Innovative Projects Realized

L’intégration professionnelle des étudiants en situation de handicap chez Hydro-Québec

Malgré la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre, l’intégration des personnes en situation de handicap dans les entreprises reste faible. Plus précisément, 39% des personnes avec incapacité occupent un emploi comparé à 72% des personnes sans incapacité (OPHQ, 2014). Ne pas avoir d’emploi est l’un des principaux facteurs de risques d’exclusion sociale (OPHQ, 2017).
Cette recherche examine les préoccupations et besoins de ces étudiants de niveau post-secondaire en situation de handicap au moment de réaliser un stage d’été professionnel chez Hydro-Québec. Les résultats de cette recherche permettront de mieux comprendre les enjeux des étudiants et des gestionnaires lors de cette intégration professionnelle. Ainsi, de proposer des recommandations pour favoriser l’inclusion des personnes en situation de handicap en emploi.

Quantum Algorithms on NISQ Devices

With the small qubit devices now becoming accessible across various hardware and cloud platforms, it is imperative to find useful tasks for the devices to perform. Such devices are known as NISQ – Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum – devices. In this regime of a few qubits, we expect the physical qubits to be noisy in the absence of sophisticated error-correction or fault-tolerant coding techniques. Therefore, it is important to understand and identify qubit algorithms that are of interest in the immediate future or near term, capable of running usefully on NISQ devices. In particular, we are interested in qubits encoded in optical modes via the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill scheme.

Immersive Visual Analytics for Large Industrial Data

We investigate new possibilities for industrial data visualization and analysis with the latest Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (AR/VR) technologies. In this cluster research, we will apply the state-of-art visual analytics methodologies to the forestry, manufacturing and mining industries, and evaluate the potential benefits for the newly introduced technologies. The research outcome may benefit industrial sectors of one fifth of Canadian economy, and provide numerous local high-tech jobs, enhancing the competitiveness of the partner Canadian company on the global stage of industrial data analytics.

Développement d’un système automatisé de suivi de l’avancement d’un projet de construction à l’aide des technologies d’acquisition de données

Ce projet vise à proposer un système qui va permettre aux surintendants et aux gérants de construction de pouvoir évaluer et suivre l’avancement des travaux. De plus en plus de projets basent leur conception sur des modèles 3D permettant l’accès à plus d’informations et de détails que les plans 2D traditionnels. Ainsi, le système proposé va évaluer l’avancement du projet en récoltant les données du chantier à l’aide d’objets connectés, et va automatiquement mettre à jour l’échéancier ou le modèle 3D. Le but est de limiter l’intervention humaine et d’automatiser ce processus afin d’éliminer les sources d’erreurs et de gaspillages afin d’aller vers une productivité optimale.
Ce système permettrait à l’organisme d’estimer l’avancement de ses projets et d’avoir des informations précises en temps réel permettant aux gérants de prendre les bonnes décisions et de contribuer à mieux maîtriser les coûts et les échéanciers des projets et de satisfaire le client.

Investigation of Low-Ductility Geogrid Reinforcement for Ground-supported Concrete Structures

Steel rebars are the dominant reinforcement elements in reinforced concrete structures due to their relatively adequate manufacturing, material property and established construction codes. In an ideal environment and under nominal loading, conventional concrete reinforcement is expected to govern the design strength based on which they are designed. However, under environmental loading conditions, such as very low or very high temperature, deterioration of the steel reinforcement is accelerated and lead to significant structural, economic and environmental losses. In Canada, especially the north, steel reinforcement deteriorates due to the above mentioned reasons and an alternative is motivated. Recently, geogrid material is proposed to replace conventional reinforcement for various structural and nonstructural elements. While the latter possess undesirable effects on concrete structure behavior, new geogrid material, ConForce Grid, poses solutions to the common geogrid problems and has the potential to act as adequate reinforcement for structures prone to abnormal environmental conditions. The research work aims at understanding ConForce Grid under standard and environmentally influenced conditions. The research work also aims at creating useful results for the proposed structural elements.

Pacific sand lance habitat management framework

Forage fish, including Pacific sand lance, play a critical role in marine food webs in the Salish Sea. They feed on plankton and transfer this energy to predators like Chinook salmon. In turn, Chinook are an important prey item for the federally listed Southern resident killer whale, playing an important role in their survival. Any variations in forage fish productivity, and distribution resulting from human impacts (e.g., shipping, expanding ports) can contribute to widespread and unanticipated ecological impacts (e.g., recent losses of iconic predators like salmon, and whales). Protection of forage fish and their habitats through improving sustainable coastal ecosystem management practices will play a key role in ensuring the health of forage fish populations, their dependent predators and the ecosystem as a whole. The proposed project will increase our understanding of how to reduce human impacts on coastal nearshore habitats and thus provide resources/information to habitat managers to do so. Data gathered as a result of this project will support the development of evidence-based management tools, which will help to improve sustainable coastal ecosystem management practices in the Strait of Georgia and surrounding areas.

