Innovative Projects Realized

Water Penetration of Brick Veneer Walls Made of Clay Bricks with Large Voids

Rain water penetration can cause severe damage to building materials and facilitates the growth of mould, endangering the health of the occupants of the building. This Mitacs project will determine the water penetration resistance of various clay brick veneers used in various buildings. This research will also provide very important test data that may allow engineers and builders to use much lighter clay bricks (clay bricks with large voids) as the brick veneer. Use of lighter bricks translates to less carbon footprint and hence, is a sustainable choice. The research work will be completed using wall tests in special environmental chambers under the joint supervision of Dr. Sreekanta Das at the University of Windsor and Mr. Patrick Kelly at the Clay Brick Association of Canada.

Analyse d’impacts économiques et fiscaux d’une politique d’achat local par des organismes du secteur public à Sherbrooke

Le projet chercherait donc à établir si l’achat de biens et services locaux par les organismes de la ville tels que le Centre Hospitalier, l’Université de Sherbrooke, la mairie, entre autres, serait juridiquement possible et économiquement intéressant. L’intérêt économique pourrait concerner les organismes eux-mêmes : est-il plus intéressant pour l’acheteur de s’approvisionner localement plutôt qu’avoir recours à l’achat groupé ? Les intérêts économiques et fiscaux pourraient aussi concerner la ville entière, la province ou même le pays : est-il plus intéressant pour la ville de Sherbrooke que les acheteurs s’approvisionnent localement plutôt qu’avoir recours à l’achat groupé ? Etc. Une question centrale serait : est-ce que le désavantage/avantage pour l’acheteur peut-il être compensé par l’avantage/désavantage pour la/le ville/province/pays ?

Visual attention in deep learning for detection and classification

Visual attention refers to the mechanism of dynamically and selectively focusing on a subset of the visual input stimuli for detailed analysis, which is part of the visual perception process of the early primate vision. It has been successfully integrated into the design and implementation of many artificial visual recognition systems with applications to image classification, object detection, object sequence recognition, as well as image captioning and visual question answering. This research will explore various visual attention mechanisms with the goal to improve the generalization, robustness and efficiency of various DCNN models and algorithms developed for Epson’s computer vision and machine learning core technologies and products.

Adaptive Artificial Agent for Smart Home Thermostat

How can we make the connected home smarter and more energy efficient? Ecobee’s research aims to address this question by making cutting-edge improvements to its smart home thermostat. There is huge potential to save energy in the residential heating and cooling space – homes with an ecobee smart thermostat can save up to 15% of their energy consumption. Ecobee’s aim is to make use of customer-volunteered usage data in the creation of an adaptive agent which can control the comfort level in the home autonomously. This agent will eliminate the need for close monitoring and adjusting of the thermostat by the user and use less energy than a house with a traditional thermostat, while still retaining maximal comfort for the residents. TO BE CONT’D

Collaboration between Polytechnique Montréal and Lund University to realise a petrochronological study in the vicinity of the Allochthon Boundary Thrust (ABT) in the Grenville Province and its Sveconorwegian extent, the Mylonite Zone.

Study of the core of ancient mountain belts is key to the understanding of current tectonic processes. In Canada and Sweden, the Grenvillian and Sveconorwegian orogenies are the relict of a major tectonic event, similar to the continent-continent collision between India and Eurasia. In both locations, a major tectonic boundary i.e. the Allochthonous Boundary Thrust (Canada) and the Mylonite Zone (Sweden) is exposed and is actively studied to understand tectonic processes, specifically exhumation or the path followed by rocks from deep within the Earth’s crust back to the surface. This project focuses on the exhumation of high-grade metamorphic rocks in both locations. Samples are studied under optical microscope and scanning electron microscopy, key minerals are dated, and metamorphic conditions are calculated from trace element concentrations and thermodynamic modeling. Thus, this study will rebuild the Pressure-Temperature-time history of key samples to assess their role in their respective orogeny. Then, this new information will be used to test existing tectonic models.

Dynamic Pricing for Optimizing Demand and Profitability

In this research project, a surcharge optimization algorithm will be developed to help the partner company to dynamically determine the premium charged for order pickup. The objective of the project is to smooth the demand curve for the order pickup timeslots: popular timeslots are congested, making it harder to deliver a positive experience, and other windows are idle, and overstaffed. In the project, large volumes of purchase history data including pickup and delivery “hot-spots”, historical pricing information, historical inventory, and shorts on pickup and delivery orders are to be utilized to determine the premium to be charged to improve both overall labor planning efficiency and customer experience.

