Innovative Projects Realized

Comparing Australian and Canadian Public Library Systems: A Qualitative Investigation of Best Practices and Barriers to Participation within Older Adult Library Programming

Public libraries have the potential to support communities in mitigating the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities associated with population aging. In order to support public libraries in meeting the needs of Canada and Australia’s older adult population, this qualitative comparative study will investigate best practices and barriers to participation with regard to older adult library programming. I will conduct an environmental scan of older adult library programming and 5-10 in-depth interviews with public library staff interested in this field. The environmental scan and interviews will occur in Australia’s five largest cities, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, which represent five of Australia’s six states. The data generated from this study will be compared with similar Canadian data that was generated between Aug. 1, 2018 and Dec. 15, 2018. This research will serve to identify lessons learned in Australia that may be applicable in Canada, and vise versa.

Couplage de scénarios d’évolution du territoire à des scénarios climatiques pour le calcul de l’évapotranspiration future spatialisée au Québec méridional — Application de la télédétection –

La recharge des eaux souterraines est le paramètre clef dans la gestion intégrée et durable des ressources en eau souterraine puisqu’elle définit leur renouvellement. Non observable directement, elle correspond à la part des précipitations qui ne s’est pas évaporée et n’a pas été consommée par les plantes (évapotranspiration – ET) ou n’a pas ruisselé. Une des solutions les plus innovantes pour le calcul de l’ET est l’utilisation d’images satellitaires qui permettent de la mesurer directement sur un territoire et de façon spatialisée (depuis 1999 pour le satellite MODIS). L’obtention d’une telle chronique d’ET permettra de préciser l’estimation de ce paramètre, clef pour la recharge des eaux souterraines, en lien avec l’évolution d’un territoire. Il sera alors possible de calculer par extrapolation des scénarios d’ET future en contexte de changements climatiques et d’évolution du territoire. Le développement de la méthode sera appliqué sur le sud du Québec.

Femmes et vie politique en contexte de violence urbaine: le cas des résidentes des favelas de Rio de Janeiro

La recherche que je mène dans le cadre de mes études doctorales en études urbaines a pour objectif principal de comprendre et analyser les actions entreprises par les femmes résidentes de favelas de Rio de Janeiro pour contrecarrer la violence urbaine ou en diminuer les effets. Celle-ci porte spécifiquement sur les femmes, puisque, de par leur position dans les divers rapports sociaux (de classe, de race, de sexe et de spatialité), elles sont généralement celles sur qui repose la responsabilité de la survie familiale; un rôle qui est exacerbé quand la violence menace cette survie au quotidien. Afin de documenter ces actions et les analyser, cette recherche s’appuiera sur une vingtaine d’entrevues, une série de neuf groupes focaux et des observations participantes effectuées sur le terrain. Un séjour prolongé de 22 semaines est ainsi nécessaire à la réalisation de cet objectif. Grâce à ces données, je souhaite démontrer que ces actions, bien qu’elles puissent a priori paraître « naturelles », sont plutôt le fruit d’un processus de politisation inhérent à la survie au quotidien.

Integration of scientific workflows in Geosciences

The 12-week research work will make a novel contribution to a large project called the Model Integration (MINT) framework, which in turn will improve the integration of scientific models in Environmental and Earth Sciences. Furthermore, this contribution to the MINT project will be a combination of best practices in reproducible research, Machine Learning, and domain knowledge in Geosciences. The outcome of this short visit to USC will benefit the research community by helping reduce the time for numerical model integration and lowering the barriers for researchers to make use of automated tools in their studies. More broadly, the MINT project will provide a state-of-the-art framework for scientists to facilitate their work when dealing with pressing societal and environmental challenges.

Improving strategic planning with pathway analysis

As a result of human impacts on the natural world, our societies may have to profoundly transform many of the systems that affect our everyday lives – especially our energy, food, and transportation systems. As these systems are complex and interconnected, it is difficult to foresee how they might behave as they change, and how changes might be brought about. To help face these challenges, my research develops computer models of societies and studies how they behave. This project focuses on improving the computational methodology that I use to model and study the behaviour of societies. By the end of the project, I will have helped to improve the methodology and make it more user-friendly. In addition, I will have gleaned insights into how societies might behave, which will be useful for developing strategic plans for managing complex changes in our societies.

Large-scale optimization algorithms for optical and fiber networks

Networks are moving towards being adaptive. This means that automation will be used to replace processes which are today highly manual. This project proposes a development of knowledge in the area of algorithms required to enable adaptive networks. The project will train two PhD students to understand optical networks and devise optimization algorithms in the areas of interest. In particular, the algorithms will be devised to be fast and near-optimal to enable their implementation in the network in accordance with operator’s goals of making the network near-optimal and adaptive. We anticipate that the algorithms will be implemented in the network and used to make transport networks work near-optimality.

