Innovative Projects Realized

Gut health biomarkers development in pigs and poultry

Antibiotic use in animals, mostly for gut disease, plays a major role in the emerging public health crisis of antibiotic resistance in zoonotic pathogens. This is very worrying given the growing global demand for animal protein. There is no clear definition of gut health and no biomarkers can capture the gut complexity. By designing a panel of biomarkers of gut health based on data mining approach, this project will help to understand the role of antibiotic growth promoters to efficiently replace especially those use in prevention to maintain or improve animal health, welfare, and performance while reducing antibiotic resistance.

Support cases resolution retrieval

Coveo provides search and recommendation software for customer support systems in which customers can ask for help by entering a case description and, on the other side, support agents must find the solution. In this context, queries to Coveo are in the form of long texts describing a problem and potential solutions are knowledge articles or help documents.
Support cases resolution retrieval (SCRR), at its very core, requires a mapping of casual English text, possibly with grammatical mistakes, to well-formed formal English documents. This mapping problem closely resembles a well-studied problem in natural language processing (NLP) that is neural machine translation (NMT). However, unlike most publicly available datasets of NMT, SCRR aims to map a long query sequence (the support case) to an even longer target sequence (the resolution document). Although, recement language model based approaches such as GPT, BERT, XLNET etc. have provided means of overcoming this issue, practical uses are yet to be explored.

Réduction des risques liés aux troubles musculo-squelettiques (TMS) et aux vibrations main-bras lors d’activités d’ébavurage chez Héroux-Devtek Inc. – Part 2

La recherche vise à développer un poste de travail incluant des outils manuels, des méthodes de travail, des dispositifs de maintien des pièces, d’aspiration des poussières, et d’éclairage qui permettent de réduire les facteurs de risques à la santé et à la sécurité des travailleurs dans une usine de remise à neuf de pièces de train d’atterrissage d’aéronefs. Ces facteurs de risques sont liés principalement aux mauvaises postures de travail, aux efforts importants lors du travail, ainsi qu’aux vibrations excessives provenant des outils utilisés. Des prototypes de postes seront développés puis testés dans en situation réelle ou représentative de travail.

The inter-language reliability of BrainScreen in co-ordinate bilinguals

Early detection of cognitive decline (e.g., Dementia) allows for early intervention of treatment and, in turn, a

better overall prognosis. However, a full neuropsychological assessment (which lasts 4-10 hours) would not be

feasible or reasonable for many individuals. Thus, a cognitive screening measure, such as BrainScreen

(developed using a previous MITACS Accelerate grant), would be used as a quick, cost-effective and sensitive

test for cognitive decline. To increase the utility of this test to non-English speaking individuals, various

translations of the test will be created using the Ortsbo Inc. translation service. Therefore, the current study

proposes to translate BrainScreen into the top five languages spoken in Toronto and to test bilingual individuals

on English and their native language. The results will be compared to measure the relative reliability of the

translated versions. The expected benefit to the partner organization is in-line with their mission statement,

which is to invest in new technologies that connect people with brands.

Evaluating the impact of culturally-sensitized brokerage or coaching on refugee newcomers’ nutritional acculturation in a pilot program

Refugee newcomers tend to experience “food” culture shock and are at greater risk of food insecurity due to inadequate social programs. Hybrid social programs may help boost refugee newcomer confidence through knowledge exchange during intercultural culinary experiences. Therefore, this project aims to: First, promote effective cultural brokerage between community sponsor groups and refugee newcomers; Second, empower newcomers to participate in multicultural and intercultural activities during their nutritional transitions into a Canadian “foodscape” in a pilot program. By evaluating the pilot program, the project hopes to contribute to knowledge on the best practices of supporting refugee newcomers during their nutritional transitions in Canada using culturally-sensitive tools and resources.