NOVEL PHASE CHANGE MATERIALS FOR TEXTILES

This project involves the design and characterization of Novel Thermal Storage Materials for Human Thermoregulation involving low-melting polymers in a highly crystalline polymer matrix. These materials when incorporated into fibers or coated on fabric can absorb excess body heat in hot weather thus promoting thermal comfort and reducing heat stress. This 4-month project will involve detailed thermal characterization of the Thermal Storage Material using sophisticated techniques such as FT-IR, DSC, TGA and cross-polarized optical microscopy.

Optimization of stimulation strategies for a retinal implant

Recent clinical trials demonstrated the capacity to partially restore vision of blind patients with retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration by electrically stimulating the remaining neurons based on an image captured by an external camera. However, these implants transmit the data and power through percutaneous cables traversing the eyeball. Although these implants have the promising ability to restore visual function, the percutaneous cables increase infection risks and complicate surgical procedures. To overcome the limitations of previous wired implants, we designed a novel implant based on an optical infrared link to transmit both data and power. Although the implant is electrically functional, confirming the feasibility of this novel approach requires to test the implant in-vivo. The research project consists in testing the implant, in partnership with the National Vision Research Institute in Melbourne, and developing a novel stimulation strategy that will maximize the visual acuity while minimizing the power requirement.

Les techniques des orthophonistes en thérapie vocale : leurs effets sur la motivation du patient et sur l’apprentissage moteur.

Ce projet vise à développer un système d’entraînement vocal virtuel offrant un support à domicile pour les personnes présentant un trouble de la voix. La première étape des efforts de notre équipe de recherche vise à mieux comprendre les éléments thérapeutiques en TV afin de développer une entraîneur vocal virtuel. Lors de ce projet, nous visons également à développer une grille afin de faciliter la documentation des processus thérapeutique en TV.
Question de recherche : Notre objectif de recherche est de documenter les éléments thérapeutiques utilisés par les orthophonistes lors des TV et d’étudier comment ceux-ci participent à soutenir le patient dans l’atteinte de ses objectifs.
Méthode : 10 séances de thérapie avec 5 orthophonistes différentes vont être enregistrées et transcrites afin d’identifier et de documenter les effets de différents techniques utilisées par l’orthophoniste sur l’apprentissage moteur et sur la motivation du patient.

Optimization and Development of Bombardier Data Based Engineering Design Tools

The proposed research will involve optimizing and improving engineering operations within Bombardier based on data collected from flight recorders and aircraft operators. This will involve developing new processes in maintenance tracking (i.e. tracking aftermarket spares sales, scheduled maintenance, accessing direct maintenance costs per component, etc.), and implementation of a stress tools suite for in-service structures evaluations. Currently, many internal processes within Bombardier are based on nonstandardized reporting and data collection methods. With the increasing influence of using data management and analytics in engineering, the challenge of the proposed research is incorporating these fields into the existing engineering simulation and design systems at Bombardier. To solve this issue, design platforms, linking to internal Bombardier databases, will be developed using tools such as MicroStrategy and Visual Basic to guide engineering decisions with respect to maintenance scheduling, structures evaluation, and aircraft efficiency.

Sentiment Analysis in Dialogue Systems

More and more companies are choosing to automate various aspects of their customer service using chatbots. While these chatbots are still in their technological infancy, they currently provide useful customer service to many people around the world. They will continue to become more desired by companies as a single chatbot system can engage millions of customers with minimal scaling costs. In these many interactions, there is a substantial amount of potential information to extract. This project focuses on extracting user sentiment information from a large set of chatbot-customer interactions. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a module that collects and summarizes customer’s sentiment about the company’s products and services as well as their overall sentiment when engaging with the chatbot. Ideally, if successful, the information generated by our sentiment analysis module can be used by companies to more efficiently identify and handle customer issues.

Autonomous Energy System; Scalable, Flexible, Light and Low Cost

Nowadays the most rewarding aspect of engineering is to create solutions to the needs

of society in a natural and resource efficient manner, therefore we must come up with more

innovative and resource efficient solutions. One such solution can be a novel scalable

autonomous energy system, which integrates Organic (polymer) based photovoltaics (OPVs),

high density Polymer Energy Storage (PES) devices, and their Integrated Circuit (IC) interface

all as a System-in-Package unit. OPV and PES cells are thin, light, and flexible technologies

that have the potential to be used for such energy system at low cost. The IC interface manages

charging of PES cells from the harvesting energy provided by OPV cells and regulates such

power for the target applications. For the scalability of the system, the configuration of the cells

(both OPV and PES) will be optimized using statistical analysis based on experimental results

and characterization of the cells. This project will build on innovations made by our research………………………..TBC