Optical properties and climate impact of wildfire emissions

Biomass burning is the largest source of carbonaceous aerosol in the atmosphere. Biomass burning aerosol can alter the Earth’s radiative balance by absorption and scattering of solar radiation, resulting in a significant impact on global climate. However, because of the complexity of biomass burning aerosol, the magnitude of this climate effect is still uncertain. The goal of this project is to measure the optical properties of aerosol in North American wildfire plumes during the Summer 2019 fire season, and thereby contribute to our understanding of the influence of wildfires on climate. The project will be conducted as part of FIREX-AQ, a major aircraft measurement campaign.
By using the state-of-the-art instrumentation, I will measure the absorption and extinction of wildfire aerosol both at the point of emission and downwind to see how these properties change with transport. The microphysical properties of aerosol, such as size, shape, mass absorption coefficient, and composition will also be measured in the campaign to see their correlations with aerosol optical properties. This knowledge will contribute to improvements in the calculation and modeling of biomass burning aerosol radiative properties and ultimately to improve our understanding of the climate impact of North American wildfires.

Process Intensification for Odor Removal in Composting Facilities

Composting is a method of waste management using biological degradation at aerobic condition. Although the process is one of the efficient and least expensive waste management options, nuisance odors emanating from waste processing facilities degrade the air quality of neighborhood. Odor compounds vary significantly depending on the type of wastes, process conditions and include bioaerosols, biomolecules, volatile organics, ammonia, and organic sulphur compounds. Of all the mitigation technologies available for odor control, adsorption on activated carbon or other highly active surfaces, and biofilter are most efficient. In this work, a process intensification using two technologies, namely adsorption and chemical oxidation will be attempted in a single unit for the removal of model odor compounds. The two adsorbents are prepared from waste materials namely petroleum coke and biochar. This collaboration will help the partnering company, Renewi Canada, to mitigate odor problems by augmenting their existing scrubber and biofilter technologies.

Fault injection framework to study the soft error resilience of FPGA based systems

Soft errors are known to have a significant impact on circuit reliability. When high energy particles from either cosmic rays or packaging materials strike a semiconductor substrate, they generate charge which in turn results in a glitch or a transient current in a circuit. Such a glitch is called the single event transient (SET). The SET can occur on a register or on a logic gate in a circuit and can propagate to eventually get captured in a register, altering the stored bit. Such an error is known as a single event upset (SEU) or soft error.
FPGAs are widely used in applications such as industrial, aircrafts, space crafts, high-end computing systems due to their high performance, easy reconfigurability, quick time to market and low cost. FPGA-based designs are more susceptible to soft errors compared to ASIC designs as they contain more memory elements. Soft error rate (SER) estimation is a crucial step in the design of soft error tolerant schemes to attain the required reliability and performance of the system. Existing studies focus mainly on single bit-upsets and mitigation schemes. TBC

Larval Ecology of the Invasive European common blue butterfly in Quebec

The European common blue butterfly was first spotted in Quebec and has since become well-established in open habitats and disturbed areas around Montreal. In late summer and early fall, it is one of the most abundant butterflies.

This project aims first to set up laboratory breeding of the European common blue and second to test whether symbiosis with local ants helps the caterpillars survive in their new North American habitat.

Many caterpillars in the blue butterfly family form symbiotic relationships with ants: the catepillar secrete nectar to feed the ants and the ants protect the caterpillars (and refrain from eating them themselves). We will use caterpillars from our lab colonies to test whether ants, particulary European ants introduced to Canada many years ago, protect the invasive caterpillars.
This project forms the first step of a longer-term research programme on a new invasive species about which virtually nothing is known. Biological invasions are one of the main processes of global change currently affecting ecosystems around the world. This project is both locally important in understanding a new player in the biodiversity of southern Quebec, ..TBC

Impacts of built environments to human well-being

Research and implementation of Haptics Device Integration with a Dynamics Simulation Engine and Applications to Milling and Drilling Force Feedback

Virtual environments represented by multibody system models play an important role in many applications. Adding the possibility of users directly interacting with such environments via physical touch using haptics can significantly enhance the usability and range of application of simulated environments. In this project we particularly target two main objectives: (1) the multirate-simulation and hatics challenge to incorporate realistic kinesthetic force feedback in multibody dynamics simulation of gemoetrically complex mechanical systems, and (2) application to millling and drilling bone in spinal surgery simulation. The partner organization, CMLabs will greatly benefit from this project. The proposed work is of direct relevance to their current work, and will also open up possibilities to broaden the applications of CMLabs’ software platform, Vortex.