Geographic Risk Visualization for Unmanned Traffic Management

Risk evaluation is a crucial aspect of Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems. Risk is calculated for missions involving unmanned systems and includes numerous factors from both ground and air risks. Currently, the risk evaluation and calculation for a mission is done by hand and based on estimations. Furthermore, the final calculated risk for a mission is difficult to conceptualize due to the high complexity of the UTM system and the method of risk calculation. This project aims to develop a system to aid in the conceptualization by providing aggregated data used for risk analysis and visualization techniques of the data and risks through software. Accomplishing this will involve collecting data used in risk analysis, analyzing the data for relevant information, and developing visualizations for the data. This project will benefit the partner organization in becoming an industry leader in Detect and Avoid and UTM systems.

Identification of plant immunity activators that protect cucumbers from bacterial and viral pathogens for commercial use in the agriculture sector

The Suncor/McMaster partnership is generating a pipeline of novel, green, agricultural chemicals to be applied as crop sprays. The proposed collaboration will expand the application of the sprays to various crop species in both greenhouse and field settings and contribute to the understanding of the mode of action of the active ingredients.

Analysis, design, and implementation of a recommendation engine to suggest charities

The goal of this research is to investigate and build a recommendation system that suggests charities to users based on their previous donations. One of the first successful recommendation systems was Amazon’s “Customers who bought this, also bought…”. This recommendation system focuses mainly on making it easier for users to find relevant information and increasing sales. The main challenge with this research is to investigate the differences between commercially implemented e-commerce recommendation systems and a recommendation system driven by altruistic goals.

Complete destruction of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water and by-products minimization via a novel Boron-Doped-Diamond anodes electrochemical oxidation

Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are anthropogenic compounds with unique properties and wide applications. The consequence of using such persistent chemicals is widespread contamination reported for groundwater, soil, sediment, and wastewater, especially in industrialized countries such as Canada. The endocrine-disrupting and likely carcinogenic nature of PFAS have resulted in strict regulations on PFAS in drinking water. Future regulations are expected for other environmental matrices, which has spurred studies to develop efficient and cost-effective treatment technologies. Electrochemical oxidation has emerged as one of the most promising advanced oxidation processes, achieving PFAS mineralization with little need or no need for chemical addition. The future commercialization of the treatment technologies requires solutions to key technical issues. This partnership between McGill University and Golder Associates will tackle this issue to expand the treatment options available for PFAS and will benefit a variety of end-users in both industrial and public sectors.

Magnetorheological actuators for active suspensions

In 2016, Magna Corporate has partnered with Exonetik to develop multiple prototypes of active seat suspension which were used for market validation and technical feasibility investigation.
In June 2019, Magna Seating officially launched a research and development program to bring the active seat suspension to production in July 2021.

The objective of this applied research project consists in addressing the problematic of the active seat suspensions with appropriate technical solutions in order raise the maturity level of the prototype to TR9. The
four major research sub-project of this Mitacs program will require design, engineering model development, simulations, testing, and result analysis through an iteration process:

A. MR Clutch Durability Testing
B. Actuator Noise, Vibrations and Harshness (NVH) testing and analysing
C. Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Testing of the Electronic Controller Unit (ECU)
D. Software Architecture Development as per ISO 26262

Mineral Reserve Weighting With Various Metrics

The partner company, Metals Economics Group, has been acquiring and compiling information and

statistics on the global mining industry for over 30 years. With an increasing pressure on existing

mineral reserves and declining productivity of reserve expansion through exploration and M&A

activity, the reserves have become a target for increased scrutiny. From a comparative standpoint, the

value of a reserve is dependent on a variety of external factors that differ from company to company

and can range from geopolitics to very nature of the deposit and how it would be potentially mined.

The project aims to combine such factors, based on historic data, to determine a weighting factor to

apply to the mineral reserves.

Toward Net Zero Transportation – Validating environmental benefits of Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles

Hydra Energy Corporation Commercial Demonstration Project based in Prince George, British Columbia 12.4 MT/day of waste hydrogen will be captured, purified and transported to an onsite hydrogen refueling station from which Class 8 tractor-trailer truck fleets will refuel daily. Hydra’s demonstration project can provide a significant reduction in fleet greenhouse gas(GHG) emissions, Particulate Matter and other air emissions. The R&D project results will advance the scientific knowledge of hydrogen in internal combustion engines, support the granting of a third party verification/certification of the environmental benefits of Hydra’s technology, and will help to expand the availability of clean energy transportation technologies in and beyond B.C.