Scalable System Services: Programming Practices and Tool Support

Scalable systems must seamlessly grow to absorb large data sets and incorporate increasing

numbers of processing units within in various communication fabrics. Broadly considered, this concept

applies to cores sharing memory, processors sharing a bus, nodes sharing a network in a

grid/cluster/cloud, or services sharing compositions of components. Ironically, attempts to add more

resources-whether they are physical processing elements or higher-level services-cannot always

be easily incorporated into existing systems.

This project explores practical means of achieving scalability by considering three different but interrelated

issues: parallel design patterns for high level system organization, tool support to help

developers reason about the tradeoffs between programming effort and system performance, and

light-weight resource monitoring and composition tools to support this evaluation. Combined, we

believe these three elements will support software development practices critical for building scalable

systems, as well as produce much needed corresponding tool support to assist developers in modern

software evolution and maintenance.

La qualité de vie liée à la santé et la participation sociale des personnes âgées souffrant de perte auditive et de leurs proches.

ans cette proposition de recherche, une étude connexe est proposée en vue d’investiguer trois questions de recherche clés. Dans l’étude, nous chercherons à determiner si la perte auditive (PA) et l’utilisation d’aides auditives (AA) chez les personnes âgées ayant une perte auditive liée à l’âge (PALA) ont un impact sur la qualité de vie (QV) et la participation sociale (PS) de ces personnes, ainsi que la QV et la PS de leurs proches (PR). Les participants seront recrutés au Canada et au Brésil à part égale. Cette stratégie permettra alors de: a) recruter un grand échantillon de participants (n=360); b) explorer et comparer l’utilisation d’aides auditives et la participation sociale selon la culture ( pays développé VS pays en cours de développement); c) fournir un ensemble de données avec un plus large éventail de résultats selon diverses variables clés indépendantes comme le nombre d’années de scolarisation, le statut socio-économique …

LCARE (Landscape carbon accumulation through reductions in emissions)

The PDF research will consist of two main tasks. The first task will be to assess carbon stocks in soils, terrestrial vegetation, and lake sediments from the 1970s to present-day around the Sudbury region. This task will involve using remotely-sensed imagery (Landsat, MODIS) validated with targeted ground-truthing collected as part of the broader L-CARE project in 2018/19. There will also be the potential to add LiDAR and hyperspectral imagery to the workflow to improve forest and soil/lake carbon stock estimation. The PDF will spend the first 6 months in Canada collating the remote sensing and ground data with collaborators at the Living with Lakes Centre, and the remaining time will be visiting collaborators at Cambridge University for help analyzing and processing the remote sensing data. The second task will use the present-day inventory data to develop and validate a spatially-explicit mechanistic ecosystem model at a regional scale with which we can forecast how future investments in pollution control and carbon capture should be prioritized under different climate and land use scenarios.

Presentation and Manipulation Techniques for Geospatial Visualizations using Augmented Reality

Headworn display (HWD) augmented reality devices, such as the Magic Leap and HoloLens provide new opportunities to enhance interactive data visualizations. While immersive HWDs provide a straightforward way to render 3D and immersive visualizations, there are opportunities to improve 2D visualizations as well. This research program considers how 3D spatial metaphors enabled by AR can extend the capabilities of touchscreen displays for 2D data visualizations.
In one sub-project we will consider the metaphor of raising elements out of the 2D visualization. We will explore its use as a mechanism for abstracting away from a base visualization, to aid in defining queries, filters, and other data constraints. After an iterative design and implementation phase we will conduct a user study comparing the technique with standard 2D tools used to accomplish the same tasks.
In a second sub-project we will explore the metaphor of offscreen data sheets or layers, which provide a coordinated views mechanism by using the space around the touchscreen, and can be physically placed over and removed from the 2D visualization on the touchscreen as a means of adding/removing data attributes.

Research on Fast and Accuracy Photonic Integrated Devices and Circuit Simulation Method

In comparison to the well-developed electronic design automation (EDA) tools of microelectronics, the simulation tools of burgeoning photonics are too coarse. Time-assuming and computer memory hungry characters restrict tradition method application on photonic devices and circuits simulation. So, the aim of the proposed research project is to find a high accuracy and efficiency simulation method and models for simulating of photonic integrated devices and circuits. With the previse work of applicant and the support of Accelerate program, the basic theory and simulation frame work will be finished within program duration. After that, the new tool will shorten the design interval and improve the quality of the products, which will reduce the costs. Further, the new tool can be applied to comprehensive simulation platform with additional benefits.

Research on Wideband Tunable Semiconductor Laser

Wavelength tunable lasers are indispensable in future wavelength division multiplexing networks which can improve the communication capacity significantly. The objective of this project is to develop wavelength tunable semiconductor lasers with an ultra-wideband. By exploiting wave manipulation method, we will target the physical realization of such a device with high fabrication yield and high reliability. As a representative of such devices, a semiconductor laser with its center lasing wavelength at 1550 nm or 1310 nm with a considerable tuning range will be designed, simulated, and experimentally demonstrated through prototyping and characterization. Meeting growing bandwidth requirement, tunable lasers will promote the development of optical communication. Therefore, this research project will enhance the competitiveness of the partner organization in communication and related fields and bring enormous economic and social benefits.