Innovative Projects Realized

Children’s Treatment Centre Design Standard

Children’s treatment centres provide specialized services to support children and youth with special needs to live life at their full potential. The design of these spaces significantly impacts the experience and well-being of the children that they serve. Children with special needs include individuals with challenges or delays in their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, verbal, and/or behavioural development. Therefore, it is important to consider the characteristic behaviour and the particular way of sense-making of children with special needs, and how these factors influence their spatial experience and interaction with the environment. This research project will seek to understand how interior and exterior spaces, including the physical, ambient, and navigational features of those spaces, might improve a child and their family’s experience and well-being.

Field testing of selected salt tolerant screened balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera) clones for use in reclamation around end-pit lakes associated with bitumen extraction in northern Alberta.

The fundamental challenge when reclaiming oil sands areas is to ensure not only survival, but vigorous growth of the plant material. Finding plants suitable for high salt conditions has offered the opportunity for Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc. to investigate the potential role of using native balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera) as a key reclamation species for the oil sands region. The main objective of this research is to identify and select balsam poplar clones from Al-Pac’s PB1 (Alberta-Pacific Controlled Parentage Program Plan) for balsam poplar that are well adapted to potentially challenging sites at an oil sands reclamation mine site near Ft. McMurray, Alberta. This project will try to supply the energy sector with well adapted, native balsam poplar trees to be used in reclamation projects across the oil sands region, where appropriate, while meeting all regulatory requirements.

Les mots, les lieux et les temps de la sexualité ordinaire à Toulouse au 18e siècle

Structurée par une collaboration de recherche internationale entre des chercheurs.res de l’Université d’Ottawa, de l’université Toulouse – Jean-Jaurès et des Archives municipales de Toulouse, cette thèse porte sur l’histoire des comportements sexuels ordinaires et quotidiens se déployant des les divers espaces et lieux de sociabilité de Toulouse au XVIIIe siècle. Notre principal objectif est de comprendre comment les Toulousaines et Toulousains du XVIIIe siècle vivent, décrivent et perçoivent leur sexualité ordinaire afin de compléter les nombreuses études sur l’histoire de la surveillance et de la répression de la sexualité criminalisée.

Dans l’ensemble de nos recherches, nous portons une attention particulière aux discours sur les différentes formes de la violence sexuelle – omniprésentes dans nos procédures – afin d’en décrypter les mécanismes et les conséquences pour les femmes du XVIIIe siècle ainsi que celles d’aujourd’hui. Ainsi, nous voulons comprendre l’ensemble des voies — et surtout des voix — de la sexualité toulousaine au siècle des Lumières et offrir une perspective historique aux débats contemporains sur les sexualités.

From Data To Knowledge for better system maintenance (D2K)

Our society depends greatly on software systems in many of its critical activities including

telecommunications, which is an industry sector for which Ericsson has made numerous

contributions. These systems, however, have to be maintained and upgraded. The cost and

the amount of effort dedicate to maintenance is often high due to the intrinsic complexity of

such systems.

The objective of this project is to develop techniques to increase the productivity of software

engineers when maintaining large systems. Our techniques combine two main research

areas: Tracing and monitoring and machine learning.

The outcome of this research is expected to have a real impact on the Telecommunication

industry. Canadian companies such as Ericsson can focus on delivering new products and

enhanced services that add value to the customers instead of spending energy and money

on understanding and fixing existing systems. The project is also expected to result in other

collaborative projects that can further enhance the methods developed in this research.

Implementation of the Engagement Score of Libro Credit Union’s Owners

Libro Credit Union wants to improve the Owners’ (customers) financial experience engaging them actively through the institution’s initiatives. Therefore, Libro is dedicating efforts to objectively measure which initiatives have a greater impact on the owner’s engagement; so they can have better insights into their audiences and can ensure best-served owners with tailored initiatives. Our main goal is to create an Owner’s Engagement Score described by three dimensions: Services, Products, and Experiences to help Libro impact positively on the owner’s financial experience through initiatives designed to meet their individual needs. We will apply machine learning methods to evaluate the owner’s engagement indicator. Consequently, Libro will be able to prioritize their strategies and focalize their initiatives. Additionally, our solution will help Libro to determine a set of possible ways for their owners to transit along with Libro’s products, services and experiences with a positive impact on the owner’s needs and expectations.

Medical cannabis and cancer: A qualitative exploration.

In recent years Medical Cannabis (MC) has become a much discussed and ever-evolving topic in Canada. A growing number of studies have highlighted the medical and multidimensional benefits of cannabis. The question of the spiritual benefits of MC forms part of this holistic approach. Qualitative research on medical cannabis is limited, and most of it has explored the experiences of people who took cannabis illegally. it must be determined prescribed MC is effective in relieving the spiritual pain and counteracting the “fear factor” associated with a terminal diagnosis with regards to patients taking cannabis legally, under medical supervision, for the treatment of chronic pain. The research question of this study will be “What are the effects of cannabis on quality of life and suffering in cancer patients”, and it will be examined through descriptive semi-structured interviews (SSI) will be used to obtain qualitative data.

