the sliding wear behaviour of the alloys by conducting worn surface and subsurface characterizations using analytical microscopy and spectroscopy. The results will be presented in the form of wear mechanism maps, which will be used to develop new wear resistant lightweight alloys by GM.

Development of a macroscopic model to simulate water beads on hydrophobic andsuperhydrophobic coatings to be used in-flight icing software such as CANICE-2D

The intern has developed a 3D microscopic model to simulate water bead behavior on

hydrophobic and superhydrophobic coatings. The microscopic model developed at Concordia

University which simulates one bead cannot be directly integrated into an aircraft icing panel

code such as CANICE-2D. CANICE-2D approved by Transport Canada has been widely

used at Bombardier Aerospace to simulate aircraft in-flight icing. This is a panel code solving

the flow, the droplet trajectories, ice thermodynamic and the geometry. CANICE-2D can run

cases in few minutes which reduces the time to find the critical icing shape. CANICE-2D

calculates the ice shape by solving the heat and mass transfer equations and the water film

at the surface when glaze ice is formed.

Adding value from coffee waste: low oxidized sterols in silverskin

Coffee production with imported beans has doubled in Canada since 2003. From this > 125,000 t of waste is generated most of which ends up in landfill. A significant component of the waste is as the pulp (cascara) and silverskin. In 2019, the Happy Goat Company roasted 50 t of green coffee beans yielding 300kg silverskin which will greatly increase in 2021. Silverskin teas have 3-6 times more caffeine than coffee beans and are rich in total phenolics, antioxidant capacity and phytosterols. There is good evidence of their safety. However, the coffee roasting process creates oxidized phytosterols in the silverskin which are somewhat toxic. Phytosterol Oxidation Products (POPs) have been reported in silverskin in several studies. We have a unique opportunity to examine POPs in silverskin considering a number of variables. These will include process, roast degree and the roast profile. When the final best conditions are chosen, measurement of caffeine, total antioxidant capacity and total flavonoids with be conducted in the final product and in the silverskin-derived beverages. The goal is to reduce waste from the roastery and add some value for the farmers in Ethiopia and Guatemala who produce coffee for the company.

Integration of Machine Learning and AI Based Optimization from IoT Datastreams and Business Information Systems

Internet of things (IoT) includes of multitude of sensors from a wide variety of applications. These sensors produce high volume and high velocity data. Recently there has been much interest in application of such technologies to improve agricultural practices. The sensors that are installed in the field transmit real time data regarding numerous environmental variables of interest. This data is then used to forecast a future state and to make a well informed business/operation decision according to an expected future state. One of the challenges in application of such technology is to improve prediction accuracy of the forecast. This project will design a generalized framework based on machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies to improve prediction accuracy that will ultimately result in reduced operating costs and higher yields in agriculture sector.

Acceptabilité des données probantes du monde réel lors de soumissions règlementaires de médicaments sur ordonnance

Actuellement, les médicaments sous ordonnance sont testés rigoureusement durant plusieurs années, d’abord sur des cellules animales et humaines, puis sur des animaux et finalement chez des humains avant de pouvoir être approuvés par une agence règlementaire telle que Santé Canada. Pour certains médicaments, les études cliniques chez les humains peuvent être difficiles ou même impossibles à effectuer. Pour tenter de régler ce problème, l’industrie pharmaceutique se penche sur l’utilisation de données provenant du monde réel, ce qui permettrait d’éviter d’avoir à faire des études cliniques complexes pour certaines populations sensibles. Ces données dites « réelles » peuvent provenir de patients utilisant le médicament à l’étude et dont le médecin fait un suivit serré pour s’assurer que le médicament soit efficace et qu’il ne cause pas trop d’effets indésirables. Ce type de données n’est pas primé pour démontrer l’efficacité d’un médicament, mais l’avancement des technologies personnelles et des banques de données rendent ces données accessibles de plus en plus. Le projet proposé ici consiste donc à faire une revue de ce qui est accepté à travers le monde quant à l’utilisation de ces données et d’en faire la critique pour aider l’industrie à les utiliser de manière adéquate.

A reconciliation of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to risk capital allocations

Two overarching approaches to allocate the aggregate risk capital stand out nowadays. These are the top-down approach that entails that the allocation exercise is imposed by the corporate centre, and the bottom-up approach that implies that the allocation of the aggregate risk to business units is informed by these units. Briefly, the top-down allocations start with the aggregate risk capital that is then replenished among business units according to the views of the centre, thus limiting the inputs from the business units. The bottom-up approach does start with the business units, but it is, as a rule, too granular, and so may lead to missing the wood for the trees.
In this research project, we will connect the bottom-up approach to allocate the aggregate risk capital to a general class of Dirichlet distributions defined on the n-dimensional simplex. The new class, which is called herein “mixed-scaled Dirichlet distributions’’ contains the classical Dirichlet distribution as a special case, exhibit a multitude of desirable closure properties, and emerge naturally within the multivariate risk analysis context.

Study of magneto-elastic torque meter for power steering system

Permanent magnets and magnetic field sensors are widely used in the automotive industry for the detection of the rotational speed of a gear or the torque measurement of gearbox shafts, vehicle axles, and electric motors. For instance, the action of a driving wheel can modify a magnetic pattern encoded in a transmission shaft. Magnetic sensors positioned around the shaft can detect the stress applied on the driving wheel. This is what we call a magneto-elastic torque meter. It provides the signal for the operation of the power steering system. In this project, a student will develop a model to study the performance of this system to help fabricate a competitive, highly sensitive and reliable magneto-elastic torque meter. Torque monitoring is very important for real-time control and fault diagnosis of a variety of mechanical equipment, such as the rotation of shafts in many things like pumps, rotational cutting equipment, gearbox shafts, vehicle axles, and electric motors. The research on magnetic field detection could also find potential applications in the detection of magnetic anomalies, geoprospection, security and biomedical imagin

The Development Of A Large-Scale Multidimensional WebApplication To Support Data Visualization, Mining & Analysis

For this project, we will develop the statistical theory to support, as well as a full functioning prototype

for, a large-scale multidimensional data visualization application. This application, which will

be fully scalable, will include an interactive user dashboard with customizable widgets. By

taking a methodological approach to research, along with an agile approach to development,

we will create tangible outputs which will have both commercial & educational value, and will

make a substantive contribution to the Canadian technology space. This work will also help

significantly advance the mining, modeling & visualization ability of Canadian technology

media companies

Découverte d’antigènes spécifiques au cancer du sein

Le risque de développer un cancer du sein chez la femme au cours de sa vie est de 11%. Chaque année dans le monde, environ 1 675 000 femmes reçoivent un diagnostic de cancer du sein. D’ici 2020, le coût total des soins pour leurs patients atteindra plus de 2 milliards de dollars par an au Canada (20,5 milliards par an aux États-Unis). Plusieurs types de cancers bénéficient des avancées en immunothérapie. Presque toutes les immunothérapies anticancéreuses efficaces reposent sur le ciblage d’antigènes spécifiques de tumeurs (AST), c’est-à-dire de peptides associés au CMH (PAC) présents exclusivement sur les cellules cancéreuses. Cependant, le cancer du sein n’a pas bénéficié de la révolution immunothérapeutique. Dans le cadre de ce projet nous profiterons des avancées immunopeptidomiques de protéogénomique des laboratoires Perreault et Thibault afin d’identifier des AST dans des lignées cellulaires et corréler leur présence dans des échantillons primaires du cancer du sein.