Innovative Projects Realized

Innovative coagulator design for the production of advanced compositematerials.

This unique approach to product and process design involves 2 intimately associated activities:

development of novel structured composite materials (SCM) in the form of latexes; and the related

design of a coagulator to tailor the final particle size distribution of the composite latex particles. If

produced correctly, SCM can provide society with useful, valuable products at a reasonable price that

are made in water-based reaction medium rather than in organic solvents. They allow us to

synergistically combine the novel properties of nanocomposite materials with the low price, ease of

production and flexibility of polymeric materials. In the current project we will be focusing on nanoand

micro-fibre reinforced elastomers. Once produced in the reactor, these aqueous dispersions need

to be coagulated in order to obtain them in a useful form, and this project will also contribute to the TBC

Obstacles and Opportunities in Improving Social Service Intake Referral Processes

When people seek help from a social service, the assistance they need may be best provided by another service in the community. In these cases, they should be referred to the appropriate service. At this stage, things sometimes go wrong: Sometimes the service agent misunderstands the person’s needs or misunderstands the kind of help provided by other local services. Or sometimes the agent doesn’t explain enough about why another service would be helpful. The result is that the person who needs help might not follow up on the referral or, if they do, they might end up thinking that it wasn’t helpful for them after all.

To help improve this situation, I will do research at a social service agency in Edmonton. The agency makes referrals to many other agencies in the community. The purpose of the research is to learn more about how referrals are made and why problems sometimes occur. By watching agents make referrals and interviewing people at the agency, I will help create a new approach to their referral process. We will test out the new approach to see if it helps avoid some of the problems listed above.

Constrained Variational Ehrenfest

A first principles approach to molecular dynamics is crucial to understanding photo-chemical reactions. These reactions take place involving multiple electronic states, in other words, they undergo non-adiabatic dynamics. The problem is analogous to the many body problem where significant entanglement between the motion of electrons and nuclei is present. In this project we will develop a computational scheme that efficiently takes both motions into account. The key to this efficiency will be using multiple electronic states and a finite number of nuclear wave-packets that can evolve on these states. One of the arising problem in such setups is conservation of energy, we will address this issue by imposing necessary constraints implemented via the Lagrangian multipliers method. The developed method will be implemented in two widely used computer programs, Quantics and NewtonX, and will be used to simulate photochemical processes in atomistic details, which should facilitate understanding biologically (e.g., vision) or technologically (e.g. singlet fission in organic photovoltaics) relevant processes.

Healthy Student Initiative

Background information: York University is committed to helping students adopt

evidence-based health practices associated with reduced disease risk. The Healthy Students

Initiative (HSI) will evolve as a volunteer, health promotion cohort accessible for serial studies

linking risk markers, self report measures and health outcomes. Given the high prevalence of

mobile/smartphone/online computer access in university youth, it is a highly valuable testing

ground for online programming assisting health practice adoption. York University researchers

(P. Ritvo, N. Cercone) have assisted Nex J Systems, Inc. in developing the online HealthCoach

program which uses smartphones/computers to guide adoptions of healthy exercise/dietary

regimens and is subject to continual revision with improvements based on user-testing and

scientific evidence. This MITACS cluster will involve: 1) health promotion coaching to

students, coordinated with HealthCoach use; 2) collection and analyses of subject self report

Supporting broadband, transportation, and trade policy using quantitative and qualitative tools

There is a disconnect between the development of advanced research methods in academia, and their use to inform real-world policies. The purpose of this research is to apply rigorous tools to support real-world policy questions at the local, regional, and global level, and assist various types of institutions meet their strategic objectives. At the local level, interns will work on an analysis of equitable access to broadband connectivity in Kingston, ON, as part of the City’s plan to expand broadband access. At the regional level, interns will support the Eastern Ontario Leadership Council, who is trying to understand and overcome transportation barriers across municipal boundaries. The interns will describe and quantify commuting patterns across municipal boundaries, project commuting patterns according to demographic and technological shifts, and identify and rank solutions to address regional transportation needs. At the global level, the interns will support the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the largest donors of foreign assistance globally, who is trying to understand the role trade policy plays in improving resilience and food security in East Africa. While all projects focus on different sectors, they each leverage novel tools to answer policy-relevant research questions.

Évaluation cinématique et dynamique pour mesurer l’effet du port d’une orthèse de genou

Médicus développe et fabrique des orthèses dont une orthèse de genou pour réduire les douleurs associées à une rupture du ligament croisé antérieur (LCA) en modifiant la biomécanique du genou. Les techniques et modèles couramment utilisés en biomécanique ne permettent pas d’évaluer l’effet de cette nouvelle orthèse puisque certaines parties du genou sont cachées par l’orthèse en compliquent la capture du mouvement (motion capture). L’objectif est de développer un modèle cinématique personnalisé au patient portant l’orthèse qui ne soit pas influencé par l’absence de marqueurs réfléchissants sur le genou. L’approche utilisée se base sur l’optimisation de systèmes multicorps. Par la suite, nous évalueront l’effet de l’orthèse sur la cinématique et dynamique du genou de 15 patients. Il est attendu que l’orthèse réduise le moment abducteur du genou.