Enhancing Compliance of Financial Service Industry Through Understanding and Predicting Employees’ Conduct Risk

Conduct risk management is a topic of great importance to financial service firms. Misconduct from staff members in financial institutions can result in substantial costs. However, compared to other types of risk faced by financial institutions (e.g. credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk), conduct risk and the related reputational risk have been understudied. One of the main reasons for the limited research in this area is the lack of data available assessing employees’ misconduct. The proposed project aims to address this research gap by ultimately researching and building a conduct risk model relating to staff in the financial service sector. First, the current project will develop an framework of conduct risk of financial service these employees. The conduct risk model will identify subcategories of conduct risk, and will also identify individual-level antecedents of the different subcategories of conduct risk. In the second phase of the current project, the model will be tested by using the data collected through the partner organization’s dataplatform that contains the regulatory system registration information of financial institutions’ employees (e.g. financial advisors, investment managers). In the final phase of this project, the intern and the data scientist of the partner organization will work on building

Exploration and Development of an Active Assisted Living Data Sharing Infrastructure Aimed at Supporting the Development of Standards, Guidelines, and Certification Programs – Blockchain for Consent Management

The Ubiquitous Health Technology Lab (UbiLab) will explore the development of a data integration framework and recommendation for associated standards that aims at combining data from (1) smart home systems, (2) AAL or IoT for health technology, (3) mHealth, and (4) wearables. Important areas of data management will be explored, as for example security and encryption (blockchain) for consent management and data management. This initiative will provide the CSA Group with a roadmap of potential future standards to be developed in Canada and around the world to support the evolution of IoT for health, AAL technology, and Blockchain solutions.

Perceptions of autism, culture, and personhood from parents of children with autism and from colleagues delivering services to children with autism

Values, attitudes, and beliefs regarding disabilities vary across cultures and within cultures and these factors have an impact on the perspectives of the child’s parents and prioritizing their needs. Although Korea was greatly influenced by Western countries in special education, it has a relatively short history compared with other developed countries. Research found that autism is highly stigmatized in Korea and due to negative attitudes toward people with disabilities, many families and students with disabilities prefer not to be identified as having a disability and sadly they believe that to get educational benefits, they should be educated in special schools with students with similar disabilities. This study will investigate and gather qualitative data on the perceptions of autism, culture, and personhood from parents of children with autism and from special education teachers delivering services to children with autism. Specifically this research looks at the pressing need for continuing to expand autism research and how this research specifically intersects Korean and Korean-Canadian families.

Stations as Living Labs: Converting an environment into an ecosystem

The aim of this research project is to focus on several key train stations and to evaluate the regional environment the station is situated in order to identify and characterize the various stakeholders involved and assess the potential for the creation/activation/participation of new partnerships along the primary axes of sustainable mobility, customer and community experience. This work will be used to develop a strategy to reorganize the relevant entities into innovation ecosystems and to support the conversion of stations from static hubs to dynamic living labs. The ultimate goal is to attempt to transform uncoordinated entities into a deliberate, coordinated innovation network.

Development of Smart Utility Management System

In recent years, the problem of global warming has brought home energy consumption to the forefront

worldwide. Grid stabilization is a matter of national security as well as household efficiency. Therefore

the goal of this MITACS project is to continue the development a Smart Utility Management System

(SUMS) to manage power consumption, reduce peak usage and decrease consumer costs. SUMS will

be designed to serve as an intelligent agent for consumers who will grant limited autonomy to it for

adjusting operation times of appliances. To do that, the SUMS will obtain the price index from various

utilities in addition to regional environment forecasts to manage devices operation and optimize cost

and consumption of the electricity usage, based on the users’ preferences, the level of the autonomy

granted to SUMS, and predictions from historical data.

This project is a continuation of an NSERC Engage-funded for feasibility study conducted by

Surrounds Technologies Inc. and SFU. So far, the research team has completed…………………………….

Chipless RF Sensing for E-smart Composite Pipeline Integrity

Recent pipeline projects in Canada and the US have attracted lots of attention due to their importance for our future economy and environment. In the proposed project University of Alberta and Shawcor propose to work together towards developing E-smart pipelines and creating defect free system. We will utilize the vast amount of emerging and cutting-edge technical know-how in wireless technologies and apply that for the benefit of our energy and environmental sectors. Such information provides the opportunity to intelligently develop defect free pipeline. The project will create synergy between three of Canada’s strategic sectors of Environment, Information & Communication Technologies, and Energy. In addition, it will provide the opportunity for capacity building to highly qualified personnel to the advance the state-of-the-art high-tech systems, making them ready to join the industry, protect the environment and optimize usage of Canada’s natural resources.