Innovative Projects Realized

Analyse de la diversité fonctionnelle des arbres de petites municipalités et mise en place d’une approche pour en améliorer la résilience

Les forêts urbaines d’aujourd’hui sont confrontés aux changements globaux, notamment l’augmentation de la fréquence des événements climatiques extrêmes (sécheresses, inondations, etc.) et l’arrivée d’espèces exotiques (maladie de l’orme, agrile du frêne, etc.), et subissent donc de lourdes pertes associées à ces stress. Les conséquences de la réduction de la canopée peuvent être dramatiques d’un point de vue social, environnemental et économique et peuvent par exemple se traduire par une augmentation du nombre de maladies cardio-vasculaires et respiratoires dans la société du fait de l’augmentation du niveau de pollution de l’air.
Ce projet vise à mettre en place une approche de diversification de la forêt urbaine de petites municipalités afin d’en favoriser la pérennité et la résilience face aux plus grand nombre de perturbations possible. TO BE CONT’D

La mesure de l’impact social des congrès d’affaires internationaux

Chaque année, des centaines d’associations professionnelles tiennent leur événement annuel dans une destination différente dans le monde. Ces rencontres servent aux participants pour acquérir des connaissances dans leur domaine d’expertise et faire du réseautage avec leur s collègues des autres pays. Notre projet de recherche pose les questions suivantes :
Comment de tels évènements pourraient laisser une empreinte positive durable dans leur lieu d’accueil?
Comment mesurer ces retombées positives?
Quels sont les facteurs de succès qui permettent de laisser un impact social local positif

Developing Design Strategies for Net-zero Energy High-rise, Mixed-use Buildings

This project explores and develops various strategies for the design of net zero energy high-rise mixed-use buildings. Net zero energy refers to the capacity of a building to generate renewable energy to supply all its yearly energy consumption. A mixed-use building combines residential and commercial building functions (e.g. retail, offices, etc.). Strategies that will be developed focus mainly on high performance building envelope with enhanced capabilities of generating energy, and on advanced building mechanical systems. Modular façade systems will be investigated to optimize the geometry to integrate photovoltaic system, and to increase its energy performance. Various mechanical systems and energy sources will be studied, and their performance will be analysed to allow further reduction of energy consumption, and thus achieving net zero energy status. Extensive advanced simulations will be conducted, employing building simulation tools.

Automated Monitoring and Orchestration of Cloud Native IMS VNFs.

By virtualizing all the various appliances in the network, Virtual Network Functions (VNF) became a key enabler for the coming 5G infrastructure and nowadays a major shift is under way bringing an evolution to cloud-native VNF. In the latter operational model, applications are decomposed into microservices running inside containers to enable automated installation, configuration and scaling with the dynamic network requirements beside self-healing and automated upgrading and updating of the VNFs. For efficient management of VNFs, reliable monitoring and advanced orchestration, powered by machine learning, are needed. This project aims to innovate methods and tools that will enable efficient monitoring and orchestration of Cloud Native IMS VNFs.

Tizen OS Support for SOTI MobiControl Interoperability

In this project, we propose to expand support of SOTI’s MobiControl (MC) to Tizen Operating System. SOTI MobiControl has assisted numerous enterprises to overcome the management issues due to lack of security and improve business performance by monitoring the health and safety of employees, and increasing productivity, with the introduction of wearables and other IoT (Internet of Things) devices. On the other hand, Tizen is a Linux-based mobile operating system developed by Samsung Electronics and offers support to Samsung smart devices, including Samsung Gear Watches, Samsung Smart TVs, Samsung Cameras and many other devices. This project aims to deploy the MobiControl management service to the Tizen devices in order to provide solutions to smart devices management to our customers.

Speaker Diarization

Machine-transcription of speech into text is very helpful in many scenarios. Consider the case of machine-transcription of conversation between a Doctor and a patient. If we are able partition and identify the segments of patient’s speech from those of doctor’s, then the transcribed text is more structured and can be more helpful for further use. The process of partitioni a given input audio stream into homogeneous segments according to speaker identity is called Speaker Diarization. In this project, we want to implement and improve the state-of-art method for speaker-diarization.