Addressing the Needs of Homeless Youth: The Implementation of ‘Housing First’ in a Medium-Sized Canadian City

This research examines the problem of youth homelessness which has significant social and economic costs for both the affected individuals and society as a whole. The research will result in a report to be delivered to Family Services Windsor Essex that will guide this organization’s youth homelessness initiatives. To this end, the report will: provide an assessment of support services that have functioned best to support homeless youth in Canadian and other national jurisdictions; establish the ways in which measures targeted at young people differ from those aimed at homeless adults; and develop metrics that allow measurement of the success of its initiatives. The report is intended to specifically facilitate the introduction of effective measures to tackle youth homelessness in Windsor, Ontario but its conclusions will be applicable to other medium and large cities in Canada.

Analyse des incitatifs financiers à la réduction des risques et à l’immunisation en assurance inondation

Le projet vise à identifier les pratiques individuelles d’immunisation qui présentent la meilleure efficience économique dans la réduction du risque d’inondation au Québec pour les citoyens riverains et l’ensemble de la société. Nous allons d’abord quantifier les coûts et les bénéfices de différentes mesures de protection et de réduction du risque d’inondation pour un propriétaire d’une résidence unifamiliale. Ensuite, nous allons déterminer les meilleurs incitatifs financiers afin de motiver un assuré à adopter un meilleur comportement face au risque d’inondation. Puis nous analyserons la viabilité de l’assurance inondation avec de telles mesures incitatives dans un contexte de changements climatiques. Ce projet cadre dans un contexte beaucoup plus large d’analyse du partage des risques financiers entre citoyens, assureurs et gouvernements (municipal, provincial ou fédéral) face aux changements climatiques.

Impact of Pulvinar on cortical visual processing

The perception of external stimuli is traditionally considered to result solely from the processing of thalamic signals through direct cortico-cortical connections between areas organized in a hierarchical manner1. In this corticocentric view, the potential role of higher-order (HO) thalamic nuclei that are reciprocally connected to cortical areas is not considered.
The main objective of this project is to test this hypothesis at the visual system level by examining the impact of modulating the neural activity of the pulvinar, the HO visual thalamic nucleus, on the processing of information within and across areas of the visual cortex. We postulate that the pulvinar will modulate activity in the primary visual cortex and will both contribute to specific RF properties and exert contextual modulation in higher-order areas. To test our hypotheses, we will determine the impact of inactivating sub-regions of the pulvinar on the cortical activity of areas of different hierarchical levels measured by optical brain imaging.

Paediatric Evaluation of Emotions Relationships and Socialisation (PEERS): L’adaptation et la normalisation d’une batterie d’évaluation de la cognition sociale

Socio-emotional skills are crucial for developing satisfying relationships; failure in this domain can have significant consequences for well-being across the lifespan such as bullying, social anxiety and isolation. However, no well-validated socio-emotional assessments exist, limiting our ability to effectively intervene. The Paediatric Evaluation of Emotions Relationships and Socialisation (PEERS) battery was developed by the Australian Centre for Child Neuropsychology Studies team to address this gap. Embedded in the SOCIAL (Socio-Cognitive Integration of Abilities model, Beauchamp & Anderson, 2010) biopsychosocial theoretical framework, PEERS Clinical is a child-direct, interactive, individually administered assessment of social skills delivered via iPad by a trained assessor. Our aim is to collaborate to produce a French language adaptation to better evaluate and intervene with regard to social cognition and competence with French Canadian children. Work on normative data will also be done on typically developing children aged 4-18 years and on children with clinical diagnoses such as autism spectrum disorder and ADHD.

Interpretation and Characterization of Recurrent Neural Networks through Lyapunov Exponent Methodology

Neuroscience-inspired AI has emerged as state-of-the-art in many machine learning applications. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a machine learning tool used to learn patterns in sequential (time-dependent) data which have also been used to model neural dynamics in the brain. Various frameworks have been developed to create RNNs capable of learning from data which have long-term dependencies. Architectures such as the LSTM and GRU have been shown to successfully learn long-term dependencies, but the underlying mechanisms which lead to their success and failure are not well understood. By incorporating tools from dynamical systems, we will examine the learning trajectories of different networks as they learn different tasks. This will create a general and formal structure in which the dynamics of different networks and models can be compared. Understanding the dynamic properties of these systems will support and broaden the performance and range of RNN-based applications of machine learning to complex, dynamic processes.

High-Performance, High Assurance Software

Optimal Computational Algorithms, Inc. (OCA) provides the highest quality

mathematical software possible. Our goal is to produce scientific software with nearoptimal

performance on increasingly parallel systems, while assuring software

correctness by construction. This research project continues a partnership with

McMaster University, and individual internship projects will focus on extending OCA’s

tools to target new computations involving the design and analysis of Magnetic

Resonance experiments, and to automatically generate proofs of software correctness

that can be checked independently by third-party software.