Super resolution for MRI scans

Brain MRI scans are a critical component in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders. However, there is a wide diversity in terms of the image quality and resolution obtained from different MRI scanner. In particular, it is common to find coarse resolution MRI scans (e.g. every axial slice is 3-5 mm thick), which limit the type of anatomical analysis that can be performed. The goal of this project is to develop and validate the performance of state-of-the-art super-resolution methods in 3D MRI scans, which generate high resolution MRI scans from low resolution scans.

Low data drug modeling

The project aims to facilitate the research and development of new drugs by exploring Machine Learning methodology useful for both the generation of new molecules and the prediction of molecule properties. Doing so will involve training deep learning models on a large number of small, heterogeneous datasets, with the objective of transferring learned representations quickly when faced with a new drug-discovery or drug optimization objectives. The trained models will be used for the purposes of predicting molecular properties of new drugs and generating novel molecules with high likelihood of satisfying certain properties. The multi-objective nature of designing new molecules satisfying competing objectives will be approached using techniques from Reinforcement Learning.

Altering Plant Microbiomes for Flavour and Nutrition

The goal of this project is to use naturally occurring bacterial partners to improve the flavour and nutritional properties of plants grown in hydroponic and aquaponics systems. This study will investigate ability of plant associated bacteria to alter the metabolic profile of select vegetables and leafy greens. Vertical farming is an increasingly popular solution for the production of plant produce year-round at a local level. However, it involves the growth of plants in engineered systems without natural soils. Soils are inhabited by tens of thousands of species, some of which move into plant tissues and contribute to their natural nutritional and flavour profiles. Our aim is to match produce plant metabolisms to those of naturally occuring bacterial associates and to test the ability of these partners to enhance the quality of food produced in vertical farms.

Development of Copper Precursors for Atomic Layer Deposition

Microelectronic fabrication needs a method to deposit very thin films of copper in very accurate patterns to interconnect the microelectronic devices on a chip. Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a method used in microelectronic manufacturing that could do this, but a suitable copper process has yet to be identified.

This internship is to help continue to develop a promising copper deposition process for ALD. Using a volatile compound containing copper, it has been shown that copper metal can be deposited at reasonably low temperature using a plasma of hydrogen gas. The intern on this project will continue to develop the copper chemistry and the deposition process, as well as help the partner organisation (GreenCentre Canada) to construct and file a patent application for this intellectual property.

Cognitive and Computationally Intelligent Algorithms for the Detection of Cyber Threats

The rapid and widespread advancement of cyber-threats within the past few years has had a profound impact on virtually everyone, from ordinary people to governments to local organizations. This has caused cyber-security to be considered a global challenge, which is now requiring innovative solutions, such as incorporating human cognition based methods into the software algorithms to detect malicious activities of adversaries. This is because, the cyber-security industry is heavily dependent on the knowledge, and analysis and investigation skills of analysists in the detection of cyber-threats. The analysists have the ability to coalesce and examine in their minds large stacks and disparate sources of data, spread across small and large temporal and spatial windows, and compare their observations with previous known attacks to decide if the dataset objects under scrutiny represent an attack. TO BE CONT’D

Mitigating heat stress effects on lactation via nutrition in dairy cows

Heat stress, defined as temperature and humidity above the threshold of animal comfort, is experienced in Canadian dairy farms each year despite the improvements in cooling conditions and results in important reductions in production of milk and of milk components. Such reductions represent lower production efficiency and therefore higher environmental impact per unit of product and significant losses in profitability for producers and for the processing industry. Importantly, dietary interventions focused on the mitigation of production loses could be easily implemented in dairy farms across Canada and result in improved production efficiency and profitability for the dairy sector. In the present proposal we set out to test the effects of increasing the supply of nutrients capable of mitigating heat stress-related production loses (select lipids, amino acids, minerals and vitamins). TO BE CONT’D